Month: January 2013

As if it wasn’t enough that my shelves were already teeming with awesome books I’ve still yet to read, 2013 is set to release some further stellar titles.

There a three due to be released in the first quarter that I’m particularly looking forward to (and that I will likely clear my schedule for—if you’re a client and you need something from me, I suggest you request it and set the deadline for it now).

The first is Melbourne-based author Anna Krien’s second non-fiction book, Night Games, which continues in her investigative journalism tradition of examining fraught, multifaceted issues. Her first (and award-winning) book, Into The Woods, explored the Tasmanian logging debate to stellar effect. Frankly, Krien’s ability to pour insight and poetic brilliance onto a page left me a little writer’s blocked and a lot in awe.

Night Games will turn the spotlight onto the shadows of football: ‘the world of Sam Newman, Ricky Nixon, Matty Johns, the Cronulla Sharks, and more’. Even non-football fans would be aware of and captivated by the tales of the exploits of these men, most recently, of course, of the train-wreck tale of Ricky Nixon and an incredibly young and seemingly unstable girl.

If Night Games is anything like Into The Woods, it’s going to be widely read and widely awarded; with it Krien will (if she hasn’t already) cement her status as one of Australia’s best writers.

The second book I’m desperately waiting to be released is one by the perennially popular, genre-hopping storytelling trendsetter Dave Eggers. Returning to his non-fiction roots (which I consider his best and sharpest), Visitants is Eggers’ first foray into travel writing (kind of surprising, I know—for some reason without any articulate-able reason for its basis, I would have thought he’d have gotten there sooner).

Visitants spans Eggers’ decades-long career’s entirety (has it really been more than five or so years since he lobbed onto the literary scene with A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius?), and apparently features writing on such disparate but characteristically complex places as Saudi Arabia, Sudan, China, Cuba, and Thailand. ‘Globetrotters and Eggers fans alike,’ the blurb tells us, ‘will find a faithful companion in his unique combination of humour, humanism, and empathy.’

The third book I can’t wait for is David Sedaris’ Let’s Explore Diabetes With Owls. I mean, really, if you aren’t intrigued enough to pick up the book based on that title, you unquestionably don’t have a pulse.

Also a travel book of sorts, Let’s Explore Diabetes With Owls (I can’t help but want to type that again, and to be impressed that he topped his previously outstandingly titled book, Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk) reportedly features a rant against litterers, a fascination with a disembodied arm found in a taxidermist’s shop, and the eating habits of Australia’s own kookaburras. I’m especially tempted to get the audiobook version of this one, as Sedaris’ voice makes anything and everything surprise snort-inducing funny.

If these three titles live up to their highly anticipated hype, 2013 is off to a crackingly good release-schedule start.

As someone who doesn’t drink for very simple but seemingly-very-confusing-to-drinkers reasons—I don’t need alcohol to have a good time, I loathe and despise waiting in taxi queues and paying exorbitant amounts of money to have someone drive me home, and I hate feeling rubbish the next day—I came at The Age health reporter Jill Stark’s soon-to-be-released* High Sobriety: My Year Without Booze from a slightly different angle from most. I wasn’t marvelling at the fact that she had (clearly) gone a year without alcohol; I was hoping this book wouldn’t be a token, hyperbolic effort.

Having won awards for her reporting on the damaging effects of drugs and alcohol while writing herself off with regularity, Stark was acutely aware of her hypocrisy. One lethal hangover too many—coincidentally, on New Year’s Day—and she turned the spotlight on her habits.

A year and a book deal later, we have High Sobriety, a brutally honest, nothing-off-limits assessment of Stark’s drinking exploits, Australia’s and Scotland’s entrenched drinking myths and cultures, the health risks we run as a result of drinking, and the complicated relationship we have with alcohol (not to mention with people who don’t drink).

