David Haynes

We hereby vote David Haynes the local writer with the best sense of humor, the guy most likely to laugh in the face of sub-zeros. And while he’s written terrific books for young people, we’re glad he’s turned his attention to adults. His latest, The Full Matilda, is a wickedly funny tale about a family that rises to the middle class, thanks to the hard work of Matilda Housewright, a housekeeper par excellence who one day starts to question the entire world she works so hard to serve. Haynes reads from his work this month in St. Paul (see below), but should he get marooned on The Rake‘s desert isle before or after, he’ll be sure to have the following necessities with him:

1. My iPod, 3,100 songs and all, and a solar recharger.

Maybe that’s cheating, but what, you’re supposed to pick between Ray Charles’ Genius and Soul collection and the complete Aretha Franklin recordings from the Atlantic years? And it’s not like when my ship-wrecks, my iPod’s not going to be plugged into my ears anyway. It’s already pretty much appended to my person, 24/7. It’s set to play songs randomly, so one minute it’s the Emotions’ “Peace, Be Still” and the next it’s Wilco’s “Theologians,” songs that are, in a really disturbing way, more or less cousins. Then there was that whole, weird Snoop Dogg/Joni Mitchell, “Gin and Juice”/”Free Man in Paris” moment I had the other day. There’s a lot to think about in an iPod world.

2. The collected stories of Alice Munro.
Why does this woman from rural Canada speak to me so? I could read her all day, every day. With all this time on my hands, I can focus on my obsession to make sense of her story, The Albanian Virgin.

3. A really rigorous language course on tape,
preferably an obscure and relatively useless one.

4. The recipe for Chinese spareribs from my father.

Alas, no one has this recipe it died when he died, but if I’m taking one food item, Paul Haynes’ Chinese spareribs is it. They were real garlicky, crunchy on the outside, chewy on the inside.

5. Finally (and for shame), the daily satellite transmission of The Young and the Restless.