Knight Life

I finished Peter David's Knight Life and One Knight Only while on safari. These had been mailed to me by the incomparable Lucky Bob, who has already reviewed both of them. His reviews are better, so the links above just send you straight over to him for the full story. Suffice to say I enjoyed both of these, as you might suspect being sort of a political junkie with a slight affinity for the truth. The notion of King Arthur returning in the present day to run for office and what that might entail… it's a gold mine.

I will say that, Peter David being a fantasy writer and not a political writer, the books—in particular One Knight Only, tended much more toward fantasy than political fiction usually does. Had I written them they would have gone off in an entirely different direction, and readers like me who don't do a lot of fantasy literature might wish Mr. David had spent more time considering how King Arthur reacts to modern politics and less time on the dirty doings of Morgan le Fey and Gilgamesh. But that's just me. I still had a good time.

River of Grass

I finished this book in November the day before the safari. Like Some Kind of Paradise, this is a book about Florida history—at least to some degree. Published in 1947, this is really the original Florida history, the first important popular book about Florida to attempt any decent coverage of the pre-Columbian period. And it set the tone, in many ways, for every Florida history that was to follow, by drawing its narrative around the state's ecology.

Marjorie Stoneman Douglas was for many years after this book's publication regarded as the foremost Everglades scholar, historian, and protector, and she fought for Everglades restoration until her death a few years ago. River of Grass was not so much the end of a long studied interest in the Glades as it was the start of a career. The book also started a lot of other careers, got a lot of people in South Florida and elsewhere interested in the unique patch of ground we have at the end of this state and have been trying to destroy for two hundred years. For that alone the book deserves high honor.

But it was written in the 40's. New scholarship and new ideas have changed the way we think about some parts of the state's early history, and this can be jarring if you're up to date on what we now think about Ponce and the Calusa and everything else. But Douglas was the first writer to say in any popular format that Ponce de Leon was not, in fact, looking for the Fountain of Youth, and indeed may not have even known the myth. It was added later by Spanish romantics looking to idealize what was a brutal and difficult conquest (and one that didn't exactly pay off for Spain).

The first few chapters are about Glades ecology, and here it is clear Mrs. Douglas really knew and loved the Glades, had spent time in it and talked to the people who'd lived in it. And it's clear how important it was to her to make the Glades seem like more than some God-forsaken swamp at the end of the Earth, which for most people at that time it still was. Occasionally the prose is a bit florid, the description just a mite too romantic to be entirely real, but it's still wonderfully evocative.

After the first five chapters, Mrs. Douglas settles down into a linear narrative, something Some Kind of Paradise could have used a bit more of. She is a gifted storyteller, and that is the key requisite for a popular historian. Though River of Grass covered much of the same material I'd read just a few months earlier, I found this book a faster read, more like a story, less a witty retelling of facts than a gripping old-fashioned yarn. That's what popular history should be.

The book focuses exclusively on south Florida, south of Lake Okeechobee for the most part with occasional notes about goings on elsewhere in the state but nothing in-depth. For this reason it's not the best available history of the state, if that's what you're looking for. But it is hard to beat River of Grass for a good historical adventure, and you'll get a great insight for the Glades and the people who've sought to tame them.

If Chins Could Kill

I was sent Bruce Campbell's autobiography, If Chins Could Kill: Confessions of a B-Movie Actor, by the inestimable Lucky Bob, who encouraged me to read it someplace where I wouldn't be concerned about laughing out loud. I am never concerned by such things, and I am already regarded by many people here as not fully sane. But the end of October seems to have reduced my ability to laugh out loud, even in private, at least for a while. So I didn't laugh out loud that much at the book.

But in any other month… well. This is a great book, a great read, funny and warm and full of passion. Mr. Campbell did what most people don't think they can really do—he followed his dream. He wanted to be an actor, because being an actor isn't really very much like working. Or at least that’s how it seemed. For Bruce Campbell, at least, acting turned out to be very much like work, hard sometimes, unpleasant, crazy, not especially remunerative. But throughout it he was what he wanted to do, what he had always dreamed of doing, and so the hardship and the struggle were never so bad, and what might have been grueling work seemed much more fun.

You may not have heard of Bruce Campbell. He admits this much on the back cover. But he also points out that his book isn't just for his fans. It's for anyone who wants to know what life in Hollywood is like for the majority of actors, for the working stiffs who come in every day and do the small roles and don't command $20 million per picture, who don't feed the tabloid machine and don't go testify before Congressional committees about their dimwit political opinions and don't headline summer blockbusters. There are lots of such people, far more than there are big stars, and to some degree Campbell is speaking for all of them.

If Hollywood is a hard place to make a living, but a kid from suburban Detroit with a big chin can make it, then what's to scare the rest of us off from trying our hand at what we really want to do? That's the message that underlies the whole book, and what a great message it is. Bruce Campbell may not be a household name, and you don't get the impression he wants to be anymore, but the friends he ran with as a kid all went out to Hollywood to make their way, and one of those friends (who appears throughout the book) is Sam Raimi, the fellow who made those little movies called Spider-Man and Spider-Man 2. I don't know if you've seen those; they're only the best superhero movies ever made. Clearly you can do well doing what you really want to do.

I could philosophize a while here about how this was exactly the right book for me to read right now, and it was. But I'll spare you. I may not have laughed out loud every other page, but I wouldn't have laughed out loud at much the last couple weeks; doesn't mean I don't appreciate the humor. And whether you're a fan of Evil Dead or Army of Darkness or Brisco County, Jr. (or The Hudsucker Proxy, one of my favorite movies of all time) or not, Bruce Campbell is a funny man, a down-to-Earth guy with a great story to tell and a great way of telling it. You're going to like this book. Go read it.

O Pioneers!

I bought this book, along with Goodnight, Nebraska, earlier this year when I was planning a long trip to Nebraska and wanted some background reading. That trip—the Nebraska Hedonism Tour, which was to begin with an old friend's wedding and included stops at nearly all of the state's dozen wineries and which I was greatly looking forward to—fell through when the trip I'm currently on came up. Consequently O Pioneers!, by Willa Cather, languished on my bookshelf for a while. It being a bit of Classic American Literature such as you might read in high school, it might have languished there for a long time (high school literature and I have had a bad relationship ever since Mrs. Foust's interpretation of Silas Marner), so before I left home I placed it among a pile of books to have my folks send me out here when I ran out of other reading material.

I've never read Willa Cather before. She was apparently quite the interesting character in her own right. O Pioneers! follows, in bits and pieces, the life of Alexandra Bergson of Nebraska and her family, of how the high plains were tamed by the hand of man and the plow. Actually, in this case, it's the hand of woman that does much of the work. Cather's Alexandra is a strong-willed woman who makes her way by her own wits. She may not get her hands dirty with the farm work, but she is one of the first large-farm managers in history and in an era when women weren't expected to manage anything and even their rights to property were suspect. Parts of the critical commentary that lead off the book—as it must lead off all "classic" literature as if readers cared what some literary critic has to say about a book who's value is adequately proved by its staying power—describe it as one of the first important pieces of feminist literature, as if somehow O Pioneers! is less about the strength of ingenuity, the American spirit, the truth that all individuals have power and worth, and instead is some sort of proto-chick lit, Bridget Jones on the High Plains.

But I digress. Had I read O Pioneers! in high school I might have hated it, because it is somewhat slow. Cather's narrative jumps years at a time, sixteen years at one point, and glosses over the most interesting bits, the specifics of how Alexandra and her wit and her brothers and their work managed to make something out of the harsh terrain of the Nebraska plains: one chapter ends with Alexandra convincing her brothers to go along with her scheme, and the next begins with the statement that the scheme has worked brilliantly.

Of course I may be interested in how they got from A to B, but Cather knows better that the story doesn't hang on how exactly the transition occurred, only that it did, and how it affected the characters and the country and the people around them. This doesn't mean the narrative is fast paced. But the book is short and it moves along, the characters are well-drawn if always somehow a bit distant, and the writing is not heavy or difficult (the book was written in 1913). I read the whole book in about four days without spending undue time doing so.

