Working backwards

With Henry, the holidays, and Rome, my reading has slowed. So I thought I could work backwards and offer some mini-reviews of books I've read pre-blog.

Since August 2008:
Good Good Pig - Non-fiction selection from my friends' book club. Life lessons from a pig. Not great, so I'll summarize: savor life.

Happiest Baby on the Block - This is the most-recommended newborn book among our friends - because the 5-S technique (swaddling, shushing, sucking, swinging, side) works.

Stumbling on Happiness - A Harvard psych prof on how the human mind makes decisions and and how these processes can lead to happy/unhappy outcomes. Fascinating. The kids-make-you-unhappy section makes for interesting conversation.

Team of Rivals - DKG's biography of Lincoln and his cabinet. Much in the news these days since Obama has cited its influence. One of the best biographies I've ever read.

Handmaid's Tale - While this feels somewhat dated to its early 80s influences (Iranian Revolution, abortion wars, rise of the religious right), it is a good read. Thought the post-script didn't fit at all.

Killer Angels - The classic fictionalized version of the Gettysburg battle. (E & I visited Gettysburg a couple years ago when we attended a friend's nearby wedding, and I got into the Civil War.) This is book is a page-turner that really involves you in the battle. Team of Rivals provided some of the larger historical/political/military context that is lacking from this.

(Then The Sparrow, etc.)

The Sparrow - 2

I finished reading The Sparrow, which Jesse wrote up a couple months ago. I figured I better make a new post rather than a comment, since the original Sparrow post rolled off the first page of the Blog into some semi-lost archive!

I liked this book better than Jesse seemed to - he described the plot very nicely, referring to the parallel stories told pro- and retrospectively, leading up to the reveal. Unlike Jesse, I was not disappointed in the reveal - rather, I was disappointed in the conclusion to the reveal! Without serious spoilers, it's sufficient to say that the main character, the Jesuit priest Emilio Sandoz, and his friends all experience the events leading up to their expedition to meet the alien species on a relatively nearby planetary system as a series of extraordinary "coincidences" that seem clearly to represent the will of God. These events nurture Sandoz' tentative faith, but his horrible experiences on the alien planet shatter it. After his return, some really likable members of The Society of Jesuits nurse him to some physical and emotional health, seeing his plight summarized in Matthew 10:29

Not one sparrow can fall to the ground without your Father knowing it.

I guess this says more about me than the book, but I found the shattering of Sandoz' faith more powerful and convincing than his semi-redemption. Still, I felt this book was very interesting and I liked grappling with this age-old question of why bad things happen to good people.

Jesse's review here

Lauren's review here

Erica Jong Votes for Stoats: Random Story of the Day

Hi All- thanks for having me here as a guest on your blog! The joys of being done with grad school is that I've got the same hunger for literature, but have the time to read fun things now and follow up on all the great things I learn. I could (and will) write a long post about my new-found appreciation for Vonnegut (he's dead, so I can't write to him. I just missed him) and the fits of outloud giggles that Gabriel G. Marquez gives me. But my most favorite literature moment came on election day when I decided that Erica Jong herself must hear, from me, what I'd learned that day and how it related to her book. I looked up her email and wrote to her. This is what we'd had to say....

On 4, Nov 2008, , at 11:09 AM, Jillian Krupski wrote:

Ms. Jong,

This past weekend after a devastating breakup I was nursing my sore ego in the kitchen of my favorite aunt (editor's note: yes, ALMP, that's you! Hooray!) She handed me Fear of Flying and said “enjoy”. It is my first experience with your literature and I can’t put it down!

Today I read while standing in line to vote, attempting to pay no attention to the republican behind me reading over my shoulder. I assume he caught a dirty word and was intrigued. I was reading the chapter where Isadora and Goodlove are about to consumate their relationship for the first time and he calls her a stoat. “What is a stoat?” I thought. I had no clue. Then I followed a link that someone had sent me to a random website and found that a stoat was the featured animal of today. http://www.cuteoverload.com/

What a random set of coincidences. I highly doubt that this stoat has anything to do with the stoat to which Adrian referred, but it was funny nonetheless! Mystery solved!

Happy election day.

Jillian Krupski

*************************************************************

From: emjongburrows@mac.com [mailto:emjongburrows@mac.com] Sent: Tuesday, November 04, 2008 11:32 AMTo: Jillian KrupskiSubject: Re: vote.....a stoat?

