Reading this month:

Conversations With Wilder
Cameron Crowe, Billy Wilder

Ah! Great. Billy Wilder has, I think, made more of the greatest films of all time than any other director; he's also made more perfectly realized films than anyone else. Sunset Boulevard, The Apartment, Double Indemnity, Some Like It Hot; perfect in every respect, including leaving you with a lingering sense of something greater. The Apartment in particular has to score higher on the dead fucking brilliant to current awareness ratio than any other Hollywood film of the last 50 years. Even if he wasn't such a great director, though, this book would be interesting for the fact that Wilder was 93 years old when it was written; the details along the way of his still-active lifestyle and his sharp mind make the book worth reading by themselves. I mean, 93 years old. Shit. (96 now, I think.) Cameron Crowe is, of course, himself a director (Say Anything, Almost Famous) and my favorite bits of the book are Wilder's running check-ups on the progress of Crowe's work (he was writing Almost Famous at the time). The film analysis itself and set anecdotes are laser-sharp; Wilder's memory and delivery were in nearly top form. (93!) For all its flaws (some of Crowe's questions are a bit heavy-handed, straying occasionally toward the James Lipton-esque), this is possibly my favorite book ever written about film.

The Castle
Franz Kafka

In my favorite parts of this book, when K. is out exploring the town around the Castle, the people he meets remind me of characters from RPG video games (particularly older ones) when their momentary relevance to the quest is past or when you're just not supposed to be in that part of the game yet, but you're there anyway; they begin to blur as you look closer at them than the game designers meant for you to look, and as their complete inability to process what you are doing becomes increasingly apparent, a note of inarticulate menace enters their speech. Kafka stays on his home ground for a lot of this book - twelve page speeches on bureaucratic madness are in no short supply - but if you like the old guy, this is vintage Franz. Orson Welles wanted to film this instead of The Trial, saying that this one was funnier. In The Trial, Josef K.'s behavior was constricted by his being a sort of Everyman, but K. here is himself a bit of a shithead, and that opens up new possibilities, since the joke in so many of Kafka's characters is how they shift back and forth from shitheads to perfectly reasonable people and you never know which they will be at any given moment, and sometimes they are reasonable shitheads, and that's just crazy. I recommend the version linked above for the translation, but check out one of the other versions when you're done. All of them are based on the same unfinished manuscript, because this one doesn't include Kafka's editor Max Brod's brief note on Kafka's planned (and utterly perfect) ending.

How To Be Good
Nick Hornby

His most mature book and, unfortunately, his least fun. Nick Hornby's books always seem like anthropological studies as much as novels. His lead characters fit neatly into a very clearly defined lifestyle, and he gives it a good exploring. The subject here is way further from my own experience than any of his others - I am, definitively, not a female doctor in my mid-40s with two children and a dead marriage - but, to whatever degree I'd be qualified to have an opinion, it seemed like an honest, true and nuanced portrayal. And there are a lot of brilliantly funny stretches on a par with his other books. But there's also this insufferable streak of Maturity in the book's form that comes to uncomfortably parallel one of the lead characters (around whose insufferable righteousness the book revolves). It seems as though the author felt obliged to make the book unsatisfying in many respects because that's the Mature thing to do, and that attitude irritates me. So, I wouldn't say I disliked it, but I wouldn't enthusiastically press this one on friends like I did his last two.

Rodin: Sculpture & Drawings
Catherine Lampert

Rodin is a friend of mine. Whenever either of us has nothing else to do, we sit on the curb in front of the 7-11 on the Rue du Bac and we drink cheap wine, harassing anyone who walks by, making Victor Hugo jokes. Sooner or later, the drunken conversation turns to how much I like his sculpture and how much he likes my sketch comedy, and we vow to do some sort of project together, because the rest of these fuckers just don't get it. Then Rodin gets it into his head that I am trying to wheedle Camille Claudel's phone number out of him, which of course I am, and one of us winds up throwing the other through the window of the 7-11. We trash the place. As we lay among the cheese doodles, exhausted, waiting for the cops to come, we vow to do it again some time.

A Scanner Darkly
Phillip K. Dick

Holy shit, this book rules. I'd read one of his later books, VALIS, and liked it; and, of course, Dick wrote the basis for Blade Runner. But A Scanner Darkly is the biz-omb. It occupies a beautiful middle ground between Hunter S Thompson's tales of perfectly reasonable paranoiacs and Kurt Vonnegut's wounded, sad yet unbreakable humanism. It begins with an investigation into those damn bugs that wind up all over people sometimes, and, though it strives to make no moral judgment, it ends with an author's note: "This has been a novel about some people who were punished entirely too much for what they did." It's unflinchingly honest, maniacally funny and sad. Instantly one of my favorite novels.

The Map That Changed the World
Simon Winchester

A biography of William Smith, considered by the author to be the father of modern geology. It begins with a lengthy discussion of the entry of scientific reasoning into a faith-dominated world, segues into some lengthy hardcore geology, and ends with betrayal and intrigue. Having no real interest in geology was a serious obstacle to enjoying this book, but the story is well told and there are lots of great side anecdotes (such as the tale of the first man to get run over by a train) along the way that made it worth the effort.