Inside Jacket

The Millions blog tells us about books that should not be read when you are pregnant.

Rosemary’s Baby by Ira Levin: I admit, I haven’t read the novel, but I love the movie, starring the bewitching Mia Farrow. I have purposely kept my blonde hair very short these last 8 and a half months because I appreciate the cinematic allusion, though I have one friend in particular who urged me, early on, to grow out my locks. “It’s not funny!” she said. “What kind of message are you sending?” How about this: Every pregnant woman wonders, at least once, if she’s got the devil’s spawn growing inside of her.

Chelsea Cain is a Bellingham native, New York Times bestselling author, and currently the humor columist for the Oregonian. She will be at Village Books on Friday, March 4, 7:00pm for her latest thriller, The Night Season.

“Do you mind getting up at four in the morning for a satellite radio tour?”

This should have been my first clue to be alarmed.

“No problem,” I said. “Of course. Absolutely.”

I had never done a satellite radio tour before. It goes like this. You sit at home on the phone and get beamed into radio stations all over the country. Many of these radio shows are on the East Coast, thus the four a.m. thing – they wanted me on during the morning commute. In New Jersey. 

Weirdly, I took this to be a thrilling development. My agent had been bringing up the possibility of a satellite radio tour to my publisher for years. Now they were doing it. That was a good sign.

But it gets worse.

I was supposed to get up for this phone call at 4 a.m. on March 1, the publication date of my new thriller, The Night Season. This is a busy day for me. I have a very big even that night. I need to be rested. But that was okay. I’d go back to bed after the phone call. “How long is this phone call?” I asked my publicist in an email.

“It’s from 4 a.m. to 10 a.m.,” he wrote back.

I was sure that was a typo.

I did the math. 4 a.m. to 10 a.m. was SIX HOURS.

No phone call could last that long.

“WHAT?!” I emailed him.

“It might go longer,” he wrote back. “Maybe seven hours. But you’ll get a five minute break every hour.”

It wasn’t a typo. They wanted me to talk on the phone for six hours. Chuck Palahniuk, author of Fight Club, is a friend of mine, and he is a pro at these tours. He gave me some advice. “Write down the names of the hosts,” he said. And then he described sitting on the floor surrounded by notes that say stuff like, “Mike and Dave, Cedar Rapids. Doug and Marty, Houston. Dick and Mark, Clinton.” One after the other, for SIX HOURS. I was never going to keep it all straight.

“These tours,” he told me, “are the only reason I still have a land line.”

A land line?

Yes.

It turns out that you need a land line for a satellite radio tour. It made sense, in retrospect. I can see why Doug and Marty in Houston would prefer not to have my cell phone drop a call on live radio. That’s probably a hassle for them. Me? A dropped call would be a relief. An extra five minute pee break. 

I emailed my publicist again. 

I need a landline, he confirmed. He suggested I get a hotel room.

You know what’s worse than a six hour phone call? A six hour phone call on a queen sized bed in a square room, with only roasted almonds and tiny bottles of vodka to get me through it.

I begged my husband to call and get our land line hooked up again. 

Because you know what?

(And this is ironic.)

I do not like to talk on the phone. I do not like to even call and order pizza.

My husband (who is used to my phone phobia) called Qwest.

They issued us a new land line and a new phone number. Suddenly we were back in 1983. I wondered if I should get an answering machine. 

Now I just have one more problem. The only landline phone we have is a cordless. Ideally, for the best reception, they like one with a cord. 

This is what Chuck has. “It’s like Serpico!” he says.

Goodwill, here I come.

Then, get this. Yesterday they came out with a study that shows that talking on a cell phone causes a measurable disruption to brain cell activity.

So, six hours on a cell phone? That’s like putting your head in a microwave.

But at least you get to walk around the house while you talk.

And isn’t that worth a brain tumor? 

Want to hear how my six hour phone call went? Come to Village Book on March 4th for my reading. I’m sure I’ll have some bitter, bitter stories.

