Our Guest Book Reviewer's Roundup for 2008
By Elliott Nook
Pop-Up Books on Tape, Vol. III. Edited by Gerald Bostock (Ear-Drum Audio Books, $24.95) Read by James Earl Jones.
Eat, Pay & Leave Big Tip. By Anonymous (Vainglory Publishing, $19.95) Restaurant etiquette as defined by the former maitre d' at several of New York's swankiest eateries.
Growth Careers for the New Depression. By Richard Saunders (Beech Books, $21.95) Hobo? Madcap heiress? Singing cowboy? Using films of the 1930s as its guide, this timely book offers practical tips for finding jobs in the current economic downturn.
Kerouac's Children. By Philip Valens (University of Inwood Online Press, $22.95) Rather than poetry by neo-beatniks, this book profiles three middle aged drifters, all claiming to be the illegitimate offspring of the On the Road author.
Madonna's "A Kabbalah Family Christmas." By Madonna (Random Hut, $14.95 OBO) They're practically giving it away. Just ask, they'll probably pay you to take one.
Woodstock 2019. By W.D. Forte (Nightflyer Press, $14.95) When everybody who's been fibbing about being at Woodstock in 1969 shows up for its 50th anniversary — along with everyone who really was there the first time around — the results are equal parts hilarity and disaster in this first-novelist's darkly comic sci-fi satire about gracelessly aging Baby Boomers.
This Was Supposed to be Out Like Four Months Ago! By Michael Phelps, with Bob Costas and NBC Sports (NBC Sports Publishing, $49.95) A heavily illustrated "memoir" made up of transcripts from NBC's color commentary about Phelps at the Beijing Olympics.
What the F*** Was I Thinking?!? By Guy Ritchie (Piquant Press, $11.95) A collection of blog entries in which the once promising British film director struggles to make sense of his eight-year marriage to Madonna.
Crash Tests for Dummies. By Norman L. Legg (Hat Trick Books, $16.95) We're not sure why the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's 5-Star Crash and Rollover Ratings needs to be presented in haiku. Nonetheless, we'll never look at our Corolla's airbag light again without thinking, Marshmallow embrace/Forward, backward, pushing hard/Yet still we remain.
Title. By Literary Heavyweight (TBA) The latest from [name here] will delight/disappoint long-time/first-time readers. This once/still great prose stylist has/hasn't lost his/her touch. [Note to Ed.: I'll send this one later. I'm off to Barnes & Noble to dig up something "more on the highbrow side," as you put it, but it's snowing pretty hard so if I'm not back by press time, just print what I've sent so far].
Elliott Nook's column "Book Nook" appears twice monthly in the Tri-County Courier-Journal's Weekend Arts & Literature Supplement Section.
