It’s Monday again. I had a houseguest over the weekend, and while the houseguest rocked my world, the pile of work which I ignored in favor of houseguest fun times did not, and I have spent most of today staring at incomprehensible IRS documents while sobs rise in my throat, wrangling a metric ton of paperwork into the appropriate file folders, and shooing Little Joe away from the back-up tape drive, on which he has developed a sudden and intense crush. I suppose I don’t have to mention that my numerous surreptitious attempts to stuff Little Joe into the houseguest’s overnight bag failed rather miserably. So here I sit, marooned in my desk chair in a sea of documents with paw prints on them while an overweight tabby pitches kibble-scented woo at my office equipment, thanking God in His heaven that I have an excuse not to write about the accursed Florida recount, because I “have to” finish boring y’all to the point of cessation of respiratory function with my list of pop-culture books.

Let me lull you gently into sleep by explaining why I write these canon entries. I admit that I write these entries primarily because I can’t think of anything else to say in a given week. Again, I could have churned out an indignant entry about the “constitutional crisis” surrounding the Presidential election, but really, what could I say that someone else hasn’t said? But I also write these entries partly so that you know where I come from – what informs my opinions on things. It might contribute to your understanding of me as a writer if you know, say, that I’ve read my copy of P.J. O’Rourke’s Parliament Of Whores so many times that I had to Scotch-tape the spine back together. Or you might not care; you might just browse through it looking for Christmas-present ideas, or hoping that I’ll tear an author to shreds. Well, I don’t want to disappoint you on that last thing, so let’s get started

The Films Of The Eighties. Douglas Brode. I bought the book because I really liked The Films Of The Seventies a lot. But whereas Marc Sigoloff, the author of The Films Of The Seventies, had a reasonable facility with the written word and had seen a movie or two in his life, Douglas Brode does not and has not. Either that, or the copy editor assigned to the project cherished a hatred of Mr. Brode hotter than the fire of a thousand suns. Brode misspells the names of characters, stumbles over simple syntax, and seldom risks an actual opinion, relying instead on lackluster plot summaries and weak generalizations like this one about Nicolas Cage’s character in Moonstruck: “Ronny is a big fan of opera, so no wonder he lives his life with the exaggerated grand passions he regularly witnesses at Lincoln Center.” Oh, please. I’ve seen better writing in the used-car circular at the supermarket, but the baggy prose would get the job done – barely – if Brode had any idea how to approach his subject matter. Instead of actually investing himself in the writing, he treats his discussions of the films like straight reporting, and it doesn’t work. You cannot write about pop culture “straight.” You have to have an opinion about it. We don’t read movie reviews to get a plot summary; we read them to find out whether or not the reviewer liked the movie, and why. Instead of investing himself even an iota in the films he’s selected for the compendium, though, Brode contents himself with taking feeble potshots at Oliver Stone, the easiest target in the history of celluloid, and with laughable assertions like, “With The Four Seasons, [Alan] Alda at last emerged as what he’d been striving toward for nearly a decade: the total filmmaker.” What? Never mind that the sentence barely makes sense; did Brode actually watch the movie? It sucked! And what’s Brode’s proof? That Alda made his own character unlikable. Of course the Alda character isn’t likable – it’s the Alda character! Okay, okay, I take it all back. I wholeheartedly recommend the book. It’s so bad, it’s good.

Love And Hisses. Edited by Peter Rainer. Follow my train of thought: David Denby leaves New York Magazine to review for The New Yorker. Peter Rainer steps in as the New York film reviewer and takes the opportunity to plug Love And Hisses in his first column, which, for the record, didn’t exactly cover Rainer with laurels. See, most film reviewers have the sense not to take themselves more seriously than a tax return, but Rainer thinks he’s bloody Gandhi, and nothing makes for a more tedious essay than a writer who feels bound to prove that he’s actually seen Battleship Potemkin in a theater unless it’s a writer who includes six of his own essays in a book he’s editing. Or a writer who sniffs that those of us who didn’t like Blue Velvet “just didn’t get it.” Rainer is all three. Still, the book is worth reading, because it examines controversial films that polarized reviewers at the time of their release. Plus, there’s plenty of crisp, refreshing Pauline Kael and Owen Gleiberman to balance Rainer’s snotty first-semester-of-film-school blathering, which is amusing in its own pretentious way.

