The University of Crumbolst

1. War Horse

2012-01-23T06:02:00.002-05:00

by Michael Morpurgo

This is a heartfelt novel for young readers about a farm horse that is sold into the British army during World War I and finds himself on the Western Front. It was recommended by one of my 8th graders when he heard that we are going to learn about the world wars. So I was to read it.

It's a good little novel. The horse, Joey, tells us of his remarkable life in a way that seems quite horse-like. I suppose not all heroes need to be human.

The days of using horses in battle are over, thank goodness. What a horrible thing to do to them. But dogs are not as fortunate.

4

2012-01-03T06:16:00.001-05:00

Four books in 2011. In 2012 I am going to count student work. Or teach math.

4. The Gamekeeper

2011-10-27T13:47:00.000-04:00

By Barry Hines

This 1975 novel came to me by snail mail from Olman’s Fifty, who reviewed it so adeptly here. Definitely read his review, which is great reading in and of itself. After I read it I wondered if the novel would impact me in the same way. We think alike in the places this novel converges.

I don’t think I have read anything quite like this. It’s simply outstanding. The clarity of Hines’s narrative is rare in 20^th century literature, which too often is crammed with proof of its own greatness and cheap twists that negate what comes before as if nothing in life is what it seems. Well, things are what they seem when a writer with knowledge, craft and confidence puts pen to paper.

As Olman stated, this novel isn’t for everyone. But I thoroughly enjoyed the intricate details of the daily life and work of this British estate gamekeeper, which are very realistic and refreshingly unromantic. While it is very good storytelling it is also somewhat of a manual for an aspiring gamekeeper. On could avoid many expensive, time-wasting errors by reading this little novel.

Of course, as much as our protagonist is a careful steward of the land on which he lives so closely, and a cultivator of the Duke’s pheasant stock, his work is entirely devoted to cultivating the maximum number of birds for the Duke and his friends to kill during their annual one day shoot. The gamekeeper works all year for this singular purpose, brutally destroying many other populations of animals and birds (rabbits, foxes, birds of prey, etc.) in order to protect the birds that the Duke and his buddies will annihilate come Autumn. It’s all so absurd.

I enjoyed Hines’s ability to realistically narrate the gamekeeper’s life and purpose without any insecurity.

3. Under the Banner of Heaven

2011-09-04T23:08:00.002-04:00

by Jon Krakauer

Wow. I had already thought that mormonism was hard to take seriously. This book didn't help their case. In most ways this fastest growing religion in America is no more far fetched than the other popular religions, but mormonism has had an especially violent and troublesome first 150 years.

Krakauer focuses on the fundamentalist sects of mormonism, those that were created from a dispute over polygamy. Great.

In the news recently is Warren Jeffs, one of the "prophets," or leaders of fundamentalists who practice polygamy. He was busted for multiple counts of child rape. Apparently he liked to take on wives in a more "pure" state. Life in prison or that clown. Now on to the rest of them!

2. Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman

2011-07-19T15:30:00.002-04:00

by Jon Krakauer

This book honors Pat Tillman, the pro football player who walked away from the NFL at the peak of his career to join the U.S. Army. As did many men and women in response to the September 11, 2001, attacks, Tillman signed up to sacrifice something for his country. He and his brother Kevin graduated boot camp, went on to excel in the Army's Airborne and Ranger schools, and were sent overseas to whoop some ass. Tillman was killed by friendly fire.

But Pat Tillman is not the poster boy that U.S. government propagandists had hoped for.

Largely built from Tillman's personal journals Krakauer puts together a story that is deeply moving as well as deeply disturbing. This account of Tillman's life and totally unnecessary death is one part biography of a young man attracted to extreme mental and physical challenges (in the same way other individuals who have captured Krakauer's imagination), and one part scathing indictment of the entire Army chain of command all the way to Donald Rumsfeld.

I really enjoy Krakauer's writing. His fascination with a very special type of human shines through yet again in the book. And if you have been reading his other books over time, you might see that his ongoing mediation on those who seek life to the nth degree is tapping a wisdom that so many of us only know intuitively. Keep seeking, Krakauer, and keep reporting in with these great books!

1. Last Night in Twisted River

2011-05-16T12:53:00.004-04:00

by John Irving

This is John Irving's 12th novel in 40+ years and I believe among his best.

It really is great. One reason for that is explained in his afterward where he says that this novel has been in his head for over twenty years. He just hadn't found the last sentence (which is where he starts). In the meantime he wrote other novels because their endings came to him first. But this one has been with him long before many of the others. Interesting... it's a truly great story.

It's also meta-fiction, which was a great experience for me, and very personal for him. He says this in the afterward:

"I've written about writers before - in The World According to Garp an A Widow for One Year. But, in those novels, I never described my process as a writer; I did not make T.S. Garp or Ruth Cole the kind of novelist I am. In Twisted River, Daniel Baciagalupo IS the kind of writer I am; I even gave Danny my educational biography. (We went to the same schools, graduated in the same years, and so forth.) What I did NOT give Danny was my life, which has been largely happy and very lucky. In gave Daniel Baciagalupo the UNluckiest life I could imagine. I gave Danny the life I am afraid of having- the life I hope I never have. Maybe that's autobiographical too..."

That's beautiful. I find that most writers are more elusive than this when talking about themselves (I suspect that they hope to seem more deep by not telling).

Anyway, among the best lines in the novel is this loving, tender exchange between Danny and Lady Sky:

"I have no right to be happy," Danny told his angel, when they were falling asleep in each other's arms that first night.
"Everyone has a right to be a LITTLE happy, asshole," Amy told him.

2010 review

2011-01-05T13:08:00.002-05:00

Great enough.

13. Fist Stick Knife Gun, a graphic novel

2010-12-10T14:17:00.000-05:00

by Geoffrey Canada
adapted by Jamar Nicholas

To adapt an extensive piece of writing to a graphic novel has its benefits - easy readability, fun, a summary of the text, a graphic interpretation, or translation, in a way - but it can be like removing ones guts and replacing them with pictures of some of the guts. It ain't the same. Something is lost and it hurts.

But the graphics are good and many more kids will read this than Canada's original autobiographical argument.

12. Horoscopes for the Dead: Poems

2010-12-10T14:09:00.000-05:00

by Billy Collins

I'll just post one and hope he doesn't mind. It is not the best one in the book but certainly my favorite:

Grave

What do you think of my new glasses
I asked as I stood under a shade tree
before the joined grave of my parents,

and what followed was a long silence
that descended on the rows of the dead
and on the fields and the woods beyond,

one of the one hundred kinds of silence
according to the Chinese belief,
each one distinct from the others,

and the difference being so faint
that only a few special monks
were able to tell one from the other.

They make you look very scholarly,
I heard my mother say
once I lay down on the ground

and pressed an ear into the soft grass.
Then I rolled over and pressed
my other ear to the ground,

the ear my father likes to speak into,
but he would say nothing,
and I could not find a silence

among the 100 Chinese silences
that would fit the one that he created
even though I was the one

who had just made up the business
of the 100 Chinese silences--
the Silence of the Night Boat

and the silence of the Lotus,
cousin to the silence of the Temple Bell
only deeper and softer, like petals, at its farthest edges.

11. Last Words

2010-12-10T11:16:00.004-05:00

by George Carlin

George is dead now.

He would prefer the bluntness of that statement to "George has passed on," or, "George is in a better place," or "George expired." He'd rant about the latter, how he's not a friggin egg, or curdled milk. He'd like dirt nap. He'd like the sportiness of kicked the bucket and would kill himself exploring where the fuck that one came from.

George Carlin is one of my heroes and went kaput, croaked, cashed it in, liquidated. Went bye-byes.

Gone to the big shit-piss-fuck-cunt-cocksucker-motherfucker-tits in the sky.

I can't believe tits makes the list.

But before he became at room temperature he wrote his autobiography. Tony Hendra had to fix it up a bit before publication but it's all George. What I especially like about it is the no-joke frankness about his life. As many memoirs do, it begins with his Irish-Catholic childhood of meager means. He then tells the story of a guy who nearly lost his soul making an ass of himself in television for over a decade before finding a more genuine voice. His genuine voice is something I like about America.

As a kid I would borrow my friend Brian's Carlin albums and secretly study (obsess over) the filth and wisdom. I couldn't believe my ears. I could not believe that someone was saying those things about language, society, Congress, the President, the church, himself... me. His voice, replayed over and over again in secret, saved me from living a clean, wholesome life that would not be my own. And now, to read in his memoirs that some nut job had saved him from the same fate makes me feel a part of something really fucking important.

Thanks George for all the "flashy word shit."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PrD6k8PDr1o&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_Nrp7cj_tM&feature=related

10. Never Let Me Go

2010-12-10T10:39:00.001-05:00

by Kazuo Ishiguro

There is no way to meaningfully review this one without spoiling the plot. So read on if you don't mind a big, fat spoiler.

Thirty-one year old Kathy is reminising about her early days in an elite British boarding school. This school and it's students are special, though, as it is a place where human beings are cloned to provide donor organs for transplants. Their lives are incredibly sheltered and controlled but they are in effect allowed to live near fully human lives at school. However they will never get married, have careers, or grow old and die. They will die in their thirties of organ donations. Kathy, our narrator, spent the decade after boarding school being a "carer" for those donating their organs.

Interesting philosophical shit. I liked thinking about it while reading. The plot is mostly centered around their childhood friendships, education and the mysteries around their existence. It is an uneventful plot for the most part but it accomplishes enough character development for the reader to experience their humanity while knowing that they are bread only to be donors.

They don't rebel. They don't seek alternatives to their fate. A testament to the power of education.

Boring plot. Interesting ideas on possible future ethics.

9. Ecotopia

2010-11-28T21:45:00.000-05:00

by Ernest Callenbach

Brother Dan sent this one to me in the mail. It seems so subversive getting a book in the mail.

I enjoyed this one. Folks living in a big chunk of northern California, Oregon and Washington secede from the United States and create their own eco-friendly state that is closed off from their former nation. Twenty years later a news reporter, the first one in all that time, is given access to Ecotopia for the purpose of informing Americans about Ecotopia and as a sort of ambassador from the United States sent to establish a new friendship.

The novel is structured by the reporter's published new pieces interspersed with his personal diary entries. In many ways this is the quintessential liberal sci fi novel of the 1970s. Ecotopia is a blueprint of a well balanced society where humans live in near-perfect balance with nature, women are liberated, and... well, you get the idea. I enjoyed reading the novel. However, it's got a few problems:

1. In order to create this highly descriptive blueprint the author sacrifices plot.
2. As my brother says in his review, there is no voice of dissent in Ecotopia. It's as if everyone in northern Cali, ORegon and Washington were 100% behind the secession and creation of this extremely controlling ecostate. It underestimates, or ignores, the libertarian presence in those states. And the polluters.
3. During the ensuing 20 years why would the United States not invade and reconquer the seceded states? There is mention that Ecotopia has planted hidden nuclear devices in key U.S. cities to be detonated in the event of such an offensive, but it is only mentioned in passing. Also, wouldn't the use of such nukes be against Ecotopian philosophy?

These issues are not easy to put aside while reading because it is so necessary to resolve them in order to believe in such a possibility. And believe me, I do wish for much of what is accomplished in Ecotopia. However, I know such things will not exist in our lifetime without extremely violent force.

a poem from The Black Riders

2010-10-15T10:48:00.001-04:00

by Stephen Crane

XLIV
Many red devils ran from my heart
And out upon the page.
They were so tiny
The pen could mash them.
And many struggled in the ink.
It was strange
To write in this red muck
Of things from my heart.

also this odd one unrelated to the above:

LVI
A man feared that he might find an assassin;
Another that he might find a victim.
One was more wise than the other.

8. The Chrysalids

2010-10-12T09:09:00.001-04:00

by John Wyndham

This was a great 1955 sci fi book about young man and his friends who live in a close-knit community of religious fundamentalists bent on genetic purification as a way of "getting back" to a state of perfection as it was for the Old People before a devastating nuclear war. Their new religious dogma, which includes intolerance of any genetic abnormality (a sixth toe, for example), leads to a closed, fearful society that is always on the watch for pretty much anything different.

Our hero, David, and a small group of his friends share a remarkable secret, one that, if discovered, would lead to their destruction at the hands of the community. Abnormal plants are destroyed. Abnormal livestock are destroyed. Abnormal adolescents are destroyed. The community is ever-dilligent in their efforts to rid itself of anything that deviates from "the norm of God's creation".

David and his friends come to realize that they too are deviants as they possess telepathic powers that would surely get them "eradicated" if ever detected. These powers, however, can also lead to unimagined freedom for them... if they can escape to the Fringes.

As it is with a great deal of post-WWII fiction, The Chrysalids is a condemnation of Nazism and an exploration of the potential of humanity after the war. Clearly, nukes play their role in both creating awesome physical and psychic pain worldwide, but in the sci fi genre the same nuclear event is seen as creating a sort of second chance for humanity as well. I especially like this novel because it warns of the dangers of religious and scientific dogma that argue that there is a certain human who is "perfect" and defined by those in power at the time.

Good stuff and a fun adventure.

7. The Undiscovered Self

2010-10-01T09:53:00.003-04:00

by Carl Jung

All of Jung's concerns are with individual liberty. Reading this little book was somewhat of a spiritual and intellectual revival for me. That always happens with this guy's work.

