How to Meditate

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.

Living the Simple Life

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.

On The Wealth of Nations

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

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

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

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

Buddha Is as Buddha Does

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

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

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

The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium

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.

The Gods Drink Whiskey

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.

The Prophet and The Messiah

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

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

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

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

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

Business

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So Many Books

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

Three Books

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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