Link This |
Email this |
Blog This |
Comments (2)
Recommended Reading: "Born Standing Up"
January 2, 2008
Yes, this book came out last October -- I've said it before: I'm reading as fast as I can!
My holiday gift to myself was to spend both Christmas Day and New Year's Day reading a couple of books that I absolutely didn't have to read, but wanted to read... I'll get to the Christmas book another day. My New Year's read was
Steve Martin's Born Standing Up, which Martin himself deems a biography rather than an autobiography, "because I am writing about someone I used to know."
I gave Martin's book to Mr. Bethanne for Christmas, and we were both astonished when he finished it in a single day. Let me explain: while
Born Standing Up is certainly engaging and not necessarily dense, Mr. Bethanne rarely finishes books at all, let alone quickly. You might have seen my 2007 book count -- 183. Mr. Bethanne's 2007 book count can be tallied on one hand, with fingers left over. This isn't because he's anti-reading (good thing he's not, since he lives in a house of books); he spends his reading hours on The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper's, Time, Newsweek, Esquire, and the occasional Vogue article I press upon him. As he says, no sooner has he finished one magazine than another arrives. When he does take the time to read a book, it's because he really wants to -- and he really appreciates it.
Thus, when Mr. B. finished this one in record time, I decided I should read it, too (it didn't hurt that
Sara Nelson told me last August that she loved it).
Whether or not you're a fan of Steve Martin's comedy, this book offers a rare glimpse inside an artist's mind as he attempts to understand how and why he reached the top. It does help if you're a fan of Martin's writing (which Mr. Bethanne of course knows well from Martin's frequent New Yorker stints), and that isn't tough -- he writes with deft humor and is capable of emotion divorced from sentimentality (for example, the early chapter in which he describes a beating from his father).
Posted by Bethanne Patrick on January 2, 2008 | Comments (2)
