My Personal Hell — Reading Lauren (LC) Conrad’s L.A. Candy Day 1…and 2

I picked up the book while in the mines yesterday and looked it over. It looks like this in case you’re interested.

My initial response, I believe, would be the standard one from any right thinking person: complete scorn.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. Did you, Kilian, actually start reading said book?

Ahem, yes I did!

Out loud.

To my wife.

She made me stop after 5 pages and asked why I was “subjecting the both of us to this torture?”

A valid question, to be sure. Especially considering that I am looking at a copy of Percival Everett’s I am Not Sidney Poitier and I started reading The Strain the other night (I’m freaked out after just 20 pages!). So, yeah, considering I have two reasonably good prospects for my immediate reading future, why would I inflict upon myself the torture of this fucking book?

Here’s why, we (by that I mean me and the thousands of pre-teen girls reading the book) find out on page 7 that Scarlett (trampy roommate of the protagonist, Jane or “Janey”) has a favorite philosopher, Descartes, and to show just how much she loves ol’ frenchy Rene, Scarlett is drinking out of her favorite coffee cup emblazoned with the phrase “Cogito, Ergo, Sum.”

Shit, that’s some damn fine writing!

My hat is off to Nancy Ohlin.

What’s that? Who is Nancy Ohlin you ask? Oh, well in the acknowledgments at the end of the book Ms. Ohlin is thanked by Ms. LC and described as a “collaborator.” I think we all know what that means.

Also, on page 7 we get this:

“Scarlett knew that she had a strange sense of humor. It made people a little wary of her. But she liked it that way.”

Isn’t it awesome how “dynamically” that characteristic is conveyed to the reader.

Next page we learn that “It (Scarlett’s ridiculous amount of hotness, apparently) made guys unable to…actually connect with her brain…

Sidenote: Are we talking about, like, some Matrix style shit? Maybe I’m not the norm, but I generally try and connect with a woman’s mind. I find her brain much too sticky

“, which she worked hard to cultivate and was actually quite proud of.”

I’ll just point out that “of” is a preposition. Who the fuck edited this thing? This wasn’t self-published, was it?

So we’ve learned that she (Scarlett) is about to start attending USC, has a favorite philosopher, and has done a “lot to cultivate her ‘brain’” but we don’t know, exactly what the cultivating included other than sleeping with stoned losers.

How about this from page 9:

“Scarlett believed passionately in a life of mind and the body–that is, to be brilliant and to hook up as often as possible.”

Sounds pretty damn brilliant to me.

OK, I know that Scar (as she is affectionately and disturbingly referred to by Janey) is probably going to end up as the antagonist to Janey’s “good girlness” (I’ve heard synopses about The Hills) but COME THE FUCK ON! I suppose that, in the multitude of universes that exist, an 18 year old, Descartes quoting, strange sense of humor having, whorish BFF has existed but why in the nine hells would I want to read about it?

But hey, at least the stoned loser she slept with had been reading James Joyce when she’d met him a few days ago.

Quick LC…name two Joyce novels?! Or any other Irish writer?

I’m exactly 7.4% through the book. It could be worse. Maybe if the main characters were KKK members or something…actually…no that would be worse.

Let us, as a way of…I don’t know, having a little fun…compare the above snippets of LA Candy to just the opening paragraph of the previously mentioned I am Not Sidney Poitier.

“I am the ill-starred fruit of a hysterical pregnancy, and surprisingly, odd though I might be, I am not hysterical myself. I’m rather calm, in fact; some might say waveless. I am tall and dark and look for the world like Mr. Sidney Poitier, something my poor disturbed and now deceased mother could not have known when I was born, when she named me Not Sidney Poitier. I was born after two years of hysterical gestation, and who knows what happens in a mind when expectant, anticipative for so long. Two years. At least this was the story told to me.”

See what we have here? In the span of one paragraph we know more about this character’s true self (and physical description) than we learn about either of the two main characters in LA Candy through the first three chapters of that book. Now, sure, Everett uses the visage of Sidney Poitier for a quick descriptor, but even if he hadn’t, would he spend, literally, pages running down physical characteristics? No, damnit, he wouldn’t! How do I know? Look at that phrase up there “I’m rather calm, in fact; some might say waveless.” Not only is that more poetic than any of the prattle in the first 25 pages of LA Candy, but it says so much about the character with a bare minimum of words. That’s what real writers of fiction do, they use terms like “waveless” to describe a character and then make the reader figure out for him/herself what the fuck they mean.

But I digress.

The next book I finish will be LA Candy. Look, I couldn’t get even 25 pages into Twilight and I really like to be familiar with something before I completely destroy it.

And I promise to give updates.

Because I like to spread the pain around.

The Cribs — We Can No Longer Cheat You