Books I Have Read

"The Tortoise and the Hare," Elizabeth Jenkins

2011-10-21T18:16:00.000-07:00

I picked this up during a visit to Manchester, which involved a trip to a Waterstones which was full of pretty Virago press editions sitting right there where I could get my dirty paws all over them. I picked the one which seemed to have the most interesting plot--a love triangle--and immediately took it off to read.

The passive, pretty, and sweet-hearted Imogen and the plain, older but very effective Blanche fight for the affections of Distinguished barrister Evelyn Gresham--a battle that should be easy for Imogen to win, as she's Evelyn's wife, but it doesn't turn out that way. The story is told almost entirely from Imogen's point of view, and I found it impossible not to like her as a character, despite her comparative uselessness (it helps that Blanche is useful in ways that involve shooting woodland creatures and hectoring knocked-up schoolgirls).

Lots of reviewers compare this to Jane Austen, and it does involve rich-ish English people and marriage, but plot-wise that's where the similarities end. Jenkins is much more sympathetic to both Imogen and Blanche than Austen would have been--Austen would have given Blanche both barrels, I think, and couldn't help but have played up Imogen's blind foolishness.

Possibly the only story I have read in which the Cinderella story serves as a B-plot, and begins with the protagonist carelessly making out with the Prince Charming figure.

Orson Scott Card, "Hamlet's Ghost"

2011-09-09T14:05:00.001-07:00

I was suckered into reading "Hamlet's Ghost" by the controversy surrounding it, which started when Rain Taxi Review got its hands on a special edition of the story, published by Subterranean Press, and panned it completely for being a homophobic mess. Other writers spoke out and eventually the whole thing made it into the papers.

I love trainwrecks and was curious to see how bad "Hamlet's Ghost" would be, and it turns out that the original story is available in a Kindle collection (don't worry about buying it, Tanith Lee's in there, too). For those who don't know (spoilers ahead): The big twist in "Hamlet's Ghost" is that Hamlet's uncle didn't kill Hamlet's father, it was really Horatio, who was fed up with King Hamlet raping him and decided to off the old man. Hamlet realizes his mistake, but it's too late and Hamlet dies and goes to rape hell. The end.

It's difficult to adapt Shakespeare, and Card isn't up to the task--the original Rain Taxi review links to an adaptation Card did of "Taming of the Shrew" which is even more ridiculous in some ways than "Hamlet's Ghost" (let's modernize the text but leave the iambic pentameter in! Genius!) At least the "Shrew" adaptation keeps some of the text, though. "Hamlet's Ghost" is pure prose, and it all goes down like a lead weight through Jello.

In this version of Hamlet, Hamlet is so self-absorbed that he never notices that his dad is raping all of his friends. This despite his friends constantly hanging out one-on-one with his dad, after which they return in floods of tears. Card's Hamlet makes Shakespeare's Hamlet look like a model of consideration for others--at one point Card's Hamlet flies into a snit because he's told that his before his father died the old man liked to garden, which meant that his father was edging or grafting roses instead of hanging out with him. Hamlet is able to slip out of his own thick head long enough to notice that King Hamlet is not a particularly good ruler, but he still spends the entire book wailing over his daddy not paying enough attention to him. This is supposed to make the ending ironic, because OMG HIS DAD WAS A PEDO and so on.

Every character in this novella is a self-absorbed idiot, with the possible exception of Ophelia, whose decision to kill herself seems perfectly sane in this context. Hamlet's mother is willing to threaten King Hamlet with a knife when she sees him feeling up his offspring (ugh), but she doesn't notice that her husband is using her son's training as an excuse to gather up a bunch of "beautiful" young lads who are just her son's age, or more likely she doesn't care. None of these boys tell their fathers or mothers, or the fathers and mothers don't care, either. It's not as surprising that they don't tell Hamlet about the abuse, because Hamlet is thick and also it would spoil the "surprise ending," but none of them seem particularly angry at Hamlet, even when he's constantly driveling on about his father. You'd think one of them would snap and throttle the moron.

This all leads up to a hilarious ending where everybody dies screaming about man-boy love, and Hamlet slips off to hell. It turns out that his ghost dad totally messed with Hamlet's head so they could have sex in hell forever! This is supposed to be creepy, but since King Hamlet and Prince Hamlet are the awfulest people in a sea of lazy jerks, they really do deserve each other--and it's not like what they're doing is really wrong, because they're already in hell, right? At least Hamlet will be forced to find something to do other than whine about his father not loving him enough. Maybe that is the true punishment.

It's easy not to take "Hamlet's Ghost" seriously, because it's just so terrible. But it's hard to read it only as a direct denunciation of homosexuality--not because Card isn't a homophobe (he is) but because the story doesn't seem connected to any sort of realistic adult sexuality. In the world of "Hamlet's Ghost," the only real sexual option seems to be homosexual pedophilia. Every other sexual predilection is either a only vague possibility or explained away as a nasty side effect of homosexual pedophilia. Yes, post-gay therapy and other such nonsense tend to "explain" homosexuality as the result of molestation, but usually they at least attempt to portray heterosexuality as normal or at least common. In "Hamlet's Ghost," there are no heterosexual adults. Everyone's sexuality is either very, very latent or fixed by an incident that took place well before puberty.

It's too odd, and I've been reading more Card to see what textual path eventually led up to the whole Vortex to NAMBLA Hell ending. More on that later.

Not About a Book

2011-09-05T21:48:00.000-07:00

This isn't about a book, but I have to comment on this Tiger Beatdown post on a study of "Gender and Digital Politics," published by the Hansard Society, no less! Apparently most political blogs are run/commented upon by men, shock of shockers. I must opine because I have seen this nonsense in action.

OK, here's my breakdown:

Politics is a nerd activity--the kind of nerd activity that attracts mostly men. Women who enter this realm are going to be treated as sex objects, especially by older men who don't get that women are not just support systems for titties. This is cool if you go into the nerd community because you want to prove the law of scarcity and be treated like a rare sex pantheress by socially awkward dudes, but not cool if you actually want to play, say, Magic the Gathering or have your opinion on political issues respected. (For further research, see this Babycakes video about being aggressive. B-E AGGRESSIVE. Man, I love Babycakes.)

Most of the time it's not actually unsafe to speak up in the "boys' treehouse," online or in real life, and you're probably not going to be straight-out called "cunt" or "bitch," but you'll definitely be treated like one, which is probably worse. I doubt this has to do much with an aggressive, insulting atmosphere (BABYCAKES!) per se, like Tiger Beatdown claims--women can be just as tenacious in defending their opinions as men are, especially in an online environment--but rather a kind of institutional misogyny. Women can adopt whatever attitude they want, they are still women and therefore suspect.

For posters/writers on political blogs who have vaginas and are willing to identify themselves as possessing such organs, avoiding being ignored or treated like a freakshow usually means giving into what I'm going to call the "Elly Hart" tendency (in honor of this post), in which the writer continuously has to set herself apart from the rest of those nasty, weak-willed women. This is often because the common consensus of the group is that women are nasty and weak-willed, silly at best and fundamentally dishonest at worst. If you're going into this group as a known female, you're going to be facing a group who think that you, because you are female, are--for example--prone to making false rape accusations all the time. (I lurked and occasionally postedon a blog where this went on all the damn time. Whenever any sort of sexual assault issue came up, it automatically turned into rants about how the ladies make this sort of shit up and how damn awful that is.)

Now political blogging is a spare-time activity--it's not like God comes down from the heavens and commands people to spend their time wonking out on the Internet. Very few people are drawn to these blogs in the first place--now how many of these people are going to be female? And how many of those are going to put in the time and effort to establish themselves in a hostile environment? And how many of those people are going to swim against the tide of popular opinion (well, popular opinion in the context of an anorak-y blog) to try to establish a view on any woman's issue that doesn't coincide with the negative opinion of the majority of posters?

And that's why you don't get a lot of women commenting on political blogs.

(Addendum: The most popular blogs in the UK definitely lean right and have this sort of anti-Zardoz "penis good!" thing going on--very heavy on the men's rights and so on. Not the natural environment for the centrist-to-left-leaning woman, or even a right-leaning woman who is not interested in talking about imaginary crazy harpy women tearing off imaginary balls.)

(Further addendum: I'm tempted to comment on my own post with "CUNT" just to get it out of the way.)

"Wildfire," Sarah Micklem

2011-08-25T11:05:00.000-07:00

This is going to be a long slog, but I have to work out my feelings about this book. I picked up "Firethorn," the first book in Micklem's series, by chance--it was a free copy. And I loved the hell out of that book! It had everything--a vision quest! A believable pseudo-medieval universe! A religion that didn't merely involve people saying "Gods!" instead of "God!"

A sequel was promised. I was stoked for years for this book, people. I snapped it up right away. And I was disappointed. Everything in "Wildfire" was amped up to epic fantasy levels. What I had loved about "Firethorn" was the smallness of it--there might be kings and queens off fighting somewhere, but what was most important were the conflicts in the heroine's life. Now I had to care about royalty and intrigues and magic again. Plus, there were all the epic fantasy cliches I had grown to hate so well.

I'm concentrating on the cliches that apply to female characters, because in the first book Firethorn was so kickass that I have to mourn what I wanted her to become. I could go on and discuss all the other things that irk me about epic fantasy, but then this post would probably span across ALL SPACE AND TIME (no, things are really not that bad between epic fantasy and me. Really).

First off:

1. The Magical Hooker

Why, oh why, does the magical hooker character exist? I'm not discussing prostitute characters in general, I'm talking about women who are Top Hooker--beautiful, cultured, the favorite of every man (and quite possibly the target of every woman). Think Inara in "Firefly"--the dominant feature of the character is that she's very good at pleasing other people.