The editor's occasional footnotes and endnotes can be annoying, and seem entirely random. One page has four footnotes, elaborating on the local flora Mrs. Cather names without description. Another page has more local flora treated in the same way by the author, but without the footnotes, as if the editor though we poor readers would be flailing about wondering what a snow-lily was but wouldn't be bothered by the mysterious marsh-trumpet. None of the footnotes add a thing to the story and their inconsistency is more annoying than anything. When possible, it's best to find copies of classic literature that are simply presented as they are and not beaten into submission by editors and critics; this is not always possible when purchasing books online, which is why bookstores are still so much more fun.

Ultimately the book brought to mind the truth that we have no more real frontiers in America, and that being in such control of the land as we are we as a people tend to forget what it took to get us to where we are. Alexandra Bergson's America was not a global Colossus bestriding the seven seas, and the simple questions of existence, of food and shelter and survival, were much more in her mind and the minds of her fellow Americans than they are in ours today; reading the book reminds us of that. For that reason if for no other O Pioneers! deserves a wider audience.

Understanding Iraq

I bought Understanding Iraq, by William Polk, at the beginning of this year when I expected to deploy there. That deployment fell through, and there is no Understanding Djibouti. So I read this book instead. We could all use a little understanding.

Unfortunately, I can't review this book and adhere to my "no political content" policy, so I won't try. The book is interesting; it is slim and well-paced and written by an old hand with no need to prove his academic credentials to anyone, so it's easy to read. That said, the author, a trained historian, has very well-defined political opinions, and it is hard not to see that from the first section of the book, on ancient Iraq. It's tempting to say his opinions are formed by years of study, and of course to some degree they must be—and the author has spent a significant amount of time living and working in Iraq and so knows the place well apart from his study—but two people can look at the same set of facts and draw different conclusions. Readers inclined to Mr. Polk's point of view will find this book a quick read and a useful resource in discussions of the topic. Readers on the other side of the aisle will not be so inclined.

The Prophet and The Messiah

I don't know how to review this book, The Prophet and the Messiah, by Chawkat Moucarry, which is I have not reviewed it before now. The book was written by an Arab Christian who has made a career teaching Muslims and Christians about each other. That such a job is both vitally important and woefully neglected is undeniable. The book was written to reach people the author cannot reach himself.

It is certainly a good book and absolutely worth a read by any Christian, any Christian at all whether he or she engages with Muslims or not. There are too many myths, too much shouting, too much demonizing and burying of truth in our society. Shouting pundits and crying televangelists do nothing to bridge the yawning gap between our faiths and in fact simply make it wider. We American Christians foment hatred and false truths about Muslims just as surely as Middle Eastern Muslims do so about us.

The book is valuable especially to Christians working in evangelism. Moucarry does not begin his discussion by claiming Islam is wrong and its practitioners evil, as so many evangelists do. It's hard to minister to a people you think to be demons, doubly so when you don't understand where the people are coming from. Muslims are justifiably proud of their faith, and any attempt to evangelize to them that starts with "you're wrong and here's why" will cause offense and close ears and minds and hearts, and is a waste for both parties.

Moucarry starts by discussing the differences between Islam and Christianity; this discussion is clearly geared toward a Christian audience and seeks to put to rest the myths Christians tend to hear about Islam. He then goes on to discuss the myths Muslims are taught about Christianity, at some length, and where they come from and why they are myths and, to some degree, how Christians can explain these things to Muslims without offending them. He then goes into specific doctrines of Islam that Christians can question validly, and why similar doctrines of Christianity are defensible against questioning by Muslims. Finally he treats the question of the truth of Islam, of whether there is genuine revelation in the faith and what we might learn from it.

It can be a difficult book to read, especially in the early going when Moucarry cites Islamic false claims about Christianity in one chapter and only in the next chapter gets around to laying out the truth. Reading with an open mind is absolutely vital, and a Bible is a necessary resource. But difficult though it may be, the book is a worthy read and I recommend it highly.

November Novel Update

It's been quiet lately at work and I've been doing a bit more reading in the evenings than the last week or so. One of the books I started was Bruce Campbell's autobiography, which has been great fun. And lately I've been engaged in a fierce (well, not really) debate about the correct taxonomy of one of the common trees on this base, Conocarpus lancifolius, which doesn't have an English common name but is called ghalab by the Somalis. It's quite a nice tree but there's a dearth of agreement as to what, exactly, it is. I'm going to post a couple pictures shortly along with a long and rather dry explanation of the naming controversy, which is not as yet settled (I've brought in the New York Botanical Gardens and the University of Florida Herbarium to help, and may have to try to get myself a wood sample to bring home). This is fair warning.

And I've been pecking away at my 50,000 word novel for National Novel Writing Month. I haven't quite managed the word count I'm going to need to reach 50k, and what with the safari coming up the last week of the month I'm thinking I need to at least give myself the first four days of December. Just to be fair, you know.

As of this writing I have 2778 words, not counting the title. I cheated, though, because the main character--acutally, it appears he's going to be peripheral--is named Ivan Marion Cartwright Harrison Templeton van Arden Telemann Romanostovich-Spastiziczisikowski. That's ten words right there. Of course, he goes by Van and his full name is only reported once.

This book has not led in any of the directions I considered in the last post. It's clearly straight farce. The action takes place in the city of Porktown, which is a state capital. The climate is uniformly warm and breezy because of the high proportion of state legislators and advertising agencies that call the place home, such that none of the characters are actually sure what time of year it is (it's the month of Checkuary). One of the other characters is named Melllllllody, although she doesn't pronounce the extra six L's (unlike her mother Ellllizabeth). Like all fifteen year old girls dream of doing, Melllllllody ran away from home and took work on the tugboats and garbage barges that ply the Dreary River, which runs into Gabba Gabba Bay at Porktown. The character I now suspect of being the central character in the story so far doesn't have a name. He goes about in a tweed smoking jacket and blue velvet cape and calls himself The Reporter. Clearly he's some sort of superhero, although at present his only superpower seems to be predicting traffic accidents.

Remember when I said, it doesn't have to be good? Right. I do take my own advice, even if no one else does.

Write a novel in a month?

My esteemed friend mentioned over on his blog that November is National Novel Writing Month, the goal being to write a 50,000 word... um... piece of fiction, in the month of November. This boils down to 1667 words per day, which is significantly less than I did on Lauderdale on good days. But "good days," on Lauderdale, were days in North Carolina on the porch where the only thing I had to do all day apart from writing was fix and consume meals. I could put in 10,000 words on such a day if things were going well.

Now I have a job that keeps me busy from 0730 to 1700 or so. I should at least be able to get 1667 words a day at the speed I type. But what to write about? I've decided this is the perfect opportunity to explore science fiction, cyberpunk, or noir, all three of which I've considered trying my hand at.

Since the goal of National Novel Writing Month is not to produce a good novel, but just to write for the sake of writing (something too few people do), it seems a great opportunity to give one of those genres a shot. And I think everyone else should, too. So I'm challenging my readers--well, my readers who blog, and my other readers who have any sort of emotional connection to the little silhouetted tree there on the right and didn't just give birth, and my other readers who think it sounds fun--to join me, and apparently also Scanime, and at the end of the month we'll see just exactly how ridiculous the things we've come up with are and pass them around and have a good laugh. Come on, you know it sounds like fun. Admit it. Even if you don't hit the 50,000 word mark, you can at least try, right? Right. So it's settled then. And since the 1st is already almost over for me you all have a head start.

Remember, it doesn't have to be any good. It just has to be.

Memoirs of a Geisha

I wasn't sure whether I was going to like this book. I don't know why I wasn't sure, I just wasn't. But it was insanely popular and they made a movie out of it. Arthur Golden is no doubt a reasonably wealthy author now (he should help out his brother Al with that Temple football program...) and he managed it by completely ignoring that old saw "write what you know."

So of course I was interested in what the book was like, but as I said I wasn't sure I'd like it.
And the truth is were it not for the stationary bikes in the gym I might not have gotten past the first ten chapters or so. It was the only thing I had that I could read there (the rest of my books at the time were all larger format) so I read it.

It does start a bit slow, at least to me. This is the problem I'm having with Lauderdale right now, in fact, is figuring out how to increase the pacing in the early part of the book without sacrificing the myriad setups to later events. I'm actually rather happy to see that Memoirs has a bit of the same problem, but it seems that millions of Americans were willing to keep reading without benefit of a stationary bicycle, so perhaps there's hope for Lauderdale, too. Not that I'm done working on it, of course.