The Bust Guide To The New Girl Order. Edited by Marcelle Karp and Debbie Stoller. I don’t like Bust as much as I used to. It’s gotten a little too rah-rah you-go-girl for me, and the constant cheerleading for the Hitachi Magic Wand has gotten really really old – like, I can exist as an enlightened feminist without owning a vibrator, but thanks so much for throwing a bunch of defensive attitude onto me. I mean, there’s nothing wrong with vibrators, but give me break. Aaaaanyway. The Bust Guide collects some of the best essays from Bust‘s run, and it’s a great book. Some of it’s, you know, a bit much, but the “Don’ts for Boys” piece on page 151 kicks all kinds of ass. “If we fuck on the first date, it doesn’t mean I am waiting for an engagement ring to appear on the second date.” God, EXACTLY. “What to Expect When Your Best Friend Is Expecting” and “Abortion Story” rock also. All the pieces run pretty short, so you can pick it up and put it down whenever.

Miss America. Howard Stern. Not as funny as Private Parts, but it’s funny. I don’t like Howard’s radio show, not because it’s offensive, but because it’s boring. You have to sit through endless pseudo-kinky “oh, look, lesbians”-related tedium to get to a single flaccid punchline. But that’s exactly why I like the books. A lot of the annoying crap is cut out and it’s just Howard, and when he’s not rambling down some politically incorrect lane or other, Howard’s pretty funny. The account of his struggle with OCD is hilarious and strangely comforting (I get panic attacks, so I can relate).

Life The Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality. Neal Gabler. Neal Gabler’s thesis – that our society has turned us all into performers, and that we all comport ourselves as though we star in our own personal movies – could have made a fascinating book. I heard Gabler talk about his book on NPR; he gave a great interview, and I decided to check it out. Sadly, there’s not much there. I suspect that Gabler really wanted to write a book about the tabloidization of American culture, or about the fact that outrage has become a consumer product, or maybe he just made a list and titled it “Stuff That Makes Me Roll My Eyes” and tried to craft a theory that he could open up like an umbrella over all of it. But it’s one thing to think to yourself, or to tell your friends at the pub when you’ve had a few beers, that Elizabeth Taylor’s multiple marriages and the media’s obsession with them symbolizes something about us as a race. It’s another thing entirely to try to write a cogent analysis of that fact and of the forces that make it so. Gabler’s editor should have sent the manuscript back as many times as it took to get Gabler to figure out what he really wanted to say, because the book is undercooked, and Gabler’s prose isn’t lively enough to save it.

The Lindbergh Case. Jim Fisher. More true crime, obviously. The writing is, well, not good. But the book is the gold standard about the case, and it puts paid to the idea that Hauptmann got framed. It’s a decent window into nineteen-thirties America as well, so if you’ve got any interest in the Lindbergh baby kidnapping, check it out.

If You’re Talking To Me, Your Career Must Be In Trouble: Movies, Mayhem, And Malice. Joe Queenan. Queenan’s writing tends toward the spotty, but when he’s on his game, he’s brilliant. You needn’t bother buying the book; just go to your local Barnes & Noble and read “Mickey Rourke For A Day.” Like the man says, “every once in a while you’ve gotta roll the potato.” No, I have no idea what that means. But like the man also says, “when a grunged-up fuck all dressed in black comes into your shithole dive at eight o’clock in the morning and says that he wants to roll the potato, hey, you let him roll the motherfucking potato.” Hee hee! “Roll the potato.” Look, I don’t get out much. Work with me here.

A History Of Reading. Alberto Manguel. It takes a while to get through, and it’s not earth-shattering, but it’s a wonderful book for people who love books – not just reading, but books. The weight of books, the fonts, the smell of the glue that holds the pages in, the thrill of pasting in a bookplate. Okay, maybe that’s just me, all that stuff. Still, A History Of Reading is really a history of how we came to value books and to want to surround ourselves with them, their portability and their permanence.

