Maybe it’s a Philly thing, but Queenan doesn’t act too impressed with anything, and his accounts of visits to writers’ homes, encounters with library staff, book tours and readings are rich with the comically anticlimactic.Īnd don’t get him started on critics (“mostly servile muttonheads, lacking the nerve to call out famous authors for their daft plots and slovenly prose”) or that thankless chore of the literary life, writing blurbs (“like being asked to give a friend’s gross, dysfunctional kid a summer job”). Neither is “One For The Books” yet another wistful ode to the disappearing independent bookstore or to selfless librarians or the heroic character of writers.

I have read books while waiting for friends to get sprung from the drunk tank, while waiting to have my meniscus repaired, while waiting for people to emerge from comas, while waiting for the Iceman to cometh.Īs he recounts in his grim memoir, “Closing Time,” Queenan grew up in a Philly housing project where books were an escape for him, in more ways than one: not just because they gave him the education he needed to leave the lumpen class, but because they were a pathway to a better reality:

I read books in all the obvious places - in my house and my office, on trains and buses and planes, in public parks and private gardens, but I have also read them at plays and concerts and prizefights, and not only during the intermissions. If Queenan leaves no doubt about what he despises, what is it that he values? He makes that clear in his latest nonfiction work, “One for the Books”: The well-known humorist hates self-pitying alcoholics, beginning with his own father ostentatious do-gooders like Susan Sarandon John Tesh (“Cornhusker Flamenco…much given to neo-Stallonian gestures such as thrusting his fists into the air to signify a triumph he has not in fact achieved”) and Andrew Lloyd Webber (of “Cats,” he writes, “like the stuff you hear on Starsky and Hutch when they have to chase some child molester”). Joe Queenan is an unflagging and hilarious hater. One For The Books by Joe Queenan (Viking) Digital Replica Edition Home Page Close Menu

Closing Time by Joe Queenan