Read "Colors Insulting to Nature"

Do it.

Cintra Wilson, sometime Salon.com contributor, pop culturist, and all-around word genius, put together a novel case study on the disease that is the quest for celebrity, replete with "the B-movie template for becoming one of life's golden winners--see page 20."

Liza Normal (it's called subtlety), the unfortunate by-product of an oversexed, self-centered, fame-addicted mother and absentee womanizing father, is doomed to follow in her mother's footsteps. Set in the suburbs of 1980s San Francisco, we observe Liza in her innummerably vain attempts to fit in while obstinately setting herself apart, falling back on the belief that she will one day be famous, saved only by her best friend Lorna and her quest for the Golden Stag.

Her older brother Ned, on the other hand, swings towards the extreme other end of the spectrum, and effectively becomes a hermit. Who said the apple doesn't fall far from the tree?

Wilson, who obviously "gets it," illustrates how truly ridiculous this Neverland-disguised-as-Hollywood is:

Though everyone was unreasonably good-looking and well dressed, they seemed hollow and desperate. These were Lost Children of Easy Glamour--young people too rich and too pretty for Life to have made many demands on them. There was a clingy sense of tribalism; they seemed to travel in packs for safety and reassurance. Liza thought, in a moment of imperiousness, that none of them had substantial character; they all seemed to be adrift, flitting in the breeze, fickle and insecure, coddling themselves by burning money up their nose holes and talking frantically about themselves.

Does Liza get her just desserts? Read the book, dammit! I'll give you this much (to quote La Ria of 2004) it's "so thing." I mean, right? Actually, you can't really know this unless you've observed it up close and personal. Just take my word for it. It is, indeed, "so thing."

To put it in the proper terms, think Angelina Jolie in Girl, Interrupted. Or Skookum's daughter.

Up next, I'll get wade through Wilson's collection of essays on the "grotesque, crippling disease" known as Celebrity. But first, I'm working on Mike Albo's Hornito. C'est tres funny.

And that is Book One off The Summer Reading List. Word.