Author, Author

 Upon further reflection, it seems that I may have made a some sort of tactical mistake when it came to making up my summer reading list. 

I read Promised Land by Barack Obama before I started reading Greenlights by Matthew McConaughey. I picked up the President's book after waiting for my wife to get to it in her stack of books to be consumed. I bought it for her, keeping with the notion that I should give gifts that I would enjoy receiving myself. Obama's detailed account of his first term in office was the ultimate salve for the previous four years. Being reminded of a White House that was competent and working toward a more perfect union made me believe that good things can come out of Washington. The struggles, the triumphs, the missed opportunities, all there laid out by a thinking, feeling author. The ultimate account from someone who was in the room where it happened. Somewhere along the line, I commiserated with my mother who was also reading Barack's book that we didn't want it to end. Suddenly we would be thrown back into the world as it is, where The Mouth That Roared had taken over the White House for four years and tried to undo everything that been done by Obama's team. My team. When I finished that last page, I closed the book and I felt good. 

Out of the box, I should tell you all that I am a fan of Matthew McConaughey. I have enjoyed a great many of his performances, and believe that he was completely deserving of his McConaissance and the Academy Award he received for Dallas Buyers Club. I feel that his turn in Richard Linklater's Dazed and Confused is a revelation, and captures that moment in time better than any one person possibly could. 

Which is to say that I have enjoyed his appearances on film. So why not give his memoir a try? 

Because it is a mish-mosh of random observations and accounts of getting beat by his father, his brothers being beaten by his father, and his mother and father beating on one another. He spends more time recounting his arrest for playing bongos naked and stoned than he does describing his work with Steven Spielberg. Drizzled over the top of this empty confection of abuse is a series of poems written at different points in his life that are distractions from the hurly-burly hedonism pursued by this treasure of American Cinema. 

And honestly, I probably would have found Matthew's book much more charming had it not leaped into the vacuum created by the seven hundred pages of thoughtful prose from a world leader. The three hundred pages of Greenlights feels like an unnecessary burden by comparison. I am clever enough to know that these are apples and oranges I am examining, but since both are fruit and claim to be nutritious or at least worth chewing, I wish that I would have looked before I leaped. Rooked before I read?