Qualiteracy

wrap-up

2011-01-06T10:03:00.004-05:00

So in order to categorize and make sense of the 100 books I read in 2010, I started to go through my reviews one by one over the last month. I took that long because I needed a break from this blog, and reporting on my reading. I've read 4 books since New Year's Day, which is happily off my pace enough that I'll not be reading anything close to 100 books this year. It's more than I usually read though, which is just swell.

Anyhow, going through the reviews was a humbling and exciting experience. There were books I'd forgotten about. There are books I think about every week. There were books I'll always remember hating and loving. And each one will come to mind when the more important subjects I absorbed from them appear in my everyday life. I'll always think about the Black Swan when dealing with the limitations of statistics, even if I didn't love the book. When people talk about Ulysses or Irish literature, I have a very specific experience and pool of knowledge in my head from reading that classic. The next time I read about Common Sense or The Prince, I'll have my own opinion about what those treatises actually say, separate from what the journalist/blogger/Tea Partier/relative thinks they say. Could I benefit from reading more about these subjects? Of course. Will I re-read some of these as the specifics drain out of my head through memory loss, other priorities, and time? I think so. Is there a point to reading these books if I am just going to forget 90% of what's in them?

Definitely. That's what being literate is, in my humble opinion. It's a process. Of keeping your brain, heart, soul, personality, memory - whatever - on its toes. And challenged. And informed. And in shape so that you can deal with the rapid-response day-to-day in a more intelligent, compassionate, worldly, empathetically, more literate way. You're never going to get to be fully literate. You're never going to get to be healthy/happy/satisfied/perfect. It's the process that makes you closer to those things, and it needs upkeep. Like a relationship or marriage or profession. The diploma doesn't mean anything if you neglect everything you've learned, or could STILL learn, about your degree. You've got to keep pushing your mind to open more, be ready for the unexpected, be able to learn something new.

I don't understand people - and I meet them all the time - that can't be told anything they don't know. At least, that's the facade some folks portray in conversation, and it drives me crazy. I love learning new things from people, and always try to stay open to new ideas and arguments - I hope I never answer everything that's told to me with some variation of "oh of course, I knew that."

Anyhow, enough ruminating - here's the list, divided by category, of everything I read last year. I'll be starting up the blog again and seeing where things go - perhaps providing some new voices and new directions. Even if no one reads it, it's still helpful to me to provide to structure to my experience.

Classics

I started the year by reading one of the first stories, Gilgamesh, on New Year's Day; Faulkner enervated me with The Sound And The Fury; Toni Morrison's writing made me smile despite depressing subject matter with The Bluest Eye; Jane Austen's wit, sarcasm, and self-awareness of the absurdity of Victorian courtship really impressed me in Pride and Prejudice;The Stranger didn't do much more for me than a bad Ford Prefect metaphor; I'm glad to have finally read The Giver; Flannery O'Connor's Everything That Rises Must Converge was a wonderful experience in loathing; Catch-22 was 100 pages too long but otherwise lived up to its reputation; The Log Of The S.S. The Mrs. Unguentine should be required reading for married couples, even if they don't like weird books; Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle could be in sci-fi but I'll arbitrarily stick it in classics - it was what I was hoping Catch-22 would be; well, and, I'm glad I finally read The Good Earth; Updike's Rabbit, Run was written exceedingly well though you can't stand the protagonist; I wished Things Fall Apart was better than it was; and Ulysses exists in its own category - my review will explain my impression of it.

Science Fiction

Ringworld was a classic novel-as-thought-experiment that managed to pace itself well; Blooodchild and Other Stories is a collection of Octavia Butler short stories I enjoyed quite a bit; Parable Of The Sower almost doesn't belong in science fiction - it's more believable post-apocalyptic than fantastical; Snow Crash was one of the better books that I'd delayed reading for years for no discernible reason; I finished a book on the Kindle for the first time with On Basilisk Station and quite enjoyed both the medium and the content; despite The Hunger Games' status as a couldn't-put-it-down young adult dystopian book lampooning reality TV, I didn't dislike it, though I think young adult editors should be meaner; Asimov's Foundation should be in "Classics" but I'll claim it in sci-fi; it was bittersweet to read a new Douglas Adams book, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency; and Ursula K LeGuin's The Left Hand of Darkness was a thought experiment about gender that I enjoyed on the whole.

Fantasy

George R. R. Martin's A Game Of Thrones remains an excellent gritty/realistic/adult addition to the genre; Neil Gaiman's short stories collection Fragile Things was on the whole very fun; Stardust, Gaiman's odd and grown-up take on fantasy was better than the movie; after enjoying American Gods, I checked out the sequel, Anansi Boys, and didn't dislike it; I finally read the buzz-worthy The Name Of The Wind and can't wait until the sequel comes out on March; and Robert Jordan/Brandon Sanderson's Towers of Midnight made the penultimate book in the Wheel of Time series into a solid standalone experience.

Horror

Richard Matheson's classic I Am Legend was much better than the Will Smith movie; I only read the not-really-horror Dead Until Dark because I enjoyed the first season of True Blood, but couldn't imagine that the writing would be so terrible (though I'm thinking of reading the sequel, barf); and I picked up Stephen King's short story collection Nightmares And Dreamscapes in the library because the audiobook was narrated by fun celebrities, and managed to rather enjoy his writing and storytelling.

Contemporary Fiction

Dave Eggers' What Is The What blew me out of the water with a near-biographical account of a Lost Boy of Sudan, combining Sudanese history with an honest look at American culture; The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao is one of the best books I've read all year; The Yiddish Policeman's Union was a spectacular counter-historical look at what an Israel located in Alaska would have been like, cloaked in a fascinating detective story; Chabon's short book The Gentlemen Of The Road was also very fun - a historical fiction novel looking at two guys in the real-life Jewish nation of Khazaria; you should go read The City And The City right now; Nicholson Baker's The Mezzanine was as good as I had hoped it would be; The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears helped illuminate African immigrants' experiences in 1980s DC; The Kite Runner was shockingly worse than the movie it spawned; I almost finished the Chuck Palahniuk canon by enjoying Invisible Monsters; the curious incident of the dog in the night-time. managed to rise above high expectations and blow me out of the water; I fell in love with Barbara Kingsolver's writing with The Poisonwood Bible; after loving Wao, I had to try Drown, Diaz's short story collection about the DR and immigration; and Murakami's After Dark was a literary version of Lost In Translation.

Graphic Novels

Maus I & Maus II deserved the Pulitzer; I adored the too-short Bigfoot autobiography In Me Own Words (and didn't realize it was a graphic novel until it arrived in the mail); and I understood why Neil Gaiman has so many fanboys and fangirls after finishing the mammoth The Sandman.

Philosophy/Religion

Jonathan Livingston Seagull confused me (inspirational or Christ-figure? why doesn't he eat?), while Khalil Gibran's The Prophet was as good as the hype - a decent how-to-be-a-good-person manual.

Poetry

I tried out my first book of poetry with Selected Poems Of Langston Hughes and enjoyed it much more than I thought I would.

Essays

I wanted to like Jon Stewart's fiction essay collection Naked Pictures Of Famous People more than I did but I probably read it 10 years too late, while Barbara Kingsolver's Small Wonder was largely very good and made me want to read her other essay collection.

History

I got blown away with knowledge in From Colony To Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776; it felt very appropriate to read Hunter S. Thompson's Hell's Angels while away at a raucous bachelor party in frigid Northern Maine; half personal reflection and half history of libraries, The Library At Night made me smile; Sarah Vowell's Assassination Vacation was a lot more fun and interesting than I thought it would be; The Victorian Internet should be required reading for anyone who uses the internet; I expected to like Sarah Vowell's The Wordy Shipmates more than I did; I suppose The Know-It-All is a history book, about a really annoying whiny guy who reads the encyclopedia A to Z and loves awful jokes, but I had to read it this year because I was doing something similar and can sometimes be whiny, annoying, and prone to telling stupid jokes; and Noam Chomsky's 9-11 was annoying to read but I'm glad he's writing.

Politics

David Plouffe's take on the Obama campaign made me scratch my head a bit in The Audacity to Win; The Nine is the best book about the Supreme Court I've ever read - okay it's the only one, but that doesn't mean it's not a fun and informative read; I unknowingly read about a friend's run-in with the Bush White House in Ron Suskind's The Way Of The World; I'm glad I read Paine's Common Sense so I can be sure that he wouldn't have been a Tea Partier; and The Prince was The Prince.

Business

I'd recommend The First 90 Days to anyone starting a new job, and those who want to take a new look at their current job would also benefit; Ask The Pilot is exactly what it sounds - an interesting if slightly out-of-date Q&A with a pilot, about airlines and the airline industry.

Environment/Energy

I understood the value of efficient, close-together living in Green Metropolis; I found The Climate War to be a very helpful introduction to the current state of climate policy in the U.S.; Silent Spring should be required reading for people who eat food or work in the environmental community, though you may not like it; and Merchants of Doubt was a slog to get through, but informative.

Food

I absolutely loved A History Of The World In Six Glasses and if you've ever drank beer, ate bread, lived in civilization, drank wine, drank hard alcohol, traded with anyone, drank tea, drank coffee, thought about something new, drank Coke, or lived in the last 60 years, you will too; Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma was eye-opening and interesting; Salt was everything I hoped it'd be, plus an extra 100 pages; Eating Animals was a very good rationale for vegetarianism, though I thought it would have been a better argument had reductionism been the goal and not absolute omission of meat from the diet; and after reading The Elements Of Cooking, I used the Thankgiving dinner turkey carcass to make delicious stock - I rest my case.

Social Science

My understanding of statistics was shaken with The Black Swan; Nickel And Dimed is almost a classic by now, of what working at the poverty line means in America; Malcolm Gladwell's New Yorker story collection What The Dog Saw was engaging, fun, and informative; I betray social scientists by putting the atrocity Why We Buy into this category, but that's what he claims to be; and Made To Stick was a lot better than expected and actually helped me a lot for work.

Biography

Barack Obama's narration of the abridged audiobook of Dreams From My Father was pretty amazing; True Compass provided an honest and intelligent look back from Ted Kennedy; talk show host Craig Ferguson's American On Purpose was one of the better books I've read all year; and Steve Martin's Born Standing Up was really, really good, and not even that funny.

Science

Carl Sagan's The Demon-Haunted World was a fun, informative read on the value of science and skepticism in a world of irrationality; Proust Was A Neuroscientist was a fun summary of the senses and how disciplines other than science inform research about the mind; and The Well-Dressed Ape was a fun almost-complete owner's manual for the human body.

Travel/International

Most of my reading in this category was to prepare for trips to France and Australia. Talk To The Snail was a terrible book about the French; The Story Of French managed to be interesting and informative prior to my trip, though the last few chapters dragged in a way that suggested they should have been an appendix; Paris To The Moon was a really fun autobiographical collection of short stories by a New Yorker writer who had moved to Paris to protect his infant son from the worst of America; Bill Bryson's Neither Here Nor There was a really fun romp through Europe; Salman Rushdie's The Jaguar Smile was an interesting look at Nicaragua; Cold Beer & Crocodiles was a fun look at small-town coastal Australia from a bicyclist's perspective, though I was sad at the lack of crocs; African environmental policy got a thorough and thoughtful treatment in The Challenge For Africa; I had a tough time getting through the definitive history of Australia's penal past, The Fatal Shore, but am glad I did; I tried to remember if I'd read Bryson's A Sunburned Country or not; and Sydney: The Story Of A City was an informative if slightly frustrating introduction to an amazing city.

And fortunately, I had a longer list of books I loved than books I didn't like. I didn't hate a single book on my list, but there were definitely some duds. If I were picking books at random at a bookstore, I would certainly have a longer "Bottom" list:

Top 23

A History Of The World In Six Glasses

The Bluest Eye

Pride and Prejudice

Dreams From My Father

What Is The What

The Nine

The Omnivore's Dilemma

The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao

The City And The City

American On Purpose

Snow Crash

The Mezzanine

the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.

The Victorian Internet

Born Standing Up

What The Dog Saw

The Poisonwood Bible

The Log Of The S.S. The Mrs. Unguentine

Cat's Cradle

Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

Made To Stick

Rabbit, Run

The Sandman

Bottom 10

The Sound And The Fury

Naked Pictures Of Famous People

Why We Buy

Things Fall Apart

2010 numbers

2010-12-31T22:29:00.005-05:00

365 days

100 books

35,691 pages (average of 357 per book)

53 library books

34 audiobooks

6 books read on Kindle

53 fiction/47 nonfiction

21 by dead authors (according to scattered Wikipedia searches)

33 by authors who are not white males

2 graphic novels

5 books on the World Library's 100 Best Books of All Time list

0 Goosebumps, board books, or children's books

And just in case you thought I did nothing but read this year...

1 new job

3 rooms of self-installed eco bamboo floors (2.5 tons carried in box by box)

3 international trips

3 walls repaired from drywall cracks

52 episodes of Mad Men

0 comprehensive climate legislative victories

28 teeth straightened

3 concerts

1 very understanding and devoted wife

All in all, not so bad. I'll have more thoughts later once I recover a bit more from Ulysses!

Here's the list in reverse chronological order if you want to peruse. Let me know what you think...

one frickin' hundred

2010-12-31T22:20:00.001-05:00

Ulysses is the kind of book you could read again and again and again and again and always absorb a different narrative or interpretation - but right now it's a book I'd be happy to leave where it is and never look at again. I'll still agree with someone if they tell me it's one of the best books of all time. I still gave it 4 out of 5 stars. I recognize its brilliance, its completeness, its revolutionizing effect on literature and the English language. But boy was it hard to get through.

I mean - again, can I really say anything about this book that hasn't already been said thousands of times before?

It's long.

It's brilliant.

It's aggravating.

It's so complex and uses so many styles, devices, lack of devices, structure and total lack of structure that at times you feel entirely at sea and unsure why you decided to read such a monster.

It's about nothing (the plot is an ordinary day in an ordinary life where a cuckolded husband wakes up, eats, does errands, thinks a lot, goes to a funeral, works a tiny bit, spaces out, commits every single one of his thoughts to memory, masturbates, hallucinates, feels shameful, rescues a drunk guy from a whorehouse, invites him home, and gets into bed with his unfaithful wife) and everything (Ireland, the English language, marriage, sex, religion, blasphemy, atheism, food, poop, pee, birth, death, women, men, poetry, work, leisure, ancestors, family, expectations, whimsy, planning, alcohol, money, progress, anachronism, monarchy, bureaucracy, advertising, scholarship, bathing, not bathing, teaching, inattention, apathy, shame, pretentiousness, death, life, home, sailing, Western views of non-Western cultures, infidelity, loyalty, childhood, loss, cats, petticoats, and farts).

It wouldn't be honest for me to say that I read the whole thing. I'd be shocked if more than a few thousand scholars on the planet read every single word of that book and understood it. The process of reading this book encapsulated perfectly the goal of this blog - to examine reading and what it means to be literate. When I read forty pages containing fewer than eight periods, or 150 pages of the weirdest play ever written, or a nine-part examination the English language in a scene where a baby is born and a group of guys go to a bar, I freely admit that I didn't absorb every word. I didn't get every reference, I didn't pick up each parodic joke.

But I think that's okay. Reading a book like this is an experience that is hopefully more enjoyed than endured. I enjoyed large parts of it. I endured some parts of it. I expect to go back and read chunks later in my life. But for now, I'm excited beyond measure to be done with the beast.

In general, Joyce seems to have - in my limited literate understanding of books and writing - shifted the tectonic plates of what literature means. I would guess that Ulysses truly pioneered different methods of examining the day-to-day life of humans so that I get to enjoy work by Nicholson Baker and Chuck Palahniuk and friends. That's pretty cool.

ninety-nine

2010-12-31T20:28:00.001-05:00

Merchants of Doubt was a work read that covered the basics of how science gets ignored, drowned out, overcompensated, and warped to advance the ends of the industry sponsoring the "research" effort. Essentially a few scientists that have gravitas because of past work on atomic weapons get paid to say that the research done on cigarette smoke, greenhouse gases, the ozone layer, acid rain, or secondhand smoke should be doubted. These scientists are often the same individuals across fields - Misters Seitz and Singer, etc, are called upon to doubt voluminous research finding cigarettes to be dangerous, anthropogenic (man-made) global warming, a depleted ozone layer, the effects of acid rain. They aren't experts in these fields, and yet the media reports both the conclusions of experts AND these schmucks to provide "balance." It's infuriating to the experts and to us, the laypeople who don't want to breathe air that will kill us and our children or destroy the ecosystem that's sustained so much human progress. Oreskes and Conway do a great job of showing how these unscientists push back on real science with industry support.

What I didn't like about the book, other than the slight dryness of the prose, is that they didn't tell us the status of the research done that did not side with the vast majority of established theorems. Were there studies that found we're not causing global warming, or that secondhand smoke is actually healthy for you? Tell us there definitely weren't, or if there were, that they were bunk and how. The focus on how the rhetorical war was won (or lost) was very useful for someone in my line of work, but I wanted to see if the other side had a single half-leg to stand on.

Regardless, it's a great book and I'm glad I read it.

ninety-eight

2010-12-31T16:23:00.001-05:00

Ursula K. Leguin is one of those names you see pretty prominently in the sci fi section and she's always been on my to-read list. Starting with the award-winning novel about gender and identity and cold weather and connecting with the outside world seemed like a no-brainer. I'm glad I read The Left Hand of Darkness, but didn't enjoy it as much as I tend to enjoy sci-fi. It was a thought experiment more than a plot-driven novel, as science fiction used to be 40 years ago. What would happen if people didn't have assigned genders, but came into a particular sex for a little while to mate and then reproduce? How would that affect civilization? What would that mean for personal relationships, families, global conquest, and personality? Le Guin's conclusion isn't really one - it's more of a rumination. People would be less aggressive, and would be suspicious of an entity purporting to be a representative of a large conglomeration of human planets. The story was interesting, starting in cities and ranging through tundra, work farms, and continents. I'm glad I read it and I think you should too, if you like sci-fi.

ninety-seven

2010-12-31T15:49:00.001-05:00

Brandon Sanderson has done it again - mostly. For those who are unfamiliar with Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series, it's a Lord of the Rings-style fantasy epic that began in the early 90s and still has not come to a conclusion. The books are enormous (regularly pushing 900-1000 pages), the scope has broadened to hundreds of characters, and, this being a fantasy series, the fate of the world is on the protagonists' shoulders. Robert Jordan plugged away for about 6 books of stellar quality, and then he lagged for several volumes that saw main characters forgotten, plotlines stagnate, annoying plotlines introduced, and very little happen. The series started to pick up with the publication of The Knife of Dreams - Things Started Happening - but then the poor guy got sick and died. Fortunately his wife and editor picked a younger author to finish off the "last" volume. That volume turned into three - and thus far it's been a good "final trilogy." There aren't many slow moments so he can be forgiven for expanding it into three books... a lot needed to happen to achieve resolution. We're currently hurtling toward The Last Battle (yes, it's even capitalized in the book), and people are Doing Things and Stuff Is Happening. And it's entertaining and well written. I won't spoil it for anyone who hasn't read it, but I'd highly recommend giving it a shot. My only quibble is the voice of Mat, one of the main characters, who seemed a bit off, though not so much that his long-awaited chapter wasn't mostly fulfilling. Can't wait for the (really) last book!

ninety-six

2010-12-31T15:03:00.001-05:00

I'm beginning to love Barbara Kingsolver - after reading The Poisonwood Bible I was happy to have stumbled over Small Wonder: Essays in the library. I'd recommended reading this - she narrates the audiobook version and her drawl and Southern accent makes her sound a bit like Diane Rehm. I got used to it after the first (rather slow) few essays. After that it was great story after great point after excellent argument. This was written shortly after 9/11, so there are some ruminations about war and fear and government, but she shines the most when she writes a simple letter to her 13-year-old daughter, and then one to her mother. She writes about independent bookstores, sustainable living, and TV. I enjoyed nearly all of them, both in terms of her writing and her points. I'm a bit fried right now (just finished Ulysses) and am not reviewing this with enough gusto, but I'd recommend it - I'll be looking for her earlier collection of essays - High Tide in Tucson.

ninety-five

2010-12-25T14:40:00.001-05:00

I wasn't quite sure what to make of Things Fall Apart through the first half - and then I got the hang of it once the conflict coalesced and the tribes found an Other. Everyone and their brother has read this book except for me - so I'm glad I read it. It's well done, especially for its time, and the first half gives you a slice of African village life and family traditions and religious mysticism through a protagonist who's got some daddy issues. I couldn't get the hang of it because the narrative was so episodic when that was definitely not what I was expecting. He also writes it in almost a fable-like format, which is really interesting, but can seem simple at times. But the relationships and the fears and the community that are all manifested in the trials and tribulations of this man and his family were well done. Nigeria is obviously a different country than the Democratic Republic of the Congo, but I could see this book being what existed before the Price family arrived in Africa in the Poisonwood Bible.

