Back in college I took a two-semester course called "Great Books," wherein all we did was read and discuss (and I suppose there were some papers?) great books. The professor provided a list of 100 great books (it wasn't the Time 100, or any other known list, just the professor's own, but there was obviously a substantial overlap with such lists) and we read maybe 12 - 15 books a semester. A couple times a year I'll pick up one that I haven't read yet. Someday I'll get through the list. Maybe. Continue reading First Monday Book Day: Now You See Me…
Category Archives: First Monday Book Day
Monday Book Day: Difficult Reads
I like pretentious things. I like difficult things. The higher the concept is, the more willing I am to try and appreciate what the author/artist/musician was going for. This past month was the most prolific reading month I've had in quite a while, and I read three books in particular that bore out my penchant for difficulty.
The Fifty-Year Sword by Mark Z. Danielewski
Danielewski made this book into an art project. The illustrations are hand-stitched (in the more expensive versions of the book at least) and the effort undertaken to make the experience of this book a visual one as well as a textual one was something that I thought worked very well. The story is short and perhaps not as engaging as it could be; at a party, five orphans are mesmerized by a mysterious storyteller and the box he brings as a prop to tell the story of the titular sword. The book is narrated by the five orphans years later, with different colored quotation marks denoting which of them is recounting the story at that time. The layering of stories and storytellers is something that Danielewski loves to do, but I think he' done it better elsewhere.
Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
I put this book down after 100 pages and I wasn't sure I was going to pick it back up. The violence was unrelenting, unending, and awful. I didn't know that I wanted to suffer through another 250 pages of that. It sat there for two weeks or so before I started up again. When I started back up again, something clicked. It's the story of the kid who joins up with a gang in Mexico/Texas in the 1850s that cuts a bloody path through the West toward the ocean. But it's more about the kid who ends up having to respond to evil, to extermination (of people, of feelings, of knowledge, of everything). McCarthy writes this all in a way that is amazing. I've heard it described as biblical and also as though he's trying way too hard to make it sound like important literature. Both are accurate. Like I said, I like pretention, so I ate it up. I'm really glad I stuck with it, the judge is a great character pitted against the kid.
Satantango by Lazlo Krasznahorkai
Maelstrom is the word that comes to mind. The members of a small, dying, Hungarian village are caught in a rainstorm. Rumor gets around that a savior is coming. Every chapter started with a sense of disorientation, that slowly resolved to something resembling clarity once the point of view was revealed. Every sentence battered and threw me around before finishing half a page later. The rain never lets up in the story and the deluge of the writing matches that well. The structure of the book is really well done (the chapters in the first part are numbered 1,2,3,4,5,6: the second part is numbered 6,5,4,3,2,1 and there is a good reason for it). It's not an uplifting book by any means, but the first half left me in awe, and the second half didn't quite match that, but it was very good. I know there are a couple people here who like Roberto Bolaño, and I think this would fit that same category.
Three books with big aspirations, and I enjoyed all three, although for different reasons. I think that "Satantango" was my favorite that I read this month, it's difficulty ended up being the most rewarding. Share your thoughts on difficult literature or start a discussion of what you read this past month.
First Monday Book Day: It’s the End of the World as We Know It
Comes the end of the year, the last First Monday of the year. With the world ending on Dec. 21 and all, my selection for this month seems entirely appropriate: Charles C. Mann's 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus
This 2006 best-seller by the science writer and Atlantic Monthly contributor was a huge, popular revelation when it was released. It brought to a mass audience a major revision of our understanding of Native Americans' impact on the environment, the depth and richness of Native cultures, and the utter (and largely unintended) devastation wrought on Native populations by Western diseases.
Mann compellingly musters the academic evidence to argue that Native populations were huge prior to the arrival of Westerners, that those populations had highly sophisticated economies, polities and cultures in many cases, and that many Native cultures had dramatic impacts on the landscape, from sculpting and expanding the Great Plains, to building magnificent pyramids, to cultivating a complex ecosystem in the Amazon, to crafting a sophisticated trading culture in the Andes.
