Smitty's Library

The Inferno

2009-03-11T07:55:00.003-04:00

It took a bit of time to read through Dante's Inferno, but mainly because I was keeping busy at other things. This is a translation by John Ciardi, not the more famous one by Longfellow, but neither makes pretense of following Dante's rhyme scheme (which I've been told ruins any translation by requiring a fight for the rhyme). I found the translation very readable and enjoyable.

This book is only the Inferno, not the other two parts of the Divine Comedy. It was 99 cents at a thrift store if you're wondering why I didn't try to get all three in one volume.

I do not believe in hell. (I do believe in giving hell to people, such as in "Give 'Em Hell, Harry," but not in a specific place or even non-place to which the souls of the condemned are, well, condemned.) I found this poem fascinating for quite other reasons. I don't know anyone, even the Catholic Church, who abides by Dante's description of hell; that wasn't Dante's point, either. He writes as though he took a literal trip through the three layers of the afterlife, but certainly he didn't claim the trip literally took place or that his descriptions were literal and real. Dante was a papist and a good Catholic, and certainly he wanted to evoke the perfect justice of the afterlife; but to a large degree the Comedy was a forum for Dante to condemn (or praise) people he knew--some of whom weren't even dead yet when he was writing--for their actions. Dante found a way to use Christian allegory to write large the political and ecumenical debates that had riven Florence during his lifetime and were not yet settled at the writing (Dante died in exile from Florence). It is in that sense a very personal work, and a rather scathing political commentary.

That is not to take anything away from the work as a piece of literature; there hasn't been political (or religious) commentary like this since. As creative allegory the Inferno is a masterpiece; the way Dante punishes the damned in hell, each sin begetting its own perfect and perfectly just eternal punishment, is a feat few writers since have managed as convincingly and as beautifully.

I can't compare Ciardi's translation with others, since I haven't read any others (though at least Longfellow's is available on the web). I've been told that any translator who attempts to keep Dante's rhyme scheme and meter intact in the English is doing a massive disservice to the work, and that's probably true; Ciardi manages to keep an aba cdc fgf hih type of rhyme scheme throughout, which no doubt affected his word choice a great deal but the translation was still very readable (Longfellow's translation abandons rhyme for meter; I'd like to see a side-by-side comparison of the two, just for curiosity's sake).

What sets Ciardi apart is his voluminous notes at the end of every canto. You could read through the whole thing in an afternoon if you didn't bother to look at the notes, but the notes illuminate much of the allegory and much of the historical setting of the work to which any typical modern reader would be ignorant (this reviewer included). Setting the work in the Florence of c. 1310 helps understand much of what Dante is doing, who the wraiths are that he speaks to, and what their relationship to Dante was in life. I found it fun to read through all the notes, and I certainly discovered elements of Dante's genius I never would have seen without them. His assembly of this poem was as much a triumph of mechanics as of literature; he put the thing together almost as a watchmaker assembles a watch, and while a simple reading of the thing would be enjoyable, getting the nitty gritty of the notes really leaves the reader impressed at Dante's skill.

I am no Dante Alighieri. Neither, sadly, is anyone else I've read.

Lauderdale Update

2009-03-04T11:31:00.002-05:00

I've been spending some time each day the last couple weeks working at Lauderdale. I say working at, not working on, because I haven't actually written any words for it. Shoot, half the thing is written, I figure, by the time I root through and take the good parts from the existing draft.

There were at least two directions I could take that book, and I've settled on the direction it's going--crime novel--which means I need to reorganize and perfect the crimes themselves, how they fit together, Hank's role in solving them, and what the more significant background crime is. Funny, but a simple murder or assault is not an independent crime in these books; the crime is some underlying (or overarching) conspiracy, and murders simply happen as the conspirators attempt to keep things hidden. This is almost universal in crime novels--bodies pile up, but that isn't the real crime. Which is, in a sense, a real crime.

Bodies piled up aplenty in the previous version of Lauderdale but, partly because I wasn't sure what the book actually was, they didn't do so to any pattern or for any larger purpose other than to offend and sicken the narrator. Who deserved it, frankly, but that wasn't the point. The question was, is this the narrator's coming-of-age story, or is it a crime novel? Of course there was far too much autobiographical content in the book as it stood to easily change things around to focus on the coming-of-age aspect, and I think I made the right call--certainly the easy call--in deciding to proceed with it as a crime novel. Our narrator, Hank Lauderdale, is a somewhat different man than he was in the earlier version, but he is a unique protagonist for this sort of book, and I don't want to change that. Of course he's still a reporter, which is more or less the opposite of unique (ubiquitous?) in crime stories, but he's not a real reporter, and more importantly he doesn't actually want to solve this puzzle. He really just wants to get paid to support his partying habit. And how many crime novels feature a half-drunk grad student as the protagonist?

Plus, keeping the setting in South Florida gives me an excuse to reread a few Florida crime novels I have (I'm going to reread a few; I have rather more than a few) with an eye to maintaining some of the main aspects of that genre (yes, Florida Crime is an established subgenre... at least in my opinion. And dammit if I don't care about my own opinions why should anyone else? Come to think of it, why should anyone else anyway?). So I've changed up the "up next" listing on the right there, but I may not necessarily review those books, at least not in-depth, not here anyway. I don't think.

How to Meditate

2009-03-01T13:27:00.003-05:00

This book is what it says: a guide on how to meditate. Starting from the absolute basics and moving into the more esoteric (and difficult) meditations, Kathleen McDonald leads readers step-by-step through what exactly meditation is, and how it's done.

The book is not meant to be read at a sitting and put back on the shelf. I went ahead and read the whole thing, but I'm still working at the most basic meditations, on the breath and on the clarity of the mind. It will take me some time be able to move past those meditations.

McDonald is a practicing Buddhist, and the book is written from the Mahayana perspective (Tibetan Buddhism). That doesn't mean it isn't accessible to anyone; McDonald even notes in later chapters describing meditation upon a particular Buddha that it's perfectly to meditate on Christ, for example. The point is not the specific belief structure behind meditation; the point is to meditate it all, to clarify the mind and permit the practitioner to live in the present and be more thoughtful and positive all the time, and one needn't be a Buddhist to benefit from meditation.

For myself, I would consider the book nearly indispensible, and it will be on my bookshelf to be reread, piece by piece, for a very long time.

Nature Girl

2009-02-22T14:29:00.002-05:00

It took all of three days for me to read this book. I point that out in case the following review seems at all negative (which it will).

I love Carl Hiaasen's work. I've read all of his adult books, to include his collections of columns and his polemic against the Disney company (which was somewhat frightening, actually), with the sole exception of Strip Tease (it's on my list; also I think I've missed one other one, Skinny Dip maybe.) I have enjoyed them all, some more than others. Nature Girl is no exception.

Nature Girl is set in the Ten Thousand Islands, near the Everglades coast south of Naples. I love the area; I've written my own essay about the area and it is frankly a natural (no pun intended... well, maybe a little) setting for fiction of all sorts. This is a good story that makes good use of the setting. But something was missing here.

I can't put my finger on what was missing. I finished the book a week and a half ago and have been trying to do so since then; but I'm tired of waiting to write this review. Part of what I like about Hiaasen is how nicely he skewers Miami, Fort Lauderdale, and the rest of South Florida. It's urban, and realistically that's what I thought was missing here. About the only "skewering" to be done of Everglades City is of the tendency of the local leadership to get involved in the drugs trade, a point made but not belabored here (it would get dull quickly). Instead the... um... quirkiness of small backwater towns is on the skewers here, and to be perfectly frank, that's been done a thousand times by a hundred people. The only special thing here is the setting, and Randy Wayne White's made a whole career out of setting crime novels in the Ten Thousand Islands. In other words... what makes Nature Girl special?

As a part of the Hiaasen library, the setting is unique. Beyond that, honestly, nothing makes it special. This is not to say that the book reads like a Doc Ford mystery (Randy Wayne Wright's protagonist) or could have been written by anyone. It bears several of Hiaasen's stylistic marks and there are familiar characters here; it's a Hiaasen novel. And like I said I enjoyed it and think it's totally worth your time to read. What really bothers me is that the last two Hiaasen novels I've read--this one and Basket Case--have both been, shall we say, subpar among his efforts. Is the well running dry? Like I said, I haven't read Skinny Dip yet, which was published just before this one, so I can't judge. It's just a feeling I have--and maybe not fair. How many books can I expect the man to write about Miami? This one at least is set in a real place (which was the problem with Basket Case and perhaps I should be happy simple that Hiaasen is branching out and will be able to continue writing novels I can enjoy reading without being stuck in the same setting all the time. Hell, the man lives part time in Montana, and what's wrong with a Montana setting? Perhaps that's coming next. It won't be Miami, but that won't make it bad.

The Book of General Ignorance

2009-02-22T14:18:00.002-05:00

This book is plenty of fun. The only problem with it--as, apparently, with all trivia books--is that you can't be 100% sure it's all accurate. Right? Is everything in there correct? After all, if so much of the trivia here contradicts the conventional wisdom... well, where did the conventional wisdom come from?

Probably best not to get an answer to that question. But it probably is best to keep a copy of this book at your desk or nightstand or wherever you can read a bit of it when you have a couple minutes to kill.

Living the Simple Life

2009-02-20T08:08:00.003-05:00

I read most of Elaine St. James' Living the Simple Life aloud to Smittywife while we were on vacation over Presidents' Day weekend; she has since been rereading it over the past week, in case you were wondering whether we thought it was a worthwhile read.

Simplifying--the Thoreauvian Imperative I like to call it--has been on our minds a lot recently, since the wedding and move certainly if not before that. We have too much stuff. We both would like to make better use of our leisure time (no wisecracks about my level of leisure time right now, please), and spend our money more wisely. Elaine St. James has written three books about the topic, and though they are more than a decade old now (and occasionally show their age) the tips and techniques she shares for finding more time in the day and overcoming our materialism and inability to keep our time scheduled the way we'd like are timeless.

It's worth pointing out here that Mrs. St. James and her husband are not sell-everything-and-move-to-a-cabin-in-the-woods people. They live in a condominium near a major city, and both work. They're not Unabomber freaks, anti-technology Luddites, or zero-carbon hippies. They're just normal people, living their lives more simply than most of us. And most of us, if we ever took the time to sit and think instead of filling every waking hour with activity, would agree a bit more simplicity would be a good thing. Smittywife and I agree wholeheartedly. We're always looking for help in the matter, and this book was very good for that. Enjoyably written, not particularly preachy. The only problem I have with it is that several parts of the book are clearly meant for people who are much, much busier and more stressed than we currently are. That's actually rather comforting, though.

I will admit, also, that over the last couple days as I've been unpacking the last of the book boxes, I've been able to put far books in the sell/donate pile than I would have thought possible before I read this book; reading about how another book freak managed to make the decision not to own every book in the world has been helpful. I recommend this book for anyone looking to simplify their own life (even parents), but if you don't at least partially buy into the notion that you may need to simplify, this won't convince you otherwise.

Patriots

2009-02-11T15:53:00.004-05:00

A.J. Langguth's Patriots was published in 1989, and I've had it on my bookshelf almost that long (not really, but it's been at least five years). The great thing about history is that it really doesn't change much and a well-written popular history, barring new scholarship, is still going to be interesting 20 or 50 or 100 years after publishing. Patriots is well-written popular history.

Which is not say everyone will fall in love with it or that it's the greatest book ever on the subject. For starters not everyone enjoys reading history (I blame teachers for that. I have a theory that there is nothing inherent in anyone's personality that will make them like or dislike history; instead it's the teachers you have the first couple years you have to take history in school. Doesn't matter what age, whether you first take history in fourth grade or seventh grade. If at least one of your first two teachers makes history interesting you stand a chance, but if they both suck you'll never be able to get into it, no chance. Anyway), although this at least is fun history. Really, what American can't at least sorta get into a story about the Revolution?

Langguth frankly admits in the acknowledgements that Revolutionary history suffers from a lack of, shall we say, academic agreement on what actually happened. To some degree all the writer of history can do is pick the least unlikely of the available options. We know Washington didn't chop down a cherry tree; what we don't know beyond a shadow of a doubt is what he did do. At least he left a lot of letters.

I've read a bit about the Revolution. Founding Brothers was great. One of the things I liked about this was Langguth's decision to cover James Otis and Samuel Adams as heavily as he did. Unfortunately the focus on Massachussetts meant I kept wanting to know more about what was going in the South. I'm sure there's a book out there like that, but the thing is, going in, I had heard the name James Otis once, but knew nothing about him, and all I knew about Samuel Adams was that he was a brewer (it turns he was not, in fact, a brewer. He made malt, but never actually brewed beer; also, he didn't really make much malt, either, and was usually broke). Following them was great; I had no idea how important Samuel Adams actually was to the early movement for independence.

It's a really big book, about 600 pages. If that's not daunting it's worth your time.

Dark Star Safari

2009-02-05T15:01:00.001-05:00

This is the first time I've read Theroux. It will not be the last.

I think the sheer audacity of the trip Theroux proposes--from Cairo to Cape Town over land--is the most attractive aspect of the book, to me. I'd love to do something that foolhardy, that crazy, but I couldn't possibly leave my wife and family and go off to do that and not feel guilty about it every single day. Theroux has been doing it for decades.

After reading, what stays with me though is not just the fact of this absurd journey, but the imagery Theroux uses. I was completely taken with his writing, his use of the language, and throughout regardless of how I felt about his commentaries on various things the writing was just wonderful.

The trip is certainly worth taking. Theroux visits parts of Africa few Westerners ever visit, and does so via means rarely if ever taken by outsiders; I was reminded of Jeffery Tayler's canoe trip down the Congo when Theroux decided to take a boat downriver from Malawi into Mozambique; who does these things? I want to talk to these people; where do they get such a crazy notion and why is there no one around to talk them out of it?

The book, perhaps the traveller himself, is strongest when he is able to be with someone strong enough to strike up an actual relationship, however brief. In Ethiopia, Uganda, Malawi, and elsewhere Theroux spends several days with one person or a group of people and it is here that we get the best insight into Africans themselves; other conversations with former political prisoners--Theroux notes that a great many men of a certain age in Africa have been in prison, often for a fairly long time, a comment I'd heard in Djibouti but never considered--are equally illuminating. Theroux by himself tends to fall into a Brysonesque tendency to pick on people, though in fairness in Egypt he's picking on people who probably deserve it.

The book has received some press coverage and commentary for Theroux's strong comments about the international aid effort in Africa. Some of his complaints are petty and I think personal--he consistently complains that aid workers in their shiny new Land Rovers never stop to pick him up when he's looking for a ride; yet at the same time he knows full well how dangerous the areas he's going through are, and why should an aid worker believe his story and give him a ride when there are no doubt dozens of Africans who'd like the same favor? Theroux never considers that or, if he does, he doesn't write about it. Seems petty and I was a little annoyed with it by the sixth or seventh time he complained about it.

Theroux's main argument about aid is that the Aid For Africa industry--and it is an industry--has done nothing to improve the lives of everyday Africans, employs no Africans, involves no Africans in its decision-making, and works almost entirely to further the goals of other nations and the careers of the aid agencies themselves. Some of those criticisms are certainly fair, not the least of which is that all the millions or billions of dollars spent in Africa by aid agencies over the years has led to precisely zero improvement in the lives of Africans; things are indeed worse than ever. And a lot of aid programs are tied to requirements from the home country--the project must use a certain contractor or purchase materials from certain places, instead of everything being done in Africa by African suppliers and companies. Part of the reason there's no corporate infrastructure in Africa to speak of is that most government budgets are aid, and most aid requires projects to use international contractors, so local contractors can't even get work from their own governments and thus cannot build local wealth.

But a lot of aid work is done by Africans, and there is a glaring problem with Theroux's anti-aid bias: he never talks to an aid agency. He talks to a couple of Catholic nuns, and a handful of teachers, but not to anyone in a leadership capacity; indeed, he'd rather sneer at the people driving the Land Rovers than try to engage them, although in fairness they don't seem interested in engaging him.
There are people more learned than I about the topic who have criticized Theroux's statements, and I'll let you look those up if you're interested; a good bit of the criticism seems to be picking nits, though, and most impartial observers are coming to agree that there is something fundamentally wrong with the international aid is handled in Africa. Whether he's right in all the details, Theroux's complaints about aid are not unique and certainly should be food for thought.

Controversy aside, the book is a wonderful read, and there's just not anything else out there like it. Travel writing about Africa tends to be either limited in scope or of poor quality in general; this book is certainly neither of those. Now if there was just something of this quality about west Africa...

When a Crocodile Eats the Sun

2009-02-04T12:47:00.001-05:00

I admit, I'll pick just about any book about Africa, and perhaps such books don't thrill the general audience (see, for example, A History of Post-Colonial Lusophone Africa). I don't really care. When a book is this good it doesn't matter. Peter Godwin's When a Crocodile Eats the Sun is without question the most deeply felt book I've read in a long time.

That does not mean it made me weep openly, or laugh out loud (certainly not that). When I picked it up, I was looking for something about the recent crisis in Zimbabwe, maybe some background on what might have changed in Robert Mugabe that he no longer about his country and only himself, and perhaps maybe a look inside the country at what it's like for the ordinary folks there. I was, I will admit, a bit disappointed that Mr. Godwin, whose picture appears on the back, is white. For shame, Smitty, for shame.

This is not a backgrounder on the crisis or even on the country, although Godwin includes good doses of history. This is a personal memoir, and, as those go, it is remarkable. During the years covered in this memoir, Mr. Godwin settled down and married and had children outside his home country, set up house in Manhattan, lived through 9/11, saw his mother become impoverished and his homeland destroyed, learned a long-held family secret and was forced to reconsider his own history, and lost his father. This was certainly an intensely emotional time, and writing about must have been difficult. Layered over these personal issues is the unyielding decline in his home, Zimbabwe, the country of his birth. Watching the rule of law dissolve in the place you grew up in and still cherish as home, watching the people there slide into poverty, crime, and open conflict, must be a terrible thing. To be able to do nothing about, that's even worse.

