DEBlog

24-Hour Read-a-Thon: Post 8

For Read-a-Thon information, see The Hidden Side of a Leaf. For my own Read-a-Thon posts, see the deblog's Read-a-Thon category archive.

Currently reading: Peter Sagal, The Book of Vice: Naughty Things (And How to Do Them)

Pages read: 8 (since last post) | 196 (total for Read-a-Thon)
Time spent reading: 9 (since last post) | 3:14 (total for Read-a-Thon)

Thoughts: I'm finishing up the (First Annual?) 24-Hour Read-a-Thon nine pages into Peter Sagal's chapter on gambling:

"Guides to casino games will talk about good bets and bad bets, but it's all relative, in the same way that being struck on the head by a small sack of oranges is a good thing relative to being struck by a hammer."

Currently he's considering William Bennett's gambling--he played $500-a-pull slot machines--the question being, why?

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And that's where it ends for me. I want to thank Dewy for coming up with the idea for a Read-a-Thon and for the Herculean effort it took to administer the thing. Even though my own participation was limited--a little over 3 hours spent reading out of 24--it was a big boost over my usual daily reading time.

I do intend, as I mentioned earlier, to try to do this sort of informal reading-cum-blogging on a smaller scale more regularly. I'm thinking now of "Reading Sundays," because the day works for me, though a better name would be nice. I would just post mid-reading reactions as I've been doing during the Read-a-Thon here, and it would serve as incentive for me to commit myself to reading more of a Sunday afternoon. So, stay tuned!

Proper reviews of the two books I read during the Read-a-Thon will be posted on my book review site, book-blog.com, shortly after I finish the books.

24-Hour Read-a-Thon: Post 7

For Read-a-Thon information, see The Hidden Side of a Leaf. For my own Read-a-Thon posts, see the deblog's Read-a-Thon category archive.

Currently reading: Peter Sagal, The Book of Vice: Naughty Things (And How to Do Them)

Pages read: 31 (since last post) | 188 (total for Read-a-Thon)
Time spent reading: 31 (since last post) | 3:05 (total for Read-a-Thon)

Thoughts: Sagal devotes chapter four to the subject of lying, with sections on Holocaust deniers and President Clinton and explicit directions on how one might go about convincing people that Massachusetts doesn't exist. ("You tell compelling stories about how you were heading north on I-95 in Connecticut, and the next thing you knew, you were in Vermont.") Being able to tell a lie convincingly is a powerful tool, because people on the whole expect other people to be telling the truth:

"People are bound by certain rules of conduct, always unspoken, sometimes never even consciously enumerated. Among these rules is that everybody will, more or less, tell the truth, with generous allowances made for subjectivity. Anyone willing to break that unspoken compact has an immediate and powerful advantage, in the same way that anyone playing soccer would have a tremendous advantage if he were just to pick up the damn ball."

By way of illustrating the social compact, Sagal writes about the lengths a husband and wife might go to to avoid doing the dishes. They may stretch the truth in claiming that exhaustion or unpleasantly wrinkled skin prevent them from accomplishing the task, but they are unlikely to beg off the chore by claiming, for example, that they have Huntington's disease.

I love this book.

24-Hour Read-a-Thon: Post 6

For Read-a-Thon information, see The Hidden Side of a Leaf. For my own Read-a-Thon posts, see the deblog's Read-a-Thon category archive.

Currently reading: Ian Sansom, The Case of the Missing Books

Pages read: 20 (since last post) | 157 (total for Read-a-Thon)
Time spent reading: 15 minutes (since last post) | 2:34 (total for Read-a-Thon)

Thoughts: In my last post on this book I said I was finding it tiresome. And I still am. But I'm torn. I laughed aloud at a scene in this last bit. Granted I'm 200 pages into it already, so one might have expected as much. Also, I don't know, I like the protagonist, and I want to like the book more. It does have great potential: book-centric, with a librarian as lead, an Englishman uprooted. It just somehow misses the mark for me. But I do think that some readers would have a much more favorable reaction to it.

I'm off to bed in minutes, though I'll be reading there for as long as I can. I should have time in the morning to post about the night's reading and perhaps to read a bit more before the Read-a-Thon closes its doors. Good night!

24-Hour Read-a-Thon: Post 5

For Read-a-Thon information, see The Hidden Side of a Leaf. For my own Read-a-Thon posts, see the deblog's Read-a-Thon category archive.