I love this post on The Top 50 Essential Non-Fiction Books for Weirdos, as the modern misfit’s answer to all the Modern library and BBC book lists floating around.

For the subculture, for the counter-culture, for your ordinary, average, modern-day weirdling, this list of 50 “essential cool/strange books” may just fit the bill better for you than others you’ve come across. This is non-fiction only; fiction is coming soon. Here are the top ten:

1. A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn: Winston Churchill may want you to believe that history is written by the victors, but Howard Zinn defies that theory in this essential review of American history. Look at our past from the viewpoint of those without power, but with the guts to stand up in the face of all manner of adversity. Crucial reading.

2. A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again by David Foster Wallace: I’ve never been on a cruise, but David Foster Wallace’s bewildered, exhaustively detailed retelling of a 7-night Caribbean cruise slayed me. If you ever find yourself in Big America and feel like you’re on another planet, this is for you. Also: state fairs, TV, David Lynch.

3. American Ground: Unbuilding the World Trade Center by William Langewiesche: Years before September 11 became a jingoistic way to rile up “patriots,” it was a horrific crime scene and victim recovery effort that had to be handled with utmost care, item by item, by volunteers who agreed to commit themselves to the task. Langewiesche used his 24/7 access to make an ugly but necessary record of the truth.

4. Columbine by Dave Cullen: There’s a lot you “know” about Columbine — the “Trench Coat Mafia,” the girl who professed her love for God and was executed — but in reality, it’s nearly all incorrect. This exhaustive look at the 1999 attack covers a lot of individual issues (gun violence, troubled adolescence, mental illness), but on a macro level, it’s about the emergence of the 24-hour news cycle, the scramble for “if it bleeds it leads” information, and what the commercialization of news has done to public awareness.

5. Commodify Your Dissent by Thomas Frank and Matt Weiland, Editors: This collection of essays from lefty periodical The Baffler is an ideal intro to the modern-day echo chamber of questions around culture, marketing, selling out, being co-opted, and the increasingly impossible task of trying to figure out which is which.

6. Country: The Twisted Roots of Rock ‘n’ Roll by Nick Tosches: I allowed myself several books by Tosches on this list because no one has shed more light on the incredible hidden grit and seedy underbelly of the history of music like he has. Or maybe he just writes about what I’m interested in. Here, you meet the wild and wooly hillbillies that predate Elvis’ polished Southern boy charm.

7. Critical Path by Buckminster Fuller: He was born at the end of the 19th century, but Buckminster Fuller was a futurist inventor of the highest order, bringing to life everything from geodesic domes to the totally dope looking Dymaxion car. In this sweeping 1981 book, Bucky covers the evolution of human civilization, his own economic ideology, and argues his conclusions about the “critical path” we should take to survive in a world of finite resources.

8. Dino: Living High in the Dirty Business of Dreams by Nick Tosches: You could line millions of bird cages with all the books written about Sinatra, but this biography of Dean Martin will not only give you a closer look at the world of the Rat Pack, warts and all, but it will reveal that Dean was cooler and more detached from the whole fuss than image-obsessed Frank could ever hope to have been.

9. Ego Trip’s Book of Rap Lists by Sacha Jenkins, Elliott Wilson, Jeff Mao, Gabriel Alvarez and Brent Rollins: I haven’t found a book on hip-hop that, taken in total, is any more revealing, informative, or flat out brilliant than Ego Trip magazine’s book of lists.

10. England’s Dreaming: Anarchy, Sex Pistols, Punk Rock and Beyond by Jon Savage: When considering this book, I asked a friend, “Essential read? Or head-in-sand version of the emergence of punk that considers the Ramones and the Dolls to be footnotes to the people standing around in a clothing store owned by Vivienne Westwood?” He answered, “Both.”

The Whole top 50

Oprah’s machine lists Emma Thompson’s seven favorite books. I’m delighted to see Spike Milligan’s Adolf Hitler: My Part in His Downfall on the list. Anyone who has read Catch 22 should also read this book.