When I put the book down I was casting about for exactly what it was about it that made it so good. This is not like any other memoir I've read. It isn't just the combination of events Godwin relates, or his smooth writing style. There's something more, and I can't say exactly what it is. But after I'd thought about it, it occurred to me that at some level this book is simply filled with emotion, moreso than anything else I've read recently. The book just makes you feel. It's generally sad, but there are moments of joy and happiness. It is so well-crafted, though, it's not that reading the sad parts make you feel sad; it's that the full weight of the sadness Godwin feels is there, on the page, and instead of trying to manipulate your emotions he's simply writing his own. He's just doing it better than anyone I can remember reading. That's remarkable.

This is not always an easy book to read, but it is worth it. If you are interested in Zimbabwe at all, don't miss it.

Backlink

2009-02-04T11:55:00.001-05:00

If you came here having read the previous note on Smitty's World about that blog shutting down, and were for some reason disappointed to read that... don't delete that bookmark just yet. The shutdown announcement may have been premature.

The American Home Front

2009-02-03T10:38:00.006-05:00

This is one of many books I've had in the house for a while but never bothered to read. It's a shame I let it sit so long.

I have a number of books by people who've attempted to travel the entire breadth of the United States to... I don't know. Find America, usually. Sometimes there's a conceit--in the case of The Cannibal Queen, it was that the traveling was done in a 1941 Stearman biplane (my kind of conceit). In Lost Continent, the conceit was the in the author's attitude to everyone he came into contact with. In other cases, there's a specific reason driving the journey, as in Haynes Johnson's Divided We Fall, a tour of America during our last (real) recession in the early 1990s (a depressing but relevant book). I enjoy the genre, but I find that there's not usually anything terribly new in it from one book to the next, once you get past the conceit or the reason. You might go to a different place, but America is America, and as Bill Bryson pointed out just about everywhere has become Anytown USA.

That makes Alistair Cooke's The American Home Front: 1941-1942 rather interesting, as he made his journey before Levittown was built, and before the rest of the country started to look like it. Cooke was a Brit sent to America by the BBC to report on America to the British. He earned his citizenship in 1941, just before the war, and embarked on this journey primarily to give the good folks back home a look at America on the brink of war. The places he visits, even those that are intimately familiar (Jacksonville and Tampa, for example), are hardly recognizable, the America of Yesteryear, yet presented without nostalgia because the book was written in Yesteryear.

Needless to say I enjoyed it immensely, because I do like the genre. But like almost every book in said genre, it was a bit too long. America is very big. You can travel around America and notice things for about 200 pages before you need to wrap it up. Really. And you can't possibly see the whole country in that time, so you have to limit yourself... or not, as no one respects the 200-pages notion. So the books always drag by the last quarter. It's not that the writing isn't as good nor the insights as fresh, it's just that, well, nothing new is happening. Change in setting is not enough to maintain interest when everything else remains more or less the same. I can't think of a book I've read of this sort that wasn't too long; even On the Road was too long. It's a shame, because either you get sick of the book and the writer, or, as in this case, you're tempted to skim parts of the last quarter, and those areas of the country last on the itinerary you're less interested in reading about.

So. I like this genre, and anything well-written in it is going to be appealing. And the greatest fault of this book is the same as that for any other in the genre, namely, it runs a bit too long. Why read this one instead of any other? I could go on about Cooke's writing, which is very nice, or his observational abilities, which are excellent as one would hope for a journalist. The truth is, though, this is an America you can not go back to. And not only that, anyone today who tries to tell you what America was like in the 1940s, even from personal experience, is going to get a lot of things wrong. We are nostalgic creatures, and nostalgia colors our view of the past. You can't change that. The only way to get a sense of a historical place is to read a contemporary writer who was deliberately trying to write about the here and now. And that is exactly what Cooke was doing.

Some travel-across-America books do not wear well, for various reasons; the writing may be substandard, the conceit may hinder readers' interest. Others will still be read decades from now. I hope The American Home Front is in the latter category. It deserves an audience, and before long there will be few people left who can even offer clouded remembrances of the era. As a historical document then, as much as anything, this is a great book. How nice that it's also such an enjoyable read.

Six Short Book Reviews

2008-09-30T09:32:00.001-04:00

I've been meaning to review these books forever and haven't got round to it and at this rate I won't for ages. So here's the abbreviated version in order of the first read. As always any of these are available for checkout from the Smitty Library.

1. An Embarrassment of Mangoes, by Ann Vanderhoof.
Wonderful book. Enjoyable to read, will whet your appetite for a Caribbean vacation. Great recipes, although we haven't actually tried any of them yet (but I really want to, especially now I know the DeKalb Farmer's Market in Atlanta has callaloo). Ann Vanderhoof has done what we all want to do--leave the rat race behind and take a vacation forever (or a year, in her case)--so obviously she has more money than the rest of us, but she never ever writes like it, and the book is just a pleasure. Highly recommended.

2. The Diamond Age, by Neal Stephenson.
A reread. I love Snow Crash and, the last time I read it, I still loved it. I like this book a great deal, but it runs out of steam 3/4 of the way through and enters a territory of great weirdness where it starts to get difficult to follow and even, frankly, to suspend disbelief for. Still contains wonderful moments of philosophy and lots of solid factual grounding, and still mostly a very fun read. But not as much fun as I remembered. Definitely worth looking at, but it shows the direction Stephenson has taken generally (i.e. increasingly hard to read).

3. Whatever You Do, Don't Run, by Peter Allison.
Subtitled "True Tales of a Botswana Safari Guide." Lots of fun. Not quite as funny as you might expect from the cover blurbs and actually surprisingly touching at times, nonetheless a light, quick read, perfect for a bedside book as it consists of a collection of short episodes. I greatly enjoyed this book, and I don't think you need to have gone on safari to enjoy it yourself. It may make you want to pick up and go, though. I suspect Mr. Allison has three or four more books of stories in him and he is a fine storyteller. Smittywife needs to read this before it goes into the lending library circulation.

4. Airline/Transport Pilot Oral Exam Guide
Technical book of very limited interest. Will be out of date soon anyway, and since none of the airlines are actually hiring I won't need to take the test. Useful for brushing up on things before my interview, though.

5. Emergency Sex, by Kenneth Cain, Heidi Postlewait, and Andrew Thomson.
Absolutely my highest recommendation; the best book I've read this year. The authors were UN Peacekeepers during the 1990s and into the early 2000s and these are their tales. If you are at all aware of the existence of other countries you should read this book. If you are a firebreathing conservative and think the UN should be shut down, you should read this book. If you are bleeding-heart liberal and think the UN should take over the world, you should read this book. If you think it matters at all how the US is viewed in the other countries, you should read this book. If you don't think it matters how the US is viewed in other countries but are aware that other people have opinions, you should read this book.
You should read this book. It is gripping. It is well-written. It matters.

6. The Power and the Glory, by Graham Greene.
Interesting. On a lot of "Best Books" lists, which is why I read it. I will pick up The Quiet American and The Comedians on the basis of this, but I can't say I was exactly swept up in it or transfixed by its brilliance. Greene knows how to build a novel and is a good writer; if the subject matter, faith (in particular Catholicism) and keeping faith when there is no Earthly reason to do so, is of remote interest to you, this is one of few novels on the subject that doesn't preach to you (there's plenty of preachy junk out there for you if you want that). But it never really answers any questions, for the protagonist or for the reader. Valuable, but not one you need to put at the top of your list.

The Victors

2008-07-24T15:16:00.000-04:00

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

2008-07-23T20:15:00.000-04:00

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

2008-07-19T08:03:00.000-04:00

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

2008-07-13T09:00:00.000-04:00

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

2008-07-11T08:12:00.000-04:00

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

2008-07-01T10:17:00.000-04:00

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

2008-07-01T10:15:00.000-04:00

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!

Modern Library's Top 100 Novels of the 20th Century

2008-06-30T11:37:00.000-04:00

I was vexed by some aspects of the NEA's Big Read list so I thought I'd look at the Modern Library list instead. This list was also controversial when it came out, not least because the #1 book on the list is an impenetrable fog of absinthe-laced stream-of-consciousness that few people ever really enjoyed or understood. But what the hey, let's look at the list, shall we? After the jump?

1 Ulysses – James Joyce
2 The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
3 Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – James Joyce
4 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
5 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
6 The Sound and the Fury – William Faulkner
7 Catch-22 – Joseph Heller
8 Darkness at Noon – Arthur Koestler
9 Sons and Lovers – D.H. Lawrence
10 The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
11 Under the Volcano – Malcolm Lowry
12 The Way of All Flesh – Samuel Butler
13 1984 – George Orwell
14 I, Claudius – Robert Graves
15 To the Lighthouse – Virginia Woolf
16 An American Tragedy – Theodore Dreiser
17 The Heart is a Lonely Hunter – Carson McCullers
18 Slaugterhouse-Five – Kurt Vonnegut
19 Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison
20 Native Son – Richard Wright
21 Henderson the Rain King – Saul Bellow
22 Appointment in Samarra – John O'Hara
23 U.S.A. – John dos Passos
24 Winesburg, Ohio – Sherwood Anderson
25 A Passage to India – E.M. Forster
26 The Wings of the Dove – Henry James
27 The Ambassadors – Henry James
28 Tender is the Night – F. Scott Fitzgerald
29 The Studs Lonigan Trilogy – James T Farrell
30 The Good Soldier – Ford Madox Ford
31 Animal Farm – George Orwell
32 The Golden Bowl – Henry James
33 Sister Carrie – Theodore Dreiser
34 A Handful of Dust – Evelyn Waugh
35 As I Lay Dying – William Faulkner
36 All the King's Men – Robert Penn Warren
37 The Bridge of San Luis Rey – Thornton Wilder
38 Howard's End – E.M. Forster
39 Go Tell it on the Mountain – James Baldwin
40 The Heart of the Matter – Graham Greene
41 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
42 Deliverance – James Dickey
43 A Dance to the Music of Time – Anthony Powell
44 Point Counterpoint – Aldous Huxley
45 The Sun Also Rises – Ernest Hemingway
46 The Secret Agent – Joseph Conrad
47 Nostromo – Joseph Conrad
48 The Rainbow – D.H. Lawrence
49 Women in Love – D.H. Lawrence
50 Tropic of Cancer – Henry Miller
51 The Naked and the Dead – Norman Mailer
52 Portnoy's Complaint – Philip Roth
53 Pale Fire – Vladimir Nabokov
54 Light in August – William Faulkner
55 On the Road – Jack Kerouac
56 The Maltese Falcon – Dashiell Hammett
57 Parade's End – Ford Madox Ford
58 The Age of Innocence – Edith Wharton
59 Zuleika Dobson – Max Beerbohm
60 The Moviegoer – Walker Percy
61 Death Comes for the Archbishop – Willa Cather
62 From Here to Eternity – James Jones
63 The Wapshot Chronicles – John Cheever
64 The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
65 A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess
66 Of Human Bondage – W. Somerset Maugham
67 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
68 Main Street – Sinclair Lewis
69 The House of Mirth – Edith Wharton
70 The Alexandria Quartet – Lawrence Durrell
71 A High Wind in Jamaica – Richard Hughes
72 A House for Mr. Biswas – V.S. Naipaul
73 The Day of the Locust – Nathanael West
74 A Farewell to Arms – Ernest Hemingway
75 Scoop – Evelyn Waugh
76 The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie – Muriel Spark
77 Finnegans Wake – James Joyce
78 Kim – Rudyard Kipling
79 A Room With a View – E.M. Forster
80 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
81 The Adventures of Augie March – Saul Bellow
82 Angle of Repose – Wallace Stegner
83 A Bend in the River – V.S. Naipaul
84 The Death of the Heart – Elizabeth Bowen
85 Lord Jim – Joseph Conrad
86 Ragtime – E.L. Doctorow
87 The Old Wives' Tale – Arnold Bennett
88 The Call of the Wild – Jack London
89 Loving – Henry Green
90 Midnight's Children – Salman Rushdie
91 Tobacco Road – Erskine Caldwell
92 Ironweed – William Kennedy
93 The Magus – John Fowles
94 Wide Sargasso Sea – Jean Rhys
95 Under the Net – Iris Murdoch
96 Sophie's Choice – William Styron
97 The Sheltering Sky – Paul Bowles
98 The Postman Always Rings Twice – James M. Cain
99 The Ginger Man – J.P. Donleavy
100 The Magnificent Ambersons – Booth Tarkington

So on this list I've only read 12. But many of them are things I've no intention of ever bothering with, starting with number one, Ulysses. I'm not going to put 18 months of my time into a book I won't really understand even after I finish it the third time. I might someday consider Finnegan's Wake, but as a rule I'm not impressed by books that only 1% of readers will ever actually understand, and I refuse to be one of those people who's read Ulysses, and didn't like or understand it, but claims it's this wonderful work of literature so that they'll sound smart.

The Big Read

2008-06-28T21:58:00.000-04:00

I'm stealing this blog thingy from Smittywife's good friend Starskin.

I will preface this with the following three comments:
1) The list is highly suspect
2) I'm doing this instead of reviewing several books that aren't on this list.
3) Ayzair, you are so tagged for this! Everybody else who wants to is, too.

The Big Read is an NEA program designed to encourage community reading initiatives. They've come up with this list of the top 100 books, using criteria they don't explain and that are highly suspect (The DaVinci Code? AYFKM? His Dark Materials? Lots of questionable choices here, and why both Chronicles of Narnia and TLTWATW...), and they estimate that the average adult has only read 6 of these. So, we are encouraged to:

1) Look at the list and bold those we have read.
2) Italicize those we intend to read.
3) Underline the books we LOVE
4) Reprint this list in our own blogs

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of ShakespeareOkay, seriously, I've only read about... 30% of Shakespeare, but I'm bolding it anyway
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Okay, so that's 28. Not too shabby. As I said to Smittywife (who has the list on her blog, too) what's more of a concern to me is the number of great classics on this list that I have no intention to read, no desire at all. War and Peace. Anna Karenina. Wuthering Heights. Emma.

I think I'm going to go look at the Library Association's list of 100 Greatest Books and see how many of those I've read.

Footprints Across the South

2008-06-25T12:14:00.000-04:00

This morning I finished James Kautz' book Bartram's Trail Revisited. There has been a minor upsurge in interest in William Bartram in the last decade or so, and Kautz began working to retrace Bartram's trail in 2001, while living and teaching in the Atlanta area. My review is after the jump.

Several works have been written about Bartram, about his travels (not least, of course, Bartrams Travels); about the flora and fauna he collected, identified, was the first European to see and name; and about the land over which he traveled. Kautz has taken a different view: this book is about what the land looks like now. He is not a fanatic follower of the exact path Bartram trod (indeed, the exact path is not known, what with GPS not being invented until 200 years later and all; very good estimations are made based on Bartram's accounts but in some places all we can do is get within 10 or 20 miles of the likely path), but instead visits the places Bartram wrote about, and looks to see what they are like today.

It's a very enjoyable read--though I'll admit if you aren't from the South or at least haven't lived here you probably won't be that interested--and spans all sorts of topics. Kautz gets into history and politics, he visits both natural places and developed ones, he discusses issues of race and class (which sadly still pervade the South at every level), he talks about fishing and canoeing, and about shopping and restaurants.

The book is not written chronologically; it is laid out in roughly the order in which Bartram traveled, but Kautz took his own trips where and when he could over the course of five years. Though certainly you'll learn some things about Bartram from this book, really, it's a look at the world Bartram visited, 230 years later. What would the man see if he took the trip today?

Kautz manages to avoid being too pro-environment here, and certainly he understands the need of people to have jobs and places to live and things to eat. He is no starry-eyed tree-hugger bemoaning the loss of the wilderness Bartram traversed. But neither is he blind to the devastation Americans have wrought on their landscape, both physically and culturally. Consequently the book is not depressing or sad, although it could be. Instead it's an enjoyable read, thought-provoking for any resident of the South, and a good introduction into the world of William Bartram. It's not the best book I've read this year (I think it will be tough to top Emergency Sex), but I can certainly recommend it.

Smitty's List of Books, Lists 3-6

2008-06-23T08:40:00.000-04:00

This post is mainly for me, so that I can find this information later. There were probably other places to put it but this one is easy to find, especially insofar as I may be getting a new computer in the relatively near term, and having this info in "the cloud," (Google's term for the internet) is probably for the best. If we sell the house, of course. So this is two lists of books here at the house that I haven't read yet--not all of which I am yearning to read anytime soon--and two more lists of books I would like to read. Mainly the first two lists are to scare me away from doing anything about the second two lists for at least a couple of months. Theoretically this will help me give form to my book buying, and also get me to read more. If I read four books from list three and two books from list four, I can buy a book from each of lists five and six. (Lists 1 and 2 are books I've already read and still own, and I don't need to put that here.) So this should encourage me to read off lists 3 and 4 since there are actually two books on list 5 that are contemporaneous enough I want to read them very soon, before they are overtaken by events. I should spend more of my downtime reading.