We also have hope. As a Scottish-born journalist who now calls both Scotland and Australia home, and who boasts an accent she terms ‘Scotralian’, Stark had all the odds stacked against her succeeding for 365 days as a non-drinker. By her own admission, her decision to not drink is ‘something akin to Hugh Hefner announcing plans to join the priesthood’. When she quipped that she might write a book called ‘My Year Without Booze’, her mate without hesitation replied: ‘My Year With No Mates’. Yet she made it through and even managed to put it in terms that might just appeal to the masses.

The year was clearly difficult, her peers unsurprisingly tactless. One colleague tells her: ‘You’re like a fat comedian who loses lots of weight. You’re just not as interesting.’ One cracker of a guy she’s stuck sitting with at a wedding tells her a book about not drinking for a year would be rubbish:

‘That would be a really short book,’ he says. ‘Fucking boring. The end.’ I laugh politely, but secretly I want to stab him in the eye with my entrée fork […] He tells me how he stopped drinking for three months a few years ago, and every day of it was so boring that he’d never do it again. He doesn’t appear to see the irony in the fact that with a beer in his hand, he’s the most boring man alive.

I’ve lived through more than a few of those moments too. Like Stark, I’ve sometimes wished I could just say I was pregnant (or something similarly irrefutable) just to stop the questions and pointed remarks; they get old fast.

In addition to charting Stark’s year, month by month, High Sobriety gathers up a bunch of frightening stats, myths, habits, sayings, and so on. Australia is, it seems, a country that:

• created ‘drinkwear’ such shirts with built-in can openers
• celebrates beer relays, which see people put teams of their best drinkers forward to scull beers, with the next team mate starting as soon as their predecessor has sculled theirs
• has seen a ‘Bunningsisation’ of alcohol, where it’s sold in bulk from warehouses and mega stores at cut-down prices
• has university orientation games of ‘fun, frivolity’ fornication, and extremely high levels of intoxication’ with such taglines as ‘If you can remember last year, you weren’t really there’
• has seen political journalists ‘ottering’ it down staircases, i.e. sliding on their stomachs with their hands behind their backs—‘if you had your head up, you wouldn’t get too much carpet rash’.

One stat I didn’t really know, or hadn’t truly comprehended, is that alcohol is likely linked to increases in cancer. But I’m not alone in missing some of the big facts. ‘As galactically stupid as it sounds, particularly for a health reporter,’ Stark writes, ‘I’ve never really though of alcohol as a drug.’

Like many of us, Stark’s relationship with alcohol was forged in her teenage years. Her 15^th birthday party involved ‘teenagers hanging out of every window, and piles of vomit forming a Hansel and Gretel-style trail from our front door’. She spent her 25^th birthday, at which she was reacquainting herself with alcohol after a detox of sorts, so smashed some friends had to prop her up ‘Weekend at Bernie’s-style’. She acknowledges too that there’s no small irony in her finally achieving her first book contract as a result of her drinking exploits: ‘Who would have thought that getting pissed every weekend for most of my adult life might be the way that dream comes true?’

Knockout singer of unfortunate circumstances and surname Amy Winehouse dies during Stark’s booze-less year. It’s a sobering experience and a weird one:

The divinely talented 27-year-old singer, who battled addiction and penned a defiant hit about resisting rehab, literally drank herself to an early grave—vodka bottles were found next to her body. Within hours, wailing fans were getting pissed outside her home, sobbing and belting out her songs. They create a shrine using, along with flowers and cards, beer cans, wine glasses, and bottles of vodka and gin. It seems that even if it kills you, alcohol’s cool.

Seems that way. Hearteningly, High Sobriety goes some way to showing that you don’t have to be drunk to have a good time. It provides an insider-outsider perspective on drinkers’ and non-drinkers’ complex relationship with alcohol, and the social and societal ripple effects of those too. Stark’s approach was fresh, objective, and hyperbole-free while also being humblingly human. High Sobriety made me re-examine my own reasons for not drinking and my own fraught relationship with alcohol—I highly recommend it.

