Mark Steyn pointed to his post of a while ago which detailed his trip to see the most humble Presidential headstone.
http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MTkwYjE1YmMxMzVhNTM5NzAxYWMwYjNlYzBkNjEyZWM=
“We draw our presidents from the people,” said Coolidge. “I came from them. I wish to be one of them again.”
As an aside I should point out that John Derbyshire made excellent use of Silent Cal's ghost in his novel Seeing Calvin Coolidge in a Dream, which may well be the most original usage of a presidential persona in a book. I have the book available to lend is anyone is interested.
And, if you were born in the last thirty years here's Kethryn Jean Lopez with a three minute youtube primer that will painlessly teach you more U.S. history than you learned in school. If you were born before 1979 it will make you laugh.
http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=YzI4Mjc5MjQ2NzEwZjIyZTA0OTdlMjVhYzQ0MWJmYTM=
Showing posts with label novels. Show all posts
Showing posts with label novels. Show all posts
Monday, February 16, 2009
Sunday, October 26, 2008
Catching up on book reviews
I've been busy reading and listening to booktapes. Here are a few quick reviews.
True Grit by Charles Portis - I listened to this as an audio book last week. I had never read it, or even heard of it except as the title for the movie. This novel is a masterpiece. It's told from the point of view of an old spinster who hired Rooster Cogburn to help track down her father's killer back when she was 14 years old and then accompanied him on the hunt. It's a bit over the top, but then a good adventure story should be a bit over the top. If you liked Huckleberry Finn or Kim or Tom Sawyer or Red Badge of Courage you should pick this book up. It's short (6.5 hours on 6 CDs) and gripping. I think is it would be as good reading as listening.
Getting Mother's Body by Suzan-Lori Parks - I also listened to this as an audio book last week. It's also short (7.5 hours on 6 CDs) and it's gripping in a different way than True Grit. It's the story of a pregnant black teenager in the 1960's South as she and various relatives set out to dig up her mother's body both to move it from where a shopping center is going to be built and also to retrieve a treasure of jewelry that they think her mother was buried with. I'll write more about this later in another post because as an audio book it's unique in my experience in that it includes professionally performed blues songs as the voice of the mother, so it's more of a multi-media presentation such as might be put on by an old timey storyteller. Probably a good read as well, but that depends on how well you can tolerate reading colloquial dialogue.
Compulsion by Jonathan Kellerman - I read this in the large print edition that all the book racks seem to have on them now as us old geezers start to predominate in the reading population. A typical Jonathan Kellerman production - well written, interesting plot, characters who are old friends if you've read his other books. It's not literature, but if you must waste time reading popular novels it's an excellent one.
The Burnt House - by Faye Kellerman - I picked this up at the same time as I picked up her husband's book (above) but, oddly enough, it is a regular sized paperback. Pretty much ditto with what I said about the book above; but if I were forced to choose between them I would say Faye writes the better novel, at least for me. She gets a bit more into the actual lives and thinking of her characters, or maybe I'm a smidgen more interested in her characters than I am in Jonathan's. Well worth reading - no, more than that - excellent.
Book of the Dead - by Patricia Cornwell - It's a sad thing to see a writer you've enjoyed in the past go over the edge and take her characters with her into utterly preposterous psychological waters. There is a phrase, "jumped the shark," which is applied to TV shows that have gone over the top and into the realm of the ridiculous. That phrase aptly describes what Cornwell did in this book, and what she has been threatening to do in a couple of previous books. The name brand critics apparently loved it; but then the name brand critics inhabit a world where it's reasonable to believe that one of a pair of very close twenty year friends and business associates suddenly tries to rape the other. Non-geniuses like Cornwell are well advised to leave repressed desire themes to geniuses. Also, the underlying plot is preposterously complex and unlikely even by pulp novel standard; and the main character's niece has now accumulated so many diverse skill sets that she puts James Bond, Sherlock Holmes and Jason Bourne to shame. The niece is now Wonder Woman with Marie Curie's brain; but still encumbered by a healthy dollop of downright Victorian emotional stupidity. I managed to finish it; but I won't pick up her next book.
