Thursday, June 3, 2010

Not Stacking Up (Cigar Smoke 6-3-10)

I noticed something about my behavior the other day that I thought I would share with you. I still buy a lot of books. Yep, even with the Internet and e-books and the Kindle and the iPad and the Nook and the Cranny, I have ignored these pissy little fake books and I continue to buy real books. Why? Because I am a good American and I want to help out the economy and actually hold a big, heavy hardbound book bought from Vroman’s in my hairy-knuckled hands and just lean back and smell the new-book ink. (I’ll wait for the applause to die down.)

And even though my pinko wife, Marge the Commie, has drifted over to the other side and now reads almost all her books on the Kindle, I still hold out for decency and apple pie and wrongheaded stubbornness. Sometimes when she’s not paying attention, I try to jam her Wi-Fi connection to our home network by running around the living room in my boxers waving an old antenna and tying aluminum foil to Archie’s collar. So far it hasn’t worked very well, except we have noticed a drop in Jehovah’s Witnesses in the neighborhood.

OK, I know you’ve been dying to ask me just what books I have been reading. Well, I am going to tell you that, but first, I have to make a little confession. Although I continue to buy a lot of books, I have noticed that I am not reading a lot of books. What I am doing is stacking a lot of books. I am a really good stacker of books. I love to stack books. It’s just so cool. It makes you look really intellectual and the chicks love the long stack.

And the art of stacking is pretty easy. I learned it in only a few days. Once I caught on to the trick of putting one book on top of the other and continuing that, I pretty much knew how to stack.

So what books do I have in my stack? What books am I not reading but have purchased to help me give the impression to houseguests that I read a lot? Is that what you want to know? OK, here’s the list of my perfectly stacked, and as of now, unread or just barely partially read, books:

“Animals Make Us Human,” by Temple Grandin
“The Wagon,” by Martin Preib
“Perfectly Reasonable Deviations,” by Richard P. Feynman
“iPhone: The Missing Manual,” by David Pogue
“The Quants,” by Scott Patterson
“The Last Empty Places,” by Peter Stark
“Going Rogue,” by Sarah Palin (I bought this to just piss off people)
“Open,” by Andre Agassi
“The Poker Bride,” by Christopher Corbett
“Hollywood Moon,” by Joseph Wambaugh
“Mao: The Unknown Story,” by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday
“The Book of Genesis Illustrated,” by R. Crumb (By the way, did you know that when you spell check R. Crumb, the spellchecker gives you “rectum?” Try it yourself.)

Now, if I had actually read those books, I may have had an outside chance of being a somewhat interesting person. But, as you now know, I have only stacked these books. But I think I have stacked them very well. I put the large, R. Crumb oversized coffee table book on the bottom and then put the giant-ass 800 page Mao monster on top of that one, and so on, up to the shortest one — “The Wagon,” only 167 pages. Pretty damn good stacking, huh? What if I had put “The Wagon” on the bottom of the stack and created an unwieldy stack? What you have still respected me? Would you have let me stack around your children? I doubt it.

Although I am a damn good stacker, and I think my stacking would stack up to any book stack I know of, I have felt a little guilty about not actually reading the books. At first, I didn’t quite know how to remedy the situation. Oh sure, I could have actually read the books. But that’s pretty time-consuming.

So I decided to buy an iPhone app to help me read more. I hit up iTunes and clicked on the Apple App Store and damned if I didn’t find an app to help me read more. It was called Read More. (That Steve Jobs is something, huh?) So, even though I couldn’t stack it, I bought the Read More app to help me read more. (They didn’t have a Stack More app.)

And, get this: You enter all the books you are reading in this Read More app, and then when you actually start reading a book, you start a timer! Then, when you finish a reading session, you stop the timer. That way you can go from book to book and keep track of exactly how many pages you have read and you’ll know your official pages per-hour reading rate.

But, hell, I already knew how many pages of each book I had read. Zero. And I knew my official reading rate. Zero. And I already knew what people thought of me. A number less than one. So I wasted my money on this damn Read More app. But at least I could stack my iPhone, which had my Read More app in it, up on my stack of books. It’s the perfect size to be on top of a stack.

Jim Laris is a former publisher and owner of the Weekly. Contact him at jimlaris@mac.com.