Today, while killing a little time at Borders, I picked up a book entitled "Palo Alto". The thing I have noticed about bookstores is that there are a whole lot of books there. The more books, the bigger the store. Astute? Yes.
Anyway, there are quite a few books in this particular bookstore and while I do love to read, I do not like wasting my time on a poorly written book. This means that I usually go to the bookstore with a book in mind or I play a fun game that involves finding a favorite book that I have read before, reading the blurbs on the back written by other author's praising the book, and then looking up books written by those authors. It is awesome.
My point is that I am not one to just pick up any old book at random because there is a good chance that is will be pretty disappointing. In order for me to do so, there has to be something pretty eye-catching about the book.
In the case of "Palo Alto", it was the author: James Franco.
Surely not THE James Franco, star of "Pineapple Express" and co-star in the Spider-Man movie. He wrote a book? Who thought that would be a good idea? Because I am all about fairness and equal-opportunity, I decided to give the book a chance.
"Palo Alto", named thus for Franco's hometown in California, is a book of short stories connected to one another because all of them take place in Palo Alto and contain the same cast of high-school characters, who take on larger and smaller roles in each or some of the stories. Because most of them are only about 10-15 pages, they are pretty easy to digest...and that's about it. Perhaps Franco was going for a shock-and-awe effect with this book, but I don't think it worked out. He writes very simplistically, which is a style that does work very effectively for many authors. However, it was hard to really feel any sort of emotional connection to the stories or to sympathize with the characters involved, especially since the activities they were involved in (which from the reading I did and a scan of the rest of the book revolved around drug, violence, and sex) were so morally repugnant, for lack of a more unpretentious-sounding phrase.
So, to sum up this unrelated first post on my baking blog, I can appreciate the fact that Mr. Franco is a man of many interests AND that he takes education pretty seriously (he has attended UCLA, Columbia, and Yale!), but I was not very entertained by his book, beyond that fact that he wrote it. Oh! And the best part of all. To confirm that James Franco, author of "Palo Alto", was THE James Franco, I flipped to the back to check out the author's picture.
Really James Franco?! Really? The most enjoyment I got out of your book was laughing at this overly-dramatic photo. I even took a picture of it with my phone.
But I don't want to be too hard on him. Firstly, because my opinion is worth all of absolutely nothing at this point and secondly because I think James Franco seems like a pretty cool guy. Admittedly, I only think this because of what I have seen of the characters he portrays in films and on TV. Still though, James Franco: I approve of you, just not your book!
Hey here is a picture of a cake that I didn't make:
This is a baking blog after all!