3. Nonfiction Books I Own And Haven't Read
On The Wealth of Nations, P.J. O'Rourke
General Washington's Christmas Farewell, Stanley Weintraub
The Last True Story I'll Ever Tell, John Crawford
Peace Kills, P.J. O'Rourke
When A Crocodile Eats The Sun, Peter Godwin
Notes From The Five States of Texas, A.C. Greene
Dark Star Safari, Paul Theroux
American Sphinx, Joseph J. Ellis
John Glenn, a Memoir, John Glenn
Flight: My Life in Mission Control, Chris Kraft
Failure is Not An Option, Gene Kranz
Lost Moon, Jim Lovell
Schirra's Space, Wally Schirra
The Victors, Stephen A. Ambrose
The Wilde Blue, Stephen A. Ambrose
Cradle Crew, Kenneth K. Blyth
Thud Ridge, Jack Broughton
The American Home Front, Alistair Cooke
Winged Victory, Geoffrey Perret
Passage to Union, Sarah H. Gordon
Consolidation: Jacksonville and Duval County, Richard Martin
Made in Detroit, Paul Clemens
The Intellectuals Speak Out About God, ed. Roy Varghese
United States: Essays, 1952-1992, Gore Vidal

4. Fiction Books I Own And Haven't Read
Primary Colors, Anonymous
Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
Peter and the Starcatchers, Dave Barry
The Hornet's Nest, Jimmy Carter
Don Quixote, Miguel Cervantes
The Entitled, Frank DeFord
Train Man, P.T. Deuterman
The Alexandria Quartet, Lawrence Durrell
Short Lines, ed. Rob Johnson
The Grand Conspiracy, William Penn
Cryptonomicon, Neal Stephenson

5. Nonfiction Desiderata
River of Lakes, Bill Belleville
The Translator, Daoud Hari
A Long way Gone, Ishmael Beah
Nine Hills to Nambonkaha, Sarah Erdman
Out of Africa, Isak Dinesen
The Caliph's House, Tahir Shah
A Small Place, Jamaica Kincaid
River Town, Peter Hessler
Getting Stoned with Savages, J. Marten Troost
Honeymoon With My Brother, Franz Wisner
The Geography of Bliss, Eric Weiner
The Ends of the Earth, Robert D. Kaplan
Central Asia's Second Chance, Martha Brill Olcott
His Excellency, Joseph J. Ellis
1776, David McCullough
Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond
Life in the Valley of Death, Alan Rabinowitz
The Bottom Billion, Paul Collier
How to Play in Traffic, Penn & Teller
At the Edge of Space: The X-15 Program, Milton O. Thompson
A Man On The Moon, Expanded Edition, Andrew Chaikin
Moon Lander, Tom Kelly
Last Man on the Moon, Gene Cernan
The Wrong Stuff?, Phil Scott
American Modern, J. Stewart Johnson
Full Moon, Michael Light

6. Fiction Desiderata
What is the What, Dave Eggers
Anthills of the Savannah, Chinua Achebe
Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
A Canticle For Liebowitz, Walter Miller Jr
Red Mars, Green Mars, and Blue Mars, Kim Stanley Robinson
Starship Troopers, Robert A. Heinlein
Hackers, ed. Jack Dann & Gardner Dozois
A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess
The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Mohsin Hamid
Run, Ann Patchett
Lamb, Christopher Moore
Windy City, Scott Simon
Bangkok 8, John Burdett
Nature Girl, Carl Hiaasen
The Laughing Sutra, Mark Salzman
The Inner Circle, T.C. Boyle
Thank You For Smoking, Christopher Buckley
Ninety-two In the Shade, Tom McGuane
The Naked and the Dead, Norman Mailer
Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie
Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie
All the King's Men, Robert Penn Warren
The Adventures of Augie March, Saul Bellow
Portnoy's Complaint, Philip Roth
Dog Soldiers, Robert Stone
Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston
The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis
Henderson the Rain King, Saul Bellow
The Power and the Glory, Graham Greene
At Swim-Two-Birds, Flann O'Brien
A Bend in the River, V.S. Naipaul
Revolutionary Road, Richard Yates
Lucky Jim, Kingsley Amis

Little Green Men

2008-03-22T17:28:00.000-04:00

If it weren't for a gift inscription on the inside page (thank you, M & L!), I would have no idea how long I've had Christopher Buckley's Little Green Men sitting unread on my bookshelves.But thanks to the inscription I know it's been six years and change. The first few chapters seemed familiar and I think I picked it up at some point and abandoned it, I don't know why. Unlike the previous, this is not a book worth abandoning unread.

Little Green Men is funny and knowing and wise in that snarky post-Lewinsky Washington way Chris Buckley has. I like his work, and this is representative. I don't have a lot to say about it other than that it's a bit deeper than such things tend to be and the story is a rollicking good ride. I finished it in less than a week if that's saying anything, and I haven't exactly been reading at a quick pace this year.

The book is essentially three Frankenstein stories interlaid, each monster created by the monster before it, each more out of control than the one before it. Makes for a good ride. There are comments I'd like to make about some of the author's choices and some of the points in the story, but I don't think I can without giving the thing away, and I don't want to do that. So, suffice to say, a nice quick read, good book, well-written, most enjoyable.

The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium

2008-03-18T12:03:00.000-04:00

Pyrotechnic Insanitarium was the term used by a contemporary writer to describe Coney Island in its heyday at the turn of the 20th Century. I think I would quite enjoy a book about Coney Island's history. Pity this wasn't it.

Mark Dery wrote The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink way back in 1999. It shows. It's been a very long nine years. And this is a pretty long review so I'll put it after the jump.

Leaving aside the problem that an unemployed person probably shouldn't read a book like this anyway--it's fairly depressing--I didn't bother finishing it for other reasons. From page one you know you're going to be reading things that may not apply any more. The before/after of 9/11 is a pretty severe contrast, and attempts to deconstruct American culture on the eve of the new millenium--and there were many--couldn't have predicted 9/11 or the turn said culture would take. Couldn't have predicted George Bush, either, who, like it or not, has defined this decade in ways historians will still be discussing a hundred years from now. And anyway, as Dery helpfully points out, the turn of the year 2000 had no special meaning whatsoever apart from what had been imbued to it by the culture: 2000 was itself a cultural creation, and had it merely been the turn from 1994 to 1995 all the cultural oddities and excesses Dery writes about would have been... well, they still would have been around. End-of-the-millenium angst was all well and good (Y2K anyone?) but most of the cultural issues Dery deals with were in the air already and only the notion that "surely, something big is going to happen" made any of it seem like it was a sign of the end times.

The fact is the 20th Century may have lasted from about 1918 until 1990, by some estimates, or it may have run until 2001. Perhaps the years from the fall of the Soviet Union to the attack on the World Trade Center were simply an interlude, history and humanity deciding whether we were going to go back and relive the violence and decadence of the 20th Century again or find something else to do. (Unfortunately I think we've decided to relive the 20th.) In any event, the constant reference to "fin-de-millenium" (Dery's terminology) makes the book feel older than it should--especially considering that, just as the cultural issues Dery discusses were extant before the 1998-1999 oh-my-god-here-comes-the-millenium era, they are still out there today.

Unfortunately the issues Dery chooses to discuss are not altogether nice. There are chapters about artists who use sheep entrails to make... not much, really, and about a photographic study of an exibition of Peter the Great's collection of freaks and mutants in formaldehyde. Things that are, in essence, gross, and I for one don't feel like reading about gross for the sake of gross. So, it's gross. So, there are gross things in life. It's one thing for an artist to make a statement that ignoring gross things or pretending they don't exist is immature, that's valid cultural criticism. It's something else to force gross down my throat because you think I'm immature. Fuck you.

Ultimately though it's not the nature of subject matter that drags the book down, since some people find such topics highly entertaining, if not arousing (I think I know some people like that. Not that I know them well, nor do I want to). There are other problems.

Dery's focus is relentlessly negative. Now, I didn't finish the book. I didn't even get halfway through, and I wasn't finished with the second section (out of 16) before I was skimming. It's possible that, in the later sections--well, in the 16th section anyway--Dery turns it all around and instead of just piling criticism atop depression ad infinitum he find something redeeming, some reassurance about the future of our society. But the fact that he labelled the conclusion "Last Things" and not "Last Words" leads me to believe the final rapier thrust in this one-sided fencing match is just like all the rest: straight to the undefended heart.

Let's be honest for a moment, shall we? Skewering American culture and society is easy. I do it. You do it. We all do it. The society we live in is the most individualistic on Earth, in history, and the fact that there is so much low-brow, so much stupidity, so many mass movements in one direction or another, so much low-grade shouting being passed off as debate, is a consequence of that. As an occasionally self-proclaimed libertarian I must accept that. But as much as I adore liberty, it results in a culture that is dominated by the lowest elements--and too much liberty scares people and makes them follow the crowd. Picking on our society does not require a 270 page book, and frankly the book just doesn't stay interesting. I may not have known about Renee French's Kinderculture series of skin-crawlingly creepy childhood cartoons, but I'm hardly surprised to find that they exist and, frankly, my life is not any richer for the knowledge. I don't need proof that most people are sickos. I suspect it anyway.

I read through to the fourth section, which was about the psycho-killer clown phenomenon. This interests me a great deal, as I have long found clowns to be mildly creepy. Not scary, but a little... je ne sais quoi. I do not like clowns for the most part, though I recognize that clowning has a long history and that our conception of them as scary pedophiles is a fairly recent invention. Clown antics, clowning around, those things are great. It's the dress-up part of clowns that is disturbing, more than anything, the idea of subjugating your whole self to another persona, a persona you yourself have created, one with no "character" or backstory per se but which relies entirely on the physical concealment of the self. A clown is a clown is a clown, after all. There's nothing creepy about acting, but clowning is not acting. Clowning is the elimination of the self: literally, in self, as it requires concealing the self solely for the purpose of being made ridiculous in the eyes of others. I just don't get it.

The chapter on scary clowns is... well, a little scarier than I want clowns to be. Dery draws heavily on the story of John Wayne Gacy, the serial killer who dressed up like a clown to lure young men into his home so he could kill them. Nice, right? But Gacy's murders took place in the 1970s and while certainly Gacy is guilty of creating a lot of the suspicion of clowns, I think Dery spends too much time talking about him. As it is, though, Dery makes a good point in his discussion that our mass distrust of clowns and people who would dress up like clowns has morphed over time into a general distrust of almost anyone who makes a living working with children. I suppose it's only a matter of time before parents start distrusting teachers simply because teachers want to work with children. Perhaps this is how the society in Children of Men came to be.

And the good point Dery makes is a problem, too. He makes some good points. He talks about the dumbing-down of culture and to what degree it is a real phenomenon (yes and no; there have always been plenty of people to partake in low-brow culture and there have always been performers willing to make jokes about shit, farts, and dicks. The difference is now it's much more widespread because broadcast media finds it more profitable to appeal to the lowest common denominator--after all, even the most hoity-toity highbrow cultural critic will find a few chuckles in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, but try getting your average joe with the emotional maturity of an 8th grader excited about Verdi's Aida, for example. He talks about how Edvard Munch's The Scream was taken in its day and how the image has been appropriated here a century later. Very interesting stuff.

Unfortunately, Dery's writing gets tiresome very quickly. He references every obscure philosopher and writer he can think of, and though he provides copious endnotes so we can read more about these depressing topics ourselves if we should for some reason want to, frankly he attempts to marry low-brow topics with high-brow writing and it just comes off weird. And annoying. It's as if Dery knows he's taking aim at such a large target that there's no reason anyone should take him seriously (a competent 8-year-old could critique American society), so he inflates his writing in the worst academic style so he can be taken seriously.

In short, even if it was late 1999 and I was specifically looking for a book about current cultural phenomena of a depressing and/or disgusting nature, I probably wouldn't have been too excited by this one.

2007 Books

2008-02-11T21:23:00.000-05:00

Thought I'd clean up the sidebar a little. Here's the list of all the books I read in 2007. It's a far cry from the original goal of 24 but hey.
They're listed in order here, though in the image on the sidebar they're listed by nonfiction best to worst and then fiction best to worst. At least as I think of them now.

Here We Come A-Grishaming

2007-12-18T09:18:00.000-05:00

Partly in order to increase my total of books read for the year, and partly because I've had Skipping Christmas in the house for at least three years, I decided it was time to read two John Grisham books in a row. Brief reviews will follow the jump. I started with The Runaway Jury. This is a story about tobacco litigation and a juror with a rather specific plan in mind.

We all know what Grisham is capable of and what he's good at, and this is a great yarn. The book may be 400+ pages long but it reads quickly and, like any good thriller, you want to keep reading and find out what happens next. Nothing new or unusual here. This isn't the greatest thriller in the world. It's probably not the greatest legal thriller in the world, and probably not even Grisham's best. But it's good enough, and that's good enough. I enjoyed it, and you can assume if you've read The Firm or any of his other works and enjoyed them, you'll like this one, too.

My favorite thing about The Runaway Jury was that the nasty bad evil character is actually likable. He's not really evil except in a somewhat esoteric sense, and he's surrounded by worse people anyway; he's just a mercenary who lets himself get excited about what he does. It's nice to see that. You know he's a bad apple and the people he works for are unethical and deserve what's coming to them, but by the middle of the book I really found myself liking him. He's sort of like a kid. It's nice to see somebody really enjoy their work, even if their work is very very naughty indeed.

I followed that up with Skipping Christmas. This book was made into a movie last year, or maybe in 2005, called "Christmas with the Kranks," starring Tim Allen and Jamie Lee Curtis. You may have seen it, although not too many people did and it was poorly reviewed. I talked to somebody while I was reading it this season who thought the movie might have been better if they'd made it with a couple of b-list actors in the starring roles, because then they might have been able to stick to the book a bit more and not cater to the whims of the big names. I don't know. I didn't see the movie.

The book is charming; it starts out reasonably enough, the main characters get in suitably over their heads, but it ends with a nice heartwarming Christmas moral. Actually it's pretty standard stuff, but it's a nice ride and when Grisham published it the story was pretty fresh. You find yourself wanting to bop Luther over the head a couple times, though--just give in on this or that, you can put the dang Frosty up and get a tabletop tree so the neighbors won't talk and then you won't seem like such a nutjob. But so it goes. Some people become more fervent in their beliefs the more they're challenged on them, true believers, and Luther is one. Doesn't make him a grinch but he sure can come across that way from time to time.

Funny though: the book is structured like, and written in a tone befitting, a legal thriller. More noticeable to me perhaps as I'd just finished The Runaway Jury, but it was occasionally a bit distracting. I wish I could cite specific examples from the text, but I think it was more a feeling than anything specific. Still, if you haven't read this, don't let the lousy movie dissuade you. It's a fun Christmas story and a quick read, just right for this crazy season.

Lauderdale Returns

2007-12-03T11:26:00.000-05:00

I've been thinking lately about Lauderdale. I've had three months here to do something with it and I haven't done a thing. Not sure why. During that time I haven't worked on much else writing-wise, either. But in the last two weeks I've taken a couple of days and worked mostly on writing. I've got three ideas in the pot right now and am dialing in on one of them. Two of them have titles (Wymer's Women and Lovebug Season), and the other one I've been referring to by the shorthand Adams-Koza--this is a really exciting project but one I won't be able to do alone. And there are about three other ideas behind those, things I've worked on in fits and starts and have some ideas for but nothing concrete enough to occupy meaningful space in my mind. I've rambled on for a long time after the jump, but I wouldn't post it if I didn't think at least some people might want to read it.

Friday I spent about four hours plotting Lovebug Season, enough that I've identified the three major problems I have to fix before I can timeline and start writing. One of them I've already solved, although I should probably write that down before I forget what it was. The third one I can probably start writing without solving, because it has to do with the epilogue and how much of one there should be. The biggest problem is with one of the characters; two of the three main characters in this story are amalgams of different people with fictional elements added. I like to say one is about half one person and half another, while a second is about a third me, a third another person, and a third nobody at all. But the third character is too similar to someone I know and needs a good bit of work before I can proceed. No big deal, though; I had the same problem with Gil Cass at first and he's unrecognizable as the person he used to be based on nowadays. Of course Gil Cass has yet to make an appearance in any story I've been serious about. He remains my second-oldest still extant character.

Last night though, lying in bed, I started mulling over Lauderdale again. The book had a lot of problems, I think at least five of my readers are well aware. I'd started working on several of them, in fact before I left Africa had written a fourth draft to solve a few. But the problems remaining were still fairly serious. At least one of my readers had mentioned that the entire focus of the book could stand a change, and when you get a response like that you know you have big issues. And I don't even want to talk about the problems like the puerile wink-wink treatment of sex or the narrator's obsessive cataloguing of mundane daily events early in the first third (or half) of the story. And the fact that about halfway through the book started to turn hardboiled and never figured out what it was trying to be. Ugh. I don't want to go into the whole mess.

I had spent some time last week going through in my head what needed to be fixed. The first novel I ever wrote, The Tragic Kingdom, once I finished it and had someone read it, I basically put it away and never tried to edit it or anything. And I doubt I ever will, it remains what it is: a warm-up. At least I want to view it that way. After I finished that I spent about eight years noodling around on different projects, including a sequel/rewriting of that book that took up gobs of time and produced a half-dozen projects that made it to about chapter five or chapter fifteen before petering out in a mess of political-junkie detail. I wasted three years trying to get a college book off the ground; I have at least four aborted attempts stored on my hard drive, two or three of which produced characters I very much like, but none of which looked capable of turning into anything useful. Three of them were too autobiographical; the fourth seemed like it would go somewhere and had a good cast, but I never got a handle on the plot and gave it up. I could go back to that one.

In any event, when on a 2005 deployment I sat down and returned to the long-cold ideas folder that contained one essay and an introduction and decided to give a go to writing about Fort Lauderdale, it came easy. I knew by the time I was halfway through, or more, that there was going to be serious reworking required on the first half, if not the whole thing. But it was so much fun to write, so easy to write. I so enjoyed the time I spent at the cabin writing it, and when I finished it up within three weeks of arriving in Africa I knew I had something that had to go out to readers so I could at least get a good idea of what it felt like to somebody who wasn't the inspiration for the narrator.

I knew it needed more help than I let on, so I'm apologizing for that now to my readers. I appreciate your help nonetheless and your comments have informed much of the changes I'm going to be making. The key thing, though, was this. It's been a year since I finished the second draft and sent it to readers. For most of that year it has sat and gathered dust (literally, because I printed the damn thing at Staples).

The question, really, is, am I going to write a novel? Am I ever going to be serious enough about this to publish something, or am I just one of those people who thinks they can write so they talk about how they're working on a novel, and maybe by the time they're fifty they actually produce something and give it to their spouse to read, and their spouse smiles and humors them and says it's wonderful, and it just ends there. Is that what I'm going to do? I don't need any reminders that I'm more than halfway to 50 and haven't actually published anything longer than a newspaper editorial.

After I got up and spent an hour putting down my thoughts about how to fix Lauderdale, things I've known for a while but hadn't collected in one place, I went back to bed--after two, so I've been dragging this morning--and I continued to think about it. Not about Lauderdale specifically anymore, but about what I was actually doing. Was I going to sit down and rescue this piece of fiction? It's not everybody who can commit themselves to writing a novel-length piece of fiction and have it all hang together, and I've done that twice now (although whether The Tragic Kingdom actually "hangs together" is a judgment perhaps best made by Ayzair and not by me), and though the quality isn't the best plenty of lousy novels have been published. Some have been hyped and made into bestsellers and made their authors a lot of money.