After the first fifty pages or so, however, I was sufficiently absorbed by the characters that I was quite happy to continue reading. This is true skill, taking characters with whom most readers have nothing in common and making them not just interesting (of course they'll be interesting), but sympathetic as well.

Truth is, I rather enjoyed the book. I'm still a little confused by that. Not much actually happened; there was very little action. I had an inkling what certain of the characters were going to do before they did it, sometimes quite some ways out. But that didn't make the book any less enjoyable.

I'll be putting the movie on my Netflix queue, if only to see how the filmmaker portrays Gion. But the book was good. It was well worth the read; I'm glad I picked it up, and glad I set aside my doubts.
But I'm also glad for the stationary bike.

Plainsong

I picked up Plainsong from the local library. I was attracted by the pretty picture of stormclouds on the front and the fact that it been nominated for but not won an award (I have nothing against awards, and would like to win one myself some day, but as a general rule I find that I don't enjoy award winning books, especially Pulitzer winners, so I don't generally pick those up). One ought not to judge a book by its cover, of course, but books contain lots and lots of words and the only way to know if one is any good is to read the whole thing, which is untenable, standing there in the library. So yes, I buy books based on whether I like the cover or not. Of course I buy books for other reasons, but I daresay a huge majority of people sometimes buy books because they like the covers.

The picture of the author, Kent Haruf, on the second page makes Mr. Haruf look almost exactly like one of the people I work with. Scary, actually. Anyway, that's beside the point.

The point being that this book was outstanding. And I'm almost surprised I can say that. Mr. Haruf has a very particular writing style, very spare and simple (almost no adverbs at all, which you may have noticed I use rather a lot), never a longer word where a shorter one will do, hardly a comma to be found, sentences that might be called run-on if you were in fourth grade. For example:

He went out into the hall again past the closed door and on into the bathroom and shaved and rinsed his face and went back to the bedroom at the front of the house whose high windows overlooked Railroad Street and brought out shirt and pants from the closet and laid them out on the bed and took off his robe and got dressed.

I could never write a sentence like that. Not because I wouldn't deign to run a sentence on so (this one here is going to be plenty long), not because I would be afraid of neglecting my friend the comma, but because I simply couldn't pull it off; I'm not good enough. Maybe someday.

Plainsong is written like that. Haruf tells you plainly what his characters did. And, he tells you what they said. That's a key point—the narrator here tells you what characters said. The characters don't say these things themselves, not in the immediate sense. Of course you have no doubt as to the narrator's veracity; it's just that there's no proper dialogue. Such as like here:

…Presently she stopped cranking the machine and put in another master.
What brings you here so early? she said.
Crowder wanted to talk to me.
What about?
Russell Beckman.
That little shit. What'd he do now?
Nothing. But he's going to if he wants to get out of American history.
Good luck, she said. She cranked the machine once and looked at the paper. Is that all that's bothering you?
Nothing's bothering me.
Like hell it isn't. I can see something is. She looked into his face, and he looked back without expression and sat smoking. Is it at home? she said.
He didn't answer but shrugged again and smoked.

I don't know how to tell you how amazed I am that I liked this. Loved it.

I set down and stopped reading The Shipping News because I didn't like the writing style Annie Proulx used in the book. The Shipping News won the Pulitzer. It was a great book, loved by millions. I didn't get past chapter two. Haruf's conventions in the writing of Plainsong are no less idiosyncratic and certainly I would have expected not to tolerate them. Instead I loved them. But for the fact that it's been done I'd try it myself. I don't know how or why, but this spare writing makes the book that much more beautiful.

And that's what the book is, beautiful. There are not many characters, not many important ones anyway. They all lead their own lives; none is central. Of course the story would hardly work if they didn't all connect, and they assuredly do. One of the advantages of setting a book in a place like Holt, Colorado (a town not at all unlike Goodnight, Nebraska) is that characters are plausibly all connected one to the next, because the town is just that small. Of course Victoria and Guthrie will intersect. How can any two people in the town not?

The story is itself beautiful. It's also hard; the characters do not have it easy. Things get worse before they get better. People hurt one another, not meaning to. And other people do mean to hurt one another, and succeed, and in the succeeding betray their own worst impulses and hurt themselves. But amidst the hardship and hurt there is love, there is the discovery of new relationships. People grow up. Some people change in ways they never thought they would, or would have to.

What Haruf has done here is no small feat: he's gotten everything right. The whole book feels right, the setting, the characters, their trials—it all smacks of life and it draws you in. And he did it while ignoring one of the most common writing conventions. I still don't know how he pulled it off, but I'm glad he did. This is one of the best books I've read this year.

God's Smuggler

It's rare I read two books at once that are both outstanding, but I got lucky this time I suppose. I must thank AMS again for sending this one to me, as otherwise I might never have heard of it.

If you haven't heard the story, it's fairly simple. God's Smuggler, a fellow known as Brother Andrew (who at the time of publication for obvious reasons didn't care to announce his name to the world), felt called to do missionary work behind the Iron Curtain during some of the hottest parts of the Cold War. He delivered Bibles to the struggling churches in the communist countries of Eastern Europe at a time when the Church was under attack and distributing religious materials apart from the aegis of the state was a criminal offense likely to be punished by a long prison term if not summary execution. This is his story of that period of time.

I can't possibly do this book justice in a review. Like Brother Andrew himself the book is absolutely filled with the Spirit; you can feel the presence on every page. It is an amazingly uplifting read; this man has given himself over entirely to the Spirit, to God's will, and has done remarkable things because of it. It is an inspiration to read the story and I'm going to have to get my own copy so I can read it again, and again and again. This is a book every Christian should read, and more it's a book anyone curious about Christianity should read. Brother Andrew's story is nothing less than proof of the real power of God in the modern world.

The book is sitting in my room. I feel bad about that; it doesn't want to be sitting here collecting dust, it wants to be in someone else's hands right now. I might bring it to church on Sunday and pass it on for a few weeks, but I'm sure the book's owner wouldn't mind at all if I mailed to it to one of my readers…

Business

I read two different books, very different, having nothing whatsoever to do with one another and concerning entirely different topics. I'm going to try to relate them here because it amuses me to do so. The first was The Alchemist, by Paulo Coelho. This book showed up in the library and it had a pretty picture on the cover and was fairly thin, and those were both important at the time so I took it home. I've been reading it for some time, though it is not only thin but has huge margins and double spaced text. The cover gush says that this is the sort of book that "changes the lives of its readers forever."

Of course right now I'd accept the small change of being able to sleep through the night. But that's beside the point.

Incidentally, for those who feel they might like to read The Alchemist at some point, this post is laden with spoilers and gives away the ending, so you should skip it.

This is a nice little tale, magical realism and all that, about prophetic dreams, fulfilling your destiny, and finding the fullness of your life along the way. It's all well and good. Listen to your dreams. Believe in omens. Follow your path and you'll be satisfied in life.

Who sets the path, though? Is there but one path for each of us? If the only way to find satisfaction is to do precisely what fate has laid out for you, then why bother living? Fatalism makes life into little more than a board game; what point is living each day if you have only to follow the signs to happiness? Why not just condense life down into a simple choice, presented to your soul the day you are born: will you live the life of fate, or not?

I don't think this was Coelho's point, but talk of fate and destiny always raises in me these questions. What point is free will if every choice but one is wrong, every path but one a dead end road to failure? This reduces all of creation to a grand experiment, the Earth to an infinitely complex maze with us as rats. Navigate each turn correctly and you get the cheese; otherwise you're damned. How does Grace enter into such an experiment? Why should it?

I'm not much for fate or destiny. God may have a plan for us, but I don't believe He damns us for failing to get it right. If so, well, I'll be… you know.

The Art of Headless Chicken Management, by Elly Brewer, was intended to be a funny look at inept managers, at how some people escape the peter principle and rise far above the level of their incompetence. It was amusing, of course. All who've worked in the business world—and make no mistake, the AF is the business world in nearly every respect, save the need for profit—will recognize the Headless Chicken Manager and can surely point to at least one example thereof. So it goes.

Are the Headless Chicken Managers (HCM) following their destiny? Are incompetent boobs who succeed in spite of themselves while making life more miserable for their colleagues and subordinates really doing the right thing? They seem to be happy. They seem to be quite full of themselves, in fact. So they must be following their destiny to be so happy.

