Joe Queenan

I used to be very amused by Queenan's articles in Movieline Magazine, in the days when it had an edge that set it apart from other entertainment publications. When it came to writing sentence after sentence of pointed but hilarious opinion, he had few equals. Under a new editor, Movieline became worthless, and I lost track of Queenan for quite a while. Recently, I decided to listen to this audiobook through Hoopla, which my library provides. So why, you may wonder, should anyone spend time show more listening to the autobiography of Joe Queenan? There are a number of answers to that. First, Queenan is a smart guy, and his observations on the people, places, and events in his life are always interesting and go deep beneath the surface. Second, while this is certainly a book about Queenan's life, it is more a book about his relationship with his alcoholic, abusive father, who could rarely hold a job for more than a few months at a time. Queenan's understanding of the good traits he inherited from his father, such as a love of learning and reading, will hit home with any of us whose relationship with our father was mixed. Without a father as a role model, Queenan turned to others, and his portrayal of the ex-Marine clothing store owner for whom he worked for many years, as well as a pharmacist turned gourmet cook, are fascinating. This book recreates a lost time and place (Philadelphia of the 1950s and 60s). As a result of his father's inability to hold a job, he grew up poor, at least until his mother started working at a hospital and rapidly was promoted to where she made more money than Queenan's father had ever brought in. Queenan's observations of the cycle of stupid decisions poor people make is very convincing.

This is also a funny book at times. Queenan's quest to become a Catholic Saint by dying at a young age doesn't quite work out, but his experiences with the church, its priests and nuns, and at a seminary in Clarks Summit, Pennsylvania are fascinating and amusing, while still maintaining the level of insight and seriousness that mark the book as a whole. There are very few throwaway lines here. If you listen to the audiobook, there is an excellent interview with Queenan at the end where he goes into the background of how he wrote the book.

Highly recommended. show less

This is a pretty scathing indictment of the Baby Boomer generation – all the more scathing, and all the more funny, because it seems totally true. Sure, Queenan is a bit obsessed with the devolution of ‘60s rock into “soft” rock, but when he tells the story about the SUV-driving, cell phone-talking guy who takes his purebred dog to another neighborhood to poop on other people’s lawns while he follows behind in his gas-guzzling monstrosity, you can’t help but think, “I know that show more guy! And he sucks.”

Yes, Baby Boomers collectively suck, and it’s nice to hear a fellow Boomer stand up and declare it. They’re bankrupting future generations, destroying the environment and displaying an unprecedented amount of selfishness and self-absorption. Worse yet, they totally sold out, yet they won’t admit it! Who can respect that? (The only part of Queenan’s book I don’t totally agree with is his diatribe against Gen X’ers – after all, as a teeny generation sandwiched between Baby Boomers and their obnoxious children, Generation Y-ine, what chance did we have?) show less

I had hoped Joe Queenan’s ‘One for the Books’ would prove to be an exception from the often stuffy, professorial tomes that wax lyrical about the joys of reading, as long as that reading is almost exclusively authored by, or about, Dead White Dudes (D.W.D).

In part it was, but unfortunately Queenan’s humour doesn’t quite negate his narrow definition of what ‘good books’ are. Queenan is a book snob, dismissing genre fiction almost in its entirety, and championing way too many show more D.W.D.

I was particularly frustrated by Queenan’s dismissive attitudes to libraries (his white male privilege is showing there), and his hatred of ebooks, and ereaders. I own about equal amounts of both print and ebooks, that brings my current total to somewhere over 4000 books. I have read many more, owned many more, borrowed many more, given away many more. I have, and I doubt anyone I know would dispute it, ‘...engaged in an intense, lifelong love affair with books...’ ,and I don’t care if they are written longhand on parchment, or are a complicated string of binary numbers...a book, is a book, is a book, no matter the format.

So, sadly, my search for a book from a self confessed bibliophile who isn’t contemptuous of the other 99% of readers continues. show less

A collection of essays by Joe Queenan about his life in books, from memories of the bookmobile that visited his impoverished childhood neighborhood, to his compulsive habit of starting way too many books at once, to his experiences as a young man living in Paris and obsessing over French writers.

This... was an interesting reading experience for me. Because, first and foremost, Queenan does a whole bunch of things that annoy me. He constantly name-drops obscure literary works he's sure you've show more probably never heard of, but which he's clearly proud that he has. He off-handedly dismisses entire genres as trash and lobs insults at the people who read them. And by the third repetition, I was thoroughly tired of hearing "You can't do that with a Kindle." (Usually about things you could, in fact, do perfectly well with a Kindle.) The older I get, the less patience I have with this kind of book snobbishness, and several times I found myself expressing my opinions of Queenan's opinions by waving a middle finger in the direction of the page. Childish and pointless, I know, but strangely satisfying.

And yet... And yet, I can't say I disliked this book. In fact, overall, I found it fairly entertaining. Queenan's snark, however poorly aimed, is often pretty funny, and his curmudgeonliness is not without a certain acerbic charm. It helps, I think, that he comes across as playing it up a bit for effect, and that while he is certainly judgmental, he doesn't seem genuinely mean-spirited. So even when I was flipping him the bird, it was more in amusement than in real anger. Plus, even when our reading tastes, habits, and attitudes are diametrically opposed -- as they certainly are in this case -- I apparently just can't help but feel a certain warmth towards a fellow passionate book lover.

So. Am I ever going to read anything else by Queenan? Probably not. Did I mostly enjoy reading this one, almost despite myself? Yeah. Yeah, I did.

Rating: I'm going to call this one 3.5/5, with the caveat that if I were rating how much I agreed with the guy, that would be a much lower number. show less