The second half was a bit more what I expected - white come in, mess with the local culture through a mix of technology, religion, government, well-meaning, cruelty, and ignorance. Perhaps Achebe was able to open some eyes with the way he ended it. I thought it was fitting. All in all, I'm glad I read it. I'm sure you already did.

ninety-four

2010-12-13T19:08:00.002-05:00

What? A comic book? Does that even count as a "real book?" I would submit, based upon reviews and awards given through two decades, that it does. Could be even more than a real book. Many superlatives are thrown the The Sandman's way, and I see why. I was very, very impressed with the story, the writing, the art, the complexity of the plot - but at its core, it's about stories. This is Gaiman's wheelhouse - he likes a good yarn.

The Sandman is one of the Endless - seven eternal anthropomorphized aspects of human consciousness: destiny, death, dream, destruction, desire, despair, delight/delirium. Dream is the Sandman, and he oversees what we, and all things, dream and hope and fear. He's close to omnipotent, yet manages to not make things boring. He's complex, and grows, and bad things happen to him that he tries to fix, and often can't. He's got a crazy family, some offspring that cause trouble, and is always dealing with other supernatural entities to preserve the dreamland - wondrous and terrifying - from unspooling. He manages to walk out of Hell because he reminds Lucifer's host of demons that Hell would be nothing were it not for the dream of Heaven. He inspires Shakespeare, he helps lost children. He exacts revenge on lovers that he thinks had spurned him. And he manages to do this all with the utmost serenity. The scope of these ten huge collections are enormous. I read the first three in an enormous anthology, and then the rest in smaller paperbacks. The art is rather good, and the writing is always fun and interesting. Very few full spots. And though lots happens in America and the UK, a lot else happens in the rest of the world - not a pantheon of gods are neglected, and very few nationalities are ignored.

But the story soars through our highest hopes to our deepest fears, our funniest jokes to our most disgusting gore, our boring day-to-day to the heights of fantasy. Sometimes the day-to-day is what Dream wants most - the scene I'll remember most is him and his sister Death (who looks like what all the Goth chicks want to look like) feeding the pigeons in New York. Two supernatural uberdeities, and all they want to do is nourish the birds.

Clive Barker does this better justice:

"There is a wonderful, willful quality to this mix: Mr. Gaiman is one of those adventurous creators who sees no reason why his tales shouldn't embrace slapstick comedy, mystical musings, and the grimmest collection of serial killers this side of Death Row. He makes this combination work because he has a comprehensive knowledge of the medium and knows where his strengths lie. He has also - and this is infinitely more important than being a Comic Brat - a point of view about the world which he uses the anarchic possibilities of the medium to express. After all, where can the glorious, the goofy, and the godlike stand shoulder to shoulder? Where else can the bubble-gum hearts, the dream travelers, the serial killers, and the occasional guest-star from beyond the grave all occupy the same space? If the sheer profusion of these inventions and the apt absurdity of some of the juxtapositions puts you in mind of on of your more heated dreams, then surely that's what Mr. Gaiman intends. Forget what he's written on the title page. Hero and author are here synonymous. For the time you spend in these pages, Mr. Gaiman is the Sandman. And look! He just brought you a dream."

ninety-three

2010-12-13T18:10:00.001-05:00

I liked the writing in After Dark enough that I'd want to read something else by Hakuri Murakami, but not enough to actually have enjoyed the book a great deal. It's essentially a literary translation of a typical night spent by the Japanese people the Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson hung out with in Lost in Translation. The characters themselves aren't very important, and neither is the plot - it's the interesting writing. In fact, it has the feel of a screenplay, because he addresses the reader directly - "our viewpoint pans across the room" etc. It does jostle your perspective and expectations in a fun way - you linger over a cell phone sitting on a shelf in a 7-11, or stay looking at a mirror after someone leaves a room. I'd recommend if that's the sort of thing you're looking for, but I'd imagine I'll find I like his other plot-centered stuff a bit more.

ninety-two

2010-12-13T15:34:00.002-05:00

Harry Angstrom is socially retarded. And no, Sarah Palin, I'm not using that in a pejorative fashion. I'm using it in the strict definition of "late" - Rabbit has not developed any sense of what it's like for other people to exist around him. Or that they can hear him. He relies on his natural gifts - physical prowess on the basketball court - until they no longer serve him. (By the by, it's never explained why he doesn't take this amazing talent to college as most spectacularly talented U.S. high schoolers do.)

At that point - spoiler alert though not really - he marries a girl who he got pregnant but doesn't like very much. At some point, Janice becomes a drunk. There's some ambiguity over whether she's the real villain in the whole ordeal, but honestly, being married to Harry Angstrom would drive anyone to drink. He's flighty, annoying, simple-minded, unreliable, immature, and his love and care can disappear with a mean turn of phrase. He doesn't seem to understand why people react to his boneheaded declarations with disbelief. This follows him to the end of the book, as he runs away from one problem to the next.

At first I was repelled by his awful nature and didn't get the book. But then Updike's easy, thoughtful, and piercing writing took over to show me that Rabbit is like a lot of people who make up this world. Different aspects of his easy-yet-terrified personality are like me, but fortunately not enough that I can't get through a conversation without insulting someone or fleeing.

The discussions of religion were interesting, and must have caused quite a stir in the 60s - just as the scattered thoughts about sex probably riled the censors. Still, it's an amazing book about a very sad person in a sad situation, causing more sadness due to his sad social skills.

It's quite obvious that Don Draper is influenced by Harry, and Janice by Betty Draper - and it totally makes sense. Harry just can't handle real people like Don so often can. Perhaps Rabbit will be able to function as well as Don in the later books.

I really can't analyze this classic more than it already has been, but I fully understood why and how Updike is an amazing writer. Definitely recommended.

ninety-one

2010-12-13T14:37:00.003-05:00

I read Made to Stick for a work meeting, a little afraid that it'd be a self-help, New Age-y business book. My fears were unrealized. It bills itself as an extension of an idea in The Tipping Point, and manages this without embarrassing itself. I was impressed - the authors follow their own rules as they write. Those rules are: keep things simple by sticking to one core message, shock people out of their expectations to make them pay attention, stay away from abstract fluffy ideas by being concrete, be sure to include arguers that are credible due to expertise or perspective, use emotional examples so people remember and feel your argument, and tell a story to make your point - people will remember the story and forget the fluff.

These sound obvious but most of the points are forgotten frequently by people who should know better. Aside from the good advice, it's presented well, concisely, and entertainingly. I'd definitely recommend to anyone who does communications for a living (as a refresher) or anyone who wants to make a solid point, even at a dinner party.

ninety

2010-12-13T14:34:00.001-05:00

The Prince is a quick read, and because I'd read chunks of it in high school, I mainly just got impressions of Machiavelli. First off, he's whiny. Complains about his situation, and flatters Vettori enough that his section warning of flatterers comes off pretty silly sounding.

As I read through his various judgments and recommendations I had to stop myself from thinking this was a mordern-day U.S. conservative manifesto. Damn the collateral damage, don't take private property, and if you need to bust some heads to achieve your goals, bust away. That's not entirely fair, and I won't make the proclamation that conservatives are Machiavellian. It's more that it seems to come easier to them. Liberals have all sorts of moral compunctions about this sort of thing, and often it doesn't serve us well. Perhaps in the back-and-forth, rhetorical battles, liberals should fight a bit more like Niccolo Machiavelli.

Interesting read for that perspective, the sometimes-thoughtful argument, and to understand the reason he became an adjective.

music

2010-12-03T17:45:00.002-05:00

That's one thing I miss this year. I still listen to it of course, and attend concerts, and find new bands, but a decent-sized chunk of my listening time is taken up by audiobooks. I'll be looking forward to next year when I can read and listen to music without a care.

eighty-nine

2010-12-01T15:17:00.001-05:00

This collection of interviews of Noam Chomsky in the weeks after 9/11/01 brings me back to that time and that two years following. This was when the mainstream American media turned gutless and you had to go to the BBC and truthout.org to get anything resembling a full picture of what was going on in the world. Chomsky was very much behind this idea and should be commended for being a contrary voice when so many were toeing a line that was called patriotism but verged on blind obedience.

His perspective - that America is a terrorist country in the same way that "axis of evil" countries support terrorism but is more effective and subtle at it - is troubling. He very rightly points out that the U.S. could practice foreign policy and national security more effectively and is shooting itself in the foot by making enemies and hurting innocent people when that's not always necessary. But he equates a terrorist attack like the events of 9/11 with the missile attacks on the pharmaceutical factory in Sudan (trying to get bin Laden) and the covert help the U.S. gave to the Contras in Nicaragua. Collateral damage and mistaken intelligence, while awful, is not terrorism, even if Sudanese people suffer from the lack of malaria medication. It's awful, but not the same - President Clinton wasn't trying to cause those particular effects, he was trying to take out someone that was actively trying to harm innocent people. The Nicaraguan Contra example is better, but still troubling. Not wanting to get into the justification for that debacle, I'll just say he makes a good point that Nicaragua went to the UN in order to receive justice (which the U.S. blocked), and uses this example to argue that the U.S. should pursue legal remedies against the perpetrators of 9/11. I'm all for legal avenues, and perhaps that would have been a more effective way of receiving justice, and possibly would have saved lives in Afghanistan. But I doubt the Taliban and Pakistani border leaders would have tracked down al qaeda operatives for us. (An interesting side note is that al qaeda doesn't merit a single mention in this book, whether by Chomsky's oversight or because no one really knew at that point that bin Laden was operating through them.)

Anyhow, the book didn't convince me that the U.S. shouldn't have invaded Afghanistan. It didn't convince me that the U.S. is a terrorist nation.

Did it rightly point out that U.S. foreign policy can be arrogant, dangerous, ineffective, and short-sighted? Sure!

Did it justify itself as a strong intelligent counterpoint to the direction of debate currently occurring in the country? Probably.

Did it make the point that there are complex motivations behind people that would attack civilians and while the action and rationale should never be justified, it should be understood in order to prevent such things from happening in the future? I think so.

Did it make me think? Was it a little repetitive? Yes and yes.

Did I find it a little hard to get through and glad I finally finished it so I can give the book away after all these years. Absolutely.

eighty-eight

2010-12-01T09:52:00.002-05:00

After reading Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, I had to give his earlier collection of short stories a shot. His clear, economical voice has the same authenticity in these stories as it did in Oscar. Thoroughly enjoyed them, from the childhood memories in the DR to the portraits of drug dealers, victims of childhood pig attacks, pool table deliverymen, and immigrants, to a guide to dating girls from different socioeconomic backgrounds (and what to hide in your house for each kind). Some of his characters have a bit of the self-destructive loathing (paired with incisive social observations) that I love about Chuck Palahniuk's writing.

Highly recommended - I'll be waiting for Junot Diaz's next book with bated breath.

eighty-seven

2010-11-29T15:51:00.001-05:00

Don Draper would scoff and say "what?"

I could barely finish this, and I'd say he ripped off Don Draper were it not for the fact that Mad Men was written after this book was. Is advertising really all about love? Hmph.

This book is written by Paco Underhill, who presents himself as an arrogant, simple-minded know-it-all who left (cue schlocky singsong playground bully voice) "academia" to go out in the Real World to actually apply all these "scientific" things that he learned in the ivory tower to the retail world. If you don't want to read the book, and I don't recommend that you ever do, this is essentially what it is:

'I mean, these retail simpletons were practically barring customers from their stores before I came on the scene! When I told them to get rid of the flaming spike viper pit in front of the cash registers and to move the Metamucil display from the volcano-based trapeze obstacle course to a middle shelf, sales went up three thousand percent, the store owners became billionaires, and they recommended my company, EnviroSell (tm), to all their friends. Ha, ha!'

Okay it's not that bad. Mostly. But that's the impression I got from Chapter 1 to the end. He does go through what retailers should know, and this book is ten years old. It's an interesting idea, and should have been a good book. Some retailers don't think about what would be easy for their customers, or who their customers really are, or what draws attention most effectively. But he presents this information as both a pool of knowledge only his company provides through the Miracles of Science, and also simple stuff that these stupid retailers should know, and rely on me, in my brilliance, to tell them for a fee. It doesn't work. Organizational, behavioral, cognitive, and linguistic psychology more than covers all of the "science" he trumpets as his own genius oeuvre that No One Else In The World thought of before he went corporate.

He does manage, in his headlong blind horror movie chase scene of a narrative pace, to accidentally step on some mundanely interesting insights. People watch you while you shop, locking things in glass cases hurts sales, people look at flashy things, customers like to do whatever's easiest, waiting in line feels longer than it actually is, parents will buy things to shut up their kids, women like to shop longer than men do, people fall for "deals," customers like interaction and information when making large purchases, and people like to pretend they aren't spending money. If this guy wasn't such a sad little goober, some of these insights, presented in a completely different way, and multiplied by about 17, would have made the book almost tolerable. I think he didn't quite get there.

If I needed one more thing to convince me that he's not some retailing psychology genius, his chapter on internet shopping (written in 2000), sealed it. Essentially this whole stores-using-internet-to-sell-stuff will never take off. People like being in stores too much. How can you replicate the shopping experience on a monitor with tiny images?

I want Roger Sterling to rough him up a bit, verbally.

eighty-six

2010-11-29T14:01:00.002-05:00

I love me some Douglas Adams, and have been putting off reading the two Dirk Gently books because I've read the Hitchhiker series, I read Last Chance to See, I've read the Salmon of Doubt, and once these two books are done, I won't have any more of his books to read. That's one of the saddest thoughts on the planet - DNA has been unable to write more books for us for some time now due to the fact that he is dead.

Anyhow, I finally brought myself to read Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, and I won't tell you what it's about, or who Dirk Gently is. I didn't find out until nearly halfway through the book, so why spoil it for you? I'm still trying to figure out the ending (Spoiler Alert: it involves time travel), and the plot is complex enough to prompt you to begin reading it again as soon as you finish. Now I know where Chuck Palahniuk got it. Instead I will, in the rich tradition that has preceded me, give you funny quotes from the book that only someone as awesome as Douglas Adams could come up with.

"Two figures in particular seemed ill-matched. One, a young man, was tall, thin and angular; even muffled inside a heavy dark coat he walked a little like an affronted heron. The other was small, roundish, and moved with an ungainly restlessness, like a number of elderly squirrels trying to escape from a sack."

"Richard stood transfixed for moment or two, wiped his forehead again, and gently replaced the phone as if it were an injured hamster. His brain began to buzz gently and suck its thumb. Lots of little synapses deep inside his cerebral cortex all joined hands and started dancing around and singing nursery rhymes."

And just to prove that he's not just skilled with his sardonic wit rifle, he can also do grief, where this character reacts to the death of a family member:

"I'm sort of embarrassed by not having a reaction ready. Talking about it would be all right except that you have to use the past tense and that's what..."

I don't want to read The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul, because there won't be any more Douglas Adams to read after that. Maybe I'll reread Hitchhiker's next year.

eighty-five

2010-11-29T00:26:00.001-05:00

The Elements of Cooking is an interesting almost-narrative glossary of most things you'd need to know to understand what a cook is talking about. I learned the definitions of lots of terms that you see on fancy menus (or hear thrown about on Top Chef or on food blogs), what beurre blanc and beurre rouge are and how to make them, and also how to make stock. We made a great deal of that using the Thanksgiving turkey, which was spectacular. I'd highly recommend this book for the non-cook, the cook, and he experienced, snooty cook.

eighty-four

2010-11-29T00:07:00.001-05:00

Thomas Paine wrote Common Sense at a time when essentially all governments in the history of the world had been monarchies, ruled by despotism, or small enough to be totally and functionally nonexistent at a societal level. His articulation of the injustice of hereditary monarchies, military dictatorships, and colonial rule (of white people) is brilliant and ... wait for it... revolutionary.

His reasoning is clear, concise, and absolutely correct. The examples he uses, which range from biblical stories to the political landscape of the 1770s are fitting when one considers that the only information most people had at the time was printed in a bible, printed in small newspapers, read to them from a bible, or told to them by people who had read newspapers. I didn't need the story of the Jews' choice of a king to show me that kings are bad, but when most people learned to read by their bibles, I'm sure it was a smart move.

What is hilarious is that the Glenn Becks of the world use Common Sense as a manifesto for the evils of government. Well yes, he does castigate monarchies pretty thoroughly, and with good reason. And yes, they are governments. Governments that overreach and are fundamentally unstable in a changing world. But Paine speaks with passion, reason, and vigor about the brilliance of an elected representative government. Democracy is good. That is his thesis. We still have a democracy, as do most "socialist" European countries. Therefore it's folly to interpret this brilliant long pamphlet is a conservative treatise that gives you proof that the Founding Fathers wouldn't like liberals.

Highly recommended if you haven't read before.

eighty-three

2010-11-23T22:25:00.001-05:00

Well, and I think that a review of The Good Earth needs to start with a "well, and" and end with a "well, now" because literally every other line of dialogue in this classic starts with one of those phrases. I assume it's a translation thing she was trying to get across, and I assume that she knew what she was talking about because she spent a good chunk of her life in rural China after having been born in West Virginia.

Anyhow, it's a classic, won a bunch of awards in the 30s and is seen as an accurate picture of Chinese rural life by much of the world. I'm not sure about that - it was interesting and it seems feasible she got the setting and customs right - but it was really a bildungsroman. For those who had to Google that, that means a coming-of-age story, but she really takes it into almost allegorical form by making it about all people (and by that she means men) and about all lives. Regrets, success, forgetting, making your mark, fear, the tenuousness of happiness, materialism - all of these are a part of Wang Lung's life.

(Spoiler alert.) He goes from poor farmer to happy poor farmer to farmer-ruined-by-drought to city beggar to extremely lucky draft-dodger to extremely lucky thief to wealthy farmer to wealthy landowner and happy old man. There are plenty of twists and turns in there for him, but that's his arc, and I was struck by how different his life would have been had he not lucked out and not come across a scared old rich guy carrying a lot of money. Buck tries to make it a story of success - poor farmer turns into the rich lord he once groveled before - but I just took the point that some people are lucky and some people are not. His hard work had very little to do with his later success.

And let's not get started on the famous misogyny - his wife and mistresses and daughters barely rate a mention, though his wife is one of the more admirable figures in literature. Maybe that's how Buck chose to make a feminist point - I sincerely hope so.

Well, now I really enjoyed it for the most part, I'm glad I read it.

eighty-two

2010-11-23T15:03:00.001-05:00

I love me some Vonnegut. Need to read more of him. Especially after reading Catch-22, this was the perfect springboard. Still absurdist and funny, but not repetitive. The plot is meandering, but it works perfectly. He starts looking into one of the creators of the atomic bomb, and then ends up with the scientist's children in a banana republic where the end of the world happens and he gains a new religion that someone made up a few decades ago. It does make more sense in Vonnegut's telling, but it's not supposed to. Quotes like this make me want to read more of his books:

"When we got into Dr. Breed's inner office, I attempted to put my thoughts in order for a sensible interview. I found that my mental health had not improved. And, when I started to ask Dr. Breed questions about the day of the bomb, I found that the public-relations centers of my brain had been suffocated by booze and burning cat fur. Every question I asked implied that the creators of the atomic bomb had been criminal accessories to murder most foul."

The book does meander and doesn't have a whole lot of focus, but it's still a fun ride.

eighty-one

2010-11-23T14:46:00.001-05:00

Isaac Asimov enabled many of the science fiction books I've grown to love, so I had to try his most famous classic. It's barely science fiction - he wonders what would happen if social science advanced enough that it became predictive with enough complex math so that a "psychohistorian" could know what would happen in the future with only a few percentage points margin of error. The book is essentially five successive short stories exploring if Hari Seldon (a psychohistorian) made correct predictions about the downfall of a Galactic Empire. We follow various people that think he has, and find out how those predictions come to fruition.

I enjoyed the book for the most part, but could only do so in the context in which it was written - the 50s. Really interesting ideas, and the writing's actually pretty good. The sequels look very uninteresting to me, but I'm glad I read this. It's not for everyone. He doesn't describe very much, but then he wasn't really trying to in this book. It was mainly a way to explore this predictive history idea, and I'm sure in the 50s, that was a very alluring idea. I'd be curious about other titles of his that would be interesting in a more modern context.

eighty

2010-11-23T14:35:00.001-05:00

From the jacket:

"Forty years ago I first linked up with Unguentine and we made love on twin-hulled catamarans, sails a-billow, bless the seas... So begins the courtship of a certain Unguentine to the woman we know only as Mrs. Unguentine, the chronicler of their sad, fantastical tale. For forty years, they sail the seas together, alone on a giant land-covered barge of their own devising. They tend their gardens, raise a child, invent an artificial forest--all the while steering clear of civilization. Log of the S.S. The Mrs Unguentine is a masterpiece of modern domestic life, a comic novel of closeness and difficulty, miscommunication and stubborn resolve. Rarely has a book so perfectly registered the secret solitude of marriage, how shared loneliness can result in a powerful bond."