That, or all us underlings are not in our correct path and need to listen harder to the omens. This seems a bit of a stretch; there are far more underlings in the world than managers, Headless Chicken or otherwise.

Thinking on this I considered that I've no desire whatever to be the sort of person, ten years from know, who would understand the jokes in The Art of Headless Chicken Management. I'd rather have left that world far, far behind, a distant memory of a dark period. I don't honestly care how I manage this.

Oh, I know. Every field has its HCMs. Every job has a boss and every boss, being just as dumb as you are, seems even dumber (the peter principle again). This sounds to me suspiciously like fate: you can't escape this horrible plight, so why bother trying? In fact, this sounds worse than fate. At least with fate, you get one correct path to happiness, one slim source of hope; the "it's like that everywhere" mantra offers none. I reject that notion, too.

Given the choice between destiny and hopeless misery, I, like the hero in The Alchemist, would choose destiny. In following said destiny our hero undergoes terrible hardship. When he seems to be just at the end of his journey, he is set upon, robbed, and beaten. The robber leaves him with naught but a few sentences to chew on: Don't be so stupid. I had a prophetic dream once, but I wasn't dumb enough to follow it across deserts and oceans. Look where it got you. And in that sentence the robber tells our hero about his prophetic dream, and the hero realizes that his fortune, his destiny, all along lay right where he came from, under the very tree he'd been sleeping at when he had his own dream.

So. I may not buy into the fate thing, but sometimes there's meaning in the words of others that they didn't intend. Life is hard. It isn't fair, and sometimes you get robbed blind and beaten up just trying to make your way. But if you keep your head on, you may find something valuable even in the beating. Strength and wisdom come through hardship, not a life of ease (a life of ease may grant you bullheaded stupidity, which can look like strength or wisdom and is enough to get you elected, but it's a pyrrhic victory). And strength and wisdom are what help you to make wise choices and good decisions. Wise choices and good decisions will get you far enough in life to have the opportunity to think about fate, and destiny, and God's chosen path. And once you have the capacity to do that, what does fate matter?

The Holy Duckfire

This is sort of a disturbing article--Two Men Charged In Duck Beating--on a couple of levels (one of which is, it's illegal to beat a duck to death with a stick but not illegal to go bowhunting for a buck that can't be brought down with a single arrow; how do we determine where cruelty starts and stops?). But the most disturbing level is this one:

Murcia-Rosa told investigators that he and two friends were fishing in a lake at Parrots Landing Apartments in the 1100 block of Sussex Drive when several ducks swam to the pieces of bread they used as bait.

Parrot's Landing is the apartment complex that Hank Lauderdale lives at in Lauderdale. The ducks in the canal there feature prominently in one of the episodes in the story. One of the minor characters sacrifices a duck in a Santeria ritual. But he isn't cruel about it.

Still. The whole thing's a little weird.

Congo

This week's reading them was The Congo. I wrote a very--very very--long review of these two books, which I've shelved as being about a great many topics apart from the books, and I'll post pieces of it as time goes on. So here's a much quicker
review.
The first book was The Congo from Leopold to Kabila: A People's History, by Congolese academic Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja. The book was more academic than I'd expected and as such I wouldn't call it a fun read. But it was certainly informative. Nzongola is a true believer in the power of democracy, truer I think than most American politicians. That bias (if you can call it that) is evident throughout the book, and Nzongola clearly believes that if real democracy can be brought to the Congo the place will settle down. But the country's history is rapine followed by more rapine; the place has never known a government that didn't consist of wealthy thugs stealing money from the treasury while ignoring the needs of the population--never. Not once since it was created in the 1880s. And it does not know that now. Having searched around on the internet for recent writings from Nzongola (the book was published in 2003, after Laurent Kabila's assassination but before this summer's election was on the calendar), it is clear he does not believe Joseph Kabila, or the elections as constituted this year, will bring democracy to the country. It is hard for me to see much hope for the place, but Nzongola does, and closes the book by reaffirming his belief that it is possible for democracy to come to Congo, and when it does it will bring peace to the country. We can only hope.

Facing the Congo by Jeffrey Tayler was a somewhat different book, a travelogue. Mr. Tayler, finding himself (as I do) bored and dissatisfied with life, decides he has a need for adventure, and that he will find himself somewhere on the Congo River. He determines to fly to Zaire (this was in 1994, while Mobutu was still in power and before the name had changed), take a barge upriver to Kisangani, the highest navigable point on the Congo, and from there purchase a pirogue (a Congolese dugout canoe), and a hire a guide, and pirogue down the river alone all the way to Kinshasa. Suffice to say he has not even made to Kinshasa and he is already wondering whether this is a good idea. It isn't, of course, it's absolutely a dreadful idea, but Tayler proceeds apace and survives to write about his trip. Of the two books, though Nzongola's is an outstanding work and very thought-provoking, this is of course far away the more readable and more interesting. More than that, as travel writing goes, Tayler's trip makes all other so-called "adventure travel" look like a Sunday drive with Miss Daisy. I highly recommend it.

Lauderdale Progress

I have completed the second draft of Lauderdale.

Ahem. Excuse me.

I finished the second draft!!!!

I haven't actually read it, yet. The first draft, that was the big part. Then I sat down and thought of all the things I knew offhand were deficient in the first draft--names that needed changing, parts that needed beefing up or reducing (or eliminating in one case), subplots that needed to be expanded or deleted, and little picky technical things like whether or not the Porsche Cayenne was being sold yet in 1999-2000. (It wasn't. Foo. I had to go with the BMW X5, a lesser vehicle. If you know of a really strange or unusual SUV that was available in the 2000 model year and was large, please tell me.)

Making all those changes constituted the second draft. I figured that would take most of a month but, once I started, I finished it in seven days. Now I have to sit down and read the thing, which I've never actually done. I'll make notes while I do that, so I know what needs to be fixed in the third draft.

It's this third draft that I'll be sending to any interested readers. If you're interested, shoot me an email (M&D and Ayzair, you're already tagged).

I won't start reading it, though, until I finish the books I'm reading now. I don't want to be distracted. But I should finish these books fairly soon, probably in about a week, so I think I'm still very much on track to have the third draft prepared by October.

Some Kind of Paradise

I am a Floridian. Some Kind of Paradise, by Mark Derr, almost makes me happy about that. But it also makes me far too sad to really claim any joy.

I have not always claimed to be a Floridian. When I went to college and introduced myself, I disclaimed any attachment to the state where I'd spent over half my life. Instead I said I merely lived there, but was really from someplace else. I had at that point no intention of returning.

That I'd spent half my life in the state and still couldn't call it home is pretty remarkable. More remarkable is the change I experienced in my attitude to Florida over just the next few years. I studied the state. I examined it in several ways, it's development and politics particularly. I became interested in it. But most importantly, I suppose I missed it.

It's hard to understand why. I don't especially like it there. Winters in Florida are wonderful, of course, and autumn isn't bad (though that season is best experienced in the southern Appalachians). I love the afternoon thunderstorms in the summer, but the heat and humidity serve to chase me indoors most summer days and I can't set foot outside in the spring for the pollen. The state is a huge mass of sprawl; even small communities far from major urban centers smear across the landscape like seagull droppings on wet sand. The major urban centers themselves are choked with traffic, unfriendly to pedestrians, and generally high in crime. Our schools are lousy. Our politicians are among the most ridiculous in the country. Frankly, to my mind, there's very little to recommend the place. Once I finally moved away, when I went to college, I was glad to be rid of the place.

And it was only once rid of the place that I started to appreciate it. Perhaps that's not the right word, appreciate. Instead I developed a morbid fascination with it, an attachment I couldn't fully explain and didn't expect. I moved back to the state, voluntarily, and stayed for two years. When I again had a chance to leave, with the Air Force, I managed to move first to a city only 20 miles from the state line, and although I ultimately made it halfway across the continent I moved right back to Florida the first chance I got.

And now that I'm thinking about leaving again, as I do every few years, I find myself inexplicably drawn to stay. For it isn't Florida itself that I love. It's the idea of Florida, an idea that loom large in Some Kind of Paradise.