It is hardly a secret to regular readers here that I have no fucking clue what to do with my life. Law school? Grad school? This job, that job? Raging bender? Flying? Teaching? You name it, I've considered it, and I probably think it would be fun. And I also can't commit to it, either. Sometimes it's outside factors; I mean, I'd be in law school right now if the AF could get its act together, but I've said all there is to say about that. But if events don't conspire against me I still am incapable of settling on a course of action to guide my life.

In the past, at any of the innumerable opportunities I've had in life to sit down and say, damn, I don't know what to do with myself, and ponder the future, I've always known that I wanted to write. It's one of the few, if not the only, consistencies in my life. Shit, I used to want to go into politics, but I've decided that even decent politicians are shitheads and the system is too broken to be worth wasting one's time in. Even voting seems barely worthwhile anymore, but it's the only thing I can do. Speaking of which I need to change my registration.

Anyway. Last night I was thinking. The problem I have with writing... well, there are several, but one that kept me up for a while was this. I abandon finished projects and half-finished projects because they don't measure up to my standards, which are ill-defined at best. Actually, my standards change to suit the subject. If ever I write something good, like the Everglades piece, I find reasons why I can't publish it. I can find a reason not to try to publish anything, everything in fact that I've ever written. It's either not very good, not good enough to be worth trying, or it's good but nobody would want to publish it, or whatever. A thousand reasons.

Self-confidence has never been a strong suit of mine. It's why I lift weights, actually, it's what I'm compensating for (I maintain 100% of weightlifters and bodybuilders and so forth are compensating for something; not "most," all. Some of them are short, or have little wangs, sure, and some of them got picked on as kids or didn't get enough love from Dad growing up, but even the ones for whom that's not the case, and I think that's most of us, are still compensating for something, and it's just a question of whether they know what it is, are willing to admit it, and whether that stops them or not). I had hoped the military would help with this but it didn't, really. Yaay, I can fly a plane. I almost washed out of pilot training on three or four separate occasions and at one point in February of 2003 desperately prayed that I would wash out just so I wouldn't have to fear it anymore. Really. I've never told anybody that. It was a hard month. I did hook a checkride during that period of time. I could have washed myself out then, but I was too chicken to SIE (self-initiated elimination) and, when the chips were down, I was too proud to fuck up the 85 ride because I knew I was good enough to pass the damn thing. I am so goddamn screwed up in the head sometimes it's not even funny. I know now I was a better pilot than I ever let myself be in UPt and should have finished better than I did. That's not to say I was great; I'm too easily distracted and the sky and the cockpit both are just full of shiny objects to break my concentration. But I could have been middle-of-the-road instead of barely competent, and I proved that to my own satisfaction in the 135 and learned to actually enjoy flying most of the time.

Anyway. I think you can see where this is going. Writing isn't that hard for me. What's hard is the idea that I'd have to sign my name to a thing and send it out there for other people to decide whether it's worthy or not. And it's not like the industry is easy to break into or anything; hell, about a year ago I recall an agent copied word-for-word some of Jane Austen's lesser-known novels and sent them out under a fake name to a bunch of publishers as a first-time writer trying to break into the game. A couple of them caught on, but the ones that didn't, every single one of them, rejected the "manuscripts." Classics all, of course. Fucking asinine industry I want to break into, isn't it? Part of what's wrong with the world. You know one of the biggest first novels of recent years, Cold Mountain? I read that. I didn't really like it all that much, but it got so much damned press it was a fucking bestseller for weeks, and they made a movie out of it (which I watched with my folks, once... and sold it later because none of us had any desire to see it again, although it did convince my father and I both to look for the Foxfire books), and author's sophomore effort was roundly denigrated by the reviewers. Of course whether the reviewers have any fucking clue what's good or not we have no idea, really. Anyway. I hate this industry, that's the point here, but for the last 15 fucking years it's the only industry I've consistently wanted to be a part of.

I just lack the confidence to do it. And I'm never going to just magically develop it, either; that ship has sailed. I never picked that up in my childhood and you don't get it when you're thirty. You either accept it for what it is, and you lift weights and remind yourself of it every time you do and get on with your life, or you don't accept it and turn your back and spend the rest of your life in therapy wondering why you never seem to succeed at anything. Fuck that. I've tried the therapy thing. It worked for what I needed, but I don't have free access to a psychologist anymore, or won't soon, and anyway people who spend their lives in therapy are just the saddest sort of people I can imagine. When the economy goes in the tank and we're all living with half the standard of living we thought we'd have at this point in history are you going to be able to go to a shrink? No. Self confidence or not, the ability to get up in the morning and do what you have to do comes from within you, and that ability has only a small foundation in self-confidence. The rest of it comes from knowing you have to do something whether you believe it'll work or not.

Anyway. At one point last night I debated whether I was just avoiding the obvious and this was in fact what I was "supposed" to be doing with my life, writing. And then I slipped into what has been my standard philosophical debate of late, whether indeed there is any "supposed" at all, whether the notion of humans having prechosen paths that we need only follow to find happiness, a notion I simply cannot square (are we really to believe that some people are called to be garbage collectors while others are called to be billionaire CEOs?). This was not necessarily a productive area of debate and thankfully I drifted off to sleep eventually, although by the time Smittygirl was up and getting ready for work I was still unable to rouse myself from bed having had only a few hours sleep.

Meanwhile I've used three separate spoons to stir the milk into my tea this morning, each time carefully setting the spoon aside so I'll know to use it to stir milk into the next cup.

So. I'm at an interesting juncture in life right now. Soon I'll be married, and we're planning to move to a more favorable climate. I can't take work right now because I'm still on active duty, despite the fact that my resignation's been in since September. I've covered all this and the situation isn't likely to change soon. By the time I can get a job, I'll be looking at a wedding and honeymoon in the very near future, and then a potential move, so I won't be trying to get a long-term career-oriented job. I'll just need money. That should be a relatively stress-free thing, then, whenever it comes to pass, and as a friend of mine has pointed out in the past it's often easier to be productive at writing (or whatever else) when you have a lot to do than when you have nothing significant to occupy you.

Last night at the store I was reading the cover of a collection of Washington Irving stories, and learned that he was the first American to make a living exclusively from writing, something remarkable then and still not terribly common today. There are of course a number of very successful commercial fiction writers who make their living exclusively by writing books, but that number isn't terribly large, probably fewer than 100 in the whole country. Most writers teach or have other work on the side, and even many of the very successful ones supplement their income in that way. It's life, you gotta do what you gotta do to get by. I'm lucky; my gorgeous fiancee happens to also be smart as a whip and enjoys her work, so I don't have to worry about supporting a family solo. I will have time, in my life, even though I'll have to work, to write. And if I'm going to be serious about it, now is a great time to start it. I can't do much else, and with the move completed, much of the wedding planning accomplished, and things set for a while, I have little reason not to jump into it.

Lovebug Season remains deeply intriguing, but I feel a compunction to revise and finish Lauderdale, to not simply leave it and move on, because if I do that, if I continue that trend, where will it end? Probably never. I'll get to a point with Lovebug Season, maybe even finish it, and decide it's not good enough and move on to another project, and so on. Bad idea. Whether this is what I'm supposed to do or not, whether indeed any of us are meant for anything particular at all, the fact remains that self confidence be damned this is what I want to do.

The real question is why has it taken thirty years for me to reach this point? Have I been here before and failed to capitalize on it? I hope not; if so, don't tell me, I don't want to know. Now, if I miss this opportunity, it's not like I'll never have another. But I will kick myself, and I've been doing that for most of my life. It's time to grow up.

Salmon Fishing in the Yemen

2007-12-03T10:36:00.000-05:00

This is such a weird little book, quite unlike any other novel I've read recently, but it's just a joy. It's the first book by its author, Paul Torday, and one of a handful of books I've picked up after reading reviews in The Economist. Thank goodness one of their reviewers has an oddball taste in literature because I haven't read a bad one from their selection yet; this may be the best yet. The rest of the review follows...

The author and the book are fully and completely British in every way, so there are some things here that are confusing to a yank. Yemen is referred to as "the" Yemen every single time it's referred to at all, a Britishism dating back to the Empire that I've never fully understood, and there are extracts from Hansard, without much explanation of what that is. However, the book contains a handy glossary, which is part of the narrative and used for mild comic effect--a "gillie" is described as a "man or boy employed on many Scottish rivers to stand at your elbow and explain why you are unlikely to catch a fish wih your present technique." Herein the Hansard is described as a the official record of the houses of Parliament.

There is nothing at all bad about any of this of course. And there's not much to complain about in the book itself, either. The characters are drawn well and are intriguing, the various plot threads are wound tightly together and each affects the other in meaningful ways. The twin romances surrounding the main character, Dr. Jones (if indeed he is the main character), are so excruciatingly well drawn you practically fall in love with him, too. This is a good sign.

Of course the premise of the book is ridiculous: a plan to introduce highland salmon fishing to the Yemen. The salmon would swim up a seasonal stream during the monsoon season, spawn, and then... well, then, says the project's creator, that's up to Dr. Jones to figure out what to do with them. Of course Dr. Jones is not just skeptical at first; he dictates a memo indicating precisely how stupid the idea is and that he won't waste a moment's time on it. Then, of course, politics gets in the way and off we go.

I loved this book, and the thing is, despite it's quirkiness (that's the word I was looking for earlier), I'd be happy recommending it to most any of my friends. It's just that charming and fun, and it's a quick read. This may be the best novel I've read this year.

Until Proven Innocent

2007-11-23T11:27:00.000-05:00

There is a lot to think about in this book. It is far from perfect, quite far. But it is fascinating, it is exceptionally well-researched, it makes an effort to include every known and provable fact about the case, and it certainly leaves no question as to who the real criminals were in the much-publicized case. Read more after the jump.

The case, of course, is the infamous Duke University lacrosse team gang-rape case of 2006. You remember when this was all over the news last spring and summer, when every news show had the faces of these rich, white Duke lacrosse players who had gang-raped and shouted racial slurs at an innocent black single mother who was studying for her degree at a nearby historically black college.

You may or may not remember what actually turned out to be the truth: there was no rape, no crime, the "victim" was lying, the prosecutor knew it, the prosecutor sought to put the three "rapists" in jail to help him win an election even though he knew they were innocent. The prosecutor actually engaged in a conspiracy to cover up exculpatory evidence, failed to actually interview the "victim" for over six months after the crime, and deliberately sought ways to make the lacrosse players seem guilty in the media before he ever made a single charge and despite multiple police interviews and DNA tests that showed they were innocent.

It was one of the worst cases of prosecutorial misconduct in recent memory, certainly the most public (which is sad, because the misconduct only really came out because the accused had good lawyers; poorer folks could easily have been sent to rot in jail to further this DA's political career). Worse, it was rather damning evidence that the mid-1990's spate of extreme political correctness on college campuses nationwide (remember the "water buffalo" incident?) hasn't gone away, as dozens of Duke University professors and much of the administration took a position that the lacrosse players were guilty without ever hearing a single piece of evidence.

This is one of those books that will make you mad. It made me mad. I couldn't read more than a chapter or so at a time before I had to put it down and walk away for a while. The only reason you can get through it at all is that you already know how it ends: you know the guys get off in the end, they're proven innocent. You know Nifong is in trouble. You know that. But it doesn't make reading about the intervening months especially easy.

Of course as I said the book has flaws. It needs a copyedit, badly. Very badly. One of the authors, KC Johnson, a professor at Brooklyn College, is a noted blogger, and the book reads at times like a blog entry, very informal. That's fine, but the copyediting is blog-like, too--which is to say, there hasn't been any. Words repeat, are misspelled, there are words missing, punctuation is missing or inappropriate... it isn't awful, it's not on every page, but it's blatant (I'm not talking about "it's" v "its", I'm talking about leaving the e off the end of the word 'are') and distracting and takes away from the book's power.

Similarly, the authors are both guilty of using the same sort of loaded language against the professors, the DA, and the administration, as they accuse those actors of using against the team members. The lacrosse players were 'trashed' in the media. The assertions of the professors were 'outrageous.' Loaded words like that are thrown around on almost every page, and while as I was reading they fit right in with the narrative, they're a problem. Quite simply, they make the book an easy target as being "biased." It seems like the authors have an agenda (which they clearly do and admit to in the last three chapters), but the story stands on its own merits. You'd be plenty outraged by the facts as they exist without the additional hyperbole. The beast is cooked by the facts; there's no need to continue stabbing it with language.

All is not lost; the authors are not some wild-eyed arch-conservatives. Stuart Taylor, Jr., is a fellow at the non-partisan and centrist Brookings Institute (if you think Brookings is conservative, bear in mind an equal number of people think it's liberal; that's how we know it's centrist), a lawyer, and a legal reporter for a number of media outlets (almost entirely on the left of the political spectrum); KC Johnson is a history professor who's scholarly output focuses on American progressives and their role as dissenters from American foreign policy, a registered Democrat and public supporter of Barack Obama's presidential campaign. These are not raving right-wingers. Johnson was once denied tenure for having the temerity to question whether a panel set up by CUNY to discuss the 9/11 attacks should maybe have at least one person who didn't think American foreign policy was the proximate and only cause of the attack. The very last chapter of the book is clearly Johnson's axe-grinding; two chapters before looks to have been Taylor's work, an attack on the grand-jury process and the inadequacies of the justice system to guarantee defendant's rights and prevent the innocent from being convicted.

It would be easy to write this book off as a right-wing attack on left-wing academia, and no doubt a number of the academics mentioned in its pages (disparagingly, for the most part) have said just that. Unfortunately for that story, the facts don't bear it out. In any other book, chapter 23, a plea for the rights of the accused in criminal cases, would be taken as so much left-wing hand-wringing when we should really be focused on victim's rights. Both authors actually appear to be somewhat to the left on the political spectrum--though to those on the farthest fringes of the left, moderate liberals are often seen as conservative (exactly the same phenomenon occurs on the far right; note the number of conservative politicians labelled "RINO" (Republican In Name Only) by the far fringe).

This is a story that needs to be told. This book was much needed, as a historical work, as an attempt to force the named parties to come to grips with the truth of what they did, as an effort to provide public proof that the three accused men were indeed innocent of any crime and should never have been treated as they were by the police, the press, the DA, and their own university faculty and administration. It is precisely because the book was so needed that it's glaring problems are so bad--an important historical work that seeks (and needs) to be taken seriously should take itself seriously; another two weeks at the editing desk would have cleared up the copy problems, and a two-week rewrite could have neutralized the language. Then we'd have had a book that would have to be taken seriously; this one compares to much to a blog, and that's a shame. The last line of the book states that "it's the facts that matter," and that's true, but in such a political atmosphere as this book and this case play out, style goes a long way to getting people to pay attention to the facts.

It's a good read, a rather ripping yarn, and an important book; but it's not what it needed to be.

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress

2007-10-28T12:21:00.000-04:00

Over the weekend, I finished Robert Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. Not your typical science-fiction--Heinlein's best work always transcended genre--this is really a novel of revolution... so of course it appealed to me right away. My review follows the jump.

Good thing, too, because from the first page I knew I would have trouble with the dialect the book is written in. I've discussed (in Plainsong and elsewhere) the fact that I'm very picky about writing style. In this case, after two pages I decided the narrator, Man (Manuel O'Kelly Davis), was Russian. This was based on some clues in the narrative (and the use of the Russian word for comrade, 'tovarishch'). Although I later decided there was no way Manny spoke with a Russian accent, by that time it didn't matter any longer. I still read it with a Russian accent in my head, which was amusing because if I read long enough I'd speak with one for a few minutes after I put the book down.

Anyway. Manny isn't Russian and the one place where Heinlein's future world falls apart is the existence of the Soviet Union and the fact that the U.S. seems to have disappeared some time around the turn of the current millenium. Hey, he wrote it in the 60's.

Two things make this book stand above others. One is Heinlein's political viewpoints, so well articulated within the framework of the narrative that the book in no way reads as a polemic. Stranger in a Strange Land, which I finished in early 2005, before I was reviewing books here, suffered a bit from this. It, too, was more than a simple work of sci-fi/fantasy literature, but Jubal Harshaw came across as a more direct Heinlein mouthpiece than Professor de la Paz does in this book. The politics is both clearer and more subtle at the same time in this book, if that makes sense.

Being a libertarian (classical liberal, whatever you want to say), Heinlein's political leanings mirror my own a bit so I just loved delving into Prof's (and Stu and several other characters') discussions. But the book also made me ache, for what Prof is describing, a state without government--a stateless state, I guess, or maybe an anti-state--was only possible on the moon because of the physical situation there. Individuals were forced to conform to a certain set of behaviors--to be a decent person at base level, having nothing to do with drinking or gambling or cursing and everything to do with working hard, being polite, etc--simply to survive in the harsh territory. It's not rule by law or by men, but by environment. Anarchy could conceivably have worked there--though, as Manny points out, men seem to have an unquenchable thirst to bully other men around, make laws, enforce standards, rather than let people get along by themselves. It's probably inherent in human nature, for some reason, for us to want to control what other people can do. As Prof points out at one point, no one wants to ban a behavior to stop themselves from doing it, only to stop other people from doing it.

The other thing that makes this book stand out is the well-crafted Lunar world. Heinlein got a few things wrong, as always happens when we try to predict the future, but the tightness and reality of his world is breathtaking. Everything fits together. The existence of Mycroft Holmes is entirely plausible in just the way Heinlein describes. The way the moon was settled, the view taken of the moon by the powers back on Earth, the necessity of living underground, the types of jobs done by Loonies (residents of Luna, naturally, are Loonies), the construction of the cities... it's done so well. Apart from the awakening of Mycroft Holmes--which I maintain is plausible--and the existence of water ice within the moon (not disproven but probably unlikely), there are no leaps of faith required, no suspension of disbelief. If the moon were to be settled surely it must be just this way.

