The Victors

Over the last week I slogged through The Victors, by Stephen E. Ambrose. Slogged is the wrong word, though, because it was actually a good read. Not always easy. Books about war never are. I could write thousands of words about this book. I think we're in danger of forgetting what it used to mean that we lived in America, what it was that differentiated this place from others. I can't see the spirit of World War II in our present conflicts; maybe it's because of our distinctly unenlightened leadership. Whatever it is, reading this book makes clear the difference in time frames; when we went out to fight an evil enemy in WWII, the nation as a whole sacrificed, especially those who went to fight. When we set out to fight the present evil enemy... the nation as a whole was told to go shopping. A sort of review follows the jump.

Maybe I'm just crotchety. I don't care. If we were actually in a fight as big our political leaders say it is, I think we'd be doing more than we are as a country. Anyway, I've gotten off topic. Ambrose was cited late in his life for shoddy research and plagiarism, and the proof is there if you wish to see it. He did skimp sometimes on research, and he did plagiarize (and although he never characterized it as such, most serious researchers would). But he still wrote a pretty readable book, and whatever his deficiencies in research, he is responsible for taking down the oral histories of hundreds, literally hundreds if not thousands, of WWII combat veterans, work that would likely never have been done otherwise. This book is in part the fruit of that particular labor, and whatever concerns may exist about plagiarism and such should be levelled at the man and not at the valuable work of recording history that he did.

Citizen Soldiers, the book from which much of this one is cribbed (his own book this time), would be a better in-depth look at the fighting man of WWII, but this book is a great overview. It is in fact one of the best examinations of life for the soldiers of WWII I've seen, certainly the best I've read. If you haven't read any of Ambrose's other works, and if you can get past the man's faults as a writer, it's a very good read.

On The Wealth of Nations

I've been reading a bit lately. Good thing, too. There are a lot of good books out there and at the pace I've been reading this year I'm not going to get read them all (or even very many). Most recently I managed to pick up and finish P.J. O'Rourke's On The Wealth of Nations inside of a week. Woo-hoo! It helps that it's a bit short, and that P.J. is one of the most readable writers working today.

This book is part of the "Books That Changed the World" series published by Atlantic; other titles so far given the same treatment (by different authors) include Darwin's The Origin of Species, Marx's Das Kapital, and the Quran, and more are planned for Thomas Paine's The Rights of Man, Clausewitz' On War, the Bible, and others. It's an interesting series, and let's go ahead and admit right now that we're not going to read any of these books cover-to-cover in our lifetimes, at least not likely. (Exceptions are made for the Bible and the Quran for people adhering to the relevant faiths, although I'll wager many a Christian goes to his grave never having made it through Isaiah or 2 Chronicles.) On that truth rests the basis for this series (a series that, when I described it to Smittywife, prompted the response, "Who's doing War and Peace," a fair question and one that I wonder whether Atlantic has considered). I have a modest review after the jump.
I actually do own Adam Smith's An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, and I even brought it with me on a deployment once on the theory that there is so much downtime on deployments that I might actually read the thing. There is a lot of downtime, but there are a dozen easier ways to kill it than with 900 pages of 18th Century philosophy. Since I haven't read it, P.J. read it for me. I should send a thank you note.

So... do I review this book, or the book that this book is about? Tough to say. The book itself is a quick read, surprisingly light considering the weight of its subject. O'Rourke, I hate to say it, may not have been the best choice for this particular review because he comes to the table with, shall we say, some pretty strong political and economic ideas of his own; he did write a book called Eat the Rich, after all. But sometimes having a slightly biased reviewer is good, as P.J. is willing to recognize when Adam Smith had a failure of imagination (or of wisdom), something which happens to most philosophers.

I could happily sit and discuss some of Smith's precepts, and perhaps I shall, but in another post. This is a book review, and I must say that this is a book that you probably should read, and which thankfully you will also enjoy. Not many things are like that. I know you're not going to read The Wealth of Nations, and you know it, too. But it is a very important work, and rests at the foundation of our entire society. And it is deeply misunderstood, too--just for starters, the whole "invisible hand" thing, Smith himself used the phrase only twice and one of those was sarcasm. But you have to dig into the 900-page tome to figure that out. And who has the time? P.J. was getting paid to read the thing, at least, and his discussion of it is readable, intelligent, and sometimes even fun. Heck, certainly you can devote a couple of weeks' reading time to one of the most important works in modern philosophy, right? I recommend it.

