We know it's December, we're between food-filled holidays and everyone, ourselves included, is feeling a little sluggish — but really, you'd think the Gray Lady just passed out working on this week's Review and died in her sleep. Perhaps she hadn't any energy left after the 80-page debacle that was last week's Times Book Review, but Intern Alexis doesn't see much point in blowing one's wad all at once, leaving nothing but nasty dribble during the following weeks. After the jump, Alexis braves the boredom and tells you what you luckily missed.

BORING

As a whole, an oeuvre, a body of work, this week's NYTBR was probably one of the least eventful ones we've encountered in our year and a little bit tenure of close reading the ol gray Review. From the letters to the frickin reviews to the 10 best books of 2005, reading about reading this week was like riding the express train to Boringsville. All aboard! Toot toot! Yeah, we were really losing sleep, sitting on our hands wherever we went, worrying whether "The Year of Magical Thinking" was going to make it on the top 10 list! Psych!


STATE OF THE ART

We'd say this was the only non-boring thing in the Review. We tend to zone out right around the byline of most NYTBR long-ass essays on the "state of" something (Iraq, poetry, etc ) but Barry Gewen's long-ass essay on the state of modern art criticism was really quite excellent! We just thought it was funny that most of the essay talks about, you know, how c-c-c-razy modern art has gotten, the extremes to which artists will go for their art (decapitating chickens, nailing penises to wooden boards painting out of one's anus, etc ) and then Barry, in discussing Viennese artist Gunther Brus, writes "A Viennese artist, G nther Brus, performed a now-famous - or at least notorious - work in which he urinated and defecated on a stage, then masturbated while singing the Austrian national anthem. (Other aspects of this piece cannot be described in a family newspaper.)" So, then it's okay for little Dick or Jane to hear about turbating in public?

We like to imagine a Normal Rockwell style portrayal of a whitebread family sitting around the old Victrola, reading the NYTBR aloud — Daddy's smoking his pipe and telling little Dick and Jane about books and things, and then choking a bit on his tobaccy when he gets to this essay. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Daddy!


Talk to the Hand
 by Lynne Truss
Reviewed by Bob Morris

Finally, what really frosted our cookies, as it were, was that the one review with the potential to be fun and amusing, Bob Morris's review of Lynne Truss's mannerscreed, "Talk to the Hand," wasn't even that. During a recent Intern family dinner, on the occasion of Mrs. Intern's birthday, the conversation turned to said review. The consensus was that Upper West Siders say thank you to bus drivers on exiting the bus, and Upper East Siders do not. Yeah, boring!

Also, a pet peeve we hate when book reviewers write things like, "Is this book good? Well, no. But is it a delightful romp through the highways of America, filled with seedy truck stops with figurative hand-jobs along the way? Yes indeed." Or "was this book worth writing? No, probably not. But a guilty pleasure, like a scoop of Haagen Dasz creme de leche topped with whipped cream and gummy worms? Fershur." Which is why we found this statement by Morris annoying: "There is a larger question of whether this book is useful. Probably not...Truss makes a sincere and well-researched attempt to shed light on the dismal decorum of this darkest age. If she fails at the task, she does so winningly."

We might as well say, was this week's NYTBR worth writing? was it good? Was it useful? Probably not, but we had to read it anyway. Yes, friends, we apologize, but these were just 45 seconds of your life that you will not get back. Sorries!