Perhaps most importantly, Mann offers us lay readers a new understanding of the relationship between the Indians and the early settlers in North America. As the New York Times review of the book put it,
According to some estimates, as much as 95 percent of the Indians may have died almost immediately on contact with various European diseases, particularly smallpox. That would have amounted to about one-fifth of the world's total population at the time, a level of destruction unequaled before or since. The exact numbers, like everything else, are in dispute, but it is clear that these plagues wreaked havoc on traditional Indian societies. European misreadings of America should not be attributed wholly to ethnic arrogance. The "savages" most of the colonists saw, without ever realizing it, were usually the traumatized, destitute survivors of ancient and intricate civilizations that had collapsed almost overnight. Even the superabundant "nature" the Europeans inherited had been largely put in place by these now absent gardeners, and had run wild only after they had ceased to cull and harvest it.
These are important cultural adjustments that will probably take another generation or more to fully be accepted by our national psyche. This is no guilt-ridden, lefty apologia, but rather an honest attempt to help us make better sense of our real past in this hemisphere. The book is fairly well-written, if non-linear in its presentation. It won't keep you up at night with riveting story-telling, but it has a lot to teach, and a lot to ponder. I would have appreciated Mann taking Jared Diamond's work more seriously (there are only two, brief mentions of Diamond's work in the book, even though much of the story he tells fits closely with Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel explanations for European conquest of the New World), and eminent historian Alan Taylor delivered some trenchant criticisms in his WaPo review, but I nonetheless found the book to be tremendously interesting.
Shifting gears, I return to the end-times theme. It's the end of the year, which is a time of lists. And since this a book post, my lists are about books. Duh.
Here are two biggies: Slate's best books of 2012 and the NY Times 100 Notable Books of 2012 list. Ho ho ho. I can honestly say that I have not read a single book on either of those lists (what, no A Dance With Dragons??? PrePOSterous!!!!). But I bet that in five years, I will have read a handful of them.
What are you reading, or at least buying for someone you love?
First Monday Book Day: Blowin’ in the Wind
Tomorrow is election day. Go vote if you have not voted already. Else, it's all your fault.
This month's selection is Timothy Egan's The Worst Hard Time, "The untold story of those who survived the Great American Dust Bowl."
Wow. What a depressing book. Chapter after chapter of personal stories of misery and deprivation and environmental disaster. This is social history at its most relentless. Egan's National Book Award-winning book is a must read for anyone interested in understanding his parents' (or, for you punk kids, grandparents') generation. Here's a little taste:
On May 9, 1934, a flock of whirlwinds started up in the northern prairie, in the Dakotas and eastern Montana, where people had fled the homesteads two decades earlier. The sun at midmorning turned orange and looked swollen. The sky seemed as if if were matted by a window screen. The next day, a mass of dust-filled clouds marched east, picking up strength as they found the jet stream winds, moving toward the population centers. By the time this black front hit Illinois and Ohio, the formations had merged into what looked to pilots like a solid block of airborne dirt. Planes had to fly fifteen thousand feet to get above it, and when they finally topped out at their ceiling, the pilots described the storm in apocalyptic terms. Carrying three tons of dust for every American alive, the formation moved over the Midwest. It covered Chicago at night, dumping an estimated six thousand tons, the dust slinking down walls as if every home and every office had sprung a leak. By morning, the dust fell like snow over Boston and Scranton, and then New York slipped under partial darkness. Now the storm was measured at 1,800 miles wide, a great rectangle of dust from the Great Plains to the Atlantic, weighing 350 million tons. In Manhattan, the streetlights came on at midday and cars used their headlights to drive.
....
