2005 Books

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

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.