More Reading With Fakename: Ziegfeld, et al.

I’ve never been to New York City (Fakename will now pause for the collective gasp), unless you count changing planes in one of their three major airports, one of which is inexplicably in New Jersey.  I feel sort of like an ad for Pace Picante Sauce.  Remember them?  Some cowpoke types are examining their bottle (bottle?  how authentic is that?) of picante sauce, when one of them says, This picante sauce was made in NEW YORK CITY!  Oh Holy Mother of God–anywhere but there.  Real picante sauce has to be made outside of NYC.  Possibly New Jersey. 

Therefore, I’ve never seen a play on Broadway.  (Oh, quit your gasping.)  I have at least once, and possibly twice, seen a touring play.  The for-certain play was Evita, which, by the way, I thought was supremely awful.  The possible play was Zorba, which may or may not have been good.  The important thing was that Anthony Quinn was there in person and at some point threw a rose into the audience, directly to me.  I kept that rose until it reverted to sub-atomic particles. 

Therefore, I thought maybe I could learn something by reading the book Ziegfeld:  The Man Who Invented Show Business, by Ethan Mordden.  I can’t really explain why I finished it, other than a sort of obsessive-compulsive need to finish a book once I’ve started it.  I did sort of speed through it, hoping I would eventually get to the good part, which never materialized.  As a history of Broadway shows of the era, and if you’re fascinated by who did the lyrics, the set design, the costume design, the choreography, etc. , this book is for you.  Ziegfeld himself was apparently a very private man, so the author didn’t really know much about him.  I wish he had said so in the first sentence.  That way I could have turned the book back in to the library before I ever got out  the door.  I thought I was getting a biography.  Instead, I got the Encyclopedia of Broadway shows from, say, 1900 to 1940.  Actually, not even that.  I got the footnotes for the encylopedia article.  In other words:  don’t read this book.  Fakename considers that as much reading as she does, she has earned the right to be a book critic. 

Now I have gratefully returned to my fiction roots, reading a book by Jeffrey Deaver called Roadside Crosses.  Deaver is in my Top Five, sharing space with Robert B. Parker, John Sanford, James Lee Burke, and Nevada Barr (a nom de plume if I ever heard one).  I wish they would all put out a book a week.  In the scheme of things, I guess they are somewhat middlebrow.  Dostoyevsky, they are not.  But did you ever try to read Dostoyevsky for fun?  I don’t, at least, do lowbrow…like, say, Danielle Steele. 

Now take this journey with me:  on the inside flap of the book cover (I’m sure there’s a name for that) of Deaver’s book, it says:  “  The Monterey Peninsula is rocked when a killer begins to leave roadside crosses beside local highways–not in memoriam, but as announcements of his intentions to kill.  And to kill in particularly horrific and efficient ways:  using personal details about the victims that they’ve carelessly posted in blogs and on social networking websites”.

Oh shit.  I could say more, but I have to log off now.  Just forget you ever heard of me, okay?