Dear Jillian--

I'm thrilled by your letter.

I wrote "that book" (as people call it) throughout my twenties--and when it was acquired by Holt in 1970, I was a baby (and a babe). I had no idea what I'd wrought.

The reactions were ecstatic, mean, unprintable, hateful, horrid and wonderful. The "official" lit'ry types called me "a mammoth pudenda" (Paul Theroux in the New Statesman), but Henry Miller of Tropic of Cancer fame loved it and so did John Updike in the New Yorker. Thus my first novel (third book) was SAVED!

And here we are in 2008 & you have just found it at a time in your life you need it. The wonder of books!

So--read it and remember that men are compelling but another one always comes along (like a bus).

Remember who you are! Fantastic, individual, beautiful inside and out. If one creep doesn't get it, a wise man
will come along who does.

I've had 4 marriages and my 4th husband is my soulmate. We are now married 19 years--a record for us both.

The others were just warm-ups.

BE WELL!

EJ

So I guess the moral of the story is....I shouldn't plan on being happy in love until my fourth marraige!! We're just warming up!

More time-travel

Leading up to October the First is Too Late, I am on an inadvertant time-travel kick. Over Thanksgiving, the Wilde clan had a multi-generational movienight, watching Back to the Future.

But I just finished Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut. It also has time travel as a major plot element, though it is used to juxtapose events for satire. And the "time travel" is probably actually just one character's delusion.

In high school, I read Player Piano by Vonnegut. Our teacher assigned PP to give us exposure to an author's first novel (to demonstrate the room for improvement?). That was my only previous Vonnegut exposure, so I thought it worthwhile to try his most well-known work. S5 is humorous, but it didn't stir me - in this way it reminded me of The Crying of Lot Forty-Nine, which is nearly contemporaneous.

Family Book Club 2

I finished October the First is Too Late and, without any spoilers, would just say that it is an entertaining read, with some nice food for thought. As much about music as time travel!

1776

This was the national best seller 3 years ago, but I finally got around to it! An engaging book and quick read....it immediately showed me that I never learned, or had forgotten, several key events at the beginning of the revolutionary war. The book is not focused on the Declaration of Independence or the early skirmishes at Lexington and Concord, but rather on what came to be called the Continental Army, commanded by George Washington. And only on the Siege of Boston; the disastrous, failed defense of New York; and the few hopeful battles in New Jersey that took place at the end of 1776.

A good read, 7 or 8 out of 10.

Blindness

I am in a poorly attended book club, largely made up of my Williams friends. (Harry Potter 7 drew a crowd as did The Game. Most of our books have been more serious and less attended - likely not a coincidence.)

Our most recent book was Blindness by Jose Saramago. The book is about a contagious epidemic of white blindness. Much of the novel occurs in an increasingly sordid quarantine. It is a distopia novel, and the reader descends into the filth with the characters.

Saramago apparently is both high culture and low: he is a Nobel laurate, but Blindness is about to be a major motion picture, coming to a theater near you! (The movie does have a "serious" cast - Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo, etc.)

I was not consulted on either the Nobel or Hollywood rights decisions. The book is tough - minimal punctuation, few pronouns, no character names. I thought this was intended to disorient the reader in manner semi-analogous to blindness. (I was still frustrated, but at least this was thought provoking.) But no, it turns out that Saramago does this stuff in all his books - so it is not specifically form-function linked.

Additionally, I generally avoid books and movies that could be described as "searing." But I'd have to say, I prefer my "brutal realism" realistic. This was a brutal parable, which didn't sit quite right with me.

I am definitely in the reader minority - Amazon's 362 reader reviews average to 4 stars. So if you're in the mood to wallow in excrement and wading through run-on sentences, go for it!

"Family Book Club" for December?

As a December Family Book Club endeavor, Jesse suggested we follow up on the time travel theme described by Will in his report on The End of Eternity by Asimov, by perhaps reading another time travel book - October the First is Too Late, by the late, illustrious astronomer Fred Hoyle. The book is interesting (see Amazon reviews), but is out of print and may be hard to get. I did find that our library has one copy, which I reserved, but........