This is a weird, short book about marriage. It's a bad marriage on the surface, but comfortable in its ways. It's told through allegory - this awesome fantastical barge that is essentially a steerable island. The lonesomeness of marriage is made physical, the focus on the day-to-day, the miscommunication, the love, the ability to ignore huge things to keep your existence moving forward. You're literally on an island, with the outside world nowhere to be seen, and your routine, though it changes, is what you rely on to keep your sanity. You pass notes to your spouse without talking to them, though you love each other. Sometimes when I'm working long hours at my job and barely see my wife except briefly at night and in the mornings, and mainly exchange information through email and IM, this portrait rings true. It took a few dozen pages to get used to the flow of the narrative, and then you're almost halfway done with the book. I think I'll be casting my memory back to this book for quite some time. Kudos.

seventy-nine

2010-11-23T14:01:00.002-05:00

I enjoyed this book more than I thought I would. I'd thought The Poisonwood Bible was more about, say, the bible in Africa than about Africa dealing with those who love the bible. I was wrong - Kingsolver really did some research to be able to speak with such strong voices.

Missionary family goes to jungle in the 60s, reverend father is a little crazy and racist and a lot misogynistic and deluded. Wife is long-suffering and does her best, and the four girls are each a different take on the West's perception of Africa. From the privileged disdain to the scholarly study, and from the wholehearted acceptance to childlike wonder and immature misunderstanding. The story is actually quite interesting, and you find yourself relating to some of these voices as you go. The African characters become more developed as a few of the Price family allow themselves to get to know the natives. They do end up richer, but I wish they'd gotten even more so by the end. You learn a bit of the history of Belgian Congo/Zaire/Democratic Republic of the Congo. The view that the book tries to impart is not only how difficult it is to get to know the continent from the West, but how much daily life of regular people could care less about King Leopold, Lumumba, Mobutu as long as they are left alone and not oppressed.

I most identified with Adah, and in addition to her fun word games and brilliant observations, I thought this was interesting:

"When Albert Schweitzer walked into the jungle, bless his hear, he carried antibacterials and a potent, altogether new conviction that no one should die young. He meant to save every child, thinking Africa would then learn how to have fewer children. But when families have spent a million years making nine in the hope of saving one, they cannot stop making nine. Culture is a slingshot moved by the force of its past. When the strap lets go, what flies forward will not be family planning, it will be the small, hard head of a child. ... For every life saved by vaccination or food relief, one is lost to starvation and war. Poor Africa. No other continent has endured such an unspeakably bizarre combination of foreign thievery and foreign goodwill."

seventy-eight

2010-11-22T15:24:00.001-05:00

Meh. I love me some Jon Stewart and Daily Show, and I love how his work over the last decade has become timeless. The Daily Show has a long shelf life. This book does not. I bought it in a bargain bin maybe eight years ago, and forgot about it. After the Rally To Restore Sanity, I thought I'd give this a try.

It's a bunch of short essays about pop culture of the late 90s, where Hanson Christmas cards detailing their decline, a Martha Stewart sendoff, and Princess Diana's immature letters to Mother Teresa all seem very dated. Somewhat "heh" but not enjoyable. The other pieces that are older (the secret Gerald Ford tapes, Hitler's Larry King Live interview, JFK's Jewish schoolboy chum's trip to the Kennedy Compound) should have more staying power but somehow don't.

I'm glad Jon Stewart is doing what he's doing now. We're all better off this way.

seventy-seven

2010-11-18T10:03:00.001-05:00

Once again, in reading a classic, I can't really add anything worthwhile to the discussion of Catch-22. I enjoyed reading it on the whole, and appreciated its contradictory absurdist use of symbols to explain some of the problems of modern life. I liked how each character was a different symbol of absurdity: status, economics, greed, leadership, opportunity, violence, sex. I did think, however, that it could have been done in 100 less pages. If you want to know what Catch-22 is, here's the distillation:

"Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane he had to fly them."

Also, not that it necessarily was meant to be, but this is certainly not a feminist book. The women are there to serve functions for the men. It's set on an Army base, so it's somewhat predictable, but nonetheless disappointing.

seventy-six

2010-11-18T00:24:00.002-05:00

Once again, Malcolm Gladwell releases a book, I read it, I like it a lot, and tell people about it. This one isn't even new material - just a collection of his New Yorker articles in book form. They're still fascinating. He looks into infomercials and Ron Popeil to explain sales and selling. Ketchup to explain taste and marketing. The Dog Whisperer to explain what animals see when they look at us. Birth control methods to explain reproductive cycles, historical change, and religion's effect on private matters. Mammograms and spy satellites to give context to supposedly foolproof methods of observation. Etc etc.

It doesn't have a central thesis like Tipping Point or Outliers did, but it's still fun and informative and challenges your brain. What more can you ask for?

seventy-five

2010-11-17T18:34:00.002-05:00

I picked up this audiobook quickly at the library and decided to try it after seeing that a bunch of celebrities narrated each one - including Whoopi Goldberg, Lisa Simpson (the voice), Rob Lowe, Kathy Bates, and Tim Curry. What it took me a little longer to realize was that the book is actually 826 pages long. But I'd say it was worth it.

The stories ranged from a moving, alive finger sticking out of a bathroom sink drain that torments a husband, long-dead rock and roll legends that inhabit a rural town in Oregon, a mafia boss getting buried in his Cadillac for revenge from the perspective of the burier, and a nocturnal vampire aviation enthusiast.

I don't usually go for horror - I've read King's The Stand, which isn't really horror, and loved it. This year I read Richard Matheson's I Am Legend, which I enjoyed as well. I don't like horror movies - those tend to scare me after the movie stops. While the stories in this collection are scary and creepy and freaky, they're also well-written, engaging, funny, and smart. He does what he does as good as you can really expect. He's even able to talk about larger issues. Color me impressed.

seventy-four

2010-11-17T15:00:00.003-05:00

I read A.J. Jacobs’ “A Year Of Living Biblically” last year, and judging by my review of it, it’s hard to imagine why I tried his other famous book. I thought his attempt to chronicle living by the words of the bible was a little juvenile and disappointing in its lack of historical analysis. I wanted to hear more about why things made their way into the bible, how people have interpreted it over the years, what it meant to him and people in our age. It ended up being a scattershot personal journey that was more about the importance of family than his intended subject matter.

This was also a lot more pop-psych than I would have hoped for. His “investigation” into what intelligence actually is amounts to various gestures toward common clichés, rather than his opinion about what being smart means. As he reports on interesting bits from the encyclopedia, he goes for the quick yuk-yuk joke rather than absorb the info or tell you what he thinks it means. “Apparently, there’s a whole group of people – and by people I mean losers – who also comb the Britannica looking for mistakes.” Ha, ha! Ha! Sigh.

All this said, it borders on informative, and it sounds like a fun way to increase your understanding of the world. A survey course of existence, forcing you to know about things you’d never read about.

I did find the entry on Thomas Paine interesting enough to want to read more of his stuff, if only to have ammunition in a theoretical fight with a Tea Partier: “His ideas were solid – relief for the poor, pensions for the aged, public works for the unemployed, a progressive income tax. But in England, where he was living at the time, it got him charged with treason. Things worsened with he wrote another pamphlet attacking organized religion. Though he made clear in the pamphlet that he was a deist and believed in the Supreme Being, he still got charged with being an atheist.” Sounds like Glenn Beck hasn’t read Paine.

I did have to identify with Jacobs in this respect:

“I’m wondering if – to continue Ezekiel’s metaphor – I bit off more than I could chew when I announced this Britannica project to the world. Because I have to tell you, I’m not sure I can go on. I’m not sure I can hear another one of those tissue-thin pages crinkle while turning. Or see another black-and-white picture of an old man with elaborate facial hair. Or learn about the average cubic meters of water discharged by another African river. Or crack open another volume with a spine emblazoned with the Scottish thistle – a plant with sharp thorns that serves as Britannica’s weird-looking and aggressive logo. Why exactly did I think this was a good idea again?”

This book was also the last one I read on a Kindle - I'll post about my thoughts on e-readers soon.

seventy-three

2010-11-15T23:32:00.001-05:00

This was recommended on a few lists that contained mostly grown-up books, and I understand why - but I wasn't expecting such a short book when I ordered it online. In Me Own Words isn't in any library system I belong to, so I had to try Amazon. It's supposed to be Bigfoot's tell-all autobiography. It's more of a short graphic novel with a lot more words than you'd think. "Me have opinion. What happen world me ask? Me once believe in good. Now, no. World go shit, just like bigfoot screenwriting career." It gets better and better, and the illustrations are funny and graphic and weird and not what you'd expect. Definitely recommended.

seventy-two

2010-11-15T23:09:00.003-05:00

So far this year in books written by comedians, I've read Craig Ferguson's book "American on Purpose" and Bill Maher's book "New Rules." Steve Martin's "Born Standing Up" is much more Ferguson's than Maher's. I truly enjoyed a thoughtful, sincere, and funny novel-length biographical essay on comedy. Martin's book doesn't try for laugh-out-loud moments, but manages to make you chuckle to yourself here and there, smile, and furrow your brow with "ahhhhhh" moments. His take on what comedy means is refreshing. He begins with a brief childhood sketch and then gets right into his career, education, and stand-up failure through success through departure to movies. I think this quote will illustrate what I liked best about the book:

"I recently viewed a musty video of an appearance on The Virginia Graham Show, circa 1970, unseen since its airing. I looked grotesque. I had a hairdo like a helmet, which I blow-dried to a puffy bouffant, for reasons I no longer understand. I wore a frock coat and a silk shirt, and my delivery was mannered, slow, and self-aware. I had absolutely no authority. After viewing the show, I was - especially since I was writing an autobiography documenting my success - depressed for a week. But later, searching my mind for at least one redeeming quality in the performance. I became aware that not one joke was normal, that even though I was the one who said the lines, I did not know what was coming next. The audience might have thought what I am thinking now: "Was that terrible? Or was it good?"

seventy-one

2010-11-09T17:39:00.001-05:00

I was not expecting to like Hunger Games - young adult books rarely satisfy me. But Collins' voice was intelligent and interesting, the story pulls you along from about page ten, you want to know exactly how far things will go, and what it all means. The meaning of this book has more to do with just how far voyeurism, reality entertainment, and exploitation will go. With these subjects it manages it does well. The larger political meaning I'm told will have to wait until books two and three - which makes me want to read them. I want to know what a post-second-civil-war-brought-on-by-resource-battles-and-regional-infighting United States looks like from another perspective than its cruel sacrificial exploitainment game system. Collins seems like she's got more to say and I'm willing to give it a shot.

seventy

2010-11-09T17:24:00.001-05:00

Sarah Vowell’s most recent book is The Wordy Shipmates, and I wanted to like it more than I did. It’s the story of the second wave of pilgrims/immigrants to Massachusetts in the 1600s. After the Mayflower landed, John Winthrop showed up with a dozen ships and became the first Governor of Massachusetts. I grew up playing the town of Winthrop in track and lacrosse, so I always find it fun to learn about the origins of Massachusetts names. Newton was a new town, Swampscott was… a swamp?

Anyhow, Vowell’s contention is that the pilgrims were nerdy religious types. When talking about how few books they were able to bring over, she says: “Winthrop and his shipmates and their children and their children’s children just wrote their own books and pretty much kept their noses in them up until the day God created the Red Sox.” Perfect.

She takes us through the voyage over from England, and this passage jumped out at me:

“To see a ship similar to the Arbella, you can go to Plymouth, Mass., and climb aboard the replica Mayflower II, which to me is a claustrophobic floating vomitorium I couldn’t stand to be on for more than nine minutes, much less nine weeks. (A replica Arbella was built for Massachusetts’ 300^th anniversary in 1930; but, according to Francis Bremer, it ended up beached at Salem’s Pioneer Village and the city of Salem tore the thing down after it “became a haunt for youths indulging in various questionable activities.”

Sounds like the north-of-Boston suburbs I grew up getting to know. The book is interesting, and well-researched, but I found it dragged here and there. I liked Assassination Vacation better, which I absolutely did not expect. There’s a lot about the religious philosophy behind what drives these people, and though the colonists’ interactions with the Native Americans looms large in the narrative of the book, for some reason I thought those parts weren’t as interesting as they should have been. Though you can see the importance of these relationships and, knowing bits of the history that unfolds through the next few centuries, you have a sense of dread as alliances are made and broken. Your mind runs through possible alternative futures – how could America have developed in peace with the people who’d lived there for millennia? Would it have been possible? It must have been. What could they have done? Something. The book doesn’t talk about this at all (it’s not its bailiwick, so that’s fine), but I was hoping for a little more. My disappointment is only a 4 out of 5 kind – I did enjoy the book and learned a lot, and her voice is very enjoyable. Definitely recommended.

sixty-nine

2010-11-09T17:18:00.002-05:00

Silent Spring is a classic, helped push the federal government to create the EPA, and was a large reason we finally banned DDT and other incredibly dangerous chemicals from agricultural and pesticide use. I admired her expert understanding of the science and how critical she saw the need to action to be. Good for someone in the environmental movement to read to know where most of everything came from.

The science she explains is so clear that it reminds me of the science behind the dangers of tobacco and greenhouse gases. The blowback she received from industrial interests reminds me of tobacco companies and fossil fuel interests. Definitely recommended.

sixty-eight

2010-10-05T22:29:00.002-04:00

Utterly fascinating history of the invention, development, spread, ubiquitous use, and decline of the telegraph. The Victorian Internet is a very important global read - this invention was truly one of the most important our species has ever created. The phone, fax, internet, and satellite systems were all just continuations of this idea. A connected planet, exchanging information in real-time. Standage, just as in his "A History of the World in Six Glasses," manages to communicate a subject that could be convoluted, dry, and inaccessible in an extremely clear and entertaining fashion. Couldn't put it down.

Quick notes - because an in-depth summary would be silly for a book of this nature:

Samuel Morse essentially invents the electric telegraph (after the French and the British try to make use of the optical telegraph - which is essentially an elaborate windmill whose arms you can manipulate). He manages to invent Morse Code at the same time.

He has the darndest time getting anyone to think it's anything more useful than a funny trick.

Thomas Edison not only invented the lightbulb, but he got his start running messages back and forth in complex telegraph stations (as did Andrew Carnegie), became an excellent Morse Code operator, and then revolutionized the existing technology behind the telegraph. Smart guy.

It took a lot of false starts to lay down the Transatlantic Telegraph Cable, but the process essentially involved dumping miles and miles of reinforced cable out of a boat and chugging to the other side.

Because you paid by the word, people developed elaborate code systems to communicate by long nonsense words that required a codebook to translate.

Highly recommended.

sixty-seven

2010-10-05T21:49:00.002-04:00

This is easily one of the better books I've read all year. "the curious incident of the dog in the night-time" is funny, intelligent, and gripping. Somehow Christopher, the autistic narrator who hates metaphors, can make you feel the emotions of the serious things happening to him despite not being able to feel them himself.

His father ended up becoming the main character in the emotional realm to me. Because Chris doesn't like to be touched, his father, despite losing his wife, is only able to express his love and devotion to his son by holding up his hand and spreading his fingers, and then joining their fingertips. Anything else will set Chris off, and though it seems like a consolation Christopher makes to the odd emotional needs of the people he's forced to share a planet with, his boiler-repairman father clings to the gesture like a life preserver.

I loved the diagrams, pictures, and sketches he includes in the book to better communicate imagery. Christopher doesn't like metaphors, though he'll try out similes.

I love how he has to wrap his head around one of his father's friends' odd habit of socializing with his father:

"When I got home Rhodri was there. Rhodri is the man who works for father, helping him to do heating maintenance and boiler repair. And he sometimes comes round to the house in the evening to drink beer with Father and watch the television and have a conversation."

If you don't like this paragraph, you probably won't like the book:

"Eventually scientists will discover something that explains ghosts, just like they discovered electricity, which explained lightning, and it might be something about people's brains, or something about the Earth's magnetic field, or it might be some new force altogether. And then ghosts won't be mysteries. They will be like electricity and rainbows and nonstick frying pans."

Seems like everyone I know has read this, but if you haven't, it's a quick read and I predict you'll enjoy it.

sixty-six

2010-10-05T00:06:00.004-04:00

I really enjoyed Assassination Vacation. I've seen Sarah Vowell on the Daily Show, and her incredibly subtle, dry sense of humor practically forces you to read her books.

This is about three presidential assassinations - Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley. Lincoln's murder, being slightly more well-known than the other two, requires more digging, and Vowell really goes the distance. She goes from historical landmarks, monuments, graveyards, seashore dying places (Garfield was shot in DC and after months of not healing, went to the Jersey Shore to escape the summer humidity), assassin enablers' prisons and, for instance, the store John Wilkes Booth bought his gun. She drags along her sister and young nephew for many of these treks because she doesn't drive. Her sister tries gamely to humor the morbid nature of these trips, but the nephew loves it all - he calls cemeteries "Halloween Parks."

You learn a lot about all three presidents, their VPs, the history of the late 1800s and early 1900s, and America's peculiar fascination with guns. You learn that though Lincoln freed the slaves, his memorial service was segregated. Garfield's assassin was much more than "a disappointed presidential appointment-seeker: he wanted to be appointed Ambassador to France, was crazy, hilarious, homeless, and a product of an Upstate NY Bible Communist Sex Cult. Also, the guy who sheltered John Wilkes Booth after he fled DC apparently knew more about Booth than he let on to authorities: "Which is why, when authorities questioned Mudd, Mudd played dumb, claiming that he didn't recognize Booth because Booth was wearing a fake beard - lame."

Lame. Awesome. More than the history and the factoids that she imparts to her readers, I love her voice. She really does show herself in the narrative, and she's a sarcastic, nosy, lovable, dark, know-it-all. For this book, that voice really works perfectly.

sixty-five

2010-10-04T13:51:00.003-04:00

I think Paul recommended I read The Library At Night, and I had no idea what it'd be about. It's a sort of history, sort of memoir, sort of exploration of his personal library, but mostly it's about the importance of reading and the history of the written word and libraries.

I appreciated learning about ancient Greek, Arabic, and European libraries, as well as global efforts to organize books. This is perfect for librarians and those, like myself, who grew up in libraries and worked in them as a teenager. I liked his thoughts on reading in general, as well as his particular literary loves. Lots of quotes in the book mean that he's thought about quotations in general:

"...to quote is to continue a conversation from the past in order to give context to the present."

I like that. I also like:

"A dictionary from the seventh century B.C. carries this prayer: 'May Ishtar bless the reader who will not alter this tablet now place it elsewhere in the library, and may She denounce in anger he who dares withdraw it from this building.'"

"The idea persists even today: our books will bear witness for or against us, our books reflect who we are and who we have been, our books hold the share of pages granted to us from the Book of Life. By the books we call ours will we be judged."

"And yet, however careful our reading, remembered texts often under go curious changes; they fragment, shrivel up or grow unpredictably long. In my mental library, The Tempest is reduced to a few immortal lines, while a brief novel such as Juan Rulfo's Pedro Paramo occupies my entire Mexican imaginary landscape. A couple of sentences by George Orwell in the essay "Shooting an Elephant" expand in my memory to several pages of description and reflection that I think I can actually see in my mind, printed on the page; of the lengthy medieval romance The Devoured Heart, all I can remember is the title."

I could spend hours in most libraries, and I always leave with far too much. Thinking about what books sit on our shelves is important to me, and when I visit someone's house, I always check out their collection. And the final thought about remembering shades of books is so true - not only for books but for life in general. There's so much we forget, that remembering the important things, good and bad, is critical. You seem to learn that as you tack on the years.

One final note is that this is the first book I've read on the Kindle. I'm borrowing it from my mother, and it's been an interesting experience. Some of the tools I like - I also like being able to set it down, not needing to prob it open in one hand with thumb and pinky. But the price of a new book will probably prevent me from ever getting one, and candidly, the button for "next page" is annoying after you press it several hundred times. We'll see.

audiobooks

2010-10-03T15:34:00.000-04:00

As for my experience with audiobooks, and to their detractors, let me just say this - it's a different experience than reading in the same way that blind people experience the world in a different way than those with sight. They miss out on brightness, color, and motion, while hearing and smelling and tasting and feeling more acutely and more fully than people who can see. There is definitely an experience that you get by picking through the words on your own via pages. I certainly prefer it, but audiobooks go back to the way stories were told around the campfire - they're given to you. They're an experience. And yet... your brain can still pause, dissect, interpret, cogitate, and process the information in the same way a visually read book can.