Ultimately everything depends on the quality of the individual, but the fatally shortsighted habit of our age is to think only in terms of large numbers and mass organizations, though one would think that the world had seen more than enough of what a well-disciplined mob can do in the hands of a single madman. Unfortunately, this realization does not seem to have penetrated very far--and our blindness is this respect is extremely dangerous. People go on blithely organizing and believing in the sovereign remedy of mass action, without the least consciousness of the fact that the most powerful organizations can be maintained only by the greatest ruthlessness of their leaders and the cheapest slogans...

...Curiously enough, the churches too want to avail themselves of mass action in order to cast out the devil with Beelzebub--the very churches whose care is the salvation of the individual soul. They too do not appear to have heard anything of the elementary axiom of mass psychology, that the individual becomes morally and spiritually inferior in the mass, and for this reason they do not burden themselves overmuch with their real task of helping the individual to achieve metanoia, or re-birth of the spirit. It is, unfortunately, only too clear that if the individual is not truly regenerated in spirit, society cannot be either, for society is the sum total of individuals in need of redemption. I can therefore see it only as a delusion when the churches try--as they apparently do--to rope the individual into a social organization and reduce him to a condition of diminished responsibility, instead of raising him out of torpid, mindless mass and making clear to him that he is the one important factor...

Oh, fun. He goes on to remind the reader of what happened to Jesus and Paul, prototypes of individuality, when they went their own individual ways, disregarding public opinion.

Here's a challenge:Resistance to the organized mass can be effected only by the man who is as well organized in his individuality as the mass itself. Or, to put it more simply: drive or drift. Drive or drift. I like that problem.

Finally: To this question there is a positive answer only when the individual is willing to fulfill the demands of rigorous self-examination and self-knowledge. If he follows through his intention, he will not only discover some important truths about himself, but will also have gained a psychological advantage: he will have succeeded in deeming himself worthy of serious attention and sympathetic interest.

Anyway, it was 125 pages of Jungian challenge. Loved it.

Salem's Lot

2010-10-01T06:21:00.007-04:00

by Steven King

I thought this was going to be a re-read, but it turns out I had never read this one. What a great book! As is typical King, the setting is a small isolated town in Maine that falls prey to incredible evil. This time: vampires, and not the Twilight clowns. These vampires are the ones from our childhood nightmares.

You know the aging adage: today's science fiction is tomorrow's reality? Well, what if today's horror were to be tomorrow's reality? Well, after reading Salem's lot I have one reason to support the Catholic Church, or at least the mass production of their relics!

Here's a fun excerpt of early King meta-fiction. An aging, single guy climbs the stairs of his own house to confront whatever hellish phenom is in an upstairs bedroom.

Going up there stairs was the hardest thing Matt Burke had ever done in his life. That was all; that was it. Nothing else even came close. Except perhaps one thing.

As a boy of eight, he had been in a Cub Scout pack. The den mother’s house was a mile up the road and going was fine, yes, excellent, because you walked in the late afternoon daylight. But coming home twilight had begun to fall, freeing the shadows to yawn across the road in long, twisty patterns—or, if the meeting was particularly enthusiastic and ran late, you had to walk home in the dark. Alone.

Alone. Yes, that’s the key word, the most awful word in the English tongue. Murder doesn’t hold a candle to it and hell is only a poor synonym…

There was a ruined church along the way, an old Methodist meeting house, which reared its shambles at the far end of a frost-heaved and hummocked lawn, and when you walked past the view of it’s glaring, senseless windows your footsteps became very loud in your ears and whatever you had been whistling died on your lips and you thought about how it must be inside—the overturned pews, the rotting hymnals, the crumbling altar where only mice now kept the Sabbath, and you wondered what might be in there besides mice—what madmen, what monsters. Maybe they were peering out at you with yellow reptilian eyes. And maybe one night watching would not be enough; maybe some night that splintered, crazily hung door would be thrown open, and what you saw standing there would drive you to lunacy at one look.

And you couldn’t explain that to your mother and father, who were creatures of the light. No more than you could explain to them how, at the age of three, the spare blanket at the foot of the crib turned into a collection of snakes that lay staring at you with flat and lidless eyes. No child ever conquers those fears, he thought. If a fear cannot be articulated, it can’t be conquered. And the fear locked in small brains are much too large to pass through the orifice of the mouth. Sooner or later you found someone to walk past all the deserted meeting houses you had to pass between grinning babyhood and grunting senility. Until tonight. Until tonight when you found out that none of those old fears had been staked—only tucked away in their tiny, child-sized coffins with a wild rose on top.

He didn’t turn on the light. He mounted the steps, one by one, avoiding the sixth, which creaked. He held on to the crucifix, and his palm was sweaty and slick…

He hits on so many of our worst nightmares in this two pages. Despite being a somewhat solid adult I still have those fears that well up and wash over my otherwise rational mind. For me, never in the city. Always among buildings in rural areas. So this was a fun read.

5. "Common Sense" and "The Age of Reason"

2010-08-09T11:55:00.004-04:00

by Thomas Paine

I picked up Common Sense for a re-read after brother Dan read it recently. Once again I was struck by the sheer guts of such revolutionary writing. The pamphlet was wildly popular in the colonies leading up to the war, effectively arguing for independence from English monarchical rule and the establishment of a government that held individual rights above all else. It also spells out ideas for a radical new republic. Good stuff.

It was an important reminder of what the true purposes of government should be in this country and how closely power should reside with the people. Wow, are we a far cry from that!

The Age of Reason is a tract on religion Paine wrote later in life. He weighs in on religion in a way that both respects the right of all to express ideas... and rejects religion! He is certainly not an atheist as I have so often read and heard, but lays out a convincing criticism of Christianity as it has been practiced - specifically the use of the bible, the establishment of "churches," etc. He is especially concerned with the freedom of ideas and how religious systems tend to be designed to fix those ideas and assert authority and power over them. For example, the Christian assertion of exclusivity (there is only one true God, Jesus is the only way to Heaven, all other religions are incomplete or false, etc.), despite the fact that Biblical stories and ideas were recycled from older religions and mythologies, which is why people were able to believe in immaculate conception, Jesus dying and then rising through the air to Heaven, turning water into wine for a wedding, making loaves and fishes from thin air, 40 days and nights in the desert, etc.). Oh, they are great stories and speak truths about deity and humankind. Paine's concern, though, is that people have come to use OTHER people's accounts of the deity, OTHER people's revelations, to instruct their lives and beliefs. In an "age of reason," the reasonable person must either do some measure of self-deception, or lying, or stick one's head in the sand in order to maintain a belief in mythological Biblical stories and the pastor's reinforcement of those stories as instruction for living life today.

Paine is mostly concerned with individual liberty and attacks religion for its attempts to corner the market on ideas and ultimately people's lives, either out of benevolent concern for them, or for power, or profit.

I very much appreciated reading this tract as I have been feeling similarly about Christianity for the past decade. I am with Paine in the assertion that if you, or your community, have experienced a revelation (hopefully from the deity, not from some other's claims) and other people have not, perhaps it is only for you. Leave everyone else alone to have their own revelations and form their own ideas. Honor them by refraining from the impulse to claim your own revelation as the only truth, the only way, the only...

4. Shutter Island

2010-08-05T08:37:00.002-04:00

by Dennis Lehane

I really like Blake's review of this book. Wow.

I read the novel after watching the movie and really enjoyed it. My biggest problem though is that the movie leaves very little of the novel's details out (which is rare), so reading the novel was amazingly familiar territory. Still, it's a fun thriller with a human darkness that Lehane is great at creating. I am only familiar with Mystic River, Gone Baby Gone and now Shutter Island (does he have others?) but it has become clear that one of his prevailing themes is child abuse and murder. That's the darkness that I'm talking about. So there is the great thriller aspect -- wily cops, inept cops, unknowing regular folk, really bad criminals, corruption, confusion -- all the things you need to make for small human disasters, but he is also a master at the plot twist. Brilliant.

But underlying the usual thriller motif is this profound tale of loss, guilt, suffering and sometimes redemption. Great stuff.

3. Horace's Compromise

2010-05-24T17:33:00.002-04:00

by Theodore Sizer

The title sounds like a novel. It makes me think of Sophie's Choice. But no, this is a call to arms for school reform! As such it is a very good one. But... yawn.

2. Zeitoun

2010-05-24T17:27:00.002-04:00

by Dave Eggers

This is a fine work of non-fiction.

Addulrahman and Kathy Zeitoun lived and work in New Orleans when Katrina arrived and then the levees broke. In fact they still live there. This is their story of how they survived the country's worst natural disaster in a century. But that is only one dimension of there experience. The rest is downright Kafkaesque. Read it and you'll know.

Really, this one is worth a read. It's due in paperback in June.

1. Little Brother

2010-05-24T17:26:00.000-04:00

by Corey Doctorow

A nice rebellious little book.

2009... 2010

2010-01-07T15:21:00.001-05:00

27. I'm alright with that.

27. Carrie

2009-11-25T10:32:00.002-05:00

by Stephen King

This is far more intense than I remembered it. It's a great little novel about a perpetually picked on young woman who happens to be telekinetic. All hell breaks loose but not before we learn about Carrie's horrific upbringing and the abuse her peers inflict upon her daily. I rooted for Carrie all the way through the mayhem. What an ass kicker!

Makes the movie seem like a cardboard representation of one of King's most potent stories. This is before he was writing screenplays in the guise of novels.

26. The Taggerung

2009-11-25T10:29:00.003-05:00

by Brian Jacques

This is a fantasy book recommended by one of my students. He said, "I think since you make us read books, we should be able to make you read books." I said ok and he brought this book in the next day. I'm glad I read it.

It's the 14th book in Jacques's Redwall Series. Good stuff. Though that's all I have to say on the matter.

2009-10-29T12:32:00.000-04:00

A hissing in the wood pile.

25. Beasts

2009-10-02T06:30:00.001-04:00

by Joyce Carol Oats

The only other of her nearly 50 books that I’ve read is a memorable novella called Zombie, which is a disturbingly intimate first person narrative of a serial killer who is at the peak of his game. Good stuff. Beasts, also a novella, which is why I chose to read it (not a big Oats fan), is not quite as powerful.

Beasts is two things: a cliché and a weak gothic horror novella, both of which have been done a thousand times before with far greater affect.

The cliché: The setting is 1975 at a small liberal arts college in culturally uptight New England. The protagonist is a young budding poet whose parents just divorced, leaving her adrift in a world of intellectual, sexual and emotional predators. By predator I mean a good looking, uber-bohemian college professor who turns the girls in his poetry class on by wearing dirty jeans instead of slacks and tweed, smoking a lot while he effortlessly and offhandedly lectures about art and “going for the jugular” in poetry, you know-keeping it real, and reading them titillating D.H. Lawrence filth.

So this young woman becomes infatuated by the anti-establishment college professor and of course he ravages her like a beast (that smells like cigarettes and ). Wait, the cliché is not complete. He has a sultry French sculptress wife who also ravages the student. Yes, a threesome in the mid-70s. It goes on for a while as we explore the, “entwined boldness and vulnerability of young women” (LA Times).

The gothic horror: Turns out this couple has done this to multiple girls. And they tend to dope them up in order to photograph them performing sexual acts for a porn magazine. Ah, the posh New England elite unwittingly becoming the objects of trashy porn mags. Also, throughout the novel there is an arsonist who keeps trying to burn buildings on campus. This may shock you, but that little tidbit becomes quite meaningful as the novel reaches its climax.

Don’t read it.

24. Aloft

2009-09-27T14:48:00.003-04:00

by Chang-rae Lee

I endured this one. At once it is a fine example of Chang-rae Lee's mastery of the language of the heart and a story about a boring man approaching sixty on Long Island. All told it is a ok work of fiction on a subject that didn't interest me.

23. Los Versos del Capitan

2009-09-21T19:45:00.002-04:00

by Pablo Neruda

This is Neruda's umpteenth book of love poems. It's especially good for me because it has both the original Spanish and the English translation on the opposite page. I can read the Spanish, but miss a great deal of the layers of meaning. Neruda has been on of the world's most celebrated poets for decades. He's still wringing out the words.

While this old man's poetry can be a bit chauvinistic, and romantic in the old Spanish way, it is beautiful.

Here's one called "La Infinita":

Ves estas manos? Han medido
la tierra, han separado
los miserales y los celeales,
han hecho la laz y la guerra,
han derribado las distancias
de todos los mares y rios
y sin embargo
cuando te recorren
a ti, pequena,
grano de trigo, alondra,
no alcanzan a abarcarte,
se cansan alcanzando
las palomas gemelas
que reposan o vuelan en tu pecho,
recorren las distancias de tu piernas,
se enrollan en la luz de tu cintura.
Para mi eres tesoro mas cargado
de immensidad que el mar y sus recimos
y eres blanca y azul y extensa como
la tierra en la vendimia.
En ese territorio,
de tus pies a tu frente,
andando, andando, andando,
me pasare la vida.