Another possibility is to explore one of Asimov's very interesting Robot books, which probe issues of free will, the nature of intelligence, and man vs. machine. The series starts with The Caves of Steel, which is an excellent story and introduces the wonderful robot R Daneel Olivaw, but is stronger as a science fiction mystery than a consideration of robot vs. man issues. The next in the series is The Naked Sun, also a good mystery. But the third book, The Robots of Dawn, really combines a great mystery story with a fascinating exploration of human-robot interactions - see the reviews on Amazon) - while I think it would probably be best to read these in order, I think it would be fine to start with the third book - that way, we could get the most bang for the book! Thoughts?

Asimov's "The End of Eternity"

After commenting to my father of how I enjoyed another book whose plot relied on time paradoxes, he recommended to me this book by Sci-Fi author Issac Asimov. In the past, I'd briefly tried one of Asimov's books, but I hadn't been hooked and eventually I gave up reading it. This time was fairly similar, but reading through the slow start was worth the wait.

The protagonist in this book is Harlan, who is known as an "Eternal". An Eternal is a dweller of Eternity, which is essentially a base from which experienced "Technicians" can time-travel. Not only can these Technicians time-travel, but they also can, after much planning, change things in the real world.

The book actually begins when Harlan is already half-way through his adventure and is blackmailing another Eternal into completing a "Life-Plot" for him. A Life-Plot is a map of what is likely to happen to a person when reality is changed. Strangely enough, we find out that this Life-Plot is for a woman, Noys Lambent, and Harlan delivers his fatal lines:

"If there was a flaw in Eternity, it involved women... he felt it personally only that day he had first met Noys... For the first time, the specific and express thought came to him. And though he pushed it away in horror, he knew that, having once come, it would return. The thought was simply this: That he would ruin Eternity, if he had to. The worst of it was that he knew he had power to do it."

The rest of the book progresses smoothly, but becomes significantly more intense in the last 100 pages, when we learn why the book is entitled "The End of Eternity".

Overall, I very much enjoyed this book. It was a slow start since I knew next to nothing about the story, and the vast number of Sci-Fi terms that were impressed upon me were confusing rather than engaging. It was not until the third chapter or so that I caught on to most of the scientific background, and it was not until more than halfway through that I understood all of it. The story, however, is fantastic. Even though Asimov takes a long time to set up all the pieces of his story, the playout at the end is fantastic, and the number of twists and unexpected turns that the book takes was very gripping.

Although I myself enjoyed this book, I don't know if everyone else would like it. I enjoyed the book because of its complexity, because this made it so much harder to predict that little quirks that came up throughout the book. Some, however, would likely find all the jargon more distracting that enhancing, and would perhaps not like to read this book as much. If, however, you're looking for a real mind-bending mystery/Sci-Fi/drama, then you should really consider reading this book.

Online reading

Google Reader is a terrific tool for following this and other things you read online. One feature is that you can mark items to "share" with others. So here's a dynamically updated web page of the things I've read and thought were interesting:

http://www.google.com/reader/shared/18188436483806673572
Bookmark and revisit. (Or, get on Google Reader!)

The Boys' Crusade

Our local library has several savvy librarians - and one happy consequence is that I frequently see books that interest me on one of the "Staff Selections" racks. In this way, I was attracted to The Boys' Crusade by Paul Fussell, an account of the very young men (as the title suggests, really boys) who fought in northwestern Europe during the late stages of World War Two. Having just finished the Orwell book, it also seemed interesting to hear another perspective on life on the front lines.

Well, Orwell's book was clear-eyed, but he saw little actual combat. Fussell's short book, though very well-written, and light on rare occasions, is largely grim:

Now, almost sixty years after the horror, there has been a return, especially in popular culture, to military romanticism, which, if not implying that war is really good for you, does suggest that it contains desirable elements - pride, companionship, and the consciousness of virtue enforced by deadly weapons. In this book I have occasionally tried to confront this view with realistic details. Some readers may think my accounts of close warfare unjustifiably pessimistic in implication, but attention to the universal ironic gap between battle plans and battle actualities will suggest the ubiquity of much of my joyless material. There is nothing in infantry warfare to raise the spirits at all, and anyone who imagines a military "victory" gratifying is mistaken.