There are benefits aside from the convenience of reading while running or doing the dishes. You gain (or have to endure, depending on the performer) the cadence, pronunciation, accents, and mood of the prose. Neil Gaiman reading me his short stories, Barack Obama telling me about his childhood - these are experiences I simply could not manufacture on my own, reading their printed words. Even if I were to adopt my own internal monologue - such as having Sean Connery read Great Expectations to me in my head when I was a high school freshman - it would not have been the same.

I recently read Alberto Manguel's "The Library at Night," and I found these passages to be illuminating in exploring what reading means:

"Socrates - who despised books because he thought they were a threat to our gift of memory, and never deigned to leave a written word - chose to read the speech of the orator Lycias, not to hear it recited by the enthusiastic Phaedrus."

"Precision of recall was deemed all-important, and throughout the Islamic Middle Ages, it was considered more valuable to learn by listening to books read out loud than by private study, because the text then entered the body through the mind and not merely through the eyes. Authors published not so much by transcribing their work themselves as by directing it to their assistants, and students learned by hearing those texts read out to them or by reading them to a teacher."

So sometimes it's better to read with your eyes, and yet it is possible to read with your ears. There is a value to absorbing the information through two different senses.

The caveat is that yes, it's certainly possible to have an audiobook playing in the background, words flowing past your consciousness without being given the attention they deserve. However, it's equally possible to have a book in front of you, turning page after page, skimming along and absorbing absolutely nothing.

In terms of my challenge this year, it's been fascinating to see people push the idea of audiobooks being a "cheat." If the logic goes that I'm not absorbing information - the same logic should extend to skimming. I'm doing my best not to do either, which is why it's so important to me to select books that I'm fairly certain will be good. You don't skim or half-listen to good books. You want every word in your brain.

sixty-four

2010-09-27T18:01:00.001-04:00

Ask the Pilot is an interesting read. I learned some things I found useful: the daily grind of a pilot, crew, and plane; how airlines operate networks; what flight attendants look at and notice when they deal with passengers; "cross check" over the PA actually does mean that the flight attendants are checking each other's work as they go through the cabin prior to takeoff and landing, while "1L, 2R" means which doors need to be opened after landing; being a pilot is very unglamorous unless you're an international long-haul pilot; seniority is the way the airlines operate; planes are both complicated and simple in that the plane automatically takes care of a lot of the more difficult aspects of flight, but these systems are complicated to oversee, and autopilot isn't used all the time.

I thought the format of chapters that begin with an essay on the topic, with a series of Q&As that follow, was a smart way to organize the book. However, I thought the Q&As got a little repetitive, and his prose is informative, snarky, but boring and pedestrian at the same time. Great job for a pilot, okay job for a writer.

sixty-three

2010-09-27T17:49:00.002-04:00

I'd heard great reviews of this book from a surprising number of people, so I had to give it a try. And the back book cover contains the following.

"I have stolen princesses back from sleeping barrow kings. I burned down the town of Trebon. I have spent the night with Felurian and left with both my sanity and my life. I was expelled from the University at a younger age than most people are allowed in. I tread paths by moonlight that others fear to speak of during the day. I have talked to Gods, loved women, and written songs that make the minstrels weep.

You may have heard of me."

Not bad - has a level of mystery balanced with snarky arrogance that I find absolutely fascinating. My only worry was that it'd be too silly to be believed, but this is a very science-based fantasy novel, if that can be believed. Rough things happen, though the way that the narrative is given to the reader, it's pretty clear that he survives the events in the story he tells. It's almost an adult's version of Harry Potter arriving at Hogwart's - imagine Harry penniless, uninvited, and attempting to enter the school four years before he's allowed, with no familial support. Rothfuss's prose is funny, compelling, and really draws you along. It's smart as well - Kvothe's quick wit and interesting observations are fun.

But I'm not sure I've seen a passage like this in a fantasy novel:

"Perhaps the greatest faculty our minds possess is the ability to cope with pain. Classic thinking teaches us of the four doors of the mind, which everyone moves through according to their need.

First is the door of sleep. Sleep offers us a retreat from the world and all its pain. Sleep marks passing time, giving us distance from the things that have hurt us. When a person is wounded they will often fall unconscious. Similarly, someone who hears traumatic news will often swoon or faint. This is the mind's way of protecting itself from pain by stepping through the first door.

Second is the door of forgetting. Some wounds are too deep to heal quickly. In addition, many memories are simply painful, and there is no healing to be done. The saying "time heals all wounds" is false. Time heals most wounds. The rest are hidden by this door.

Third is the door of madness. There are times when the mind is dealt such a blow it hides itself in insanity. While this may not seem beneficial, it is. There are times when reality is nothing but pain, and to escape that pain the mind must leave reality behind.

Last is the door of death. The final resort. Nothing can hurt us after we are dead, or so we have been told."

Usually when fantasy authors try to ruminate about morality or existence like this, I've found, it comes across as filler or self-indulgent blather. Rothfuss seems to have a deeper story he wants to tell than magic and swords (and honestly, I'm not sure I remember a sword in the whole book). The Name of the Wind is more about the nature of stories than adventures, sorcery, and battles. I eagerly await Kvothe's wit in the next volume, which will be out next year.

sixty-two

2010-09-22T01:32:00.003-04:00

On Basilisk Station has been on my list since I read David Weber's "Oath of Swords" and "The War God's Own" and somehow loved them. Those were in his own fantasy world (knights, armor, gods, dwarves, engineering), whereas I know a lot of people seem to like his larger sci-fi Honor Harrington series. This is the first one.

Honor is a great character, smart, succinct, funny, and manages not to fill all the stereotypes for the "smart female captain." Seeing as it was written in 1993, Weber deserves some applause for this. The story itself was gripping, interesting, and managed to make you think a bit. Set in the distant future, but still somewhat realistic, and relying on physics we can mostly understand, Honor is in the Royal Manticoran Navy, which is one nation of star systems vying for power with others nearby, connected by faster-than-light drives and wormholes. The interesting bits come in when Weber brings us effortlessly into his space combat tactics, local politics, military politics, and the role of the enlightened colonizer. The plot that Honor uncovers is a little predictable, but still interesting. It kept me reading long enough to want to know more about her, and I'll be reading the next in the series soon.

This was also my first book read on my borrowed Kindle - I'll post about it separately soon, after I post on audiobooks, but I'm finding the experience alternately easy to use and annoying to use.

sixty-one

2010-09-21T19:15:00.005-04:00

After planning a trip to Sydney, of course this book called Sydney, The Story of a City makes sense to pick up from the library. I would have loved a less stodgy tome, but I did learn a lot about the city and who lives there. One thing I'll get out of the way is that Moorhouse loves to write run-on sentences. Here's an example:

"People also fish from jetties here or over the concave wall that was built right around this part of the Harbour to prevent rats ever again coming off the tramp steamers into town, after a disastrous plague at the turn of the century; they slurp ice cream as they watch the ceaseless traffic in vessels rumbling past; they linger over a coffee and a Danish while they read the Sydney Morning Herald or one of Mr. Murdoch's publications; they queue for Travelpasses of varying denominations that will allow them to ride any ferry, bus or CityRail train without further ado; they amble along the eastern arm of the Quay, to sample bivalves in the Oyster Bar, and then continue strolling on to the Opera House where, on a shining day, scores of sun worshippers will arrange themselves lazily on its long cascade of steps."

Yeah. That's one sentence. It was a bit of a list, so it's slightly justified, but really? It's distracting, like the singer at the family picnic that holds a note three times longer than is really necessary, just to get attention. Yeah, I just said family picnic, and implied people sang at them. Deal with it.

The book was useful to have read on the trip, and I recommend it if you plan on spending time in a city as lovely as Sydney. I don't recommend it if you don't. It was slightly difficult to get through and he's kind of a dork, but as I said, I did learn a lot, and was able to play Annoying American In-Law Tourist and tell Australians things they didn't know (or things that Moorhouse told me that were lies). For instance, did you know the Labor party is not spelled the "Labour" party in Australia because three Greek started the Anglo-American company, and then, one can assume, imported American spelling habits? Or that once the news came back from Gallipoli and began to sink in, a new batch of recruits in WW1 decided they didn't want to go to war - so they found a hotel, drank themselves silly, came into town on a train, and had a gunfight with police that involved a firehose, several injuries, and one death. The official response was to order all bars closed at 6pm during the war - but these rules lasted well beyond the war. So the tradition arose that workingmen would run to the bars as soon as 5 o'clock chimed, binge drink for an hour, and then stagger home with a bottle in a brown paper bag. You also find out that stoush means "fight." You begin to understand Australia a bit after a few anecdotes like this.

We had a great trip and I highly recommend it - it's a beautiful country, people are nice, they do have good beer and often spell things correctly. The book... only entertain reading that if you're up for it.

sixty

2010-09-21T19:12:00.004-04:00

I have read so little poetry that I had to add "poetry" as a new shelf on Goodreads when I reviewed this book there. But Langston Hughes was a perfect solid introduction to poetry that I wasn't required to read by a teacher or professor. And seeing as I got married in a room called the Langston Hughes Room, I figured I should read a bit more of what he had to say. Fortunately, he had a lot of great things to tell the world.

He tackles the everyday with humor, insouciance, wit, and a twinkle in his eye:

Looks like what drives me crazy

Don't have no effect on you-

But I'm gonna keep on at it

Till it drives you crazy, too.

And he still manages to deal with bigger, important national issues with intelligence, sincerity, and integrity. This poem was very well written in a time (early 20th century) that must have been frustrating, depressing, and awful for people of good conscience:

Democracy will not come

Today, this year

Nor ever

Through compromise and fear.

I have as much right

As the other fellow has

To Stand

On my own two feet

And own the land.

I tire so of hearing people say,

Let things take their course.

Tomorrow is another day.

I do not need my freedom when I'm dead.

I cannot live on tomorrow's head.

Freedom

Is a strong seed

Planted

In a great need.

I live here too.

I want freedom

Just as you.

I wasn't sure how I'd deal with poetry. A lot of it has seemed to me to be silly and self-absorbing and self-absorbed. But oftentimes you (or at least Langston, who does it much better than you) can communicate more clearly in poetry than prose. It is fun to feel the cadence of the song of poetry in your head, rather than proses sometimes plodding sentences. I doubt I'll turn into a poetry nut, but I'm opening my eyes to the good stuff. Do you read poetry that you enjoy?

fifty-nine

2010-08-27T16:21:00.003-04:00

I am definitely getting old. I honestly could not tell you, if you put a revolver to my head and asked me politely, if I have ever read In A Sunburned Country before. I just couldn't. I remember several of the vignettes. I remember the general gist of his trip. I remembered that he came and went several times, and that I thought of the expensive airfare. But I marked it "to-read" on Goodreads, and couldn't remember much of the book, and don't remember being anyplace where I read it, don't currently own it, don't remember borrowing it...

I just don't know. It makes me think about the general efficacy of what it means to read a book. Is that what happens to many of the books we read? A decade later you might remember that you've read it? Some general sweeps of plot, an anecdote or two, whether or not you liked it? I remember more from other books. Most of them. Maybe? I'll have to think about this. Have you ever forgotten you've read a book?

Anyhow, it was great, just like whatever echo of my brain misremembers it. Bryson is an awesomely funny and informative writer, and following his trek through Australia is fun, informative, and absolutely makes you want to go there. Fortunately I am in a week, so that's nice for me. I think it's even nice if you're not going there - though he'll make you want to plan a trip. Even if the hoteliers in Darwin are horrible people. He informs you of fun local recent and ancient history - something I wished I found a bit more in The Fatal Shore.

He also, according to my mother-in-law, really gets the Australian people - a great mix of happy-go-lucky, optimistic, fearless, no-worrying relaxation, as well as the sometimes worrying effect this has on their local environment, natives, families, and prospective immigrants. He also talks about an assumption that no one's paying attention to them, of being overlooked. Not sure what I'll find, but it's an interesting thing to ponder. I wonder if someone could do the same for America, or if there isn't really a national identity in a country that large and divided.

His synopsis:

"Australia is mostly empty and a long way away. Its population is small and its role in the world consequently peripheral. It doesn't have coups, recklessly overfish, arm disagreeable despots, grow coca in provocative quantities, or throw its weight around in a brash and unseemly manner. It is stable and peaceful and good. It doesn't need watching, and so we don't. But I will tell you this: the loss is entirely ours."

fifty-eight

2010-08-26T17:37:00.003-04:00

After American Gods, I wasn't sure what Anansi Boys would bring. It delves into family, maturation, and tradition the way American Gods explored small-town America, belief, progress, and tradition. You see a lot more of the god world that's only glimpsed in American Gods. It's interesting, and Fat Charlie is a great main character. He's boring and just wants all the craziness to go away. But Gaiman excels at adding an "or does he?" to a situation like that.

Because it's by Neil Gaiman, it's funny and clever, even when small parts of it drag. But I thought Graham Coates was an interesting, annoying villain, who manages to get a lot more accomplished than you first think he's capable of - which is a switch. Spider is a fun, juvenile-but-smooth deity, and of course, Mr. Anancy is all laughs and tricks.

I did finish and think to myself "that's it?" - I was a little disappointed that there was only so much going on. I thought there could be a broader scope, but I suppose he had his story he wanted to tell and he told it. Pretty fun.

fifty-seven

2010-08-25T16:30:00.003-04:00

The Fatal Shore is not a title that makes you think "warm and fuzzy." Which is good - Australia, despite cute koala bears and kangaroos and adorably childish town names, is not a warm and fuzzy place, especially when white people stumbled ashore. Nor was it so beforehand - it's a hot, poisonous, bitey/toothy, antipodean, riptide-y, terrifying, empty, starvation-inducing continent. The Aborigines seemed to manage fine, though Hughes does portray their existence as a little nasty, brutish, and short - a point I'm not fully willing to grant. The point remains that the shore that the British fell onto after a 6 month journey was indeed, as much as a shore can be, fatal.

The particular brilliance of the Brits lay in making the shore fatal-er. They wanted a place to put their criminally minded people and their desperate poor people through forced exile known as "transportation." These two groups can be visualized with a Venn Diagram that has a decent amount of overlap, but with clear crescents of open space that represent only awful people and only those trying to survive in a pretty awful underclass. The Brits wanted to "sublimate, deter, reform, and colonize." They got tired of Irish people demanding rights, poor people demanding food, swindlers demanding other people's property, and some of the violent characters (murder was usually punishable by death) demanding the ability to hurt others. In the bargain of penalizing lawbreakers, the British government wanted to colonize a continent before the French or Dutch. They managed to create communities where convicts were rehabilitated and became upstanding citizens, as well as hellish prison environments that turned people into animals while torturing and abusing men and women to death. America had some of this through indentured servants and slaves, though the context was different, and revoution and independence changed the historical path.

Apparently the Australians referred to their convict past as "The Stain" - something to be put away in a trunk and thrown into the Pacific. It was both a source of embarrassment and a source of quiet pride - either you're upset that your forebears were thieves, or you're proud that they did what they had to do to survive the awful English or stood up for what was right and got shipped to New South Wales. Hughes does a great job of dealing with both ends of the stick honestly, without broad generalizations.

The book does manage to give you a very good idea of how European civilization was introduced into Australia, from its discovery, founding, development, and the final abolition of transportation. You get to know the governors, the failed reformers, the overseers, some of the convicts, a bit of the Aborigines, and some of the British that tried to manage the whole thing. It goes over some of the development beyond Sydney, of the road over the Blue Mountains, and some of the societal structures set up to this day. It goes into a LOT of detail about Tasmania (called Van Dieman's Land for most of the beginning of Australia, just as Australia was New South Wales or, more narrowly, Botany Bay) and Norfolk Island. These islands became the main receptacle of the truly criminal criminals. Most people shipped to Australia were "assigned" to farmers and settlers to work the land and build things, when the government didn't need them to build infrastructure. The convict labor served as a form of slavery and indentured servitude that allowed the country to be transformed into European-approved civilization on the cheap.

I was a little surprised the book stayed so focused on the convicts and penology (yes, it's a word). However, prior to this book, there weren't many scholarly explorations of Australia's history as a penal colony - and due to the huge effect it had on subsequent Aussie culture, it's an important gap. That Hughes makes the book so readable (mostly) is glittery frosting.

fifty-six

2010-08-25T15:54:00.001-04:00

I hadn't heard of The Way of the World, but found it to be a fairly comprehensive picture of the current national security status, specifically regarding weapons of mass destruction. He jumps between George W. Bush, Tony Blair, Benazir Bhutto, an Afghani exchange student, a Pakistani professional emigre, a Blackwater expert on loose nukes, a lawyer for a detainee in Guantanamo, intelligence officials, and lots of anonymous sources. All of their stories, together, make up a compelling picture of what extremists are trying to do to blow up the Western world, what the West is trying to do to stop them, and the very grey middle ground. From private undercover teams that try to test our detection systems in buying weapons grade nuclear material and trying to get it into the country to what the detainees at Guantanamo were doing before they were captured, from conservative Islamic family culture to modern Islamic family culture, from George Bush's approach to fighting terrorism to the rest of the world's, from the willingness of the globe to help stop terrorism before we invaded Iraq to the difficulty and loss of moral leadership we encounter now - it's a very sweeping book. I was impressed - and not just because I found out a lot more about a friend of mine who I had no idea was a big focus of such a sweeping book (hint: it's not George W. Bush).

This is not a post about books; this is a post about kitten mittens.

2010-08-24T16:38:00.004-04:00

It's just so easy to watch this over and over again.

fifty-five

2010-08-18T17:16:00.004-04:00

Invisible Monsters was Chuck Palahniuk's first real novel, though it didn't get published until Fight Club and Survivor were out. It truly is his style, and his exploration of voyeurism, gender, and vanity is bracing. You can also see his literary path from this, through Fight Club, Survivor, Choke, Lullabye, Diary, Haunted, Rant, and probably the rest that I haven't read yet. I can definitely see how the publishers weren't interested. Apparently they're fine with violence and anarchism, but gender issues and mutilation - that's too much. Awesome, gripping story that picks you up, drops you, picks you up again, drags you a bit, and then deposits you behind the hazy lines of the traditional Palahniuk mind-warp. Definitely recommended, and more than just "Fight Club for models."

What?

So how's it going?

2010-08-18T14:47:00.009-04:00

Yeah, I went with a lolcats. Deal.

Well, this blog has become a bit more of a book review site than I had initially intended - my apologies for that to the two of you who are actually reading this. I really wanted to get more into the experience of reading than I have, but unfortunately, life has gotten in the way of giving me enough time to read at the pace I need to in order to get to 100 this year, while also attending to the things I need to (as well as see friends, family, travel, home renovate, start a new job, and be a husband). I'm going to try to intersperse reviews of the books I read with a bit more of the qualia of reading.

Anyhow, how's it going? I'd say pretty well. I reached 50 on the last day of June - perfectly on schedule, and then took the month off of intensive reading. I installed some bamboo floors and focused on some other things for the month of July. As it stands right now, I'll essentially have to keep to a ten books per month pace, which is what I managed for the first few months. I still have leviathans like Team of Rivals and Infinite Jest on my list, and I'm trying to finish The Fatal Shore soon, but I'm finding that it's not the length of the book that dictates how long it takes to finish. Salt and The Climate War were loooooong reads, but I inhaled Snow Crash, Game of Thrones, and True Compass.

How am I liking this increased pace? I love the fact that I get to crack open a new book 100 times this year. There really is nothing quite like starting a book. You generally have little idea what you're in for - it could be something that will change the way you see the world, or something you'll complain about and be sad you spent your time on. I've tried to select books I'll probably enjoy, so over the last 7 1/2 months I've been pretty happy with what I've found inside. I don't like how some books drag, and cracking them open to the bookmark can sometimes be a chore. I don't like how there are plenty of other fun, social things I could and possibly should be doing with my time other than reading. But generally, I'm very happy with how things have been going. I'm learning a lot, my mind gets blown a lot more often than blogs usually manage, I'd like to think I'm a slightly more interesting conversationalist, and I'm able to ask better questions when people bring up things I don't know much about.

I think I'll make it - with a trip involving a 14 hour plan flight coming up soon, as well as some downtime at the end of the year, I should be able to reach 100 without too much trouble.

How is your reading going this year? I'd love to hear from... both of you.

fifty-four

2010-08-18T12:56:00.003-04:00

The name Flannery O'Connor comes with accolades and gravitas and sad trombones of wonder - and Jacob is reading this book of short stories while he waits for John Locke to be pushed out of his father's high rise condominium. So I had to try her out. What I found was some excellent writing craft, some piercing looks into how our minds work, and a whole lotta loathing.

