Nonfiction Pizza Party
BACK TO SCHOOL. Teachers and students (and lunch ladies, shout out to lunch ladies), hope you're enjoying all the cheap school supplies, social anxiety, and of course, reading! This week in my MFA cave I studied the opening chapters to six of contemporary nonfiction's most popular and acclaimed titles. Now I will make ridiculous assumptions about how good I think the rest of each book will be. Pay attention, people who aren't sure if they should trust Oprah's literary opinions.
Moby-Duck by Donovan Hohn: In case you don't read the subtitle (“The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea and of the Beachcombers, Oceanographers, Environmentalists, and Fools, Including the Author, Who Went in Search of Them”), the prologue also explains everything that happens in the book. People trying to rescue a bunch of bath toys before they destroy a body of water sounds like the plot to a (solid) episode of Parks and Recreation. Still, I'm feeling some Ron Swanson apathy towards this one.Chance of success: 28% The Father of All Things by Tom Bissell: [Inappropriate Eggers-Zeitoun joke removed after I realized McSweeney's didn't publish The Father of All Things.] I really enjoyed the Harper's excerpt I read from this book last year, and the best part about Bissell writing a serious Vietnam Father-Son Story is that he's also written an All Night Coke Binge Playing Grand Theft Auto Story.Chance of Success: 71% Born to Run by Christopher McDougall: Read this one kind of quick, but I think it's about a chubby American dude who tries to find Mexican superhero-ghosts to teach him how to run, but can't, so instead he becomes friends with a white horse.Chance of success: 100%(R.I.P. Micah True.)Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo: The writer does her third-person close narration of a young trash picker in a Mumbai undercity. Maybe Boo can pull it off—“The Marriage Cure” is straight fire—but so far, I'm not hooked.Chance of success: 35% Half a Life by Darin Strauss: Best opening line of 2011: “Half my life ago, I killed a girl.” In high school, a classmate swerved in front of the writer's car, resulting in her death. This memoir's probably going to make me want to curl up under a blanket in the middle of the afternoon, but I can't wait.Chance of success: 82%Wild by Cheryl Strayed: On the cover is a photo of an old boot, and in the prologue the narrator accidentally loses one boot off the side of a mountain, and then in frustration throws the other over the edge. Many boot questions. Which boot is the one on the cover? Will the boot she murdered come back for revenge? Is the first boot actually the husband she recently separated from?Chance of success: 51%--David Bersell