As this quote indicates, Fussell is a masterful writer - among his other books are Theory of Prosody in Eighteenth-Century England, Poetic Meter and Poetic Form, and Samuel Johnson and the Life of Writing. All his talent is evident here, forcefully illustrating the horror of war. Not so much the carnage, though there are some vivid descriptions of that, but especially the utterly terrifying and hopeless situations into which so many of these boy recruits were thrust. Not a light read, but powerful and great.

At any rate, there was a distinct difference between American and German reactions to the desertion impulse, which any soldier must have felt occasionally. In the American army, the idea of soldiers running away was considered as not unlikely: thus the institution in infantry platoons of the guide sergeant in the rear, whose duty (never discussed) was to catch and dissuade youngsters reacting to a powerful impulse to run to the rear. In the German Army, such soldiers would be shot on sight. The difference is surely one of the things the war was about.

Sparrow

When I was a kid I really liked the sci-fi classics: Asimov, Herbert, Bradbury. I don't read much of it now, though I did love Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game. But Ryan and Eunice listed Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow as a favorite on their website, so I thought I'd give it a try.

It's the story of a the discovery of alien life and an expedition to the nearby planet. It is a Jesuit party and it goes horribly awry. The stories of the discovery and the post-mortem investigation are told simultaneously, building toward the same climax. It is an effective storytelling device and the hero is a compelling figure. Ultimately, though, I was disappointed in the "reveal."

So, all in all, I'd say a pretty good quick read - maybe a 7 out of 10.

Dad's review here

Lauren's review here 

Homage to Catalonia

While visiting my son Jesse, Eileen, and new grandson Henry in New York, I picked a book of Eileen's from their bookshelf to read: Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell. I liked it immediately and requested it from my local library - have been reading it on and off for the last few days and am now about one-half done.

Like everyone else, I was required to read Animal Farm and 1984 in high school or jr. high - can't remember which - and although I liked these OK, it was Down and Out in Paris and London that really made me appreciate Orwell's clear-eyed views of society, his highly empathetic but realistic picture of the underprivileged, and his simple but powerful style of writing.

Homage to Catalonia, Orwell's account of his few months fighting for the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War, was written in the same voice as Down and Out and immediately engaged me. Orwell had gone to Spain to cover the war as a journalist, but was quickly galvanized by the revolutionary spirit of the Republican side and enlisted with the POUM (Party of Marxist Unification), being sent to the front in Catalonia after the briefest and most inadequate of training periods. The weapons they received were antiquated and largely useless and he saw little action (though evidently he is severely wounded as described later in the book).

Orwell truly desired to fight for the revolutionaries, who wished to create a classless society - at one point he says "When I joined the Militia I had promised myself to kill one Fascist - after all, if each of us killed one they would soon be extinct". The revolutionary factions were aligned with the Communists, but Orwell came to believe that the Communists, though fighting hard to defeat Franco and the Facists, were surprisingly, bitterly opposed to the revolution - in Orwell's view, this was because the Communists were desperate to placate and obtain support from the pro-Democratic supporters in England and France who would be essential allies for the Soviets to resist invasion by Nazi Germany.

These differences caused enormous bickering and divisions between the "allies", especially as the Communists accused the POUM of deliberately impeding the war effort and, in effect, of being traitors. Orwell's summation of these events is devastating:

"This, then is what they were saying about us: we were Trotskyists, Fascists, traitors, murderers, cowards, spies, and so forth. I admit it was not pleasant, especially when one thought of some of the people who were responsible for it. It is not a nice thing to see a Spanish boy of fifteen carried down the line on a stretcher, with a dazed white face looking out from among the blankets, and to think of the sleek persons in London and Paris who are writing pamphlets to prove that this boy is a Fascist in disguise."

There are many more instances in which Orwell concludes a clear, factual account of events or summary of views with a simple but stunning anecdote.

The introduction to this edition is written by the social critic Lionel Trilling, who contrasts Orwell's book with the genre of "personal confession of involvement and then of disillusionment with Communism". He says

"Orwell's ascertaining of certain political facts was not the occasion for a change of heart, nor for a crisis of soul. What he learned from his experiences in Spain of course pained him very much, and it led him to change his course of conduct. But it did not destroy him, it did not, as people say, cut the ground from under him. It did not shatter his faith in what he previously believed, nor weaken his political impulse, nor even change its direction. It produced not a moment of doubt or self-recrimination."