Each story is a thoughtful stare from a different angle at the worst and possibly most fun trait we've got as a species: self-absorbed loathing. Whether that loathing is directed at: your uneducated, needy, Southern mother's racism; everyone you feel has done you wrong from the help to your good-for-nothing sons; your lack of artistic talent and the inability of the world you know to appreciate it; black people; women; your useless son who just wants to mourn your dead wife for some odd reason; the city; your wife's reserved religiousity; God; your in-laws.

This loathing at first is unrecognizable, but then it comes to you: we all feel it. From the guy who cuts you off and the daggers you stare into his rearview mirror to politicians to Glenn Beck to Keith Olbermann to the uncaring responses pedestrians have to the homeless to something your spouse does without thinking to... your in-laws. It's not always loathing of the first degree, but sometimes it's background noise that flares up out of nowhere and you find yourself deleting an angry email or staring too hard at people who don't deserve it or apologizing to a friend. Or you blog about how stupid and evil that pundit or this Senator is.

We all feel it - it's part of living in this world that we don't control. O'Connor's world is a little different than ours, and certain words and ideas come more easily to her than they do to us (just ask Dr. Laura). But though her characters can seem archaic and ignorant, there are more similarities than you first think. We're all the richer for her piercing, funny, horrible, depressing, and amazing view of how we try to get through the trials of life.

fifty-three

2010-08-18T09:41:00.004-04:00

Wow. I'm still absorbing this book and the many, many, many ideas it casually contains. To start off, here's Publishers Weekly's review:

"Africa's moral and cultural dysfunctions loom as large as its material problems in this wide-ranging jeremiad. Maathai (Unbowed), a Kenyan biologist and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize for organizing the tree-planting Green Belt Movement, surveys Africa's struggle with poverty and disease, political violence, climate change, the legacy of colonialism and a global economy that's stacked against it. But the deeper problem she sees is the selfishness, opportunism and shortsightedness of Africans themselves, from leaders who exploit their countrymen and loot their nations' resources to poor farmers who ruin the land for short-term gain. Maathai means this as an empowering message aimed at a mindset of dependency that would rather wait for someone to magically make development happen; she urges Africans to recover indigenous traditions of community solidarity and self-help, along with the virtues of honesty, fairness and hard work. Maathai shrewdly analyzes the links between environmental degradation and underdevelopment, and floats intriguing proposals, like banning plastic bags as a malaria-abatement measure. But the challenges she addresses are vast and intractable—and sadly, many of the development and environmental initiatives she extols seem to have already fizzled."

I was very impressed by her argument, her intellect, and both her optimism and skepticism. My thoughts, as a white American who has never been to Africa and has taken a college class focused largely on the effects of colonialism, run naturally to a guilt of the developed world taking advantage of a resource-rich undeveloped world. If the continent didn't have to deal with this, I think, then things would be different.

Maathai says that yes - while the developed world needs to cancel the debts incurred by African leaders who plainly could not pay them back, and while the mining companies headquartered in rich countries should be mindful of the terrible effect that their resource extraction has on the local populace, and while foreign governments and companies prolong and enable warfare and suffering by selling weapons to warlords, and while Russian fishing trawlers fish the waters off Angola, bring the fish back to Russia, and ship them frozen back to Angola to sell in the market - the real palpable fault lies with African leaders. These leaders, she says, have the benefit of education and influence, money and power, yet largely choose to squander it all on self-aggrandizement, short-term thinking, uneducated decisions, and ignoring the lessons learned by other countries. She has a long list and a comprehensive plan that these leaders should follow in order to: strengthen democratic institutions and revive trust in the government; respect and preserve natural resources so that all may benefit for centuries to come; and foster a culture of peace so that societies and families exist to be able to implement and take advantage of the other two "legs of the stool."

You could make the argument that she is arguing for utopia, but because her recommendations and observations are so attainable, and so logical, and so easy, this argument is unfair. Africa deserves even some tiny steps toward utopia, doesn't it?

Her writing is clear, very intelligent, thoughtful, and powerful. I sincerely hope people listen to her - both here and in Africa.

fifty-two

2010-08-17T18:36:00.004-04:00

I saw Stardust the film last year, and liked it, though I thought Robert De Niro's cameo was pretty ridiculous, and Michelle Pfeiffer (when she's not Catwoman) is... Michelle Pfeiffer. Otherwise I quite enjoyed the movie, and I will echo that I quite enjoyed the book. Reviews of the book on Goodreads etc have warned against it because it's weird and not a children's book - to that I say... it's Neil Gaiman. Google him. Get over it.

As I said, I quite enjoyed the book, even though I knew the plot from the movie. It's Gaiman's take on a fantasy novel, and he throws enough curves that it rises a bit above boy-saves-girl-and-becomes-king story. Even when it's predictable, his prose and hilarious metaphors and similes and devices bring you through. The dead princes were great, and if you haven't seen the movie and don't know the story, the double-take in the first chapter is refreshing.

fifty-one

2010-08-17T17:27:00.002-04:00

It's not often that I like a movie more than I liked the book. But I actually enjoyed the flim version of The Kite Runner more than I liked the book. I didn't expect to - not in the least. I thought the book would be a more detailed story that delves into the characters, their backgrounds, the history of Afghanistan, while maintaining the interesting, gripping story of redemption and compassion I admired in the film. It did flesh out the characters more, and you definitely get more of the motivations of the usually pathetic main character. The whole sweeping story is there, from Kabul to California, back to Kabul and then Redemptive Adoption With Kites.

The movie relied on the amazingly realistic performances of the Afghni child actors, who, Google tells me, aren't exactly movie stars back in Afghanistan. The book relies on Hosseini's prose, which I found lacking enough to get in the way of the story he wanted to tell. I also found it hard to root for Amir. I know you're not supposed to like him in the beginning, and the revelation about his family is supposed to make you understand his horrible arrogant and insecure behavior as a child, but I found it hard to root for him as an adult as well. And it wasn't just the phrasing that grated at times - some of the plot developments, especially later in the novel, just seemed too predictable (even ones that I didn't know about from the movie). Additionally, you get the feeling that this story is what Hosseini wished had happened to him - his father really escaped Afghanistan as a rich emigre to Iran, and then escaped the Iranian Revolution to Paris, and then to America, where they were well off and his son became a doctor - who then wrote a book. I get the feeling that this book was written to assauge the guilt that bubbled up after emigrating from Afghanistan due to his high standing.

I think I would have found this more compelling if this were nonfiction - if the writer had actually gone through it all and saw all of the horrors firsthand. Still I valued the glimpse of what has happened to Afghanistan since the 70s enough to enjoy the read.

fifty

2010-08-13T00:40:00.002-04:00

Started reading the Climate War after seeing Eric Pooley interview a few Environmental Defense Fund senior staff at an event recently, and he signed a book for me. After recently starting a job in the climate science world, I thought a book that covers the recent history of efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions would be very useful. It absolutely was - there's been scientific consensus for decades that we're making the planet warmer, but scientists don't make policy. Therefore the main difficulty with responding to a natural problem like this is that scientists, and those who think science should trump regional factionalism, have to convince supporters of the fossil fuel industry and regional factionalists to fix a long-term problem. This is very difficult, I can now say from personal experience.

However, there has been a great deal of progress in convincing the world that there's a problem, we need to deal with it, and we can. There's also been some progress in starting to move on solving that problem. There is so much more that needs to be done in order to head off a self-sustaining warming reaction that will dramatically alter our world and more importantly to the human race: our existence. The more the ice caps melt into the sea, the less light is bounced back into space and the more is absorbed into a warming ocean. Which makes other things warmer. The more CO2 there is in the air, the more makes it into the water, which causes the salt water to acidify, which kills phytoplankton, the things that eat phytoplankton, coral, etc. The warmer it is, the more moisture gets moved around, so in certain places, there are record droughts, and in others, there are record rainstorms, floods, and blizzards. Species experience extinction more frequently, mosquitoes can survive winters longer in more temperate clients (and can bring dengue fever to the U.S., let's say). Not to mention the pollution brought by burning all the fossil fuels we can get our hands on as fast as we can. As a friend once told me - when it comes down to it, we're burning stuff to make turbines spin. It's messy.

We can start to turn down the knob on this process by using less fuel, creating cleaner energy, creating markets that have incentives to develop clean energy technology, and saving the carbon that exists in forests from being clear cut for little economic and social benefit. If someone can convince me that the free market will do this on its own - if the invisible hand can manage externalities - then awesome, we don't need government. Unfortunately, we haven't seen a largely unregulated energy industry clean itself up, and no one's convinced me that it'll manage to do so without government, so for our own sakes, bring on the regulation. The globe will be fine no matter what, and most species will be fine, but we'll be looking at a much different world in 100 years than the one we know. And it'll be super duper sweaty.

Now all we need is 60 Senators to realize we're cooking ourselves beyond any ability to forestall massive effects on the world we know...

forty-nine

2010-08-12T23:54:00.001-04:00

All in all, Fragile Things is a fun set of stories. I really like Gaiman's turn of phrase, and his imagination is truly unique. You range from fun poems to dystopian Sherlock Holmes London, a modern Beowulf story to scary childhood memories re-imagined, and anthropomorphic months of the year telling each other short stories around a bonfire to what happens when you meet alien girls at a party.

His voice narrating the book on tape was quite fun - he truly enjoys telling stories and I think it added a lot to the experience.

forty-eight

2010-08-11T16:42:00.011-04:00

I liked The Prophet much more than I was expecting to like it. It's a classic and I'm not sure I could analyze it any further than it already has been. Essentially it's a collection of pretty good advice, of how to live your life. There were only a few areas where I rolled my eyes or shook my head in liberal, secular disapproval. He goes from birth to death, work to leisure, love to loneliness. You've heard a chunk of his marriage advice plenty of times at weddings. It's well written, once you're past the odd device he uses to get the wise man to impart his wisdom. Flowy language that almost makes you want to read the bible.

It's something you might want to have on your shelf throughout your life, kind of like a sequel to a holy book, without the holy part. I'm sure that if this were written today, the advice wouldn't have to change a whole lot - it's that timeless.

forty-seven

2010-08-11T15:59:00.002-04:00

This book was recommended because it takes place in DC and deals honestly with the African immigrant's experience in America. I liked the descriptions of slowly gentrifying Logan Circle, and the lives of the characters who immigrated from Ethiopia were interesting snapshots of what I assume is the immigrant's experience. We just assume that people get up every day and are either happy to be here, just get along, or have tragic lives - but lives that come with massive changes are also presented with depression, ennui, and other psychological problems that the drug companies love to talk about in commercials. I thought the scope of the book could have been a bit larger - as I said, I thought the characters were more snapshots than fully developed people. But I'd recommend it if you want a quick read that gives a picture of DC gentrification and a modern African immigration story.

forty-six

2010-07-21T16:08:00.002-04:00

I picked up The Well-Dressed Ape a little randomly in the library, and don't really regret it. Her writing is a little corny, she's obviously incomplete in a full description of the human body (that would be impossible), and sometimes the research felt either incomplete or repetitive. However, through those flaws, I definitely enjoyed the book. The premise is a field description of the animal homo sapiens. She goes top to bottom, describing brain, senses, posture, reproduction, locomotion, eating, homeostasis, and all kinds of behavior. She uses the homunculus analogy in her description of brain real estate, but the same analogy could be used in her page real estate. Most of her focus is on the senses, sexual behavior, brain usage, etc - I would have loved to be regaled with anecdotes and information about the organs, the bones, the muscles, the circulatory system, etc. Some of these get small mentions, but I wanted more. For someone who's not read a lot of books about human biology/psychology/evolution, the research she goes through won't be repetitive, but I tend to like that sort of book. Her approach on a familiar topic is unique enough that I stayed interested even through parts I found boring. Definitely recommended.

forty-five

2010-07-20T18:00:00.004-04:00

I bought Cold Beer and Crocodiles a few years ago and it sat on my shelf collecting dust, ever since.

This happens to me quite often. My eyes are bigger than my ... eyes? Something like that. Anyhow, a large reason I'm trying to read 100 books this year is to get through a bunch of these investments that have been sitting on my shelf, collecting dust, getting outdated. I'm still using the library and bookstore on a weekly basis, but I hope to drop the number of unread books on my shelves by about 50 at the end of December.

Anyhow, this was fun. Journalist quits his job, buys a bike, rides around the coast of Australia, end of book. In between, he meets a lot of people, gets injured and sunburned, and sees a lot of the country. It's not, contrary to the subtitle, a journey INTO Australia - he stays on the outside. But most of the people live on the outside, so it works. I thought he managed to make it less of a diary and more of a book, and I appreciated the little historical blurbs he included in his narrative. Because I picked this up in preparation for an upcoming trip to Australia, I wanted a bit more history, but I'm guessing he didn't write the book for me. His vast amount of time in the desert was illuminating - the Australia that people mainly experience is on the coast between Melbourne and Cairns. There's a lot of land in the rest of the country, and it's really, really hot! His snapshots of people he spends time with were also fun and educational. I should probably read a historical book about Sydney before my plane leaves, I suppose.

Regardless of my motives, I thought the book was entertaining, informative, and servicably written. It wasn't amazing though, and unless you've got a keen interest in Australia, I wouldn't highly recommend it. Also, I can't think of an interaction with a crocodile, though he did have lots of beer - apparently Aussie beer hydrates you after 100 miles on a bike.

forty-four

2010-06-30T17:54:00.001-04:00

SNARKY SPOILER ALERT:

So a young boy uses his blue eyes to see the world in color and magically receive memories from another blue-eyed old man via backrubs, escapes the Soviet Union, saves his brother from infanticide, and dies of hypothermia while hallucinating about Christmas.

:END SNARKY SPOILER ALERT

I can understand why so many people were terrified of this book as children - lots of scary topics are dealt with on a very personal level. But I was of course impressed by it - it's a classic dystopian sci-fi book! Lowry makes the day-to-day believable in this communist community, and very fairly puts a lot of good qualities into this well-organized society.

Impressive for a kid's book, lots of interesting issues to think about afterward, but the plot and ending was a little odd. Glad I read it though.

forty-three

2010-06-30T17:11:00.001-04:00

I bought The Jaguar Smile a few years ago after having spent a bit more than a week in Nicaragua visiting a friend. I was a little surprised to see Salman Rushdie writing about Central America, and I think at first I thought it was a collection of fiction stories. I was pleasantly surprised to find that it was actually a nonfiction look at his stay in Nicaragua during the time the Sandinistas were in power in the late 80s. Apparently the book got a lot of flak for being too kind to Ortega and the new government, and he does see many of the improvements that the communists brought to the country over the previous horrible dictatorship. He did spend some time talking about censorship, but it was always in a larger context. His summary of the situation:

"The argument usually ended in the same place. Nicaragua was an imperfect state. But it was also engaged in a true revolution: in an attempt, that is, to change the structures of society in order to improve the lives of its citizens. And imprefection, even the deep flaw of censorship, did not constitute a justification for being crushed by a super-power's military and economic force."

He also spoke to the privileged vantage point he occupied as a visiting observer of the conflict:

"We parted in Madrid, and returned to our separate lives, two migrants making our way in this West stuffed with money, power and things, this North that taught us how to see from its privileged point of view. But maybe we were the lucky ones; we knew that other perspectives existed. We had seen the view from elsewhere."

All in all, I was impressed by this little time capsule that opened a small window to the history of Nicaragua.

forty-two

2010-06-30T16:16:00.002-04:00

I've always wanted to read The Mezzanine, after getting my first glimpse of Nicholson Baker from Vox (which has quite a different premise, but a shared amazing attention to detail). The Mezzanine was written in the mid-80s, and is a curious, deliberate examination of middle class America and office work life. In focusing on the details (tying shoes, office conversation, bathrooms, sleeping, milk cartons, etc), he actually does manage to say some profound things about the life as he (and we) knew it. I'd love to see an updated version of this book - one that takes into consideration the modern grocery store, computers, interconnectivity, transportation, and other changes since the 80s.

A synopsis of this book (the plot is that he takes a ride from the bottom of the escalator to the top of the escalator and thinks about things) would be silly, so here are some quotes:

I had signed enough office farewell and birthday and get-well cards by that time to have developed an unhealthy sensitivity to the nuances of signature placement. I moved over to an antipodal flower's pedal, near Deanne's name, and signed what I hoped was an original angle.

(To start a long footnote): 1 Perforation! Shout it out! The deliberate punctuated weakening of paper and cardboard so that it will tear along an intended path, leaving a row of fine-haired white pills or tuftlets on each new edge! It is a staggering conception, showing an age-transforming feel for the unique properties of pulped wood fiber.

(Another footnote) 1 Among average men, the singular, "oop," is the normal usage; the word is found in its plural as "oops" most often among women, gay men, or men talking to women, in my experience, although there are so many exceptions to this that it is irresponsible for me to bring it up.

(Another footnote) 1 The absence of stealth or shame that men, colleagues of mine, displayed about their misfortunes in the toilet stall had been an unexpected surprise of business life. I admired their forthrightness, in a way; and perhaps in fifteen years I too would be spending twenty-minute stretches in similar corporate stalls, making sounds that I had once believed were made only by people in the extremity of the flu or by bums beyond caring in urban library bathrooms. ... One time, while I was locked behind a stall, I did unintentionally interrupt the conversation between a member of senior management and an important visitor with a loud curt fart like the rap of a bongo drum.

(Another footnote) 1 When you leave a job, one of the hardest decisions you have to make on cleaning out your desk is what to do with the coffinlike cardboard tray holding 958 fresh-smelling business cards.

forty-one

2010-06-23T15:26:00.003-04:00

Yes, Maus is a comic book, but it's not like any comic book you've probably ever read. The author's personal story is much more a central part of both books than I was expecting it to be, and I found that very compelling. The premise is the story of his dad growing up in Poland and surviving the Holocaust all the way to the end of Auschwitz, only with the Jews being anthropomorphic mice and the Germans being anthropomorphic cats (Americans are dogs and the Poles are pigs). This device serves to present the well-known history in a new light, especially when his dad is trying to pass as a non-Jew to stay alive - he puts on a pig mask and when people start to suspect he is in fact Jewish, his mask starts to slip. But the brutally honest story of the author's difficult relationship with his father (and dead mother) was the real surprise. I think we can all relate to his honest portrayal of parental relations. Seeing his scattershot progress of reconciliation with his ailing father as he hears the details of the Holocaust is very moving. I can see how this won the Pulitzer Prize.

I am counting Maus I and Maus II as one book, and the additional volume is serving as a counter to the fact that I only read half of the second book I read this year in 2010. So I'm legit now!

forty

2010-06-21T12:57:00.003-04:00

Eating Animals starts out with assurance that it will not be a manifesto for vegetarianism, and Foer does his best to present a measured, scholarly, informed, and compassionate report on the way we get our meat - which is 99% obtained through factory farms, slaughterhouses, and industrial fishing. It ends as exactly what he said it wouldn't be: a manifesto for vegetarianism.

You can tell he didn't want to end up there - his research and reporting are fair and somewhat detached, even as he's explaining how factory farms keep animals sick and cramped, pumped full of hormones and antibiotics, and then inhumanely slaughter them - too often cutting them apart while still accidentally alive; pollute the planet with poo and industrial fertilizer; serve as hotbeds of virulent diseases (bird flu, swine flu, etc); run small family farms out of business through heavy-handed Mafia-like tactics, and generally assault our consciences. Fishing doesn't escape either - the current industrial fishing system often will throw back 90% of what it catches, after killing or mangling the creatures, and we're so efficient at using 75 mile long nets and sonar to catch fish that there's very little left to reproduce. He goes from this extreme (and likely accurate) view of the current agri- and aqua-business system to farmers trying to do things better. Michael Pollan's admiration for Polyface Farm doesn't escape the criticism that Polyface Farm uses a factory slaughterhouse and Joel Salatin's turkeys are the same genetically mangled birds that the factory farms use, that cannot naturally reproduce and die young because they can't walk after a certain age due to the size of their breasts, like sacrificial Barbies. He even finds a vegan who designs human slaughterhouses (mobile so as to keep the animals from stressing out during transportation), but of course the big slaughterhouse businesses put him out of business.

Foer's reaction to this bleak but accurate view of the way we get our meat is, for him, to stop eating meat. The whole reason he began looking into the food system is because after his son was born, he wanted the answer to the question "what should we feed him?" and further, "what should we feed ourselves?" He believes that the only morally, environmentally, and economically viable answer is to eat only vegetables and not kill animals. He doesn't say you're a bad person if you eat animals, just not informed enough, and he tries to inform you. That's the only conclusion he could draw.

