Hereby Monsters is a podcast about facing the unknown. I, uh, I start to float, float away from the earth. Have you ever smoked crack before? We're all kind of frantically searching for meaning. They have the neurotransmitters. I think we're all jugglers in some way. Yo, we're not broken. Crazy delinquents. We're in our last day, young man. Listen to Hear Be Monsters.

The podcast about the unknown.

On the KCRW iTunes page.

Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannon Foundation.

Boots.

Where we're we be without boos?

Where would we be without good?

No, Timber.

It's a rhetorical question, sir.

But where would we be without books?

From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm.

Today I'm happy to have as my guest, Elizabeth McKenzie, the author of The Portable Veblen.

It's published by the Penguin Press, and I found it to be a very funny, an unusual book,

and by the time it stopped being funny, it brought me nearly to a state of great anxiety for its characters

because the two major characters manufacture happiness. They don't really feel it. They feel

obliged to feel it. Their parents have been so weird and so pressuring and so demanding that these two have become first-class people-pleasers, and they can not, they just cannot say what's truly on their minds. I'm going to ask my

guest, Elizabeth McKenzie, to read from the opening chapter of the portable Veblen, and you'll get

an idea how pleasantly nuts this book is. Here we go. This is Elizabeth

McKenzie. End the attachment. Huddled together on the last block of Tasso Street in a

California town known as Palo Alto was a pair of humble bungalows, each one a plot in lilies, and in one lived

a woman in the slim green spring of her life, and her name was Veblen Amundsenhovda.

It was a rainy day in winter shortly after the new year. At the end of the street, a squirrel

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