I would like to formally invite you all to welcome in the new year with a great little book.

Not that the author really needs any publicity and he certainly doesn’t need the money generated from book sales, but ignore all of that and go read Steve Martin’s The Pleasure of My Company anyway.

I’d read Shopgirl and thought it was sweet, but just sort of okay. (I actually just looked in my book notebook [where, in theory, I write down what I think of the books I read, but usually I forget] and after I say it’s sweet, I start picking on tiny inconsistencies, such as the type of gift wrap at Neiman-Marcus. Huh.) I like Steve Martin’s “Shouts and Murmurs” pieces in the New Yorker, so I decided to give The Pleasure of My Company a chance.

And man, I’m glad I did.

It’s the brief story (163 pages) of Daniel Pecan Cambridge, a loner with several glaring strains of obsessive-compulsive disorder, who fears that the total light bulb wattage in his apartment will go under or over 1125 watts; curbs; and transportation. Somehow, Martin manages to make this absolutely hilarious without making fun of his narrator–actually, Daniel Pecan Cambridge is a very endearing character. If he lived next door, I would go visit him every day. Daniel Pecan Cambridge knows he is a bit of a kook (which is probably why he is a likable fellow and not a pitiable freak). In this passage, he has decided to enter an essay contest sponsored by a frozen pie company–the subject is why he is the most average American:

The challenge was not how to present myself as average, but how to make myself likable without lying. I think I’m pretty appealing, but likability in an essay is very different from likability in life. See, I tend to grow on people, and five hundred words is just not enough to get people to like me. I need several years and a ream or two of paper.

Although he stays home a lot (except for trips to the Rite Aid), this doesn’t mean he doesn’t have love interests. There is Elizabeth, a realtor who periodically shows apartments in the house across the street. In this passage, he seizes an opportunity to meet her:

…she was still pitching and discussing the apartment. This was my opportunity to meet my objet d’amour. Or at least give her an opportunity to see me, to get used to me. My plan was to walk by on my side of the street and not look over her way. This, I felt, was a very clever masculine move: to meet and ultimately seduce through no contact at all. She would be made aware of me as a mysterious figure, someone with no need of her whatsoever. This is compelling to a woman.

I guess when you consider that it was written by Steve Martin and it is only 163 pages, it should not be that much of a surprise that almost every single sentence is funny, sweet, or reveletory in some way. I highly recommend it!

Speaking of reading, I thought about instituting some sort of reading challenge to myself–I admire those out there who do the 52 books in 52 weeks thing, but I think I would probably get hung up on the time constraints and not enjoy the books as much. So instead, I’m just going to try to read as many books as I possibly can and write about them when I do.

(Man, I just re-read that and does that sound lame. Sorry.)