True Grit by Charles Portis - I listened to this as an audio book last week. I had never read it, or even heard of it except as the title for the movie. This novel is a masterpiece. It's told from the point of view of an old spinster who hired Rooster Cogburn to help track down her father's killer back when she was 14 years old and then accompanied him on the hunt. It's a bit over the top, but then a good adventure story should be a bit over the top. If you liked Huckleberry Finn or Kim or Tom Sawyer or Red Badge of Courage you should pick this book up. It's short (6.5 hours on 6 CDs) and gripping. I think is it would be as good reading as listening.
Getting Mother's Body by Suzan-Lori Parks - I also listened to this as an audio book last week. It's also short (7.5 hours on 6 CDs) and it's gripping in a different way than True Grit. It's the story of a pregnant black teenager in the 1960's South as she and various relatives set out to dig up her mother's body both to move it from where a shopping center is going to be built and also to retrieve a treasure of jewelry that they think her mother was buried with. I'll write more about this later in another post because as an audio book it's unique in my experience in that it includes professionally performed blues songs as the voice of the mother, so it's more of a multi-media presentation such as might be put on by an old timey storyteller. Probably a good read as well, but that depends on how well you can tolerate reading colloquial dialogue.
Compulsion by Jonathan Kellerman - I read this in the large print edition that all the book racks seem to have on them now as us old geezers start to predominate in the reading population. A typical Jonathan Kellerman production - well written, interesting plot, characters who are old friends if you've read his other books. It's not literature, but if you must waste time reading popular novels it's an excellent one.
The Burnt House - by Faye Kellerman - I picked this up at the same time as I picked up her husband's book (above) but, oddly enough, it is a regular sized paperback. Pretty much ditto with what I said about the book above; but if I were forced to choose between them I would say Faye writes the better novel, at least for me. She gets a bit more into the actual lives and thinking of her characters, or maybe I'm a smidgen more interested in her characters than I am in Jonathan's. Well worth reading - no, more than that - excellent.
Book of the Dead - by Patricia Cornwell - It's a sad thing to see a writer you've enjoyed in the past go over the edge and take her characters with her into utterly preposterous psychological waters. There is a phrase, "jumped the shark," which is applied to TV shows that have gone over the top and into the realm of the ridiculous. That phrase aptly describes what Cornwell did in this book, and what she has been threatening to do in a couple of previous books. The name brand critics apparently loved it; but then the name brand critics inhabit a world where it's reasonable to believe that one of a pair of very close twenty year friends and business associates suddenly tries to rape the other. Non-geniuses like Cornwell are well advised to leave repressed desire themes to geniuses. Also, the underlying plot is preposterously complex and unlikely even by pulp novel standard; and the main character's niece has now accumulated so many diverse skill sets that she puts James Bond, Sherlock Holmes and Jason Bourne to shame. The niece is now Wonder Woman with Marie Curie's brain; but still encumbered by a healthy dollop of downright Victorian emotional stupidity. I managed to finish it; but I won't pick up her next book.
Wednesday, September 24, 2008
A sublime confection
For the past couple of weeks I've been listening on and off to an audio novel titled The Book of Air and Shadows by one Michael Gruber, who I’ve never heard of before although I find he has five recently published novels on Amazon. He must have achieved significant success with one and then had publishers eager to bring out his former efforts.
I’m only about halfway through Air and Shadows; yet he has already managed to include a bookie, an intellectual property lawyer, the Russian mob, Shakespeare scholars, a document ciphered in the 16th century, a discussion of world class weightlifting, a Palestinian driver who formerly served as one of Yassir Arafat’s bodyguards, a detailed discussion of bookbinding, a pistol formerly owned by a decorated member of the SS and a world class model. What a sublime confection. When I have such an audio book in the car I yearn for the days of long commutes.
In enumerating the list above I’m only scratching the surface of the complexity; yet he makes it delightfully readable, or rather listenable. I have to be careful of that distinction because on more than one occasion I've found novels that enrapture me in audio to later bore me on the printed page - and not because I’ve read them as my second go around, already knowing the plot. I often reread novels, yet I only rarely find my first judgment faulty on second or third reading. The very best novels, in fact, become like old friends, improving with the rereading at different stages of life. In that class I can name, off the top of my head: Tai-Pan, Hawaii, The Godfather, The Mote in God's Eye, The Winds of War, War and Remembrance, Shogun, Stranger in a Strange Land, Shibumi, A Soldier of the Great War, Kim. . . I'd better stop; the list could go on for a long time.