Currently reading: Peter Sagal, The Book of Vice: Naughty Things (And How to Do Them)

Pages read: 31 (since last post) | 137 (total for Read-a-Thon)
Time spent reading: 35 (since last post) | 2:19 (total for Read-a-Thon)

Thoughts: In chapter 3 of his book, "Strip Clubs, or, Sure, They Like You. Really," Sagal returns to the business of sex. He recounts his various experiences visiting strip clubs, both pre- and mid-research. He talks to various strippers and to a pair of female sociologists (with whom he visited one strip club), and comes to terms with the "callous anonymity" of the whole business.

Sagal's writing continues to charm:

"There we were, soaking the $30 steaks in our stomachs with $8 longneck beers and all we had to look at was stuff we could see on a French beach, albeit not a French beach we had ever been to or that even probably actually existed, but still. We were gentlemen at a bachelor party in Las Vegas, for God's sake, and not to put too fine a point on it, we demanded both $8 longnecks and pudenda. Or pudendae; authorities differ."

24-Hour Read-a-Thon: Post 4

For Read-a-Thon information, see The Hidden Side of a Leaf. For my own Read-a-Thon posts, see the deblog's Read-a-Thon category archive.

Currently reading: Ian Sansom, The Case of the Missing Books

Pages read: 28 (since last post) | 106 (total for Read-a-Thon)
Time spent reading: 20 (since last post) | 1:44 (total for Read-a-Thon)

Why am I reading this book? I've taken a break from Peter Sagal's book to return to one I'm currently in the middle of. The Case of the Missing Books has been on my TBR shelves for a while. I started it the other day when another book I'm in the middle of turned out to be disappointingly slow. (I don't normally read more than one book at a time; now I find myself in the middle of three.)

Comments: This is the first in a series of books by Ian Sansom featuring Israel Alexander, who, in this book, travels to Ireland to take up a position as the town librarian only to find that the library has closed. Par for course for Israel, for whom everything goes wrong, always. The story finds him thrown into a series of awkward situations, in which he must communicate--haltingly, ineffectually--with the quirky characters of his new community. It's supposed to be funny and charming, Nick Hornby meets Alexander McCall Smith, according to the back of the book. But I'm finding it tiresome.

Reading was interrupted by the creation and disposal of dinner, but I'm now returning to it.

24-Hour Read-a-Thon: Post 3

For Read-a-Thon information, see The Hidden Side of a Leaf. For my own Read-a-Thon posts, see the deblog's Read-a-Thon category archive.

Currently reading: Peter Sagal, The Book of Vice: Naughty Things (And How to Do Them)

Pages read: 23 (since last post) | 78 (total for Read-a-Thon)
Time spent reading: 28 minutes (since last post) | 1:24 (total for Read-a-Thon)

Comments: Sagal devotes his second chapter, "Eating, or Sodom's Restaurant," to the subject of gluttony. Specifically, he describes a night out at a très exclusive restaurant, Alinea, where he and his wife enjoyed a 24-course meal. How, you ask, can someone possibly eat a 24-course meal? Well, each course is just a bite or two. A bite or two of some food that's taken the restaurant's chef's literally hours to prepare. Sagal also muses on the paradox that gastronomic hedonism--the sort of eating that inspires "wonder and envy among the less fortunate"--leads inevitably to unenviable physical complications. Which is why one leaves a 24-course meal looking for a Jack in the Box.

Thoughts on the Read-a-Thon: I'm a little farther along than this post lets on, as I switched to another book, already in progress, to cleanse my palette a bit. And while my number of pages read may not rival what some of the other Read-a-Thonners are up to, for me it's a big jump over what I usually manage to get read in the course of a day. In large part, that's because I tend to put other things--more urgent or not--ahead of reading, which I think of as an indulgence.

Clare of Keeper of the Snails and I had been batting around the idea of doing this sort of thing more frequently. For myself, I may very well make an effort to make reading-cum-blogging a mainstay of Sundays. Reading Sundays? I also like this very informal, as-it-happens approach to book blogging.

24-Hour Read-a-Thon: Post 2

For Read-a-Thon information, see The Hidden Side of a Leaf. For my own Read-a-Thon posts, see the deblog's Read-a-Thon category archive.

Currently reading: Peter Sagal, The Book of Vice: Naughty Things (And How to Do Them)

Pages read: 26 (since last post) | 55 (total for Read-a-Thon)
Time spent reading: 29 (since last post) | 56 (total for Read-a-Thon)

Comments: In the first chapter of his book Peter Sagal discusses the swinging lifestyle. He and his wife Beth went to a swinger's party by way of research, at the invitation of a couple who open their home (for a price) to other practitioners of the Lifestyle roughly once a week.