It's brilliant. It's gripping. It's well worth a read. My friend Taemon sent it to me while I was in Djibouti, and it took me this long to finally get around to reading it. Sorry it took so long, T--but it was great. Thanks.

The Gods Drink Whiskey

2007-09-25T10:19:00.001-04:00

The Gods Drink Whiskey, by Stephen Asma, is not quite what it seems. It was deep, fascinating, and well worth a read. And I don't think the cover blurbs were written by people who'd actually read the thing.

I picked this book up thinking it was a travelogue. The top cover blurb from the Dallas Morning News says "An account of the ultimate hippie road trip." Steve Asma isn't a hippie. This isn't a road trip. And if you look at the entire blurb from the DMN on the back, it becomes apparent that the reviewer never actually read the book.

This is not a book about getting drunk and stoned and patting the Buddha's belly at Angkor Wat. It's not even a travel book, except in the sense that Asma did in fact travel to Cambodia and did do some traveling while he was there. But while he went to Vietnam and Thailand and possibly elsewhere, chronologic tales of these trips are glossed over in favor of philosophical trips the author took while on those travels. It's a much deeper book for this.

I actually wanted to read this with a highlighter at times. Asma says much that I've been thinking lately (and no doubt this book has influenced my thinking plenty). He discusses what I mentioned above, the incapacity of Americans both to be happy where they are and to actually be happy when they get that one thing they wanted that they thought would make them happy. By contrast southeast Asia's Buddhists are taught to eliminate craving and find their happiness and satisfaction whatever the present circumstances, to experience the now and not confine themselves in the prison of craving for the future or living in remorse for the past.

But Asma, a Buddhist himself (he traveled to Cambodia not for some hippie road-trip but to teach Buddhist philosophy at the Buddhist Institute in Phnom Penh, quite an honor for an American but important since Cambodian Buddhism lost most of its philosophers during the Khmer Rouge era), is no starry-eyed idealist about the virtues of Southeast Asian Buddhism and lifestyle. Around him he sees grinding poverty, blind mysticism, meaningless violence. He sees where Buddhism has helped the people live in this environment, but also sees where a little Western modernity would help them live better in their environment. He wants neither to make Cambodia a Buddhist America, nor to make America a prosperous Cambodia. No place is perfect, no society has all the answers. But there is good in many places, and Asma notes how these goods could be combined, if only.

If only is the problem, and again, our author and mentor and tour guide is a realist. He has trouble grasping the horrors of Khmer Rouge era when confronted with them at the S-21 prison, where tens of thousands of innocents, many of them children, were tortured and killed for no real reason. He has trouble reconciling the mystical neak ta temples and lingam (penis) worship cults with the deliberately non-mystical Theravada Buddhism that is the official religion of the state (and Mr. Asma).

I'll go ahead and say this is my favorite book of the year thus far. Whether it's the best is open for debate depending on your view of "best." I tend to think Fierce Invalids might have been "better," and it gave me plenty to think about, too, but The Gods Drink Whiskey was just the sort of philosophical brain food I needed right now. I mean, Asma makes the point in chapter 3 (I think) that Americans are actually often made prisoners of their liberty as much as they are liberated by it. Because we have, and demand, freedom of choice in so many areas, we are often overloaded by choices, incapable of feeling confident about making the right choice, and beset by anxiety over how to choose. That's me to a tee. I would fain lay down my life before I'd give up my liberty, but I clearly don't understand how to use and appreciate it. It makes me anxious and depressed; I don't trust my instincts and frequently regret my choices. Sometimes with hindsight and meditation I can be satisfied with choices I've made in the past, but I worry excessively about upcoming choices and refuse to let myself be satisfied once a choice is made. Asma isn't too sure that we wouldn't all benefit from a little less liberty and opportunity at times, and while I'm not convinced of that I had to put the book down and take a walk after reading his discussion of it because it rang so true in my life and I've never considered it. With effort I hope I can learn to recognize the benefits of liberty without allowing myself to sink into the prison of it.

And there was the comment about the division of labor in Southeast Asian families vice that in American (and most Western) ones. Asma doesn't claim the patriarchal society and family values of Cambodia are better than the equality of American family life. Actually, he believes Cambodia could benefit from a little Western-style women's liberation. But he also notes that in the Cambodian family, there is less family strife because family roles are clearly delineated. Thus even arranged marriages tend to hold up better than Western marriages do because everyone understands going in what they can expect of the other partner and what is expected of them. It isn't that the man should work and the woman should run the household; it's that somebody needs to take on the responsibility of running the household finances, and somebody needs to give that responsibility up to the other partner, instead of both constantly fighting to get things done their way. Indeed, it isn't at all necessary that one partner work and the other stay home, as long as both partners recognize that each will responsible for certain things. If both work, no one can be responsible for maintaining the household. Asma points out, too, that while in Southeast Asia the men are responsible for making the money, the women are entirely responsible for spending it--and they have a responsibility to be thrifty and spend less than the husband makes. I would say in American families, with both partners working (okay, I know I'm not working now, but that's not intended to be permanent, and I am still drawing a paycheck), the key is to say, we will live entirely off of one partner's paycheck (as much as possible). Should that partner then be responsible for the family budget? Should the other partner be responsible for keeping house? It doesn't matter; the key is, those responsibilities should be delineated, and expectations should be understood, so couples aren't fighting over every decision. The same can then be extended to dealing with kids.

Yeah, this was a book I needed to read right now. But lest you think it's all philosophy and Eastern wisdom, I'd like to point out the marijuana pizza, and the story of the schoolchildren who wanted their pictures taken with exotic white foreigner who threw up all over the front lawn of the sacred shrine (to the Buddha's toe, or hair or something). I mean, this is actually a really fun read, and I would be doing the book a great disservice not to point that out. There are plenty of laughs here, and the narrative moves along. There are a good number of unfamiliar words, and as ever I wish Asma has at least given us approximate pronunciations of the Khmer words ('Khmer' included), since there are lots of unfamiliar consonant combinations there and I stumbled over lots of the terms. Still, this isn't important.

Asma's prose is generally light and enjoyable, although at times following his train of thought through levels of philosophy takes some work. It's well worth it, though, and at the turn of the page he brings the reader back to the surface for a breath of air and a comment about something funny such philosophical introspection brings to mind when surrounded by a totally foreign culture.

In other words, this book is both fun to read and challenging at the same time. It's tough to marry those two, and for that reason alone this book is a worth a read. I highly recommend it.

Absurdistan

2007-08-26T20:50:00.000-04:00

I actually finished Gary Shteyngart's Absurdistan two weeks ago, but I've had to cogitate over whether or not I really liked it in order to write an actual review.
Let me start out by saying, I liked it well enough. But I didn't always find it easy.

I won't claim the book has any great flaws. From a literary perspective I'm not qualified to claim that and, anyway, I don't have any nits to pick. Instead there were just so many little things that occasionally put me off. For example, the country for which the book is named, Absurdistan, doesn't appear in the book until almost halfway through. The author shows up and makes fun of himself for writing this book. The protagonist is... shall we say, he's not terribly easy to accomodate.

To wit, Absurdistan introduces us to Misha Vainberg, a Russian Jew, the son of a mid-level Russian gangster, a man of large appetites and the wherewithal to feed them. He is not easy for any of us to recognize. He is tremendously overweight, suffers from anxiety and depression, and does not work. He is in love with New York but cannot go there because of things his father the gangster did to Americans in the past. He is in love with a poor girl from the Bronx he met at a Coyote Ugly-type bar. What she sees in him, apart from money, I can never really understand, because to be honest, Misha is not, for the first half of the book, all that likable.

In fairness, as Misha himself explains, he is a Russian, not an American, so if Americans think some of the things he does are unusual... bah! In Russia it is acceptable to throw your shoes at your servants. (That he has servants sets him several levels above most of us who'll be reading about him.)

Misha also idolizes his father in ways that don't always seem healthy. To be honest at times I found myself wondering whether Misha was dancing around the fact that his father sexually abused him. It seems like it would fit. He never comes clean. He doesn't, to be honest, say much about his father, apart from occasional sermons on how much he misses and loved his father. That's all. There's a very weird vibe there, and I don't usually look for those sorts of things.

The first half of the book keeps Misha in Russia, a place he seems to want to leave but only for America--the one place he cannot go. He is miserable and does dreadful things. He is not, in short, easy to like, easy to care about, easy to really stay interested in.

This is not to say that protagonists have to be likable or good people or any of that rot. I would not wish to argue that. But, likable or not, I need a reason to care about what the protagonist is up to and why I'm bothering to read a story about him. This can work with unlikable people just fine, and is more fun with flawed people--and Misha is these things. But he's not... I don't know, I just couldn't get around to where I really cared about him. He's a difficult character. Shteyngart has won a lot of praise for this book, though, so perhaps I'm missing something.

Once we move from St. Petersburg to Absurdistan, however, things pick up. Yes, the action picks up, which is helpful, but what matters is that Misha picks up as a character, too. For half the book he talks about how he's really a decent person and wants to help, but he doesn't do much of it. Then, as he's on his way to Absurdistan, he finally takes action to demonstrate what he's been claiming--and, once in Absurdistan and when things start to go awry, he demonstrates at least some mettle, and finally I could really identify with him. He wasn't just all talk, he was actually going to try to do something. Nice. Took too long to get there.

Thus the book does reward your patience. Shteyngart does a good job of describing one of these post-Soviet countries where you live and die by the favor of the government and half the budget is made up of U.S. grants. Sort of like Kyrgyzstan, really. Absurdistan has been colonized by KBR--Kellogg, Brown & Root, a former division of Halliburton--and Shteyngart's description of how KBR works is... well, it's dead on accurate, which is pretty scary.

In any event the latter half of the book is well worth the first half, and since I still can't put my finger on exactly why I didn't care for the first half so much... well, maybe you'll like it better than I did. I don't know. But there was one character who so consistently irritated me I can't leave without a mention.

Professor Jerry Shteynfarb. Note the shocking resemblance to the author's own name. Indeed, this is... well, clearly Shteynfarb takes a great deal of his character from the author. Shteynfarb/gart both left Russia at the age of 7 and are American citizens, both teach in New York, both have written books that won them praise. Indeed, Shteyngart seems to have anticipated some of the reviews he'd get--one dust-jacket blurb notes that "No one is more capable of dealing with [the subject] than Shteyngart..." which Misha pointedly argues (persuasively, I might add) is hardly the case. Shteynfarb lets Shteyngart make fun of Shteyngart... but, really, do we need that? The criticism there, of the way a man who left Russia at 7 is treated as the great relater of Russian-ness to the West, that's valid. But is this the tool to use to make the criticism? Makes his reviewers, if not all of his readers, seem a bit daft to me. I don't buy it. Shteyngart's next book supposedly has Shteynfarb as the protagonist. I've been guilty of writing a book where the protagonist is based on me, and I think now I understand better why I never really warmed up to it as much as I thought I would. That book still needs a lot of work, and I probably won't be buying Shteyngart's next one. Take it for what you will.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

2007-08-26T14:45:00.000-04:00

I finished it, at last. This is about the longest it's taken me to read a Harry Potter book. But I'm busy.

Obviously I can't give anything away because you might not have read it. But... well, okay, I know Rambling has finished it. And I know Scanime and Mrs. Scanime were reading it, but I don't know if they've both finished it. And I don't know whether the fabulous Mrs. G has had time to read it what with raising the little ones and all. Anybody else? Who else has finished it? I want to talk!

Okay. By way of a review: I liked it. It was certainly gripping. It had the slow patch I've come to expect from Mrs. Rowling but that was less noticeable this time and more broken up. The ending was... it was good. The last three chapters, say, or four, four chapters, very very good. The Epilogue quite nicely put things together without giving unnecessary details, so we are free to fill in the gaps as we wish ourselves. I will note here that my assertion in my review of the previous book that "I now believe nearly the entire story arc of book 7 can be found in the six existing books" was perhaps innaccurate. I'll have to reread the others again with an eye to the Deathly Hallows themselves.

Also, I'd like to note that Severus Snape met my expectations.

There, I don't think I've given anything away.

A Name Selected

2007-08-20T09:09:00.000-04:00

Thank you all! Based on suggestions--Attenborough was particularly good--I have decided on Overbury. Probably Ted Overbury, not sure. The Life of Sir Thomas Overbury may give you some inclination of the direction this character is headed...

Name Suggestions Needed

2007-08-19T18:17:00.000-04:00

I'm looking for a 4-syllable surname that sounds English. Or, if not English, at least not blatantly ethno-specific: no Takahashis, no DiSalvatores, no Hackensteiners. The only thing I've come up with is Neverwinter, which I like, but is not a surname anywhere I can find. All suggestions welcome and appreciated.

Set Phasers on Stun

2007-07-21T17:49:00.000-04:00

I borrowed Steven Casey's Set Phasers on Stun from Lucky Bob because it sounded interesting and Lucky wrote a good review. I did the borrowing back in... oh, December. Really. It's been on the sidebar a long time, huh?

Well, I made the mistake of setting the book by the bed as a little before-bed reading. Unfortunately, though it's interesting, it gave me kafka dreams if I read it right before bed. I mean, the whole book is about situations where there was a small error in engineering--generally, where a product was designed without the end-user in mind--and sadly most of these ended in tragedy, one life or many. Not the best bedside reading.

So I read almost all of it in the last couple weeks not at bedtime, and it was much better. It's a very interesting book, and I can see why it was a textbook for an engineering design class. Now I just have to figure out how to get it back to its rightful owner.

Resurrection, Inc.

2007-07-12T17:50:00.000-04:00

Smittygirl's best friend recommended this book to me, and although it's not normally my genre I always like reading other peoples' favorite books (and I'll lend anybody copies of my favorite books if they want). The book is out of print now but if you click on the cover you'll be taken to BN.com's used book area. At least that's what supposed to happen. Anyway, on to the review!
Having just read Fierce Invalids, I caught something interesting in this book that I might not have picked up on otherwise.

Switters, our fearless hero from Fierce Invalids, has this idea that government and industry combine to keep the great mass of people entertained by meaningless garbage--Jessica Simpson, movie box office totals, the latest tawdry Hollywood affair, sports stars using steroids, even politics presented purely as a horse race--because it keeps them from getting curious about anything else, keeps them too happily occupied to ask questions about what the government or corporations are doing. Thus they can do what they want without much inquiry from thinking people.

The antihero of Resurrection, Inc., Francois Nathans, believes he is setting humanity free by creating undead Servants to fill menial tasks--and finds out that the majority of people set free in such a manner are bored, incurious about government or industry or, indeed, anything at all. Nathans had hoped they would take up the arts, sciences, anything--give in to natural human curiousity. Instead, they didn't--and Nathans sets out to eliminate them once and for all.

What an interesting perspective. Is Switters right, that without constant entertainment people would actually ask questions about the world around them? I like to think he is--curiosity and a desire to learn are hallmarks of humanity. But what if Kevin Anderson, the author of Resurrection, Inc., is right? What if, deprived not only of constant entertainment but of menial work, many people would just sit bored, turn to crime or riots not out of a need to support themselves but simply because they can't think of anything else to do?

One of the books on my reading list is Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, one of many futurist books set in a post-scarcity world, where the only things that are hard to come by are good seats in restaurants and short lines at theme parks. Post-scarcity worlds have been treated before by science fiction writers (see the Culture cycle by Iain Banks, the Queendom of Sol by Wil McCarthy, and E.M. Forster's The Machine Stops or Arthur C. Clarke's The City and the Stars, though I haven't read any of these; even The Matrix is a sort of post-scarcity society, at least for the machines that control the place), and occasionally there are looks at the world as it struggles to get to that post-scarcity plain. The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson shows a society approaching post-scarcity. And Resurrection, Inc. shows one man's attempt to push society in that direction.

Writers are divided on whether post-scarcity is good or not (in Riders of the Purple Wage, Philip Jose Farmer notes that artists, though they are the toast of society, often run out of inspiration for their art because the society is free of conflict). Francois Nathans seems to have believed it would be great. Though his Servant revolution (Servants are recently deceased people who's bodies are preserved and implanted with microprocessors and synthetic fluids to allow to function as androids would--except androids are prohibitively expensive and there's an endless supply of the dead) would not have ushered in true post-scarcity economics, he did create the means for vast improvements in efficiency in most industries and commerce, meaning many people lost their jobs but were supported by bouyant governments and welfare (presumably in turn supported by immensely more profitable industry). Nathans and his company (Resurrection, Inc., of course) might have started the machinery of the post-scarcity age to come.

But what happens when nothing is scarce and thus no one needs to work? In Resurrection, Inc., we see that a lot of people don't even bother to get up in the morning. A version of online gaming (the book was written in 1988 so MUDs existed at the time, but Anderson still made a good guess at where multiplayer online games were headed) occupies many people, and others simply sit around, bored, start riots, or turn to petty crime. In the world of Resurrection, Inc., scarcity matters--without it, people's live become meaningless.

I suppose this is the danger of defining yourself through your work--when you have no work, you have no self-definition, either. Though I doubt that was Anderson's goal in telling this story.

Indeed, this is a pretty ripping yarn all the way through, and I haven't even mentioned any of the main plot points. Bear in mind I referred to Francois Nathans as the antihero--because he's certainly no hero. After all, as wonderful as Servants may be, even if the people they freed from work found constructive things to do, everything wouldn't be quite hunky-dory, now would it? What if, through a quirk of the resurrection process, some Servants retained the memories of their previous life... and death?

Oh what a tangled web we weave.

Good book. You'll probably find it a well-stocked local library.

Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates

2007-07-04T17:47:00.000-04:00

Verbose, aimless, disorganized, overstuffed, and incredibly delightful. There's just so much going on in Tom Robbins' Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates it's impossible not to like it. My review follows the jump.

If I wanted to, of course, I could find plenty of things wrong with it. Robbins just loves his big words, almost abuses vocabulary. And with a lot of other authors (myself included, probably), that just gets annoying. Here it's generally a pleasure, only occasionally a bother. The book seems barely contained, asides and tangents spring up amid the fertile soil of Robbins' pen and wither on the ground, leaving the reader lost in the garden and desperately trying to catch up. Again, this sort of thing could be annoying, but here... here, it's not.