In "Wildfire," Firethorn is sent to a courtesan's house to learn the art of being a "whore-celebrant." However, Firethorn is written as stubborn and a bit introverted. In the first book, she reacts to a traumatic experience by running off into the woods, and she finds camp life hard to adjust to because of the lack of privacy. Firethorn does work as a healer, which is a "people" sort of job, but it's obvious that she's not just a passive magic-worker--she prescribes treatments to her patients, and if they're not obeying her good advice, she'll lay down the law. A job that involves being pleasant to a bunch of strangers, who have a total command over her body and time, would tire her out pretty quickly.

Plus, by the time she arrives at Courtesan Boot Camp, she's not in the best physical shape--she has cataracts in one eye, a bunch of scars on her back, and partial paralysis on one side of her face. This wouldn't be so much of a problem for the time period except that the society she's in at the time puts an emphasis on physical perfection.

Micklem overcomes these handicaps by suddenly gifting Firethorn with the power to learn a new language in a few months, to the point where she can spout off her own original poetry--all because she knew a few words of this language as a very young child. Like I said, magical hooker.

I liked Firethorn better when she was just a horny witch doctor. There aren't enough female characters who both like sex and know about things other than sex (unless they are ridiculously evil sexy sorceresses).

2. The Love Triangle

Oh, love triangle, plot device which pops up everywhere. I understand why: it's a very useful device in a genre which demands at least a trilogy out of every storyline. The author can work in one lover per book, then pit them against each other in the third and final volume. Unfortunately, it only works when the protagonist has two decent prospects to choose between.

The main plot of the first book kicks off when Firethorn falls in love with a knight and follows him off to war as his camp follower or "sheath." Her warrior, Galan, is part of the class of men who conquered her country, and she's part of the native or "mud" class, so she's socially inferior and he does treat her like it. At one point he even whips her for some minor transgression, and she takes it in her stride. At the end of "Firethorn," when Galan offers Firethorn a cottage and a small piece of land, he's being amazingly generous--foolhardy, according to the men in his social class. Part of the dramatic tension of "Firethorn" comes from watching Firethorn try to protect herself as best she can, while keeping Galan's image of her as a sweet, innocent mudwoman intact.

However, even if Galan is a problematic love interest, it's easy to see why Firethorn wants to be with him. He's sexy, daring, and important in his clan, which reflects well on Firethorn and also means that she doesn't have to worry about being forced to sleep with her man's masters. As a camp follower, Firethorn can also follow him to places she wouldn't have access to on her own, with some level of protection. It's a good arrangement all round, as good goes by the standards of Firethorn's universe.

Prince Whatever-His-Face pushes Firethorn through the mountains while she's manacled and freezing, then spends the rest of his time sulking over his lost wife and kingdom. He intends to get his kingdom back through some hare-brained scheme that involves training Firethorn as a courtesan, then ritually tattooing her and sending her to his usurping brother as a "princess" to marry, after which Firethorn will spy on the brother, or kill him, or something or other. His other main characteristic is that he's celibate. That's it. It's like watching a romantic epic where the hero transforms from Viggo Mortenson into David Miliband.

This wouldn't be so much of a problem if the prince was just a plot device to send Firethorn off on another adventure, but Firethorn falls deeply in love with the prince, mainly because he treats her badly and won't sleep with her. At this point, she is no longer a rather defenseless camp follower but a successful courtesan, so the "I love you despite your treatment of me" storyline seems sour instead of natural to the situation. Firethorn can have her pick of rich, successful men, so why fall in love with the dullest of the bunch?

3. Pregnancy

Fantasy authors writing from a female character's perspective usually have to find a way for their heroines to have tons of sex and never, never, never have babies. This phenomenon is usually explained by some form of contraceptive, magical or otherwise (unless you're George R.R. Martin and don't understand the differences between contraceptives and abortifacients, but THAT is a topic for another time). Firethorn takes some berries to keep herself from getting pregnant when she first meets Galan, which I was willing to believe as a possibility.

At the end of the first book, Firethorn runs out of the berries. She mentions that her periods have stopped and that she might be pregnant. (She's mentioned wanting Galan's child before.) I wanted to see this happen. Would she have to end the pregnancy? If she didn't, how would she manage childbirth in camp, and how would she deal with a baby? How would she and Galan function as a family, or would they split up? Usually childbirth and kids mark the end of a female character's story arc, and it would be great to follow a character dealing with children while existing in her own right. I wanted my barefoot and pregnant protagonist, dammit!

And of course, it didn't happen. It turns out that Firethorn is not pregnant--she's temporarily barren because of some sex voodoo that some mean priestesses laid down on her. This is discovered (and reversed!) while she's working as a courtesan. (Why you'd want to reverse the process while you're working as a courtesan is beyond me, but it happens.)

Sexual magic is generally a boondoggle in the first book--Firethorn's friend and fellow camp follower, Mai, sells love potions and brings Firethorn into her business. At one point, Firethorn, jealous of Galan and frightened by his interest in a noble lady, begs Mai for a charm to keep Galan's attention, and Mai gives in. When the charm "works," Mai tells Firethorn that the charm didn't have any power--the point was to reassure Firethorn and keep her belief alive, and hopefully that would do the rest.

In the second book, sex magic is real. Maybe not the stuff that Mai does, but ladies who are classier than Mai can really do magic. Oh, there's a knot in Firethorn's uterus that was put there by sex priestesses? All right, then.

Authors--if you have to bend the rules of your own universe to preserve your protagonist's infertility, you might want to come up with another explanation.

Oh, goodness, that was insanely long.

"The Help," Kathryn Stockett

2011-08-23T23:21:00.000-07:00

Here comes "The Help"! A coworker read it, and it was recommended on various Twitter feeds (more on that later), so I decided to pick it up. The plot--for those who haven't seen the commercials for the movie--a Southern white girl writes down the stories of black maids for a book back in the early 1960s, and all sorts of drama ensue.

Generally, the book and the film both got a good reception, although there has been some dissent over the historical inaccuracies (Black Panthers in the early 1960s?), the use of dialect, and the depiction of race relations during the civil rights era, which is definitely, er, whitewashed (hur hur).

That was my main problem with the book--I really don't know much about 1960s Mississippi, but I know enough to tell that the world of "The Help" is a much gentler world than the reality. People get away with shit (literally) that they wouldn't be able to do in Real Life without coming in for the risk of some severe physical harm.

But if the book was going to be unrealistic, couldn't it have been just totally unrealistic? Take the ending: Skeeter, the white girl who wrote the book, gets a dream job in New York far away from her straitlaced life with her family on a Mississippi cotton farm. She'll be financially independent, have a much wider range of romantic prospects, and be able to make friends who aren't completely disgusting puckered-up assholes. Meanwhile, Aibileen, the "main" black maid, who didn't have a family to begin with (I think her son was run over by a lumber truck, just like Meg Ryan in "City of Angels," but I might be making that up), is stuck wandering around the city, unemployed. Seeing as there isn't much for black women to do in the universe of "The Help" other than deal with white people--all the black men are dead or abusive, and apparently Medgar Evans did 99 percent of the civil rights work--presumably poor Aibileen just hangs out at church, growing poorer and poorer until she keels over one day and dies. Rotten!

Aibileen should have kidnapped the ugly white baby she was taking care of and run off to join the Black Panthers, who in this version are all rich and live in some sort of offshore enclave that looks like Martinique. I'm not sure where it goes from there, but it definitely seems more fair than leaving the woman to wander around without a job.

I think I'm just bitter that there are no magical Negroes left to help me achieve my dreams. If only black people still couldn't vote, then I could be slightly nicer to them than other, horribly nasty white people, and then they would get me, I don't know, a trip to Paris and just be happy that I remembered to send a postcard. Tragically black people are not the same as fairytale elves.

If you want to read a well-thought-out piece on all the many, many issues that "The Help" has, read this great essay by Roxane Gay Bio over at The Rumpus.

"Let the Right One In," John Ajvide Lindqvist

2011-08-21T09:38:00.000-07:00

I loved "Let the Right One In"--it's a Swedish movie about vampires and the title is also the title of a Smiths song, joy!--so I decided to try the book, too.

I thought I was going to be getting a story about a young bullied boy and his love for a vampire--which is the focus of the film--but I also got the story of a PEDOPHILE WHO TURNS INTO A ZOMBIE WITH A PERMANENT ERECTION. Yeah, the book is much more horror-centric, with blood and skin and poop flying everywhere, and cops chasing down serial killers. There's a scene where a vampire is attacked by cats (they sense EVIL, apparently), but it's not only a mass cat attack, the cats are all gross and genetically deformed and full of dead kittens, and yeah, it's a tribute to Lindqvist's writing that I felt nauseated instead of just cracking the fuck up. Swedish people are very good at writing about horrible, over-the-top things happening while avoiding unintentional humor or really, any humor at all (I base this generalization entirely on this book and managing to get through the first two "Girl With a Dragon Whatever" books).

The romantic in me enjoys the whole "twisted love" angle more than the "zombie rape" angle, so I'd much rather re-watch the movie than re-read the book. Then again, Lindqvist is very good at evoking the kind of shitty suburban lifestyle that makes fighting a zombie pedo-rapist sound like a cool thing to do with your day.

An Apology and a Fresh Start

2010-04-26T08:25:00.000-07:00

I know I made up a new purpose for this blog, then made a whole fuss over it, then... stopped. Then hid for a year in shame (and full-time employment).

You know what? Bad books are just, well, bad. Unlike a bad movie, you can't easily share the real-time experience with your friends. So I'm going back to just detailing what I read. Sorry, kids.

Arise my Book Blog

2009-04-16T08:08:00.000-07:00

You may have noticed that this blog has lain dormant for quite a while. Mainly this is because I no longer had the mental energy to devote to capsule reviews of books. I was still reading, but not blogging. Of course, the fact that I was still reading (am still reading) Robert Caro's "The Power Broker" didn't help. Sucker is 1,500 pages long. Try reading that in the bath.

