Father's Day Gift Guide

Father's Day is nigh upon us and you will probably say "I don't know" when asked for gift ideas to commemorate the occasion, or maybe you don't know what to get one of the dads in your life.  This post aims to alleviate that problem.

Men in Love and/or the Trainspotting collection

If you read G:TB you were probably born between 1968 and 1978 which means you are of exactly the right age to have seen, and been absolutely blown away by, the movie Trainspotting when it came out in 1996.

Barry!  The book on which it's based is just as good and it got me into other works by Irvine Welsh including all the sequels and prequels involving the same group of radge jakeys which are available on Amazon as the "Trainspotting collection."  This does not include the latest installment, Men in Love, which takes place shortly after the end of Trainspotting and before Porno.  This means the new book is a sequel and a prequel.  As a fan of the series I enjoyed it greatly.  I guess you could come to it cold but I suspect you'll enjoy it more if you already read the other books, or at least Trainspotting.  I've cited some favorite Welsh quotes before--my top choice from Men in Love is from Sick Boy (natch) and it's at least tangentially related to Father's Day:

Pah-pah, Papa: even a broken clock is right twice a day.  I thank God that out of the billions of retard sperm that this miasmal mongol hound shot from those festering hee-haws intae my ill-omened mother (and countless Leith hoors), that it was the solitary, exceptional, perfect bastard that managed to penetrate her egg and furnish this saintly woman with her only son.

Onlae a dozy bam couldnae relate to that!

Syitren R300 CD player

zwoman got me one of these small modern CD players for my birthday.  It has AUX and optical jacks and Bluetooth so it works with AirPods or any other Bluetooth device.  More importantly, it justifies keeping all my CDs, especially the ones that are currently only on Notify (like Done By the Forces of Nature which was removed from Spotify because I suspect it includes exactly zero cleared samples).  I dig the Scandinavian vibe of the walnut version.  Who doesn't dig Scandinavian vibes?

Patagonia R1 Air Hoodie 

zson borrowed my softshell to clean out stables in the rain and a horse bit the zipper off (don't ask) so I went to REI to replace it during their recent 25% off sale.  They didn't have anything that fit the bill, but I spend a lot of time in fleece jackets and two of them are close to crapping out so I perused REI's selection and discovered Patagonia's new (at least to me) Air Fleece.  I'm not sure how it works but it keeps you warm without getting too warm (unlike their Better Sweaters) and the medium fit me perfectly.  They are wildly overpriced, even at 25% off, but it's replacing two fleeces (one of which I bought about 12 years ago) and zson is about my size so he can wear it too (so long as he avoids the zipper-eating horse) so I justified it to myself and I'm hoping it will last a long time.  I went with the hoodie version because who doesn't like hoodies?  

A subscription to The Atlantic

There might not be a better source of content outside G:TB than The Atlantic.  It's chock-full of think pieces from deep thinkers, cultural observations from cultured observers, and short fiction from non-fictional writers of all heights.  Notable writers include Tom Nichols, Anne Applebaum, David Frum, Robert Kagan, McKay Coppins, Sarah Fitzpatrick, Jonathan Chait, Adam Serwer, Derek Thompson, Annie Lowrey, Jamele Hill, George Packer, Eliot Cohen, Alexandra Petri and a boatload of other Washington Post defectors.  They put out new stuff online daily and offer a web-only subscription but for an extra $10 you can get also get the dead tree version mailed to your house along with a tote.

Short Attention Span Book Reviews

As a rule, follow-through isn't one of my strengths. I'd go as far as to say that it's one of my most obvious weaknesses, if I'm being honest. My life is littered with the detritus of business ideas, short stories, home projects, and any number of other notions that I started and didn't finish. Given the fact that I'm clearly aware of this character flaw, you'd think that age would give me the wisdom to rectify it, or at least be aware of not taking on things that I'll struggle to finish. Instead, the opposite seems to be be happening as I grow older.

A recent case in point: my inability to focus on one book long enough to complete it before starting another. By my count, I am currently in the middle of five different books, having just this week finally finished Pat Conroy's excruciatingly honest memoir, The Death of Santini.

Because it's really difficult to have any idea when (or even whether) I'll finish any of the five, I thought you might be interested in a partial review of each book. Consider it sort of a bizarro Sentence of Dave.

