It all depends on what you consider heavy metal music, and if you even think there's any heavy metal around anymore. Two books in the bookstores at the moment take quite different views of what constitutes metal, and which one you prefer will depend on how you define the genre. (Which makes me wonder what people with no prior exposure to metal will think -- too bad I can't think of any friends of mine who have lived under a rock that long.)

David Konow's Bang Your Head: The Rise and Fall of Heavy Metal and Ian Christe's Sound of the Beast: The Complete Headbanging History of Heavy Metal start out in the same place: Black Sabbath as the progenitors of metal, with some help from Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple. But Konow takes a much broader view of metal -- his 1970s include a lot more Kiss and Aerosmith than Christe's; his 1980s focus much more on bands that got MTV play during the daylight hours as well as the Headbanger's Ball on Saturday nights, while Christe prefers the bands most people only knew from reading the black t-shirts of their high school's headbanger clique. So Bang Your Head deals with the end of the most high-profile days of glam metal, while in many ways the relatively underground scene Christe chronicles had nothing to lose from changing fashions and the grunge explosion.

For me, Bang Your Head was a lot more fun to read -- it tells the amusing stories of the bands' attempts to life the wildest rockstar lives possible. One of the Amazon reviews calls it a "puff piece" for this reason, but seeing the details of the bands' lives is what many fans like (hence the popularity of such shoes as MTV's "Cribs" where the camera tours famous people's houses, and of course "The Osbournes" which enthralls people who never bought an Ozzy Osbourne album in their lives). Sound of the Beast loves to categorize -- power metal, death metal, nu metal, etc. -- and for those with eclectic tastes like me, putting everything into its own little box gets annoying pretty quickly. "OK, I own three out of ten albums on his list of definitive '70s progenitors, but only one of the list of paradigmatic New Wave of British Heavy Metal bands" -- well, the list titles aren't really so pompous, but they still made me feel like I was supposed to measure up to his standards or be considered a "poser." Remembering the comment in Chuck Klosterman's metal-fan memoir Fargo Rock City: A Heavy Metal Odyssey in Rural North Dakota about the surprising popularity of certain non-metal artists, like the B-52's, among his head-banging friends, I'm sure I can't be alone in wanting to ignore the habit of sticking a label on every group (then and now).

Metal music is escape -- the kind of escape you prefer is up to you. If you want to escape fluff and find something that holds up to even some non-fans' critical analysis, you'll probably prefer Sound of the Beast. If you want some energetic fun, you'd do better with Bang Your Head. However, if you just want to know about the evolution of the music that has held so many people (and particularly disenchanted young people, and those who remember being one) in thrall for decades, you might want to set aside the time to look through both.

I used to read Bret Easton Ellis' Less Than Zero a lot as a teenager, mostly when I was depressed. When life didn't seem to matter to me, I felt in tune with Clay, the narrator, an 18-year-old coming home to Los Angeles after his first semester at college. Disconnected, nihilistic, willing to go out on a limb. The rich, wild, not-old-enough-to-drink cocaine users of the book had very little to do with my nerdy life, two hours a day on a school bus to the IB magnet school -- I was living vicariously through the characters, while some of my classmates were going out and drinking, fucking, whatever, stuff I only knew from bits of overheard gossip. But there was a sort of envy in me of people not saddled with shyness or a sense of responsibility; their lack of care about anything seemed kinda glamorous. They were doing something, not sitting at home with a science-fiction novel.

Now, I'm 30. I pulled the paperback off the shelf a few days ago -- it's been years since I last read it. Now, I'm no one's picture of "settled down into adult responsibility." I work part-time, sleep late the rest of the days, and cohabit with my boyfriend in an apartment full of Simpsons and Powerpuff Girls toys never touched by physical children. Nonetheless, Less Than Zero hit me in a new way -- as a chronicle of boredom. Constant boredom. Hanging out in restaurants and movie theaters waiting for your drug dealer to show up. Sitting around alone, watching TV. Going to parties that don't turn out to be very good. One gets the feeling that Clay isn't even bothering to look for something interesting -- he's just passing the time because he can't get rid of it any other way. It's not that the things he does couldn't be fun -- but the interactions and conversations transcribed are superficial and don't seem to bring people closer. Some of this is the narrative style -- Clay's story of accompanying his friend Julian, who's working as a prostitute to pay his drug bill, on a trick and having to go throw up in the bathroom, is given in the same tone as he talks about Christmas with his family or having a one-night stand. We don't know why Julian ran up such a drug debt, but when Clay has to do some lines of cocaine to get through lunch with his dad, and Clay's younger sisters steal his cocaine if he doesn't lock his door, Julian's problem seems like only a slight difference of degree. None of these people are seeking extensive thrills; they just want to bring their moods from negative to average. (The movie based on the book is a very different story and makes Clay an average guy with some feelings.) I don't find the book's characters at all glamorous anymore -- I think they need to find something to do with their lives, some people they can actually get close to, and maybe some anti-depressants. (And that change in my view makes me feel a little old.)

