10: Isadora Duncan: a graphic biography, Sabrina Jones

A biography of Isadora Duncan in comic book form. It's O.K.

9: "Don't Take Me the Long Way", M.C. Mars

Taxi driver's stories, mostly from his time in SF. It was better than Callgirl. I don't know whether that teaches me anything about life.

8: Sumo Watching, S.W.A.

A beginner's guide to watching sumo wrestling. The text is often endearingly condescending. I suspect I'd find it annoyingly condescending if this weren't translated from the Japanese.

7: Callgirl, Jeannette Angell

At best an interesting anecdotal account of being a call girl in Boston in the late 1990's.

Jeannette thinks she's more clever than she is. She gets herself into hideous money trouble by misjudging others and by keeping on spending exorbitant amounts when she's broke (e.g., buying her boyfriend a Philippe Patek watch while still in debt on her credit cards), decides prostitution is the way to go. She is snooty about being a "call girl" rather than a "hooker", which is fine, except she is awfully judgmental of "lesser" prostitutes. She also brags about "being able to get any man she wants", which makes me dislike her immediately. Then she starts doing drugs.

Perhaps it's an interesting "oh, that's how you get into cocaine" story, but I'm not convinced it's a particularly objective account, so is it really useful or interesting? Unclear.

I find it interesting how detached she can be from sex, and how easy she finds it to have sex with men she finds unappealing. I also find it interesting to hear what douchebags there are surrounding the business. (Not surprising—but still interesting.)

For someone with a Ph.D. in the humanities she doesn't write terribly well. Maybe she wrote this thing in a hurry? I don't know. It could have been so much better.

Best sentence in the book:

I was usually a little high, a little buzzed from whatever we had done with the client; the last thing that you want at a time like that is to be sitting alone in a room with a giraffe staring you down.