I've never read Tom Robbins before. I think his best-known work would be Even Cowgirls Get The Blues, which was made into a movie a few years ago. But that book is from another era; Fierce Invalids was written in the late 90's and the world of its main character is clearly recognizable. I had a great time and I'm going to go out looking for his most recent novel, Villa Incognito, but that doesn't mean I'd recommend this book to everyone.

Robbins breaks the fourth wall. He does so in the fourth chapter quite blatantly, and occasionally throughout, though most noticeably (and, I'm afraid, distractingly), right towards the end, and the beginning of Part 4. The book veers dangerously close, at times, to polemic, as Robbins (through his character and mouthpiece, Switters) decries the state of everything, from American society (controlled by a government and corporations that want everyone kept dimwitted and incurious) and foreign policy to organized religion and the nature of life itself.

This could get tedious if readers aren't receptive to this sort of thing. If, for example, you would be offended by Switters' assertion late in the book that "terrorism is the only rational response to American foreign policy," there will be plenty of other things in here you will be so annoyed by that you won't enjoy the book. If, on the other hand, you could care less what Switters thinks about foreign policy (being a fictional character, after all), or you agree with him, then you'll enjoy it.

There's no question but that Robbins' phrases are wonderful. In this one book you'll come across so many fascinating new metaphors you'll wonder why anyone ever resorts to cliche (well, not everyone is blessed with so fecund a mind as Mr. Robbins). Read it for the words, for the joy of reading, as much as anything.

But it's actually about something, too. And that's where it gets fun. Our hero, Switters, is a man of contrast, of inner contradictions--as, says Robbins, are we all. But unlike most of us, Switters is not concerned about taking one side in his inner life. He takes both. He loves his 16-year-old virgin stepsister, and a 46-year-old nun at the same time. And even to the last page he's trying to figure out how to have them both. Switters' message to is to embrace our inner contradictions, for to do otherwise is a betrayal of both our beliefs and ourselves. At one point he points out that being willing to lie to protect a belief is just one step away from being willing to kill for the same purpose. And much, if not all, of the world's suffering has stemmed from that very evil. Better to embrace our own inner contradictions first, thus be ready to accept the contradictions thrust upon us and our beliefs by the outside world.

All this is somewhat lost in the mysterious coda, however. The last several paragraphs take Switters to Thailand, and while I don't suppose they detract from Switters' character or our understanding, I don't see how they add anything to the story. Oh well. Nothing, and no one, is perfect.

2005 Books

2007-06-23T14:23:00.000-04:00

This is a list of all the books I read after about May of 2005. Click on a cover, and you'll be taken to my review. Click on the cover in the review, and you'll be taken to Barnes & Noble if you want to buy the book. Or at least see how much money I spent on it...

2006 Books

2007-06-23T14:20:00.000-04:00

This is a list of all the books I read in 2006 other than in Djibouti. Click on a cover, and you'll be taken to my review. Click on the cover in the review, and you'll be taken to Barnes & Noble if you want to buy the book. Or at least see how much money I spent on it...

Djibouti Books

2007-06-23T14:13:00.000-04:00

This is a list of all the books I read in Djibouti in 2006. Click on a cover, and you'll be taken to my review. Click on the cover in the review, and you'll be taken to Barnes & Noble if you want to buy the book. Or at least see how much money I spent on it...

Can You Kill Your Muse?

2007-06-15T17:20:00.000-04:00

I'm wondering this lately. Last night I sat down to write a blog post, and nothing would come. Nothing. Not that big a deal really, since I frequently have trouble putting anything on the blog that abides by my self-imposed restriction on political content—a restriction I'm no longer particularly interested in maintaining.

But now I'm worried about whether my muse hasn't taken a permanent vacation. More after the jump.

This inability to come up with decent blog posts has become a bigger problem of late, as regular readers may have noticed. Again, by itself not the biggest concern.
But then, there's Lauderdale. I haven't really done anything to it this year. I did a little work on a new draft in December right after I got home, but since that time I haven't even really looked at it. I printed the thing out, in April, on the theory that it would be harder to ignore in tangible form. Nice theory, but it hasn't worked.

I've written two paragraphs in The Reporter since I got home. I even read the whole thing a couple times but I never felt called to write any more.

I did manage to come up with a new idea earlier this year, in the spring. Two of them, although both had been percolating for some time. I did about 1000 words worth of framing back in May, after Memorial Day weekend. I was inspired by lovebugs. But since then… nothing.

It's not that I don't have the time. If I want the time to write, Smittygirl always lets me take it no questions. If I wanted to write at work… it's not like I'm doing anything else most days. What I do is usually pretty wasteful. But I just don't have the inspiration for it. I'm not feeling it. Even when I was inspired to write something after Memorial Day, it took me two hours to put together 1000 words. The idea was there but I couldn't focus on it and bring it into form.

I've been depressed lately, certainly, but only about work. It's strange… the last two weeks I've actually been extremely happy—outside of work. This week at the office I've just been so irritable I can't do anything. I fly off the handle at nothing. I can't even focus on my work, I'm just so angry about having to be in this job any longer. It's a waste of my time. I can't control my own situation there, I've done everything—hell, most of the people around me have done everything—I can do, frequently two or three times. I've brought it up repeatedly. No one I can talk to can do anything to move my case forward. It's just… sitting. There's nothing for me to do. And yet nothing is happening.

And that constant frustration has to no surprise turned into depression about work. And that depression has morphed into anger and irritation. So at home, sometimes I get depressed or sad, and at work, frequently I'm angry and frustrated. And in no place am I inspired enough to write.

Okay. This is a temporary situation. My depression is related to this short-term environmental situation. I don't want to go on anti-depressants to fix this (the suggestion by my employer that I do so I consider tantamount to forced drugging; welcome to the Brave New World), since they would just be a band-aid designed to cover up a problem that will not be solved until the temporary environmental situation is alleviated.

And I'm willing to concede that my muse is quiet lately because of the depression, frustration, and anger.

But it's been a long time. And last night, as I sat in front of a blank Blogger edit screen, I started to fear my own black dog: that my muse might not come back from this vacation. What if this situation has permanently depressed or destroyed the creative spark that I hoped would be my outlet for the rest of my life.

Is that possible? What do you think?

Snow Crash

2007-05-10T15:23:00.000-04:00

I hadn't read Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash in quite some time so I decided to pick it up a while back and go through it again.
It took me longer to read this book this time around than it ever has before, by about a month. Shocking, really.

You might think that means I didn't enjoy it as much this time, but that could hardly be less true. I love this book. I truly do. It's one of the best I've ever read and it still holds up. In fact, I'm not even going to bother reviewing it because there's no way I could give it a neutral review, or even pretend to. If you haven't already read it, I'll lend you my copy. Actually, I'll just give you my copy since I need a new one anyway. This book turned me on to cyberpunk, and it's still the best of the genre as far as I'm concerned.

Lost Cosmonaut

2007-04-03T18:25:00.000-04:00

Daniel Kalder's Lost Cosmonaut is funny and... weird. A little weird. Not too much. As travel writing goes, it's certainly unique. You can read a dozen travel books about Tuscany or the French countryside or Ireland. But there is only one travel book about Udmurtia, or Mari-El, or Kalmykia. This is that book. Certainly you aren't burning to travel to Udmurtia. If you know where Udmurtia is on a map, you are one of a very few people. If you even know what country it's in you're doing better 99%+ of the population of the world. I imagine some Russians are unaware of Udmurtia's existence. Hell, some Americans think Idaho is a job description, so I can only imagine what Russians must think of a place like Kalmykia.

The book is divided into four parts. In the first, Kalder travels at the behest of a friend to Tatarstan, at the eastern edge of European Russia, and discovers an utterly unknown place--unknown to most Europeans (or any Westerners)--with significant cultural development all its own that none of us have ever heard of. I'm considering trying to find a recording of music by one of the "18 Great Tatars" Kalder lists in his book, but he says not to bother--you can't find it. It's not there. This is a country that has been utterly lost to the West--and it's in our backyard.

Next Kalder convinced his travelling partners to accompany him to Kalmykia, a province at the edge of European Russia. The Kalmyks are Turks--the name means "left behind" or some such, as this is the portion of a Turkic tribe expelled from this part of Russia 200 years ago who somehow managed not to leave. It's a country with half the population of Baltimore, Maryland, spread out over a wasteland larger than Texas. Kalder wanted to go see nothing--and that's about all there was. Kalmykia is nominally Buddhist, the only such country in Europe, and the leader of the place is a bit of a wackjob who built an entire (vacant) city in the scrub dedicated to chess. Weird stuff.

In the third and fourth parts of the book Kalder traveled alone, first to Mari-El, the only officially pagan area in Europe (though only half the residents are actually Mari, and maybe half of them actually practice the local religion) and apparently a hotbed of the Russian Wives By Mail industry; and then to Udmurtia, a province named after a people who've been all but subsumed by the Russian culture that surrounds them. Both of these sections started off somewhat slow--in part because Kalder is travelling alone, in part because they start off the same way as the previous two. The fourth section, which by the end was perhaps my favorite, started VERY slow--a fact Kalder acknowledges in a section detailing his attempt to spend the entire trip in his hotel room (he doesn't succeed).

By the latter sections of the book, though, Kalder admits that he had already decided he was working on a book--he wasn't just travelling for the sake of it. Although this hurts the illusion a bit--I wanted to believe he was just visiting these places because he was an eccentric--the knowledge forced Kalder's hand a bit, so that he had to actually get out of the hotel room, set a goal, find something new, figure out what he was looking for in these places. It gave form to his narrative, and though he book would have rather different had it been written without this form (but just by an eccentric Scotsman with a taste for cold weather and poor countries), in the end it made the book feel more whole.

The section on Udmurtia is particularly interesting, as here is a place with a long history and its own culture and language, that has been completely absorbed by Russia. 200 years ago such a place would swiftly lose that language and culture and it's history would have been rewritten, but in the modern era you can't just wipe a culture off the face of the map. Yet this is what's happening--and it's the Udmurt who are allowing it to go on. Kalder makes some interesting points: there may be 1000 years of Udmurt history, but nobody--literally--knows what it is anymore; the Udmurt language was so frighteningly complex that, given the chance to speak Russian instead (itself a complex and difficult language) today's Udmurt leap at the chance; Udmurt cultural traditions in many cases were similar enough to--and sometimes were added to--Russian culture that the distinctions have mostly blended into nothingness. This is a country that by rights should be totally assimilated into the Russian mass, yet that will never be allowed to happen. There will always be someone working to preserve the language, guessing at what the cultural traditions once were, and there probably never be anyone to care. It's kind of sad.

The other sections are not so sad, but they are melancholy in their own way. Kalder is a good guide to such places. He doesn't really laugh at them, which would get tiresome (the dust-jacket copy calls him a "Bill Bryson with Tourette's," which is an insult to both Kalder and to Tourette's patients, and Kalder is in no way as cynical or elitist as Bryson can be), but he does keep a sense of humor about him and about the places he's visited. They're not very nice, after all.

This is genuine travel writing, unlike The Sex Lives of Cannibals or Together Alone, so I can easily say it's the best travel writing I've read all year. I just don't want to compare it to the other two; all three are vastly entertaining and plenty diversionary.

Together Alone

2007-04-03T17:53:00.000-04:00

Oh good, a book I've finished somewhat recently.
Together Alone is a fascinating book, and although it's very hard to find (you could always borrow my copy, of course) it is certainly worth looking for. Ron Falconer, the author, spent several years wandering about the South Pacific in his own handbuilt boat, and, together with his wife and two children (and cat and dog) decided to move to a tiny uninhabited island far outside the usual sea lanes. And he actually did it. This is the story.

The island was Caroline, in the far southeastern corner of Kiribati--the very same Kiribati J. Maarten Troost wrote about in the far funnier (but entirely different) The Sex Lives of Cannibals. But this is a far different place from the Tarawa atoll Troost and his wife called home. Caroline supported small populations in the 19th and early 20th Centuries, but by the time the Falconers arrived at the atoll in 1987 it had not seen human habitation for almost 50 years.

Into this paradise the Falconers brought only those things they needed to survive, and they managed to do so for nearly four years. During that time they relied upon annual trips to French Polynesia and occasional visits from passing yachters for whatever they couldn't produce themselves. Over the years they built a fully-functioning settlement.

Falconer's goal was never to achieve total self-sufficiency. It was to achieve isolation. He went there to think big thoughts about society and man's place in the world. Whether he found what he was looking for you can never be sure. Falconer digresses into introspection only occasionally, usually in the form of a conversation with his wife (conversations I assume are mostly made-up and intended just to get the point across), and although you can tell he's doing a lot of thinking about man's impact on the world, for whatever reason he leaves a lot of his thinking off the pages of the book. Perhaps he prefers it that way.

Smittygirl read the book before I did (or at any rate read it after I'd read about 60 pages) and occasionally had to put the thing down and read something else out of frustration with Falconer's occasional self-reverence. Yes, that's the word I was looking for--not self-reference. Falconer does seem to think he was on the verge of--or perhaps right in the thick of--creating a new way of life for all humanity, and he certainly has a bit of an ego. I didn't find it as annoying as she did but then I was also expecting it.

The book is written in the present tense, which I found a bit jarring at times given that the thing wasn't published until 2004, thirteen years after the family left the island.

The Falconers wanted to stay on Caroline as caretakers, but they were evicted by the Kiribati government at the behest of a new leaseholder who wanted to build a casino and other things on the island. Falconer's description of the end of their idyll is sometimes a bit wrenching; of course Falconer may make the family out to be better than they were (it's his book after all), but certainly it seems hard to imagine the family as "undesirables," especially on an otherwise uninhabited island. Given that the leaseholder's plans for development never took off it seems especially unjust that the Falconers were forced to leave.

So the ending's a bit of a downer. Bummer. It's still a really great read. Who hasn't dreamed of running away to some deserted isle to survive by your wits for a while? Well, okay, but who hasn't dreamed of just getting away from it all for a while, getting back to where what matters is a roof and enough to eat and beyond that you're free to do as you please? Ron Falconer and his family actually did that. Together Alone is definitely worth a read.

Notes From a Small Island

2007-04-02T18:42:00.000-04:00

Bill Bryson's Notes From a Small Island was voted the best book about Britain by the British themselves in a poll in The Guardian or some such several years ago. It says so on the book jacket somewhere but it's all the way on the other side of the room and I don't want to get up.

Bryson lived in England for fifteen or twenty years (that's also on the book jacket), but this book was written in the weeks before he departed the country to return to the United States. He went across to the continent, then hopped a ferry and returned to England through Dover, just as he had first come to England year previously. He travelled across the country without benefit of a car, which is fairly interesting--partly because it colors the narrative and partly because no one in their right mind would try such a thing in the United States.

There's not a lot to say. It's a great book for the flavor of the English countryside, but lately I find Bryson is sometimes so sarcastic ("wry" in the language of dust-jacket copy writers) that I get the feeling he doesn't enjoy anything at all, really. This wasn't so noticeable in A Walk in the Woods but it was terrible in The Lost Continent. To my surprise this book is at times rather closer to Lost Continent than I'd have hoped.

Which is not to say it's bad. After all, it was as I said voted the best book about Britain by the British (according to that wry dust-jacket copy, or something; really, I should just get up and go get the book but I absolutely refuse to do so at this point), and if for no other reason it's clearly worth a read. It is funny and enjoyable, and Bryson's description of the three-hour film This is Cinerama that he saw in Bradford is enough to make me want to book a flight right now. Well, almost.

The Sex Lives of Cannibals

2007-04-02T17:48:00.000-04:00

J. Maarten Troost's The Sex Lives of Cannibals includes little to no information whatsoever regarding cannibal sex, which is almost certainly a good thing.

Mr. Troost was a young over-educated politically-minded Washingtonian with no real plan for life and no desire to do what he'd been educated to do. Huh. Sorta familiar, really. His girlfriend was given the chance to travel to the Pacific island nation of Kiribati, to do... well, it doesn't really matter. Kiribati is in the middle of the ocean. There's nothing around Kiribati except other bits of Kiribati. And none of the bits have anything interesting going on. Mr. Troost notes that it just may be the worst place on Earth.

I finished this book almost three months ago. It was a laugh riot. Sometimes just the chapter titles are enough to make you laugh out loud. If you're going to read one book about being isolated in the South Pacific this year... well, actually, I read two, and they were both pretty good. This one will definitely give you the bigger laughs. Like all travel writing (this is more adventure--or perhaps lack of adventure--than travel) Troost has a little trouble in the final act, but it doesn't diminish the fun. This is definitely worth picking up.

What a review

2007-03-30T16:39:00.000-04:00

There are several books over there on the right that I've finished recently but haven't reviewed, mostly for utter laziness and no other reason. Each is worthy of a good review and I hope to write them this weekend, perhaps even this evening. Stay tuned.

In any event, you'll note all four of them are travel or adventure writing. No fiction. Haven't had the yen to pull out a fiction book in a while, though I did just start reading Snow Crash for the umpteenth time because I love it. I do want to read fiction now, and I read a review of what sounded like a very interesting book in, of all places, The Economist this afternoon. The book is called Salmon Fishing in the Yemen. Sounded interesting. I had to pre-order it, since it's a British book that's due in the States until next week. If I wait til next week, I'll forget to buy it.

While looking around at other reading I happened upon Special Topics in Calamity Physics, which was evidently very strongly pimped by its publisher when it came out last summer (O Djibouti, Thou hast made me miss so much pop culture) as a wonderful new thing. I'm leery of wonderful new things, which often tend to be less wonderful than advertised.

I did not choose to purchase this book (I bought Absurdistan instead, since you have to buy two things to get the free shipping. Amazing; if I'd paid for shipping and only bought one book I'd have saved fifteen bucks overall. How do they do this to us?). The reviews were generally pretty lousy, 2.5 out of 5 as the average. Many reviewers gave the book a 1. I noticed fairly quickly that the first few reviews, which were amazingly positive (and pretentious at the same time, one of the criticisms of the book) were from within days after the book's publishing. Not enough for people to have genuinely read the book. The reviewers were (shock!) anonymous. Sony got sued for faking reviews of their movies, but then Sony faked the reviews and used said fake reviews to sell the movies; this is a bit more nebulous and difficult to prove, but it certainly seems as though the publisher added a couple positive reviews in days immediately after the book came out to boost buyer confidence. It's an anonymous forum and, technically, the reviews on BN.com or Amazon do not qualify as advertising. I wonder what the legal status of this sort of thing is.