The Entitled

I picked up Frank DeFord's The Entitled a few weeks ago on sale at Borders, and decided I'd read it now, during the season, rather than wait until next year or whatever. Kind of a lark, really.

Dang is this a good book. It's subtitled as "A Tale of Modern Baseball," and the cover blurb says it "ranks with the greatest sports novels ever written." "Sports novels" are not a genre I've read much of, although I did read The Natural in college. But I won't dispute the cover blurb, and the truth is, this is waaaay more than a baseball book.

I'll keep this review short because, really, I think you should read this. I think you should definitely pick this book up at the library or the bookstore and give it a week, because that's all it's going to take (heck, it took me barely a week and I've been reading at my slowest pace in years). It draws you in, and although the first half of it will appeal to any even casual baseball fan (DeFord knows the game, knows the players and the managers and not for a second do you ever doubt the veracity of Howie Traveler as the veteran manager or Jay Alcazar as the gifted star), by the time I was into the middle of the book I was so drawn to the characters the book could have been about professional housepainters and it wouldn't have mattered. This isn't just a great sports novel, it's a great novel, period, and the issues it raises are really far deeper than you'd ever expect.

The Entitled gets my highest recommendation.

Buddha Is as Buddha Does

I have finished Buddha Is as Buddha Does, by Lama Surya Das. I don't know what to say about it. I started reading this nearly three months ago, and a book this long of this nature should not take so long to read. Especially considering as I enjoyed reading it.

It is not a book meant to be read quickly. It is to be considered, studied, pondered, meditated over (I didn't do enough of that last). It became frustrating toward the end as the teachings in it began to diverge significantly from my own rational beliefs--and yet even as it did so Lama Surya Das brought me back into it by acknowledging the metaphorical nature of much spiritual writing and belief. Who is to say that things we did not see ourselves are literally true? Ah, but isn't there a lesson even if such things are merely meant as metaphors?

Indeed. I will return to this book again, many times perhaps. But it remains a challenging text. I think I'll pick something easy for the next one.

The Island of Lost Maps

Recently I finished The Island of Lost Maps by Miles Harvey. It was a pretty good read, especially so for a map geek like me. A brief review follows the jump.

I enjoyed the book, but it is a weird little tome. You may or may not have heard about the crime spree that inspired it--odds are you didn't, since I think the only major news outlet that covered it was NPR and I listen to NPR all the time. Of course this was back in the late 1990s.

Nonetheless, it's a strange subject for a book--and indeed, the book's subject seems to drift around a lot. Is it about old maps? Map-collecting and map collectors? Gilbert Bland (the thief in question)? Or is it about Mr. Harvey's search for Gilbert Bland? Really, it's all of those things, and that could be leveled as criticism against the book, if you were inclined to do so. I won't.

The book can be fascinating at times. Harvey's descriptions of the Peabody Library in Baltimore, of Bland's crime there, his dealings with the map trader Graham Arader, are all fascinating reading, and great writing. Harvey is generally at his best when treading historical waters here and those passages are always interesting.

The book is a quick read until about the last third, when things begin to slow down a great deal as we focus less on Mr. Bland and the history of cartography and more on Mr. Harvey and his research for the book. As he starts soul-searching about what exactly it is he's doing, we start asking ourselves the same question, and that's never a good idea in a book. I shouldn't be wondering why you're bothering to write this--and if you're not sure yourself, you certainly shouldn't tell me.

Fortunately it all picked up a little at the very end, just before the epilogue, and on the whole it's certainly an interesting read. Harvey's writing on the nature of map geeks and what it means for us to stare at a map and be absorbed by it for hours is the most eloquent writing on the subject I've ever seen. Well worth the time.

Smitty's Top 24 Books

I considered over 200 books for this list. And here they are in no particular order:

Huckleberry Finn, Silas Marner, Fahrenheit 451, The Grapes of Wrath, 1984, Animal Farm, Apropos of Nothing (series), Knight Life (series), Tom Sawyer, Neuromancer, The Alchemist, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Turners and Burners, Freakonomics, God's Smuggler, Plainsong, If Chins Could Kill, Resurrection, Inc., Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates, My Family and Other Animals, Last Days of Summer, Test Pattern, Going Postal, A Bevy of Beasts, Birds Beasts and Relatives, Gods and Generals, Fat Man in a Middle Seat, Understanding Arabs, The County of Monte Cristo, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (series), The Killer Angels, I Rode with Stonewall, Faith of My Fathers, Nixon off The Record, Memoirs of a Geisha, Rebel Private Front and Rear, Congo: From Leopold to Kabila, Colin Powell: My American Journey, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Get Shorty, Cold Mountain, The Framing of the Constitution, Founding Brothers, The 15 Biggest Lies in Politics, Stephen King On Writing, The Amazing Kavalier and Clay, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Wonder Boys, The Right Stuff, Rocket Boys, Stranger in a Strange Land, Big Trouble, Palace Walk, Night of the Avenging Blowfish, The Peoples Choice, Frankenstein, Double Whammy, Complete & Utter Failure, Tourist Season, Collapse, Emergency Sex, Straight Man, Good Omens, Basket Case, The White House Mess, The Sound of waves, The Mother Tongue, The Supreme Court, Goodnight Nebraska, Miracle at Philadelphia, Portrait of an Artist as an Old Man, Naked Came the Manatee, Savannah, Some Kind of Paradise, The Real World Order, The Westing Game, A Man in Full, Bonfire of the Vanities, American Hero, Harry Potter (series), Absurdistan, Skin Tight, Good as Gold, God Knows, Be Cool, Pattern Recognition, Stormy Weather, The World According to Garp, A Prayer for Owen Meany, Lucky You, Pronto, Riding the Rap, The Man who Invented Florida, Condominium, Something Happened, Bandits, Sick Puppy, The Cannibal Queen, Hammerhead Ranch Motel, Florida Roadkill, Home from Nowhere, Picture This, On the Road, Snow Crash, River of Grass, The Prophet and the Messiah, From Bauhaus to Our House, Star-Spangled Men, The Road To Nowhere, No-Fault Politics, Napoleon Bonaparte Broward, Inside the White House, A Court Divided, This New Ocean, The Big U, Party Politics: The American Decay, It Looks Like a President Only Smaller, The Death of Common Sense, The Tortilla Curtain, A History of Post-Colonial Lusophone Africa, The Patriot, The Road to Wellville, Divided we Fall, The Nine Nations of North America, The Wrong Stuff (Moore), Liftoff, What it Takes, Runaway Jury, Skipping Christmas, The Firm, The Pelican Brief, To Kill a Mockingbird, Back to the Moon, East is East, The Osterman Weekend, The Diamond Age, The Bourne Trilogy (series), The Road to Gandolfo, The Road to Omaha, The Chronicles of Narnia (series), Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, Life of Pi, Lit Life, Chariots for Apollo, Catch-22, Little Green Men, Sphere, Jurassic Park, Lost World, The Andromeda Strain, I Am Charlotte Simmons, Deke, Bartram's Trail Revisited, Notes from a Small Island, A Walk in the Woods, Lost Cosmonaut, The Sex Lives of Cannibals, The Gods Drink Whiskey, Together Alone, An Embarrassment of Mangoes, Whatever You Do Don't Run, Facing the Congo, The Lost Continent, The Overloaded Ark, As I Lay Dying, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Heart of Darkness, The Secret Garden, Lord of the Flies, The Hotel New Hampshire, The Cider House Rules, Native Tongue, Alice in Wonderland, The Great Gatsby, A Farewell to Arms, Understanding Iraq, The Scarlatti Inheritence, The Rhinemann Exchange, The Gemini Contenders, The Chancellor Manuscript, The Aquitaine Progression, The Icarus Agenda, The Water-Method Man, Breakfast of Champions, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, The Martian Chronicles, The Scarlet Letter, A Separate Peace, The Odyssey, The Jungle, The Fountainhead, The Catcher in the Rye, Ethan Frome, A Gathering of Old Men, The Time Machine, Alas Babylon, On Liberty, The Prince, A Man on the Moon, John Adams

And now, without further ado, let me present
The Smitty Library Top 24 Books

1. Straight Man - Richard Russo
2. The Right Stuff - Tom Wolfe
3. Snow Crash - Neal Stephenson
4. A Man on the Moon - Andrew Chaikin
5. Emergency Sex - Cain, Postlewait, Thomson
6. Picture This - Joseph Heller
7. Harry Potter (series) - J.K. Rowling
8. Wonder Boys - Michael Chabon
9. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (series) - Douglas Adams
10. Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain
11. The Tortilla Curtain - T.C. Boyle
12. Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
13. On Liberty - John Stuart Mill
14. A Walk in the Woods - Bill Bryson
15. Life of Pi - Yann Martel
16. The Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
17. The Cider House Rules - John Irving
18. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress - Robert A. Heinlein
19. Collapse - Jared Diamond
20. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe - C.S. Lewis
21. The Death of Common Sense - Philip K. Howard
22. Heart of Darkness - Philip Conrad
23. My Family and Other Animals - Gerald Durrell
24. On the Road - Jack Kerouac

The Smitty's Library Top 100 Books of Whenever Discussion

So I've posted two lists of top books recently. How about a list of Smitty's top 100 books?
We'll, I'm not sure I can put 100 books on a list of top 100 books; I mean I've read a lot of books, but at some point down there after about 40 or so I'd just be listing books I'd read and not actually books I thought were particularly great or worth reading. And if I just list everything I've read or everything I thought was worth the reading it wouldn't be a great list, either. So I've decided to limit it to 24 books. But after the jump, you'll find that I rambled on for some time about the creation of the list itself and my collection of books, so the list is in the post above this one, and after the jump here you'll find some ramblings about books as things.

This was fun to put together. I had to start by actually committing to 1s and 0s List 1 and List 2 of my book lists, those being Books I Own and Have Read (List 1) and Books I've Read but Don't Own (List 2). They're long lists. Many of the books on List 2 are floating around somewhere in the personal libraries of people I know (Lucky Bob, Taemon, and M&D in particular), and many of the rest are textbooks I sold back to my college bookstore.

Did you keep many of your college textbooks? I did, mainly the political science ones, because for some reason, I don't know why, I thought at the time that I'd want to hold on to, for example, V.O. Key's Southern Politics in State and Nation, or the classic text by Ellis and Wildavsky, Dilemmas of Presidential Leadership. Let me tell you, those are real page-turners. I don't really know why I still have them; there's probably still a market for both. In my more fevered dreams I tend to see my library as a budding Jeffersonian endowment, something I'll donate to a college or library when I die, but what made sense for Jefferson (there were no sizable libraries in the Southeast in Jefferson's time) isn't exactly going to make sense for me. I should weed out my library. I could start by getting rid of the textbooks, then move on to reference works I don't need or plan to use (do I need an Italian dictionary any more? What about the February 2006 edition of the Southeast U.S. Airport/Facility directory?). Then I could weed out those works of narrative nonfiction that I didn't think were particularly good or that I won't read again (Haynes Johnson's Divided We Fall, great for those days when you're just feeling a little too happy, or what about The Personal and Private Writings of Harry S Truman, which I'm sure some college library would love to have), and move on to bad novels (most of which I've already gotten rid of, but Neal Stephenson's The Big U is still lurking on the shelf behind me). Now's probably great time to do it, what with the impending move.

I just have a hard time getting rid of a book, any book. It's like getting rid of a healthy plant; I can't do it. I'm donating five healthy plants (two poinsettias, a Delonix regia, and two Thevetia peruvianas) to my mother-in-law next weekend, and I want to plant them myself as a goodbye; I know I need to get rid of them and they will thrive and be well-cared-for at her house, but still. Nonetheless clutter is a useless and annoying part of our lives and the more I can get rid of the better.

I'll be driving up to SC sometime in the next few weeks either to interview or to move, and I think I'll bring with me in the car a box or two of books that I can donate to a local library. I imagine the Abbeville County library system, or maybe the McCormick County one, would love to have some books, and some of the others might find a home in Greenville or Anderson counties. That would reduce the total bookshelf weight by a few dozen pounds and help me justify buying a few books I really want to have.

Anyway. Of course I put lists 1 and 2 together I had to actually come up with 24 books to put on my own list. This was every bit as hard as I'd anticipated it would be, and there are many books I'd like to include as footnotes to my list of 24. But the point of a list of best anythings is to settle on some actual criteria by which things can be judged, then judge them.

So after putting together lists 1 and 2, I set up some judging criteria. I knew from the beginning that I would not be limiting my list to novels exclusively; I am a lover of narrative nonfiction and some of the best books I've ever read were engaging memoirs, biographies, and travelogues. I absolutely could not have embraced a list of best books without including on it Emergency Sex or A Man on the Moon. I considered writing two lists, but in the end, Smitty's Library embraces fiction and nonfiction equally and it wasn't as hard as I thought it might be to rank books from both worlds.

That said, I did drop several items from consideration. I didn't include any plays. I didn't include comic books, graphic novels, or collected books of comic strips; had I done so Calvin & Hobbes books might have taken up the top twelve spots and that would have been ridiculous.