Well, I want to blog again, but I can't do the numerical challenge again. While it works well as a goal, the thrill wears off once you've actually done it, and it's not as if you can tell anyone about it once you're finished. Can you really announce "I read 50 books a year!" as a part of normal conversation? What's the answer to that? I mean, the books could be anything (see my previous reading list). It sounds as if you're begging for a gold star, or maybe a shiny button and 10 Personal Pan Pizzas.

So I've decided to modify the challenge. I'm going to read 50 awful books instead. That way, I'll be spared having to improve my writing skills, as it is always easier to write about something dreadful than something decent, and whoever's reading this will be spared having to read capsule reviews of classic novels that read along the lines of "wow, this book is good." Perhaps this is not the best way to challenge myself. But I do not care.

If anyone is still reading and has any suggestions for awful books for me to read, feel free to comment.

"The Grass is Singing," Doris Lessing

2008-12-10T08:06:00.001-08:00

Picked this up after reading about it on "Eve's Alexandria" and read it all in an afternoon, which is the best recommendation any book can have. A wonderful exploration of boredom, frustration, societal pressure, and emotional cruelty, although it's not a "man and woman overcome cultural boundaries and make sweet love until Society ends it" sort of book - the interracial relationship really only develops in the last part of the book and is basically the logical end to a series of choices on the part of a woman who ends up with very few choices to make.

Which might be disappointing if you picked up the book based on a cover like this.

"Ripley's Game," Patricia Highsmith

2008-12-10T07:56:00.000-08:00

Not quite as engaging as "Talented Mr. Ripley," mostly because Ripley himself has evolved into a sort of god figure who is busy playing with the life of Jonathan Trevanny, the individual who finds himself in the "talented" slot that Ripley occupied in the first book. An ingenious setup that drags out a bit by the end - because of Trevanny's circumstances, it's pretty clear what's going to happen to him, so the attraction lies in Highsmith's ability to evoke emotional atmosphere (which she does very well, though).

I accidentally skipped the second book in the series, although these aren't the kind of books that you have to read in order after you finish the first one. So back to "Ripley Underground," then onward to "The Boy Who Followed Ripley."

"A Magnificent Catastrophe: The Tumultuous Election of 1800, America's First Presidential Campaign," Edward J. Larson

2008-12-02T19:39:00.000-08:00

There are a lot of American history nonfiction books sitting round the house, as we like nonfiction here (also the Costco book racks). Back in the days of yore, there was no direct presidential voting; instead, states chose electors through various methods, and whoever got the most electors won the prize. Because of a lack of party organization - as American political parties were just being born - two candidates from the same party ended up tying, and finally, after much machination, Thomas Jefferson became third President of the United States.

Larson chooses to emphasize conflicts and problems that echo our own, and it seems like there are certain truths to any successful American presidential campaign, no matter when it's held (don't split your party, organization is key, being an atheist is not a good thing). Because the narrative focuses mostly on the election itself, some of the fun parts of American history are left to hang in the misty future - I was disappointed that I didn't get to read more about Burr shooting Hamilton, for example.

"Throne of Jade," Naomi Novik

2008-12-02T19:28:00.000-08:00

The second of Naomi Novik's Temeraire novels. The Chinese government, furious over a mere captain commanding a rare breed of dragon, demands the return of Temeraire. Of course, his rider Captain Lawrence, comes along, and of course, adventures are had, before everything comes out all right in the end. Novik's concept of dragon "culture" (since I can't think of another way to put it right now) is pleasantly complicanted, in that there are different ways that different human cultures interact with dragons, and also in that her dragon protagonist, Temeraire, demands a different relationship with his rider after observing how dragons are treated in China. Temeraire is not just a source of endless reassurance for his captain, which puts "Throne of Jade" a cut above most fantasy novels.

Unfortunately, soon after finishing the book, I had a conversation with an acquaintance in which she revealed that the stories were based on "Master and Commander" fanfiction and the dragon is supposed to be the guy who wasn't Russell Crowe in the movie.

DWAGGINS.

"Her Majesty's Dragon," Naomi Novik

2008-11-13T18:00:00.001-08:00

I am really ashamed to like this book because:

1. It has dragons in it
2. It's like Patrick O'Brian, but since dragons aren't real, I don't have to feel stupid for not knowing what the hell is going on in the fight scenes
3. I BELIEVE I AM A SPIRIT DRAGON

OK, I made the last part up. I'm really a spirit wolf.

"The Privilege of the Sword," Ellen Kushner

2008-11-13T14:19:00.001-08:00

A sequel to "Swordspoint" - Alec Tremontaine, the mad student, has grown up into the Mad Duke of Riverside and sends for his teenaged niece, Katherine, to make her into a swordswoman. Katherine gets involved in various intrigues and duels.

Katherine is a great heroine - unlike your typical fantasy heroine, she doesn't particularly want to pursue masculine interests at the beginning of the novel, yet she comes to appreciate the new freedom and power that her knowledge of the sword gives her. Also, the characters are allowed the loose sexual definitions of the first book, which makes for a nice, angst-free atmosphere (at least on that point - I remember reading Mercedes Lackey novels in which it seemed as if everyone was quite tolerant of whatever sexuality you were, until it became convenient for the plot for someone to pop up and start bothering the poor protagonist so they could be very sad and attempt to off themselves. Why are fantasy protagonists always so oppressed in such teenage ways? I mean, durr, the audience and all, but still.)

The one thing that bothered me was the re-use of Richard St. Vier and Alec - they're such outsize characters that I really just wanted to leave them be after "Swordspoint." While Alec's character development makes sense, he's still not as much glorious fun as his younger (older?) version. St. Vier becomes a sort of bland mentor figure, which also makes sense due to his part in the plot, but come on, where's the St. Vier who would take the life from every inch of a man's body? Alas.

"Under the Banner of Heaven," Jon Krakauer

2008-11-07T19:49:00.001-08:00

The story of the horrific murder of a mother and child in a small Utah town in the 1980s, all set against the broad sweep of Mormon history."Into Thin Air" and "Into the Wild" use smaller, related stories to back up the main narrative, but in "Under the Banner" there are really two main stories vying for attention - one a history of the foundations of the Mormon Church, and one the story of the Lafferty murders. Krakauer tries to tie the two together, but it doesn't quite work. It's unclear how exactly the violent nature of the early Mormon years spurred the Lafferty brothers' murder of their sister-in-law and niece. Structured the murders, yes - people raised in a religious tradition that encourages revelation certainly might frame a deed like that as an instruction from God. However, it seems more like Dan Lafferty was upset that his wife had left him, and decided to wreak his revenge against the person he held responsible in the most violent fashion he knew - a scenario that's certainly not unique to Mormons. (Krakauer includes horrific tales of polygamy and incest among fundamentalist Mormons, but the Laffertys' lifestyle smacks more of drifters bouncing from "wife" to "wife" than the extremely close-knit communities with so many warped branches in their family trees. They might have wanted to be fundies, but they didn't have the social capital to join the club.)

Because of this split, "Under" is like reading a true crime story and a history book rolled into one, and it just doesn't quite come off. (Krakauer admits that he first intended the book to be a straight meditiation on the nature of Mormonism in the afterword. He doesn't reveal what spurred him to add the true crime angle.) I do feel like I know a little more about the Mormon Church now (although a thorough reading of "Lies My Teachers Told Me" had already given me the dirt on the Mountain Meadows Massacre).

"The Turkish Gambit," Boris Akunin

2008-11-07T19:39:00.000-08:00

The second Akunin I've read, and not as enjoyable as "Winter Queen," mainly because Fandorin is off-screen (off-page?) for most of the narrative. Instead, everything is seen through the eyes of Varya, who turns out not to be the burning revolutionary I expected her to be but more of a well-intentioned flirt who has bumbled her way into a Russian army camp in search of her boyfriend. So while Varya is wondering which handsome soldier is attempting to win her heart, I'm wondering what exactly Fandorin is up to and what exactly the mystery is. Perhaps if I knew more about the 19th century conflicts between Turkey and Russia, I could imagine the dashing officers and courageous war correspondents in more detail, and fall in love along with Varya, but since I don't it's all a bunch of names that Fandorin strings together so that he can make a big "I have solved everything!" speech at the end. Perhaps I'm just not interested in war fiction pastiche? "Murder on the Leviathan" is next, regardless.

"Benighted," Kit Whitfield

2008-11-03T09:51:00.000-08:00

I am a faithful reader of Kit Whitfield's blog, and actually gave a copy of this book to a friend under its British title as I thought she'd have a laugh if not enjoy the book itself (the British title is "Bareback" - immature of me, I know). So I was devoutly hoping that when I read the book itself, it wouldn't be horrifically bad and I would still be able to read the blog.

I wasn't disappointed - "Benighted" is actual dark fantasy. Not dark as in "wow, sometimes a main character dies and also there is titillating rape," more like dark as in there is no automatic perfect happy ending. The protagonist, Lola, lives in a world in which it's normal to be a werewolf. She is one of the few people who doesn't transform each month under the full moon, and is therefore condemned to an untouchable existence as part of a government organization that rounds up misbehaving "lunes" during that time of the month. Lola is a sort of public defender for these miscreants, who are tried in a special court descended from the Inquisitors. It's a traditional crime/romance story (girl solves mystery, girl meets unsuitable boy, gritty things occur) but thankfully Lola isn't a "special girl" in any way - she behaves like an unhappy woman. Which is understandable, as "barebacks" are really, really limited in their opportunities. In fact, aside from a bit of overwriting, my one big problem with the book is that it's revealed that Lola has a "big secret" of a kind near the end - this is supposedly the reason she's depressed - as if being cut off from her family and their comfortable lifestyle, undergoing a childhood of continual abuse, and being stuck in a life-endangering job isn't enough!

