Friday Night Lights Meets The Last Picture Show and They Get Really Wasted

My top five favorite current living writers in no particular order:
1. David Sedaris
2. Sarah Vowell
3. Steve Almond
4. Mary Roach
5. Dan Savage
These writers qualify because at any given time, if anyone of them publishes a new book, I will stop whatever I’m doing to purchase and read said publication, regardless of whether or not I’m reading something else or in the middle of towel-drying my dog.

Chuck Klosterman and Sarah Vowell are the two who’ve published most recently, and so I stopped everything I was doing (for the record, I was raking a small portion of the approximately 457 billion leaves that have accumulated in my front yard) and bought the Klosterman book and have been unable to anything productive for the last three days because I have been devouring it.

Downtown Owl follows three characters through the winter of 1984 as they pursue their lives in the teeny, tiny Owl, North Dakota. Mitch Hrlicka is a high school senior, a sometime-quarterback, who has his hate on for his football coach, who is certain has been inappropriate and unethical with some of his female students. Julia Rabia is new to town—a twenty-three year old history teacher who takes a job in rural Owl to get some work experience. She is befriended by Naomi, an older teacher, and the two of them end up bar-hopping nightly. Horace Jones is 73, drinks coffee daily with a group of other old Owl residents, and understands the truth clearly.

Through these three characters, we learn the history of Owl, its scandals past and present, and much about small-town 1980s culture. I liked this book for many, many reasons, but I loved it for passages like this:

"'Why do we get out of bed?' Mitch wondered. 'Is there any feeling any better that being in bed? What could possibly feel better than this? What is going to happen in the course of my day that will be an improvement over lying on something very soft, wearing only underwear, doing absolutely nothing, all by myself?' Every day, Mitch woke to this line of reasoning: Every day, the first move he made outside his sheets immediately destroyed the only flawless part of his existence."

And the best thing about it, as the reviewer for Entertainment Weekly wrote, is that it reads exactly like a Chuck Klosterman book--which is absolutely the perfect sentiment and just the right hook to grab a fan like me (and yes, that is a Scooby-Doo band-aid on my chin).