Lest you think me a total time wastrel I should point out that I took a one credit hour speed reading course way back when at Illinois Tech. I came out of that course barely able to sustain eleven hundred words per minute, almost a page of easy material at a glance; although a headache would stop me after about a half hour. So, when I say I read something, I might mean I savored it at a couple of hundred words per minute, and I might mean I slammed through it at six or seven hundred words per minute. There was a time when I could slam through an interesting novel of a certain sort at almost a thousand words per minute without the headache.
Here's a cheery thought for you young folks - the performance of one's central processing unit, among other things, does not improve with age; and furthermore, as a general rule, what does not improve over time degrades over time. I used to see more than a dozen stars in The Great Square of Pegasus - now I see two. That is not all the result of light pollution.
The physicist Richard Feynman did a long running study of his own central processing unit by regularly doing certain mental calculations and recording the time and accuracy in his notebook. If you find his writeup of that study it will not improve your mood. There's another great book - What Do You Care What Other People Think - and another - Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman. Not for nothing did Freeman Dyson once refer to him as "all genius, all buffoon" - what a character. I once believed that I had attained a glimmer of understanding of why his seemingly simple little idea of Feynman Diagrams was worthy of a Nobel Prize in physics but I gave up on thinking I understood that kind of stuff a long time ago.
Another related story, Albert Einstein once wrote a simple little book in plain language about general relativity. I can't remember the title; but I remember foolishly thinking I understood what he was saying - this was back when I foolishly thought I grasped the Lorentz Transformations because I could ponderously follow the equations when they were laid out in front of me. Later I read that Niels Bohr, I think, once said that there were perhaps a dozen people in the world capable of fully understanding the implications of Einstein's simple little book. Taking Bohr as speaking figuratively, I knew one of those "dozen" once, and had a bit of a chance to appreciate the workings of her mind - in fact that has a lot to do with why I'm a words schlub rather than a science schlub; but I see that I have digressed a bit - that's a story for another day.
Anyway, I’ll definitely find The Book of Air and Shadows as a print book after I finish the audio. I hope it doesn’t disappoint.
I’m only about halfway through Air and Shadows; yet he has already managed to include a bookie, an intellectual property lawyer, the Russian mob, Shakespeare scholars, a document ciphered in the 16th century, a discussion of world class weightlifting, a Palestinian driver who formerly served as one of Yassir Arafat’s bodyguards, a detailed discussion of bookbinding, a pistol formerly owned by a decorated member of the SS and a world class model. What a sublime confection. When I have such an audio book in the car I yearn for the days of long commutes.
In enumerating the list above I’m only scratching the surface of the complexity; yet he makes it delightfully readable, or rather listenable. I have to be careful of that distinction because on more than one occasion I've found novels that enrapture me in audio to later bore me on the printed page - and not because I’ve read them as my second go around, already knowing the plot. I often reread novels, yet I only rarely find my first judgment faulty on second or third reading. The very best novels, in fact, become like old friends, improving with the rereading at different stages of life. In that class I can name, off the top of my head: Tai-Pan, Hawaii, The Godfather, The Mote in God's Eye, The Winds of War, War and Remembrance, Shogun, Stranger in a Strange Land, Shibumi, A Soldier of the Great War, Kim. . . I'd better stop; the list could go on for a long time.
Lest you think me a total time wastrel I should point out that I took a one credit hour speed reading course way back when at Illinois Tech. I came out of that course barely able to sustain eleven hundred words per minute, almost a page of easy material at a glance; although a headache would stop me after about a half hour. So, when I say I read something, I might mean I savored it at a couple of hundred words per minute, and I might mean I slammed through it at six or seven hundred words per minute. There was a time when I could slam through an interesting novel of a certain sort at almost a thousand words per minute without the headache.
Here's a cheery thought for you young folks - the performance of one's central processing unit, among other things, does not improve with age; and furthermore, as a general rule, what does not improve over time degrades over time. I used to see more than a dozen stars in The Great Square of Pegasus - now I see two. That is not all the result of light pollution.
The physicist Richard Feynman did a long running study of his own central processing unit by regularly doing certain mental calculations and recording the time and accuracy in his notebook. If you find his writeup of that study it will not improve your mood. There's another great book - What Do You Care What Other People Think - and another - Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman. Not for nothing did Freeman Dyson once refer to him as "all genius, all buffoon" - what a character. I once believed that I had attained a glimmer of understanding of why his seemingly simple little idea of Feynman Diagrams was worthy of a Nobel Prize in physics but I gave up on thinking I understood that kind of stuff a long time ago.
