The Bedwetter: Stories of Courage, Redemption, and Pee, Sarah Silverman — I’m not generally a fan of celebrity bios or memoirs but when I saw the local library had Sarah Silverman’s book, I figured I’d join the reserve list. Her humor intrigues me enough that I figured it might be worth taking a chance.

Blind Descent: The Quest to Discover the Deepest Place on Earth, James M. Tabor — I saw the author on The Daily Show shortly after the book came out and so the book has been in the back of my head for a while. As with Silverman’s book, when I saw the library had it I joined the reserve list.

Comedy in a Minor Key and The Death of the Adversary, Hans Keilson — As I’m already reading the latter, it may not be fair to add these to this list. The fact, though, is I didn’t learn about them until early August so they didn’t make last month’s list. Keilson, a German author, wrote both books in the 1940s and the novels explore the rise of rise of Nazism and resistance to it.

Freedom, Jonathan Franzen — I figure this almost has to be on the list given some have already called it the best novel of the century. I often find, though, that rave reviews either create too much expectation in my mind or lead me to wonder what in the world the reviewers were thinking.

Kings of the Earth, Jon Clinch — Favorable reviews, including one I heard this past weekend, pushed this onto my hold list at the library. The novel was inspired by the 1992 documentary Brother’s Keeper, which I enjoyed, so I thought it worth a try. The novel and the doc are based on the death of one of a set of basically illiterate brothers living on a farm.

Report Card:

Year-to-date (January-August)

Total Bibliolust books: 44

Number read: 26 (59%)

Started but did not finish: 4 (9%)

Cumulative (September 2008-August 2010)

Total Bibliolust books: 130

Number read: 86 (66%)

Started but did not finish: 8 (6%)

Mason Cooley, City Aphorisms, Eighth Selection

• Google’s Book Search: A Disaster for Scholars (“In short, Google has taken a group of the world’s great research collections and returned them in the form of a suburban-mall bookstore.”) (via)
• Building a Nation of Know-Nothings (“It’s one thing to forget the past, with predictable consequences, as the favorite aphorism goes. But what about those who refuse to comprehend the present?”)

Bookish Linkage

• “Think of an e-reader as the cloth diaper of books.”
• Medieval copyright protection

Nonbookish Linkage

• An interesting story behind the forthcoming release of the latest in Bob Dylan’s official bootleg series.
• Blogger beware: Postings can lead to lawsuits
• Will our search for ET find artificial intelligence?
• io9 comes up with a list of 25 classic SF movies everyone must watch. I’ve seen 19.
• I presume TimeLife’s Torture Classics is an extremely well-done spoof.
• A U.K. company is offering to “press your ashes in a vinyl recording your loved ones will cherish for generations.” You (actually your family) will get 30 copies. Service also available for pets. (via)

Title cut, Jackson Browne, Looking East

Next door in Maryland, a man is suing a hospital, alleging among other things that its security guards assaulted him when he tried to leave the hospital to avoid surgery to remove a potentially cancerous mass from his chest. The man was in the hospital because of a car accident the day before and was not the person scheduled for the chest surgery.

Drunkenness never ceases to amaze me. “A Polish man living in Germany was unaware he had been shot in the head for five years, because he was drunk when it happened.” Actually, the term that was used was “very drunk.” (via)

But this one I might understand: “A Salt Lake City mortgage company employee allegedly got drunk, opened fired on his firm’s computer server with a .45-caliber automatic, and then told police someone had stolen his gun and caused the damage.” I don’t drink but being on our firm’s technology committee leads me to believe that if the server dies it may be a case of justifiable homicide.

A Toledo lawyer has been suspended for submitting bills in cases in which she was court-appointed where she billed for more than 24 hours on three separate days and in one stretch of 96 hours billed 90.3 of time. Not surprisingly, the Ohio Supreme Court said her fee requests were “simply incredible.”