I didn't include children's books and didn't include very many young adult books. There were obvious caveats to this, including books that are considered absolute classics and things that are so great even if they are geared to younger folks they stand up against more adult-themed literature. Hence Harry Potter and Charlotte get in, but Ralph S. Mouse doesn't.

I also didn't include collections of essays or short stories. This meant cutting out some of my favorite pieces of writing, including everything by my favorite writer, P.J. O'Rourke, who is the second-most-important influence on my writing and without question the man who made me want to be a foreign correspondent (which I still want to be, and always well, even though it will never happen). This was a tough decision; some of O'Rourke's later works, including Eat the Rich and All the Trouble in the World (hereinafter "Trouble"), have a pretty concrete narrative drive despite having been born of disparate bits of reportage. Ultimately I decided that any book that could be broken up into several parts and published separately without losing any of its value had to be considered a "collection." This cut out a number of books that I've very much enjoyed, but I think it was the right decision. Had I not done this, Trouble would have taken the top spot on my list, and Parliament of Whores would have been in the top 10. I can't recommend them highly enough despite not including them on my list.

On a related topic I had to decide whether to include books that are part of a series as one book or individually. (The Big Read list seems to do both.) As an example, take the Harry Potter series. They stand as books on their own, just as any single essay from Trouble would. But like the essays in Trouble, each book gains from the others in the series and they have more impact read together. But unlike collections of essays, the question here was not whether they should be included at all, but rather whether they should be included individually or as a single entity.

The truth is I'm not satisfied with either choice, and ended up choosing in certain circumstances. Individually, a single very good series might take up several spots on a relatively short list, which is dissatisfying; and, individually, no single book in a series is usually as good as the entire series taken together. This is certainly true of the Harry Potter series; individually they are mostly very good books, but as a series they come close to brilliance. Would I rather include them as a single great book, or as a number of good ones?

I chose to consider series' together, mainly because of two dissatisfying choices it was the one that allowed me to include more different books on my list. But what constitutes a series? The Harry Potter series certainly. The Hitchhiker's Guide trilogy constitutes a series, too, if you ask me. Then things get tougher. Robert Ludlum wrote The Road to Gandolfo, which was hilarious and I suggest you check it out if you enjoy thrillers, as it's a well-written send-up of the genre by one of its masters. Almost 20 years later he wrote The Road to Omaha which had the same characters and was a sequel of sorts. But do the two books constitute part of a series? Or was the one just written to capitalize on the belated popularity of the other? Certainly Ludlum's Jason Bourne trilogy were written as a trilogy, but the two Roads weren't intended that way. And then when you look at the later work of Robert Heinlein, for example, he has the same characters appearing across many books that are unrelated, but simply because they exist in the same universe. Certainly we can't consider those part of a series.

In the end, for my purposes here, I considered a series to be anything where the first book of the series was written when the author already had the intention to write the last book of the series, or where the time elapsed between the first book in the series and the next book was less than five years. I did not consider a "series" to be made up of only two books. Nor, for my purposes here, does a series consist of books that include the same characters and are written soon after one another but do not constitute a single narrative drive. So, for example, I considered Randy Wayne White's Doc Ford series of mystery novels individually, since although all of them have Doc Ford as a protagonist, they don't build on each other to create a single narrative stream; you could read them out of order and it wouldn't matter. (Try that with Harry Potter.)

And so after going through all of that, I then had to sit down with my list of books and root through them. It was easy to get down to 50, and then 40, but after that it got tough. Choosing between number 24 and number 25 was the hardest. And then I had to rank them. It's always hard to pick a number one, but deciding between 16 and 17 isn't a piece of cake, either.

And I ended up breaking my own rules. I was thinking about the Chronicles of Narnia, which I've read all of, but I only really recall the first book (because I've read it twice) and a number of scenes in one of the later books that go on and on about Turkish Delight. As I recall, the later books did not stand up as well as The Lion et al, and I barely remember them. Could I include the whole series? Well... after thinking about while cleaning house yesterday, I don't think the whole series is as recommendable as The Lion et al is by itself. So I ended up listing The Lion et al in my list rather than the series. Oh well.

And I ended up with On the Road there at number 24. This was a bit of a surprise to me, since I didn't think it was all that great. But then again, I thought the first section of it was ridiculously awesome. And compared against some of the books that were in my list of 50, I thought it was more deserving of a place in the top 24 than others. Why? Because I think you should read it. And what good is a list of top books if it doesn't include books I think you should read? So take a look at my list. Feel free to borrow any of them if you want. Make up your own list, too. I want to see it!