"Updike will put you right out on one of those warm summer afternoons when lawn mowers are whirring all over the neighborhood," Tom Laskin observes in a feature on summer reading. His solution? "Real trash," he enthuses. "Take that kind of mental junk food along next time you're invited to another BYO barbecue, and I swear the hours will disappear faster than the Sheboygan brats." Leading off his recommendations: Moon Walk. "Michael Jackson's new autobiography is a very easy read" - it's "obvious that he's one lonely, mixed-up cat." Rock Star, by Jackie Collins, "is so inane (and funny) that it isn't apt to destroy anybody's crazy notions about how glamorous it is...to sweat out a couple pints of liquid in front of screaming fans who demand nothing less than an hour's worth of old hits." The survey concludes with Trump: The Art of the Deal. "This man has no shame," writes Laskin, noting that "even if the super developer does come across as a vain, conceited jerk, it's kind of fun to listen to him call everybody in the public sector a 'loser.'" The LINKcat database maintained by Wisconsin's South Central Library System suggests little demand for any these books 20 years later. A recent check showed one of seven copies of Moon Walk was checked out, all of the 21 copies of Rock Star were gathering dust, and one of the 17 copies of Trump: The Art of the Deal, was in circulation.
Yesterday's trash
From the Isthmus archives, May 27, 1988