"We are told, via their occasional interviews in the press, that swingers or Lifestylers or whatever are no different from you and me...they meet up to socialize, talk, drink, and dance with their good friends, old and new. And then they have sex with them. Which makes me stop, and consider the various good friends my wife and I have, and then consider how it would be if one of our suburban dinner parties ended with us removing our clothes and performing sexual acts, and I have to put my head between my knees and take deep breaths."

24-Hour Read-a-Thon: Post 1

For Read-a-Thon information, see The Hidden Side of a Leaf. For my own Read-a-Thon posts, see the deblog's Read-a-Thon category archive.

Currently reading: Peter Sagal, The Book of Vice: Naughty Things (And How to Do Them)

Pages read: 21 (since last post) | 21 (total for Read-a-Thon)
Time spent reading: 27 minutes (since last post) | 27 (total for Read-a-Thon)

Why am I reading this book? You know how when Homer Simpson sees a donut he kind of drools and his eyes glaze over and he says something like, "Mmmm, donut...." Right. Well, that was me more or less when I heard about this book. Peter Sagal is the host of NPR's news quiz show Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me! It's been on for some years, I gather, but I only started listening to it a few months ago. I'd catch it in the car while driving daughter number one around Saturday mornings. I'd catch bits of it. It appealed to me, a lot. Probably part of that is that it's on the radio: I think that sparks our imagination in a way television cannot. Part of if is that it's this group--the guests change--of witty, smart people ad libing about current events. It harkens back to a different world. Well, specifically this world, one in which a game show could count on having a literate audience. Also, the fact that I only caught it in bits and pieces somehow made the show even more appealing. It brought me back to those early teenage years when, alone in my room, I'd catch things on the radio (Garrison Keillor) that seemed outside the normal experience of my age group--more intelligent, more interesting.

Okay, so the other day I'm driving to the post office and I catch an interview with Peter Sagal on NPR. I didn't know for sure it was him at first. His voice is distinctive. His voice is marvelous. And it sure sounded like him, so I was delighted to find out it was. And it turns out he'd written a book about, of all things, vice. He's talking about being this vanilla guy visiting sex clubs with his wife to research the book.

I was more than sold. I think I gurgled. I mean, this book would appeal to me even if Peter Sagal hadn't written it, but he's whip smart and clever, so I was really excited about getting a copy.

It got here yesterday.

Comments: I've read the Author's Note and the Introduction so far, and have already laughed aloud several times, starting on page one (well, actually page ix). He's writing here about Marv Albert:

"I felt some sympathy for him. Not for his strange appetites--I can't even bring myself to bite ice cream, let alone a forty-two-year-old woman to whom I am not married--but for what I imagined was going on in his head."

Sagal goes on in his introduction to discuss, wittily and well, the "three essential elements of vices, as they have traditionally been described by me once I stopped to think about it a little while ago...." These turn out to be: social disapprobation, actual pleasure, and shame.

Next up: The first chapter: "Swinging, or Dinner Parties Gone Horribly Wrong."

24-Hour Read-a-Thon: It begins

For Read-a-Thon information, see The Hidden Side of a Leaf. For my own Read-a-Thon posts, see the deblog's Read-a-Thon category archive.

I wanted to post this at the precise time that the 24-Hour Read-a-Thon begins so that folks know I am awake and aware but also woefully unable to begin reading yet. In fact, right now I'm not even here. I'm driving south-bound on the Merritt Parkway (who knew it had its own web site?) between Meriden and North Haven, CT, having dropped off daughter number one in the former town, and trying desperately to get daughter number two to her swimming class in our own hometown by 10:15. There will be more driving after that. I hate Saturdays.

Read-a-thon reading--and posting--will commence in the early afternoon. Good reading, everybody!

Saturday's 24-Hour Read-a-Thon

Dewy over at The Hidden Side of a Leaf is throwing a 24-Hour Read-a-thon on Saturday, beginning at 2 p.m. GMT. (See my previous post on the subject.) I've signed up to be a reader, as have a number of other folks, including the likes of Kimmy, of The Smug Cloud, and Clare, of Keeper of the Snails, both of whom should be familiar to regular readers of the deblog's comments section. If you're interested in signing up for it yourself, either as a reader or a "cheerleader," head over to Dewy's site and take a look at the goings-on.

Participation in the event is a flexible business, happily: that is, one needn't stay up reading for the whole 24 hours, and of course you can read whatever you want. The heart of it, of course, is that one is to read as much as possible and to blog about that reading, however frequently and at whatever length one chooses.

For myself, Saturday mornings are unbearably busy, so reading will not commence until the early afternoon (U.S. Eastern time). And I'll read as much as I can but will by no means be staying up very late. Stay tuned!