But I don't think it's this black and white. Foer probably made a few thousand people stop eating meat. This has admirable environmental, ethical, biological, and economical ramifications. However, what if he'd made several million people dramatically reduce their meat consumption, so that it wasn't the culinary center of every meal? What if those millions then did their best to seek out meat that was organic, pasture-fed, family farm raised, and humanely slaughtered? Wouldn't this have a larger effect on the industry and actually cause less meat to be eaten than a few thousand newly-minted vegetarians?

Once we start to draw boxes around what we eat - no mammals or birds due to inhumane slaughtering, no fish due to overfishing, no non-organic veggies due to pesticides and Roundup, no non-heirloom vegetables due to the chokehold Monsanto has over plants' DNA (even soy), no dairy because of the treatment of dairy cows, no sugar because some diet says it's bad for you - what is left to eat? I have no problem with the rationale against those types of foods, but I have a problem with the uncompromising nature of drawing those boxes. You reach more people through moderation than through tee-totaling. And I think that's the conclusion I've reached after reading this and some Michael Pollan. Moderation is the best avenue down which to make the choices we wish to make. At least for me.

thirty-nine

2010-06-17T14:20:00.003-04:00

I'm almost 20 years late in reading Snow Crash - I wish I had read it in the early 90s. But in some ways, I got a lot out of it by reading it now. If you haven't read it, go ahead and do that. I think it's entirely appropriate to quote Wikipedia in a review of this book:

"The story begins and ends in Los Angeles, which is no longer part of what is left of the United States, during the early 21st century. In this hypothetical future reality the federal government of the United States has ceded most of its power to private organizations and entrepreneurs. Franchising, individual sovereignty and private vehicles reign (along with drug trafficking, violent crime, and traffic congestion). Mercenary armies compete for national defense contracts while private security guards preserve the peace in gated, sovereign housing developments. Highway companies compete to attract drivers to their roads rather than the competitors', and all mail delivery is by hired courier. The remnants of government maintain authority only in isolated compounds where they transact tedious make-work that is, by and large, irrelevant to the dynamic society around them.

The Metaverse, a phrase coined by Stephenson as a successor to the Internet, constitutes Stephenson's vision of how a virtual reality-based Internet might evolve in the near future. Resembling an MMO, the Metaverse is populated by user controlled avatars as well as system daemons. Although there are public-access Metaverse terminals in Reality, using them carries a social stigma among Metaverse denizens, in part because of the poor visual representations of themselves as low-quality avatars. Status in the Metaverse is a function of two things: access to restricted environments such as the Black Sun, an exclusive Metaverse club, and technical acumen, which is often demonstrated by the sophistication of one's avatar."

In a lot of ways, Stephenson is spot-on in the direction the internet is going. The Metaverse is a plausible iteration of a Google-Second Life-Wikipedia-eHarmony world plus 10 years. His view of society is that an anarchy-like libertarianism takes hold, which after 8 years of Reagan, I could understand that conclusion. The story transcends the environment while comfortably inhabiting it - we go from the Mafia to ancient theology to language to commerce to evangelical religion to refugees to WWII history to ancient Sumer. Astoundingly entertaining and educated. And fun. I would see this movie anytime.

thirty-eight

2010-06-17T13:54:00.004-04:00

"I don't say this to try and impress you but I was a bed wetter until I was around eleven years old. Then I stopped, but not for long. I started drinking alcohol regularly when I was in my early teens, at which point I returned to intermittent bed-wetting until I was twenty-nine. I haven't peed myself since the 18th of February, 1992, the day I got sober."

Craig Ferguson, Scottish late late night talk show host that follows Letterman, starts his story with: "It probably began when the Germans tried to kill my parents." Instead of continental Europe, we're in Scotland, where his parents had to deal with bombing raids on cities that produced Britain's war machine. That's not the focus - he goes back to his family history to sketch out his story, which is hilarious, humble, sad, and moving. He goes from his childhood, dropping out of high school, his stand-up career, marriages, America, alcoholism, sobriety, acting, getting his talk show, becoming an American citizen, all the way up to his speech at the White House Correspondents' Dinner - which opens his book, "American On Purpose."

It's not a boring memoir, it's not a self-congratulatory bio, it's not a self-help book, it's not written by a ghostwriter (he wrote a novel before he got super famous, I believe this is his writing), it's not a humor book. It's a warm, witty, hilarious, humble take on one man's life and the crazy things he put himself through. He's got the perspective to point out his flaws, and show you how things could have been better. Maybe this passage describing his Uncle James perfectly encapsulates the idea behind the book:

"He is a mathematician who is also literate and loves music and the arts. He is an extraordinarily charming gentleman, tall and elegant, with a huge infectious laugh that trumpets out of him after even the very first dram of Laphroig. He's worn thick glasses since he was a teenager, his hair sticks up when he's thinking, and there is nothing about our planet, our universe, or human relations that doesn't interest him. If you meet Gunka James and you don't like him, you're a dick."

He also gives a bit of a take on how show business works:

"There was a quick meeting with the show's producer and co-creator, Bruce Helford - a Tolkienesque character who was small and dark and busy, like some kind of super-intelligent alien hamster from a world more advanced than our own."

Love it. Go read this! If you've never seen his show, this is a great example of what he's doing differently...

thirty-seven

2010-06-07T00:57:00.003-04:00

Slight spoiler alert - skip this paragraph if you don't want any info about the book:

When you walk past a homeless person and have no money on you, do you mumble some platitude explaining your situation? Show some sympathy and grimace/nod? Pretend you don't see them? What if they also pretended not to see you? What if the only way you could occupy the same city was to go about your life pretending they don't exist, unseeing them. The City and the City asks that question, and imagines an entire city existing like this. Pretend the Palestinians and the Israelis both inhabited Jerusalem, divided between two countries block by block, with certain streets and squares shared between the two nationalities. Now fast forward to generations from now, where all inhabitants have been taught how to unsee the buildings, inhabitants, lights, cars, and activity of the "foreign" occupants of a country that exists all around your home. You beep at your countryman's car as he cuts you off, but when you have to drive around the car of a foreigner waiting to make a left turn, you pretend it's not there and thoughtlessly drive around it. What would be required to keep this mass illusion and delusion humming? What would the rest of the world think?

End of spoilers.

I was impressed by China Miéville's answers to these questions. Clever writing, interesting new ideas, unexpected turns. The main character is a police detective investigating a murder, and the hunt for the killer, while somewhat transparent, becomes this fascinating exploration of his City, and the foreign City he's been able to ignore his whole life. When he starts digging deeper, even archeological digs become interesting. At times it jumped around a little too much, and dwelled unexpectedly, but these faults were more than overcome by the originality of the ideas and truly fascinating vocabulary he uses to convey the existences of the citizens of both cities.

thirty-six

2010-06-06T14:05:00.001-04:00

This was just a fun read. After reading Chabon's Yiddish Policemen's Union, I came across Gentlemen of the Road, saw it was short, wanted more of his dense, clever, and intelligent writing, and picked it up. Super fun historical fiction novel about two guys 1100 years ago in the Caucasus trying to get by. One's a huge Abyssinian (African) veteran with a large axe, one's a rail-thin Frankish (French/German) barber (doctor) who fights rather well with a very thin sword. Both of these gentlemen happen to be Jewish. This was when Islam was still relatively new to the world, and Jews had a kingdom called Khazaria. The plot unfolds in a swashbuckling adventure story about a deposed bek (king), a runaway prince (who's not what he seems), and the friendship of these two guys. I absolutely enjoyed it - I only wish it was longer!

thirty-five

2010-06-06T12:48:00.002-04:00

I think that if Salt were 100 pages shorter, I would have loved it. There are parts of the book I found fascinating and informative, but it ran long and superfluous for scattered stretches. It took me a lot longer than I thought I would to get through it.

That said, I'm glad I've read it. A good synopsis shows up in the first chapter:

"The search for salt has challenged engineers for millennia and created some of the most bizarre, along with some of the most ingenious, machines. A number of the greatest public works ever conceived were motivated by the need to move salt. Salt has been in the forefront of the development of both chemistry and geology. Trade routes that have remained major thoroughfares were established, alliances built, empires secured, and revolutions provoked -- all for something that fills the ocean, bubbles up from springs, forms crusts in lake beds, and thickly veins a large part of the earth's rock fairly close to the surface."

The book absolutely accomplishes this exploration. It also explains the question I had - why salt was so valuable when it fills the ocean and exists in huge piles and mines close to the surface. It has to do with the fact that solar evaporation (of seawater) doesn't happen very efficiently in Northern climates where Western global powers existed, that we need salt so desperately for biological function, and a largely agrarian society needs to locate salt separately from their normal diets just as wild animals seek out natural salt licks to supplement their diets.

Instead of a synopsis, I'll just regale you with fun tidbits that made me dog-ear my copy of the book.

Did You Know... Roman soldiers were sometimes paid in salt, which is where we get the word salary. The Seven Seas were just the lagoons between Venice and mainland Italy, now mostly filled in by landfill. It's possible Marco Polo never really went to China - he just disappeared for 25 years, returned to Venice, got captured in a naval battle, and dictated his story to a fellow prisoner who happened to be an established writer of adventure tales. Cheese without salt is essentially ricotta - it doesn't become aged cheese until it's brined. China discovered salt mine drilling techniques millennia ago, and also harnessed natural gas from the same wells. The town of Syracuse, NY exists because of a weigh station built there for Erie Canal barge loads (often salt). Foods were thought to be better preserved in salt than in ice for many centuries, and not always because of climate or lack of refrigeration. The salt laws and salt taxes in British colonial India were insane because Britain had a subsidized salt industry, and efficient evaporation of Indian salt was a threat. The British banned salt production and gathering of natural salt that had been going on for centuries, and enforced the ban by building a 14 foot high thorny hedge that stretched 2,500 miles from the Himalayas to the ocean.

On a side note - I'd like to read a Celtic History of the World, because the Celts sound fascinating. I knew they were in the British Isles, and I knew they sacked Rome, but they ranged over all of Europe, invented new technologies, mined salt, invaded Turkey, were called Gauls by the Romans (after a Greek word for salt), and people don't know much about them because they didn't leave behind permanent records in stone or metal.

thirty-four

2010-06-01T17:30:00.002-04:00

I was really excited to pick up the Yiddish Policemen's Union, because I've heard so many good things about Michael Chabon's talents as an author. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay is on my list for this year - I might just try for another author repeat on the strength of this novel.

In 1940 there was an effort to offer the Jews worldwide a sanctuary in a part of Alaska, both to save their lives, but also to import manpower to help tap the natural resources of the Alaska Territory. The effort failed - and this book is based on the contrapositive of the effort succeeding. Set in modern times, in essentially our world, the Jews of Sitka, Alaska, face the prospect of reversion, which meant that the United States was taking the territory back. This leaves their status uncertain, and drives large parts of the narrative.

The main character is Detective Meyer Landsman (pronounced Lohndsmun), and his profession allows him to show us the highs and the lows of Yiddish Sitka life. The story unfolds like a spool of thread thrown down a few dingy flights of stairs. I won't say any more because it's a mystery and one just doesn't do that.

The spool of thread simile was purposeful (but inadequate): Chabon's imagery is spectacular and unrelenting. An approaching motorcycle is "a heavy wrench clanging against a cold cement floor. The flatulence of a burst balloon streaking across the living room and knocking over a lamp." One important character is "a deformed mountain, a giant ruined dessert, a cartoon house with the windows shut and the sink left running, a dough model made by blind orphans who never laid eyes on a man ... A millionaire could cover a Rolls-Royce with the fine black silk-and-velvet expanse of the rebbe's frock coat and trousers. ... a creature of the deep, a man-made structure, or an unavoidable act of God."

Wow. I mean, that isn't a character introduction, it's an assault like a... just kidding. I could see how some people might grow tired of the constant comparing of things to other things, but usually the comparisons were so creative that I just marveled. I hope you will too.

thirty-three

2010-06-01T17:24:00.002-04:00

I had no idea what a book called Proust was a Neuroscientist would be about, but it came highly recommended on the intertubes. It was absolutely worth the read - his premise is that you can often find artists (be they painters, composers, authors, poets, or even a chef) that discovered interesting aspects of brain and sensory function before the science had a chance to think of experimenting on the ideas. It didn't really get anti-sciency, which was something I was nervous about after reading the introduction. But it's more that the artists served a function, in addition to producing their art, to become a font of hypotheses about the way we experience the world. It makes absolute sense - if science stays in the laboratory all the time, it won't function right. The best kind of science starts with people saying "I wonder why" or "I wonder if" - ideally triggered by doing things in the world. These cooks, writers and visionaries knew a lot more about the actual qualia (triple bonus word score for using the word that inspired my blog in an actual post) of existence than many of the scientists running experiments did at the time. Auguste Escoffier realized that we like hot food not just because you're supposed to cook the meat or warm ourselves up - it tasted better. Science figured out that the nose is more important to taste than the tongue is in terms of receptors. Impressionist painters saw the world in blotches and mixes of colors, which is actually how our eyes see the world. Our brains are relied upon to make sense of a very rudimentary primary set of visual data. Proust himself wrote very uniquely about memory (as did Virginia Woolf) - presenting people that don't remember things accurately, which is often ignored in fiction.

It's a neat introduction to some psychological and neurological ideas that definitely does not get bogged down in details. If you like Oliver Sacks, you'll like this book.

thirty-two

2010-05-22T22:30:00.002-04:00

I think the only things I'd heard about The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao was that the author had an interesting writing style, it was a Latino-based story, and there were a lot of references to fantasy and sci-fi. Too interesting to ignore, so I picked it up.

Utterly amazing. It focuses on Oscar de Leon, who's obsessed with the sci-fi and fantasy genre, and who also happens to be a first-generation Dominican immigrant to Patterson, New Jersey and is painfully awkward and overweight. He speaks like a Vulcan, attempts to woo girls (spectacularly inelegantly) like a robot would, and will break your heart. He's the nice guy finishing last, and his teenage experience gives voice to what a lot of people went through in high school. Unfortunately, Oscar continued to go through it after high school.

The narrator takes an active role in the story, but you don't find out who it is until halfway through the book. In addition to Oscar's story, or perhaps as another way to tell Oscar's story, you get equal treatment of other members of the de Leon family, and I came away impressed by the way Diaz illustrates female perspectives. He builds out the family's story in a way that, I think, educates the reader a great deal about the history of the Dominican Republic (Matt, feel free to read the book and differ with this assessment).

I think that this quote from the book sums up why I liked the book so much:

"And every day he found himself watching the “cool” kids torture the crap out of the fat, the ugly, the smart, the poor, the dark, the black, the unpopular, the African, the immigrant, the strange, the femenino, the gay—and in every one of these clashes he must have been seeing himself. Sometimes he tried to reach out to the school’s whipping boys—You ain’t alone, you know?—but the last thing a freak wants is a helping hand from another freak."

Somehow this passage ends up being transcendent, rather than maudlin. Just read the book.

thirty-one

2010-05-08T17:42:00.004-04:00

I've been a little wary of Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma, but I can't for the life of me remember why. Maybe I was worried it's a guilt bomb that makes you feel bad about eating anything that has a face? I've been on a decades-long eating arc away from an all-chocolate-chip-cookie-and-milk diet and toward veggies and good lean meats. Not that I've stopped with the cookies, but it's dawned on me that I can't make an entire dinner out of them. I hear diabetes is a total bummer.

Anyhow, I'm so glad I read this.

He takes you through an educational, compassionate, funny, and really really interesting trip backwards from your plate. Or more realistically, your bun, your hand, or however you eat the Big Mac. Fortunately, he doesn't stop here, or this book would just be another Fast Food Nation. Though he does trace back how the corn is grown and fed to the cattle and chickens, and industrially processed to form such a huge percentage of your Coke and sauce and chicken McNugget, he doesn't try for the Upton Sinclair oeuvre by exposing the inner workings of slaughterhouses. He definitely gives you a picture of what happens (though he's not even allowed into the facility), but the focus is more on the effect the corn-based food has on your body. Corn is fascinating, and terrifying.

He then tries for a meal harvested from his local Whole Foods, and provides an interesting take on the industrial organic food industry. The basic takeaway is that it's a good thing so many farms are going organic because they're not putting lots of unneeded chemicals into the groundwater etc, but the processes are often not too different from non-organic factory farms. Grass-fed free-range chickens can receive that appellation by "having access" to grass and open fields for some portion of their lives. The farms keep the doors to the outside locked for most of the first few months of life, and then open them a few weeks before slaughter. Predictably, chickens living their entire lives inside don't run outside as soon as they have the chance, so they often don't have any range to be free on. But they also don't have a lot of chemicals and antibiotics put into their food. So it's a great step forward and if we can get all food produced this way and reduce the cost in the process, the planet and our health will be a lot better off.

If we could all eat his third meal, we'd all be happier and healthier. He goes to Polyface Farm in Virginia, where they raise chicken, cows, pigs, and veggies. But if you ask the farmers, they say they raise grass. All animals are pastured in sequence. In one paddock, separated by mobile fences, grass experiences a cow munching it down to an inch off the ground (as it's used to on an evolutionary scale), and then getting pooped on by the cows, which enrich the soil. Then they're moved, and chickens move in (as birds around the world follow herbivore herds) and eat the grubs in the now-short grass and the bugs attracted to the cow paddies. The chickens poop all over, nourishing the grass further. Then the grass gets time to relax and grow, and the cycle starts again. They let trees grow to keep moisture in, saving on irrigation and cooling down the animals. There's also, you might guess, a very elaborate composting system. This is a very self-sufficient farm. At work we just signed up for Arganica.com, which lets us order local organic food to be delivered every week, and to my delight, Polyface Farm meat is available. At least, it is theoretically. The downside to farms like this is that it's probably not scalable and you don't have the 400 cows being slaughtered every hour that permit me to go to the supermarket any day of the week to get a steak. But the meat from grass-fed beef and chicken, and the veggies that take advantage of this cycle are supposed to taste amazing and be very good for you. I can testify to the eggs - true pasture-fed chicken eggs are delicious. I'll let you know if they ever fill our order for Polyface steak.

His fourth meal is based entirely out of gathered food. He grows veggies in his garden, hunts a wild pig in Northern CA, gathers yeast from the air outside, and picks fruit from neighbors' fruit trees. Fascinating. And about 2 months of work for a single dinner.

I'd highly recommend this book. He deals with vegetarianism in a very honest way and I believe gives all sides a fair shot. The quibble I had early on in the book was when he discussed how setting scientists loose on the makeup of food was a bad thing, because they identified what nutrients are important and industrialized the food chain. He makes the claim that by introducing science to the understanding of food and creating, say, multivitamins, aspects of food that weren't understood back then (isoflavones, omega 3 fatty acids, etc) were eliminated from people's diets. My response as I was reading this was "but that's how science works - that prior understanding of food held up until scientists experimenting more recently found that other compounds in food were important for digestion or fighting cancer." He went off on pseudoattack on science that made no sense.

But that blip wasn't enough to take the fifth star off the review - I was very impressed by this book, and his motto: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly vegetables."

thirty

2010-05-08T17:38:00.001-04:00

Octavia Butler really does know how to write a tight, gripping story that challenges your assumptions, and Parable of the Sower doesn't disappoint. I read The Road last year, and while that was a story about what happens after society disintegrates and no one's left, this book was a story about society having disintegrated with a lot of people left. It seems scarily realistic - vast gulfs between the well-off and the poor, how moral systems might break down, climate change, water shortages, economic collapse. Butler keeps her story driving forward, and there's always a seed of hope in the basic decency of your fellow human. I don't want to give too much of it away, but it's safe to say I'll try out her other books.

twenty-nine

2010-04-27T23:49:00.002-04:00

I started this book in 2007 and had to stop partway through. I thought I'd be able to pick up where I'd left off, but I'd forgotten enough, and George R.R. Martin's plots are very complex with a lot of family history, so I ended up reading it cover-to-cover. I can read a swords-and-sorcery book pretty quickly, and A Game of Thrones is no exception.

What makes it exceptional is that Martin avoids the airy, naive, formulaic plotlines and moods that cling to most "fantasy" books. This is the opposite of what you'd normally consider a fantasy - characters are mean and selfish, they swear, people get hurt in detailed ways, main characters die without even a pause to catch your breath, there's sex and killing and power and people just trying to do what's best for themselves. Magic isn't even the prime vehicle of save-the-day goodness or corrupting badness - normal people serve just fine. Sounds an awful lot like what the Middle Ages probably was like. Aragorn, Drizzt, Sparhawk, Cadderly, Egwene, Richard Cypher, Bahzell, Eragon, Polgara - all of them wouldn't last a few hundred pages in Martin's Westeros. Everyone's a Red Shirt. It's as if he asked "what if the main guys weren't lucky about avoiding arrows and executions and sickness all the time? What if they were like everyone else?"

The result is that the book isn't exactly... peppy. You're just waiting for the next horrible thing to happen, and when there's triumph, you're waiting for the Bad Guys to figure out a way to undermine it. They usually do. But it certainly keeps things interesting.