Another related story, Albert Einstein once wrote a simple little book in plain language about general relativity. I can't remember the title; but I remember foolishly thinking I understood what he was saying - this was back when I foolishly thought I grasped the Lorentz Transformations because I could ponderously follow the equations when they were laid out in front of me. Later I read that Niels Bohr, I think, once said that there were perhaps a dozen people in the world capable of fully understanding the implications of Einstein's simple little book. Taking Bohr as speaking figuratively, I knew one of those "dozen" once, and had a bit of a chance to appreciate the workings of her mind - in fact that has a lot to do with why I'm a words schlub rather than a science schlub; but I see that I have digressed a bit - that's a story for another day.
Anyway, I’ll definitely find The Book of Air and Shadows as a print book after I finish the audio. I hope it doesn’t disappoint.
Wednesday, July 16, 2008
With Kim gone to a better place I'm into a McMurtry now
With Kim done his mountain adventures and safely back in the lowlands I've moved on to a McMurtry which actually is "Brilliant. . . funny and dangerously tender" just as the Time cover blurb proclaims.
First "Kim". In a scant 411 small hardbound pages Kipling took me from the heat of Sind to the cold of the Hindu Kush and, more importantly, into the minds of representatives of more than a dozen castes, races and tribes. And he developed Kim from a wild and wily bazaar boy into a disciplined servant of the Raj in The Great Game. Why haven't I systematicly read all of Kipling's work? I've never read one of his that failed to please and satisfy, never listened to one as a book tape that failed to sadden with its ending. I shall plunder Wolfgang Books of every cheap used copy of Kipling the next time we go to Phoenixville for dinner.
Next "All My Friends Are Going To Be Strangers." What can one say of McMurtry? His characters really do leap off the page. Danny, it's true, is probably a thinly disguised Larry McMurtry in his much younger days - the book was copyrighted in 1972, but still. . . such a gift to be able to move as effortlessly as McMurtry does from introspection to conversation to preposterous action and all the while hold the reader by the throat.
I've mostly avoided McMurtry's more or less contemporary fiction despite how much I liked "Comanche Moon,""Lonesome Dove," and the other two novels that dealt with Gus, Woodrow, Buffalo Hump, Famous Shoes and Blue Duck. But I think I'll also pillage the McMurtry section at Wolfgang as well when I next get there.
First "Kim". In a scant 411 small hardbound pages Kipling took me from the heat of Sind to the cold of the Hindu Kush and, more importantly, into the minds of representatives of more than a dozen castes, races and tribes. And he developed Kim from a wild and wily bazaar boy into a disciplined servant of the Raj in The Great Game. Why haven't I systematicly read all of Kipling's work? I've never read one of his that failed to please and satisfy, never listened to one as a book tape that failed to sadden with its ending. I shall plunder Wolfgang Books of every cheap used copy of Kipling the next time we go to Phoenixville for dinner.
Next "All My Friends Are Going To Be Strangers." What can one say of McMurtry? His characters really do leap off the page. Danny, it's true, is probably a thinly disguised Larry McMurtry in his much younger days - the book was copyrighted in 1972, but still. . . such a gift to be able to move as effortlessly as McMurtry does from introspection to conversation to preposterous action and all the while hold the reader by the throat.
I've mostly avoided McMurtry's more or less contemporary fiction despite how much I liked "Comanche Moon,""Lonesome Dove," and the other two novels that dealt with Gus, Woodrow, Buffalo Hump, Famous Shoes and Blue Duck. But I think I'll also pillage the McMurtry section at Wolfgang as well when I next get there.
Sunday, July 6, 2008
I'm 474 pages into the very worst sort of book
I should have known better because one of the most prominent plugs on the cover is, "RAVISHING. . . Combines the dark mythology of fantasy with the delicious social comedy of Jane Austen into A MASTERPIECE OF THE GENRE THAT RIVALS TOLKIEN." - Time.
Now I ask you, Is there are single American male who has ever read all the way through one of Jane Austen's "delicious social comedy(s)"?