Side note: A shout out to the book’s graphic designer, whose adept handiwork sees the book’s title and subtitle, Stark’s name, and John Birmingham’s testimonial forming the alcohol bottle and label. A shout out, too, to awesome book acknowledgements such as this:

And kudos to you, Timmy, the pillar that props up our inner-north crew, for not questioning why a journalist/would-be-author didn’t have her own printer when I asked to print a 300-page manuscript on yours, 12 hours before deadline.

*High Sobriety will be released in February. Thanks to Scribe for the advance copy.

I bought a book a few years back based purely on the fact that lots of boys were furtively buying it. A lot of boys who weren’t what you’d call avid readers, that is. The phenomenon piqued my interest. What was it about this book that made word spread of it among secret boy channels? Could it deliver what they hoped? More importantly, would its anticipated benefits be enough to get them to read it, a reasonably hefty book, from start to finish?

Given that I was buying it for product knowledge reasons and that it wasn’t the most relevant or appealing book for me, I subsequently shelved it with a plan to get around to reading it just as soon as I’d tackled my Pisa-like tower of to-be-read tomes.

I finally read the book over Christmas not because I’d make it through the other books, but because yet another guy did a you have this?/you know about this?/what the?! double take when he saw it on my bookshelf. Huh, I thought, there’s clearly something in this book they don’t want me to know.

The book is Neil Strauss’ bestselling The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pick-Up Artists. It seems to be a finely scoured bible for guys on cracking the code to meeting girls*. I can see why the guys were a little nervous I had the book, but I was more than a little dubious this book would contain the bulletproof answers they were looking for.

The Game is surprisingly good, but not at all what I’d expected. It’s more memoir than instruction manual. It’s more cautionary tale than do this and you will win (although some of the guys I’ve put this to have been genuinely mystified—they didn’t see that side to it at all). With a graphic novel feel, it’s also incredibly cleverly designed and clearly catering to boys’ tastes. Images of dice denote the chapter numbers. Crosshair-like targets and strong, solid black lines frame the page and page numbers. Quotes writ large in white text on full pages of black ink break up the chapters (and yes, I’m wondering about the printing costs). These quotes are weighty too, including some profundity from such greats as Fyodor Dostoevsky.

The tale unfolds this way: Strauss becomes a pupil of pick-up artists (PUA). There’s a bunch of different methods or schools of thought and he samples lots before finding and honing the ones that work for him, at which point he becomes a master pick-up artist (MPUA). He charts his progress as well as of those he meets, and at one stage lives in a house full of pick-up artists in LA.

There’s an entire PUA language (in case you hadn’t already noticed). The Game helpfully provides a glossary (and it’s likely you’ll need to refer to it, with all the acronyms and initialisms the book contains making it hard to keep up).

An ‘AFC’ stands for an ‘average frustrated chump’, i.e. a stereotypical nice guy who struggles for pick-up skills. An ‘AMOG’ is the ‘alpha male of the group’. To ‘sarge’ is to pick up women (or to try to). To ‘FMAC’ is to ‘find, meet, attract, close’. To ‘peacock’ is to dress outrageously to draw attention from women, e.g. wearing a cowboy hat or a loud shirt. To ‘neg’ a woman, is to deliver an ambiguous statement or seemingly accidental insult to a beautiful woman to demonstrate a lack of interest in her and to, arguably, bring her down a peg or two. ‘Chick crack’ is that which appeals to most women but few men, e.g. tarot cards.

Contrary to perhaps most girls, I was down with most of The Game. My one sticking point was the negging, which is not cool. Girls’ confidence is in the red at the best of times without guys further undercutting it with such statements as ‘Is she always like that? How do you live with her?’ I put this to a friend of mine who said I was misunderstanding it, then conceded he mightn’t think negging was so great if girls negged him. Done well, he said, negging should never wound.