Mark Leyner, The Sugar Frosted Nutsack

That same sentence artist turned me on to Leyner's sui generis brand of literary lunacy a long time ago. The author's dizzyingly comedic style reminds me of nothing so much as a coke-fueled Robin Williams standup routine with a plot, albeit a loosely connected one that may or may not choose to resolve itself. According to my Kindle app, I'm about 39% of the way through 'Nutsack', which is, as near as I can tell, the story of a group of modern-day gods ensconced in a Dubai skyscraper and obsessed with an unemployed anti-semitic plumber from New Jersey named Ike Carton, who may or may not be Jewish.

The story presents itself as the ritualistic chanting of a tribe of bards, with every diversion and recursion folded into the story as a natural extension, and in true Leyner fashion, nearly every paragraph is a diversion - he's a master of the non-linear. As Ben Marcus explains in a New York Times review of the book, "[Leyner] is either a genius or a freak, and it may not matter which, because his books are compulsively readable, created by a literary mind that seems to have no precedent." Frankly, it's exhausting, and made moreso by my lack of attention span. I'm doing a lousy job of reading this book, to be honest.

Michael Chabon, Telegraph Avenue

This is my first Chabon book, though I'm familiar with his lofty reputation. I picked this up at a little bookstore in Healdsburg, CA a few weeks ago, because I obviously needed to carry one more book home on the plane.

Set in 2004 on a decaying street on the border between Berkeley and Oakland, the first 92 pages of Telegraph Avenue tell the story of a failing vinyl record store owned by a pair of friends. Brokeland Records' demise seems to be hastening, as the community's most prominent political force as brokered a deal to attract a big box megamedia store owned by a football star-turned entrepreneur.

The book moves easily between its modern setting and the early days of one of the protagonists' father's modestly successful blaxploitation film career. Chabon has a gift for detail, and for conveying sounds and smells that drive the action. Both cinematic and musical, the book tackles themes of race, gender, social equality, and gentrification. Or at least I think it will.

Bob Ryan, Scribe

The veteran sportswriter's memoir is a fairly straightforward account of his time in the game, at least up to 1987, but it's told with brevity and wit. It doesn't hurt that Ryan got to cover some of the best NBA teams of all-time, pre-Jordan Bulls. His love for sports, particularly NBA basketball, is clear, as is his obvious gratitude for the life he's led.

Ryan's not looking to break any news in this book, but his choice of John Havlicek as the greatest basketball player in history might at least offer a starting point for an interesting barstool debate.

Chad Harbach, The Art of Fielding

Harbach's debut novel was highly touted upon its release in 2011, later being named one of the New York Times' Best Books of the year. It's equal parts Chip Hilton and Jane Smiley, a slowly-unfolding story about the baseball team and President of Westish College, a fictional Division III school hard on the Wisconsin shores of Lake Michigan. It's got romance (both in baseball and human terms), bromance, and a bit of Kinsellan mysticism.

I'd read some reviews of this one when it was released, and am apprehensively turning pages in dread of the Knoblauchian plot twist that befalls the story's mild-mannered and decent central character. And so while Harbach's book is beautifully drawn, it may take me some time to work up the courage to finish it.

Jamie Summerlin, Freedom Run

One of my co-workers is an avid endurance athlete, and as a formerly overweight kid and young adult, particularly drawn to stories of perseverance and overcoming limits. (He's also, coincidentally, married to one of my wife's college roommates, so I've known him for many years prior to working with him.) In a previous professional life, he was a professor at West Virginia University, where he taught Summerlin.

The subtitle to this book is 'A 100-Day, 3,452-Mile Journey Across America to Benefit Wounded Veterans'. Summerlin, a former Marine, decided in 2010 that his training as an endurance athlete could be put to use in service of a greater good. As he writes in the prologue, "Maybe running is what I can use to accomplish something more meaningful. Maybe that is my calling in life."

And then he went and ran from Coos Bay, OR to Rehoboth Beach, DE. I assume he made it, though I've only read the first few pages. I started reading this one expecting that I would meet Jamie at the Richmond Marathon yesterday, where I'd planned to run the half. My absurd work (and eating) schedule over the past few weeks led me to defer my race entry until next year, so I've got 365 days or so to finish the story.

Maybe I'll have completed one or two of the other books on this list by then.