I have only myself to blame. I could easily have read the cover and the first and last pages and then done a quick riffle skim of the middle pages to get a reasonably coherent sense of the thing. Then I could have blandly claimed to have read it if my son who recommended the book ever asked about it. That tactic got me all the way through high school and college under evaluation by teachers who were mostly old and wise in the ways of student fraud, so it would have probably served me excellently with a 25 year old who's far less cynical than those teachers. Why I even got an A+ once for filling an entire blue book with analysis of a book I had forgotten to open by the tactic of using the test question and pure assumptions, incorrect assumptions as it turned out, as my take off point. I've always wondered if the professor was being merely straightforward when he penned his little "excellent irony" note next to the A+, or if he was himself being ironic. This was, after all at Illinois Tech where the unfortunate prof was no doubt regretting that his PhD had landed him in a school inhabited by American techies who predominantly communicated in grunts, and foreign techies whose interest in English usage mostly ended at resume writing skills. But I digress. . .
The book is "Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell," and it's just good enough to save itself from being put into the "I'll finish this some other time" pile, but it's just bad enough to make each page a chore. A bad book makes itself very easy to put it down, a good book makes itself easy and enjoyable to read, a very good book makes itself impossible to put down until finished - no matter how bad the eyes droop. This book is squarely in the middle. It's written excellently, if ponderously, just like Jane Austen's pretentious and over-analytical swill. And it's plot is somewhat interesting, just like Tolkien's preposterously over-long elf and orc sagas. But it lacks the mayhem of Tolkien and even the faeries are all too English. And. . . and I'm not reading it at 15 years old as I read Tolkien in one great spasm, all the way through the three ring novels and well into "The Hobbit" which I thankfully put down before terminal saturation with Tolkien's prose drove me to suicide.
Anyway I'm 474 pages into this thing and I just checked the last page and found it to be numbered 1006. I also discovered that the main characters still seem to be alive and just as Austenishly obsessed with themselves in the few pages leading up to the end.
Why did Susanna Clark end at 1006? She seems to be relating the entire history and sociology of England up to 1816 via allusion and symbolism and she's shameless about writing empty pages. So why didn't she tack on another 60 pages so as to make the book a very symbolic 1066 pages long?
Now I ask you, Is there are single American male who has ever read all the way through one of Jane Austen's "delicious social comedy(s)"?
I have only myself to blame. I could easily have read the cover and the first and last pages and then done a quick riffle skim of the middle pages to get a reasonably coherent sense of the thing. Then I could have blandly claimed to have read it if my son who recommended the book ever asked about it. That tactic got me all the way through high school and college under evaluation by teachers who were mostly old and wise in the ways of student fraud, so it would have probably served me excellently with a 25 year old who's far less cynical than those teachers. Why I even got an A+ once for filling an entire blue book with analysis of a book I had forgotten to open by the tactic of using the test question and pure assumptions, incorrect assumptions as it turned out, as my take off point. I've always wondered if the professor was being merely straightforward when he penned his little "excellent irony" note next to the A+, or if he was himself being ironic. This was, after all at Illinois Tech where the unfortunate prof was no doubt regretting that his PhD had landed him in a school inhabited by American techies who predominantly communicated in grunts, and foreign techies whose interest in English usage mostly ended at resume writing skills. But I digress. . .
The book is "Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell," and it's just good enough to save itself from being put into the "I'll finish this some other time" pile, but it's just bad enough to make each page a chore. A bad book makes itself very easy to put it down, a good book makes itself easy and enjoyable to read, a very good book makes itself impossible to put down until finished - no matter how bad the eyes droop. This book is squarely in the middle. It's written excellently, if ponderously, just like Jane Austen's pretentious and over-analytical swill. And it's plot is somewhat interesting, just like Tolkien's preposterously over-long elf and orc sagas. But it lacks the mayhem of Tolkien and even the faeries are all too English. And. . . and I'm not reading it at 15 years old as I read Tolkien in one great spasm, all the way through the three ring novels and well into "The Hobbit" which I thankfully put down before terminal saturation with Tolkien's prose drove me to suicide.
Anyway I'm 474 pages into this thing and I just checked the last page and found it to be numbered 1006. I also discovered that the main characters still seem to be alive and just as Austenishly obsessed with themselves in the few pages leading up to the end.
Why did Susanna Clark end at 1006? She seems to be relating the entire history and sociology of England up to 1816 via allusion and symbolism and she's shameless about writing empty pages. So why didn't she tack on another 60 pages so as to make the book a very symbolic 1066 pages long?
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