This week, Intern Alexis goes to work on a cryptic and ultimately lazy edition of the New York Times Book Review. Since the Times is clearly phoning it in for the holidays, we were going to let Alexis off the hook—but she actually found this edition of the Review to be rather enjoyable after we gave her some Christmas crack. Once she was tweaked, we couldn't stop her from writing if we tried. After the jump, Alexis' weekly analysis of what you should pretend to be reading.

This week s cover of the NYTBR screamed holiday-time laziness. Someone probably was like, Hey, how about we just use some crrrazy fonts? and everyone else was too busy updating their Amazon wish-lists to argue. Hence the uninspired Hippies, Groupies, and Censorship cover. Underneath the Censorship hed are a bunch of words that have been blacked-out— censored, if you will. In our never-ending quest to make your lives easier, we strained our pretty little eyes to uncover the poetics of these crossed-out words:

I have been by here left of before
 hello my name is Rachel Donadio at
 author for the New York Time Book

Hello, my name is what the fuck? We spent about 30 seconds trying to decode this gobbledy-gook (we even read it backwards!) but then we got bored, not to mention sleepy, and had to take a nap.

Speaking of being hit with the holiday-time laziness stick, both Stephanie Zacharek and Brooke Allen use the ol talk about the number of pages in the book trick in their ledes. Zacharek, in her review of The Whole Equation, writes: In the abstract, 400 pages doesn t seem like a lot to cover the history of that hydra we call Hollwyood and 12 pages later, Brooke Allen opens her review of Isherwood with A biography of 800 pages is acceptable when its subject is a Churchill or a de Gaulle We re not sure who is lazier here, the writers for using gimmicky opening sentences or the editors for not catching this sloppy repetition. But we guess after reading HUNDREDS of pages, these folks must get a little bleary-eyed.

As for the rest of Ms. Zacharek s review, we appreciated her use of the phrase gassy digressions to refer to the parts of Thomson s mammoth history of Hollywood where he goes off track. Zacharek goes on to tsk tsk at what she believes is Thomson s foolish and screwy dismissal of the silent film genre. She ends the review by balls-out (in a way we don t generally see in the NYTBR—what with all that blatant ball-coddling that goes on there) trashing the thing. She writes:

Thomson s view of Hollywood s earliest products and it s earliest art suggests he s not as with it as he professes to be. Then again, silent film probably wouldn t be popular with a writer who likes words lots of them as much as Thomson does. To show a world of heartbreak in a single, silent frame is the kind of economy that s lost on him. Maybe that s why, when you reach the last page of The Whole Equation and close its cover, the silence seems golden.

Where Aquarious Went
 Reviewed by Christopher Hitchens

Christopher Hitchens rambles on about the sixties in his pastel-painted school bus of a review of Hippie, What s Going on? and Back from the Land. We didn t get very far in this review cause we were laughing so hard after the second paragraph when Hitchens writes, Yet photographs (plus a certain pungent reek that some people, such as myself, never actually inhaled) are the best mnemonic prompting. Don t even joke, Hitchie, we ve seen you make a gravity bong in under 3 minutes.


Hetty by Charles Slack
Reviewed by Constance Rosenblum

Ms. Rosenblum s review of Charles Slack s biography of bagillionaire Hetty Green is an example of a review that starts off with a cute, funny lede ( If you can picture Donald Trump as a stout, 19th-century matron wearing an unfashionable bonnet and an ankle-lenth black coat trimmed with ermine, then you get an idea of that the figure of Hetty Green cut in the financial circles of her day ) but ends with a decidedly not cute and not funny clunker ( Which practically makes you want to say, You go, girl! ). No, YOU go, girl — go re-write this book review, that is!


Essay: You Can t Get a Man With a Pen
By Curtis Sittenfeld

Author Curtis Sittenfeld wonders why it is that bright, young, female thangs have posters of Jonathan Safran Foer plastered on the ceilings above their beds, but that their like-minded male counterparts aren t thinking about Barbara Kingsolver when they masturbate. The most interesting part of this entertaining essay becomes a Mini Blind-Item Guessing Game:

Of course, that s about the same age difference as that between a much-lauded male novelist I know of and the dewy-eyed students he dates in the New York program where he teaches.

Any guesses? The NYTBR just got a little more titillating, even though this could be just about anyone.