Not enough snow days!

I am almost always in the middle of reading two books at a time, but right now I seem to be in a veritable quagmire of "in the middles" and have been since the first of the year. My favorite read right now is "The Star Machine" by film historian Jeanine Basinger. Its thesis is to show how the big movie studios, from the 30's through the 50's, worked to produce stars, regardless of their acting ability, and how they were molded (sometimes literally, through plastic surgery and enforced diets) and sold to the public, how their movies and their personas were chosen, and what happened when the machine didn't quite work the way it was supposed to. However, this isn't a strongly thesis-driven book; it feels like Basinger had some essays lying around and decided to force them together into a framework. This isn't really a criticism, however, because it is such delightful reading. What I really appreciate is that she covers not the superstars like Bogart and Hepburn and Davis, but more of the second-tier names like Errol Flynn, Tyrone Power, and Lana Turner whose names are known by most folks but whose movies largely go unseen today. For example, I imagine that most people know Flynn's name, but most could only name one of his films, Adventures of Robin Hood. She also devotes many pages to even lesser known names, like Jean Arthur, Deanna Durbin, and Dennis Morgan, and I'm looking forward to a later chapter called "Oddities and Character Actors." Quite fun reading, and a book I'm taking slowly on purpose because I don't want it to end.

Others I'm stuck in for less enjoyable reasons. One is a novel called "Zeroville" by Steve Erickson. I've been tempted by his books (mostly surreal, vaguely SF tales) before, but this is the first I've stuck with past a few pages. Its protagonist is a manchild named Vikar who verges on the autistic (he has a hard time reading emotions and recognizing irony) and who had a troubled childhood (his father thinks God's biggest mistake was in stopping Abraham from killing his son), but who loves the movies. He arrives in Los Angeles in the late 60's with a shaved head on which is a tattoo of Elizabeth Taylor and Motgomery Clift in a shot from A Place in the Sun, and the tattoo seems to be a test for the other characters; if they know it's Taylor and Clift, they're good, but if they think it's James Dean and Natalie Wood, screw 'em. Vikar gets a job working on movie sets and is taken up by some Hollywood insiders, some real (one character who is named only Viking Man is almost certainly the writer and director John Milius), some not--I've googled "Dorothy Langer," a film editor who befriends Vikar and she seems to be an invention. I can't really bring myself to care much about Vikar or the people who drift in and out of his life, but the book is drenched in movie atmosphere and trivia, and many times, movies and people aren't named directly, and it's a lot of fun to figure out what he's referring to. Since it's set in the 70's and Vikar loves older movies, I'm getting almost all the references so far, which frankly is what's keeping me from deciding not to finish the book.

Other books near my bed with bookmarks in the middle include "The Magic Mountain" by Thomas Mann (this is the second time I've tried to read this, and I've gotten stuck at the same place, around page 75), a biography of Erich von Stroheim by Arthur Lennig (not very well written, but the subject is interesting), and "Can't Buy Me Love" by Jonathan Gould, about the Beatles, their influence on culture, and culture's influence on them. I really need a few good snow days so I can break this literary logjam!