Anyway. Barring the first few reviews which were almost assuredly fake, the positive reviews of the book were all notable for their backhanded compliments. Such as this one:

If you can get past the pretentiousness of the writing, you are in for a real treat.

I don't get that. If I have to "get past" something in the story, I'm not going to read it or enjoy it. If you read a restaurant review that said, "If you can past the awful taste, dining at Barth's Cafe is a pleasurable experience," would you go? I doubt it. Another favorite review of the book said that the prose itself was

a delight to read for it's own sake, regardless of where the story is headed.

Which is to say, of course, that this particular story isn't really headed anywhere. O-kay. I'm just jumping out of my chair to buy this, let me tell you. This one here is my favorite of all--and it's from one of the fake reviews:

Finally, a book worth the effort of reading it.

Excuse me? Worth the effort of reading it? Look, I put a lot of effort into writing things so that you the reader don't have to make a great effort to read them. That's the goal here. I wouldn't bother reading something that took a great deal of effort... well, except for I Am Charlotte Simmons; trying to finish that book caused actual physical pain, but I couldn't properly skewer it if I didn't read it, right? Right.

Anyway. Dear reader, I have a book I'm looking to publish, and I do hope it doesn't take you a great deal of effort to read it. If it does, please, put it down and tell me to hang up the pencil.

Nature's Building Blocks

2007-01-01T13:52:00.000-05:00

Nature's Building Blocks, by John Emsley (a Cambridge chemist), has been hanging around the periphery of my reading for almost two years. It has in its time been the reading material of choice in the guest bath, it accompanied me to the doctor's office to pass the time waiting for last year's annual physical, and it spent much of last autumn sitting by the porch door for me to take out and read any time I had just a few minutes to spare. Such a book could not possibly appear on my "Now Reading" list, but nor could a book as fascinating and enjoyable as this not warrant a full review.

This is a delightful little book of the sort that you can open to any page and find something interesting. It takes the form of a series of essays about each element on the periodic table (as well as one on the history of the table itself). These range in length from 9 pages for major elements like hydrogen or oxygen, to 3 pages for uncommon things like hafnium, or heavy radioactive elements like berkelium that mainly exist in laboratories. There are also separate essays covering the "Transfermium Elements," which are created in laboratories and only last a few seconds (if that), and the Lanthanides (also called "rare-earth elements," though they are hardly rare) as a group (each lanthanide has its own entry as well).

Each essay is divided under several subheadings: Cosmic Element, Human Element, Food Element, Medical Element, Element of History, Element of War, Economic Element, Environmental Element, Chemical Element, and Element of Surprises. Each element has at least one surprise, except one, which is only surprising because there is absolutely nothing surprising about it. I won't tell you which one it is. You probably haven't heard of it anyway; I hadn't.

The book is just plain fascinating, even if you have no interest in chemistry. It's written for a general audience and the prose is light and engaging. Pick an element, any element, and you will find something unique and interesting about it. Wondering why there's manganese in your daily multivitamin? You'll find out why here. Never heard of tantalum? Well, don't feel bad; who has? Amazingly, there's a form of tantalum carbide that grows a crystal harder than diamond. Pretty nifty, eh? It's probably not going to replace diamond rings any time soon, though.

Nothing in this book is earth-shattering. It won't change your life or make you more popular at parties. But it is an intriguing and often amusing read, and if you can find a copy at the bookstore (good luck), you'll certainly enjoy having it on your bookshelf for a few minutes' diversion or the settling of disputes.

On the Road

2007-01-01T13:39:00.000-05:00

I've had this on my bookshelf for so long I don't even remember when I got it or if it's even actually mine and not one I snagged from a friend. I've been meaning to read it forever but other things kept coming up. I brought it along on safari because it seemed like the right sort of book for that. It wasn't. That's not to say it was the wrong book, but Facing the Congo would have been much better for safari.

I have one important comment up front: reading this book is like taking a dose of Benzedrine. You don't need any uppers for at least the next half hour after you're done reading. They say Kerouac wrote the thing in three weeks (to which some eminence, Tom Wolfe I think, said, "That's not writing, that's typing.") and that manic energy flows off the page and directly into your brainstem as you read. I even talked faster after I'd read a few pages. People remarked on it. This may not happen to you but be forewarned.

The book is divided up into five parts. The fifth is just a few pages of summary. The fourth is about a trip to Mexico. The first three are… well, frankly, they're all the same. And that really bogged me down. Took me three weeks to get through part three (didn't finish the book until I was home for Christmas, and by then it felt like work).

I don't know why this bothered me so much. I really expected to like this book; people who've read it and who know me, said I'd really like it. And the truth is I absolutely loved part one. Loved it. I felt like I could read it three more times and it would be just as great… and then I did. The rest of the book was basically part one again, with minor changes in setting and tertiary characters.

For such a slim novel to seem so repetitive, so devoid of new material, seems odd, but the plot is as thin as an old dress sock: a couple guys get on the road and beat around the country bumming rides and money and working odd jobs. Towards the end I was starting to think Kerouac wrote it in three weeks because his memory was hazy and he just kept writing the same thing over and over.

But that's not fair, because it's not the same thing over and over. It's incredibly similar things, broken up by some really awesome description. And that's, ultimately, what has to carry you through the later chapters. In part one I was thrilled by the newness of the concept, awed by the vitality of Kerouac's words and sentences, and caught up in the excitement of the characters—the characters' own excitement about America, about going out and seeing it, really experiencing it, their absolute joy of and love for this country and its freedoms.

In part two I was still excited about reading the book, but I realized that the characters were not different than they had been in part one. Dean, I'm sorry to say, is a jackass. Sal comes across as a little dimwitted, although I don't think that's really the case. I think really he's just along for the ride, for whatever the ride may be. That's the point, after all, the point of the book—life is about the experience, about going out and seeing and doing and trying and learning and failing and living. This was a reaction to the notion that life is a certain specific thing, that you are supposed to live a certain way, do certain things. Nah. That's not life. This is life, hitchhiking across the country, working at different jobs, scrumming for your dinner, trying to figure out how to get by on wits alone and still have enough left over to go out, to experience what's out there.

I had a very strong connection to Sal Paradise throughout the book. Sal is the somewhat older, somewhat wiser guy (only somewhat), and he doesn't always initiate the travels so much as he has a yen to do them but needs someone to provide him with a destination or an excuse. Dean Moriarty does both, but as I said he's a jackass. Far be it from me to criticize someone else's lifestyle (except for all those times when I do), but you can't have three wives and five kids and not be able to support a one of them. There's a line somewhere between going out and experiencing all the weirdness life has to offer, and being an irresponsible shitheel. Both are equally fun but only one is remotely honorable.

The other characters apart from Sal and Dean are sketches. We spend some time with them, but what separates them? One has a wife he leaves. One lives in New Orleans and does a lot of drugs. One lives in San Francisco and Sal manages to piss him off but good. But really, what's different about them, one from the next? What do they matter? I'm not sure. They're pretty much the same people from one scene to the next, one voyage to the next, and at the end I'm not real sure they'd changed much. But they were real people, and Sal and Dean really went out there and really met them and hung with them and experienced them, really dug them, grooved with them, whatever sort of beat phrase you want to do. That's what it's all about, is getting out and really digging a guy, you know?

All well and good, but by book three I was just damn tired of the whole thing. There was no change, no real difference in the characters, nothing new. The point—get out and see what's out there, you know, hit the road--was already made, the beast was cooked, the horse was beat. Man, that was a beat horse…

At least in the fourth act we got to go to Mexico, and it felt sort of new again, but only sort of, and Dean was still a jackass. I was tired by then. I was beat. Beat, man. Beat.

But throughout the book there was description, the kind of description that wraps itself around your brain stem and beats itself into you and makes your eyes water and your hair burn and your teeth rattle around in your mouth from the sheer presence of it, the very nearness and certainty and clarity. Awesome stuff. Early on you notice the place descriptions, towns and cities and houses and farms and the road, just the road itself. Later on the descriptions are of people and what they're doing, of jazz music and jazz musicians. Even in the depths of part three when I was sick of the whole damn thing there would come along this amazing, fascinating description of these jazzmen and their tunes. I'd put in some passages but man it doesn't work unless you've already been reading for five minutes and you've got the cadences and the spirit and the feel, man, just the whole beat language and rhythm, rhythms like the jazz that so exulted Sal and Dean, and Jack and Neal in real life. It's amazing.

Sorta sounds like I really dug the book, you know? Only I didn't. Except when I did. It was like that.

But I gotta tell you this, man. I don't get it, you know what I mean? Here was this great piece of American literature, and it was cool, and it was beat, and I liked parts of it, and I just don't feel like I really got it. Why? Why was it so great? As a chronicle? As philosophy? As the new American writing par exemplance? I don't know. Was this supposed to change my life? Affirm it? Transport to a land of ecstasy? Or just, you know, was it just supposed to be a good read? I have to admit it came closer to some of the former than it did the latter.

Have you read On the Road? What did you think?

Knight Life

2006-12-30T18:45:00.000-05:00

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

2006-12-30T18:30:00.000-05:00

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

2006-11-10T10:40:00.000-05:00

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!

2006-11-10T10:33:00.000-05:00

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

2006-11-10T10:30:00.000-05:00

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

2006-11-10T10:25:00.000-05:00

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

2006-11-03T11:31:00.000-05:00

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?

2006-11-01T12:19:00.000-05:00

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

2006-11-01T11:27:00.000-05:00

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

2006-10-06T13:13:00.000-04:00

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

2006-10-06T08:10:00.001-04:00

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

2006-09-26T18:23:00.000-04:00

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

2006-09-13T10:16:00.000-04:00

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

2006-09-08T14:37:00.000-04:00

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

2006-09-04T06:58:00.000-04:00

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

2006-08-28T16:53:00.000-04:00

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

2006-08-21T12:04:00.000-04:00

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

2006-08-14T12:13:00.000-04:00

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

2006-08-12T12:39:00.000-04:00

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

2006-05-09T17:39:00.000-04:00

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

2006-04-30T17:30:00.000-04:00

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

2006-03-13T18:50:00.000-05:00

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

2006-02-25T21:14:00.000-05:00

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

2006-01-22T17:28:00.000-05:00

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

2006-01-10T22:45:00.000-05:00

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.

Arnold's Cyclopedia

2005-12-28T19:23:00.000-05:00

I got yet another book from my local library! You should see what your library has to offer.

I checked this book out because A) I wanted some new exercises to do in the gym and the book lists pretty much every way you can lift a weight, and B) it costs like fifty bucks to buy a copy and weighs about nine pounds. My bookshelves are overloaded as it is and my checkbook is a bit underweight.

I did not read this whole book. Nor did I plan to. Nor would I bother. If you want a history of bodybuilding, it's in the book. If you want an entire workout plan for years, it's in the book. Every exercise ever conceived? In the book. Tips on competition? Yeah, it's in the book. I read the exercises. I have a few comments for those who might care.

This is the revised second edition of this book. It still offers a few exercises you should never, ever do (behind the neck chinups), but it also presents more alternatives. And, the discussion of squats and deadlifts goes much further into safety and why it's so important to keep the back straight. That's a good change.

The exercise plans are fairly absurd. Work out six times a week, hitting each body part three times? Fine, if you're on steroids. Anyone else will overtrain in a heartbeat. Then it gets better, with a plan for two workouts a day six days a week. Again, poor advice for non-roided types.
Of course, I'm not planning on using any of the workout plans in the book. I've done enough work on my own to know what works for me and I'm happy with that (although I'm less happy with the fact that I went to the gym all of once in November, and maybe four times in December). And after all, what should I have expected from a professional bodybuilder/governor (though probably not governor anymore by this time next year)?

All in all, this is a book with many ideas, only about half of which are probably crap. This is pretty good as books of ideas go. Most philosophers probably get to about 50%, if they're lucky. I'm sure my writings don't crack the 50% crap level. Marx never got anywhere near it. And, if you need to glue two things together, you can set this book on top of them.

Bartleby the Scrivener

2005-12-28T19:04:00.000-05:00

So, I read Bartleby the Scrivener, part of this book here called The Shorter Novels of Herman Melville. I checked this book out of my local library.

If I had more time I'd probably read the other shorter novels of Herman Melville, but as it is I've been busy and I only checked this out to read Bartleby. I did this on the advice of a friend, but I no longer know how the subject came up. To be honest, I'm not sure I got Bartleby. Was there something to get? Or was I just looking for something more than was there. I guess this was just absurdism, and as such, it was an interesting read. Though I would have to argue with a few points. The coda wherein it is supposed that Bartleby worked in the dead letter office really seemed to destroy the mood. I don't know. I liked the idea of Bartleby just being impossible to figure.

That said, I like the way he controlled his situation. I'd like to see something similar happen in reality, to see how it would play out. How long could you get away with simply prefering not to do things? I'd prefer not to go to work, but I don't think I'd quite manage that as successfully as Bartleby controlled his boss.

It was interesting. And short, which is nice, since the books remaining on my reading list are both very long and have taken me a long time to read.

Freakonomics

2005-11-28T20:10:00.000-05:00

So... I read Freakonomics, which apparently is one of the biggest nonfiction books of the year.

I didn't buy it, though, I borrowed it from a friend. It turns to be very interesting and thought provoking, but I'm not sure it's quite as amazing as a lot of folks are saying. The main problem with this book is that not everything in the world can be explained with the cold logic of economics. I like the book's premise--that we can use the tools of economics to answer all sorts of questions. I like the idea of coming up with my own questions and trying to find solutions in the same manner as the book's authors. But I am not among those who believe that all of live can ultimately reduced to algorithms. Messrs Levitt and Dubner seem to think that is possible.

I may write a longer review when I'm feeling better, but I might not. This book gets... oh, I don't know. It's probably worth a read, I mean, it is interesting. Just don't forget your salt.

Test Pattern

2005-11-15T22:22:00.001-05:00

Okay, so I was going to go off on my next adventure (St. Pete Clay, specifically), but then Clemson put three touchdowns up on FSU and now I can't leave the television. I'll go to the studio tomorrow.
So... I guess I should write a review of Test Pattern, by Marjorie Klein, which I read while on vacation.
I picked up this book at the used book store in downtown while wandering around down there one afternoon. I also picked up several other used books, and the total bill came to something like four dollars. So as you can see, this book didn't exactly cost a bunch of money. For what I paid, it was a good book.

It was Marjorie Klein's first book; she writes for the Miami Herald and the book has a promotional blurb from Dave Barry on the cover. That's pretty high praise; I'll read anything by Barry and for the most part I'll read anything he recommends (say what you will, but I think Dave Barry's a better judge of literature than Oprah). That, and the cover of the book caught my eye. Bright yellow, with a picture of a TV dinner. The old kind of TV dinner, the kind that predated microwaves and that had those neutron peas that never seemed to warm up all the way (and seemed to exist in every compartment of the dinner whether there were peas in the dinner in the first place or not).

They say you can't judge a book by its cover, but that is in reality how we judge most books, and nearly everything else as well. And I'm not disappointed in this book. It wasn't bad. It wasn't remarkably good, but it had its own charms.

The central conceit of the book is that there's more in the tv test pattern than meets the eye--at least for one little girl. The book is set in the early 1950s or very late 1940s, in the early days of television. The family at the center of the book have just acquired their very first television, and the book's theme is the effect tv has on the family. As you might expect, the effect is not exactly a good one.

Marjorie Klein has done some very amusing things here. For one, each chapter alternates between the daughter narrator, and third-person narrator following the mother. This is pretty unique; I've tried to write stories where multiple characters each get to narrate, and the reason so few people can make this work (Faulkner aside) is that it's hard to get the narrators to be convincingly individual. Here, instead of having mother narrate herself, mother's chapters are written by a third narrator, but with a very limited point of view. I've never read a book that used this tool, and I quite enjoyed it.

The father, who is a key character in the story every bit as important as mother and daughter, doesn't get to narrate. Hard to say why exactly, but there are plenty of possible reasons. We never really get into his head, but it's clear enough exactly what sort of problems he's having, with his wife, with his job, with life in general. That he doesn't suffer from not having his own chapters is clear enough indication that Marjorie Klein knows what she's doing.

As I said, it was an enjoyable read, but not one of my favorites. The test pattern bit seems...silly, and frankly insignificant, until the moment comes in the story when it actually plays a role. And then, it feels a little... I don't know. You can't call it deus ex machina, since she's set it up right from the start of the story. I guess it's just that, I never fully bought into the test pattern magic anyway. I have problems with magic in realist stories, and this is a very realist story. In fact, I almost wonder whether the magic is necessary to story at all--and until that one fateful moment late in the book where it does matter, it could almost be eliminated. So it feels as though this bit of magic is only in the book to save everybody there in that one crucial climactic moment.

That, and, there's a glaring error in the book that should have been picked up by a decent editor. At one point when snippets of The Simpsons appear in the test pattern, Lisa's name is given as "Susie." Why Susie? It's a throwaway moment and thus no commentary is intended by the name change; it's simply an error, a bizarre error to be sure, and the sort of thing that editors are paid to catch. Then again, I do watch an inordinate amount of Simpsons, since it's on twice every night as I'm cooking and eating dinner.

The main commentary in the story, about television's effect on this working-class family, is very well stated, and the book is worth reading because of that. Indeed, a lot of people who have less trouble with magic in realist stories would probably enjoy this book a great deal. As for me, it was... okay.

Savannah

2005-10-02T19:45:00.000-04:00

Lucky for me, the last few books I've received as gifts (of which Savannah is one) have all been very good. Savannah is not the sort of book I probably would have picked up on my own, so I'm doubly glad to have got it (was it for my birthday? Or Christmas?). Thanks, Mom and Dad!