Ernest Hemingway, quoted in In the Company of Writers: A Life In Publishing

In that regard, Neil Cossar’s This Day in Music is a sort of diary of the building blocks of history. For each day of the year, the book lists events and occurrences that are part of rock and pop music in the 20th and 21st centuries. With all but about a dozen pages of the book devoted to those 366 days (yes, February 29 is included), the work is self-limited. The need to fill a page for each day means significant cultural events, such as The Beatles first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show (February 9, 1963), get roughly equal billing with such things as that on December 21, 2005, “Madonna is forced to cancel a romantic holiday … in Scotland after her private jet breaks down with technical difficulties at London Airport.” Entries like the latter, though, are also indicative of how and why perspective is an essential part of history.

Yet the fact This Day in Music runs the gamut from seeming minutiae to people and events that resonate even today gives an idea of its scope. It includes events from 2009 and going back to January 4, 1936 (the date Billboard introduced the first national pop music chart). And the book covers a wide gamut of music, from classic rock to punk to country to rap. (Jazz, though, is notably absent.) It deals with people, concert performances, movies, births, deaths and singles and LPs. Like the music itself, the book also has a bit of sass. Thus, the first item for January 2 is the photo that graced the cover of John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s Two Virgins album, in which the two are standing in the nude. Likewise, a photo relating to Janet Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction” at the Super Bowl in 2004 is unedited.

Cossar, who played in a U.K. band in the late 1970s and early 1980s that “never troubled the charts,” began collecting music facts and trivia while working in a radio in the 1990s. In 1999, he launched a website called, not surprisingly, thisdayinmusic.com. That led to this book first being published in 2005 and updated this year. Cossar’s background may, though, present a minor issue for some American readers. Not only are there numerous entries dealing with British bands with which U.S. readers are likely unfamiliar, the book has not been edited to reflect differences between British and American culture. Thus, most monetary sums are listed in pounds, weights of individuals are given in stone and phrases like “drink driving” appear. This doesn’t mean American acts are overlooked, though. Numerous entries detail events in Bruce Springsteen’s career, including gigs with his earlier bands, The Castiles and Steel Mill.

As may be expected from a work with so many entries, This Day in Music is not free of error. For example, we are told that on August 31, 1957, Elvis Presley performed in Vancouver, Canada, “only the third time Presley has ever performed outside North America.” Even 50 years ago, though, Canada was in North America. In fact, Elvis’ travels outside the U.S. seem to be problematic. The entry for March 2, 1960, says that when his flight stopped for refueling in Scotland, he “steps on British soil for the first and only time in his life.” Yet 31 pages later, we are told that a year earlier, on April 1, 1959, Elvis performed in south London while on a brief visit from his Army station in Germany. It is the date proximity of such errors that makes them baffling. Thus, when Bob Dylan’s Desire LP hits number one on February 7, 1976, and Blood on the Tracks does so on February 8, 1975, both entries tell us it is “his second US chart-topping” album. Similarly, both November 8 and November 12, 1980, carry an entry as the day Springsteen’s album The River becomes his first LP to top the Billboard album charts.

To a certain extent, though, many of these errors are failures of proofreading. The overall context and content of This Day in Music has plenty for nearly any fan of modern music. There is the odd. On September 29, 1976, Jerry Lee Lewis “accidentally shoots his bass player … in the chest [while] blasting holes in an office door.” Other items offer a touch of social commentary. Cleveland banning rock ‘n’ roll fans under 18 from dancing in public unless accompanied by an adult (January 23, 1956) or the BBC banning “teenybopper acts” from appearing in person on the show Top Of The Pops when a riot follows a performance by David Cassidy (March 21, 1973). Most important, there is the historic, whether the invention of stereo records (March 27, 1958) or Dylan recording “Like a Rolling Stone” (June 16, 1965) or the release of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (June 1, 1967).

Whether browsing a day. a week or a month at a time, This Day in Music provides plenty of slices of modern music’s developments, absurdities and trivia. There’s enough here for almost any music fan to find something of which they were unaware, something to laugh at or items that will cause them to pause and pursue their own recollections.

Neil Cossar, This Day in Music