Critical question of the day: What do Bowling Alone, Breakfast of Champions, and The World Until Yesterday have in common?

Outside of any brilliant, Clavin-esque answers, the only plausible correct answer is: Those were, prior to today, the three books that had earned premature and very dishonorable dispositions from my company. (As in: Could not be completed. Trash.)

A little background on me: I am a bit stubborn and frugal to a fault…hell, I am cheap. If I buy a book I am damn sure going to read it. More, if I invest time and effort into starting a book, it will take some massive force of nature to drive me to abort it before the end. (That goes double for an audio book on loan from the local library…heck, I’m just killing time in the car on the way to and from work, all I have to do is sit there on my ass and zone out.) There are, of course, notable exceptions to the rule. As of today, four exceptions to be exact. The new addition to the Hall of Shame: Life on the Mississippi: An Epic American Adventure by Rinker Buck.

Bowling Alone was only $2 from the annual sale at the library. I made it to about page 60 before I got up from my morning reading chair and threw it in the kitchen trash can. I remember shouting something about his intentional and repeated misinterpretation of simple data. A total waste of $2.

I made it through the first disk of Breakfast of Champions and was just confused…it was not good. Worse, as read by John Malkovich it was just un-listenable.

I’m not sure how far I made it into the audio version of The World Until Yesterday – I admit that I have lost all documentation of this one, I think this is the right book by Mr. Diamond – but I pulled the disk out of the car CD slot on the way home from work and deposited it directly in the drive up slot at the library. Again, I seem to remember mumble-bitching about some rather pathetic revisionism about Teddy Kennedy and Chappaquiddick.

As I am slowly running out of books to listen to from my local library, I seem to be slower on the trigger these days. I made it to the fifth disk of this latest dis-honoree. To be honest, as a Twain fan, I was really interested in the topic and wanted this to be good. It wasn’t. This is my first exposure to Rinker Buck, and others may have read better offerings and/or have had better impressions, but based on this he just isn’t that good. The characters clumsily forced into the personalities of his crew seemed very disingenuous…as in, I believe he just made most of it up. (Bill Bryson he is not.) By the time I was starting the fifth disk, it was clear that these seemingly fake characters were to be his main vehicle for wedging political jabs into story. Then, about two and half minutes into that fifth CD, I was treated to this bit of enlightenment as Buck discussed one member of his crew:

… One contradiction about [him] fascinated me: A dogmatic…conservative, he rarely missed an opportunity to gratuitously rant about blacks, liberals, and immigrants. But personal experience seemed to have rid him of the rote homophobia of right wingers. …

[Unofficial transcription by me…feel free to verify for yourself.]

And with that monumental piece of ignorance on display, this intellectually shallow political bigot of an author and his otherwise not-very-good book joined the previous three entries on my growing list of un-readables (or not-to-be-reads).

Unfortunately, I am growing more aware every day that there are a whole lot of Rinker Bucks out there…and significant concentrations of them in specific regions of these United States. One country trying to live in two (or more) realities is getting more interesting all the time…but I will not allow such intellectual un-seriousness to invade my personal book time.

And then there were four.

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AFTERWORD

Because it was referenced in the second paragraph above, it would be a shame to miss this opportunity to include the following for the enjoyment and entertainment of all: