Book Report

My new year’s resolution this year was to actually read all of these lovely books I amass here in the house yet never read. The first of these books was a cheapie I picked up just because of the great title and back jacket description. “Dreaming of Gwen Stefani” by Evan Mandrey has a great premise, Mortimer is an obsessive-compulsive hot dog maker at one of those places in New York City with the word “Papaya” in the name where the hot dogs are perfect and sold for 75 cents. When flipping around TV stations late one night, he stumbles across a video of Gwen Stefani and falls in love with her. This fervor increases when, after pathetically researching the minutiae of Gwen’s life, he finds out her favorite food is (wait for it) hot dogs at the very place he works. The rest of the story follows Mortimer as he crazily readies himself for the day which he knows will come soon, when Gwen will come to the Papaya place, get a hot dog and (of course) fall in love with him. With a premise this good it’s surprising how horribly wrong this book can go. Endless uninteresting chapters about the building blocks of biology are thrown in, along with a heavy handed and clumsily executed moral that is so entirely self-congratulatory and immature were I the author, I would be embarrassed that anyone might think this was ‘the deep statement I wanted to make with my book’. By the end I was left with was a strong desire for a Papaya Plus hotdog, though sadly I found myself about 200 miles away from one.

Much better was a book I bought a year ago, in hardcover, lent to my boyfriend at the time, and then never read myself “Killing Yourself to Live” by Spin writer Chuck Klosterman. I first encountered Klosterman a few years back when a friend bought me his crazily brilliant love letter to a youth loving heavy metal “Fargo Rock City”, a book that I have now bought for at least 5 other people. “Killing Yourself” follows Klosterman on a Spin-funded expedition across the US, visiting the sights of various rock celebrities deaths, obsessing all the while on every girl he has ever had (or hoped to have) sex with. The resulting treatise is painfully honest, embarrassingly geeky and pathetically rock-dorky, but damn good reading. As proof I hold up the fact that at one point the author actually goes to the trouble of letting us know which member of Kiss each of his past loves would be. This includes members who were in temporary lineups, managers, the kind of thing an in-depth and perhaps dismayingly over the top knowledge of Kiss is required to fully grasp. It is brilliant. It is pathetic. Go read it now.