In English:

The Infinite One

Do you see these hands? They have measured
the earth, the have separated
minerals and cereals,
they have made peace and war,
they have demolished the distances
of all the seas and rivers,
and yet,
when they move over you,
little one,
grain of wheat, swallow,
they can not encompass you,
they are weary seeking
the twin doves
that rest of fly in your breast,
they travel the distances of your legs,
they coil in the light of your waist.
For me you are a treasure more laden
with immensity than the sea and its branches
and you are white and blue and spacious like
the earth at vintage time.
In that territory,
from your feet to your brow,
walking, walking, walking,
I shall spend my life.

22. Winter's Tale

2009-09-07T20:57:00.003-04:00

by Mark Helpern

This novel is about the unforgettable character Peter Lake. That’s his name because he didn’t have one. He has beaten time. Well, I think he’s beaten time but you might think that time is an entirely different thing than we thought it was. It’s magical. It’s about Winter for sure.

It’s 750 pages, but came highly recommended so I dove in. Not one page was a waste. It spans over a century in New York City, its harbor, rivers and bays, and the Hudson Valley… and an impossible and yet highly plausible town beyond the valley. In terms of time it’s a lot like the inside back page of a Mad Magazine cover where the image is one thing until you fold along the lines and go “Ahh!”

I fear that evoking thoughts of Mad Magazine might lead you to thinking this novel is not serious. Oh, it's serious. It's serious about love and belonging and adventure and awful, senseless grudges that are fun -- all those things that are proven to scoff at time.

I already loved the city… and the impossible… and messing with time, but this book runs a great distance with those feelings. It’s exceptional.

It’s a very funny, fully engaging tale full of passion, epic love, long held grudges… and a horse that can do extraordinary things. The tale begins with him running away from his stable in Brooklyn over 100 years ago. He’ll be no slave.

Then there’s Peter Lake. Did I mention him?

Helpern is a very gifted writer. If you are tired of the American novel, if you think it has had its day in the sun, pick this one up. There is little convention about it.

21. The Last Great American Hobo

2009-08-18T15:19:00.004-04:00

Essay by Dale Maharidge
Photos by Michael Williamson

When he was a teenager, Montana Blackie heard about other teenagers just walking away from their lives and "riding the rails" together. The Great Depression was in full swing when Blackie hopped his first freight train. Sixty years later (at the time of publishing), he still hasn't returned to conventional life. He's a life long hobo by choice. And if the authors of this remarkable little book about his existence can be believed, he is the last of the Depression-era hobos.

This is a beautiful prose and photo essay on Montana Blackie's remarkable existence, which by the 1980s had become nearly impossible to maintain. Society has changed and no longer distinguishes between the homeless and the hobo. It's a tough time to be old. At 76 years old in 1989, he was, "a man out of time and place." During the three years the authors spent with Blackie in the late 1980s, he had built a grand camp along the Sacramento River reminiscent of the 1930s Hoovervilles. As the authors note time and time again, it seemed odd that he would build such an extravagant place when the likelihood that it would be demolished by authorities was very high. But that is Blackie's way.

Blackie says, You've got to maintain, keep your camp clean. Son'bitch can't keep his camp clean, he's no good. Well, I figure I might be on the fucking road, a dirty old filthy bastard, but my place is going to be clean. The old hobos in the old days, they used to be a bindlestiff, that bastard packed everything, and if he was crazy, he had a name for every pot and pan hung on the fucking wire of his tree. The old bindlestiffs are gone. A few around like myself. There's only a few crazy diehard bastards like me around that still motivate [ride rails]. As far as hoboin' goes, it's the same as it used to be. Fuck the idea of steam trains. All they did was change the motivation, that's all. There ain't a damn thing modernized. Still the same old tracks. Same units. Same goddam road, clickity-clack on down the line. Really nothin' has changed over the years. Not for me anyway.

This a well-written, intimate essay that honors a man and his way of life. It's a bit heart breaking, though, since it's clear that the world has changed around Montana Blackie, leaving little room or tolerance for his way of being.

The photos are fantastic. I wish I could share a few here.

Since childhood, I am perpetually drawn to the hobo life.

20. The Postman

2009-07-28T12:54:00.003-04:00

by David Brin

Men can be brilliant and strong, they whispered to one another. But men can be mad, as well. And the mad ones can ruin the world.

It is 2012, some sixteen years after all out war sends the world -certainly the United States- into total chaos. Nuclear war destroyed all U.S. cities and left a wake of radiation and fallout that killed off the vast majority of the population. But the U.S. may have recovered as a nation if large groups of violent "survivalists," or vicious, opportunistic pseudo-Darwinists, hadn't organized to plunder what was left... Damn those Holnists to hell!

The story is about the unlikely hero, Gordon Krantz, who changes things through a lie he initially starts telling in order to ensure his survival. He is a survivor, a wanderer, in search of some semblance of civilization in a land rife with separatist violence, starvation and... well, you get the idea. Just as he is finally about to meet his own end he happens upon an abandoned U.S. mail truck with the skeleton of it's driver still in the seat. He takes the deceased postman's uniform and two bags of 16 year old mail and sets out with a new scheme to trade the illusion of a restored postal system -and thereby the beginnings of a "Restored United States"- for food and shelter. He underestimates the old, worn out uniform's power as a symbol of hope.

I really enjoyed this book. It's an exciting plot. It also has some unique insights as a work of social commentary. If you are poring through the catalogue of good post apocalypse fiction, this one should be somewhere on your list.

I didn't want to mention the movie, which was lame, and I certainly didn't want to say the obvious "the book is better", but something needs to be said about how incredibly screwed up the movie is. It is an unprecedented butchering of an excellent novel.

Anyway, this is a pretty exciting novel. I recommend it.

19. My Name is Asher Lev

2009-07-13T16:43:00.007-04:00

By Chaim Potok

Make even greater works to make up for the pain you will cause.

This one struck my heart. It’s about the becoming of an artist who must reconcile his own nature with that of his orthodox Jewish tradition and beliefs. Asher Lev is a Hasidic Jew from Brooklyn. Told by the painter himself, his story begins when he is five and runs well into his adult life as a successful artist. But his success did not come without causing great pain to his family and community… and therefore himself. It’s all necessary, though, in order for him to become an honest/great artist.

Millions of people can draw and paint well, but how many have an eye for the essence of things, and dare to make pictures that depict the world as they truly see and feel it? How many Chagalls are there? Picassos? Matisses? Levs?

I am a bit speechless, as I just finished the book and am somewhat blown away. I can't be objective. It’s a very beautiful novel, one that might usurp something on my top ten list.

David, have you read this one?

18. Survival in Auschwitz (or If This is a Man, it’s original title)

2009-07-06T13:16:00.003-04:00

By Primo Levi

I am finally almost caught up on my book reviews!

Thanks, Walkerp, for recommending this one. What a remarkable account of this man’s survival during his ten-month imprisonment at the German death camp, Auschwitz. Primo Levi, an Italian Jew, was twenty-five when he was arrested by Italian fascists and transported to Auschwitz. His story is an extremely valuable document of the systematic cruelty and genocide engineered by Nazi Germany.

I can’t help but compare Levi’s accounts with that of Eli Weisel, having read them only a month apart. Both were at Auschwitz at the same time. In terms of fact, both tell the same story. But they are very different men. One thing that is remarkable about Levi’s account is the extent to which thinking contributed to his survival, the thinking of a practical, humane, scientific mind. Sure, like Weisel, Levi takes care to acknowledge biological strength and incredible luck, and the grace of many men who could have just as easily hoarded life for themselves. But it is his ability to think, to remain level-headed, that is key to remaining human, and ultimately to survival, in the chaos of random, unconscionable evil. His is a testimony of the indestructibility of the human spirit.

An example of Levi’s thinking (it’s a bit out of context, but…):

Sooner or later in life everyone discovers that perfect happiness is unrealizable, but there are few who pause to consider the antithesis: that perfect unhappiness is equally unattainable. The obstacles preventing the realization of both of these extreme states are of the same nature: they derive from our human condition which is opposed to everything infinite. Our ever-insufficient knowledge of the future opposes it: and this is called in the one instance, hope, and in the other, uncertainty of the following day. The certainty of death opposes it: for it places a limit on every joy, but also on every grief…

Thinking. He often felt he was thinking too much during those ten months, but the man who thinks too much is inseparable from the survivor.

Like so many survivors of genocide, Levi’s morality was challenged to the extreme. He argues that the ordinary world’s sense of morality (what’s right and wrong, or good and evil) don’t stand a chance at a place like Auschwitz. That sounds bleak… and yet some may survivors (and they weren’t many. Two thirds of Europe’s Jews were murdered) returned with a deeper sense of humanity and purpose. Put simply,

There comes to light the existence of two particularly well differentiated categories among men – the saved and the drowned.

His question, our question, is one of responsibility for all those people.

Among the things that have been bothering me as a read through Holocaust literature this year is that we have no equal account from the other side, from a Nazi who desired to come clean. It’s one thing to talk in near-hyperbole of the evil Nazi Germany, but what of the individual giving or taking orders at a place like Auschwitz? The cruelty. The insanity. How can that be explained?

Another aspect of morality that I find profound is the discovery of how impossible it is for these survivors (Levi and Weisel) to think that their God had anything to do with either the atrocity or their survival. They come out very different believers, much more human believers. Just after a “selection,” a routine event whereby prisoners are selected for slaughter, Levi and others who survived yet another close call, have a moment of reprieve:

Now everyone is busy scraping the bottom of his bowl with his spoon so as not to waste the last drops of the soup; a confused, metallic clatter, signifying the end of the day. Silence slowly prevails and then, from my bunk on the top row, I see and hear old Kuhn praying aloud, with his beret on his head, swaying backwards and forwards violently. Kuhn is thanking God because he has not been chosen.
Kuhn is out of his senses. Does he not see Beppo the Greek in the bunk next to him, Beppo who is twenty years old and is going to the gas chamber the day after tomorrow [he’s been selected] and knows it and lies there looking fixedly at the light without saying anything and without even thinking any more? Can Kuhn fail to realize that the next time it will be his turn? Does Kuhn not understand that what has happened today is an abomination, which no propitiatory prayer, no pardon, no expiation by the guilty, which nothing at all in the power of man can ever clean again?
If I was God, I would spit at Kuhn’s prayer.

This is a must read for those wanting to understand the Holocaust. I also recommend it to pretty much everyone else.

17. Blackwater

2009-07-02T16:45:00.002-04:00

by Kerstin Ekman

My dad gave me this one by Swedish writer Kerstin Ekman. It’s a mystery/thriller with some conventions we Americans might be surprised by.

Set in the 1970s, in the mountains of Sweden, there is a murder. The protagonist is a 30-something mother who has decided to leave her life as a teacher in Stockholm and trek it up to live with her former student-turned-boyfriend on a commune in the mountains surrounding the very rural town of Blackwater. She arrives to encounter a cast of characters who are less friendly than she imagined they would be. The local store owner and his wife seem put off by her and her daughter’s presenence, despite the appearance of poverty. While at this local store she also encounters a group of crude mountain boys who are pissing, throwing their empties, etc., just as crude mountain boys might.

Ekman is a master at creating situations or encounters that are not quite what is reasonably expected. This style creates an often imperceptible stress or discomfort in the reader. That is even before the protagonist happens upon the aftermath of a brutal murder scene at a remote campsite.

Some things that make this novel interesting to an American reader:

- Taking her time. As a thriller, this novel plods along, taking its sweet time as we explore all facets of a strikingly unromantic Swedish mountain life.

The forest. I felt deep in the forest myself. It got under my skin. In this way, the novel is excellent writing.

- The clear distinctions between and biases among Swedes, Finns and Norwegians.

- Life among crude, brutish mountain men.

- The very frank language of sex and sexuality. This was great.

- A massive cast of characters. I’m not used to so many suspects, and characters with cross-purposes.

As the reader of a thriller, I got lost. She tries to accomplish too many things. A big, unstoppable conglomerate is leveling the mountainsides as folks try to establish a commune. Mixed into this small, problematic population are those trying to occupy the land only to protect it from the tree-killers. Then there are the hikers. And many, many the locals. Aside from placing a vast array of characters in proximity to each other, it’s never clear what most of them have to do with the murders. It is almost as if the novel is social commentary in the guise of a thrillers. Well, that’s not so bad.

16. August: Osage County

2009-06-26T09:16:00.002-04:00

A play by Tracy Letts

Mike: Beautifully and cleverly written but I did not like the family.
The Dad: What’s not to like? She takes pills and I drink. That’s who we are.
Mike: And your kids, who have all grown up into the types of people I avoid like the air of a stranger's bad fart? Your family is a catalogue of types of assholes. Why should I care what happens to them?
The Dad (pours himself another drink): Can’t help you with that. Cummings once said…

[yawn]

Mike: You were a poet…
The Dad: One fucking book of poems. Sold like crazy, and mostly among the academic elite. In fact, I believe every copy is yellowing on their office shelves between a whole lot of the same. I’m not a poet.
Mike: Please tell me you have been writing in secret all those years and that it’s just a matter of your asshole children and their asshole husbands, ex-husbands and boyfriends on the side happening to never find it all…
The Dad: I told you, I drink. She takes pills and I drink… and speak caustically to my dear, beloved pill-sogged wife…
Mike: Oddly, that’s the best part of the play. You’re all fucked.
The Dad: Yes. We’re all fucked.