I'm a little terrified to continue the series. He wrote this is 1996, produced three more gigantic books, the last in 2005, and still has three more to write in order to finish. Safe to say it's worse than Wheel of Time, and depsite Robert Jordan's death, that series will finish in two years.

twenty-eight

2010-04-18T19:37:00.004-04:00

I'm a little addicted to Bill Bryson's style of writing. My email verbiage has slowly morphed into a stepchild of his prose, and I'll read anything he's written. Neither Here Nor There jumped out at me when I was looking through the Europe section of the library, and after scanning Fodors, Frommers, and Let's Go editions, I was surprised to see a Bill Bryson book in the nonfiction section. Not that I have much reason to doubt anything he says in his books - it's more that I enjoy reading him so much that he must be fiction. So of course I picked it up, and finished his small section on France on the subway ride home, and then forgot about it until we got back from our trip. I picked it up again to see what I had missed in our Europe trip. Not much, it turns out, but at the same time, quite a lot.

He wrote this in 1990, and as such, his Bulgaria and Yugoslavia chapters are slightly arresting. But many of his other observations remain very salient. At the same time, however, his approach to travel in this book is not very similar to mine:

"When I told friends in London that I was going to travel around Europe and write a book about it, they said, 'Oh, you must speak a lot of languages.' 'Why no,' I would reply with a certain pride, 'only English,' and they would look at me as if I were foolish or crazy. But that's the glory of foreign travel, as far as I am concerned. I don't want to know what people are talking about. I can't think of anything that excites a greater sense of childlike wonder than to be in a country where you are ignorant of almost everything. Suddenly you are five years old again. You can't read anything, you have only the most rudimentary sense of how things work, you can't even reliably cross a street without endangering your life. Your whole existence becomes a series of interesting guesses."

I understand that excitement, but I like to prepare more than that, and am always trying to learn as much vocabulary before I cross a border as possible. But it does make an interesting book.

Instead of describing what else is in the book, I'll just quote bits to show you what you get when you read a Bill Bryson book. You can extrapolate this prose out to him fumbling around Europe. And now, comedy genius:

"It wouldn't bother me in the least if all the dogs in the world were placed in a large sack and taken to some distant island - Greenland springs attractively to mind - where they could romp around and sniff each others' anuses to their hearts' content and would never bother or terrorize me again. ... To my mind, the only possible pet is a cow. Cows love you. They are harmless, they look nice, they don't need a box to crap in, they keep the grass down, and they are so trusting and stupid that you can't help but lose your heart to them. Where I live in Yorkshire, there's a herd of cows down the lane. You can stand by the wall at any hour of the day or night, and after a minute the cows will all waddle over and stand with you, much too stupid to know what to do next, but happy just to be with you. They will stand there all day, as far as I can tell, possibly till the end of time. They will listen to your problems and never ask a thing in return. They will be your friends forever. And when you get tired of them, you can kill them and eat them. Perfect."

Even when I disagree with what he's saying, he makes my sides hurt.

"I tend to think of life as bleak when I can't find a parking space at the supermarket, but imagine what it must have been to be Italian in the fourteenth century. For a start, in 1345 it rained nonstop for six months, turning much of the country into stagnant lake and making planting impossible. The economy collapsed, banks went bust, and thousands died in the ensuing famines. Two years later the country was rocked my terrible earthquakes - in Rome, Naples, Pisa, Padua, Venice - which brought more death and chaos. And then, just when people were surely thinking that things had to get better now, some anonymous sailor stepped ashore at Genoa and said 'You know, I don't feel so hot,' and within days the great plague was beginning its long sweep across Europe."

"...but I soon learned that everyone in Paris was like that. You would go into a bakery and be greeted by some vast sluglike creature with a look that told you you would never be friends. In halting French you would ask for a small loaf of bread. The woman would give you a long, cold stare and then put a dead beaver on the counter. 'No, no,' you would say, hands aflutter, 'not a dead beaver. A loaf of bread." The sluglike creature would stare at you in patent disbelief, then turn to the other customers and address them in French at much too high a speed for you to follow, but the drift of which clearly was that this person here, this American tourist, had come in and asked for a dead beaver and she had given him a dead beaver and now he was saying that he didn't want a dead beaver at all, he wanted a loaf of bread. The other customers would look at you as if you had just tried to fart in their handbags, and you would have no choice but to slink away and console yourself with the thought that in another four days you would be in Brussels and probably able to eat again."

twenty-seven

2010-04-14T23:50:00.001-04:00

I'm very skeptical of business books - I see them as slightly more serious versions of Get Rich Quick books and Self Help books. But this was actually helpful. As someone who's worked in less traditional office and business settings, starting a new job in a real organization would be a very different experience. The First 90 Days provided some productive ways of thinking about how offices and coworker and boss relationships work. It also gave strategies of thinking about how to hit the ground running in any new situation. Planning for goals after the first day, week, month, two months, and three months helps you think about what you might want to be doing. Even for less senior people, the chapters that go through how a new CEO starts surveying her team and figuring out who should stay and go are interesting - you end up looking at a common situation through another set of eyes. Other helpful thoughts ranged from how you want to introduce yourself to new coworkers, how to organize priorities, and how to split up what you need to learn into easily manageable chunks. Much better than I thought it was going to be.

twenty-six

2010-04-14T23:20:00.002-04:00

If you haven't read Ender's Game, go read it. And then you have two choices of follow-up novels - Speaker for the Dead etc, or Ender's Shadow etc. I followed Ender's Shadow and truly enjoyed the geopolitical sci fi exploration of what happens after a unified earth loses its distant planetary enemy. I understand that the Speaker for the Dead sequence is a lot more philosophical and esoteric - I'll have to be convinced to try it.

Anyhow, Ender in Exile is a bridge between the two. It takes place within the last two chapters of Ender's game, where Card gave a quick "and this it what happened to the main character" summary. This book is an interesting exploration of that. Card's very good at writing very smart people acting very smartly. This turned out to be scientific, sociological, psychological smart pulp. I enjoyed it very much, and it kept my brain interested. He also kept the book emotionally interesting, when it'd be easy to keep very smart young people unemotional. But it's really only interesting if you read Ender's Game and wondered what happened to Ender, and don't feel like cracking open Speaker for the Dead.

twenty-five

2010-04-03T22:43:00.002-04:00

Jeffrey Toobin usually annoys me on CNN, so I picked The Nine up with a bit of dread. Fortunately the reason I erroneously thought he was inane and stupid on TV had more to do with TV and the usually moronic subjects they turn to their legal experts for than Toobin's intellect itself. He knows the Supreme Court much better than Anna Nicole Smith and divorce lawyers - and we come out the winners of that in The Nine. I knew just enough about the Supreme Court to get by in politics and DC, and just enough to know that a legal career wasn't in my future. This book serves as an excellent introduction to the last 14 or so Justices, the day-to-day of the Court, the important decisions of the last few decades, the effect the Court's had on society and politics, and most importantly, the measures being taken to influence the Court itself. If you don't know a whole lot about any of those things, this book is for you, and will actually entertain you. Toobin has a liberal perspective, so if this sort of thing would bother you, it's probably not your best introduction. But it only comes out rarely and didn't get in the way of communicating the facts. Toobin's writing is clear and lively, when it could so easily get bogged down in dates and _____ v. ______ formatting.

You get a picture of how close the court was to striking down Roe v. Wade in the Planned Parenthood v. Casey case in the early 90s - if it weren't for a chance meeting O'Connor had with Souter that pulled Kennedy away from the majority, Roe would have been struck down by a 5 Justice majority. Rehnquist was already writing the majority opinion that would do just that when Kennedy bolted and wrote a new majority opinion. Scalia was not happy at all, and throughout the book you get a picture of just how pugnacious and angry he is at just about everything. O'Connor's power as the swing justice on the court is more fascinating than you'd think - she didn't want the power and tried to circumscribe the scope of her role when writing opinions. Thomas is also fascinating - his hatred of those who opposed his nomination bursts out at odd times, all the while he exists as the most friendly justice to regular people working at the Court. He's also an RV nut - who'd have thought?

twenty-four

2010-04-03T22:22:00.001-04:00

Dead Until Dark is the novel that started the True Blood HBO series. After watching and enjoying Season 1, I thought I'd give the books a shot, to see if there's more world building and interesting detail in literary format. There's a little bit, but HBO got most of the interesting stuff into their scripts, and added more than was in the books, in my opinion. The writing's not very good, but it does try its best to pull you along. The rootsy, political, and racial interesting aspects of the HBO series are essentially absent from the book - it reads like what I'd always expected the book to read like from all of those hours I spent shelving under "H" in the Waldenbooks mystery section. It's fun and pretty brainless, and I'm glad they made a better TV series out of it. I might try the next book, but I'm looking forward to Season 2 a lot more.

twenty-three

2010-04-03T11:56:00.000-04:00

Jonathan Livingston Seagull is a 70s New Age classic. I'd also been told it's a Christian allegory, and I definitely saw why people think that, too. Basically Jonathan loves flying, instead of eating and fighting for food like the other seagulls. He discovers amazing new ways of flying fast, acrobatic flying, etc etc. The other seagulls don't like this and exile him. He then kind of goes to heaven, but then returns, and teaches other like-minded gulls. It's inspiring and the message that you should do what you love, and strive for art and beauty and compassion is all right there. If I'd read it when I was younger, I would have taken it as encouragement to keep reading. But I also would have continued to not eat a lot. Because Jonathan only eats once in the whole book, and I got worried he would waste away. Silly I know, but when the other birds tell him he's wasting his time and should eat more, I was also asking him when the last time he ate was. The clueless "flock" shouldn't be able to make such a good point. Regardless, I thought it was at least interesting enough to know what it was about, but I was very glad it was so short.

twenty-two

2010-04-02T14:28:00.001-04:00

Adam Gopnik's a writer for the New Yorker who moved his budding family to Paris because, as he writes at one point, he wanted his infant son to grow up in a beautiful world, and not be exposed to Barney the Dinosaur. He succeeds at the first, but the beautiful world is still a globalized one, and his son becomes obsessed, in a very French way, with Barney. I assume the same sort of logic propels the continued existence of EuroDisney.

The book is a collection of his essays, nearly all of which are totally fascinating and very well-written. He writes the common tropes about an American experiencing odd European customs, and witnessing the strange cultural colonization of American habits invading Paris. His essay on finding a gym was illuminating - people in Paris, other than ex-pats and police officers, don't jog. And their gyms are more for hanging out and eating sandwiches in pools than burning calories. When he finds a brand new "New York style" gym and joins it, it still retains enough Parisian-ness that the actual workout is pretty self-conscious and almost funny. His chapters about fashion week, French cooking, and daily cultural interactions are great, and he writes in big enough words that it keeps you on your toes. Enough history is thrown into the mix that you learn quite a bit about French politics and social events, too.

He shines when writing about his son, and trying to raise him well. He talks about their story time before bed, which at first just consists of him telling heroic baseball stories about "The Champ" who's a pitcher about the age of his son. There's not baseball in France so he feels he has to instill some American cultural heritage. But he goes and researches old early 20th century baseball and creates a world where The Champ is fighting with Ty Cobb, and playing in all of the old timey parks in their funny hats every night, and it apparently just captivates his son. I'd guess that pretty much anything would have, but the added storytelling prowess just adds to the effect. Anyways, it worked, as did the book.

twenty-one

2010-03-31T10:56:00.002-04:00

This was an interesting exploration of the development of French through a historical and linguistic lens, a very interesting anecdote-filled explanation of how French influenced other languages (mainly English), and a not-so-interesting set of essays on French's continued effect on the world. The authors know how to bundle their history well, so European history in the context of the development of French from early Frankish, Latin, and other local dialects was cool to know. King Francois beat some Italians in battle in the middle ages and brought back some Italian cooks (along with a family member) and French cooking got its start.

The most interesting part to an American reader is their take on the influence French had on English and North American history. Apparently the French explorers were very ambitious in the early 1600s - Champlain sent a guy named Etienne Brule to go live with the Algonquins to learn their language for a summer. He came back as a bush man, dressed as a native, and served as a translator for a bit. He also explored a lot - he was the first European to see Niagara Falls. He adopted the ways of Native Americans, which the Europeans disapproved. Tragically, he was murdered by his adopted tribe, who then ate him - no one recorded the reason.

Other "did you know"s: sled dog racers "Mush" is from a mongrelized "Marchez!" ("Walk!" or "Go!"); "tennis" is from early French's "tenetz" ("take this"); Cajuns are Northern Louisianans who fled or were deported from Acadia - Northern Canada - when the British tried to crush the French speakers of Canada in the 1700s; Dixie is called Dixie because the ten dollar bill used in Louisiana was printed in French - and the French word for "ten" is "dix."

Unfortunately the book went on a little long for my interests and I skimmed the last couple chapters. Unless you're very interested in the Quebecois nationalism movement or specific utilizations of modern French, the last third of the book can drag. I did find it funny that although the French Academy tries so hard to preserve an idealized form of French so stridently, everyday French speakers are simplifying the language by eliminating the use of the passe simple and ensuring that all new French verbs follow the -er form and not the more convoluted -ir or -re forms. Normal people want things to be easy, not complicatedly pristine or beautiful. Even the French.

twenty

2010-03-07T11:22:00.001-05:00

Stephen Clarke moved to Paris more than a decade ago from London, wrote a couple novels about France, and then decided to write a declarative book about how to understand the French: Talk to the Snail. This is a fine idea, and the book contains many fine ideas. Even some passable jokes and amusing observations. He was able to get a few positive French reviews, and does not appear to have been deported - so his largely mocking roast of French culture and social habits didn't cut too deeply or inaccurately. He even said some nice things, quite sincerely.

All that said, I struggled mightily to like this book. One of the main theories I have for why this was so difficult for me is that he's kind of a jerk, and allows this fact to surface in his writing.

One of the better examples is in his last chapter (or "commandment" - the book is organized into 11 commandments used to understand the French), where he talks about how to deal with falling in love with French people. He talks about the different kinds of French lovers, introducing his three main archetypes with:

"Some French men are considerate, good listeners, stylish, funny, and always available to take a woman out for a great evening. As in so many other countries, they are gay. Or they are straight and on their best behavior because they haven't yet got the girl into bed."

Ha ha! Men who try to be considerate to others and not oafish boors must be gay, everywhere! And this is implied to be a bad thing! Ha! Ha! If this were the only instance of this sort of implication, I'd brush it off as a joke, but this seems to really mark his personality, and unfortunately it colors the rest of the book.

He also litters the book with lots of unfunny jokes. Not just the "no pun intended" when there was not actually a pun made. When he talks about the French habit of smoking wherever, whenever they like, I expected some good humor and observations. He does this here and there, and it's mildly pleasant (while at the same time worrying for someone planning a trip to France who hates cigarettes). But then he tries this:

"One Californian occasionally tries the UN-sanction approach. 'You're not going to smoke any more!' he tells baffled French smokers, who wonder what he is going to do about it. Invade their table, maybe? This frontal attack never works. At best it causes a colonial war."

Ha ha! Colonial war! Wait, what? How did we get to Algeria, or perhaps India or Vietnam? Are colonial wars like French natives ignoring tourists? I can't see the next laborious "punny" setup in the next paragraph because you're too far in the weeds.

On the whole, I enjoyed the general intent of the book - a loving, playful, embittered roast of the French. I learned a bit, laughed at times, and gained more of an understanding about a culture (from, obviously, one person's perspective). But all of that was almost undone by the author's pervasive, jerky personality thrusting itself through the prose.

The main reason it got three stars instead of two is his educational discussion of French swearing. My favorite is "Tu me fais chier" which means "You're boring me to death here (literally, you are making me shit)." I just love that - there's no equivalent in English in the least. In French, if someone is boring you, they are making you shit. Thank you, Stephen Clarke, for I never would have known this without having read your silly book.

nineteen

2010-03-04T23:43:00.002-05:00

Richard Matheson wrote a book called I Am Legend a few decades ago, and then last year they apparently made a Will Smith movie out of it with the same initial premise, but a very divergent story (if I'm to believe the trailers and Wikipedia). Matheson's tight book about Robert Neville, the last man on earth taken over by vampires, is an enjoyable horror novel that verges on sci-fi and stays well away from fantasy. These vampires are much more like current cinema zombies and much less like the Twilight/True Blood fanged model types. I thought there was enough new and interesting material, especially for a book written that long ago, that it kept me interested and fulfilled the hype that caused me to read the book in the first place. I particularly liked how Neville, the main character, is a scientific man, and approaches trying to figure out what's wrong with these people that so resemble vampires from nightmare. He starts to experiment, tries theories, and eventually reaches a very natural conclusion. Matheson takes the story to a different place that Hollywood appears to have been afraid to go. I'm glad I gave it a shot.

eighteen

2010-03-02T18:46:00.003-05:00

I wish Carl Sagan was my live-in step-uncle who could take me outside and explain the wonder of the night sky, tell stories about forgotten scientists, and explain to me how to live my life. What a great guy! I loved reading Contact, and I also read either Cosmos or Pale Blue Dot (it was in middle school so I honestly can't remember), but The Demon-Haunted World was the kind of book I'd been wanting to read at this point in my life.

The synopsis is that he explains the wonder, utility, necessity, and awesomeness of science. The book is dense, and I would have taken out some of the middle chapters where he compassionately, carefully, and thoughtfully debunks paranormal theories from faith healing to alien abduction. But who am I to tell him how to write a book? My copy is now so dog-eared I'll be going back to it for the rest of my life.

I'll be absorbing this one for a while, so I'll leave this review with just some thoughts in scattershot bulletpoints:

-Science is both utterly human and difficult for us to absorb. When hunter-gatherers first learned how to track prey, they had to learn many physical laws in practical terms. Older tracks became more eroded due to wind, heavier animals had deeper tracks due to weight, injured prey moved differently than healthy prey. They must have tried theories and either proved or disproved them, and this became knowledge, which was passed on through generations. The same with gathering plants - how much trial and error before our ancestors settled on the foods we tend to enjoy? And not to mention agriculture. Science, skeptical thought, curiosity is what makes us human.

-Subsequent cultural pressures to explain the unknown through faith or paranormal causes pull us away from where our minds naturally want to go. So those who castigate science as a malevolent force, or immoral tool have only to look at witch hunts and other dogmatic explorations for truth to see that it's not science, but those who would abuse it, that we need to fear. For instance, did you know that a man named Trofim Lysenko managed to convince Stalin that genetics was a philosophically incorrect field and should be banned from the USSR? He chose to believe in acquired characteristics - not that evolutionary forces caused adaptation, but that if you worked out a lot your offspring would be strong too. His theories lacked experimental controls, his conclusions flew in the face of a large body of contradictory data, and when smart Soviet scientists disagreed with him, he managed to have them deported. His recommendations messed up the Soviet agriculture system so much, for instance in waiting for an extra crop of wheat, that farmers actually produced less than the otherwise would have. Soviet geneticists were set back decades. Amazing!

-People writing science curricula should read everything he's ever written. His anecdotes, lessons, stories, and essays made me want to go back and study physics, chemistry, and math.

I can't say enough about this book. I'll leave things, for now, with a typical quote from the book:

"As I've tried to stress, at the heart of science is an essential balance between two seemingly contradictory attitudes - an openess to new ideas, no matter how bizarre or counterintuitive, and the most ruthlessly skeptical scrutiny of all ideas, old and new. This is how deep truths are winnowed from deep nonsense. The collective enterprise of creative thinking and skeptical thinking, working together, keeps the field on track."

For the fun anecdotes and warm jokes and fascinating arguments, you'll have to pick it up for yourself.

seventeen

2010-03-02T18:26:00.002-05:00

I can't really say much about Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickeled and Dimed. It's been around for ten years. Most people I know have read it. I thought I had read it until I realized I never actually consumed the words, just talked to enough people about it that it seemed I had. I had an idea of what the book would be, and it essentially manifested itself to be the theoretical book in my head.

She tries an academic exercise to try to live paycheck-to-paycheck in some spurts of dead-end jobs, and experiences some of the hardships of the working poor. She fully explains her self-evident safety valves that keep her sane and safe, and she's able to deal pretty honestly with herself. At first she seems even more whiny than I would be, complaining about silly things that wouldn't faze me. But by the end of the book she's really in the element, not bothered by some pretty soul-crushing circumstances.

