I enjoyed Chuck Klosterman’s second novel, The Visible Man about as much as his first, Downtown Owl. In a lot of ways, this book more closely resembles his more famous essay collections, as its story is more a loose structure for traditional Klosterman asides and tangents than a fully developed narrative (It certainly doesn’t have the wonderfully specific setting of Downtown Owl). That’s not to say it’s not an incredibly entertaining and occasionally fascinating book. There are a lot of interesting ideas about a typically wide array of subjects, including (most prominently) voyeurism, The Beatles, how people watched LOST, Facebook, and class struggles.

Despite its manic attention span, Klosterman does a good job developing The Visible Man’s central (and, really, sole) relationship between a female psychiatrist and her unusual patient (only referred to as Y___). When the anecdotal elements began to slow down and the book moved toward its end, I found myself invested in both of their struggles.

Klosterman has yet to master fiction like he has essays or long form non fiction (Killing Yourself to Live remains his pinnacle), but The Visible Man is in many ways, a leap forward from Downtown Owl. Where it lacks that book’s sense of setting and mood, it has bigger ideas and utilizes more ambitious narrative devices.

Just finished reading Live from New York, an oral history of Saturday Night Live. Haven’t watched the show regularly in a long time, but the book reminded me how much I loved this show throughout most of my life. Every era has some great stuff, but as far as the book goes, the most interesting stories are (unsurprisingly) from the first five (best) seasons. Still, there’s some really fascinating stuff about Norm MacDonald’s “Weekend Update” and Janeane Garofalo’s bad experience with the show. The least interesting stuff is in the last chunk of the book—the Will Ferrel/Tracy Morgan/etc. years. While I enjoy a lot of that period of the show, most of them are pretty boring people comapred to Bill Murray or Phil Hartman. I’d love to see the book updated, since it’s ten years old now. Really fun read, and much, much better than the Simpsons oral history.

So, a friend of mine doesn’t think I can finish reading every Harry Potter book by the time the last movie comes out. Even though I only have a faint interest in the series, I couldn’t let this challenge go, so I started reading Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone yesterday. I actually read this one around when it came out, thought it was alright, and moved on with my life. One hundred pages in, and I’m finding it much better than I remembered it. There are problems, but I’ll keep them to myself for now. I’ll post a full review of each book as I finish them, and then the same with the films. I thought it’d be interesting to write about a franchise like this from the standpoint of a casual fan (at best). So expect a decent amount of Harry Potter shit in the next couple months.