Joe Queenan - One for the Books

BOOKS BY JOE QUEENAN

Closing Time: A Memoir

Queenan Country: A Reluctant Anglophiles Pilgrimage to the Mother Country

True Believers: The Tragic Inner Life of Sports Fans

Balsamic Dreams: A Short but Self-Important History of the Baby Boomer Generation

My Goodness: A Cynics Short-Lived Search for Sainthood

Confessions of a Cineplex Heckler: Celluloid Tirades and Escapades

Red Lobster, White Trash, and the Blue Lagoon: Joe Queenans America

The Unkindest Cut: How a Hatchet-Man Critic Made His Own $7,000 Movie and Put It All on His Credit Card

If Youre Talking to Me, Your Career Must Be in Trouble: Movies, Mayhem, and Malice

Imperial Caddy: The Rise of Dan Quayle in America and the Decline and Fall of Practically Everything Else

ONE

FOR THE

BOOKS

Joe
Queenan

VIKING

VIKING

Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

First published in 2012 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

Copyright Joe Queenan, 2012 All rights reserved

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

Queenan, Joe. One for the books / Joe Queenan p. cm

ISBN 978-1-101-60119-8

1. Queenan, JoeBooks and reading. 2. Books and readingUnited States. 3. Books and readingPsychological aspects. I Title.

Z1003.2.Q44 2012 028.9dc23

2012015087

No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the authors rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

To Skip McGovern, Lover of Books

Contents

CHAPTER ONE

Great Expectations

T he average American reads four books a year, and the average American finds this more than sufficient. Men who run for high office often deem such a vertiginous quota needlessly rigorous, which is why they are sometimes a bit hazy on what Darwin actually said about finch beaks and can never remember which was Troilus and which was Cressida. I am up to speed on both. Yet I find this no cause for celebration, much less preening. For though I read at least a hundred books a year, and often twice that number, I always end up on New Years Eve feeling that I have accomplished nothing.

I read booksmostly fictionfor at least two hours a day, but I also spend two hours a day reading newspapers and magazines, gathering material for my work, which largely consists of ridiculing nincompoops and scoundrels. I read books in all the obvious placesin my house and my office, on trains and buses and planes, in public parks and private gardensbut I have also read them at plays and concerts and prizefights, and not only during the intermissions. I have read books while waiting for friends to get sprung from the drunk tank, while waiting to have my meniscus repaired, while waiting for people to emerge from comas, while waiting for the Iceman to cometh. On more than one occasion I have buried my face in a book to take my mind off the low-lifes at the other end of the subway car in which I was inexplicably traveling at midnight, alone. I always carry a book I can page through while in line at the supermarket or during jury selection or at wakes of people I barely know and do not much care for. I read anywhere and everywhere, except in the bathroom, as I find this unspeakably vulgar and disrespectful to the person whose work one is reading, unless one is reading someone appalling.

I am enthralled by the concept of stolen kisses. In high school I used to prop up a copy of Dr. No or The Spy Who Loved Me against the back of the rhino-shaped youth who sat directly in front of me and delight in James Bonds spine-tingling adventures while the teacher was rattling on about the ablative case or the genetic fallacy or photosynthesis. During my summer vacations in college, I worked the graveyard shift in a bubble-gum factory, where I would volunteer to climb up into an overhead funnel and scour it, which the older, fatter, full-time employees were loath to do. Some of them feared heights; all of them feared ladders. Once ensconced in my stainless-steel crows nestwhose filth or cleanliness no one down below was in any position to verifyI would stir up a bit of a ruckus every so often, creating the impression that I was getting on with the housecleaning job, and then settle in amidst the sugar and the debris and read F. Scott Fitzgerald all night.

In my twenties, when I used to load trucks at the A&P warehouse in a mirthless Philadelphia suburb, I would read during my breaks in the dead of night, a practice that was dimly viewed by the Teamsters I worked with. Just to be on the safe side, I never read Russians, existentialists, poetry, or books like Lettres de Madame de Svign in their presence, as they would have cut me to ribbons. During antiwar protests in the nations capital back in the Days of Rage, I would read officially sanctioned, counterculturally appropriate materials like Steppenwolf and Journey to the East and Siddhartha to take my mind off Pete Seegers banjo playing. I once read Tortilla Flats from cover to cover during a Jerry Garcia solo on Truckin at Philadelphias Spectrum; by the time hed wrapped things up, I could have read As I Lay Dying. Often I have slipped away from picnics and birthday parties and childrens soccer games and awards ceremonies to squeeze in a bit of reading while concealed in a copse, a garage, a thicket, or a deserted gazebo. For me, books have always been a safety valve, and in some caseswhen a book materializes out of nowhere in a situation where it is least expecteda deus ex machina. Books are a way of saying: This room seems to have more than its fair share of bozos in it. Edith Wharton may be dead, but shes still better company than these palookas.

I have never squandered an opportunity to read. There are only twenty-four hours in the day, seven of which are spent sleeping, and in my view at least four of the remaining seventeen must be devoted to reading. Of course, four hours a day does not provide me with nearly enough time to satisfy my appetites. A friend once told me that the real message Bram Stoker sought to convey in