If you’re in the Portland area and looking for something cool to do Thursday (8.14) night, let me suggest swinging down to Powell’s on Hawthorne (3723 SE Hawthorne Blvd.) around 7:30ish to listen to Mickey Hess read from his new book Big Wheel at the Cracker Factory. [Buy]

Hess is a professor at Rider University, but he’s published two tomes on hip-hop and several short pieces at McSweeney’s and other places.  Anyhow, the question is why should you go see him read.  Well, I haven’t the foggiest and though that’s not the best sales pitch a person can offer, call it a hunch.

I’m about 80 pages (228 total) into Big Wheel and I’m loving every minute of it.  The book is technically creative non-ficiton, which means it’s mostly true in the conventional sense (non of that James Frey shit), but Hess probably changed enough to not get sued or make his family and friends hate him.

Big Wheel is a rollicking adventure of Hess’s early years trying to stay afloat in the world of college teaching.  To do so he takes a bunch of shit jobs like driving an ice cream truck, being a haunted house character and other fringe jobs that offer the benefits of money, flexibility and not caring about the stupid job in the first place.

It’s a light-hearted look dealing with that period in life when you have to go from being a reckless youth to an adult, without sacrificing anything.  That’s hard to do and for some people it just paralyzes them.

Wow, that sounds almost like an intentional blurb for the book?  Yeah, yeah what are you gonna do.  I suppose in a way what I like most about Hess’s writing is that he’s funny and self-aware enough to make great observations about himself and others, but mostly he’s enthusiastic. Punches are not pulled, but there’s very little angst.  We don’t like angsty white men around these parts.  Especially because being a white, angsty male is so 1915-1998.  Humor and enthusiasm counts for a lot, especially when so many people go for the detached irony aesthetic starting around 2001.

It’s hard not to feel like Hess is one of us, just someone doing what they have to do to get by so that he can do what he loves, which is write and consume hip-hop.

If that’s not enough he promises free stuff if you ask him nicely.  I’m going to ask him for a copy of his first book, El Cumpleanos de Paco, which he self-published and gave away to people.  It was a limited run, so hopefully he has one or two left.

When I actually finish the book in it’s entirety, I promise a more thorough review/examination of it.  For now though, it comes highly recommended.  And if you ask nicely, I’ll gladly pass it along once I’m done with it.  I’m sure Mickey wouldn’t have it any other way.

George Orwell will always be remembered for writing 1984 and Animal Farm, but if that’s all you’ve read by him let my suggest you pick up his travelogue of essays Down and Out in Paris and London. It was his first book, published when he was 30.

I suggest that to offer that Orwell was more than just his two most famous novels.  He was a superb writer of the highest order.  One need to look no further than his intimate diaries to ascertain his brilliance.  Lucky for us they are available to read.

The Orwell Prize has decided to publish Orwell’s diary - one entry per day 70 years to the day after they were originally written.

What impression of Orwell will emerge? From his domestic diaries (which start on 9^th August), it may be a largely unknown Orwell, whose great curiosity is focused on plants, animals, woodwork, and – above all – how many eggs his chickens have laid. From his political diaries (from 7^th September), it may be the Orwell whose political observations and critical thinking have enthralled and inspired generations since his death in 1950. Whether writing about the Spanish Civil War or sloe gin, geraniums or Germany, Orwell’s perceptive eye and rebellion against the ‘gramophone mind’ he so despised are obvious.

Orwell wrote of what he saw in Dickens: ‘He is laughing, with a touch of anger in his laughter, but no triumph, no malignity. It is the face of a man who is always fighting against something, but who fights in the open and is not frightened, the face of a man who is generously angry — in other words, of a nineteenth-century liberal, a free intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls.’

What will you see in the Orwell diaries?

That’s a great question.  I like that the diaries, only a few entries in, are diverse.  Some are no longer than a single line, while others read like an ethereal haiku.  This is going to be a wonderful project to follow.

David Carr is the real deal New York Times media/culture critic and he’s coming out with a book about his days in Minnesota battling substance abuse and trying to get his life together, who only did so when his twin daughters came into his life. The early buzz is tantamount to a tsunami.

Books about substance abuse are often the most talked about books because they take place in a world that many people begin to travel down at 18-25, but most people make an abrupt U-turn when the realize the stakes involved with continuing down the darkened alley. And let’s be honest, to a certain extent for those who have never been habitual drug users, it’s a fascinating world. One that 80% of people are not privy to.

He’s the rub for The Night of the Gun. David Carr doesn’t trust his memory of those events, so rather than embellish them and become embroiled in some James Frey-type of shit (would you want Oprah bitch-slapping you?) he went out and thoroughly investigated his own life. Pouring over court documents and arrest records and interviewing over sixty people connected to his life at that time. It sounds like heady stuff. Stuff that I can’t wait to dig into.

The New York Times Magazine ran an excerpt this morning of the book titled “Me and My Girls.” It’s breathtaking, simply one of the most outstanding things I’ve read in quite some time. MORE »

As compiled by the UK’s Telegraph. They’re not too clear on what they consider a “cult book.” Often times it’s hard to differentiate these types of books from say, bestsellers or classics. Also, cult books vary significantly from cult movies. Cult movies tend to be trashy or bad in a way that makes them pleasurably good. But that isn’t the case with cult books. Cult books tend to change our lives in one way or another. They’re the type of books you go clamoring on to your friends about that they have to read it.

“In compiling our list, we were looking for the sort of book that people wear like a leather jacket or carry around like a totem. The book that rewires your head: that turns you on to psychedelics; makes you want to move to Greece; makes you a pacifist; gives you a way of thinking about yourself as a woman, or a voice in your head that makes it feel okay to be a teenager; conjures into being a character who becomes a permanent inhabitant of your mental flophouse.

We were able to agree, finally, on one thing: you know a cult book when you see one. And people have passionate feelings on both sides: our appeal for suggestions yielded enough for a list at least three times as long as this one,” they wrote.

Among the books they’ve included are: Slaughterhouse 5 by Kurt Vonnegut, Baby and Child Care by Doctor Spock, Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, The Beaty Myth by Naomi Wolf, A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole and many more.

It reads like a who’s who of important literature, so much so that many of these novels are considered classics and I would be hesitant to call them cult books. I guess, I wish there were more books on here that were unknowns instead of some obvious choices. Still, you could do worse than reading the books on this list, which works as a fantastic literary primer.

Full list after the jump. We’ve left the original authors’s notes because they indicate a personal attachment to the books, which is sometimes the best endorsement. MORE »