I left off last time explaining how Zeitoun is the only “new release” book I’ve ever read. I zoomed through it in eight days, since I had checked it out from the local library (the book was sold out everywhere from Christmas until about a week ago — but I hadn’t had a library card since I was a kid, so that’s fun). My main reason for reading the book was to get a sense of what happened to New Orleans and the people who called the city home. Even though the book was written from the perspective of a single family, I thought it would still feel epic in scope (it didn’t).

I did enjoy learning about the Zeitoun family though. Abdulrahman Zeitoun is a Syrian American man who settled in New Orleans after about a decade of living and working at sea. A friend introduced him to his wife Kathy, a Louisiana native who was raised Southern Baptist but had converted to Islam on her own. Kathy has a son from a previous marriage, and she and Zeitoun (as everyone calls Abdulrahman) have three daughters together. In my opinion, Eggers’s focus on this quintessential “American” family is the strongest aspect of the book. The result was that I learned more about Islam than I had ever known before.

You may have noticed from my discussions that I don’t read much modern literature. I think Palahniuk’s Fight Club and Choke might be the only works of narrative prose (i.e. – fiction or creative nonfiction) published within the last 25 years on my bookshelf at home. (Correction: I also have Nick Horby’s novel High Fidelity, Jon Krakauer’s nonfiction work Into The Wild, Tao Lin’s short story collection Bed, and one or two others.) There are a few reasons for this. First, I’ve been trying to catch up on many of the “classics” that I missed out on while skirting the reading requirements in high school English classes. More often than not, I managed to patch together a project without reading the entire book — and N64’s “Goldeneye” seemed much more important at the time.

The second reason is more complex, but it relates to my skepticism over the value of contemporary publishing. I’m sure there’s a long catalog of works that try to explain the reasons for the degraded efficacy of modern literature: people watch too much TV and movies, play too many video games, aren’t educated enough, or are tasteless, unrefined cretins. That’s without even mentioning the publishing industry’s concerns over lagging profits. Of course, the assumption there is that the publishers deserved whatever success they had enjoyed up until recent times.

I saw this today and I couldn’t help but post it here. Plus we’re all in need of a lighter post. NPR is holding a vote for the 100 Best Beach Books Ever. They received 600 nominations, which they narrowed down to a list of 200. Now you get to vote for 10, whether those are good books to read at the beach, good books about beaches…or (if you’re not a fan of beaches) books that you’ll read wherever you are.

Anyways, NPR makes it really easy to embed the voting screen, so you can do it right here! It’s probably not a huge mystery what I voted for: The Rum Diary, Big Sur, Lord of the Flies, and Heart of Darkness. I didn’t feel like voting for 10, and I’m not much for reading on the beach…

UPDATE 7/29/09: The winners were announced today. What do I have to say about it? As Mr. Horse often stated on Ren & Stimpy, “Hmmmmm…no sir, I don’t like it.” This list has almost zero connection to beaches except Jaws and (barely squeezed in at the 100th spot) Treasure Island. Nor are they short books — as in, convenient to take to the beach. Who the flip would pack Anna Karenina, a 1,000-page book, in their beach tote? The unsurprising top ten includes the Harry Pooper series and Bridget Jones. Whoopee. I guess even NPR’s book-reading audience isn’t too far removed from the general book-reading population. You won’t find me on their beach though…