[She destroyed it all.] He was wrong by any standards.”
Don’t you love that last sentence? The message is clear: if you’re a writer whose work will interest future generations, and you’re screwing around, don’t delete those emails, because Claire Tomalin and her colleagues are going to need them. Zadie Smith and Michael Chabon and the rest of you, watch out. (I’m not implying, of course, that either of you is screwing around, and I’m sorry if you made that inference. It was supposed to be a compliment. It just came out wrong. Forget it, OK? And sue the Spree, not me. It was their sloppy editing.)
This Is Serbia Calling, Matthew Collin’s book about the Belgrade radio station B92 and the role it played in resisting Milosevic, has been lying around my house for a while. But when my post–McSweeney’s 13 research into comic books led me to conclude that I should buy, among other things, Joe Sacco’s Safe Area Gorazde, I wanted to do a little extra reading on the Yugoslavian wars, and Collin’s book is perfect: it gives you a top-notch potted history, as well as an enthralling and humbling story about very brave young people refusing to be cowed by a brutal regime. It’s pretty funny, too, in places. If you have a taste for that hopelessly bleak Eastern European humor, then the Serbian dissenter of the 1990s is your sort of guy. You’ve got warring nationalist groups, and an inflation rate, in January ’94, of 313,563,558 percent (that’s on the steep side, for those of you with no head for economics) which resulted in a loaf of bread costing 4,000,000,000 dinars. You’ve got power cuts, rigged elections, a government too busy committing genocide to worry about the niceties of free speech, and, eventually, NATO bombs. There are good jokes to be made, by those with the stomach for them. “The one good thing about no electricity,” one cynic remarked during the power failures, “is that there’s no television telling us we’ve got electricity.” This Is Serbia Calling is essential reading if you’ve ever doubted the power or the value of culture, of music, books, films, theater; it also makes a fantastic case for Sonic Youth and anyone else who makes loud, weird noises. When your world is falling round about your ears, Tina Turner isn’t going to do it for you.
Y: The Last Man is a comic-book series about a world run by women, after every man but one has been wiped out by a mysterious plague. It’s a great premise, and full of smart ideas: the Democrats are running the country, because the only Republican women are Republican wives; Israel is cleaning up in the Middle East, because they have the highest proportion of trained female combat soldiers. It’s strange, reading a comic—a proper comic, not a graphic novel—in which a woman says “You can fuck my tits if you want” (and I can only apologize, not only for repeating the expression, but for the number of references to breasts in this month’s column. I’m pretty sure it’s a coincidence, although we should, I suppose, recognize the possibility that it marks the beginning of a pathetic middle-aged obsession). Is that what happens in comics now? Is this the sort of stuff your ten-year-old boy is reading? Crikey. When I was ten, the only word I’d have understood in the whole sentence would have been “you,” although not necessarily in this context. Daniel Clowes’s David Boring—yeah, yeah, late again—is partly about large bottoms, but as one of the reviews quoted on the back called the book “perverse and fetishistic,” I’d have wanted my money back if it hadn’t been. It’s also clever, and the product of a genuinely odd imagination.
There’s no rule that says one’s reading has to be tonally consistent. I can’t help but feel, however, that my reading has been all over the place this month. The Invisible Woman and Y: The Last Man were opposites in just about every way you can imagine; they even had opposite titles. A woman you can’t see versus a guy whose mere existence attracts the world’s attention. Does this matter? I suspect it might. I was once asked to DJ at a New Yorker party, and the guy who was looking after me (in other words, the guy who was actually playing the records) wouldn’t let me choose the music I wanted because he said I wasn’t paying enough attention to the beats per minute: according to him, you can’t have a differential of more than, I don’t know, twenty bpm between records. At the time, I thought this was a stupid idea, but there is a possibility that it might apply to reading. The Invisible Woman is pacy and engrossing, but it’s no graphic novel, and reading Tomalin’s book after The Last Man was like playing John Lee Hooker after the Chemical Brothers—in my opinion, John Lee Hooker is the greater artist, but he’s in no hurry, is he? Next month, I might try starting with the literary equivalent of a smoocher, and move on to something a bit quicker. And I promise that if there are any breasts, I won’t mention them. In fact, I won’t even look at them.
1. I bought so many books this month it’s obscene, and I’m not owning up to them all: this is a selection. And to be honest, I’ve been economical with the truth for months now. I keep finding books that I bought, didn’t read, and didn’t list.
2. [We do indeed pay Nick Hornby to write his monthly column, but we didn’t pay him to mention McSweeney’s 13. —Ed.]
BOOKS BOUGHT:
BOOKS READ:
Shortly after I submitted my copy for last month’s column, my third son was born. I mention his arrival not because I’m after your good wishes or your sympathy, but because reading is a domestic activity, and is therefore susceptible to any changes in the domestic environment. And though it’s true that the baby is responsible for everything I read this month, just about, he’s been subtle about it: he hasn’t made me any more moronic than I was before, and he certainly hasn’t prevented me from reading. He could argue, in fact, that he has actually encouraged reading in our household, through his insistence on the increased consciousness of his parents. (Hey—if you lot are all so brainy and so serious about books, how come you’re still using contraception?)
Shortly