Smitty's Top 24 Books

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

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

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

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

The Smitty's Library Top 100 Books of Whenever Discussion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.