New York was a dirty city in 1934.... On a typical day, the dust measured 227 particles per square millimeter -- not a good reading for someone with health problems. But on May 11, the dust measured 619 particles per square millimeter. ... A professor from New York University...calculated that on the seventeenth floor of the Flatiron Building on Fifth Avenue, the thickness of the dust was about forty tons per cubic mile, which meant all of New York City was under the weight of 1,320 tons. [pp. 150-152]
Thousands of residents of the Texas panhandle, Oklahoma, and Kansas developed "dust pneumonia". During dusters, drivers would drag chains from their cars in order to dissipate static electricity. On "Black Sunday," April 14, 1935, an even worse storm struck. "The storm carried twice as much dirt as was dug out of the earth to create the Panama Canal" (p. 8).
John Steinbeck wrote famously of the Joads and others who escaped the Dust Bowl. This book is the story of those who stayed behind. It is riveting, shocking, numbing reading.
So. Now that I've cheered you up, who wants to go watch some political commercials?
Paterno by Poz
I told BrianS I would pick up the book day post. The wife and kids are out of town for the weekend so I figured I could fit this in between cleaning the garage, raking leaves, trimming bushes, trimming trees, etc.
I recently finished "Paterno" by Joe Posnanski. I'm not a big college football fan. I'm not a big non-fiction fan. I am a big Posnanski fan although I was disappointed in both of his first two books. This book had an uphill battle to win me over.
I wasn't really sure how this Paterno book would go. Poz works best when he is telling feel-good stories and I think he made it pretty apparent that he was a Paterno fan-boy. He didn't sign up to write this kind of story.
Despite the challenges, Poz did a great job with this book. It starts out a little slow with Paterno's Brooklyn upbringing. But that focus on his upbringing, and the emphasis on doing something special, helps us not only to understand his achievements but also his shortcomings.
In the end, I didn't feel hatred towards Paterno. I felt disappointed. I felt he was deeply flawed. I also felt that he did really want to do good things with his life. Somewhere along the line, I think Coach Paterno took over and Joe Paterno no longer existed. The best line in the book was this one - "It is hard for any man, even a plainspoken Brooklyn kid determined never to lose his bearings, to hold on to what matters when people start to see him as a saint."
So, what are you reading?
First Monday Book Day: Shape Up, America
So, I didn't get much reading done this month either. And I'm currently back in the Motherland ("Hi, guys! Sure hope I can slip out for a Surly with y'all!"), ensconced with brotherS and sisterinlawS, preparing to deposit The Boy at the Alma Mater. Which means that this post was actually written some time ago.
Just in time to see this cool, new link to the Library of Congress's new exibition, Books That Shaped America.
So rather than talk about a book o' the month, I'm going to play the list game.
The list ranges from 1750 to the present (no shining city upon a hill stuff here people!)
Continue reading First Monday Book Day: Shape Up, America
Books? What books? The Olympics are on!!!!1111one111!!!!
It's been a long, hot summer, curiously bereft of book posts. The Natives are restless.
Ok, ok, ok. My bad, people.
Truth be told, I haven't finished a book in the last two months. Back in June, I started reading a book about the experiences of a first-year med student learning about human anatomy via dissecting cadavers (no, it was not Mary Roach's Stiff, which is said to be a very enjoyable and funny read). I got about three chapters in and realized that I was bored. The author was determined to convince me that this was all such a wondrous, magical, spiritual journey, but I was bored. So I set it aside.
I then ran across Vernor Vinge's The Children of the Sky, his long-awaited sequel to A Fire Upon the Deep and its sort-of-prequel, A Deepness in the Sky, both of which were absolutely awesome. Perhaps best known for his origination of the concept of a technological singularity, Vinge is a smart, sophisticated writer, equally impressive in his handling of complex technological concepts, inventing alien cultures, and writing compelling characters.
This one is engaging, but (life and) the quadrennial festival of bad television coverage of sports has intervened, preventing me from getting this thing done. Children stumbles a bit in the front end, with a somewhat unbelievable naivety affecting several characters, but the world Vinge created in Fire is thoroughly engaging. I am looking forward to re-focusing and finishing this one.
What are you reading, damnit?
First Monday Book Day: Do you really wanna live forever?