I've never read John Jakes, though I've thought about picking up Charleston once or twice. I probably will. This is a very simple little story, a fast read, but rather exciting nonetheless. The cast of characters is wide but ably drawn, and with a handful of exceptions are brought together well at the end. I read most of this book this afternoon; it's not a particularly weighty tome, but it isn't meant to be. It's the sort of thing you could read in a few days at Christmastime, and I think that's what was intended. (More after the Jump.)

The story centers around a young girl named Hattie Lester, and the family cobbled together around her. She and her mother share duties at a dried up old plantation on the outskirts of Savannah. They flee into the city to stay with a friend as Sherman's troops approach the city, and the story plays out around and through those desperate circumstances.

The book takes in over a dozen separate plot lines, which is a lot to manage. This can be a bit confusing in the early going, keeping everyone straight. Once the action moves into Savannah along with the Union army, the book picks up substantially. I'll wager you probably won't want to put it down once Gen. Sherman himself makes his appearance.

Of course, by the time you've got a third of the book left, you have a pretty good idea how it's all going to play out in the end. The question that keeps you reading is, how exactly is Jakes going to get us there? It's well worth the journey.

My main criticism would be that one of the plotlines is deemed so frightfully unimportant as to not warrant resolution at the end of the book. This little plotline seems to stem from a need to allow young Hattie to visibly irritate her relatives early on in the story; Jakes returns to it only two or three times, taking the time to flesh out a backstory on a sympathetic character, but come the end of the book the story is left open. Hopeful, but open. I question the need for it, but this is minor.

Gen. Sherman is almost sympathetic here, which is saying something because of all individuals I've studied from that era, Sherman comes the closest to having a heart of pure evil. I'm not saying I need to reevaluate my impression of him, only that Jakes has done a good job here.

This is a very charming little story, and as the Christmas season is approaching and it's coming out in paperback, it's probably worth picking up.

The Mother Tongue and Seven Samurai

2005-09-28T17:00:00.000-04:00

I recently finished Bill Bryson's wonderful book The Mother Tongue. And, I recently watched Akira Kurosawa's masterpiece, Seven Samurai.

Both are highly recommended. Of the two, the book is the more accessible; if you have an aversion to subtitles you won't enjoy the movie, but then, if you have an aversion to subtitles just grow up. I'm no big samurai movie fan, but this is one of the great movies of all time (if we believe the AFI 100 list), and is well worth watching for characterizations. Unlike modern action movies that claim descent from Seven Samurai, this movie actually has three-dimensional characters and stands as a great film apart from its action sequences. It is three hours long, but if you watched Dances With Wolves or any of the Lord of the Rings movies you should be over that.

The Mother Tongue is an extremely amusing look at where English comes from and why it is the way is. It's not exactly a linguistics textbook, but for the vast majority of us who have no particular desire to take a linguistics course, that may be a good thing. The book covers the development of English, then takes a look in separate chapters at slang, names, swearing, and numerous other topics of general interest to anyone who speaks or reads English (which is all of you). It's an extremely entertaining read, so much so as to warrant not reading it anyplace that you'd earn disapproval for laughing out loud.

Again, both are highly recommended. I would have written longer reviews because I much enjoyed both book and movie, and both gave me something to think about long after I'd finished them (how often can you say of an action flick that you were still thinking about issues it raised hours later as you went to bed?), but other matters (detailed in a post later this evening) have occupied my mind rather a bit more this afternoon.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

2005-09-11T11:21:00.000-04:00

Totally Spoiler-Free Review:

1. Well, I at least knew who wasn't the Half-Blood Prince, but I didn't guess who was.
2. This book was way, way better than Order of the Phoenix.
3. I had guessed correctly what might happen at the end of this book. I feel very smug about all this, especially given some of the theories I read.
4. Ms. Rowling has given herself a very, very big list of things to accomplish in Book 7. No wonder she said she would probably just "keep writing and writing and writing." I guess we shouldn't expect to see Book 7 before, oh, 2007. Enough time to reread all of the previous 6 beforehand.
5. It's not that this book is so much better than Neuromancer, but, you know, it took me two days to read it. As opposed to two months. I could have read it in one day if I hadn't started reading at 8'00 in the evening.
6. I now believe nearly the entire story arc of book 7 can be found in the six existing books.
7. Let's say the comments are nota spoiler-free zone, so we can feel free to talk about the book there.

Neuromancer

2005-09-06T20:58:00.000-04:00

I have finally finished reading William Gibson's Neuromancer. It only took me, what, about two months?

Like Frankenstein and The Martian Chronicles, this was a book I didn't so much want to read as it was one that I felt I should read--because it is the first "real" cyberpunk novel. Like those other books, I was a little less than enthralled.
A not entirely negative review follows the jump.

I enjoy the "cyberpunk" genre as rule. I like detective stories and crime novels, I like dystopian fiction, and while I wouldn't call myself a sci-fi "fan," I do appreciate the genre. Cyberpunk tends to blend these things together, and I like blenders.

If I may be so bold as make some sweeping statements about cyberpunk: beyond what the Wikipedia article linked above says, there are a few other general similarities. Cyberpunk usually has a male protagonist, and a female protagonist who links up with the male, though not always sexually. This male is, at least in the outside world, usually a loser (an "anti-hero" in the literary jargon). The female is usually attractive and given over to leather and boy toys like motorcycles and skateboards; in particular she is tough and can fend for herself--but at some point in the story her feminine vulnerability will be exposed. At the end of the story, the man and the woman do not get together.
Cyberpunk endings are vague, and often dissatisfying. So is life a lot of times.
Cyberpunk's stock in trade is a fantastic but recognizeable near-future, or even present day. Like Tom Clancy, cyberpunk writers throw around a lot of jargon that they don't bother to explain. Context often takes care of this, and where it doesn't the mind is free to wander. A good cyberpunk novel introduces a lot of new concepts, and coins new terms, and some are often quite prescient.

I would like to try my hand at maybe a little cyberpunk short story sometime. The fact that Gibson knew next to nothing about computers when he wrote Neuromancer gives me hope that I could do this. But, the fact that Gibson knew next to nothing about computers also shows through in this novel, in a way that Neal Stephenson's avowed dislike of the internet did not show through in Snow Crash (which is a superior novel in most respects). The novel, written in 1984, also shows its age.

Gibson's characters are at least temporarily interesting, but if you like backstory you won't find it here, unless the backstory affects events in the current story, as with Armitage. In other words, if you like to see where characters come from and why they might react as they do, if you like a good character study, this is not your book (some readers will disagree with me; I'll get deeper into this later on). You'll learn little about the twin protagonists, less about the periphery characters. I hate to say it, but it makes it harder to care about the protagonists. The mysterious nature of their quest, and its vague morality, make it hard to care about the outcome. And when you don't care about the characters or what they're up to... well, then it takes you two months to read the book.

Still, Gibson broke some new ground here. His imagining of the Freeside space station and the necessary oddities of a rotating, cylindrical space, is close to genius. His vision of Chiba City's Ninsei enclave--and his rationale for its existence--has echoed throughout the entire cyberpunk genre. Certain scenes in the movie Hackers look like a visualization of Ninsei. I love this description of the place's existence:

But he also saw a certain sense in the notion that burgeoning technologies require outlaw zones, that Night City wasn't there for its inhabitants, but as a deliberately unsupervised playground for technology itself.

I'm sure at the time Gibson thought this was a true and worthy insight. Nowadays it seems the companies at the forefront of this "burgeoning technology" are trying to shut down any potential playgrounds and keep the technology for themselves.

Gibson also managed to make a couple of contributions to the lingo--"ice" as a byword for network security, "construct" as a word for a digital entity based on a real person (think Halo), that sort of thing--but the real feat of this novel is that it was written in 1984. The internet as we know it did not exist, but Gibson came up with a plausible realization of it. His visual depiction of what the Net looked like to a hacker who had "jacked in" compares again to 1995's Hackers; note that the computer in that movie, which is depicted much like Gibson's "Net," is called "The Gibson" in his honor.

The book was ground-breaking. It more or less created, or at the least defined, a new genre of fiction. It is imaginative, fast-paced, and includes enough sex, violence, and drug use to keep even the most worldly and jaded readers interested.

Still, Neuromancer left me feeling somewhat empty. It wasn't the ending (hey, I just watched Cold Mountain; this ending was great in comparison). No, I keep coming back to the characters, to Case and Molly. Both are interesting as characters, but not interesting enough to really be worth caring about.

This may be part of the problem with cyberpunk. Anti-heroes and tough girls can be interesting because they break the mould, but if their characterizations do not go far beyond that, they don't hold your interest. Case and Molly are interesting character sketches. There's not a lot to Case--we know he's 24, that he used to be a great hacker cowboy, and that he got burned by a mega-corporation/crime syndicate (megacorps being an important aspect of this novel and this genre) for being naughty with their data. We know little else about him, and, since despite attempts to correct them he maintains his drug addictions and his impropriety, it's hard to see why we should care what really becomes of him. Case is a protagonist (unlike Cold Mountain's Inman) who's death would not sadden us. Molly has more backstory (which will be familiar to readers of Gibson's Johnny Mnemonic (though not to viewers of that film)), but her motivation--she's only doing it for the money--makes her hard to know, hard to get involved with, and hard to care about. The most interesting character in the entire story, apart the eponymous Neuromancer, is Armitage, a broken and twisted man who's backstory we get just a tantalizing hint of. But Armitage plays another role; he's more of a tool than a character, both in the sense of his role in the story and his characterization.

So how big a fault is this? Gibson was, as I said, defining a new genre, and sometimes in doing that, especially if one isn't doing it consciously (it's hard to believe Gibson wasn't conscious of it, even if it wasn't his primary intent), the genre itself, the plot and its direction, outweigh the characters. The question, after all is, "What is cyberpunk?" not "Who is cyberpunk?" Case is a shell, like Molly and, quite literally, like Armitage. These shells have been expanded on and fleshed out by later writers, and by Gibson in some of his later works. In the long run, my inability to care about Case is less important than my ability to understand what he is.

Still, this makes characters into mere tools. I don't like to think of them that way. In my own writing I've discovered that plot happens because of the characters; plot doesn't happen to the characters. Not all writers work that way; not all readers expect it. But I do. And for that, and despite all the great and interesting things about it, Neuromancer was a disappointing read.

A History of Post-Colonial Lusophone Africa

2005-08-07T13:57:00.000-04:00

Yesterday I finished reading A History of Post-Colonial Lusophone Africa, a book that was as informative as it was entertaining to watch people's expressions when they saw its title.

Yes, I chose to read this because I wanted to, not because I had some pressing reason to do so. Africa is a mess. The five former Portuguese (which is what Lusophone means, don't ask me why) colonies in Africa are particularly messy. Here is a book that purports to frame their particular messiness in terms of the colonial legacy and the post-colonial mistakes of their leaders. Lusophone African history is a microcosm of overall African history, and there just aren't many (any?) good African histories. Plus, having been rather smitten with Portugal on my sole trip to that country, I've become keenly interested in Portugal and its legacy.

The rest of the review is after the jump.

The book is divided into two sections and written by a team of six. The first section is written by Patrick Chabal, who has written a number of books on Angola. Angola thus figures fairly prominently in this section, which is a general overview of the history of the Portuguese colonies as a group--what they faced in common, what separated them, and why some succeeded while others failed. Of course, in a very real sense all of them have failed, so this degenerated into a discussion of why they each failed in different ways and at different speeds. Chabal is not a terribly exciting writer, but one needn't know very much about these countries or their history to understand what he's written.

The second section includes pieces on each of the five countries individually, each written by specialists on those countries (and edited by Mr. Chabal). The chapters on Angola and Mozambique--by far the most important and interesting of the five colonies--include much information already discussed in the earlier section, but both contain plenty of new information and are for the most part fairly easy to read, particularly the section on Mozambique.

By far the worst part of the book is the chapter on Guinea-Bissau. This is a shame since I've always felt that if I could become a third-world dictator, Guinea-Bissau is the country I should like to rule. The author, Joshua Forrest, is clearly of this group the one most tainted by academe; his writing is particularly illucid and much that might have been informative and interesting is buried under a layer of jargon. Additionally, the chapter's layout fails to use any even remotely chronological order, which makes it difficult to follow.

The two final chapters are somewhat shorter, being about particularly small and unimportant places (Cape Verde and Sao Tome e Principe). Both chapters are chock full of information you never knew existed about countries you may not have known existed. They are also among the best written parts of the book; I suppose specializing in a place like Sao Tome e Principe presents you with few enough opportunities to publish that you make sure what you do publish is very good.

Sadly, AHOPCLA was published in early 2002, and thus misses out on several frightfully important developments, notably the 2004 coup d'etat in Guinea-Bissau that brought former prime minister Kumba Yalla into the presidency, and the death lat er in 2002 of Angolan rebel leader Jonas Savimbi; Savimbi's death finally put an end to near 30 straight years of civil war.

Overall, however, there is no better book on the subject. There is essentially no other book on the subject, either. Should you ever have a yen to know more about obscure and destitute places, this is all the information you'd ever want to have.

Turners and Burners

2005-07-17T21:10:00.000-04:00

I've finally finished reading a book! It's been, what, about three, four weeks? I've been trying to whittle down a backlog of Economist magazines and it's cut into my regular reading time. Oh well.

So the book I finished was Turners & Burners, by Charles Zug. I had to finish it because it was due back to the library today. Yes! I actually have a library card, and I use it! Amazing, no?

But anyway, this book is about the folk pottery tradition in North Carolina. Sort of an esoteric subject. I'd write an honest review of it, but I think the odds of anyone reading this blog, at any time in the future, really needing this book, are pretty slim. It is, at least, a wealth of knowledge, and has a lot of good pictures in it. Zug has written the definitive book on the subject, such that he is referenced in almost every significant American pottery book that has been written since. And, I learned a lot of good techniques in this book--capping pots, ways to do lids and handles, that sort of thing.

This is the sort of book I'll have to check out again in the future. It has everything you'd need to be a North Carolina folk potter--glaze recipes, notes on where the clay came from, how to build a treadle wheel and a kiln, how to fire. Turners and Burners may not be a book for everyone, but if it's a great resource if you want to know anything about the life of the folk potter.

Expanding the reading list

2005-06-10T09:08:00.000-04:00

I didn't want to have to drop some of the books off the end of my "Recent Reads" list, so I've expanded it to ten. I put Frankenstein and the Martian Chronicles down at the bottom even though I read them after numbers 7 and 8. But since I've already mentioned them on the blog, I figure it will be no great loss if they drop off the list first.

But maybe you're curious about some of the other things on the list.

Number 8 there is Life of Pi, by Yann Martel. I read this on my last deployment, and I loved it. It is a terrific story, entertaining and sometimes funny, and it always makes you think. Martel is a lyrical writer, almost as good as Michael Chabon, and it's a pleasure to read his words. The story, of course, is somewhat fanciful--at least, it might be. The ambiguity of its reality is part of the fun. Of the fiction books on this list, I would give this my top recommendation for all my readers.

Number 7 is Stranger in a Strange Land, by Robert Heinlein. It's the first Heinlein book I've read; this is the "uncut original version" and I'm not sure how the abridged version would read. This is certainly an interesting book. Heinlein's views on sexuality and religion are...different. But certainly of some interest. This is an absolute classic of the genre so any sci-fi fans who haven't read it would be encouraged to do so... but bear in mind that the subject matter is a bit out of the ordinary.

Number 6 is A Court Divided, by Mark Tushnet. Tushnet is a law professor and Supreme Court scholar. His book is about the Rehnquist Court, and the various factions thereon and how they've affected the conservative legal agenda--namely, it's been variously thwarted in some circumstances (property rights) and moved forward in others (religion in the public sector). This is an interesting study, especially combined with the fourth book on the list, but would be of interest mostly to people already interested in legal issues.

Number 5 is Age and Guile beat Youth, Innocence, and Bad Haircut, by P.J. O'Rourke. O'Rourke is one of my very favorite writers; he practices what you could call gonzo journalism," though he's not quite so ridiculous about it as Hunter Thompson was (though Thompson is fun to read anyway). This is a book of some of his older pieces, the type of thing that you publish after you've published a lot of other books, which O'Rourke has. It's not his best, but it is entertaining.

Number 4 is The Supreme Court, by Chief Justice William Rehnquist. This is one of the classic popular studies of the Court's history and function, and is far and away the most strongly recommended book on this list for every reader.

Number 3 is O'Rourke's All the Trouble in the World. This is one of his best, maybe his very best, but it's hard to say. Chapters include Plague, Poverty, the Environment, Famine, Overpopulation, and the various other of the world's ills, and O'Rourke travels to countries around the world to report on what causes those ills, what they look like first-hand, and what is and can be done about them. I love this book; this was probably my fourth reading of it. It would be really cool to follow in O'Rourke's footsteps but, oh well, guess that ship has sailed.

Number 2 is poo. But book number 2 on this list is the Count of Monte Cristo, which I've already discussed. Read it, it's good.

Number 1 I just finished last night, O'Rourke's Eat the Rich. This was his next book after Trouble and, if you read them in order, you can see how he gets from one to the next. After visiting Haiti (Plague) in the previous book and discovering that the plague there was secondary to the crippling poverty and governmental mismanagement, he wrote that the real solution to Haiti's plague was to make the Haitians rich. In Eat the Rich, O'Rourke travels to such places as Wall Street, Sweden, Cuba, and 1997 Albania (after the pyramid schemes collapsed) to look at what makes wealth, what wrecks it, and how to go about making everybody in the world rich.

P.J. O'Rourke was once a self-described conservative, but in the last 5 years he's been working as a fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute and preaching some degree of the libertarian gospel. What would make him unusual as a conservative Republican is the desire to see everybody in the world get rich. A lot of conservatives (casting aspersions here, but conservatives do it to liberals all the time) seem not to be terribly concerned about getting the rest of the world--or even the poorer parts of our country--rich. Of course, a lot of traditional lefties feel the same way. Wanting everybody to get rich is definitely a libertarian ethic, and O'Rourke sells that gospel very well.

So there you have it, my recent reading list. I'll discuss the other books as I finish them.