The Bookworm Sez: “Basketball Jones” Is A Slam Dunk
Review by Terri Schlichenmeyer
You've waited almost exactly a year for this.
  March Madness will be dribbling in soon, and if you're nuts for nets, you're probably overjoyed. If you're not a watcher, well…
  Basketball fans are bonkers over buckets. They pore over stats, fill in charts, and offer prayers for their teams during this time. Non-fans, on the other hand, look forward to having their beloved's attention back when the season's over.
  So which end of the court are you on?  In the new book “Basketball Jones” by E. Lynn Harris, a man chooses sides but it might cost him the game.
  AJ Richardson is crazy in love. Dray Jones is everything AJ could want in a man. He's tall, with six-pack abs and smooth dark skin. His hands are strong, and he smells so good. Dray is smart and generous and, as a pro basketball player, he's got good money and can take care of AJ.
  There's just one little problem: Dray is married. And Wifey doesn't know that Dray is on the DL and sleeping with Aldridge James “AJ” Richardson, who is definitely a man.
Creeping around is just fine with AJ. He knows Dray loves him, and he knows that Dray's marriage is just a cover-up. Dray thinks he'd be dropped from his fan's radar in a hot minute if they knew his “friend” was more than just his friend, so he and AJ are discreet.
  Still, it's not easy. AJ knows he has to share Dray's free time with that woman, but it's all worth it. Besides, someday, he and Dray will be able to live together without hiding. In the meantime, AJ won't breathe a word about Dray to anybody, including his gossipy best friend, Maurice, who lives and snarks in the ATL.
  But discretion may not be enough. Online sites hint that a “certain” NBA player has a double life and that this “certain” b-baller is about to come out. Dray begins to panic. His wife is newly pregnant, his beloved father would be horrified to learn of Dray's “secret life”, and Dray can't afford rumors. He accuses AJ of yakking, because somebody knows something and they've got to be stopped.
  Then Dray's phone rings and a dark voice rumbles at the other end, demanding $100,000.
  And AJ's phone rings…
  Looking for slam-dunk entertainment, something a little foul and lots of fun?  Then don't pass “Basketball Jones”.
  Author E. Lynn Harris presents his readers with a basically nice “boi” who gets into not-so-nice trouble and has to use his wits to save himself. This novel is plenty satisfying, quick to read, not too taxing on the brain, and while I probably wouldn't hand it to my mother (there are steamy-enough bedroom scenes between these covers), I think reading it and tossing it your friends' way will get you points.
If you've got a little time on your hands and want to run down the clock, reading this book is a good way to do it. “Basketball Jones” is a big score for novel lovers.
“Basketball Jones” by E. Lynn Harris c.2009, Doubleday $22.95 / $25.95 Canada     246 pages
The Bookworm is Terri Schlichenmeyer. Terri has been reading since she was 3 years old and she never goes anywhere without a book.  She lives on a hill in Wisconsin with two dogs and 11,000 books.

The Bookworm Sez: “As a Friend” by Forrest Gander
Reviewed by Terri Schlichenmeyer
You have a friend who’s golden. People flock to him just so they can tell everyone they spent a few precious seconds in his presence. They repeat his words as witticisms, even though he spouts mere common clichés from his lips. Even those who don’t know him, pretend that they do. Everybody loves him. You want to be him.
  And you hate him.
  In the new novel “As a Friend” by Forrest Gander, a man’s charmed life turns out to be not-so-charmed. But nobody notices until it’s too late.
Les is full of lies. He tells everyone that he has a wife “up on a farm” in Missouri. He claims with a wink that he convinced her to stay there because it’s a better place for her to paint the pictures that she sells. Les visits her three times a month on weekends, and during the week, he lives with a so-called lesbian named Sarah who probably is in love with him.
  Clay knows all this because he works at the survey company with Les. After work, Les, Clay, Quentin, and maybe the part-timers go to The High Hat for a few drinks when the weather gets hot, more for the air conditioning than for the beer. Everybody there talks to Les. He quotes poetry in the middle of conversation and speaks in fake accents, and Clay hates it.
  He hates that Sarah and Les sometimes invite him to spend time with them, and then they ignore him. He detests it when Les gets away with things at work: calling in sick when he really isn’t; getting Clay in trouble by avoiding hard jobs; making small tasks difficult by pulling pranks that Quentin brushes away. All in all, Clay really hates Les.
