Inventory

I have been a long-time fan of the A.V. Club's take on pop-culture. While parent publication, The Onion, gets regularly compiled in book form, there has only been one A.V. Club book thus far -- the [quite good, by the way] interview collection Tenacity Of The Cockroach, which was published in 2002. The A.V. Club is finally putting out a second book this October, this time a collection of writings their "Inventory" feature -- which one could probably deduce from the title:

Inventory: 16 Films Featuring Manic Pixie Dream Girls, 10 Great Songs Nearly Ruined by Saxophone, and 100 More Obsessively Specific Pop-Culture Lists

It's the type of thing I enjoy way more [perhaps] than I should.

On a related note, I'm curious to check out A.V. Club head writer Nathan Rabin's new memoir (a genre I tend to approach cautiously) which is due out soon:

The Big Rewind: A Memoir Brought To You By Pop-Culture

From the advertising copy:

Rabin writes movingly about how pop culture helped save him from suicidal despair, institutionalization, and parental abandonment -- throughout a childhood that sent him ricocheting from a mental hospital to a foster home to a group home for emotionally disturbed adolescents.

I have a soft spot for the "saved by pop-culture" idea. Always have. Probably always will. I might have more to say on the subject at some point, but my laptop is doing the overheating thing again (which is fun, because it starts making sounds like Chewbacca fucking a Roomba) so, I'm just going to cut this short for now.