Mike: I don't like when writers create poets.

15. In the Country of Last Things

2009-05-16T18:44:00.003-04:00

by Paul Auster

I liked this novel. It is in the form of the young Anna Blume’s letter home to an old childhood friend. It is an account of Anna’s experiences in a city (probably New York) that has fallen into chaos and destitution. Its inhabitants have depleted nearly all resources, buildings have burned, decayed or been destroyed by pillagers and roving gangs. Many streets are blocked by rubble and the bridges are guarded by a government/police that changes routinely. Stealing is so rampant that it is no longer a crime. There are corpses everywhere, most of which are the result of either starvation or suicide.

The somewhat myopic but compelling view we get is straight from Anna’s memory as she writes to beat death. As she admits, this is a flawed memory under the stress of being in constant survival mode. Anna travels to this mess of a city from a seemingly comfortable life somewhere outside. She does so in search of her journalist brother who disappeared while on assignment for the town’s local newspaper. You might be left wondering what was the state of things in the place she left to go to the city? Well, me too. How was it that the city fell into chaos but everything was okay at home outside the city? In fact Anna’s letter home doesn’t answer many questions, such as: How long ago did the Troubles begin? Were did they begin? What caused it, or was it as gradual as it is these days? Of course answering these questions in satisfactory detail would make this a very different book.

-- I enjoyed her thoughts on scavenging but wished for more detail about the actual scavenging. Well, there were pockets of really great detail – like when she goes to buy shoes from that guy’s cousin, or when she and an equally emaciated friend had to carry a corpse to the roof and throw it off— but overall the book read just like… it was written by someone who struggled to remember the details. Of course she is writing from an extremely faulty memory, as she states repeatedly, and under incredible pressure.

Other thoughts:

-- Why the awkward interjection of third person in the beginning? Is this just a third person omniscient due to an author’s lack of confidence, or does it suggest that her letter/notebook was actually found and transcribed?

--One of the great things (there are many) about the novel: Auster explores sex and sexuality in the post-apocalyptic world. I’ve only read a dozen books of this genre but the absence of this most important part of human life is glaring. I applaud the effort!

-- Once she finally shifts her thinking to the ways of survival it was hard for her to stomach the “service to others” mentality of some friends who help her after she is seriously injured in a fall. There are also a few gems of thought on survival in terms of separating eating and pleasure. Just one example of the psychological effects such a reality.

-- I really like the ending. The hope and trepidation.

This is an excellent little book. I recommend it for those that like the post-apoc genre, and for those who are simply looking for an excellent wordsmith. I’ll definitely read more of his stuff. Any suggestions?

14. Ten Little Indians

2009-04-29T18:37:00.004-04:00

by Sherman Alexie

Thanks Dan for your review of this one, and sending it to me. This is a hearty, moving collection of short stories. As is usual, Alexie explores so many facets of Indian identity, particularly that of Spokane Indians. Reading these stories I was struck once again by how much I am not Indian, yet I connected so deeply with so many of his characters. He has a gift for pushing readers like me away and drawing me closer simultaneously. The lesson is: listen. Don’t pretend to know. Just listen. Just meet these characters on their own terms, in their own states of being without framing it in the usual bullshit white people tend to frame things in.

Alexie’s characters are some of the most complete, honest characters I’ve experienced, ever.

I am somewhat of an expert on the short story, which means, in part, that I am aware that most of them are the result of trying too hard. But the power in Alexie’s short stories comes from his poetical powers and a profound love for people.

The seventh story, “Do You now Where I Am?,” is one of the best short stories I’ve ever read. It is the story of a life-long love told from the voice of an elderly man in total awe of his wife of 30-something years. He looks back to their early days and a stupid, selfish mistake made while the two rescue a lost cat, a mistake that has profound consequences. It is ultimately a story about her decades long awesomeness. It’s so human, so absolutely like what really happens.

Here’s one that made it’s way into The New Yorker. Another excellent story with his typical humor, voice, and frankness about how sometimes things go the way we like, other times they don’t.

“Do Not Go Gentle,” is another that deeply moving story. There’s the laughter, yes, but also the bluntness, the candor, that cuts to the heart of the human experience. Powerful stuff. Read ‘em and weep. Unless Dan wants it back I’ll send it along to the first that asks for it.

13. Black and Kinky Amongst Brown Waves

2009-04-20T12:57:00.005-04:00

by Margaux Delotte-Bennett

This is an original play/performance piece by my friend Margaux. She spent almost a year in India on an internship for her MSW program at Galliadet, a deaf university in Washington, D.C. As a black woman in India, she experienced aloneness and, to some degree, alienation, for the first time. It was a hard trip, but one in which she made friends with herself.

This is an exceptional performance piece but I shall not say much as it's in the early drafting stage and, of course, has not been performed. I'll post here when she schedules the performances!

I'm very proud of her and am glad to be a part of the process toward its creation.

12. Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, II: And Here My Troubles Began

2009-04-14T01:05:00.001-04:00

By Art Spiegelman

I wonder why Spiegelman opted to make it two separate books. The first book is wholly incomplete without this second and both combined would only be approximately 270 pages. Maus I, was the first half of the story of survival of Vladek and Anja Spiegelman, charting their desperate progress from prewar Poland Auschwitz. Maus II is the continuation, in which the Vladek survives the camp and is eventually reunited with his wife (these are not spoilers since you know this happens from the beginning of the first book).

Aside from the decision to make this extremely valuable personal account of Vladek Spiegelman’s survival into an allegory, which I think weakens it as an important historical account, this second part is as compelling and gut wrenching as the first.

I am going to use Maus I and II in my 8th grade Humanities classes during the last cycle of this year as we explore World War Two. It was a toss-up between Wiesel’s Night and Spiegelman’s Maus I and II. I really wish we had time for both of these important works!

Maus wins for a few reasons but the main one is that it is equally about the son’s struggle to understand what his parents went through. I feel like we are all trying to understand what happened and Art’s voice really rings true.

And they helped further expand my understanding of what comic books can accomplish.

I say read them. They are great reading and really important.

11. Night

2009-04-07T19:35:00.003-04:00

by Elie Wiesel

How can this be true?

From his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech:

" And then I explained to him how naive we were, that the world did know and remained silent. And that is why I swore never to be silent... We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere..."

10. Indian Killer

2009-04-02T19:26:00.004-04:00

by Sherman Alexie

This one is a thriller with sometimes brutal, sometimes mystical prose. It is haunted by hundred plus year old Indian rage, at times a sort of forceful undercurrent in the novel and at others the very topic being discussed by the characters. But just like other thrillers, I was left in the dark about the awful culprit's identity and motives. Good stuff.

It's set in Seattle and the nearby Spokane Indian reservation, both of which are dealing with on-going festering tensions between whites and Indians. Someone is committing brutal murders with a knife, scalping the victims and leaving two owl feathers behind as a signature. Is it an Indian or some nutter trying to make it seem like an Indian did it? Alexie introduces a variety of characters who might have motive. All of them are either Indian, white people pretending to be Indians, white people that hate Indians, or, in the case of the main character, an Indian raised by white people (and who doesn't know what tribe he's from). As is the case with all of Alexie's work, no matter what genre he dabbles in, this is a novel deeply immersed in the problems of Indian identity.

Alexie is not known for this type of thriller, but he does a great job building suspense and creating some interesting/horrific crimes. It is a page-turner and sufficiently weird and inexplicable for me to have enjoyed it like all of his work. Like the title, for example. I spent the whole novel wondering if the title should be Killer Indian or Indian Killer. I won't say any more about that, though. That should be your problem as I do recommend this one for sure.

A young Indian to a white college professor who is irresponsibly teaching a "Native American Literature" course:

"If Crazy Horse, or Geronimo, or Sitting Bull came back...They would start a war....They'd listen to some dumb-shit Disney song and feel like hurting somebody....if the Ghost Dance worked ...All you white people would disappear. All of you. If those dead Indians came back to life...They'd kill you. They'd gut you and eat you heart."

9. Maus: A Survivor's Tale

2009-03-16T20:43:00.000-04:00

by Art Spiegelman

This graphic novel is a really impressive work of art and biography. Spiegelman tells the story of his strained relationship with his father as well as his father’s experience during Nazi occupation of Poland and the Holocaust.

For some reason I want to write about the story within the story (or comic book within the comic book) about Spiegelman’s mother’s suicide, and his own subsequent bout with madness. It is a dark and powerful moment in the story, and tells more of the effects such a war has had on generations of family. But it is Vladek’s (Art’s father) story, after all, that is being told here. Interestingly, this is an unsentimental depiction of his father, who, it seems, was quite a bastard. Maybe that’s what such experience does to a man. And, perhaps his son, since Spiegelman’s own depiction of himself is one of a son who is only interested in visiting his father to gather details for his book.

This is a great book. It’s a quick, powerful read that will leave you thinking about the extraordinary pain and suffering endured by those who survived the Holocaust.

How can we humans get to a point where this type genocide is a thing of the past?

8. The Light of Men

2009-03-16T07:45:00.007-04:00

by Andrew Salmon

First, this is all the fault of the folks over at Doc's 50.

I don't read much science fiction. I think the closest I've gotten is Vonnegut without feeling like I need more from the genre. I'm not sure I'd categorize Salmon's The Light of Men as such - sci fi is way too narrow for this one -- as it is quite a gripping novel in many ways. Salmon's style is unnervingly straightforward, which, once experienced, is just right for a novel set in a Nazi concentration camp. It's very effective at bringing a sense hunger, brutality, exhaustion and injustice close to the reader. In fact, it turns out that there is another very significant reason for this matter-of-fact style choice once we discover the true nature of the protagonist.

But it bothered me that, considering the setting, the protagonist's purpose was so narrow. Though he does go through a sort of limited transformation and revises his mission. Also, as an escapee from Christianity I found the religious parallels and allusions a bit... distracting. Fortunately Aaron goes through this same transformation in his logic as well. These are the only negatives for me, and they are matters of personal preference. I really like the book.

Damn, it's tough to discuss this without spoiling things.

I was definitely captivated by the question of this mysterious guy's identity and why he is so aloof as he steps off the crowded death-laden train and first encounters the horrors of the camp. I often flinched from the stark presentation of atrocities and at the same time leaned toward reading on to see what might happen next. It's a solid story, and a unique one.

The Light of Men is certainly a bit horror, has a healthy dose of sci fi, but its power is in its overwhelming sense of humanity... which is ironic since... oh, damn, I won't say a thing.

Definitely give this one a read. Hopefully you'll easily find it in bookstores soon because it deserves attention. Until then, you can find it on Amazon. Anyone find it somewhere else?

Other reviews of this book can be found at Mount Benson Report, Olman's Fifty, Doc's 50, and are soon to come at Jar's 50, and Meezy's Blog.

7. The Sea Wolf

2009-02-25T20:16:00.007-05:00

by Jack London

Didn't like it. Well, I enjoyed reading about a turn of the century gentleman suffering so greatly. Having never worked a day in his life, he finds himself aboard a schooner headed for Japan to hunt seals. This is a result of a highly implausible accident in San Francisco bay between this man's ferry and a steamer. The crew on The Ghost pluck him from the freezing bay waters but refuse to drop him off. Instead they sail out of the bay with the wealthy wimp and are at sea for most of the story.

The gentleman (on land, at least), Humphrey Van Weyden, becomes "Hump" the cabin boy/dishwasher at sea. This scene where the incredibly brutish and violent Captain Wolf Larsen is interrogating the gentleman his crew just saved, was fun:

"What do you do for a living?"
I confess I had never had such a question asked me before, nor had I ever canvassed it. I was quite taken aback, and before I could find myself had sillily stammered, "I-I am a gentleman."
His lip curled in a swift sneer.
"I have worked. I do work," I cried impetuously, as though he were my judge and I required vindication, and at the same time very much aware of my arrant idiocy in discussing the subject at all.
"For your living?"
There was something so imperative and masterful about him that I was quite beside myself-- "rattled," as Furuseth would have termed it, like a quaking child before a stern schoolmaster.
"Who feeds you?" was his next question.
"I have an income," I answered stoutly, and could have bitten my tongue the next instant. "All of which, you will pardon my observing, has nothing whatsoever to do with what I wish to see you about."
But he disregarded my protest.
"Who earned it? Eh? I thought so. Your father. You stand on dead men's legs. You've never had any of your own. You couldn't walk alone between two sunrises and hustle the meat for your belly for three meals. Let me see your hand."

That stuff is fun but the stormy, tortured, brutally primitive ship's captain seems annoyingly cardboard in the shadow of Captain Ahab. Captain Wolf Larsen seems to have little reason for his excessive brutality, excessively muscular body or for his desire to be at the helm of a seal hunting schooner full of men who'd love to see him dead.

Sorry, I much prefer the character of the wolf in White Fang than the one in The Sea Wolf. I much prefer the clarity and experiential nature of the ways of London's wild than the overblown primitivist/industrialist (?) philosophy bantered broodingly in the cabin of his ship, one that felt more like a stage setting than a schooner out on the Pacific.

I guess I'm really dissatisfied after my great experiences reading Call of the Wild and White Fang. I'm loving London, but I'm staying on land.