  And he’s is sure he’s in love with Les. Clay also practices Les’s little mannerisms. He wants Les dead so he can become Les.
  But how do you take down a legend?  How can you argue with a roomful of people who reach out to someone as if he’s a Messiah? How can you hurt a man who appears to be immune to pain?
  The answer: with a $50 bribe and a quarter coin.
  The word “Huh?” comes to mind a lot when reading this book. More fictional essay (at under 110 pages) than novel, the first half of this book had me on the edge of my seat. It’s the story of a birth, and Clay’s version of Les’s life. If author Forrest Gander had stopped there, I’d be raving about “As a Friend”.
  But such a great beginning morphs into near-incoherency all too quickly. Unfortunately, the latter half of this book consists of half-sentence thoughts from Sarah, and random paragraphs that only punctuate the confusion you’ll have by then.
  If you possess the ability to put a book away in the middle of it, then read the first half of this one. If you, like me, are compelled to finish your novels, then “As a Friend”, I can’t recommend this one.
“As a Friend” by Forrest Gander c.2008, New Directions Publishing Corp.    $13.95 / $15.50 Canada   107 pages
The Bookworm is Terri Schlichenmeyer. Terri has been reading since she was 3 years old and she never goes anywhere without a book.  She lives on a hill in Wisconsin with two dogs and 11,000 books.

The Bookworm Sez: “Voluntary Madness” by Norah Vincent
Reviewed by Terri Schlichenmeyer
“Are you crazy?”  It’s a common query, one you’ve probably been asked an insane amount of times. Maddening, really, how often people question your sanity when you do something loony. It’s enough to make you cuckoo.
  But what if your lunacy was the real thing? What if you - perfectly normal you - had something buried so deep you barely knew it existed? In the new book “Voluntary Madness” by Norah Vincent, you’ll read about a journalist’s time in “the bin”.
  As she finished her first book “Self-Made Man”, Norah Vincent realized that, in masquerading as the opposite sex, she had lost a part of herself. She tumbled into depression and subsequently entered a mental ward to “do some serious recalibration.”
  But, she wondered, does that make her “mentally ill”?
  Probing the writings of writers and doctors, Vincent became intrigued, then curious, and she decided to write a book on the subject. Over the course of a year, she checked herself into three facilities: a public hospital in a big city, a private rural hospital in an unnamed prairie town, and an alternative-treatment facility that she found on the Internet.
  The public hospital, she learned, was discombobulating. Mostly ignored by staff (except to enforce “rules”), Vincent was put into a room with three other women. Good nutrition was all but non-existent; autonomy, even less so. There was a near-complete lack of privacy. Patients were allowed out-of-doors briefly, occasionally. Heavy-duty medications were common. Boredom was rampant.
“No matter how bad you feel,” Vincent says, “never go to the bin. In fact, never confess enough to your therapist to give her even the slightest inclination to commit you to the bin...”
  Just before entering the private hospital, Vincent felt depressed again. Hoping for quality treatment with no additional meds, she checked in and found an understanding doctor who allowed clients freedom, knowing it could help with healing. Vincent also writes about the most compassionate “use” of a patient any hospital could have.
  But at the alternative-treatment facility - where new-agey dance and white-board drawings were part of the program - Vincent learned some surprising, frightening things that set her on a real path to recovery.
  I wasn’t crazy about this book at first. In the beginning of “Voluntary Madness”, author Norah Vincent used a lot of fifteen-dollar words when a couple of five-cent words would have sufficed. I like what she said, I just didn’t like the way she said it.
But as soon as Vincent gets to the meat of her book, I was locked down. This book is informative, funny, desperate, sobering and downright very scary. Not only are Vincent’s experiences fascinating, but her examination of the state of mental health treatment will give readers pause.
Sanity, as it turns out, is a subjective thing. And if someone with more power says you need help, your opinions don’t always matter.
  If you’ve ever felt blue, been sad, furious, drunk, or ever needed a little professional help to get you through, read “Voluntary Madness”. You’d have to be nuts to miss it.
Meet The Bookworm:
The Bookworm is Terri Schlichenmeyer. Terri has been reading since she was 3 years old and she never goes anywhere without a book.  She lives on a hill in Wisconsin with two dogs and 11,000 books.