Rules:

1. Pick up the nearest book.
2. Open to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence on the page.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people.

I happened to be sitting by my bookcase, so I closed my eyes and randomly selected a title. As fate would have it, the book I chose was Nicholson Baker’s The Fermata, the most profane book I own. I turned to page 123, found the fifth sentence, and quickly concluded I can’t post what comes next. This is a family blog (supposedly), and the passage contains some colourful language that may not be suitable for all readers. In fact, the whole book is pretty smutty, so I doubt there are three sentences in the entire book that I could post here.

I went back to the bookcase and randomly selected Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential. I turned to page 123, found the fifth sentence, and here’s what I found:

We wanted to be the best, we wanted to be different, but at the same time, correct. We yearned to bring honor to our clan, and in that vein, we came up with the looniest, most ambitious menu our super-heated, endorphin-overloaded brains could agree on, a sort of Greatest Hits of our Checkered Careers So Far collection. French classics sat side-by-side with Portugese squid stew, my Tante Jeanne’s humble salade de tomates, dishes we’d lifted out of cookbooks, stolen from other chefs, remembered seeing on TV.

So, it may not compare to Grand Theft Auto IV, but it’s not bad diversion for a Monday night. Anyone else want to play along? Friar Tuck? Kelly? Bueller?

I was stunned.  I’ve always thought of myself as pretty well-read, but I’m hard pressed to remember even six books I finished last year (if we include titles like Mother Cat’s Busy Day, then the number increases to something like 534).  Upon reflection, I realized that I read a lot, but it’s largely newspapers, magazines (The Walrus, The New York Times Magazine, US Weekly), and online articles.  Somehow books have taken a backseat to other priorities, and I didn’t even notice it.

So, I decided that I should make some time for reading, and have set a goal of getting through two books a month.  Coincidentally, my friend Kelly-in-Vancouver recently challenged herself to read 50 books this year, which puts my little project to shame.

So far, so good.  I just finished A.J. Jacobs’s The Year of Living Bibically, an entertaining read that I will come back to another time.  I also admit to having read Self Leadership and the One Minute Manager, a fluffy motivational business book that I only read to pad my numbers.

I’m now working on book five – Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything.  Then I think it will be time for some fiction.  Titles in the queue include A Complicated Kindness, Bill Pullman’s Dark Materials trilogy, Flashman on the March, and everything by Cormac McCarthy.  If you have any recommendations, pass them along.  No Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, please – I’m interested in sprints, not marathons…

A few years ago, Mick Foley wrote a book about his experiences in the wrestling business. Mick is an unusual character – he wasn’t blessed with any obvious athletic ability. He has a very high pain threshold, though, so he made his name in hardcore wrestling, like Japanese death matches featuring flaming bats, florescent light tubes, and barbed wire ropes. Mick is also really smart and very articulate, and his two books were a breath of fresh air in a business that has tried to keep its secrets hidden from gullible marks for years.

Many other wrestlers have written books since then (actually, a lot of them had a ghost writer do it) and in most cases, they’re pretty bad. Some wrestlers just can’t seem to separate real life from their character and gimmick, and the result is a mish-mash of fact and fiction that insults the reader’s intelligence.

That’s why Bret Hart’s new autobiography was so eagerly anticipated. The Hitman has been working on it for years, and rumour had it he planned to release a three volume book that would be more than a thousand pages long. Luckily he had a good editor, and the resulting Hitman: My Real Life in the Cartoon World of Wrestling is a pretty good read.

Bret is practically wrestling royalty. He’s the son of Stu Hart, a legendary wrestler who ran Calgary’s Stampede Wrestling in and trained dozens of young wrestlers in his “dungeon”. With 12 kids, the Hart house seemed to be a bit of a zoo. Most of the kids wound up involved in the wrestling business, either as a wrestler, booker, or in the case of his sisters, as a wrestler’s spouse. The wrestling business has not been kind to them – they almost seem to be cursed.

The first half of the book details Bret’s rise from young worker to World Champion. I loved this part of the book as Bret details his early meetings with many of the guys I watched in the ’80s – Davey Boy Smith, The Dynamite Kid, Ravishing Rick Rude, Ted Dibiase, etc. Bret doesn’t pull any punches – he reveals a lot about his drug use, adultery, and the various weaknesses of his colleagues.

As unexpected as his rise to prominence was, nobody could have predicted his eventual fall from grace. In short order, he fell victim to backstage politics, his brother Owen was killed in a stunt gone awry, his parents died, his career ended after taking a stiff kick to the head, and he suffered a bad stroke. He has since recovered, but Bret still comes across as a bitter man who believes he deserved a better fate.

My main criticism of the book is Bret’s need to continually remind us of how great he was. I guess this should be expected – after all, his catch phrase was “The best there is, the best there was, the best there ever will be”. Humble he is not. Some of his prose is a little clumsy, but he should be commended for writing the book on his own.

If, like me, you grew up watching Saturday Night’s Main Event and debated the merits of Hulk Hogan and Randy Savage with your friends, this book is a must-read. If you think wrestling is just a vulgar circus, then Bret’s tales may open your eyes a bit.