Careless Love: The Unmaking Of Elvis Presley. Peter Guralnick. I’ve got an unhealthy obsession with fat Elvis. So sue me. I hear that the first volume of the set, Last Train To Memphis, rocks also, but I skipped right over that and headed for the fried-peanut-butter-sandwich, barbiturate-and-bourbon, died-taking-a-crap fun. Guralnick does not disappoint. He doesn’t write particularly well, and his attempts to channel Colonel Parker’s “thoughts” begin to grate after a while, but I’ve got to give the man credit – he doesn’t skip a single lurid detail. The book sounds really sleazy, but taken together, the account of Elvis’s decline and fall is terribly sad. If even one person had stood up to him – had told him to stop taking drugs, had told him to leave the terrible scripts alone, had told him no just one time – he might have lived.

Minding The Body: Women Writers On Body And Soul. Edited by Patricia Foster. The jacket calls it “important and much-needed reading for women who seek to understand the relationship between their physical and emotional selves.” I wouldn’t go that far, but the book contains a few excellent essays by the likes of Margaret Atwood, Kathryn Harrison, and Naomi Wolf. Nothing really new here, and again, not really pop culture but, again, I didn’t know where else to put this one.

For Keeps: Thirty Years At The Movies. Pauline Kael. If you don’t like her reviews, you can use the book as a doorstop. Literally. I don’t agree with her a lot of the time, but nobody writes more intelligently about film than Kael.

Kitsch In Sync: A Consumer’s Guide To Bad Taste. Peter Ward. It’s a British book, so it’s got a slightly different take on the flotsam many Americans take for granted. It could have used a proofreader, but it’s got loads of hilarious pictures (remember the Village People’s Nu-Ro period? No, neither did I, but the proof is in the photo on page 67), and the captions evince a certain droll weariness, like this one for the lobster phone: “Kitsch always delivers less than it promises – how genuinely clever is this?” Ward’s undisguised loathing of the Bay City Rollers makes for some good copy too. A wonderful book to give or to leaf through if you can pick it up cheap.

The New Roadside America: The Modern Traveler’s Guide To The Wild And Wonderful World Of America’s Tourist Attractions. Mike Wilkins, Ken Smith, and Doug Kirby. You can check out their site, so I won’t go into too much detail, but any book that includes a 3-D guide to failed pyramids in the continental US is a book I want to own. Plus, “Motorcade of the Damned” (page 60)!

Big Secrets. William Poundstone. In the three-book series that also includes Bigger Secrets and (duh) Biggest Secrets, Poundstone solves all sorts of consumer mysteries. What goes into Oreo filling? Did Walt Disney really get frozen? Where’s Mount Weather, and what does it do? Can you see Barbra Streisand in a porno? How does one go about scamming Bloomingdale’s? And how the hell did David Copperfield make the Statue of Liberty disappear? If you want to start with just one, Bigger Secrets is the best of the three. Pick it up the next time you have to take the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory; Poundstone cracked the code and can help you cheat (ditto the Rorschach blots).

Holy Terror: Andy Warhol Close Up. Bob Colacello. Now a contributing editor to Vanity Fair (and almost every New York-based general magazine on the newsstand), Colacello started out as a film reviewer for Interview, and rose through the Warhol Factory ranks to become one of Andy’s right-hand men. I’ve read this book dozens of times, and I never get tired of it; Colacello is a wonderful writer, economical but exact, and he paints a fascinating portrait of the glamorous circles Warhol moved in in the seventies and early eighties, and of Warhol himself. It’s a perfect companion piece to

The Andy Warhol Diaries. Edited by Pat Hackett. Warhol comes off kind of pathetic and manipulative, but once in a while he busts out with a real gem and redeems himself: “Steve Wynn came by, the Golden Nugget guy from Atlantic City. He came with his wife, who’s intelligent, but she’s old enough that she could be traded in soon.” Ha! I wish I could get away with saying things like that. He reminds me of Gustave in that way. Gustave would totally say something like, “And you see Ronald Reagan in these neighborhoods with the poor people and you can just hear him saying, ‘Oh my God, what am I doing here?’ But his hair looks really good.” That’s a compliment, by the way, Gustave, if you read this.

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