6. White Fang

2009-02-11T09:52:00.003-05:00

by Jack London

After reading The Call of the Wild, White Fang was just begging for a turn. I'm definitely on a Jack London kick.

White Fang is about a wolf born in the wild, but through unusual circumstances ends up in captivity where he endures unimaginable cruelties for much of his life. This renders White Fang a relatively tamed (obeys his cruel master, but wishes for the chance to tear out his throat) but violent, ferocious outcast of a wolf. He becomes the formidable enemy of the "man-gods" and his own kind. It's the latter that makes this a heartbreaking story.

Once again London's thoughts on the ongoing symbiotic relationship between humans and dogs are conveyed in the epic journey of a single canine. First is London's fascination with how dogs lend themselves to human mastery. White Fang depicts the extremes of human cruelty and abuse, and later kindness and love, from the point of view of a wolf. One great thing about London's writing his how his wolves think like wolves. Dogs and wolves don't think like humans. Instinct drives them and the discipline of experience teaches them what to do and what not to do. They don't share the "wide vision" of humans. London believes that wild beasts get quite as much pleasure as pain out of the life that they are intended to live. It is under the brutality of humans that White Fang is nearly driven to madness. And yet it is the love of another human master that saves this wolf in the end. Hmm. Man and dog.

Although London presents the wild's feral nature as something separate from human nature, White Fang is torn between the impulse to fidelity to (and loyalty safety and security of) his "man-god," and the ever-beckoning call of the Wild. Both are in his nature but, like all creatures, White Fang's nature is like clay molded by his environment.

I'm no expert but I'll dare say that as a biographer of wild animals, London has no match. This story is incredibly satisfying.

I'm left with a question: does the wild call because it is the opposite of a civilization we blame for what ails us (so Romantic!), or is the call something that humans instinctively feel? I'm stuck on this one. But I do know that The Call of the Wild and White Fang have stirred some instincts in me that are not fit for New York City living!

Word

2009-02-04T21:36:00.005-05:00

"The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightening and the lightening bug." - Mark Twain

5. Wilderness

2009-02-04T20:33:00.003-05:00

by Roddy Doyle

Roddy Doyle is a favorite Irish author in this household. Among his best novels are Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, A Star Called Henry and the Barrytown series: The Commitments, The Snapper and The Van. WIlderness, however, is a "young readers" book about a Dublin family that books an adventurer vacation in Finland.

It's really only the mother and two sons that go, while dad and daughter have the good sense to stay home. The daughter, Grainne, is to meet her biological mother for the first time since mom abandoned her in early childhood, while the boys and step mom travel to the icy north. Both stories are told in alternating chapters.

The boys have a thrill a minute as they bounce around in sleds pulled by hearty huskies. Grainne's experience at home is a sort of emotional wilderness as she reunites with her mother. Part roaring adventure, part family drama.

You get the idea. It's fun.

4. The Call of the Wild

2009-02-02T10:56:00.001-05:00

by Jack London

Buck. Hell of a dog.

This is one of those that I didn’t read when I was supposed to in my intellectually degenerate youth. I really wish I’d given this one a shot back then, though, as it would have affirmed my repressed animal intuition, just as being thrust into the Yukon wilderness did for the domesticated Buck.

Yep, the protagonist is a dog. Buck grew up a privileged dog on the property of a judge in Cailfornia, enjoying a life alongside his owners on hunting trips and warming his paws at the fireplace. You know, the sort of hearty, happy life a shepherd/St. Bernard mix might dream of. That is until one of the hired help secretly sells him to dog sledders from way up north. It isn’t long before Buck finds himself in the extremely harsh, brutal, primitive world of the frozen Yukon wilderness among dogs and men of a different order.

Buck must learn the ways of the wild, “the law of club and fang,” fast if he is going to survive.

Enough of the summary. The story is about the remarkable dog’s transformation from a domesticated, loyal family dog to a resourceful, primal ass-kicker of a dog (albeit one sold to slavery). It is incredibly beautiful.

And it’s an allegory, which invited me wonder a great deal about my own ability to survive without the sense-dulling safety net of civilized society. What if I was thrown into a world of wilderness? Could I survive? How would I fare when governed by the law of club and fang? I really do think I’d do well with the primitive life… but would not choose it.

Here’s a long excerpt from this amazing little book:

He swiftly lost the fastidiousness which had characterized his old life. A dainty eater, he found that his mates, finishing first, robbed him of his unfinished ration. There was no defending it. While he was fighting off two or three, it was disappearing down the throats of the others. To remedy this, he ate as fast as they; and, so greatly did hunger compel him, he was not above taking what did not belong to him. He watched and learned. When he saw Pike, one of the new dogs, a clever malingerer and thief, slyly steal a slice of bacon when Perrault's back was turned, he duplicated the performance the following day, getting away with the whole chunk. A great uproar was raised, but he was unsuspected; while Dub, an awkward blunderer who was always getting caught, was punished for Buck's misdeed.

This first theft marked Buck as fit to survive in the hostile Northland environment. It marked his adaptability, his capacity to adjust himself to changing conditions, the lack of which would have meant swift and terrible death. It marked, further, the decay or going to pieces of his moral nature, a vain thing and a handicap in the ruthless struggle for existence.` It was all well enough in the Southland, under the law of love and fellowship, to respect private property and personal feeling; but in the Northland, under the law of club and fang, whoso took such things into account was a fool, and in so far as he observed them he would fail to prosper.

Not that Buck reasoned it out. He was fit, that was all, and unconsciously he accommodated himself to the new mode of life. All his days, no matter what the odds, he had never run from a fight. But the club of the man in the red sweater had beaten into him a more fundamental and primitive code. Civilized, he could have died for a moral consideration, say the defense of Judge Miller's riding whip; but the completeness of his decivilization was now evidenced by his ability to flee from the defense of a moral consideration and so save his hide. He did not steal for joy of it, but because of the clamor of his stomach. He did not rob openly, but stole secretly and cunningly, out of respect for club and fang. In short, the things he did were done because it was easier to do them than not to do them.

Adaptability, cunning, physical strength, instinct, courage, and the willingness to administer violence. And even among dogs it is imagination that ensures ones survival. Those are the means of survival of the primitive life. But what about happiness?

As Buck becomes more adept at survival (among dogs and brutal men), he begins to experience something primordial rise within him. Leading the chase for a rabbit, he becomes intimate with his true dog nature:

There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life cannot rise. And such is the paradox of living, this ecstasy comes when one is most alive. This ecstasy, the forgetfulness of living, comes to the artist, caught up and out of himself in a sheet of flame; it comes to the soldier, war-mad on a stricken field and refusing quarter; and it came to Buck, leading the pack, sounding the old wolf-cry, straining after the food that was alive and that fled swiftly before him through the moonlight. He was sounding the depths of his nature, and of the parts of his nature that were deeper than he, going back into the womb of time. He was mastered by the sheer surging of life, the tidal wave of being, the perfect joy of each separate muscle, joint, and sinew in that it was everything that was not death, that it was aglow and rampant, expressing itself in movement, flying exultantly under the stars and over the face of dead matter that did not move.

I want that.

I did this story no justice whatsoever. I highly recommend this book. It’s a life-affirming story of a dog who finds freedom, and one you will not soon forget.

3. Engaging Grammar: Practical Advice for REAL Classrooms

2009-02-02T10:09:00.002-05:00

by Amy Benjamin with Tom Oliva

Oh, you wouldn't believe what happens to the semicolon in the end!

Some old college writing on Lolita

2009-01-26T20:18:00.003-05:00

I found it! Some reflective writing on Lolita from a Literature class in the Spring of 2000. It's not a cool as I remembered it to be.

Nothing in the realm of fiction has broken my heart as Lolita did. I read it years ago, but felt less like Humbert Humbert then, and longed less for my innocent childhood days. At once, I mourned for Dolores’ lost innocence and despised the depraved monster that stole it. But I also found myself reading on with, I’m embarrassed to admit, a certain curiosity. Of course, my defense will be that I was being manipulated by one of the true masters of the English language, although Nabokov deems his English “second-rate.” What, I wonder, does that say about me, the trusting reader?

Lolita is also a wonderful travel novel, albeit one propelled by desperation. The descriptions of the roads, various motel rooms and inns, and the plethora of vivid characters along the way, in totality make for a brilliant illustration of early to mid-century America. Yet, with all the incredibly vivid scenery, we must constantly remind ourselves that we are witnessing the perspective of an established liar and scoundrel. I have come to realize that “modernist” writers, if that can mean anything useful, are merely attempting to offer another kind of realistic experience. After all, when in real life do we have the benefit of an omniscient narrator with no interest in the outcome of his/her story? Is it not more realistic to read the story of a man who at least reveals that he is employing all his verbal faculties in order to persuade us, the jury? Perhaps some of the literary conventions of modernism are simply a new realm of realism. Or, perhaps, after experiencing Lolita, it is necessary for both terms to be abandoned.

2. Lolita

2009-01-25T23:19:00.002-05:00

by Vladimir Nabokov

“You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style” (chap 1, para 3).

The synopsis on the back of my copy calls the novel, “Nabokov’s most famous and controversial novel, which tells the story of the aging Humbert Humber’s obsessive, devouring, and doomed passion for the nymphet Dolores Haze.” Isn’t that beautiful? Sounds like a quintessential Romance novel. It manages not to use the terms phedophilia, rape, abduction, and “creep in the park who is rubbing himself on your daughter”… and other contemporary terms we use when this type of “love affair” happens in reality.

Apparently, according to the back cover of the same book, a Time magazine reviewer called it, “Intensely lyrical and wildly funny.” I think I missed the wildly funny part. Where was that? Okay, I did chuckle at some of his prickly observations of American culture. But what else is funny about it?

But I love the book. I suppose I have to admit my grimacing interest in (concern for?) the despicable pursuit, and my outrage at the abuse. I certainly enjoyed the scraps of triumph as the growing, petulant Dolores drives the sleazebag to madness. How many times did I wish the bastard hit by a car, kicked in the groin, walked in on by a hotel employee. Alas, the pedophile has his way again and again, knowingly destroying that whom he professes to love.

I suppose I object to all the reviewers, academics and publishers of this novel who call it a love affair, or love of any type but the grossest kind of solipsistic self-love. And I think Nabokov would agree that too many readers have fallen for Humbert’s greasy charms. It should be no surprise, though, as we have all heard someone argue the “she seduced me!” defense (hopefully in reference to someone of a compatible age!). See, so many of us are already prone to accepting this rationalization from men. We are half way to believing Humbert before he speaks. Lionel Trilling says that we then, “find ourselves the more shocked when we realize that, in the course of reading the novel, we have come virtually to condone the violation it presents … we have been seduced into conniving the violation, because we have permitted our fantasies to accept what we know to be revolting.” As readers, we are implicated in the crime.

But I love the book. I love it. As a reader I am captivated; as a writer I am humbled. It contains some of the richest, emphatic language I’ve read to date. Nabokov said it is, in part, about his “love affair with the English language” (Nabokov’s essay, “On a Book Entitled Lolita,” which is appended to my edition). I can’t say enough about his incredible lyrical style. It amazes me to think the Russian is his first language. English wasn’t even his second. There is a poetry to his writing that is moving, powerful. I will certainly read other Nabokov works in search of it. Partly with the hope that it doesn’t only reside in the voice of a pedophile!

Great book. I recommend it to anyone who 1) is old enough to understand that Dolores is not to blame for Humbert’s sickness (the narrator is quite slick with word play: puns, double entendre, and the outright lie) and 2) is not a victim of the Humberts of the world.

1. The Business of Fancydancing

2009-01-07T07:54:00.002-05:00

by Sherman Alexie

This is a small book of his stories and poems. His poetry has a clarity and simplicity that makes me glad about poetry again each time I read it. I read a lot of poetry and much of it is uptight, insecure bullshit. I'm afraid that might include my own. So reading Alexie's I feel at once so obviously not an Indian and that words have power when they are strung together with love and care.

There's love and care for words themselves, the reader, and for the subjects he writes about.

Also, he was very funny on The Colbert Report in late November:

http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/189691/october-28-2008/sherman-alexie

2008

2009-01-07T07:52:00.001-05:00

I ain't been read'n so much. It's in the past. In 2009 I'm going for 50 again. I love the goal.

8. The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fist Fight in Heaven

2008-09-16T20:30:00.003-04:00

by Sherman Alexie

Alexie is a Spokane Indian poet and novelist. This one is a collection of endearing, heartbreaking, humorous and ultimately hopeful in a limited way, short stories. Great stuff. I am exploring the stories along with my 12th grade English class. It has been great. They love his writing too but often for different reasons than me.

I think the author photo on the newest edition of Lone Ranger says a great deal about the man. Kind of reminds me of this guy's humor. A lot of pain that humor can make tolerable, sometimes palatable.

7. The Pillowman

2008-09-16T20:23:00.002-04:00

by Martin McDonagh

Jesus, this is perhaps the best funniest and darkest play if read. It's brilliant. An actor friend of mine tried to talk me into paying 70 bucks to see the play when it hit New York but everything he tried to tell me about it seemed just plain nuts. So I'm not going to try to explain it here for fear that you'll never see it or pick up a copy.

McDonagh also wrote and directed the movie In Bruges this past year, which was truly outstanding. Grossly underrated. You must see it.