I'm a practicing cynic, especially about the environment and double especially about Florida. I shouldn't have any sense of idealism about my home; the place is doomed. I don't think Florida can save itself and I don't believe any of the ten million people who will move there in the next 20 years know it needs to be saved. If they did, they wouldn't move in, but they don't care or don't understand what's wrong with the place. They are responding not to Florida as it is, but Florida as they want it to be.

And that, my friends, is the truth of Florida: she is a temptress. She calls to me as surely as the sirens did to Ulysses, as surely as she called to Ponce de Leon and Pánfilo de Narváez with tales of riches and a fountain of youth, as surely as she calls every summer to millions of Disneyfied tourists, as surely as she does to the thousand people who move in every day. Florida is most attractive to us when we're nowhere near her, when all we can here is the beautiful song, the eternal, unyielding sales pitch: "This is paradise."

It's some kind of Paradise, all right, but not the sort theologians and supplicants imagine. In truth I don't suppose Florida has ever lived up to expectations. The natives were violent and uninterested in welcoming white explorers—who did plenty to foster the natives' antipathy. Even upon settling the place and beginning to tame it, the Spanish found Florida devoid of the riches they sought, and the Fountain of Youth passed into myth.

The state's early settlers found a place of unmitigated difficulty, with fierce wildlife, poor soils, and resources that, though valuable at one time or another, were difficult to extract profitably. The climate kept out all but the hardiest souls until the state was finally tamed by railroads and the dream of transcontinental travel, and of winter retreats, became reality. Even then the state was never paradise for more than a handful of wealthy part-time residents; the vast majority of the state's population struggled to survive in a harsh and unyielding environment.

Parts of the state remained untamed until man in his infinite wisdom decided that Lake Okeechobee and the rivers that drained it, particularly the Everglades, were obstacles to be surmounted—or in this case to be dredged. Thousands were enticed to come to Florida to the most fertile land on Earth, to a place where one had only to cast seeds upon the ground and watch crops of all manner grow in rich soil without a hand to tend them. This fantasy died a quick death when the Everglades muck turned out to be nigh infertile without constant infusions of nutrients, but the name "Florida" had made its way into the national consciousness as a place where untold wealth might be had.

Very soon land speculators began to carve the state up into townsites and developments, and everyone was offered a chance to own a piece of paradise. This boom lasted only a few years before it collapsed, preceding the national Great Depression by three years and leaving hundreds of land promoters and other scoundrels penniless and thousands more people stuck with deeds to worthless, undeveloped and often unusable land.

And what of today? What is it about my Florida that keeps calling me, that keeps calling thousands of families a week to pull up stakes and move south? It's still paradise, but in an altogether different form. I guess the truth is, I no longer understand it. I've spent most of my life in paradise, and I don't like it. If this is Paradise, I'll be damned.

This is a wonderful book. It falls short in some ways, soars in others, but it has the siren song at its core, and anyone who's heard it knows it will always echo in their heart and mind.

So Many Books

It occurs to me that there are several books over there on the right that I have not reviewed. Before they get any farther down the list I thought I’d give them each a quick review.

I'll starting with V for Vendetta, by Alan Moore and David Lloyd. This is the comic book series (graphic novel, if you prefer; this format is a collection of several comic books into a book-length narrative) on which the recent movie (that I dearly loved) was based, and of course I was intrigued and wanted to read the comic. It’s pretty darn good. It’s also pretty darn different from the movie in a number of ways, not least the fact that V, in the book, is very much an anarchist, rather than simply a liberator of a captive populace, although the regime against which he’s fighting is equally oppressive. Most of the key events from the book made it into the movie. V is an altogether more difficult character in the book, though, a more complex protagonist. I enjoyed this but unless you are a comic book fan or a fan of the movie it’s probably not worth your time.

Next up, the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I’m not going to review this book because you should already know what it’s about, and that it’s very good. And if you haven’t read it I will track you down and make you do so; ask Smittygirl if you don’t believe me.

Then we have Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life, which I picked up a while ago in the bookstore on a whim. I really enjoyed reading this book, but it wasn’t an easy read. No book that encourages you to ask questions about where you’ve been, to search for patterns in your life and identify the myriad ways you’ve been reacting to your life the way you did when you were a child. FMSHL argues that we react to most events in life based on the way we saw the world as children, and we have to learn to break away from our habits and our childhood understanding to really live as adults. The book is targeted at the midlife-crisis crowd, but I found that much of the book had a lot to say to me.
Frankly, this book deserves a longer review and some discussion. It’s not the sort of thing I can recommend without knowing whether you need to read it or not. But I found it a thoroughly engrossing read.

A Walk in the Woods, by Bill Bryson, was outstanding. It’s my favorite of Bryson’s books, at least of the books I’ve read. Any outdoorsy person should read it, especially if you’ve ever considered hiking any part of the Appalachian Trail. I’ve hiked on perhaps as much as a mile of AT over the course of my life and probably will never attempt any significant stretch of it, mainly because as Bryson points out much of the trail is not especially scenic and there are lots of other scenic hiking trails to go on. But you have to admire what the man attempted to do, and this book is a fascinating and at times hilarious read. This one’s very highly recommended.


Basket Case is one of Carl Hiaasen’s more recent novels, and he’s as funny and entertaining and off-the-wall as ever. Hiaasen is my favorite Florida crime author by a wide margin (a club that includes John D. MacDonald, Elmore Leonard, Tim Dorsey, Randy Wayne White, and a few others) and this book is in keeping with my expectations. But there’s an upsetting difference between this and nearly every one of Hiaasen’s earlier books (apart from Stormy Weather): this one doesn’t take place in the real world. Hiaasen skewers south Florida most effectively when his characters operate in a real city; Basket Case, though it manages a good satire of south Florida, is weaker for taking place in some ill-defined mythical town.

The Sir Apropos of Nothing series was a lot of fun. You can read reviews of the Peter David series from the esteemed Lucky Bob here, here, and here. On his recommendation I decided to bring the series out to Africa with me to read. I’m glad I did. I don’t usually read fantasy literature. Actually, apart from Harry Potter, I don’t read any fantasy literature at all. I’ve never even read The Lord of Rings trilogy (although I did enjoy the movies). You have to wonder about a person whose introduction to an entire genre of literature comes from a series of books that satirize the genre. I like to think the eponymous hero of the series would rather appreciate that.
I’m not likely to start reading fantasy literature any time soon. I don’t dislike it, it’s just not my thing. But this was an excellent series, and I went through the books pretty quickly. They are all quite funny, though I think the first book is funniest because it’s newest. The third book might have had the most laugh-out-loud moments, though, in particular the exchange about Ho, and Who Ho is. Had a good laugh at that; actually, had to go look up the whole Who’s on First routine for another good laugh.

These books were more than just simple fantasy, though, because the protagonist is quite the introspective fellow at times, and we are treated to some very interesting viewpoints on the notion of heroics and chivalry and fate, and when Apropos descends to darkness it’s not hard to see just about any of us doing the same thing. Absolute power indeed.
This was a fun series of books, and while as I said I’m not going to start reading a bunch of fantasy novels now, I would encourage anyone who wants something unique and humorous that’s not completely throw-away to give these books a look. You'll certainly enjoy yourself. As for me, I'm sort of hoping the adventures of Apropos aren't yet over.

Pattern Recognition

I finished reading a book. It feels like it's been a while since I did that; I guess it has been about three weeks.


Since the book I'd been expecting to read was still in transit to me when I finished the last one, I borrowed one from the library here. The library has lots of romance novels, and crime novels, and spy thrillers, and military thrillers. None of which I'm much interested in. But I happened to spy a book by William Gibson, he of Neuromancer, called Pattern Recognition, which I decided to pick up and read.

I had to go back and reread my review of Neuromancer, because I liked Pattern Recognition somewhat and wondered what was different, since I recall not liking the earlier book as much.

I think in large measure Neuromancer suffers from my tendency to compare it to Snow Crash, which was written later but is, as far as I'm concerned, far superior in most respects. That and characterization was lousy.

That was not the case with Pattern Recognition. The book is helped by having a cast of characters whose motivations are much more clearly understood than those in Neuromancer; I found it much easier to care about Cayce Pollard than I ever did about Case or Molly.

I still have trouble with some aspect of Gibson's place descriptions. I don't mean to say his setting descriptions, which are nothing if not evocative; I mean his description of geographic space, of the relation of one neighborhood or place to another. I don't know what it is and I don't know how to describe it; it may just be me, or it may be something genuinely odd about Gibson's writing. In either case it's unsettling.