I first saw Stephen Fry as an actor on the British comedy series Blackadder, in which he plays several different parts over the four seasons, each set in a different historical era. Then Jeeves & Wooster and A Bit of Fry and Laurie, both comedies pairing him with the equally funny Hugh Laurie. So of course I've also read Fry's written work. Novels The Liar and The Hippopotamus were okay but didn't much stick in my head; Making History wasn't bad either but since I'm a longtime science fiction fan, it seemed to cover ground already much seen in other alternate-history stories. I really preferred Fry's autobiography Moab Is My Washpot, though, so I tended to sum it all up in "His nonfiction is better than his fiction."

I'm going to have to stop saying that now that I've read his most recent novel Revenge. The basic plot is not new; it's a modern retelling of The Count of Monte Cristo, and I knew about that before I started reading. But even knowing what's going to happen didn't stop me from having an intense desire to find out how it was going to happen -- I started the book around noon and finished by 4:00 p.m. Though I'm always an extremely fast reader, I usually put a book down after a while to avoid developing a headache from prolonged reading -- that didn't happen this time.

The modern setting adds an extra spice to the "kept away from the world for twenty years" plot device -- Rip van Winkle encountered the effects of time on people, but to this can now be added the effects of time on technological advance. However, the people are the interesting part: who they are at the beginning, how they change over twenty years, and how their own pasts are used against them. The setting of imprisonment in a psychiatric hospital rather than a prison adds to the opportunity to see inside the protagonist's head compared to the original (I think -- it's been nearly two decades since I read Count of Monte Cristo). Normally, thrillers don't do much for me, but Revenge is the exception.

Written 11:30 p.m., 19 March 2003: Despite the end of President Bush's ultimatum to President Saddam Hussein today, it was unsure when/if the U.S. was going to attack Iraq exactly. (And it is the U.S. -- no matter what Bush's attempts to say it's a "coalition," the fact that the U.S. has two or three allies is basically the same as Japan's being allied to Germany and Italy during the Second World War; the fights in the Pacific were still essentially American forces against Japanese ones.) The uncertainty may have been there, but the tone of the news in general may have been what prompted me to pick up science fiction anthologies rather than the non-fiction more usually reviewed here.

But hardly "escape literature," no. Today's pick was Harlan Ellison's Angry Candy, impressive stories from an impressive author. Ellison is a great favorite of mine, but I only read his fiction when I'm in certain moods. Angry Candy collects stories about death, Ellison says in the introduction, and I say that war is undoubtedly death. Despite Bush's little speech about doing his best to keep from killing innocent Iraqis, and of course his (most likely genuine) hopes that American casualties will be kept to a minimum, war between countries cannot happen without people dying. "Faces twisted in anguish at the precise moment of death, or more terribly, at the moment of realization of personal death, each soldier looked up at me with eyes just fogging with tears, with mouth half-open to emit a scream, with fingers reaching toward me in splay-fingered hope of last-minute reprieve." ("Eidolons")

It's by no means all sad and depressing. "Laugh Track," for example, is wickedly funny -- imagine a woman's soul caught on tape when she laughed as part of a studio audience at a comedy taping, and after her body's death the ability to say things on the soundtrack of newer shows re-using that laugh track! But all the potentialities of humanity are covered, real-seeming beings in real-seeming situations, even when the situation is that an alien being is taking the souls of human suicides and putting them into alien bodies, or that a vampire encounters a sort of half-plant/half-human (in Paris, no less). Many science fiction writers can make you suspend your disbelief and submerge you in another universe; not nearly as many can do that while also making you look inside yourself and your own beliefs. Other authors have used the same themes -- while reading "The Avenger of Death" I was reminded of Piers Anthony's On A Pale Horse, since both deal with a human being who is Death, in charge of all humans' ends. But Ellison provokes more thought in fourteen pages than Anthony did in a thick mass-market paperback (my copy of which eventually got donated to the library). In summary, Harlan Ellison is the kind of writer who makes me feel less depressed that the Bush Administration has pushed the U.S. into the role of the world's bully, saying that we can dictate who is allowed to have weapons of mass destruction and who isn't (for example, France has nukes, but all the U.S. government has done is rename its cafeterias' French fries). "I think we dream to forget. And sometimes it doesn't work," the protagonist of "The Function of Dream Sleep" says. Ellison's dreams should not be forgotten, and it benefits the world to read those that he's put into print.

