Peachy Reads

Craig Taylor took years gathering interviews from all sorts of Londoners to create the impossible-- a comprehensive picture of this multifaceted metropolis provided by its inhabitants. Well, if he didn’t get every representative voice from London, it wasn’t for lack of trying. Included in this book are interviews with the voice of the London Underground (“mind the gap”), taxi drivers, tourists, a beefeater and his wife, protester, angler, rapper, paramedic, estate agent, foreign worker, bouncer, squatter, etc. Their candid commentary shows London, warts and all. Taylor goes far off the beaten tourist trails where the gritty side of London starts to show, providing a picture of London some may be unfamiliar with, but in so doing creating a book that any Londonophile needs to read.

Oversized billboards on Florida’s byways beckon tourists to Swamplandia!, an Everglades sideshow that features the Bigtree family wrestling and swimming with ‘gators (they call them Seths) in a nostalgic tourist trap that most readers will recognize. After opening with a hugely engaging first chapter that introduces the quirky members of the Bigtree Family and their unusual business, it all goes quickly to pieces—Hilola Bigtree, the show’s headliner and family matriarch, succumbs to cancer, the “chief” disappears to the mainland, and the home-schooled children are left more or less to their own devices to fend for themselves. Ossie starts dabbling in the occult and hooks up with a ghostly paramour (whose backstory is somewhat superfluously told in significant detail), Kiwi defects to the rival amusement park, and Ava hooks up with an unsavory swamp character she employs in an attempt to bring her sister back from the “other side.” This novel was noted as one of the ten best books of 20...

I just reread The Great Gatsby since my 10th grade daughter is reading it in her English class. I read it years ago, but remembered very little. It’s impressive what F. Scott packs into under 200 pages. The character development is pretty amazing and the plot rather complicated with the split love triangle. It also offers an interesting glimpse into the party atmosphere of roaring twenties New York, East versus West, old versus new, nouveau riche versus established wealth. I can see why it makes such a good choice for High School English classes. Not overly long, full of symbolism and metaphors. Not so unlike a tv drama with the carnage at the end. I’m glad I reacquainted myself with it. Maybe we’ll go to the new movie version with Leonardo di Caprio and Carey Mulligan when it comes out in December 2012.

Tina Fey didn’t really cross my radar screen until I became a fan of "30 Rock" in its first few seasons (thanks mostly to time-delayed viewings via Hulu). The quirky sitcom featured such quick, smart, off-the-wall humor that it sort of defied comparison to anything else I’d seen on network TV. Then there were Tina Fey's Sarah Palin impersonations which were inspired and still inspire laughter today. Bossypants has been in high demand in the library, and my curiosity finally got the better of me and I checked it out. Tina Fey is just one of those smart funny women that you have to admire. Her self-deprecating view of herself and her day-to-day life play in stark contrast to her confident entertainment persona and her many professional successes. The chapters describing her father and her annual Christmas visits to her Youngstown inlaws provide an interesting glimpse into her groundedness and precious ordinariness, and in other chapters she makes her “glamorous” TV lifesty...

It’s pretty damn easy to get to Hell. If you exceed 700 mutterings of the F-word, for example, you’re damned for eternity. If you honk your horn just one time over your lifetime allowance of 500, you’re damned (probably less in Switzerland). If you exceed your charitable allowance of urinating in a public swimming pool, you’re damned. Not to mention the obvious ways to get in— murder, suicide, genocide. Maddie is a thirteen-year-old girl (daughter of a Hollywood power couple that sounds an awful lot like Brangelina), who finds herself the newest resident “downunder,” and she’s not completely sure why. She decides to make the best of things though. Her backstory is revealed little by little, as she and her cohorts (who are a Hellish version of the Breakfast Club) plod their way across the Dandruff Desert and a wasteland made up of toenail clippings (just some of the topographic treats waiting for you in Hell). By the end of the story Maddie has the diabolical job of telemarketer, callin...

Peter Ackroyd wrote the ultimate Londonophile’s companion to the city with 2003’s London: The Biography , which was not a chronological history in the traditional sense but a rather fascinating thematic approach to all things London. Now he’s dug a little deeper (pun intended) and produced this volume that addresses the things that exist under London’s streets. Most people are familiar with the tube and maybe even Churchill’s Cabinet War Rooms, but there's so much more to be uncovered, so to speak. Graves, wells, hidden rivers, secret tunnels and air raid shelters, layers and layers of archeology—it’s really pretty fascinating. Just to illustrate how fascinating, have a look at the following excerpt, which chronicles the historical investigations that accompanied the extension of the Jubilee tube line when it pushed across the Thames and then towards Canary Wharf: [The Jubilee Line] travelled back 5,000 years. In the depths of the new system were uncovered pieces of Neolithic potte...

I don’t know why I have such a phobia of Dickens. There’s some hidden event in my schooling that turned me against him, and I can’t for the life of me think of what it is. My brother-in-law, on the other hand, is a Dickens enthusiast, maybe even a little bit of a Dickens fanatic. It is his eternal concern that I have yet to read any Dickens novel cover-to-cover (though truth be told I have read A Christmas Carol ). So, he gifted me Great Expectations, the graphic novel . Quite nice. I really rather enjoyed it, though even in this much condensed graphic form, there was a plethora of characters that were sometimes hard to keep track of. Luckily for me there was a two page spread of dramatis personae at the front of the book that was convenient to make reference to. It’s actually a good way to ease into the novel. Maybe I’ll do that some day.