Readers, Run to It!

There are some writers whom one wish would just stop already, and turn their attention to un-writing what they'd already produced so as to aid one in un-reading it. Stephen King has been one of those for most of the last twenty years, and I would say the same thing about the unhinged inanity of The Atlantic's Andrew Sullivan if I had actually read anything by him since 2005.

And then there are books you wish would keep on going, such as Matt Labash's Fly Fishing With Darth Vader. Labash usually writes for The Weekly Standard, and most of these pieces were longer articles in that magazine. The title piece describes Labash's experience fly-fishing with then Vice-President Dick Cheney, as both of them are fly-fishing enthusiasts. There are also articles on the decaying city of Detroit, a variety of political figures and several other characters. Not all of those subjects are all that interesting to me in and of themselves -- and some of them are people I more or less dislike -- but I read every word of Labash's profiles anyway, and I became fascinated in the people or subjects he was covering. He knows how to interview, he knows how to profile, and he by gosh and golly knows how to write better than all but a sliver of folks who pound keyboards for payment (or pleasure) these days.

One quibble with the book is that it pretty much reprints the articles as they appeared in The Weekly Standard, so magazine readers will have seen most of them. Although it is nice to have them all in one place. And WS is not the most widely-read magazine on the shelves, so a lot of folks might not have seen them before (True Fact: When I recommended a Labash article to a friend and said it was in WS, she responded, "Oh, I'm too open-minded to ever read anything in that magazine.") It would have been nice to see them reworked or perhaps organized along a theme, but if I'm lucky Labash has a whole lot more in him and they can save that option for the next book.