I don't have much of a review. It's Gibson's first "present day" work, which is interesting, but moreso to his fans than to the rest of us. It has been criticized for its frequent "tangential interruptions," to quote one reviewer, which surprises me because Neuromancer was the same way. I guess when Gibson goes off on a tangent about a near-future world of his own creation that's okay, but when he does so about the present world it's a tiresome interruption. I don't understand why that would be so and frankly like the fact that the story wanders a bit. Life wanders a bit, and Gibson's wanderings are interesting.

There are some conceits here; the protagonist is a little... unusual. She has some quirks I guarantee you've never imagined before, and that can take some getting used to. I suppose Gibson likes characters who are a little off the scale; in this case all of them are. If you can get past that, this is an enjoyable read.

Books For Thought

A meme thing of sorts, from the lovely and talented Ayzair:

1. One book that changed your life?

I don’t know its title. I don’t know that it was ever finished, much less published. I only ever read one chapter of it. But it was a book, being written by my best friend, Richard Osborne, in the 8th grade. I went over to his house for a party. Might have been his birthday party, actually. I think I spent the night. It was an interesting night. In any event, Richard had the pages of the book he was writing tacked up on his wall. I scanned them. It would have fit in with the “potboiler” style of crime or mystery novels, or at least it seemed that way to me. The protagonist was assaulted, I don’t recall by whom, on his way home from a restaurant. Could have been a scene from a noir novel. The hero managed to flick a toothpick at one of the bad guys and have it spear the guy through the palm. That’s one hell of a toothpick-flick.
In any event, after reading over the pages tacked to Rick’s wall I decided that didn’t seem so hard and I could probably write a book.
And so I did.
I’ve written three, now, although only the most recent one is publishing material. Still, if I hadn’t read Rick’s book, hanging there on the wall of his room, I may never have bothered trying to write my own. And then where would I be?

2. One book you have read more than once?

I’ve read Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash at least four times, and it’s my second-favorite book. I’ve read most of P.J. O’Rourke’s books multiple times, including Parliament of Whores about a dozen. The first book I read multiple times was Beasts in my Belfry, by Gerald Durrell, which I probably read for the first time when I was eight.

3. One book you would want on a desert island?

Well, Keller’s Outdoor Survival Guide comes readily to mind, although the book is geared towards surviving in a large temperate wilderness, not on a finite desert island. I think what I’d want most is a large book full of blank pages, and a pencil. And a knife, to sharpen the pencil.

4. One book that made you laugh?

Many books have made me laugh, but I’ll pimp my favorite book, Straight Man, by Richard Russo.

5. One book that made you cry?

I don’t know. I honestly don’t; it’s not that I don’t cry often, it’s that I can’t think of a book that made me do so. Probably We Were Soldiers Once, And Young, by Hal Moore.

6. One book you wish had been written?

The Infallible Tell-tale Signs Given Off By People When They’re Lying

7. One book you wish had never been written?

Probably could have saved a lot of trouble if Das Kapital, and the ideas therein, had remained forever locked in Karl Marx’s skull.

8. One book you are currently reading?
Some Kind of Paradise, by Mark Derr, which is a history of Florida that focuses to some degree on the impact of human habitation on the state’s ecology. I don’t find a lot of time to read it or I’d be done with it already, because it’s enjoyable and well written.

9. One book you have been meaning to read?

Many many dozens of books could be listed here. I’ll go with The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, in a tie with a book I need to reread, On Liberty by John Stuart Mill.

10. Now tag five people.

Actually I don’t know five people with blogs who haven’t already been tagged, so I’m only going to tag two: Lucky Bob, and Malda laire. If she even reads this…

Straight Man

I've been going through life for quite some time thinking Snow Crash was my favorite novel, and I've read it enough times that I need to purchase a new copy. Among the top several I've long included Straight Man by Richard Russo, which I picked up again on Friday because after the wretched disappointment of Charlotte Simmons I wanted to read something very good.

So it is an amusing coincidence that after this second read, Straight Man has replaced Snow Crash at the top of my list of favorites, and I need to purchase new copies of both.

The first several pages of my copy of Straight Man are now forever affixed to one another with two-ton epoxy. The chair for which I bought the epoxy remains broken and probably needs to be replaced. The sequence of events that brought this about were absurd, but of course anyone who knows me would have been able to predict what would happen as soon as I cut open the tube. At least the cat didn't step in it, which had been my biggest fear going in.

Anyway. Why do I like this book so much? Is it just a case of comparison against a very bad book? I don't think so; on Saturday morning I reread The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy for the umpteenth time after watching the movie, so I had a good book in between Charlotte and this one. I think it's something more.

For starters, Richard Russo has a gift for marrying melancholy with farce that no other writer I know of can match. It's not enough simply to have a melancholy scene followed by a funny one; at the heart of Russo's funniest moments is a touch of sadness, a feeling that the characters know exactly what they're doing and that it won't end well, but can't stop themselves nonetheless. Fatalism is a very melancholy attitude. And, too, some of the saddest and most affecting moments in this book coexist with an ironic humor born of the characters' ability to step back and see their lives for what they are—no matter how much it may seem that fate has intervened, that something was inevitable, there is always the knowledge that in fact it isn't fate at all, that every moment is put in place by some earlier action.

We should all be so gifted as to see—or even have shown to us—the chain of choices that bring us to our greatest sadness or greatest joy. But we aren't. This is what literature gives us.

In thinking about the contrast between Straight Man and Charlotte Simmons I was struck by how few times—exactly once—in this book I felt a character did or said something that didn't connect, didn't make any sense. Comparatively I was constantly jarred by the bizarre characterizations in Charlotte Simmons. I couldn't even what it was that bothered me in this book, when I went to find it just now. It must not have been important.

And I like that. That's good writing. The fact that the book is an uproarious scream and a sad introspection at the same time is good writing, and entertaining, too. That our narrator, Hank Devereaux, is undergoing a midlife crisis so easily recognizeable to things in my own life just makes the story better.

I can't wait to go buy a new copy and read it all over again.

I Am Charlotte Simmons

As you may recall, I had been greatly enjoying Tom Wolfe’s I Am Charlotte Simmons when I put it down earlier this year to take up other reading. And so when I picked it up again after finishing A History of the Middle East it was with great expectation and excitement.

But I can't recommend this book—which, considering that I actually recommended A History of Post-Colonial Lusophone Africa, should come as something of a surprise. Tom Wolfe has been—and I suppose still remains—one of my favorite writers, certainly one of my favorite novelists (along with T.C. Boyle and Richard Russo). Thus, unfortunately, when I don’t like one of his books it’s rather like the betrayal of a lover, instead of just a lousy read.


I won’t go back on what I said earlier. The beginning of this book is almost scary good. Wolfe got so much right it should make any writer feel like a hack for even trying. But then it starts to get… to get… to get…

Well, actually, once the introductions are all complete the book starts to get really interesting. What Wolfe is great at is taking a group of characters who have no earthly business being in the same story, and throwing them all together. He's given us an interesting cast in this story, and by the middle of the book you're getting jumpy, eager to see how he's going to weave them all together and what miracles he will show you along the way.

But by this time, a few things have really started to irritate you. Wolfe has selected two particular aspects of college life and harped on them so mercilessly they become a cliché before the story itself is even half over:

1. College students fuck a lot.
Wow. I mean, great, great insight, that. Truly deserving of a place in the pantheon of profundity. How much research did he have to do to uncover that little gem? A casual glance at MySpace? In fact, he bases the entire thesis of this book (yes, Wolfe's novels do indeed theses, and I only wish I was good enough that mine did, too) on a study that indicates that even rational non-sexaholics placed in a highly sexually charged atmosphere will turn into raging hornytoads. Too bad he made up said study.

I disagree with this entire thesis. I'm extremely smart. I went to college. A lot of the students at the college I went to fucked around a lot. I didn't turn into a drooling lust-crazed poonchaser within one semester of my arrival there. Nor, surprisingly, did any of my friends—at least, not that they're letting on. I can warrant that people less self-assured or intellectual than myself might have, but young Charlotte Simmons is if anything far more self-assured and intellectual. That she would be so swept away rang a bit hollow for me.