"Into Thin Air," Jon Krakauer

2008-11-03T09:31:00.000-08:00

Krakauer's account of his part in the ill-fated 1996 Mount Everest expedition. He went as part of a commercial expedition - "you, too, can climb Mount Everest!" His group got to the top - however, not everybody made it back down.

Krakauer seems to have carefully pieced together what actually happened and doesn't gloss over his part in the tragedy. However, there are conflicting accounts - Krakauer and guide Anatoli Boukreev were in disagreement over the suitability of Boukreev's conduct on the mountain (the conflict was never resolved, as Boukreev died attempting to climb Annapurna). I'll have to pick up "The Climb," Boukreev's co-authored book, and see what he had to say on the subject. If there's one thing that's not in doubt it's the sheer insanity of trying to haul yourself up the side of a mountain to what is approximately the cruising height of an airplane.

"Into the Wild," Jon Krakauer

2008-10-27T19:26:00.001-07:00

Designed to appeal to me - I have a love of both survival-in-nature tales (honestly come by - read my copy of "My Side of the Mountain" til the cover fell off) and disaster stories.

Of course, I enjoy Krakauer's writing - he manages to patch together a convincing human interest tale out of a few scraps of evidence. It's not terrifically maudlin, either, which is a danger when you're reading this kind of book - "when this tragedy-struck young man wandered off that Alaska path that sunny day, did he know that with that very step...," etc., etc. He also manages to convey the parallels between his life and McCandless's without seeming narcissistic, as if he's just using McCandless to get readers to read about his own life (it helps that Krakauer's story involves the perils of solo mountain climbing, one of which is burning down your tent by lighting a joint on the mountainside - who knew).

"The Winter Queen," Boris Akunin

2008-10-25T13:58:00.000-07:00

I am not an especial lover of the mystery genre, but a friend has sung the praises of Boris Akunin once too often for me to pass by "Winter Queen" when I had the opportunity to pick it up in the local library.

The story itself is as old as dirt - callow policeman is thrown into mysterious situation, manages to make his way out and catch the thugs but at what cost? - and the plot twists are apparent to anybody who's ever read this sort of novel before (or knows anything about foreshadowing). However, Akunin keeps the plot going at a good clip, and the unfamiliar setting (1870s Tsarist Russia) keeps things fresh as well. It's impossible not to like scenes of decadent aristocrats playing "American roulette" to prove their nihilist credentials. And there are ghosts! Definitely am going to read the next one - apparently it involves cross-dressing revolutionaries who can't resist our hero's imperialist booty.

"Claudius the God," Robert Graves

2008-10-20T19:42:00.000-07:00

Ah, Claudius, everybody's favorite possibly-retarded Roman emperor. I've read the first volume of this duology and I adore the miniseries and would purchase it in a heartbeat if I had any of that little thing called cash. So when I saw "Claudius the God and His Wife Messalina" (no forgetting Messalina, people) at the library, I felt compelled to pick it up.

And now I have to pick a bone with Orson Scott Card, who slates Graves's Claudius books for being anachronistic and unappealing to a modern audience. I disagree - you don't have to have grown up scribbling "amo, amas, amat" under the beady eye of your headmaster to enjoy the books. The more knowledge you have of the time period, the more rewarding the book is.* But if you have an amateur interest in Roman history, or even if you've watched the I, Claudius miniseries, you won't be left scratching your head over the particulars.

In fact, that's a problem, as much of the book is taken up with Claudius and pals' various military and political endeavors, described in loving detail, so that you, the reader, know everything of the times. This matches Graves's conceit exactly - his Claudius prides himself on his historical works, so it's no surprise that much of this "autobiography" is a record of events. It's also no surprise that all of the drama and intrigue of the miniseries is gone, as there would be no reason for Claudius to dwell on the more sordid and personally painful aspects of his reign. Of course, this also means that there's no $1.98 orgy scene and no Decapitation-cam (although I doubt that those charms would translate into print - Colleen McCullough's "Masters of Rome" series, anyone? Time for some indigo prose!) Visual appeal aside, Claudius's viewpoint does become limiting, after a while - unlike the first book, in which he's mainly observing his crazy relatives, here he's mostly justifying his own actions, and it does become tiresome. Still, better written than most historical fiction, and a good companion to the miniseries.

* And if you know something about Graves's own life (I know the bare minimum), it's fun to extrapolate Claudius's prejudices from the author's life experiences.

"Beyond Black," Hilary Mantel

2008-09-25T08:15:00.000-07:00

I love it when you get two good books in a row! Alison Hart is a psychic who makes a living doing James Van Praagh-type séances. Unfortunately for her, her gift is real, which means that an entire neighborhood of shifty characters from her past are after her from the other side. Her entire existence centers around keeping them away while her assistant Colette deals with the practical earthly issues, like money (the grasping Colette is hilariously monstrous).

The book drags a bit at times, almost tipping over into tortured-child territory (those books with faded pictures of sad looking kids on the front, and inside it's all about how the sad looking kids' mothers were burning them with crack pipes and whoring them out to the local one-legged man, and also the kids were ugly, to boot). But the quality of the writing keeps it from being mawkish.

"Addition," Toni Jordan

2008-09-21T18:40:00.000-07:00

Bought this as an airport read and didn't regret it. Chick-lit meets OCD - I swear this is better than I'm making it sound. The heroine, Grace, has to count everything she sees because of a Problem in Her Past, as happens to these sort of women in these sorts of books. Yet usually these sorts of books do not involve erotic fantasies starring Nikola Tesla. In an Aztec temple, no less. It's really a pity more chick-lit heroines aren't openly mentally ill, because the genre needs more weird sexual fantasies and less nonsense about buying shoes. Maybe I'm alone in my pervert opinion, though.

Jordan manages to make her heroine angry and unhappy without making her unsympathetic - in fact, Grace's misanthropy is funny enough that I could sort of see what the romcom boyfriend saw in her (if you want an example of how not to write an unhappy woman, read Jennifer Weiner's Good in Bed). Bonus points for making her horny as well - well, to put it less bluntly, bonus points for writing a relationship in which sexual attraction is a good thing and not a sign of future disaster (if you want an example of how to write an romantic "happy ending" where it's easier to imagine the "lovers" clipping each others' toenails than ever having sex, again - Good in Bed is for you. God, that book annoyed me.)

"Inversions," Iain M. Banks

2008-09-21T18:33:00.001-07:00

More fun with an M. from Mr. Banks - this one is a "Culture" novel although the Culture itself stays on the periphery of things. I didn't enjoy this as much as "Feersum Endjinn," possibly because the conceit isn't as fun - less dialect, more idiot narrator (well, not idiot narrator per se, it's more that the gimmick relies on the reader knowing something the narrator doesn't). I'm sure I would have found the book more appealing if I had already read another of Banks's books narrated from the Culture viewpoint. Ah well, I will just have to give it another go.

"Feersum Endjinn," Iain M. Banks

2008-09-21T07:02:00.000-07:00

Time for some Iain Banks with the M added in! This time it's the story of almost-abandoned Earth, where humans fight artificial intelligence in a giant crypt. Banks doesn't insult your intelligence by explaining anything - it's all told in a realistic enough manner, which means no "As was written in the secret scrolls 1,000 years ago, this is about to happen in the plot!" infodumps - which was a relief in that it made the writing infinitely less clumsy, but it also made the book a hard-ish read as sometimes my intelligence needs insulting, I suppose.

I enjoyed the first-person dialect sections of the book, which are in a sort of phonetic language/semi-rebus ("1/2" for "have," etc.) and the concept of Serehfa - what seems to be an ancient missile silo turned into a human-scale gigantic dollhouse.

"The Bloody Chamber," Angela Carter

2008-09-10T07:11:00.000-07:00

A collection of retellings of fairy tales - "Little Red Riding Hood," "Beauty and the Beast," etc. Carter's language is elaborate, to the point where reading this book is the literary equivalent of eating a box of very high quality chocolates. One is delicious, eating ten in a row makes you feel sick. Which is probably why it took me so long to finish the book (it was worth it in the end - who doesn't like chocolate?)

"The Journal of Dora Damage," Belinda Starling

2008-09-10T06:38:00.000-07:00

I picked up this book During My Travels and it turned out to be a good airplany sort of read. The story is simple - London bookbinder's wife has to take over from her husband when he falls ill and ends up binding pornography for rich men with time on their hands. Binding porn turns out to be a dangerous business, and it's all complicated when Dora's employer's wife forces her to take on a hot ex-slave as her assistant. It all ends with tattoos in uncomfortable places and candlelit sex, as it should.

I can't utterly dislike any novel that has pornography binding as the basis for its plot (there are lots of good descriptions of 18th- and 19th-century naughty books, and Dora's reaction to the forbidden material she was reading struck true). However, I found Dora too agreeable a character, which is always the danger in first-person historical novels - the supporting characters have the attitudes of their time and place, while the viewpoint character expresses thoughts that are similar to the reader's moral code. Voilà, instant sympathy for the heroine. (It usually is the heroine - the common tactic is to make the men in the book nasty misogynists even by the standards of the day, and the women proto-feminists. Which implies that the only reason that a woman would want her own power in the world is in reaction to living with a brute, but there you go.)

Maybe it was the Generic Proto-Feminist Heroine deal going on, but I found myself more interested in the side characters and their pasts and futures - Dora's opiate-hooked, sex-abhorring husband, the frivolous wife of the leader of the pornography club (I didn't buy her ending - not for a second), Din, the educated former slave who goes back to America to lead a rebellion. I mean, crazy sexual repression! Class conflict! Slave rebellions! Forget binding porn, that's porn-worthy stuff right there!

"Nothing That Meets the Eye," Patricia Highsmith

2008-08-14T03:09:00.000-07:00

A collection of the thriller writer's short stories. I have to admit that based on my extensive Highsmith reading - namely, the first Ripley novel - I prefer her in long form. That said, the short stories aren't bad, they just don't give the same sense of satisfaction as reading an entire novel.