The Game was plenty amusing, though. When Mystery, one of the main guys, decides to move out of the house he also decides to sell his bed. His selling point, which includes listing the girls in chronological order: ‘I’ve only slept with ten girls on it so it’s very clean.’

One ‘opener’ made me laugh, mostly because I have an ongoing My Little Pony joke with some friends. Do you remember the show? the guy asks. I was trying to remember if they had special powers. Cue girls chatting to him about the much-loved cartoon. Another opener I like involves a guy saying that their friend just bought new puppies and wants to name them after an ‘80s pop duo. Do they [the girl they’re targeting] have any suggestions?

There were also a few moments that appeal to me as a writer. One of the other PUAs, who’s a little strange and is a lot like a rival, pretends to be Strauss as an in. It doesn’t always work. ‘Let me tell you something,’ Strauss tells him. ‘I’ve been writing for over a decade, and it hasn’t gotten me laid once. Writers aren’t cool or sexy. There’s no real social proof to be gained by hanging out with a writer.’ Amen to that.

I have to say, though, that as writers go, Strauss is very cool. He has a talent for finding and writing about the fascinating quirks of life and in publishing subsequently bestselling books (not to mention writing for the New York Times and Rolling Stone. I mean, kudos). He’s most famous for The Game, but I’m currently ordering up his other titles here on Boomerang Books; in addition to his story-sniffing skills, I enjoy his style of writing. These books include Jenna Jameson’s How to Make Love Like a Porn Star, Motley Crue’s The Dirt, and Marilyn Manson’s The Long Hard Road Out of Hell, Dave Navarro’s Don’t Try This at Home, as well as Everyone Loves You When You’re Dead: Journeys Into Fame and Madness and Emergency: This Book Will Save Your Life.

There also seems to be a second book (or a book that comes in a boxset with The Game) called Rules of the Game. I’m not sure I’m that enamoured with the PUA lifestyle to want to read it, but when it comes to book reading, I never say never. I think I’d be more interested in the boardgames, though, apparently called Who’s Got Game? The Game with Benefits.

One guy friend told me I should now watch pick-up videos on YouTube. I tried, but only watched moments because I found them cringeworthy, not to mention a little creepy that the guys were filming themselves picking up girls. It’s this need to catalogue, to prove, to share these pick-up successes that people smarter than me have already noted. In the New York Times (AKA the publication Strauss himself writes for), Alexandra Jacobs, for example, wrote that The Game is the mens’ version or antithesis of The Rules and that Strauss ‘does come to perceive one curious thing about the PUAs: They seem far more interested in spending time with fellow PUAs, amassing, refining and discussing the game, than actually getting to know women. Call them SLBs (scared little boys)’.

I find it interesting that many (if not all) of the PUAs self-destruct in some way in Strauss’ book and that, despite one PUA arrogantly saying that he’s ‘starting to feel like I’m hunting rabbits with a howitzer’, the PUAs seem to struggle to find and maintain a real connection with a girl.

‘The problem with being a pick-up artist is,’ Strauss writes in the book, ‘that there are concepts like sincerity, genuineness, trust, and connection that are important to women. And all the techniques that are so effective in beginning a relationship violate every principle necessary to maintaining one.’

Tellingly, none of Strauss’ PUA techniques are what help him attract the girl of his dreams and he writes that while those techniques helped him meet plenty of girls, they never prepared him for how to keep one.

But that point didn’t wash with some of the guy friends I put it to. Cautionary tale? they puzzled. No. Pick-up manual. Maybe that’s my girl perspective at work. And my hope that no guy has ever or will ever run the game on me as Strauss’ book dedication hints:

[This book is] dedicated to the thousands of people I talked to in bars, clubs, malls, airports, grocery stores, subways, and elevators over the last two years. If you are reading this, I want you to know that I wasn’t running game on you. I was being sincere. Really. You were different.

*It should be noted that this book that assumes heterosexuality and involves guys chasing girls. I’m hazarding a guess that the techniques may work under other circumstances.