Sorry this is so late. I had a few good titles at the end of the month, but figured I'd pack up all the very interesting, edifying half-finished non-fiction titles I had sitting around the house and finish them all on vacation. Wow, nothing like hitting your hotel on the first day of vacation, opening your bag and seeing 6 half-finished, very edifying and totally plotless books staring back at you. I watched tv instead (The 18 member Dugger Family on TLC - whoa!) and went to B&N to buy cheesy murder mysteries for the rest of the trip. So, here's August's books, all truly read in August.

In Praise of Slowness: How the Worldwide Movement is Challenging the Cult of Speed - Carl Honorè

Honorè starts this book by recounting how he came to be interested in writing about time and the Slow movement. While waiting for a plane, he read an article in the paper about a series of new one minute bedtime stories. He gleefully thought to himself how he could whip through story time with his son in less than ten minutes and get to watching the news. Fortunately, he came to his senses and realized how skewed his perspective on time was. Those of you with a co-op in your area have probably heard of the slow food movement - the idea that food is better and better for you when it is cooked from scratch, rather than prefab, and that people are happier and healthier having long meals together. This slow movement has spread to all other areas of life. HonorÈ covers the biggies - food, mind/body, exercise, sex, travel, work and talks a bit about various founders of slow movements in each of these areas. While the slow time movement does not encourage people to do everything slowly, it does focus on enjoying life and a slower pace and its benefits. The author points out, and rightly so, that our insatiable desire for greater speeds in everything is making us a sick, exhausted culture. We have no time for enjoyment or health, no time to use our vast resources and that often we sabotage ourselves by rushing so much that we need to redo all the work we frantically pumped out. I hear there is an abridged version of the book coming out soon too. Kidding, kidding!

Fargo Rock City and Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story - Chuck Klosterman

Klosterman was an excellent recommendation from Mike H (and yes, I'm reading and enjoying Hatless Jack -one of those edifying books in my aforementioned bag). Both titles are semi-autobiographical books about Klosterman's love of rock and roll/metal, his job as a writer with Spin, his childhood in North Dakota and various and sundry famous and infamous bands. Fargo Rock City is, if anything, a manifesto of heavy metal. Essentially Klosterman says "Yes, metal may be loud and obnoxious, violent and often stupid and is often written off as a wholly pointless a genre. But metal does matter simply because it means a lot to some people." This is a point that can as easily apply to metal as it can to collecting Hummel figurines, Elvis or Baroque instruments. It matters because some people care very deeply about it. Klosterman also makes the most brilliant response to the various "decency groups" that have cropped up throughout the years. They say "Metal (or rock or rap or whatever) is sexist, violent, stupid, misogynist, etc." To which Klosterman replies "Well yeah, duh." Irrefutable logic.

Killing Yourself to Live is an account of a cross-country trip Klosterman took to write a story for Spin on famous places where members of rock bands died. While the premise may sound a bit weak, I found his ramblings on the bands, his life and the locations thoroughly entertaining.

I think what I like most about Klosterman's voice is how familiar he is. His narratives remind me of brunch after a reunion or party. Everyone stares around the Denny's in dull exhaustion, except for one person. Delighted to have found a captive audience and often still drunk from the night before, they launch into a monologue on their favorite subject. They lecture, muse, make jokes about and spew reams on their pet topic. The rest of us sit in bemusement, sip our coffee and let them rip. Maybe the topic isn't dear to our hearts, but it is just so fun to sit back and watch the stream of conscious flow by. Good stuff.

Job Hopper: The Checkered Career of a Down-Market Dilettante - ayun halliday

It took me over half the book to realize why halliday's voice was so familiar. I realized, with a start, that I regularly read her column in Bust magazine about her life in NY with small, mouthy children. Job Hopper is definitely pre Inky and Milo (her kids). Popped out into the brutal world with only a theater degree, halliday needed to support herself. Written in short story format, halliday recounts the funny and often weird circumstances she found herself in trying to earn a paycheck. From waitress to clerk at an import store in a ghetto to nude model, none of her jobs are that out there. However, her description of fellow workers and the politics that accompany any job are amusing and engaging and very familiar.

A Working Stiff's Manifesto - Iain Levison

Less lighthearted than halliday's book is A Working Stiff's Manifesto. While there are definitely some priceless moments (the ceramic donkey), I was more than a bit disturbed by this book. Levison first joined the military to get training in electrical engineering. While he did receive training it what may be considered a vocation, he soon realized that what he learned was highly specialized and almost useless in the real world. He then attended college, earning an English degree. Once again, he felt that he was lied and cheated to about the usefulness of the degree. At this point in the book, I kept hearing the lines from the musical Avenue Q:

What do you do, with a BA in English?
What is my life going to be?
Four years of college and plenty of knowledge
Have earned me this useless degree

In Levison's case, the degree is not only useless, it is a detriment. One employer after another wants nothing to do with Levison and his degree, assuming that he will want more money and be stuck up. He instead bounces from one horrendous, low-paying job to another, often lying about his skills to get hired for princely minimum wage jobs. All in all, he estimates having at least 40 jobs after college. After a short foray working as an assistant to a friend who is a long-distance trucker, Levison decides to take the big money plunge and go to Alaska to work on a slime line gutting fish. While large sums can be earned working on the rusty hulks, leaving before your contract can leave you stranded without pay or a ticket home. Conditions are miserable and the other workers often violent and dangerous.

If anything, I found this book a sad, though fascinating, cautionary tale for the modern worker. While Levison does, for the most part, portray himself as a guy with poor decision making skills but a hard worked who just can't seem to get a break, I do have the sneaking suspicion that some of his misery is brought on himself. He does mention once, late in the book, that he does often have to squelch feelings of superiority because of his degree. He also mentions that he put himself through college as an EMT, something which he never returns to. Regardless, a much more thought-provoking book than I had expected, though I doubt the author had intended it as such. Perhaps the most disturbing comment in the book - in his blurb at the back he is listed as currently unemployed.