The earlier stories are better, I think - more about alienation and less about what it would be like to be an anthropomorphic pigeon (that was easily the worst story in the book).

"Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit," P.G. Wodehouse

2008-07-30T13:45:00.000-07:00

Fun (is it possible for a Wodehouse novel to not be fun?) but a little repetitive - a lot of references to previous books, "as readers of my past works will know" sort of stuff. There really isn't that much Jeeves in it, either, he shows his feudal spirit once or twice and spends the rest of the novel offstage. Still, what am I complaining about?

"Naked Empire," Terry Goodkind

2008-07-23T17:25:00.000-07:00

I have had many a chat (don't ask me why) which centered on whether it was appropriate for other people to read Terry Goodkind novels, so I decided to read one myself so I could give my definitive judgment from upon high. I picked this particular one because it had a goofy picture of a statue on the front. It's midway through the series, but I really don't think I missed anything by skipping five or six or seven books.

Goodkind is notorious for his objectivist rants translated extremely poorly into a fantasy setting. Personally I enjoyed those parts the most, if enjoyed is the word. At least I felt some sort of response, even if that response was "Wow, that's a really stupid straw man argument" or "Wow, our hero Richard Rahl is certainly a bagful of Summer's Eve." Ayn Rand would come back from the dead and slap Goodkind for some of the crap he pulls in her name (and I'm certainly no fan of Rand) - I mean, there's an argument against pacifism that involves the nature of cheesemaking. It's really all very bizarre, and pretty funny in its way.

However, when Goodkind isn't going on about the principle of life, his writing actually drops in quality, as he feels the need to add tons of exposition to make sure that the reader gets that Rahl is the smartest smarty who ever clevered upon the face of the earth. Example: The first chapter is taken up by our heroes wandering through the desert, panicking because some big black birds are on their trail. Now it's obvious that the birds are following them for a reason, but Goodkind hammers this message home to the reader by describing the birds (they're big, and black - Goodkind is not exactly a master of poetic description), then having Rahl comment on the birds and their possible relationship to falcons, then having everyone else worry about the birds, then finally giving Rahl the last word, in which he reveals that yeah, those birds are big and bad and they are following us!

There's also a lot of rape and torture, which is par for the course in this sort of fantasy novel, as it allows the "good guys" to kill pretty much anyone they like and still come out looking morally decent, as at least they've kept it in their collective pants.

Anyway, Terry Goodkind. Very bad and very long. Avoid.

The lowdown on the Goodkind universe. His sword is powered by rage!

"Number Ten," Sue Townsend

2008-07-19T11:12:00.000-07:00

For some reason the first few "Adrian Mole" books were in the kids' section of my childhood library, and I read and enjoyed them. But I prefer to leave him in the mists of memory, perpetually on the cusp of losing his virginity to the beauteous Pandora. So I picked this up instead, because it's a farce about Tony Blair and who doesn't hate Tony Blair and want bad things to happen to him in some sort of wacky hell? Hey, I liked "The Queen and I"!

What I didn't realize was that reading this book was going to be the equivalent of listening to "Holding Out For a [Socialist] Hero." There's this weird current (I was going to say undercurrent, but considering that the Blair figure spends most of the book in drag, it's more like a raging torrent) of anger at Blair, not because of anything he's done, but because he and his pals are just so goddamn New Man. Apparently when Labour got back into power, not only were they supposed to restore the welfare state, but they were also supposed to be all musclebound, like real working men, and not quite so into grooming products and cookery, but like, they'd be sensitive too, just not quite so, you know, gay. They're all so girly! Where have all the good men gone, where are all the gods, etc.

The whole "watered-down politics=personal effeminacy" idea gets the worst when you get to the parts about pseudo-Gordon Brown. Suddenly the tone changes from contemptuous to something ickily near adoring. Size-related adjectives are used several times. And our Troo Socialist Hero likes sports! And socialism! But he still likes babies! And his delicate wife! (No, really, I'm not making any of this up. All in the text, ladies and gents.) It's like Sue Townsend got tired and decided to slot in pages from Polly Toynbee's secret fanfiction archive.

It made me realize - it must have been really easy to appeal to a certain section of society as the Hope of True Socialism if all you had to do to earn your laurels was not wash your hair and be tall and kind of lardy. Alas, appearance doesn't guarantee a true red-blooded performance (wakka wakka! Tip your waitress.)

Anyway, I was hoping it would end with the everyman hero hooking up with his alky lady love, but that plot thread is entirely dropped in favor of fictional Gordon getting one over on fictional Tony by winning the heart and mind of the fictional Tony Blair spawn. Why? Is there no happiness in this world? Tony Blair may have betrayed socialism but that doesn't mean that he doesn't believe in the power of looooove!

Whatever, I don't blame Townsend for falling down on this one; real Tony Blair is so amazing that it must be hard to satirize the man. Still, you'd think that she'd get that Tony is only gay for one man - himself, er, I mean Jesus! But aren't the two really the same thing?

At least it wasn't as horrific as "Trial of Tony Blair" - "Oh no, Tony, we moved into a Muslim neighborhood! How ironic!" Noooooo.

"Interview With The Vampire," Anne Rice

2008-07-17T11:51:00.000-07:00

I'm a little ashamed that I read this book all the way through, but there is a reason! Just as with "Pride and Prejudice," at a certain point in my life I adored the movie version of this book, but I had never actually read the book. I had tried, but somewhere in the middle I just couldn't keep going. I had seen the movie, so what was the point of reading further?

After finishing "Pride" and thoroughly enjoying it, I thought back to these days of yore and decided - hey, maybe I was wrong about "Interview" as well! It certainly wasn't going to be a masterpiece of English literature, but maybe there was good trashy fun to be and I had been too mopey to pick up on it. And besides, it was there at the library! For free!

Yeah. I was right the first time round.

The problem? Vampires, at least in Rice's conception, are really whiny creatures. You would think that with the advantages of superhuman strength and eternal life, they might have interesting adventures or at least cultivate a hobby, but generally vampires do very little other than suck people's blood and think about how bored they are. Perhaps they suffer from SAD. Whatever the case, it was unattractive, kind of like reading about a family reunion gone wrong, only with the petty fights and angsty declarations of hate going on forever.

I'm being a bit harsh - the first part of the book, where the titular vampire is just discovering his powers, is interesting, mainly because of Rice's descriptions of old New Orleans - very romantic and sensual. After the book moves out of New Orleans, the ratio of gothic romance to people crying about how bored they are drops dramatically, to the story's detriment.

Also, much of the book's appeal rests on its veiled sexuality - there's intimations of homosexuality/incest but not really because they're all vampires, and so on. This was much more titillating back when I was reading the book under the table during science class. Perhaps I should try A.N. Roquelaure/Anne Rampling instead?

No post about Anne Rice is complete without mention of her batshit Amazon antics.

I Lied! - Books I Haven't Read

2008-07-11T11:06:00.001-07:00

Out of some masochistic desire to display my failures (or a not-so-masochistic desire to inflate my post count), I present a list of books I haven't read - or more precisely tried to read, but just couldn't get all the way through.

- "The History of Love," Nicole Krauss: I'm sure this is better written than "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close," but I just can't read two Holocaust-tragedy-meets-present-day-tragedy-in-a-quirky-fashion novels right in a row. My mistake.
- "The Name of the Wind," Patrick Rothfuss: Ye gods, this book is long. And nothing much happens in it - I understand that fantasy doesn't sell if it's not in a trilogy, but really, if you're going to write almost 700 pages' worth of book, you should really have something interesting happen. Perhaps I'm being harsh and something really earth-shattering occurs right after the point where I gave up, but other than the obligatory orphaning scene, basically the highlights of our hero's journey involve being banned from a library and playing the lute. There's a whole lot of playing the lute.
- "The Scar," China Miéville: Bad timing - a book about a city of ships menaced by a giant sea monster is a poor choice for beach reading. It's also a bad book to take on a transatlantic flight (lots of nice gory descriptions of people falling out of airships into the sea).

"Pride and Prejudice," Jane Austen

2008-07-11T10:44:00.000-07:00

I have a confession to make: until now, I have never read "Pride and Prejudice." A few excuses in my defense! Quite possibly part of the problem was an excessive attachment to the miniseries version from 1995 - whenever I attempted the book, Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth would overwhelm my weak little reader's brain. Another part of the problem - Darcy, as a hero, well - he's a bit of a cold fish, isn't he? Of course he makes up for it, although there really should be an alternative ending:

Darcy: I've saved your sister's honor to prove my love to you, Elizabeth!

Wickham: Wait a minute, Elizabeth! I have built a time machine and gone back in time to stop myself from hooking up with your sister!

Elizabeth: And I'm using that time machine to go to the future where I will no longer have to be utterly financially dependent on men! See you on the flip side, suckers!

I like time machines.

No, but really, it's very obvious to say but this is a wonderful book, "light, and bright, and sparkling" as Austen herself said. It's also very pleasant to have a heroine who's allowed to be witty without it being shown as compensation for something else (lack of looks or money) or a trait that she'll lose after her marriage: "Georgiana had the highest opinion in the world of Elizabeth; though at first she often listened with an astonishment bordering on alarm at her lively, sportive, manner of talking to her brother. He, who had always inspired in herself a respect which almost overcame her affection, she now saw the object of open pleasantry." And I even do like Darcy, by the end - which is I suppose the reaction you're supposed to have to him, gradually coming round to his good points as Elizabeth does. As I said, weak reader's brain - perhaps I expected him to be "good" all the way through because he was handsome Colin Firth? Miss Austen is probably spinning in her grave at the silly readers she has nowadays.