6. Moby Dick

2008-08-10T22:06:00.002-04:00

by Herman Melville

Still walking on literary sea legs.

Awesome experience.

5. Into the Wild

2008-05-02T12:26:00.004-04:00

by John Krakauer

For years I have had it in my mind to read this book but it kept getting bumped on the list for something else. Alas I ended up renting the dvd, which is based on Krakauer's book. Sean Penn's "Into the Wild" is fantastic. I loved it. That was two or three weeks ago.

Krakauer's spirited account of Chris McCandless's open-eyed, passionate travels and subsequent death in the Alaskan wilderness was an outstanding read. The writer walks a literary tightrope between the distanced criticism of a traditional biographer and the voice of a writer who identifies deeply with the young man.

I am deeply moved by this kid's story. I wish I could have met him along the way. I wish he would have survived because I have a few questions for him.

It's funny, when I think about weather to recommend this book I find myself thinking about the kind of person that would benefit from it, for it is certainly not everyone. It think it's best for those who want to understand what happiness is (which is different from wanting to feel it). The book is not a complete answer, of course, but it will inspire a seeker along the way.

I also think it's a great book for readers who are interested in why many young, bright people put themselves at extreme risk for the sake of knowing or solving something within.

4. To Kill a Mockingbird

2008-04-28T20:47:00.004-04:00

by Nelle Harper Lee

What can I say about a book that's been discussed by millions over the past half century? I'll just get personal.

This is yet another book I didn't read when it was assigned in school. It's easy to remember this because I didn't read any of the books assigned, in junior high or high school. I've made up for this lack of reading since and in many cases I am glad to have these first experiences as an adult. My adolescent resistance has merit.

To Kill a Mockingbird is one of those books that I enjoyed immensely over this past two weeks. Ironically, I read it along with my seventh graders, who were also reading it for the first time. They got a kick out of knowing that I knew about as much as they did each step of the way. Our discussions were great as we shared our insights as equals.

I am usually reluctant to call a thing an American masterpiece, but what the hell. In this case it fits. It is so beautifully written: the music of deep south dialects, the charge of intensely felt grief over a dying way of life, the layers stomach turning racism, the awakening eyes of a young girl, the shared pain of an economic depression, and the fantastic suspense surrounding rape, homicide... Christ it's got everything. Best part, though, are the kids and their innocent, loving obsession with the mysterious Boo Radley.

I highly recommend this book, even though everyone as probably read it when they were supposed to.

3. A Man Without a Country

2008-04-06T12:39:00.003-04:00

by Kurt Vonnegut, absurdist

Like the folks over at Davids50, I enjoyed this little book of Vonnegut tidbits. But it felt like old territory for him. If you want to read his more powerful collections of essays and short pieces, try Palm Sunday (1981) and Wampeters, Foma and Grandfaloons (1974).

I liked it though.

2. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

2008-04-06T11:46:00.003-04:00

by Sherman Alexie

I laughed my ass off a couple of times despite the tragedies of this adolescent's life.

Sherman Alexie, perhaps best known for his novels Reservation Blues and The Long Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, has an incredibly prolific career writing from the world of American Indians today. It's the today part of Indian life and identity that he has been trying to illuminate for us- that they are living, breathing people who exist in the same contemporary world as the rest of us.

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian is adolescent literature about a high school boy named Junior who is a budding cartoonist growing up on the Spokane Indian reservation. He is a misfit and because of that is picked on mercilessly by his peers on the res. Despite this he manages to maintain a long time friendship with the toughest, meanest kid his age. In mean junkyard dog mean.

With the help of a loser teacher at the reservation's high school, Junior comes to realize that he'll never succeed unless he finds his way off the reservation. So he gets himself into the nearest high school (50 miles one way) outside, which is in the all white town of Rearden. So he is shunned on the res for trying to be white and shunned in his new school for being Indian. And all he wants to do is form him own identity and be happy. You get the idea.

The story is told in Junior's very funny, very self loathing adolescent voice. Sherman Alexie's gift is a certain blend of funny and tragedy. He makes understanding human identity and Indian identity great stuff to think about.

I like his novels. But I love his poetry. It's got a straightforward, plain speaking quality... Oh, just read some:

Little Big Man

I got eyes, Jack, that can see
an ant moving along the horizon
can pull four bottles shattering
down from the sky and recognize
the eyes of a blind man

who told me once, The future is yours
and I believed him until he left me
without a campfire, without an axe
to chop down a tree and build myself
a chair, house, cold drink.

Jack, how much pain is thre
in the world? I think there's only one kind
and we all keep moving around it in circles
like clumsy pioneers, over the same ground
until the landscape becomes so familiar
we settle down and call it home.

Seems like everybody wants to be an Indian.
Why should you be any different, Jack?
Still, when you rub the red dirt off your pale nose
your little insanities vanish.
Listen: the proof is glass.
When an Indian looks through a window
it's like a mirror. When the Indian looks
into a mirror, it's like a window.

I know you have dreams, Jack. We all want
an acre of land, love, and a full stomach.
Without that, we couldn't listen to the wind
without anger. But I've been sitting in a cold room
watching stars through a hole in the roof.
That bright star to the north doesn't have a name
I know. Like everything else, it will break my heart.

More:
http://www.fallsapart.com/horses.html

1. Memories of My Melancholy Whores

2008-02-17T09:31:00.003-05:00

by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

I finished my first book of 2008!

Marquez's newest novel Memories of My Melancholy Whores is a beautifully written narrative in the voice of a ninety-plus year old man (not far off from old Gabriel himself). On his ninetieth birthday he calls the madam of a local brothel- an old friend of his- and says he wants a virgin for that very night.

What ensues is the last waning days of an old man’s life as he stumbles on the reality that he hasn’t had a lasting loving relationship his entire adult life, opting instead for the temporary thrills of whores. He is coming to terms with his life long loneliness despite literally hundreds of relationships.

As is usual with Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the pages are laden with a very palatable, often heart gripping romanticism. Loss, loneliness, love, friendship are always of epic proportions. Homes fall into decay as their inhabitants suffer life without love. Old friends nurse the dying to health by mere reminiscence of greater by-gone days. It’s all corny when said this way, and no other writer I know could get away with this today, but Marquez is a master storyteller. Certainly among the world’s best. He puts a spit shine on life. He illuminates the depth and meaning in even the most mundane of lives. He’s certainly done it again in this short novel.

Ever since I met a professor who studies “senior sexuality,” I have been apprehensively intrigued by the issue. I will be sending him this book.

2008

2008-02-17T09:30:00.001-05:00

Well, last year's reading was scarce but that's all behind us now.

S.E. Hinton and The Outsiders

2007-10-10T06:13:00.000-04:00

Yes, it's 40 years later. This is an nice AP article wherein she reflects on the book and stuff. A nice read.

http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5gGyy-Aol9Q2dU7tbutR4nkrG05agD8RV1GNG0

10. The Giver

2007-09-02T20:48:00.000-04:00

by Lois Lowry

I recently read Lowry's Gathering Blue and wasn't impressed. The Giver is much, much better. Very good utopian/dystopian literature for younger readers. This one definitely gets worked into my middle school curriculum some day.

But that's about all I have to say on that.

9. A Thousand Splendid Suns

2007-09-02T20:34:00.000-04:00

by Khaled Hosseini

A few years ago this guy wrote his forst novel, The Kite Runner, which floored me. It is one of the best novels I've read. I was a little worried that his second novel would pale in comparison, or that it would turn out that he's just like so many other writers who have just that one genius book in them and don't know to quit, or that he'd try to force another Kite Runner, or that...

A Thousand Splendid Suns, is outstanding. It is comparable to Kite Runner in its emotional power and unflinching telling of how cruel and how loving people can be. Set entirely in Afghanistan, spanning from the 1960s into the 21st century, the novel tells of three generations of women who endure the whims of political despots, messy soviet communism, civil war and then their worst nightmare, the Taliban, and then US occupation, etc.

If you've read Kite Runner and wish for more from this guy, I can promise you that A Thousand Splendid Suns delivers... with perhaps more rewards.

I am more than relieved that Hosseini's second book kicks ass. This guy is great storyteller. I loved it. I couldn't put it down. It has expanded my mind about some things. It has strengthened my resolve about others. It has moved me deeply just as Kite Runner did. Powerful storytelling.

8. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time

2007-08-27T19:13:00.000-04:00

by Mark Haddon

I happened to be finishing this one up when Meezly posted her quick review of it. I have to say, despite this being well written in a mechanical sense (easy, smooth flowing narrative... like talking) I have two major problems that force me to give it a cold review.

First, for some reason I never trusted that the author's representation of the mental processes of autistic people was accurate. Why wouldn't I? I don't know. I am usually willing to give any author the benefit of the doubt. But there is something about this one that had me skeptical all the way through. In fact, after a while I felt like the whole thing was bullshit. It's not fair, though, to call a book bullshit when I can't back it up with concrete examples of said bullshit. And yet I am compelled to do so. I can't pinpoint why.

The larger problem I had with the book has to do with character. I think this book is a good example of how unrewarding a book can be when the protagonist undergoes little or no growth over the course of time. This character doesn't change. That is until the seemingly forced sense of confidence in the very last lines:

And I know I can do this because I went to London on my own, and because I solved the mystery of Who Killed Wellington? and I found my mother and I was brave and I wrote a book and that means I can do anything.

Really? Sadly, after getting to know this fellow's limitations (just as we all have our limitations), the reader is left with the knowledge that he is very wrong about his ability to do anything.

Sorry, this novel has turned me off like few have of late.

7. Gathering Blue

2007-08-14T12:16:00.000-04:00

by Lois Lowry

Lowry has created a strange but plausible future world (apparently she does something similar in The Giver). It is a society ruled by savagery and deceit, that shuns and discards the weak. Even the government is in on it. Left orphaned and physically disabled, Kira is made an exception, first because of a politically powerful grandfather and then by her talents as a weaver/artist. The great Council of Guardians saves her from being sent to "The Field" and gives her the task of finishing weaving an important communal robe by literally weaving in the story of the society's future (across the shoulders)...

You are welcomed to puke at any time.

6. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

2007-08-14T12:11:00.000-04:00

by J.K. Rowling

This was a richly rewarding ending to a fantastic seven book series. I loved the whole lot of them. I'll say nothing more.

5. A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier

2007-08-14T11:31:00.000-04:00

by Ishmael Beah

I read this one in July and am still blow away by it. Whenever the book is referenced the lump grows in my throat and the eyes well up. I guess in some small, safe way, I have been traumatized by his expereince. I am at once outraged by humanity's capacity for atrocity and deeply moved by our unwavering belief in eachother. It's inexplicable. It's great.

It probably helped that Sandy and I met him last night at a Q&A following a viewing of the documentary Sierra Leone's Refugee Allstars. We also met this remarkably positive, hopeful band of musicians.

Beah was a child through Sierra Leone's civil war (mid-1990s to 2004ish) and ended up indoctrinated into the govenerment army when he was twelve. What this boy had gone through, what he was forced to do, is perhaps the greatest crime of humanity. And yet he survived and is hopeful and loving... and an outstanding writer.

It is a shocking and heart-wrenching personal account of a civil war that was fought by tens of thousands of children, on both sides. Many of these children are now in their twenties and early thirties and are suffering in profound ways... or have not survived.

Beah has posted the first chapter for us:

http://www.alongwaygone.com/media/ALongWayGone_Excerpt.pdf

When he first walked past Sandy and I in the small theater last night, my heart filled with feelings for him. Mosty I felt an inner celebration for his survival mixed with immense gratitude for his decision to share this experience with us. Sandy told him as much. Beautiful.

The Sierra Leone Refugee Allstars are great. This is a band that formed in the refugee camps in Guinea and grew during their decade in exhile. They joined the Q&A last night and performed some of their music for us. Here they are. Here's the documentary, which I highly recommend.

Anyway, Beah's book is awesome. I think you should read it now.

Northbound 35

2007-06-14T08:58:00.000-04:00

I know that lyrics torn from their music often die an embarrassing death. But I think these by Richard Shindell are quite impressive ("except for ther phrase "champagne glasses"). I especially like the unknown-ness of "eslebound train."

Northbound 35
Through the iron hills
Under infidel skies
It's two hundred miles to drive
You won't be home

I saw an elsebound train
On the overpass
In the driving rain
Every ticket costs the same
For where you can't go

Mustang horses, champagne glasses
Anything frail anything wild
It’s the price of living motion
What's beautiful is broken
And grace is just the measure of a fall

So I rolled into your town
I passed the smokestacks
And the ore docks down off of Main
And the sky spun around
With her diamonds on fire

We fought all night and then we danced
In your kitchen
You were as much in my hands
As water or darkness or nothing
Can ever be held

It's just flashes that we own
Little snapshots
Made from breath and from bone
And out on the darkling plain alone
They light up the sky

It's 51 and driving south
Ain't it funny
How things'll turn out
I never even kissed you on the mouth
When we said goodbye

Thank You

2007-06-06T08:09:00.000-04:00

If the sun refused to shine, I would still be loving you.
When mountains crumble to the sea, there will still be you and me.
-Led Zep

4. The Road

2007-05-19T21:53:00.000-04:00

by Cormac McCarthy

I picked up this one on the recommendation of the folks at Mount Benson. A father and son travel on foot along the roads of a timeless post-apocalyptic landscape. The world is gray, a gray ash falls endlessly leaving a gray dust on the gray world. The only other hue in the story is black, which is the vast fire burnt landscape revealed only where the cold wind has blown the ash away. They are starving. And walking. Get it? Really. It's that bleak. Whatever happened happened years before and pretty much all resources have been depleted. There is absolutely no life left but for an occasional fellow human, but none will dare to risk getting close. The potential for horror is high and the reader encounters it often (and in surprisingly creative ways).

