DISCOVERIES

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Don’t Get Too Comfortable

The Indignities of Coach Class, the Torments of Low Thread Count, the Never-Ending Quest for Artisanal Olive Oil, and Other First World Problems

David Rakoff

Doubleday: 224 pp., $22.95

IN case you missed David Rakoff’s first book, “Fraud,” here’s another chance. Rakoff is a strange combination of David Sedaris and Melville’s Ishmael: a fast-talking, encyclopedic digresser of the first rank. “As a homosexual delivered by cesarean section, I have spent my life at a double remove.” In this collection of essays, Rakoff takes on President Bush, the Concorde, the fashion world (what Rakoff calls “the monstrocracy”) and other symbols of excess in this “world of irksome peas,” peopled by a bunch of “multiply chemically sensitive, high-maintenance princesses.” “We have crossed over,” he writes, incensed by the existence of ice cubes from rivers in Scotland that the willing consumer can buy to put in single-malt scotch, “into a realm of narcissism so overwhelming as to make the act of masturbation look selfless.”

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On the Sea

of Memory

A Journey From Forgetting

to Remembering

Jonathan Cott

Random House: 240 pp., $24.95

HE may have lost his memory, but somehow, magically, not his ability to write. In 1998 and ‘99, Jonathan Cott received 36 rounds of electric shock for depression, which left him with very little memory of the previous 15 years of his life. Without memory, the 62-year-old Cott writes, one’s being is erased. “You lose touch with yourself and the narrative of your life.” Feeling like Rip Van Winkle, having forgotten key words and phrases and even whole chapters of relationships, Cott set about trying to learn everything about memory from the great thinkers of the world, living and dead, while reconstructing those aspects of his life’s landscape that had been obscured.

The book is a series of interviews: Neuropsychiatrist Richard Restak describes how memory is stored in the brain, actress Ellen Burstyn explains the importance of emotional memory in Konstantin Stanislavsky’s teachings, Rabbi Lawrence Kushner discusses remembrance and ritual in the Jewish tradition, James McGaugh (of the Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory at UC Irvine) explains the use of beta blockers to treat post-traumatic stress disorder, spiritual writer Thomas Moore talks about memory and imagination and how they help connect the soul of the individual to the soul of the world.

Of these and many others, Cott seeks answers to his questions: What is memory? How critical is it to identity? This is a book with an almost pleading tone, as if the author seeks reassurance that all his experiences in those years matter.

He finds consolation in Oliver Sacks’ assertion that there exists a “living flow or inner music of even the most fragmented individuals,” and George Carlin’s belief that “time is just God’s way of making sure that everything doesn’t happen all at once.” But in the end, he’s left with loss -- a life ahead and 15 years to account for.

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Nerd Girl Rocks Paradise City

A True Story of Faking It

in Hair Metal L.A.

Anne Thomas Soffee

Chicago Review Press: 242 pp., $22.95

ANNE Thomas Soffee was wearing Alice Cooper T-shirts to school in the third grade. In high school she wanted to be Lita Ford or Joan Jett. A freshman at the College of William & Mary in Virginia, she pierced her nose. Upon graduation, she wanted nothing less than to be the next Lester Bangs. Soffee made her way to L.A. to freelance for magazines like Throttle, Metal and Screamer. She wrote about the “hair metal gods” and the “babyfaced satanists” and the “Betties” and their “slut passes.” She covered Glenn Danzig and Suzi Quatro and had one too many beers with her Valium, making her even more of a “junkie magnet” for bad relationships. “Nerd Girl” ends on the brink of adulthood, with Soffee, a lifelong “weirdo chick,” making a late-night run for olallieberry pie on Normandie Avenue.