And, of course, I cannot fail to point out Wolfe's continual repetition of the theme: college students fuck a lot. (Sorry for the profanity, but it's Wolfe's choice of word, and, frankly, all of our other euphemisms for the act—even the word "sex" itself—are too soft-edged to be accurate descriptors.) On virtually every page is some reference to the theme. Even on pages that consist of conversations between three adults, there will be some reference to the quantity of rumpus the students engage in. And of course, there's Wolfe's favorite phrase: "rutrutrutrutrut." It was comical the first time, amusing the second, and mildly interesting the third. By the fourth it was simply repetitive. By the time Christmas break finally rolled around, two-thirds of the way through the book, I was sick of it, wanted to cross it out with a Sharpie every time it was written. Find a new fucking metaphor, Tom!

2. Boys in college work out.
This actually rates higher than the previous insight, though that isn't saying much. In fact at first I was quite impressed with some of the comments Wolfe makes—muscles are just like any other thing you put on your body as a fashion statement. How true. How insightful. How many times will I have to read it in the course of this novel? Let's try to keep it under a hundred, if possible.

It's a fair point to make, certainly—when I went to college a mere (dare I admit it?) certain number of years ago, this trend had not yet fully developed, but is certainly the case now. Muscles are in (though only for men, thankfully). Abs are probably the highest altar of this particular religion, at least at the moment, but muscle in general is now fashionable. Hey, good for Madison Avenue! They've given us a trend that isn't unhealthy! How long do you think it'll be before women get one? Never? Probably.

Of course, the reason muscles are in now—and this is my insight, not Tom Wolfe's—is because most fashion designers are homosexual, and most gay men like muscles. I mean, if you gotta have models around, might as well be models you find attractive, right? (I maintain this is why so many female supermodels are so creepy; gay men don't really know what straight men want. The same is true in reverse, of course, but in reverse it doesn't result in mass anorexia, or in even very attractive women claiming they need to go on diets. Give me curves, dammit!)

Apart from the endless repetition of this theme—and I do mean endless, I hadn't even reached the halfway point when I wanted to phone Tom up and yell at him for saying the same thing on every one of the first 300 pages—there is the problem of grotesque exaggeration. I may not be immersed in a college campus at present, but there is one just three blocks away, and I drive by the gym there on my commute home from work twice a week when I take the toll road. The guys walking into and out of said gym are of decidedly average physique, and good for them. We ought all to be satisfied with as much.

I also visit another campus upon (too rare an) occasion. The last time I was up at Clemson I actually paid a great deal of attention to this while walking around the campus (Lord knows it was hard, because there were also women around, and it was spring, and they were in bikinis on the lawn, and… well anyway, Tom never managed to mention the glory of Spring). I can report that at my alma mater at least the guys are not as Tom Wolfe describes them. Every time he describes a guy it is with greater superlatives than the last time. By the time he gets to talking about the lacrosse players, the descriptions read like Lou Ferrigno at his peak. I know lacrosse players. They don't look like that.

Across the bay in St. Petersburg there's a modeling outfit called "All-American Guys." The guys they use are the "epitome of sculpted muscularity" without being hideous steroidal freaks (though I doubt they require urine tests). There was an article about the company in one of the competing tabloid-style papers here last week. Not a one of the guys pictured was even remotely as big as Tom Wolfe wants us to think virtually every guy on the DuPont campus is. The truth is, if even 1% of guys on college campuses looked like the All-American Guys, you wouldn't be able to swing a genuine Dungeons & Dragons quarterstaff around on campus without damaging a promising young model's career. In fact, if you hadn't noticed, the obesity epidemic has not bypassed college campuses.

Ultimately, with this topic the exaggeration might not have been as irritating without the constant repetition—then again, it might have been. Certainly the repetition wore quite thin.


Lest you think me shallow, I don't base my opinion of this book on these two minor, if highly irritating, problems. Repetition unto itself, however, does bog the book down in numerous other ways. Adam Gellin lusts for Charlotte Simmons. Good for him! She's pretty and smart. She's exactly the kind of girl I'd lust after if I couldn't be brought up on charges for doing so. But how many times do we need to cut away to Adam thinking about how he lusts after Charlotte before we get the idea? Two, three dozen? I don't know, it seems a bit much.

And then… and then there's Charlotte's depression. For well over a hundred pages, Wolfe gives us Charlotte Simmons, the depressed freshman (which would make her a "depreshman," a word I just made up that I rather like). Charlotte depressed lying in her dorm room. Charlotte depressed and hiding from the world in the library. Charlotte depressed riding back to campus after the formal. Charlotte depressed trying to avoid talking to her friends. Charlotte depressed at home for the Christmas holiday. Charlotte depressed and wailing for Adam to comfort her.

Hey, guess what? Charlotte's depressed! I assume at some point Wolfe has suffered from it himself, he described it so accurately: How you just want to be alone. How much you really, really hate talking to people. How answering questions is the most miserable thing you can imagine, except for all the other things you'll imagine in a minute if everyone would just let you be. God, I knew exactly what he was writing. I could have written it myself. It was so very familiar. And so… tedious. My God man, I wanted to throw the book in the trash before she even got home for the pain of Christmas break. I knew exactly what was going to happen, what everyone was going to say, how Charlotte would respond… I wanted to scream! I wanted to cry out, "enough already, Tom!! I freaking get it! Let's move on!" Was there anything else to this story? Did I even care any more? Charlotte kept hoping an angel would come steal her away, and frankly, I wouldn't have minded one bit. The other characters were all—every last one of them, even the ones you're supposed to hate—more intriguing by this point, and what's more if Charlotte really had caught the last train for the coast it would have made the rest of the book that much more interesting.

I skimmed about fifty pages. I don't skim, in novels, it's just not right. If it's bad enough to make me skim, I'm about one minute from donating it to the library unfinished. I put down Martin Dressler because it was so tedious I was skimming. I did the same with Scorched Earth. And dadgumit I very nearly did the same with this book—this book by a writer I idolize, this first book he's published in half a decade and which I've been looking forward to for so long—I almost put the damn thing down and started reading something else.

I decided not to. I got up, washed the dishes, fed the cat, and went to bed. I picked it up this afternoon and slogged it out, and it did get better. Once the various characters and their plot threads all began to race together toward their tidy conclusion, the book started to move. But by this point there were fewer than a hundred pages left—less than a seventh of the novel—and all the brilliant insights and interesting moments that had occurred in the first 500 pages—and there were many, like the definition of cool, or the nature of male humiliation—had been forgotten. By this point I was reading simply to finish the thing.

And I did.

And it ended… it ended well, in many ways, and not as well in others. The villain ends up broken, as all villains must. The exact nature of his brokenness is, of course, left to the imagination, as it should be, as Wolfe always does. (There is a reason I so enjoy his work.) Charlotte ends up with the right person, not with either of the wrong people. The right person ends up like Colossus astride the harbor, as he should. The little man ends up making his own way in the world, as he should. It all ends so terribly well.

But how did he get there? I overuse the phrase deus ex machina, but… I want to use it again. The timing, the nature of it all. The setup, such as it is, comes a whopping four pages before the actual climax, in the same narrative stream. Four pages. In a book over 700 pages long, the setup to the climax is first introduced four pages prior. There is a weak element of foreshadowing some hundred pages prior, but after rereading I still don't find it an adequate setup for the animosity that solves the climax.

Lord knows I've written myself into corners before from which there seemed little escape. That sometimes happens when you let your characters take over your story (as you should) and they end up not doing what you wanted them to, the sotty little ingrates. Still, I'm not Tom Wolfe. I can get away with that on first draft, but I try to correct it.

I suppose it can be viewed as a "surprise," an element that should amuse the reader, and perhaps had I been holding a more charitable view of the novel prior to the climax that might have happened. But no. I had just slogged through 700 pages of the exact same witty observations repeated ad nauseum til long after after all the wit had been wrung therefrom.

Yes, Wolfe tackled a big world here. Yes, he got a lot of it right. If you wish, read the first two or three hundred pages and savor the wit and insight. Then put it down and move on to something more interesting. If you bother finishing this book, you'll only end up disappointed.

Goodnight, Nebraska

Earlier I mentioned that I had picked up a book that completely drew me in after just a few pages. That book was Goodnight, Nebraska, by Tom McNeal.

