Read This Book

Every month at Ravenna we each pick a book and those Staff Picks are 20% off for the entire month (at the Ravenna location only...sorry LFP).  Well, In December, Ami chose the book I Love Dick by Chris Kraus.  But customers didn't really seem that interested in it.  Maybe it's because everyone was shopping for gifts and not themselves, or perhaps it's the title...

At any rate, Ami is bound and determined to get you to read it.  So, it's going to be her Staff Pick for January too.  And she threatens that it will remain her Staff Pick until someone buys it.  She has some amazing things to say about it.  I was talking with her about it and the words she uses to describe the book are pretty remarkable.  Here's the list:

• intense
• emotional
• academic
• provocative
• unique
• abrasive
• self aware
• uncensored
• prickly
• authentic

I don't think I've ever heard anyone describe a book as prickly, how can you NOT want to read it now?  Well, if you're still unsure here is Ami's full review:

Revolutionary, momentous, phenomenal. This true novel (or novelistic memoir?) chronicles Chris Kraus' infatuation with the eponymous Dick in a story of obsession, intellect and art that, despite its expansiveness, is tightly woven with confidence and purpose. Kraus is a bold, honest, vulnerable and highly intelligent voice, a radiant beacon through the haze of an aloof, indifferent world. A forceful accomplishment, equally detested and revered--if you can handle it, this book will change your life.

And here's a bit more on what I Love Dick is all about...

In I Love Dick, published in 1997, Chris Kraus, author of Aliens and Anorexia, Torpor, and Video Green, boldly tore away the veil that separates fiction from reality and privacy from self-expression. It's no wonder that I Love Dick instantly elicited violent controversies and attracted a host of passionate admirers.

The story is gripping enough: in 1994 a married, failed independent filmmaker, turning forty, falls in love with a well-known theorist and endeavors to seduce him with the help of her husband. But when the theorist refuses to answer her letters, the husband and wife continue the correspondence for each other instead, imagining the fling the wife wishes to have with Dick.

What follows is a breathless pursuit that takes the woman across America and away from her husband; and far beyond her original infatuation into a discovery of the transformative power of first person narrative. I Love Dick is a manifesto for a new kind of feminist who isn't afraid to burn through her own narcissism in order to assume responsibility for herself and for all the injustice in world; and it's a book you won't put down until the author's final, heroic acts of self-revelation and transformation.

I don't know about you, but it sounds like the next book I'm gonna read.