What I thought was interesting is that she manages to articulate so much of the problems in a comprehensive way - not just lack of money, but lack of safe and dependable housing, food, safety, goals, family, etc etc. My hat's off to her for spotlighting issues that people truly choose not to think about whenever they get the chance. If this book doesn't make you give a smile to the person checking your groceries or stocking the shelves next time you're shopping, I don't know what will.

sixteen

2010-02-21T16:09:00.002-05:00

What, you were expecting me to read Camus' The Stranger and attempt to give an intelligent literary or philosophical review that says something profound and new? Not even going to try. I will, however, posit that Meursault, the main character, is actually a self-absorbed, psychopathic Ford Prefect that went to Algeria after he realized that he was stuck on Earth while writing the Earth entry to the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Meursault (Ford's pseudonym, obviously) is a dispassionate observer of reality and Earth culture, and barely reacts to what people normally assume humans would react to, and pays deep attention to the mundane. Ford to a T. He's often not engaged, stares off at nothing (probably looking toward his home planet in the vicinity of Betelgeuse), and the traditional moral code of Earth culture has little bearing on him. He doesn't understand when people are aghast at his aloofness after his mother's death, because his mother is actually in another solar system.

He's also a little depressed and psychopathic due to his realization that he can't leave the planet and falls in with bad company. He doesn't care. He's also still getting used to English. He therefore speaks in short sentences. Camus was wise to notice this.

Okay, short of that breakthrough, I've got little else to say about The Stranger. It didn't really teach me anything about French culture (other than the caricature of existentialist French philosophers smoking cigarettes in cafes saying "ça ne fait rien"). I got the cursory philosophical understanding my mind is capable of in the exploration of existentialism and lack of meaning. It wasn't a very enjoyable read, and I'd only recommend it to people who want a quick exploration of these themes. Meursault's a jerk who couldn't care less about anything, but instead of just sitting there, his only actions are to make other people's lives worse (except maybe Maria's). I don't have time for people like this, not even imaginary antagonists. He disqualifies himself as the protagonist, in my view.

One more note - I wonder what atheist thinkers say about this book. Granted, the chaplain and the magistrate he deals with are more representations of overt dogma, forced meaning, and outmoded ideas about the reason for guilt. Yet Meursault catapults himself so far away from decency, while also attacking religion, that things get tricky if people assume all atheists are like this. I'd be curious to hear how folks of secular inclinations have dealt with books like this.

I guess I was just expecting a little more from a book that's so critically acclaimed. But I could absolutely change my mind - I did love Fight Club, which is a modern existentialist story. But it doesn't really matter in the end, after all. Right?

fifteen

2010-02-21T02:49:00.005-05:00

What a book. When you read "fictional autobiography" your ears should prick up in warning, and when the subject matter is a Lost Boy of Sudan, the danger of an author's journey to exploitative self-gratification goes to Def-Con 2. Dave Eggers' What Is The What manages the wobbly tightrope and works with the real-life subject of the fictionalized autobiography, Valantine Achak Deng, to write an incredible book.

As I understand it, Eggers was initially just going to help Deng write a book about his life, as a way to try to explain the conflicts in Sudan to a global audience. They met after he'd been in the States for a while and attempting to acclimate himself to the new environment and resolve the differential between his goals and what seemed possible. Somehow Deng and Eggers, after lots of work together, realized first that Deng wasn't up to writing a comprehensive book in English, and then that a straight-up biography or memoirs wouldn't be feasible. So they settled on an attempt to tell the story of his life through some fictional devices to streamline the narrative. I also imagine that the broader historical expository that was weaved into various conversations and internal ruminations was more for the reader's benefit than an actual part of his life. Somehow it works.

Valantino Achak Deng is a Dinka from Southern Sudan and experiences the second major civil war in Sudan starting at roughly age 7 or 8, when his village is destroyed and he's separated from his family. He eventually joins groups of other orphaned boys walking to Ethiopia, hundreds of miles west, through deserts, rivers, government soldiers, lions, local Islamic militias, hyenas, strafing helicopters, and rebel troops, all of which try to kill the orphaned boys. Making it to the refugee camp in Ethiopia of course does not solve their problems, and they have to flee to a refugee camp in Kenya, where he spends ten years growing up. He finally gets cleared to go to America as one of the famous Lost Boys of Sudan to settle in Atlanta, in 2001. He's sitting on his plane on the tarmac in Nairobi ready to fly to New York on Tuesday, September 11th. The plane doesn't take off for obvious reasons. He does make it to the States, and acclimating to a new environment, culture, and country isn't the only thing he has to deal with. The first sentence brings you to the present (of the book), and in the events of about two days, he doesn't tell his backstory through obvious flashback narration. Eggers uses what seems like a very authentic device - instead of "remembering" entire portions of his life, or telling people verbally what his life was like, Deng is shown to internally monologue (dialogue?) with people he's interacting with that don't fully seem to understand him. The man who robs him gets a detailed explanation of what insane things he went through just to stay alive in Sudan - at least he does inside of Deng's head. It jumps around a bit, but the narrative flows well and I think it works.

I like to think I read enough newspaper articles, blog posts, and books, and talk to enough people who know more about this conflict than I do that I have a small idea of what's happening in Sudan. But it's hard to meld recent updates (that often assume a lot of prior knowledge) and conversations into an understanding that makes sense in a narrative format. This book was invaluable for me to put a lot of the puzzle pieces together. It's not that it teaches you historical facts (though it does), it's that Deng's story personalizes the insane things that have happened and are happening in a desolate part of the world. I feel like now when I read a NYT story on Sudan now it fits into a more comprehensive framework.

Eggers also manages to either take his own sense of humor, or use Deng's sense of humor at the absurd to join intense occurrences with humorous interpretations. It goes beyond just the silliness of African-immigrant-figures-out-air-conditioning jokes, to provide some universal misunderstandings and hilarious mis-takes that let you laugh at the bizarre, and see Deng's deeply optimistic and hopeful view of his life. That is an accomplishment in and of itself.

PS - I read this on audiobook, and a character from the Wire narrates! He does a great job and had the accents down pat.

fourteen

2010-02-19T02:30:00.003-05:00

I read the short story Bloodchild years and years ago and forgot how good it was. I didn't know it was in a larger short story anthology, and was happy to find the chance to read more Octavia Butler. She mentions in one of the extra essays in the back of the book that she's the only black woman who makes her living writing sci-fi, and after reading the short stories, I want to read some of her novels. The stories in the mix touch on interspecies love (via a parasite kind of relationship); biblical incest in present-day life; disease's effect on progeny and coping; a total breakdown of language's affect on society; and finally what the lives of the crazy people who work in dead-end jobs that we quickly look away from must be like. The one about disease was very interesting in the way the characters deal with a degenerative genetic disease and how that affects their plans for creating a family. Of course she takes the plot on a perpendicular turn from there, but I thought the whole story was interesting.

That's all I'll really say without ruining more of the plots than I already have, but if you like alternative fiction, give her a shot. I'm going to give some of her novels a shot, perhaps even this year.

Also, in another essay she recommends audiobooks to gain a further understanding of the way language is used, so take that, audiobook doubters!

thirteen

2010-02-19T00:59:00.003-05:00

I was really excited to read this book - as we'll never be able to have autobiographies of JFK or RFK, this is as close as we'll get. Teddy'll always be my Senator, and he's been a hero to liberals, but I wanted to gain another window into his older brothers in addition to an accounting of his long life. It was an enjoyable and informative read. He didn't paint over the bad parts, dealt honestly with happy and sad times, and I think managed to say some interesting things while thinking over an extraordinary existence. It's not often that people are able to spend a year writing their memoirs when then know they're going to die. Certainly even fewer with the life of Edward Kennedy.

I'd heard lots of stories about his parents (pushy, demanding, abusive, supportive), but I think this sums up the way he viewed it:

"Once, when I was thirteen or fourteen years old, Dad called me into his room for a chat. I must have done something that prompted the conversation, but I don't remember what it was. But he used phrases so concise and vivid that I can remember them word for word nearly sixty-five years later: 'You can have a serious life or a nonserious life, Teddy. I'll still love you whichever choice you make. But if you decide to have a nonserious life, I won't have much time for you. You make up your mind. There are too many children here who are doing things that are interesting for me to do much with you."

Wow! That's cruel, loving, and hilarious honesty, and I can understand why Teddy Kennedy became the man he was. His mom sounded great along those lines too - lots of trips to the museums and pop quizzes in arithmetic on the way there and back.

The stories about Jack and Bobby helped complement what I'd learned in books like The Last Campaign - I really need to see if there are some well-reviewed RFK biographies.

I'd provide more of a summary but that would be silly for all he's seen. It was helpful to go through the important political events of the last 50 years through his eyes, even the things I thought I knew about. One anecdote about Reagan might prove exemplary. He and several other Senators walked into the Oval Office to discuss trade quotas and protective tariffs for domestic shoe production. Massachusetts, Missouri, and several other states had a strong local cottage industry making all kinds of shoes, and foreign manufacturing was threatening livelihoods across the country. When Kennedy started to raise the point and explain what might be done, Reagan cut him off and asked him what kind of shoes he was wearing. Kennedy was thrown off track and told him, and Reagan launched into literally a half hour's talk about what kind of shoes he liked, how his dad sold shoes, where in the country you could find the best shoes, how to polish your shoes so they'll keep their shine, and so on. The Senators were floored and never got the discussion back to where they wanted it, and soon the meeting was over. The Senators then had to go out to the cameras and have a press conference about what was not talked about in the Oval Office. Reagan had no idea and no interest.

Kennedy manages to write without a My Life-ish laundry list of everyone he's ever met, and also without a stream of talking points in pablum form. I learned a lot, and loved the conversational tone. So sad he's gone.

twelve

2010-02-16T00:56:00.001-05:00

I decided to break my permanent rule against reading abridged books by trying the audiobook version of Dreams From My Father, read by the author, now known as POTUS. I never read abridged versions, especially this year, but I made an exception because I thought the experience of the President reading his book, written in 1996, would be entertaining and enlightening, adding depth to prose I wasn't entirely sure about.

I was right - hearing him read this truly added a lot to this book, even if certain parts were excised. I'm making a note to go back and read the full book after this year to get the full text, but I'm really glad we spent the drive up to Boston hearing him tell us his story. After finishing The Audacity of Hope, I knew he was a great writer, so his particular clever ways of putting words together didn't surprise me. But the clear sentiment he felt when writing about his feelings in Dreams From My Father shines through the prose, allowing him to say some pretty unique things. I'd love to be able to quote longer passages, but because it's an audiobook I could only email myself short blurbs. These were what got to me:

Each of us chose a costume, an armor against uncertainty.

Sorry-ass motherfucker ain't got nothin' on me

Maybe we could give the bad-ass n@$%*! pose a rest, save it for when we really needed it

Everybody was welcome in the club of disaffection

Those phrases are not something you hear from State Senators, Senators, or Presidents, and it was refreshing to hear them, in his own voice. It gives me hope for the remainder of his presidency.

eleven

2010-02-03T17:18:00.004-05:00

I can't really do much to add to anything that's already been said about Pride and Prejudice. I'd heard it was a favorite of many friends, so I gave it a shot on audiobook. I was expecting awful convoluted prose, halting stiff drama, obsession with etiquette, and lots of sighing. Essentially I was fearing either a romance novel or the antecedent of every awful romantic comedy you've ever seen.

I wasn't counting on Jane Austen being so smart. She can write very, very well. I've had to stop myself from imitating her style after I finished - I'm amazed at how complicated her phrasing could be without sounding too contrived. She manages to make complex sentences flow easily. Consider me impressed.

As for the subject matter, I'd heard people sighing about Mr. Darcy for years, so I imagined that he was either the one that got away or the one meant for Elizabeth in the end. Perhaps that's what colored my view of Wickham's account of Darcy and Elizabeth's credulousness. I mean, you meet one guy, he seems okay if a little awkward, and then another guy who you know even less tells you the first guy's a jackass, and you believe the second guy? I suppose she called the book Pride and Prejudice for a reason (and Wikipedia tells me it was first called First Impressions).

I would have been even more misanthropic than Darcy if I had to deal with these lunatics and their slavish attention to social contrivances all the time. I suppose it would have been useful for me to read this in high school to see what my dislike of high school social contrivances seemed like to some people from the outside. But really, wouldn't you have been like Darcy?

Elizabeth is a great character - managing to be logical and intelligent but human and messy as well. I liked her relationship with her father, and it took me a while to see her mother's being more ridiculous than harmless.

Anyhow, I went into the book with low expectations, and came out impressed. It seems as if the bad romantic comedies rip off Austen rather than all of them being cut from the same silly cloth.

ten

2010-01-31T12:58:00.003-05:00

This was Dr. Hunter S. Thompson's first book, published as he was arriving on the journalistic map in the 60s. I was interested to see how much of his style perfected in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72, and The Great Shark Hunt was endemic to his writing. Hell's Angels is a great deal more journalistic and straight than his later writings, but you can absolutely see pieces of his manic existence, sometimes only alluded to in passing. The strange quotations, casual mentions of drug use and alcoholism, the rantish meanderings that begin in confusion and end up on another plane of understanding all the while discussing very real and important things... they're all there. But he also relies more on traditional storytelling techniques, and the mishmash works well.

He became close with some members of the Hell's Angels motorcycle club in San Francisco and Oakland, and decided to write about it. His presentation of the Angels seems schizophrenic. They define themselves as being Against Everything. They have no qualms about escalating conflicts, both imagined and mundane, into raging brawls, massive property destruction, and gang rapes. They just want to be able to ride their choppers (stripped down Harley Davidson motorcycles) wherever they want, drink at any bar serving beer and whiskey, steal what they need, find girls that'll have them, not bathe or shave, dress in leather with their "colors" (patches and insignia designating them as Hell's Angels outlaws), and not get disrespected. In this sense they are compared to Wild West Outlaws and John Dillinger types.

They are also artists in the caretaking of their bikes, retrofitting them, ensuring they run perfectly, and only house what they need on a bike. They do need a big frame though, and HST describes their view of other motorcycles thusly:

"The little bikes may be fun, like the industry people say, but Volkswagens are fun too, and so are BB guns."

He also describes them as descendants of Scots-Irish downtrodden Appalachian fighting people, in the tradition of that book Albion's Seed, Jim Webb's book Born Fighting, Malcolm Gladwell's explanation of its "honor" culture, or this blog post. Thompson follows the group's migration to the west coast, where they found the end of the road. Their descendants, after fighting in WWII, still had places they wanted to explore and things to prove. Going on "runs" to the middle of nowhere to be alone with friends, drink to insanity, and break things seemed to be the only activity that sated those bottled-up needs. As he describes: "There is the same sulking hostility toward 'outsiders,' the same extremes of temper and action, and even the same names, sharp faces and long-boned bodies that never look quite natural unless they are leaning on something."

There's a point when they're lounging on a lake in Inland California on a run, and an expensive platoon of motorboats arrive on the other side of the inlet. The people piloting them are handsome frat boys and gorgeous model type girls, playfully lounging in the sun and clear water. At the same time:

"A hundred feet away, on the other side of the inlet, the Hell's Angels lounged in all their grubby splendor. There were no sun tans, bikinis, or waterproof watches on that side, The outlaws stood on the rocky beach in jockey shorts, wet Levi's and matted beards that made their skin seem pale and moldy. Several were splashing around in the water with their clothes on."

You wonder where this kind of apathetic, negative, mutually destructive, suspicious slice of the population has gone - Hell's Angels aren't the menace they were in the 60's. But it's just changed into another generation, and grown. Here's HST again:

"Their lack of education has not only rendered them completely useless in a highly technical economy, but it has also given them the leisure to cultivate a powerful resentment ... and to translate it into a destructive cult..."

Recognize this resentment? Go to any political blog post and read the comments. Turn on Fox News and wait for a "Special Comment" or Glenn Beck's show. Go to a Tea Party protest. It's all there. And some have started to spread an educated veneer onto the resentment, while others have inexplicably tied right-wing religious politics to it, while others have forced a strange marriage of this resentment with the political priorities of the super-rich. Whenever this angry zeitgeist can be harnessed and shoehorned into the voting booth through scare tactics and misrepresentations, anyone can get elected, because there are a lot of people the feel left behind in this country. I wonder if this is a uniquely American thing, or if other countries have similar movements, but in different forms.

Anyhow, Thompson surprised me with the clarity and thoughtful analysis he brought to this book - along with his usual wild ride. Definitely recommended because it manages to jump through the anachronisms and speaks to certain parts of our present sociological existence.

nine

2010-01-29T12:24:00.002-05:00

The Black Swan - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

I've been digesting this book for a day or two, and I still don't really know what to say about it. Taleb is very intelligent and can write about difficult philosophical and epistemological subjects with ease, and he usually has the courtesy to bring you along with him. You know he understands what he's trying to say, but sometimes it seems like he's trying to say contradictory things. The book is a discussion of how people treat probability, risk, statistics, and prediction incorrectly. He marshals his experiential anecdotes, fictional stories, theories, philosophical ideas, and statistical breakdowns in the main argument that we need to pay more attention to Black Swans. These are events or quirks in existence that are nearly impossible to predict, very important and impactful, and rare. His argument is that usual statistical models (the bell curve, Gaussian statistics) aren't useful because they don't take into account these rare and important events. This causes people to build their lives around safe assumptions of what will happen, ensuring they remain unprepared for Black Swans, which can be positive or negative.

I think it's an interesting argument, and he managed in 2007 to talk about the dangers of Wall Street ignoring the warning signs of a large collapse in the housing market and hedge fund/investment bank over-leveraging. That's an important insight, and I'd like people like him weighing in on how our financial sector should be organized.

My troubles with the book mainly reside in the organization - he meanders a great deal. At times he seems like he wrote it to settle scores and write wrongs by explaining himself to people he feels have slighted him (similar to Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion). I found myself noticing increasing instances of not-so-subtle digs at the French, Nobel Prize winners, most philosophers, economists, Wall Street traders, people who think they know anything, and anyone who's looked askance at Taleb's theories. Additionally, he veers between "we don't and can't know anything" and "I'm not saying we don't and can't know anything" as we speed through the book.

I got the point that narrow uses of statistical models are dangerous and panning out in the picture of reality is important. I got that a lot of "experts" are too focused and blinded by their dogma to be safely useful for dictating policy and research. I got that good ideas are often ignored, important events aren't predicted well, and history is often unexplainable. Skepticism is underutilized. But other than vowing to think critically-er, I'm not sure exactly what else I'm supposed to take from the book.

I'll still be ruminating about what I got from this book for some time, and I'm glad I read it. But I think it could have been a better book.

eight

2010-01-25T17:15:00.002-05:00

This was a lot of fun. Tom Standage is a writer for The Economist, and this book, A History of the World in 6 glasses, reads well. It takes you through 6 chapters dedicated to: beer, wine, distilled spirits, coffee, tea, and Coke.

Beer was a big part of the development of domestication and agriculture, and he goes through how it probably developed and what customs still survive. Beer used to be drunk from one huge jar, and everyone would use a straw, so it was a very communal thing - one of the antecedents of the modern "cheers."

Wine he takes through its discovery and the Greek and Roman preference for it. Did you know that "strong wine" for them was a mixture of 2 parts water to 1 part wine? Only insane cultures and Gods drank unadulterated wine without mixing a lot of water with it.

The distilled spirits chapter followed the exploration of the world, sea voyages, and increasing international trade. Rum became a standard daily ration on British Navy vessels, and because they drank it with sugar and lime juice (called grog), sailors stopped getting scurvy. The French sailors, who still drank brandy every day, were more scurvy prone, and Standage attributes some of the Royal Navy's successes to the disappearance of scurvy.

Coffee is important in terms of the Enlightenment and waking up a population that drank beer, wine, and liquor all the time (water was too unsanitary). Once coffee's popularity took hold, and people could drink something that didn't make them inebriated and actually gave them energy and focus, coffeehouses turned into meccas of discovery, discussion, business and science. Newton was inspired to invent calculus after a friend had made a bet at a coffee house about the elliptical orbits of planets. And the dubious story of Gabriel de Clieu is just funny, true or not.

Tea was another import from Asia (coffee came from the Middle East) that caught on in Britain and followed the development of the colonial system. The British imported their tea from China, not knowing how it was harvested. Once they got their hands on some of the actual plants and began cultivation in India, the British East India Company became a very powerful entity in the region with armies, government-like powers, and a huge influence on Parliament.

And Coke brings you to the present, where corporations, branding, globalization, and the relationship between business and government can be explored in an interesting way through the development of Coca-Cola. I don't drink it myself, but if I did, I'd really be interested in how it came about and how the company has operated for the last century.

It's all fascinating, I'd encourage anyone to read it. The contextual treatment of world history was very easily absorbed. For instance, his explanation of the actual reasons Bostonians held the Boston Tea Party would make certain parts of the conservative movement think twice about their ideological mascot - the Tea Act was actually a move to lower taxes but also gave the British East India Company a monopoly to export tea to the colonies. The Tea Party is more of a lesson in the dangers of ties between government and business than a pat anti-tax catchphrase.

You'll never look at your glass, mug, bottle, or tumbler the same way again.