I find Orwell so attractive because his belief in equality and his empathy for those in misfortune are so strong, clear-eyed, and durable.

November 8 Update
Just finished the book - very serious and powerful, but with light touches and ultimately optimistic, despite Orwell's dismal experience and the reality of betrayal and infighting among the pro-government factions.

The safest thing at present was to look as bourgeois as possible. We frequented the fashionable residential quarter of the town, where our faces were not known, went to expensive restaurants and were very English with the waiters. For the first time in my life I took to writing on the walls. The passage-ways of several smart restaurants had "Visca P.O.U.M." scrawled on them, as large as I could write it. All the while, though I was technically in hiding, I could not feel myself in danger. The whole thing seemed too absurd. I had the ineradicable English belief that 'they' cannot arrest you unless you have broken the law. It is a most dangerous belief to have during a political pogrom.

The last several lines of the book are very powerful, but I will not write anything here to spoil them. Instead, I will finish with one observation of Orwell's so contrary to my own views that I was quite amused. He comments thus, on this now landmark Gaudi cathedral in Barcelona:

For the first time since I had been in Barcelona I went to have a look at the cathredal - a modern cathedral, and one of the most hideous buildings in the world. It has four crenellated spires exactly the shape of hock bottles. Unlike most of the churches in Barcelona it was not damaged during the revolution - it was spared because of its 'artistic value,' people said. I think the Anarchists showed bad taste in not blowing it up when they had the chance...

One can only imagine what Orwell would have thought of Gehry's Bilbao Museum!

Simon Armitage

I have been on a Simon Armitage craze recently. I was aware that he had published an acclaimed translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (a family favorite since 1999, when we did a short, comical version as our annual New Year's Eve dramatic presentation). And then I was browsing in the excellent campus bookstore at Miami University and saw a radio play version of the Odyssey done for the BBC by Armitage - well, I'm a sucker for the Odyssey, so I picked it up, read a couple pages and bought it. Fabulous! As appropriate for the radio play format, it's shorter than the original and more focused on dialog than narrative. And it's fresh and vivid - it captures the feeling of ancient Greece, yet is expressed in a contemporary conversational style.

So then I got Sir Gawain and the Green Knight from the library. Armitage's introduction was very interesting - he chose to compromise strict accuracy in translation in favor of capturing the sense while retaining the strong alliteration and rhythm that are so characteristic of the original. His commented that the history of the manuscript (lost until relatively modern times) was a stimulus for fresh translations, allowing one to put a personal mark on it that would be less possible for texts that have been in the public domain for a few hundred years and consequently worked over repeatedly by eminent translators. It had been many years since I had read Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and I was delighted to find it to be, in Armitage's hands, no arcane chivalric epic, but a vivid account of courage, temptation, and character.

I have also read a few of Armitage's poems in Shout, and find them to be fresh, exciting, sometimes savage, and sometimes hard to understand. These will take more work for me.

A prodigiously talented man!

A Most Wanted Man by John le Carré

I have been reading le Carré for years - originally knocked out by The Spy Who Came in From the Cold and then even more enthusiastic about the Smiley novels. The Perfect Spy was a particular favorite.

The books are all about deceit in interpersonal relationships - a topic of great personal interest to me, as my father and mother divorced when I was very young and I grew up with my father and grandmother, who re-created my exceptionally savvy mother as an irrelevent no-account. Further, my grandmother was a true Victorian - born in Leicester, England in 1890 - who did not talk plainly or realistically about important things in life (sex, religion, prejudice). And finally, as I was growing up, there was an increasing chasm between the attitude presented to me by my father and grandmother that mothers were inconsequential and the fact that my dad lived almost his entire adult life, unmarried, with his own mother.

Well, but to le Carré! So the last few of his books (e.g., Russia House, Tailor of Panama) did not seem to me to be all that great. I liked The Constant Gardener, but hadn't read the books afterward. Then I heard le Carré interviewed on NPR about his new book, A Most Wanted Man , and next time I walked into my local library, it was sitting on the new arrivals shelf! So I grabbed it. Found it to be true coin of the realm - immediately engaging, with the familiar le Carré voice and world established immediately and firmly. The book doesn't contain many surprises, but was still a wonderful read. le Carré is now 77 - hope he keeps writing for another 30 years!