I felt the need for some good, old-fashioned, rock-em, sock-em space adventure stories recently. So I reached for a volume with the appropriate cover art (manly man with bulging muscles and movie-star good looks in futuristic, military-style outfit, set amidst post-apocalyptic ruins): L.E. Modesitt Jr.'s omnibus, The Forever Hero, a stapling together of three novels: Dawn for a Distant Earth, The Silent Warrior, and In Endless Twilight.
This one is part post-apocalyptic saga, part superman story, and part tragedy. Yes, the hero in the story is a genetic freak who, as it turns out, is all-but-immortal (I'm not giving away any spoilers here; the "I" word shows up on the back cover blurb). Yes, the hero takes on the Herculean task of mucking out the Augean Stables restoring a devastated Earth to habitability, and of course succeeds. It's not the existential kind of tragedy. OR is it?
I was swept up by the story. Lots of action to be had here. But Modesitt also manages to add some philosophical heft, non-ridiculous historical/political/economic thought, and thoughtful, tragic twists that make this more than just a shoot-em-up. The hero struggles with the burden of myth-making and the complexities of moral choices on a galactic scale. And he struggles to maintain his humanity in the face of a long, long, long existence. I was thoroughly entertained and more than willing to suspend disbelief on many of the more ridiculous parts (like, umm, the fantastical interpretation of how evolution actually works).
What are you reading?
First Monday Book Day: Digging deep and piling high
This month, I succumbed to marketing. I'd seen multiple copies of Ken Follett's The Pillars of the Earth 
around my used book store, trumpeting the new miniseries. Ken Follett seemed like such a familiar name, but I'd never read any of his stuff. So I figured, what the heck?
Well, heck. This sprawling novel plays out like a Behind the Music episode. The good guys get ahead, then SLAM! back to square one they go, over and over and over again. Yet good triumphs over evil in the end.
I was not particularly enamored with the writing in this book. Follett maintains a third-person omniscient perspective throughout, which I found somewhat tedious. "He said," "she thought," etc. It just seemed a bit wooden. The dialogue is a bit too "modern" to really sell the story as a period piece, despite the obvious efforts Follett made to tie the story into real history from the 12th century.
Still, I'm an easy audience. Despite the rather ludicrous Series of Unfortunate Events that befalls the lead characters, and the inevitable triumphs that bring them back from the brink time and again, I found myself fairly engaged. If you enjoy learning a few tidbits about early English history, the Catholic Church, architecture and the building trades, then maybe this novel is right up your alley. It was interesting enough for me to finish in fairly short order, despite its hefty 1,007 page length.
What are you reading?
First Monday Book Day: Pillars of the Community
Ok, so, I finally finished the latest installment of A Song of Fire and Ice
That pretty much wore me out. But I have started a new epic -- Ken Follett's The Pillars of the Earth.
Of course, Follett has no chance of rivaling Martin for scope or spectacle, and I'm not entirely persuaded by the 3rd person omniscient POV so far, but I'm starting to get into the story. Like with a Disney film (uhh, except for John Carter, which I saw on Sunday with The Boy), at least one parent has to die in the opening scenes or already be dead. Oh, wait, John Carter was "dead" in the opening scene. Check that box.
Back to Follett. Yes, poor Tom Builder's wife gets offed within the first 50 pages or so. Which is about where I am. Surely, Follett won't set ol' Tom up as the hero of the story and then G.o.T. him at the end of the next act, right?
I also managed to read a chapter or so of Richard Dawkins' The Blind Watchmaker, his 1986 masterpiece in defense of full-metal jacket, no holds barred evolutionary theory. If you care about the culture war struggles between the "intelligent design" folks and the mainstream of biology education, this book is an indispensable resource for understanding where the hardest of the hardcore evolutionary theorists are coming from. Fair warning: Dawkins is downright disdainful of both I.D. and, more generally, religion (a viewpoint that comes out even more strongly in his 2006 book, The God Delusion). But he also is a literate and nimble defender of the scientific method and of evolutionary biology. Perhaps most pertinently for this audience, Dawkins is responsible for the term meme.
What are you reading?