"An Essay on the Art of Ingeniously Tormenting," Jane Collier

2008-06-30T14:09:00.000-07:00

I almost bought this book on the strength of the title alone, without knowing anything about the contents. When it turned out to be an 18th-century anti-self help book I was ashamed of my doubts and promptly purchased it.

The subject is the fine art of making people miserable - your friends, your family, your servants, and (if you are absolutely desperate for subjects) yourself. Wonderfully psychologically astute before there was even such a thing as psychology, and hilarious as well. I'm surprised it's not more generally taught, as it's a short read and even if you sadly have no interest in learning how to be the best annoyance you can be, it's a good window into the daily life of the time - especially the relationships between masters, mistresses, and servants. Apparently nothing was quite so annoying as a master with transportation issues - was that horse really necessary or not?

The author, Jane Collier, was an 18th-century contemporary of Henry Fielding and Samuel Richardson, and is now so obscure that she lacks even a decent Wikipedia entry for me to link to. But she must have been great company if "Essay on the Art" is anything to go by, although you probably wouldn't have wanted to get on her bad side.

"Gordon Brown," Tom Bower

2008-06-30T02:27:00.000-07:00

I decided to read this book because I love a good disaster story. Bower specializes in writing takedowns of unpleasant people, so I thought most of it would be scurrilous gossip a la Kitty Kelley, but a great deal of it is actually about failures of economic understanding. I know about as much about economics as George W. Bush did about the interplay of ethnic and religious forces in the Middle East, so I have conveniently translated what I could understand of the action into Liberal Arts Major-ese.

Gordon Brown, by Tom Bower: The Play

starring Our Heroes (civil servants, anybody with a working grasp of economic theory)
Gordon Brown

Act I
The setting: an office
Our Heroes: Hey, what's up? Can I look at that policy you're working on?
Gordon Brown: No, because I'm a control freak with problems! I grew up in a manse!
OH: Come on, just a tiny peek.
GB: Noooooooo!
He attempts to eat the paper, but failing, decides to hide his work by sitting on it instead.

Act II
Later that day Our Heroes sneak into the office and find that Brown's cunning plan of concealment has failed. He failed to perceive that when he got up from the chair, the notes would once again be visible to his enemies!

Our Heroes: Jesus Christ! This is an unholy marriage between neoliberal economic theory and state interference! It will never work!
Brown springs from underneath his desk. He was hiding the whole time!
GB: It will too work, because I said so!
Brown savagely beats them to death, then steals their policies for himself.
GB: I am a genius!

Choral interlude
Brown appears underneath Tony Blair's window to sing him a beautiful song. ORCHESTRA appears, Charlie Whelan on synth, Ed Balls on the panpipes.

"Freeze, freeze, thou bitter sky,
Thou dost not bite so nigh
As means-tested benefits forgot:
Though thou the waters warp,
Thy sting is not so sharp
As friend remember'd not..."

WHEN'S IT MY TURN AT THE BIG JOB? YOU PROMISED, TONY!

Act III
The economic plan fails... because it was stupid!

The cycle repeats for about 300 pages, and Bower has to end with another round of this nonsense and some "what does the future hold?" speculation because he published before it became clear that Brown would get to be PM. Reading the speculation now is strangely upsetting, like reading a truncated version of "Carrie" that ends right before Carrie goes to the prom. "Would Gordon be elected prom queen? Would this be the best prom ever? I don't know, but time will tell!" Cue pigs' blood, fire, and a whole lot of laughing at you.

Anyway, now you without counting skills have read the nasty biography of Gordon Brown. Oh, I forgot, he was mean to his girlfriends for some vague reason that may or may not be actionable under libel law. Now you've read it.

"Servants of the People: The Inside Story of New Labour," Andrew Rawnsley

2008-06-26T13:10:00.000-07:00

I have been on a politics reading kick lately. It's embarrassing; I promise to make up for it by reading something less horribly dorky, like a romance novel or something about space soldiers commanding armadas of space dragons. Bear with me, I am sure I will recover soon!

Frankly, I should have known better in another way; history makes for better reading after all the participants are dead, because then you can get all the gossip and cod psychoanalysis in without the danger of libel suits popping up. But I keep forgetting this, to my detriment. Stupid contemporary history! You can't have a proper narrative without knowing how things end! (I felt like writing in little epilogues for all the "characters" on the endpages.)

Anyway, according to Rawnsley, Tony Blair became Prime Minister and some things happened (not Iraq, the book was published before that shitstorm came to rain feces upon the land). Everything that happened, good or bad, made everyone involved feel terribly insecure, because they were all terrible fakes. Rinse, repeat, the end.

The one part of the book that really sticks in my head is the account of the 2000 London mayoral election, mainly because Rawnsley keeps making newt-themed puns at the expense of Ken Livingstone, the now ex-mayor. By the end of the book I was half-reading, and half thinking about newts and why they were so important to Red Ken - so important that Rawnsley had to bring them up every damn time the man was mentioned. I came to a conclusion: The newts were obviously Ken's spirit animals, the amphibian equivalent of Dick Whittington's cat. I like to think that Ken would go riding round London at night on a giant newt, visiting all of his ten bajillion children and maybe siring some more along the way. That's why he lost the mayoral election; the giant newt died and without its psychic powers he is nothing. I wonder where it is buried?

"Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close," Jonathan Safran Foer

2008-05-30T06:55:00.000-07:00

Oh dear Lord, this book pissed me off so much. Forgive me for going on at length, but sometimes it has to be done, for spiritual reasons, I suppose. Good for the soul!

I’ll start by pointing out one nice thing. One of the nice things about Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is that it has pictures, so there’s less of it to get through. However, the pictures themselves add nothing. Maybe it’s supposed to be “innovative,” but playing with text and pictures is nothing new – hell, Lawrence Sterne did it in Tristram Shandy and that was back when the printer was a man in a wig hunched over a wooden press. The thing is, Sterne was funny. 250 years later and we’ve regressed. Most of the photos are the equivalent of the clip art in a Powerpoint presentation - somebody doesn’t have enough to say about the future of, say, travel agencies, so they stick a cartoon of a smiling plane up on the slide. Safran Foer’s work is the same; the kid talks about a cat, there’s a photo of a cat. There’s a mention of the Staten Island ferry crash, so of course there’s a shot of a CNN report showing the busted-up ferry. And so on. Most of it’s dull, although I’m saving discussion of the money shot, so to say, for the end.

The text, what’s legible, isn’t that much better. Safran Foer can’t resist a “deep” moment, and it starts to become funny pretty quickly – who’s going to cry next, or come up with a cutesy Rube Goldberg contraption that reflects the Nature of Love, or throw out a trite reflection on Death, or write something, hence demonstrating within the text the limits of the writer’s form, or – well, it goes on. None of the characters are presented as anything other than appealing in a stock sort of way, despite the fact that they are all collections of tics and oddities. As an example, there’s a subplot that takes place in WWII Dresden, of all places, and the German family involved is sheltering a Jewish artist who makes pithy comments about the state of the world. Presumably if they hadn't been sheltering a Jew, or sheltered one of those pushy Jews instead, the reader would think that they were Bad Germans and deserved to have their lungs set aflame. No, I’m being going at this from the wrong direction – it’s much more likely that Safran Foer is constitutionally incapable of writing a character who doesn’t speak in the language of a Hallmark card. Some of the conceits would be cute or charming if they were spaced out into individual books, and I like a good love story, but thrown all together it’s like – to quote an Amazon reviewer with a better grasp of metaphor than Safran Foer – “reading a book in the middle of a swarm of bees.”

Back to the pictures: the book ends with a series of pictures of a man falling out of one of the WTC buildings. I know that this is the classic cry of the prude, but there’s really not much that will positively stop me from finishing a book. I may get bored, but content-wise I can deal with almost anything if it holds my interest. That said, I couldn’t get through the flipbook at the end. It was just too disgusting. I read the last page of text with my head turned to the left and then slammed the book shut because I knew what was coming. I mean, that’s a real person who died in a horrible way and here comes Jonathan Safran Foer to Marley and Me all over his splattered remains by putting him in a goddamn flipbook like something out of a Cracker Jack box. Perhaps I am a softheaded moralist, but I think rather that this reaction reflects some deep inner fear of mine, that one day I will die in a terrifying and humiliating way and then my remains will be immortalized in a mash-up of The Tin Drum and Love Actually.

"Erewhon," Samuel Butler

2008-05-28T04:50:00.000-07:00

I attempted to get through Samuel Butler's The Way of All Flesh for class, and failed miserably; however, I remembered that Butler had written Erewhon, which was prominently featured in the Dictionary of Imaginary Places (a wonderful book and everyone should own a copy), and decided to read that instead. Our hero (a sheep herder, as Butler was once) decides to go exploring in the wilds of colony ----, and finds himself in the mysterious land of Erewhon, where illness is punished by death, and babies are really spirits who have emerged from a nebulous pre-existence. The centerpiece, I suppose, are the chapters on the evolution of machines which were written as a sort-of response to Darwin. I have very little understanding of the 19th century debates on evolution so I am no informed judge; I have to say that were I alive then, I would be swayed to Butler's side, merely because his style is so compelling.

My edition was printed in 1911 and has a list of ads at the back for other books the 1911 reader might want to purchase, including Racial Decay: A Compilation of Evidence from World Sources, in which "The literature of Neo-Mathusianism and the sale of abortifacient drugs and preventive appliances are severely handled by [the author]," The Nursery of Toryism: Reminiscences of Eton under Hornby ("a picture of idleness, lack of organization, and waste of any intellectual energy that showed itself"), and my personal favorite, A Holiday With A Hegelian.

The quick and dirty biography of Samuel Butler.

