Quick, I Need a Sales Handle on the New Nathan Rabin Book!

Sometimes it's hard to get a handle on a book until you read it. Of course other times it's best not to read it.

Nathan Rabin's memoir, The Big Rewind, is a case in point. Quotes from Neal Pollack, Roger Ebert, Chuck Klosterman on the back (Oh, plus two people I don't know, but one works for The Colbert Report), means this a pop culture filled rant in memoir form.

Hey, that's good for us. We not only sell Klosterman well (putting Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs on our paperback table after the event--we sold another 7 copies pretty quickly) but Tucker Max and lots more like these guys.

Ah, but here's the other part of the equation. Now that I'm 100 pages into the book, I'm seeing that this book has a lot of Augusten Burroughs-ness in it too. There's difficult relatives, a group home, a mental institution, eccentrically violent roommates, and I'm not even halfway through.

So now I can say "It's like Chuck Klosterman crossed with Augusten Burroughs." I like to "cross" things. I also like things to "meet." So Don Lee's Wrack and Ruin is like Charles Baxter meets the movie Sideways. (It's important to mention the book Wrack and Ruin periodically. Also, Little Bee.)

So I hear the last part of The Big Rewind is about Rabin's involvement on John Ridley's film review show Movie Club. Rabin grew up for a time in Milwaukee. So did Ridley! It's a secret cabal, but I can't find the password. But local angles are always important.

OK, someone else I was talking to knows Rabin casually gave me another sales handle. But I can't use it.

Event for The Big Rewind is Friday, July 17th, 7 PM.