The first 70-some pages of this book were incredible. I didn't want to put the thing down. McNeal's descriptive powers are outstanding and his characters, particularly his protagonist, was consistently believable and intriguing.

And then the book started to drag a little. The middle part of the narrative, which takes place in the eponymous town in the Nebraska Panhandle (the town seems to approximately replace Hay Springs, if any of you are curious and in posession of a good Nebraska map (and why would you be?)), drags a bit. In large part this is because the story turns into more a series of vignettes, and the focus on the protagonist is lost--he becomes just one of the few hundred people who call Goodnight home.

By the end, though, you realize what that means. The other residents of Goodnight, in fact, the town itself, are just as important as Randall Hunsacker. This is both a benefit and a drawback, since after about 100 pages the plot becomes unmoored and drifts around the sumptuous landscape of western Nebraska. In one sense it's the location itself that gets the best treatment in this novel.

Still, while I bogged down a bit chasing the plot, I enjoyed the story and appreciated it more after it had ended. In a large sense, the episodic nature of the story helps push the real theme, namely the repetitive and seemingly directionless nature of small town life. Most, if not all, of McNeal's characters are leading lives of (sometimes not so) quiet desperation, outwardly cheery while inside wrought with loneliness, boredom, and an unfulfilled yearning to break free and find out what else life has to offer.

Three Books

I've finished three books recently without reviewing them, and I should rectify that oversight.

First was Undestanding Arabs, which I picked up back when I thought I'd be in Iraq right now instead of whiling away the hours at work desperately waiting for something interesting to happen. It was the first of the pre-Iraq books I decided to read, and as such is also the only one I've finished so far. I can say safely even without having finished/read the other books, this is the one of the four that I would have brought with me overseas.

Obviously this isn't the sort of book you're just going to pick up and read for fun. But if you find yourself heading toward that part of the world, this book (now available in a new edition from September 2005) is basically the standard (not to say only) text on Arab culture written for Westerners. It's a great primer on dealing with Arabs on a personal level. Would that I had reason to use it.

Next up was Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, by Philip K. Dick. This is the novel upon which the movie Blade Runner was (loosely) based. It's a nice slim book and I took it with me during the fantastic trip to Valdosta a couple weeks ago. I read the whole book in one afternoon and another evening. I need to rent Blade Runner now and watch it again, but the differences in the two are significant.

This was a great book. I won't insult you with a synopsis since if you're reading this blog you are almost certainly well-read and well-screened enough to know how the story goes, from one source or another. If you only know the movie, and you liked the movie, you ought to pick this up. It's so much deeper, but typical of Dick it showcases a very ambiguous morality. I can't recommend this book too strongly to fans of sci-fi or dystopian fiction, though I'll admit non-fans would find many of the book's conceits a little to bizarre. Still, this is probably the best novel I've read in the past year.

And just today I finished Bill Bryson's Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America. I picked this one up to take home last weekend because I wanted something ligther than the history of the middle east to read. Today I read the last two-thirds of it. Bryson is terrifically readable, funny and light and, for such a recent discovery of mine, one of my current favorites among writers. After Mother Tongue, I was really looking forward to this.

And it was light and engaging and humorous and a little sad, but it wasn't as great a read as I'd hoped--mostly because I couldn't get past Bryson's condescension toward so many of the people he met. Certainly not everyone you meet is as wise or warm or witty as yourself, but neither is everyone necessarily less so because they come from a different region or speak with a different accent. For an American, even one who when this was written had been living in England for over 12 years, Bryson comes across almost a little bit too Euro-trash, and that was disappointing.

Nonetheless, he makes some brilliant comments, especially considering that they're now over 15 years old. In particular he seems disappointed that every town in America is becoming the same--they're all Anytown U.S.A. He is disturbed by the tendency of the towns immediately abutting National Parks to become seedy tourist traps and is fairly negative toward tourist traps in general. He has some very insightful comments about the NPS' administration of the National Parks, which he sees as quite poor.

The book has been compared to Travels with Charley and Blue Highways. Not having read Blue Highways I don't know how to compare it, and Charley is almost 45 years old, so some of the insights show their age (plus I don't like poodles. Or Steinbeck). But before I started this blog, I read a book by Stephen Coonts called The Cannibal Queen. Coonts is no Steinbeck (or Least-Moon or even Bryson, frankly), but his book is perhaps the most recent version of the schlepping-through-America genre that started with de Tocqueville (who's book is still the best of the type), and to be honest with you, I like Queen better than Lost Continent. A 1941 Stearman is way cooler than any Chevette ever made, and Coonts manages to be less critical of the places he visits, possibly because as a former military man he has an easier time than Bryson looking past America's faults. While I chide this tendency in my colleagues, in print it's a much more attractive tendency than Bryson's condescension.

The Areas of My Expertise

Smitty's super-short review of John Hodgman's The Areas of My Expertise:

Why didn't I think of that?

And how in the hell did he think of all that?

Buy this book. Read it on the john, because you're going to laugh a lot. Really hard. And if you actually read every one of the 700 hobo names, write and tell me. That's a lot of hobo names.

No, seriously, this was really absurdly funny, and it was just the sort of thing I needed to be able to read during this period of intense and often confusing turmoil in my life. Thank you, Melinda.

Collapse

Jared Diamond’s Collapse is a long book. But societal collapse may not take a very long time at all. An interesting juxtaposition.


Let me start out by saying that this is an outstanding book. It has a handful of minor faults, most of which are of curious nature and not worth discussing (Mongolia is neither politically nor environmentally in danger of collapse; I assume he meant Nigeria, which has many of the same letters). That a book of this size and scope should have but a handful of minor faults is remarkable, and were I to write a full review of this book it would be almost entirely positive.

But time is short these days. It feels like it always is; and that’s why it took me so long to finish this book, which I started in October. Time is the one resource we must almost deplete at a constant rate, and there’s nothing at all we can do about that.

So I’ll keep this review short. What will you get if you buy this book? In the first few chapters, you’ll learn a great deal about the collapse of several ancient societies (and no, Rome is not one of them; Visigoths are not an environmental issue). These stories present lots of interesting questions and will keep you thinking long after you’ve put the book down.

Next you’ll read several chapters about collapses in more modern societies, and about the environmental problems facing certain places and how those are causing societal changes. This is an important point: Diamond is surely an environmentalist in some sense and he is surely writing from that perspective, but he is not writing about what is happening to the environment in these places (Australia, China, Rwanda) simply because the environment is pretty and full of fluffy woodland creatures; this is a deficiency of many environmentalists, the notion that we should care about the environment for the environment’s sake. What Diamond has done is show us, both in the previous chapters about ancient societies and in the ones about the present day, is that environmental degradation creates significant impacts on human society, so significant as to result in that society’s ultimate destruction.

Taking these two sections together, Diamond is showing us how societies themselves affect the environment, and how the effects those societies themselves had on their environment led to their downfall—or, in some cases, how those societies recognized and solved their environmental problems to their own benefit. This isn’t Al Gore’s Earth in the Balance. Diamond is no breathless idealist. He’s simply using empirical evidence to show how societal mismanagement of the environment has significant, and often negative, impacts on society itself.

The final chapters of the book relate more general ideas about the environment and society, such as how on Earth could the Easter Islanders have been so stupid as to cut down all their trees. Diamond examines how societies fail to perceive, to understand, and to solve environmental problems. He discusses how major players in any society, be they tribal chieftains or corporate CEOs, have looked at environmental issues.

The final chapter of Collapse summarizes what Diamond sees as the largest environmental problems currently affecting society, how they are interconnected, and how they can be solved. He doesn’t propose solutions, he simply points out that all of the problems can, in fact, be solved by modern world society. But it will take sustained political will. And a part of that sustained will must come from us First Worlders, in the form of embracing a lifestyle that involves less consumption. Less consumption frequently is translated to "lower standard of living," but this need not necessarily be the case. Diamond does not get into this but I'm thinking about it and will probably post on it later.

I would love to discuss this book at length with anyone who is interested in doing so. But I must leave this review here. In summary, this is an outstanding book, one that deserves to be read by everyone. One reviewer called it "the most important book of the decade," and he may not be far off. You owe it to yourself and your children to read it. My only fear is that most Americans will likely turn their backs to Diamond's message. Jared Diamond calls himself a "cautious optimist" about the future. I hope he's right.