"The American Way of Death Revisited," Jessica Mitford

2008-05-27T11:44:00.000-07:00

I wasn't feeling particularly morbid when I picked this classic up, but I was ready to be rocked by a total takedown of the Undertaker!* And it just didn't happen for me. Part of me enjoyed the prose, and part of me was outraged at the amount of money that the undertakers, cemetery owners, florists, and so on were able to gouge out of grieving families. But a little voice whispered in my ear: But what if you want a really tricked-out coffin? I know it's culturally relativistic and bullshit of me, but all cultures do have their own funeral traditions and we should honor them all, and not get mad at undertakers for... well, being undertakers. It's not their fault they want respect, we all want love and affection, even if we spend our time writing scholarly articles for "Casket Monthly."

Maybe if I was at risk of being embalmed and put on view myself, I'd care more, but as far as I can tell I'm in line to be dumped in the ground ASAP in accordance with religious tradition. Personally I'd like to end up like Jeremy Bentham, but maybe that's a bit much to ask.

* Does anybody remember what the name of that guy was that hung out with the Undertaker, and had the spoooooooooky voice? A question that haunts me to this day.

"The Corrections," Jonathan Franzen

2008-05-27T11:41:00.000-07:00

I have a confession to make. I have been lying to others about how crap The Corrections is. I was mainly going off the strength of this review, which quotes from Dune so you know it’s good (I mean that seriously, what’s better than Dune?) I’d never actually read the book – well, I had done the classic bookstore flip-through, but I’d never gone through and absorbed every word, beginning to end. And here I was using the book as an example of literary failure. I wanted to make things right. So I sat down and read the whole thing. And?

Dolan is right when he says that Franzen is a crap writer of metaphors. The “sinus” metaphor really does go on for pages, and then Franzen has the gall to reuse it later on. Some of it the writing was so bad that I started to think that it must be a put-on, that Franzen must be sitting somewhere laughing, or maybe emitting a small strangled sound while his lips twist in an approximation of a smile, over what he was allowed to get away with and win a National Book Award. A description of Manhattan executives as “supergentry” is barely technically correct, but what the “super” is doing there is anybody’s guess. And Franzen describes a Midwestern wind as like “Mexican violence.” Stormy like a burrito fart? Come on.

As for the charge of misogyny? I’m not sure if Franzen’s misogynist – not because he’s particularly kind to his women characters, but because all the male characters are loathsome as well. That said, there are an awful lot of scenes where a woman jumps through hoops to get a man interested in her; even the lesbian scenes have the femme partner degrading herself, while her girlfriend gets a kick out of turning her aside. Generally only the worst sort of women (two-timing golddiggers, slutty students who for some reason are obsessed with their distant professors) actually get to the point of consummation. Yeah, actually maybe he is misogynist.

There’s also a talking shit. Dolan doesn’t bother to mention the talking shit, but it’s not as much fun as Mr. Hankey.

The verdict? The Corrections isn’t terrible. The plot hangs together, and I was generally able to make out what was happening (although, come to think of it, Wizard’s Daughter was slightly better at conveying the passage of time). It’s a moving read, in parts. Not many parts, but in parts. And despite it reading like a fictionalization of David Brooks, it’s less egregious than, off the top of my head… Jed Mercurio’s Bodies. I wouldn’t have read it for pleasure, though, and the fact that I got all the way through it should stand as a lesson that lying doesn’t pay.

"The Talented Mr. Ripley," Patricia Highsmith

2008-05-27T11:35:00.000-07:00

Who doesn't like books about closety psychopaths who kill their friends, then assume their identities? This was a good read with wonderfully clean prose (I'm thinking in comparative terms to what I'm going to post on next). Highsmith is exceptionally skilled at making the reader sympathize with a character whose greatest attachment is to items and to a certain ideal of life. She also makes misogyny fun! (again, compater to what I'm going to post on next). There are lots of sequels to Talented Mr. Ripley, which means that I can sink my time into seeing how many people Ripley can get away with killing, and this time without having to imagine Matt Damon involved (unless they made a second Mr. Ripley movie and I just didn't know about it). Ah, bliss.

"Wizard's Daughter," Catherine Coulter

2008-04-22T15:55:00.001-07:00

K. dared me to read this, and I took her up on the dare and... well, I expected something horrific and I wasn't disappointed.

All right, here's what happens... there's this dude, and he's looking for this girl that he sees in his dreams singing some song, and he finds her, and then they get married and have really awful-sounding sex, and then suddenly they're fighting mystery creatures in another dimension, and it sounds like it would be good, but trust me, it isn't. All the characters seem to be the kind of people that in Olden Days would have been restrained from breeding by an interfering government, considering the odd and random way they speak to one another. Also, there's poetry and a pirate ghost and an evil gay guy (I don't even know why I remember this part, except that maybe I was thinking "What could make this romance worse? An evil gay guy? Oh, there he is!") Yeah. "Wizard's Daughter."

Cassie Edwards the plagiarist "Indian" romance writer might still be worse, though. Time for a re-read of "Savage Moon!"

"The Ides of March," Thornton Wilder

2008-04-22T15:18:00.000-07:00

It's been a while - paper writing takes a toll on one's reading abilities. I am not about to regale whoever's looking at this this with tales of psychoanalytic theory...

So, Ides of March. I've been wanting to read this book ever since watching almost all of the "Rome" series last year, yet it was hard to find as it was out of print. Then one day I stop into a closing-down bookstore and what's there but a paperback copy? I'm quite proud of finding it, all the other books were about ancient Egyptian ships or old copies of Debrett's Peerage. I almost missed out!

Anyway, it's an epistolary novel - for the most part, the reader gets to know the characters through letters they send to each other. Wilder carries this off for the most part - it's all good gossipy fun between Caesar, Cleopatra, Catullus, and some lesser known folks like Pompeia (Caesar's wife) and Clodia (the crazy noblewoman), all of whom existed but whose timelines are rearranged to make the story flow. Some of the "what is the meaning of life" pondering from Caesar gets a bit old, but overall this is a solid historical novel and if by luck you find a copy rotting away somewhere, pick it up.

"Amsterdam," Ian McEwan

2008-03-17T09:14:00.000-07:00

I fully expected to hate this book, and I'm pretty sure that my not hating it is contingent on reading it after finishing a third-rate thriller. Still, I didn't hate it. In fact, there were several points where I laughed out loud.

Then again, I was reading it not as Great Prize-Winning Literature but as a thriller, or a parody of a thriller. I wonder if the book was written as a piss-take of the format. Or just as a piss-take in general. I mean, come on, who the hell writes something like:

'I can never remember sex,' he said after a pause. 'I'm sure it was brilliant. But I do remember her teaching me all about porcini, picking them, cooking them.'

with totally serious intent? There are also gloriously long passages on how to write a symphony, which must be the museum member's equivalent of those passages in Tom Clancy books about ships and guns, and since it's a McEwan novel of course there's sexual violence. Everything is in this novel, except a realistic description of how anything worked in the existing world, ever. Maybe that's why I liked it.

A few years later McEwan would use the exact same silly bourgeois stereotypes in "Saturday," only now they were bulwarks of Western civilization and also they had magic powers (don't tell me that fending off muggers and robbers with poetry alone isn't magic). Maybe "Saturday" is McEwan's high fantasy novel!

"The Remains of the Day," Kazuo Ishiguro

2008-03-14T07:26:00.000-07:00

I can see why this won a Booker Prize - it's an easy, well-written read. And I enjoyed it, too, because who doesn't love character studies full of pathos?

Still, I couldn't help but do an alternate reading of the book, in which Stevens (the repressed butler) is not just a repressed butler but also a high-functioning autistic. The storyline really seemed to make more sense that way, although then it was no longer a pathetic story of a man holding himself back from love and life, but instead a Time magazine piece on amazing people who happen to have crippling mental disorders. Of course, it could just be that 1930s England was a society based entirely off an autistic concept.

"Regeneration," Pat Barker

2008-03-14T07:15:00.000-07:00

The professor who assigned this book for class did so because he wanted to tear it down and complain about it in public, which is a noble cause and certainly more interesting than when everyone pretends to like the book, but still it isn't quite as bad as he made out. (As everyone knows, the worst assigned reading-type book ever is Ian McEwan's "Saturday," or if you want to go back to the American high school experience, probably "The Scarlet Letter." It's scientifically proven, they keep a copy of "Saturday" in a vault somewhere, just like they used to do with the meter bar. Really!)

In any case, the book read a little like fanfic, which I guess it is - real person fanfiction starring the war poets. Everyone is a little too nice and they all solve their problems by talking them out (which makes sense for a book about psychoanalysis, in a way, but still). Also, everybody is gay.

I might be biased because "Regeneration" is part of a trilogy and I read the 2nd book, "Eye in the Door," first, and that book is all about hustling and blackmail and pacifists starving themselves and 47,000 perverts. Maybe I was expecting something darker.

"The Wasp Factory," Iain Banks

2008-03-14T06:53:00.001-07:00

I've attempted Iain M. Banks before - "Consider Phlebas," which is part of his sci-fi "Culture" series - but was never able to get very far into it. So I didn't think I'd like him very much with the M. taken out, but I was wrong. In fact, I liked the book enough that I don't really want to read anything else of his because I'm afraid it will all turn out to be crap and disappoint me. Stupid, but there it is.

Really, this book is hilarious in a way that only a book about a 16-year-old serial killer can be. Highly recommended to anyone who likes Gothic tales, ladies kept in attic, and gun wankery. Love the "happy ending," as well.

"Nightwood," Djuna Barnes

2008-03-14T06:44:00.000-07:00

More lesbians! Only this time, they are modernist lesbians.

I really have a problem with High Modernism, at least when it's the "let's use racial tropes and talk about race memory for pages!" High Modernism. It sort of reminds me of the time when I tried to play a Dungeons & Dragons type game back in high school and you had to pick a race of ugly elf being or whatever and each one of the races of elf beings had Racial Characteristics. Or maybe it reminds me of Star Trek. In any case, it reminds me of something very nerdy. Maybe Dungeons & Dragons is like what High Modernism degenerated into. It is the Morlock to T.S. Eliot's Eloi.