As bleak and futureless as this world is, the father and son relationship is remarkably beautiful. A book of hopelessness and horror and yet a heartfelt tale of the best of human emotions.

I definitely recommend this book. It's really quite a good read.

3. Jump Up and Say!

2007-05-03T12:35:00.000-04:00

edited by Linda Goss and Clay Goss.

This is a small "collection of Black storytelling" that provides a wide range of themes and geographical perspectives on the Black experience. There is also a wide range in the quality of storytelling, in my opinion. Even some of the works by the famous Alice Walker and Zora Neal Hurston were lackluster stories, making me wonder what the editors' intensions were. I still don't know. It is not merely a collection of inspirational writing. Nor is it simply writing about identity. I don't know why these stories are put together as they are in this collection. I also don't know why there are four stories from William Faulkner (by far the most of any author in the book) in the very beginning.

But some of the stories were great. Anyway...

2. From Both Sides Now: The poetry of the Vietnam war and its aftermath

2007-05-03T11:28:00.000-04:00

edited by Phillip Mahony

The is a very moving collection of poetry from a troubling war. Reading the American voices helped me replace many Hollywood images and ideas with ones closer to the event. The kind of truth I seek always seems to lay in the hearts of poets. After filling my head with so much of it, there is a general feeling of pain and hopefulness. What is most moving about the American poetry are the connections made between the soldiers and their enemies. These American soldier/poets try to love their enemy in very real ways. There is an underlying sense that both sides were trying to understand eachother while being compelled to fight.

The very best, most mind-expanding part of this collection was the mountain of poetry from South and North Vietnamese poets. Wow. It is so beautiful, so heartbreaking. And yet so damned hopeful. Like the American poets, the overwhelming majority were preoccupied with knowing the men on the other side. It made for memorable reading.

Finally, I came to further understand that while Americans saw this war at the "Vietnam War," the Vietnamese viewed it as a civil war, one that would lead to the inevitable requirement that they learn to live together in the aftermath. Where the Vietnamese poets concerned themselves with trying not to become hard hearted, finding pathways to peace and reaching reconciliation, the American poets did not have that pressure. Nevertheless, all sides share a sense of tremendous loss and longing to understand that war and its effect on the soul.

1. Fist Stick Knife Gun

2007-02-10T10:53:00.000-05:00

by Geoffrey Canada

This one shows up in the memoir/biography section but is really more of an argument about the culture of increasing violence in poor, urban American neighborhoods. And yet it's a memoir, a vivid account of a childhood surrounded by violence in the Bronx, a place where only those who can fight will survive. Christ, I don't know what it is but it's excellent. It's sort of a personal history of violence in America, if that makes sense.

Canada (the man, not the country) survived a dangerous youth and grew to become a teacher, principal and radical community organizer. This book leaps back and forth from his work with today's Bronx youth, many of whom have guns or can get them within the hour, and his own knife-populated youth. He has two basic premises: 1) violence is learned, not innate and threfore can be unlearned, and 2. guns have raised the stakes in poor urban neighborhoods. It is, as well, an indictment of the gun industry, which has deliberately targeted urban drug dealers and young people.

A great read. The man is inspiring, a warrior.

Sandy's 56 for 2006

2006-12-30T11:37:00.000-05:00

She doesn't want to make a big stink about her own private participation in the 50 books challenge, but I have to make one here. Not only did she read 56 books, but many of them are very impressive books, including The Iliad and The Odyssey! Check it out!

Instead of writing a review of each book, she has created a simple rating system:
F=how did this even get published?
D=not recommended
C=okay
B=recommended
A=this book rocks

1. Until I find you by John Irving (A: maybe my second favorite Irving book)
2. The God of Small Things by Arundati Roy (B: this book is too sad)
3. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (A)
4. Finbar's Hotel by a consortium of Irish writer (C)
5. Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha by Roddy Doyle (A: a repeat)
6. How to Practice by The Dalai Lama (C)
7. More Rootabaga Stories by Carl Sandburg (B)
8. Morning, Noon and Night by Spalding Grey (B)
9. Border Passages by Leila Ahmed (B-I learned a lot)
10. Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire (D: good idea, bad writing)
11. Persepolis by Marjan Satrapi (C)
12. Monster by Walter Dean Myers (C)
13. Interpreter of Maladies by J. Lahiri (B)
14. Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut (A: best book ever. a repeat)
15. The Known World by E. Jones (B)
16. Born on the Fourth of July by Ron Kovic (B)
17. Jarhead by A. Swofford (C)
18. A Parrot in the Oven by V. Martinez (C)
19. The Feminine Mystique by Betty Freidan (B: I learned a lot)
20. Don't Play in the Sun by M. Golden (B)
21. Chickamagua by S. Foote (C)
22. Ladies Night at Finbar Hotel (C)
23. The Bluest eye by Toni Morrison (B: a repeat)
24. Sundiata by D. T. Niane (D)
25. Fist Stick Knife Gun by Geoff Canada (A: an inspiration)
26. Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Natisi (C: writing is too academic)
27. Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger (B: it's growing on me. a repeat.)
28. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (C)
29. The Iliad by Homer (A)
30. Fires in the Mirror by Anna Devear Smith (C)
31. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury (B: a repeat)
32. Chinese Cinderella by Adeline Yen Mah (B)
33. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote (B)
34. Snakes and Earrings by H. Kanehara (D)
35. The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion (A)
36. The Giant's House by E. McCracken (C)
37. I Capture the Castle by D. Smith (B)
38. Amazing Grace by Jonathan Kozol (B: this one is too sad)
39. Flying with the Eagle, Racing with the Great Bear by J. Bruchac (A-)
40. Chronicles of a Death Foretold by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (A-)
41. Doctors Cry Too by F. Boehm (D: kind of corny)
42. Farewell to Manzanar by J. Wakatsuki-Houston (B+)
43. The Odyssey by Homer (A)
44. Teacher Man by Frank McCourt (B+)
45. In Dubious Battle by John Steinbeck (C)
46. Lucy by Jamaica Kincaid (B)
47. Lord of the Rings I (B)
48. Lord of the Rings II (B)
49. Lord of the Rings III by J.R.R. Tolkein (B)
50. 'Tis by Frank McCourt (B-)
51. Animal Farm by George Orwell (C)
52. The Miner by N. Soseki (A-)
53. Wholly Communion by assorted poets (B)
54. Satanic Verses by Salaman Rushdie (B+)
55. The Crucible by Arthur Miller (C)
56. Rabbit Proof Fence by D. Pilkinton (C-)

Wow.

18. The Crucible

2006-12-20T12:37:00.000-05:00

by Arthur Miller

This reading was inspired by the folks at June23rd.

Our nation had bizarre and violent beginnings. In a way, we are born from moral panic. We haven't stopped hunting witches, in their many forms, since.

The Crucible is really good play. I just taught it to my tenth grade. We read the whole thing in class over the course of two weeks. They loved it. I loved it. It really came to life over the days. We traded off parts each day so everyone read minor and major parts.

A great reading experience that turned into somewhat of a performance. I am looking forward to the next time they play comes around.

This will be a bit cryptic (to minimize spoilers) I am amazed by what happens to Salem when damn near all its leaders are in jail. And why is not cause for the men to rethink. Just the fact that no one in the region put a stop to this is mind boggling.

Crowfoot and Hagakure

2006-12-06T23:04:00.000-05:00

Two great quotes I encountered this year:

"What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the winter time. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the Sunset."
-Crowfoot, Blackfoot Indian

"There is something to be learned from a rainstorm. When meeting with a sudden shower, you try not to get wet and
run quickly along the road. But doing such things as passing under the eaves of houses, you still get wet. When you
are resolved from the beginning, you will not be perplexed, though you still get the same soaking. This understanding
extends to everything."
- Hagakure, The Book of the Samurai

The latter quote is (finally) a good definition for the Japanese expression "shoganai," which is too often assumed to mean the same as the Western defeatist shrugging of the shoulders. I love this expression, shoganai, and am happy I've finally found a way to define it.

The first one, by Crowfoot, is really beautiful. Especially the second sentence, "It is the breath of a buffalo in the winter time." That is certainly not nothing! But it is a momentary flash, or force, in the grand scheme of things. And the fact that such a breath is beautiful, or stinks like rotting grass, doesn't matter so much.

Songs

2006-11-04T08:59:00.000-05:00

I haven't been doing a lot of reading outside of student wok, but that doesn't mean there aren't a lot of words going in. Here are a few songs that have affected me lately:

I See a Darkness - Johnny Cash and Will Oldham (Oldham's song)
The Curtain/With - Phish (Brooklyn Cyclones Stadium, August, 2004)
No One Knows My Name and Lover's Prayer - Gillian Welch (in fact the whole album, Soul Journey is excellent)
Ole Slew Foot - James McMurtry
I'm a Long Way from Home - Shooter Jennings (singing one of his dad's songs)
Falafel - Pierre Bensusan
Willin' - Little Feat

Still can't get enough of Richard Shindell's album, Vuelta, that I bought a year ago.

I have also been purusing the brand new Who album wherever I can hear it for free. It's pretty good. Townsend sings a lot and, in their old age, he sounds much better than Daltry. The album is a poppy and operatic at the same time, which is how Townsend has always been. But the rock opera section of this one is about a pop band that does something-or-other so it makes sense. Some great Townsend vocals.

17. 6 Poems

2006-08-29T22:52:00.000-04:00

by Margaux Delotte-Bennett

Ordinarily I'd say this book was too short to count but I must make an exception. This is my dear friend's book and she published it herself. In fact she made them herself. And the poetry, as usual, is deeply personal, asking the reader to read closely and be moved. I did and I was.

Her poetry is richly rewarding. I highly recommend you find one of these rare copies! In fact, if you ask I might send you mine.

16. Fahrenheit 451

2006-08-17T14:33:00.000-04:00

by Ray Bradbury

This probably won't shock you but I have read this book before. This time was better. It's strange, we often consider these books optimal for adolescents (that is when we are forced to read them) when in fact it takes a mature mind to fully realize this little book's power. I was stricken this time by a troubling difference between the world in Orwell's 1984 (often considered F 451's "other") and this one. In 1984, the problem is a totalitarian government forcing its will on the people and, of course, the control of language. Bradbury, on the other hand, creates a world where it is not the government that begins things by burning books- it's ordinary people who turn away from reading and the habits of thought and reflection in encourages. When the governemtn starts actively censoring information, most people don't even bat an eye.

Bradbury's world is a utopia of sorts. Everyone is happily distracted by life's pain and suffering. Instead, people live lives of convenience, pleasure and a trouble free "happiness" brought on by some great technological advances in TV (wouldn't we all like an interactive TV that runs from floor to ceiling on all four walls of a room?), "sea shell" earpieces that whisper sweet nothings 24 hours a day, and drugs. It's interesting to read this in a time of hundreds of channels of TV avaiable 24 hours, including an array of challengeless reality shows, Walkmans, iPods, and literally thousands of pain-reducing drugs to choose from, all of which serve their specific purposes... and isolate us from humanity. Oh, it's that last part that is the downer.

Some lines that were cause for pause this time around:

"You are intuitively right, that's what counts."

"Good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies."

"You can't guarantee things like that! After all, when we had all the books we needed, we still insisted on finding the highest cliff to jump off. But we do need a breather. We do need knowledge. And perhaps in a thousand years we might pick smaller cliffs to jump off. The books are to remind us what asses and fools we are."

"Our civilization is flinging itself to pieces. Stand back from the centrifuge."

"The blowing of a single autumn leaf."

"Shake the tree and knock the great sloth down on his ass."

Anyway, everyone has read this book so there is little sense in reviewing it at length. I liked it even more the second time around. Pick up a copy. Give it another read.

By the way, I just discovered that this book had a special edition of 200 copies printed in 1953 with an asbestos cover! What they didn't know about asbestos! There's one copy going for $13,000.

from The Curtain

2006-08-15T13:08:00.000-04:00

As he saw his life run away from him
Thousands ran along
Chanting words from a song:

Please we have no regrets
Please we have no regrets

15. Fires in the Mirror

2006-08-13T18:23:00.000-04:00

by Anna Deavere Smith

This is a eye-opening series of monologues performed live by Anna Deavere Smith in 1993. Like most New Yorkers, the 1991 Crown Heights riots both shocked and perpexed her. In these 20 or so monologues, all of which she performs herself, she manages to channel a diversity of voices of both sides of this conflict. It is not only important social commentary but a creative look at the culture gap between Black and Hassidic neighbors in Crown Heights.

I have ordered the live performance on video, which is certainly the best way to experience this thing.

14. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

2006-08-07T12:43:00.000-04:00

by Robert Louis Stevenson

Nabokov (who bought the rights to Jekyll and Hyde) implores to readers, "Please completely forget, disremember, obliterate, unlearn, consign to oblivion any notion you may have had that Jekyll and Hyde is some kind of mystery story, a detective story or a movie." Of course I found that impossible being that this story had been retold hundreds of times in my own lifetime. It has become a staple of Halloween. Certain aspects of the novel are frequently credited as being a prominient ancestor to our modern mystery and detective stories. How does one erase such lore from one's consciousness and go on reading the thing?

Well, the answer is to just relax knowing it is not necessary. The answer is to skip right past the pretencious literary introductions added to books way after the fact and read the thing itself. I admire Nabokov greatly but for his own fiction, not his haughty justifications others'.

Anyway, despite the high Victorian style and language, I really dug this novel. It is a remarkably strange 72 pages. Well worth the trouble. Here is a copy in hypertext:

http://etext.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/SteJekl.html

While you are at it, you might want to browse the other texts that the University of Virginia has been converting to hypertext.

http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/collections/languages/

Happy Birthday Jerry Garcia

2006-08-01T13:16:00.000-04:00

That's it. Just happy birthday.

13. In Dubious Battle

2006-07-30T22:38:00.000-04:00

by John Steinbeck

This is one of Steinbeck's novels about migrant labor strife. And an awesome one. Apporoximately 1,500 workers arrive at California apple orchards to find that the orchard owners had decided to cut their pay. With the help of the protagonists, two labor organizers, better knows as reds or radicals, they strike and all hell breaks loose. The rapacious landowners will stop at nothing to get their apples to market (besides paying a decent wage; they'd rather kill) and the starving, angry migrant workers have absolutely nothing left to lose. The violence- and there is a great deal of it throughout- was nothing short of apocalyptic.

A gripping, tense novel. I'd go on about Steinbeck's extraordinary social vision and perfectly natural voice but we all know about it. Still, this being my foourth Steinbeck novel I am beginning to think he's a friggin' Shakepeare.

12. Honky

2006-07-24T21:04:00.000-04:00

by Dalton Conley

This one is a memoir written by a white dude who grew up in the projects of the lower East Side, in Manhattan. In fact, he and his sister where the only white kids to grow up there. Conley, now a sociologist, draws on his experiences being the "other" in an environment where race and class as social determinants are impossible to ignore. As he argues, if Whitey wants to witness the gap between white priviledge and black and latino social obstruction, he/she move to the projects.

The book is a fairly interesting look at identity development in terms of race and class, two undeniable factors when brought up amidst members of underclasses. I liked it as a memoir but a not sure it holds much water as a sociological study. After all, the very act of writing one's memoir is the act of constructing a reality, not observing one. But I even like the problems this poses him as a sociologist. How does such a person tell the "truth" when he is so damned close to it?

A good read and a great catalyist for many inevitably heated discussions.

Sandy's 50 (so far)

2006-07-24T20:45:00.000-04:00

Sandy doesn't want to start a blog but she has been quitely rocking the 50 book challenge. Here is what she has read since January 1:

1. Until I find you by John Irving
2. The God of Small Things by Arundati Roy
3. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
4. Finbar's Hotel by a consortium of Irish writer
5. Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha by Roddy Doyle
6. How to Practice by The Dalai Lama
7. More Rootabaga Stories by Carl Sandburg
8. Morning, Noon and Night by Spalding Grey
9. Border Passages by Leila Ahmed
10. Pegagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire
11. Persepolis by Marjan Satrapi
12. Monster by Walter Dean Myers
13. Interpreter of Maladies by J. Lahiri
14. Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
15. The Known World by E. Jones
16. Born on the Fourth of July by Ron Kovic
17. Jarhead by A. Swofford
18. A Parrot in the Oven by V. Martinez
19. The Feminine Mystique by Betty Freidan
20. Don't Play in the Sun by M. Golden
21. Chickamagua by S. Foote
22. Ladies Night at Finbar Hotel
23. The Bluest eye by Toni Morrison
24. Sundiata by D. T. Niane
25. Fist Stick Knife Gun by Geoff Canada
26. Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Natisi
27. Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
28. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

11. In Cold Blood

2006-07-20T09:06:00.000-04:00

by Truman Capote

Wow. This was quite a compelling read. Like most readers I knew the story beforehand but it didn't matter. Capote has written an outstanding piece of non-fiction, or "creative non-fiction" as he called it. He writes about a real life multiple murder in rural Kansas but in a style that explores the humanity of it. Yes, the goodness and usefulness of the family that was slaughtered but also the humanness of the killers. It is compelling because Capote is able to bring all characters to life. One effect is that the murderers are not the usual distant cardboard monsters. They are also not the product of a slack-jawed liberal writer striving to make excuses for them. Instead, In Cold Blood explores their lives- and everyone they have crossed paths with- in extraordinary human detail.

Never have I come to know so many characters so intimately: each member of the Clutter family, the local sheriff, the killers, the Clutter family's friends and loved ones, state investigators, etc. It's written so well that I feel like I met them during that aweful time.

Here is an example of Capote's ability to combine the results of extensive interviews with the people involved in the case and his creative abilities. In this part, the two killers, Perry and Dick, are chatting. Perry is telling Dick of a dream he had the night before. In it Perry is being attacked by a snake. Perry cuts the story short whe he realized Dick was uninterested and would likely not understand the rest.

"Dick said, 'So? The snake swallows you? Or what?"

"'Never mind. It's not important.' (But it was! The finale was of great importance, a source of private joy. He'd once told it to his friend Willie-Jay; he had described to him the towering bird, the yellow 'sort of parrot.' Of course, Willie-Jay was different- delicate minded, 'a saint.' He'd understood. But Dick? Dick might laugh. And that Perry could not abide: anyone's ridiculing the parrot, which had first flown into his dreams when he was seven years old, a hated, hating half-breed child living in a California orphanage run by nuns- shrouded disciplinarians who whipped him for wetting his bed. It was after one of these beatings, one he could never forget ('She woke me up. She had a flashlight, and she hit me with it. Hit me and hit me. And when the flashlight broke, she went on hitting me in the dark.'), that the parrot appeared, arrived while he slept, a bird 'taller than Jesus yellow like a sunflower,' a warrior angel who blinded the nuns with its beak, fed upon her eyes, slaughtered them as they 'pleaded for mercy,' then so gently lifted him, enfolded him, winged him away to 'paradise.'

"As the years went by, the particular torments from which the bird delivered him altered; other- older children, his father, a faithless girl, a sergeant he'd known in the Army- replaced the nuns, but the parrot remained, a hovering avenger...")

I think this is a good example of Capote's mode of "creative non-fiction." He sat with Perry Smith- the real Perry Smith- for hours upon hours each visit for years. In fact, Capote sat with everyone involved in this case and nearly everyone in Holcolm, Kansas and the surrounding towns. The result is a writer (who was already a sucessful novelist and journalist) who knew all parties so intimately that it was nearly impossible to write without compassion for and understanding of the humanity revealed in this single event. What we have in In Cold Blood is not simply a re-telling of a heinous crime, but a very deep exploration of the lives of those effected by the event: victims and murderers, their families and friends, a confounded and eventually triumphant law enforcent, the local postal worker... You name it.

Of course, the book does pose problems for those who tend to cling to factual truth. But there are other kinds of truth that artists try to reveal.

I highly recommend this book.

10. Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America

2006-07-18T23:54:00.001-04:00

by Barbara Ehrenriech

A good read. Sort of what you might expect from of a now privileged prolific political writer who cares deeply about struggling people. She reports on her passable job of trying to exist economically working some of the more low end jobs. Her gift is her sensitivity and willngness to write about her very personal struggles trying to cover the costs of rent and food while working as a house cleaner, hotel room service worker and a resaraunt waitress. Turns out that it can't be done for very long.

Problem is that she approaches it half-heartedly. What I mean is that that she allots herself a rental car, health care and a certain distance from her "subjects." These amenities render her incapable of experiencing the most critical aspects of these people's lives: the falling. What happens when the car breaks down? What happens when you really can't make the rent? What happens when you don't have health insurance for a long period of time? These are the concerns that drive this class of people. The fact that there is no safety net. The fact that economic as well as emotional crisis are imminent, a guarantee.

I think the book is a good report from one member of the upper middle class to others of the same class but I'm not sure of its effectiveness as a catalyst for change.

But she does criticize Wal-Mart, although even that is a soft punch.

Redwing

2006-05-15T11:38:00.000-04:00

Check out our friend's new boat.

Graduation

2006-05-15T11:19:00.000-04:00

I finally graduated. I am relieved. Tired and relieved.

9. If I Die in a Combat Zone: Box Me Up and Ship Me Home

2006-05-04T19:11:00.000-04:00

by Tim O'Brien

This is a kick-ass memoir of a foot soldier's 1-year stint in Vietnam. It is O'Brien's first book, written soon after the war ended. My first exposure to his writing was a short story called "The Sweetheart of the Song Tro Bong," which was a powerful read as well.

I don't know. There is something about writing that tries to tell the truth that rings clearer, that stands out above the mountains of published bullshit. Sort of like Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five, another author's attempt to write about the most painful experience of his life. Some things must be written.

I enjoyed O'Brien's style, which is a shifting back and forth between a frank, matter-of-fact voice and a contemplative, heartfelt one. The latter gave the effect of being in the guy's head while he trapsed through mine fields, seeing the incredible natural beauty about him that was also blowing his friends to bits each day. It is the inner discourse of a man who morally objected to the war but didn't have to will to run to Canada or the riches to buy a get-out-of-Nam-free card.

It is a good philosophical read. The more I learn about Vietnam, the more obviously insane the whole thing was.

8. Art Works! Interdisciplinary Learning Powered by the Arts

2006-04-20T21:38:00.000-04:00

Edited by Dunnie Palmer Wolf ad Dana Balick

The itle of this book pretty much tells the whole story. The theory is pretty straightforward stuff. But this book was valuable in that it provided a collection of in-depth case studies of teacher incorporating multiple disciplines into broad themed projects. Often, the results were interesting school wide projects.

Most notable was a project headed by a Humanities teacher in Massachusetts. She had chosen the topic of "The Middle East" and knew she wanted her students to explore the many cultures and conflicts that exist in that region today, especially the issues surrounding Israel. She and many colleagues from the other disciplines (Math, History, Science, Art, etc.) developed what they called The Jerusalem Project. In short, students were challenged to create designs for a community center in Jerusalem that would meet the needs of the diverse groups now living in conflict in the region. The idea was to create a facility that would express, architecturally, the values of all groups and would bring the sides together. You get the idea.

Anyway, on to the next novel...

Good advice for avid news watchers

2006-04-15T00:26:00.000-04:00

"It would be better not to know so many things than to know so many things that are not so." - Felix Okoye

7. Born on the Fouth of July

2006-04-14T00:17:00.000-04:00

by Ron Kovic

Wow. What a powerful, heartwrenching memoir. I am somehwat speechless. What our warroirs live through, what we ask them to do, is just plain wrong.

The Wheel

2006-03-18T22:04:00.000-05:00

The wheel is turning and you can't slow down,
you can't let go and you can't hold on,
you can't go back and you can't stand still,
if the thunder don't get you then the lightning will.

-Grateful Dead

6. Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood

2006-03-16T17:17:00.000-05:00

by Marjane Satrapi

Satrapi is an Iranian and this is her autobiography in comic book form. Capturing her life from ages ten through fourteen in a country rought with uprisings, revolution and social turmoil. It is a forceful coming-of-age story. Amidst a world of turmoil and opression, Satrapi emerges. She tells of her family's everyday existence in touching, disarming detail while simultaneously illustrating the history of a short, violent period of Iran's history. The graphics are at once enlightening and very disturbing. Even the most terrible moments are conveyed with an unflinching matter-of-fact tone that seems to simply pass any appropriate angst on to the reader.

I picked this up from my cooperating teacher's desk while the students watched a movie clip and finished it by the end of the day. What a good read. I highly recommend it.

Apparently, Satrapi has written Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return. I'm certainly going to read it.

Kite Runner stuff

2006-03-13T21:43:00.000-05:00

Hey, did you read The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini? If so, this BBC News article might interest you. Why they would ban such and important sport is beyond me...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/4800004.stm

If you haven't read this novel, I highly recommend it. I have a review in my archives.

5. Is This English?: Race, Language and Culture in the Classroom

2006-02-23T16:23:00.000-05:00

by Bob Fecho

Another self-congratulatory teaching book written by a white guy teaching bloack kids. Oddly, after having read the book I am not sure why he chose that particular title.

I think the most useful thing I've gotten from Fecho's book is a clearer idea of what is meant by "learning across borders" and his well articulated discussion of the discomfort we experience in dialogue when situated outside our comfort zone. I am encouraged by his insistance that we cross boundaries, take risks, interrogate eachother and "share the discomfort," and to learn about that.

I appreciate Fecho’s argument about making inquiry not just an occasional component to classroom teaching, but the center of it. Inquiry is not something students can turn on and off depending on the demands of our lessons. Rather it is a habit of the critical mind, to be cultivated daily. It is the process of learning. Not only that, an inquiry based classroom gives itself permission to take the risks we "experts" fear will reveal how little we know about eachother and our differences.

Yawn.

Are you still reading this?