What I'm Reading Now...

Here are a few books I'm plowing through at the moment. Not sure when I'll finish any or all of them off, but they're all pretty interesting as of now, so consider this a recommendation. If any of them really drop the ball on the one yard line, I'll alert you on Twitter. (By the way, if you're not already, how about following me on Twitter @willpfeifer?

I've been reading a lot about semi-modern Russia lately, and this is before Trump and Putin revealed themselves to be besties. This book combines my love of modern culture with my love of sleazy culture. So after reading how the folks in post-Soviet East Germany live ("Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall") and what modern media looks like in Russia ("Nothing is True and Everything is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia"), I want to see how trash culture responds to that sort of social and political change. Judging by what I've read so far, it's exactly what you'd expect: it's gone whatever the Russian word for "bananas" is.


Here's the thing: I'm not even a wrestling fan, not really. Aside from the early 1980s, when Hulk Hogan was ascendant and everyone was watching wrestling, and a brief flirtation with the sport in the mid 1990s, when the Rock and company were ushering in a new wave of popularity, I've hardly ever watched pro wrestling at all. But, oddly enough, I love reading about it. My absolute favorite book of the past few years is "The Squared Circle: Life, Death and Professional Wrestling," David Shoemaker's history of the sport. I thought it was a fascinating portrait of pop culture (there's that phrase again, sex, race, success, failure, birth, death and America as I've ever read, even though I never watched much of the action described within. On a similar (though less academic level, I've been loving the two collections of the zine The Atomic Elbow that I stumbled upon recently. Each little squarebound book collects four issues (though issues one through four apparently remain uncollected at this point), and feature articles, reviews, essays and cartoons from various contributors. My favorite pieces, though, are the insanely, obsessively detailed recaps of obscure wrestling events by editor Robert Newsome. Trust me, his 30-page report on the 1991 UWF Beach Brawl of Palmetto, Florida is worth the price of admission all by itself. (Order copies of Atomic Elbow here.)


One of the cartoonists interviewed in The Atomic Elbow is Box Brown, who wrote an acclaimed graphic biography of wrestling legend Andre the Giant a couple of years ago. His new book just hit the stores, and though I'm just a few pages in, so far it's even better than his Andre book. "Tetris: The Games People Play" is, of course, a look at the origins and popularity of the video game Tetris, but it's a lot more than that, too. So far, it's a wide-ranging discussion of the very concept of games themselves, from their possible origins in prehistoric days as both entertainment and competition, to their development in the ancient world as ways to exercise the mind and develop areas of the brain necessary for higher civilization to develop. It's not all ancient history, of course -- the book, as I'm reading, just made a giant leap to the 20th century and the arrival of Donkey Kong -- but it's nice to have a videogame book take the long view.