So, anyway, yeah. I had a problem with Nightwood.

Supposedly Djuna Barnes slept with her grandmother.

"Zami: A New Spelling of My Name," Audre Lorde

2008-03-14T06:31:00.000-07:00

"Zami: A New Spelling of My Name" was written by Audre Lorde, black lesbian feminist poet. Books written by 70s feminists are always discussed as Historical Artifacts, because 20 years later everyone has realized (come back to the realization?) that women are conniving bitches who will go any lengths in their quest to leech off the power of the Man, since they have none of their own. Still, I personally like the idea of sisterhood better than the idea that I was born into something akin to Highlander, only determined by social codes of decorum and attractiveness instead of swords, even if the idea of sisterhood is a lie. So I liked "Zami."

It's odd, anyway, because most of the book isn't a manifesto for sisterhood, it's about growing up in Manhattan (way up in Manhattan) and about growing up lesbian. It's all very romantic, in a good way, not in a "they gazed sadly at each other and then spent the rest of the book angsting about their inversion" way. The descriptions of 1940s/50s New York are very evocative and make me nostalgic for my own imagined past - mainly a past made up of stories my mother told me, not from my own experiences in New York.

"A Wizard of Earthsea," Ursula K. Le Guin

2008-03-07T11:19:00.000-08:00

I picked this YA fantasy up on a whim and spent a weekend night reading it - the equivalent of staying in and drinking hot cocoa, I suppose, comfort-wise. I had read "Tombs of Atuan" (the second in the Earthsea series) beforehand and found it absolutely fascinating - the girl-priestess wandering around in the secret caves, the air of cloistered unreality - so "Wizard" was a bit of a let-down in that it was a classic Hero's Journey. I'm just not much of one for the Hero's Journey in its classic form, I guess - give me the point of view of the wicked villain or the hanger-on or the tragic lovers. I do like Baby Cakes' description of the Hero's Journey, though. "I guess every one of us is just hoping to turn out to be one of those forgotten chosen ones." "Right!"

Fortunately, even so-so Le Guin is still a good read, and the prose was spare, which was a bonus. So much of adult fantasy is overwritten - "Wizard" seems quite similar in plot to "Name of the Wind," but it's about an eighth of the size, I'd estimate. Perhaps someday I will get round to finishing "Name," or perhaps not. There might be a call for a "Books I Haven't Read (And Why)" section on here. It would be more vituperative, at least.

PS. Ged is brown!

"Lady Chatterley's Lover," D.H. Lawrence

2008-03-07T11:16:00.001-08:00

Everyone in the world (by which I mean everyone in my graduate-level English class) is still embarrassed by this book, although now it's probably more because of the written-out dialect than the sex. Also, whatever happened to Lady Chatterley's clitoris? This is a mystery that haunted me throughout my reading of the book.

"Taking It All In," Pauline Kael

2008-02-20T17:14:00.000-08:00

I started reading Pauline Kael as a very young child, when I would pick up copies of "The New Yorker" in my parents' bedroom. The only things I could properly understand were the cartoons and the movie reviews. I'd like to say that this reading made a deep impression on me, and perhaps on some subconscious level it did, but consciously all I remember is snickering at a review of "Spanking the Monkey," which must have been published long after Kael retired. My first genuine contact with her film reviews was her first book, "I Lost it at the Movies," which I have read over and over, to the point where the cover is falling off and the pages are bent at the edges. ("Fantasies of the Art-House Audience" and "Hud, Deep in the Divided Heart of Hollywood" are some of the best take-downs of goopy Hollywood "liberalism" that I've read.)

It's hard to find Kael's longer reviews and essays, so when I ran across "Taking It All In," I snapped it up. The movies reviewed are from the early 80s, and I didn't find that the writing had the same snap as in her earlier works (Kael was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease around this time, although with essays like "Why Are Movies So Bad? Or, the Numbers", it could have just been sheer weariness at work). Nevertheless, there's a sense of pleasure in this book that's unmistakable, and Kael cares deeply about what she's reviewing in a way that you don't get with, say, David Denby (all right, I just want to bitch about David Denby).

A collection of Kael's capsule reviews.

"Fingersmith," Sarah Waters

2008-02-20T16:47:00.000-08:00

I read over "Fingersmith" over two nights, and it took two nights only because the necessity of sleep intervened. It's hard for me to describe the plot of the novel, because it would take a lot of "and then... and then!" sort of description and also because I don't want to spoil it for anyone who hasn't picked it up yet. I'm shallow, so I admit that I started the book with the thought "ooh, Victorian lesbian erotica!" in mind, but Waters is really playing with the tropes of 19th-century sensation fiction here. (How could she top the ending of "Woman in White," anyway? Ménage à trois with two sisters...) There's a madhouse, an evil uncle, kidnapping, orphans, a criminal trial, and everything in between.

I found the first section the strongest - I'm a sucker for Victorian street urchins, what can I say? Since the section told from Maud's point of view is a retelling of what we've already seen through Sue's eyes, I found it a bit slow going, and I have to say that if I see one more book where the protagonist is redeemed by the act of writing I'll cry. All right, that's a bit far, but is it really necessary to justify the act of writing in the text itself? (I'm being unfair to Waters, who really doesn't go as far with this concept as many other authors I've read.)

Bonus: much of the action takes place in my neighborhood; Sue's haunt is close to the tube station I take almost every day.

"The Portrait of Dorian Gray," Oscar Wilde

2008-02-03T03:48:00.000-08:00

I know I'm revealing a defect deep within my soul, but I never found Lord Henry Wotton that witty a character. I always pictured him as carrying around a book of aphorisms, which he would study intensely so that he would always have a good reverse aphorism at hand. Then he would deploy his reverse aphorism, and polite laughter ensued!

Apparently Dorian was so awful that his portrait turned into a Marc Chagall!

"One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," Ken Kesey

2008-02-03T03:31:00.000-08:00

I've read this book before and I've always found it an easy read, despite it being incredibly misogynistic. The women in the book are mostly Bad: borderline-incestuous, overbearing mammas, oversexed bimbos, or sexually unappealing spinsters who take out their frustrations on the poor suffering maniacs under their care. Add a redemptive Christ figure, who uses rape as a tool against the (Wo)Man, and a lot of 60s bitching about "ticky-tacky houses" and the "Combine," and it's really pretty noxious. Yet I tear through it every time. I guess the idea of the glorious return to nature is just that appealing.

The movie is a much better bet - Milos Forman cut out a lot of the scenes from the book and re-imagined the rest, and it's just less gross overall. And you can't beat Jack Nicholson, Christopher Lloyd, Brad Dourif, and... Danny DeVito. Plus Kai Winn as Nurse Ratched! (All respect to Louise Fletcher - nobody can rock a goofy hat of evil like this lady.)

"Autobiography," John Stuart Mill

2008-01-25T16:35:00.001-08:00

John Stuart Mill was one of the original liberals, back when that word meant "person who believes in individual rights and free trade" and not "weakling who hates America."* I've had to read this book twice, and each time I dreaded it, and each time I ended up reading the whole thing with ease. Mill's reputation as being dry as dust helps, because when you get to the parts about his nervous breakdown and the paeans to his wife, you're pleasantly surprised.
* I personally don't believe that liberals are weaklings who hate America, but then again it's not as if you can find an American who will willingly call him- or herself liberal anymore, so debating whether liberals are nasty or not is a bit like debating what color of rock candy the Big Rock Candy Mountain is made out of.

"Confessions of an English Opium-Eater," Thomas de Quincey

2008-01-14T17:51:00.001-08:00

There are two versions of this book; I read the first edition, which is the comparatively straightforward tale of a boy, his adventures roughing it in early 1800s London, and his addiction to opium. The second edition was greatly expanded because de Quincey was not the type to pay his bills and he needed something to hook the readers in a second time, I suppose. Therefore there are long sections about the grandeur of the Whispering Gallery and so on.

De Quincey is a "philosopher," which means that he will go off on his favorite subjects (David Ricardo, how exactly he got a friend to help him raise money with a Jewish moneylender, why doctors are wrong about the effects of opium) at any time. Reading this style of memoir was a pleasant break from the modern addiction memoir, where the addict is generally so horribly enslaved that you never hear about anything else other than their sufferings. Maybe de Quincey was boring to his contemporaries, though, and I just find him interesting because he's quaint to me. I'm sure that Coleridge and Wordsworth flipped through the pages til they got to the good parts, where he freaks out and sees crocodiles trying to eat his walls.

"Mrs. Dalloway," Virginia Woolf

2008-01-12T07:17:00.000-08:00

I'm afraid that I don't have much to add to all the commentary there must already be on this wonderful book, so I'll just say that I absolutely adored it and read it in one sitting. I am embarrassed that a reading list was what finally got me restarted on the book, having unsuccessfully tried to read it all the way through a few years ago. I'd like to think that I now love Mrs. Dalloway because I am a grown woman and not a green girl, but it's probably just that I don't have cable anymore.

It was interesting to compare to Saturday, in that Saturday is supposed to be a homage to Mrs. Dalloway - yet the reader only gets one perspective in Saturday, and Woolf lets us into all her characters' thoughts. It certainly makes for a much less monotonous read, even if the only one anybody ever remembers after finishing is Clarissa.

Vivat my book blog!

2008-01-02T12:41:00.000-08:00

I've decided to start a book blog for 2008, mainly because it should keep me reading - through the spirit of competition - and because I need something else to procrastinate with, now that I'm writing papers and have to spend more time worrying in front of the computer.

I will try to read 50 books this year, although I'm not sure whether I should count books for class in that total. I promise not to bother with reviewing anything too scholarly, unless it's ridiculously bad and I want to rant about it or it's a book I think might be interesting to somebody outside the academy. So there are the ground rules.