What I'm reading right now is Kathryn Davis's The Thin Place: A Novel.

Body Piercing Saved My Life is well worth reading if you, like me, are puzzled by why Christian rock exists, why people actually listen to it, and if you were under the impression that all of it was uniformly awful. It apparently is not. And the book is fair; it doesn't shy pointing out the absurdities and inconsistencies of a music genre that is, in some regard, no genre at all, but rather a whole bunch of rampantly appropriated mainstream flavors of music (punk, rock, etc.) to serve a niche market. The book does manage to build a case for the music, and--most surprising--provides a portrait of musicians whose opinions are less dogmatic and narrow, and far more aware and interesting, than one would think.

All that said, the best parts are the ones that skewer (this is often reserved for "worship" music, which isn't actually christian rock proper; it's music meant to be played in church services):

...folks in the audience started lifting their hands in the air.

This gesture is probably the characteristic of evangelical services that looks the most unusual for outsiders. Some call it a "hug from God," and as the music that morning lifted in intensity, more and more hands popped up till the ballroom looked like a psychedelic classroom in which a lot of students had questions. (152)

Christian culture's strong preference that young people marry rather than date has not just resulted in a divorce rate nhighter than the national average, it's produced a bumper crop of chunky singers. It's a sad fact that once men are freed from the fear that each woman they meet may be their last chance at happiness, they tend to scarf that third hot dog without reflection. (165)

What I'm reading right now is Andrew Beaujon's Body Piercing Saved My Life: Inside the Phenomenon of Christian Rock .

Made to Break was full of detailed, interesting historical nuggets on obsolescence, but irritatingly short on insight. The book is good but undercooked; if anything, it seems to suggest that obsolescence serves a couple of really important functions, and that it's not the overconsumption nightmare that conventional wisdom makes it out to be. If that's the case, however, then Slade should develop the idea. And if that's not the case (as Slade seems to hint now and then, particularly toward the end), then he should explain why. As it stands, the book feels like a compilation of data with no clear point and little development. Even if it is meant to be read as simply a kind of history, the book feels lacking.

Less undercooked, but also unsatisfactory, was The Book of Lost Books: An Incomplete History of All the Great Books You'll Never Read. While there is terrific material in nearly every page--an odd anecdote, way witty turns of phrase--the problem is with the form, and so maybe the book is not to blame so much as my own irritability with compendiums, where you get a page or two of an author's life, learn a thing or two, and then you're off to the next. (I had the same problem with Farquhar's A Treasury of Deception: Liars, Misleaders, Hoodwinkers, and the Extraordinary True Stories of History's Greatest Hoaxes, Fakes and Frauds, which I abandoned near the end. Nothing wrong, exactly--after a while, however, you've had enough story-lets. If that's all you're getting, and you're getting too much of it, you eventually get a little sea-sick.)

High Concept: Don Simpson and the Hollywood Cultures of Excess, on the other hand, is thoroughly meaty and satisfactory. Part E! True Hollywood Story, part meditation on aesthetic and moral failures and successes, this is as good a Hollywood story as one can get. The book is fair to Simpson, compassionate without shying away from the awfulness of the man. This is a book worth devouring.

What I'm reading right now is Made to Break : Technology and Obsolescence in America. Moby Dick was fantastic, though it did take me three months to finish it.

Also read Stephen King's Cell, Peter Straub's Lost Boy Lost Girl, Edward St. Aubyn's terrific, acerbic Mother's Milk , The Complete Peanuts 1959-1960, and Wimbledon Green, and Dave Barry's Money Secrets. All of these were pretty terrific, and well worth your time, though the Straub novel loses steam near the middle (it's still a good novel, full of uneasy family relationships, but some of it seems pulled out of a second-rate horror movie).