As a longtime fan of Jean Auel's Clan of the Cave Bear books, I wonder about the accuracy occasionally. It starts to get annoying that their protagonist Ayla, or someone she knows, invents everything from needles to spear-throwers, and that obvious bit of literary license provokes my curiosity about other possible factual fudges. Especially since the five books in the series so far have come out over two decades, and theories current when Auel started writing might have fallen out of favor. Maybe that's why I picked up The Neanderthal's Necklace: In Search of the First Thinkers by Juan Luis Arsuaga, translated from the Spanish by Andy Klatt.

The book wasn't always easy to get through (and I don't know whether Arsuaga or Klatt is responsible for the duller sections and their overuse of technical terms) but on the whole, it was an interesting look at the hominids of the past, the environmental conditions that influenced their very evolution, and the archeological/paleontological research being done now. The inferences that can be drawn from ancient bones, teeth, and chipped stones are truly amazing, and Dr. Arsuaga does not hesitate to tell about both views on a disputed subject.

(On a tangential note, his focus on excavation sites in Spain was particularly interesteing, and I feel like I picked up a lot more information on the geography, geology, and ecology of the Iberian peninsula than I had before. Reading a translated work also exposed me to references to authors and philosophers that might not have been brought up in an originally English-language work.)

In short, the book summarizes current knowledge on the origins of human anatomy, consciousness, language, and behavior, while staying firmly based in physical evidence (unusual for discussions of some of those subjects). Jean Auel's stories may have made the Stone Age seem human, but it takes a work like this to make hers seem truly non-fiction.

I was born in 1973, and raised wearing pants and playing with erector sets. (And my mom wondered why I didn't show much interest in makeup and stylish clothes in high school -- didn't she expect her child-rearing tactics to have an effect?) Lynn Peril's Pink Think: Becoming a Woman in Many Uneasy Lessons details all the stuff I was lucky enough to miss. It's a collection of ads and products aimed at women from the 1940s to the 1970s, from pink Lionel train sets to douching with Lysol so your husband wouldn't think you smelled bad. Peril makes it amusing and ridiculous instead of completely flinch-worthy; your "oh my God!" reaction to the things in this book is a laughing "I can't believe that happened!" like a an edge-pushing comedy gets, rather than the horror that some serious news reports evoke. Yet her final chapter reminds us that "pink think" indoctrination for women hasn't ended, as the success of books like The Rules: Time Tested Secrets for Capturing the Heart of Mr. Right, described in its Amazon.com review as a "return to pre-feminist mind games." Pink Think should be read by all women, for those who do not study history are condemned to repeat it.

Susan Orlean's The Orchid Thief is the book that the movie Adaptation is sort of based on. "Sort of," because The Orchid Thief is essentially a documentary on orchid lovers and south Florida, while Adaptation, from what I have read (I have yet to see it) is more about the process of adapting the book as a screenplay, despite the fact that it isn't really the sort of book that would work as a screenplay. If a camera had followed Orlean around as she did her interviews and looked at all kinds of orchids, it could have played on PBS or the Discovery Channel and would have been very interesting, but it wouldn't be in mainstream movie theaters with big-name stars in it. The book isn't fiction; it doesn't have a single plot, just the individual lives of quite a lot of different people who are interested in raising orchids, hope to make money from selling orchids, or just happen to be connected with the south Florida orchid enthusiasts in some way or another.

As a resident of Florida, though a few hundred miles north of where most of the events of the book take place, I found a lot of familiar things in the book. Heat, swamps, gators, Seminole Indians, transplanted plants and people -- they're all to be found in Tampa as well as down in the Everglades. And I have read enough books on weird little specialty areas of interest that the orchid fanaticism displayed by the people interviewed didn't surprise me as much as it did Orlean. But her outsider viewpoint makes the stories of trudging through swamps in search of the elusive ghost orchid blossom a lot more amusing than they probably would be if told by someone who did this regularly.

So how the hell did anyone come up with the idea of making a movie about trying to make this book into a movie? I don't know, but I'm really curious to see the movie now since I've read the book, even though I don't really think any of the things Orlean talks about in the book will actually be in Adaptation. I just want a peek into the brain of the guy who came up with the screenplay that they actually made.