Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Category Archives: Books ‘n’ Authors
On reading
I’ve been thinking about Dean’s comment to yesterday’s post — how my life has taken such a different trajectory in this regard. I used to be an avid reader, too. When I was a grade schooler, I would check out eight or nine books from the library and I’d cycle through them, reading each one until I tired of it, going to the next, and eventually finishing them all. This drove my dad a little nuts, since he’s one of these OCD start, finish, then move on types. He couldn’t figure out how I managed to keep all the plots straight.
Then high school happened, and while I remember reading for fun during summer vacation (Frank Herbert’s Hellstrom’s Hive comes to mind . . . not sure why), I was usually too busy during the school year to do much pleasure reading. I have a dim memory of Dune, and Watership Down, and countless science fiction novels, but I think those happened during junior high. In Eight Grade, old Bud Camfield convinced me to start reading the classics. And while Crime and Punishment was a worthwhile experience, it wasn’t exactly pleasure reading.
It only got worse after college. The one novel I recall reading for “pleasure” was Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, which left me hollow and depressed and convinced that I and my whole family were doomed. Yes, I think I had forgotten how to read for pleasure. (Oh, wait! There were Stephen Donaldson’s horrendous fantasies, Lord Foul’s Bane and the like. Tried to reread that one a few years back, couldn’t make it past the first page.)
And it just kept getting worse, what with med school and then (worst of all) internship and residency. I recall reading exactly one book for pleasure during residency: when Karen and I vacationed in Hawaii, I reread Heart of Darkness. Light fare indeed.
Then I got out of residency and started teaching, and I discovered William S. Burroughs and John Le Carre, Robert Graves and Roald Dahl. Maybe it was Dahl that got me out of my serious rut, led me to Doug Adams, then Terry Pratchett, and eventually Christopher Moore.
Dean, if you want to rediscover the joy of reading, you could do no better than to pick up Christopher Moore’s Fool. What a pleasure that one was. I’m currently reading Terry Pratchett’s Going Postal, which humor-wise is a much different experience. Enjoyable, but it’s Moore’s fool my mind returns to, wants to spend time with. (The audio version voiced by Euan Morton was spectacular, by the way.)
And stay away from Cormac McCarthy.
D.
I think I’ve finally lost patience with le Carre
John le Carre, pen name of author David John Moore Cornwell, elder don of the spy novel (The Spy Who Came In From the Cold still reads like a dream and is far, far more than a spy novel), roped me in with his 2008 A Most Wanted Man. I found it on a discount shelf and could not resist.
My favorite le Carre novels remain his George Smiley trilogy (Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; The Honorable Schoolboy; Smiley’s People), but I’ve enjoyed others, more for his masterful writing than for the stories themselves. In that vein, Single & Single had a climactic paragraph that I still reread on occasion just to see how a master brings off a cinematic shit-hits-fan scene, and Absolute Friends broke all writing rules yet shined because of it.
But the problem with le Carre is his predictability. As I read, I find myself thinking: What’s the most cynical, depressing ending possible? The one in which our heroes end up disillusioned or worse? The one in which the innocents are ruined, and the powerful prevail? And that will inevitably be the ending.
I had hopes for A Most Wanted Man. I could imagine an ending in which the various secret service agencies trip over one another in such a way that they achieve the opposite outcome of their desires. It would have been so easy. But no.
Karen says you read le Carre for the ride, not for the ending, and I think she’s right. But I guess I’ve become more demanding of my novelists — I want unpredictability, which is an elusive thing, really. For that, I may need to stick to someone like Terry Pratchett.
D.
PS Two years ago today: A yummy dinner in Las Vegas. Too bad my parents later decided they didn’t like it (after enjoying it that night). Otherwise, I’d make a point of going back there this Crhistmas.
On this Thanksgiving Day . . .
So nice to know that there really is no one going hungry in America:
Only one child in 75 went “hungry” for even a single day during 2009 because of a lack of food in the home.
Love the quotes. But it gets worse. See, the hungry are to blame for their hunger, cuz they just don’t know how to budget:
Interestingly, the USDA report shows that millions of families that are judged “food secure” have lower incomes (relative to family size and age) than do many homes that are “food insecure.” This same pattern appears in each annual food security report. It indicates that “food insecurity” is, to a considerable degree, dependent on how efficiently a family allocates its food dollars and how it distributes its available food over the course of a month.
This guy goes on to claim that the “food insecure” are, in fact, obese, and
Virtually no food-insecure adults are underweight.
No one starves to death in the US of A. No one.
Or at least, virtually no one.
Here’s to William S. Burroughs, who recognized as well as anyone alive the hypocrisy of America.
D.
I love this guy
Alan Grayson, you are a hero.
Sadly, he was targeted by the Right with Citizens United money, and he lost his election. I hope he will be back soon — we need this man.
D.
I’ve been plagiarized!
Or is it plagiarised? I always have trouble with that. My spell check says z, not s.
Hat tip to new reader Andrea, who somehow figured out that this article on EmpowHER is a pretty thinly disguised regurgitation of this article on my website (which also appeared on allHealth.com, and may still be up there for all I know). The author has added a great deal of editorial input, thus justifying her byline. My “Mumps, for example,” has become “For example mumps.”
I’ve written to the website’s feedback email addie . . . we’ll see if anyone replies.
In other news, I finished Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn tonight, and WOW. Here’s a protagonist that keeps living when the book is done. I keep picking it up, rereading the ending, bits from the beginning; but nothing I do is going to make Lethem write a sequel. Motherless Brooklyn was pubbed in 2000, so if Lethem hasn’t written a sequel yet, I don’t know that he ever will.
Per Wikipedia, there’s a film in the works:
A film adaptation of the book, set in the 1950s, is in development and is planned to be released in 2013; Edward Norton will direct, adapt, and star in the film.
Ugh. 2013? Anything could happen between now and 2013. And who’s Norton going to play in this? I hope he’s smart and casts himself as Frank Minna, the father-figure who ends up dead at the end of Chapter One. I can buy Norton as Minna. I can’t buy Norton as Lionel, the Tourette’s-afflicted protagonist.
In still other news, our Giants are walking away with game one of the World Series.
D.
The City & The City
The City & The City by China Miéville, 2009. I’ve perhaps mentioned once or twice that China Miéville has left me cold. I couldn’t finish King Rat or Perdido Street Station, and after dropping cash on those two books only to be disappointed, I’d kind of put him off my radar. I’m not sure what led me to check up on him again after all these years, but I’m glad I did. The City & The City was a great read — a technically proficient hardboiled mystery and also a provocative fantasy (or anti-fantasy, an idea Miéville kicks around in the end-of-book interview).
The conceit is that two cities, Beszel and Ul Qoma, coexist in the same space. This is far more a psychological separation than a physical one, however, since there are areas which are purely one or the other, and areas where the two interleave. From an early age, denizens of either city are taught to un-see the cars, pedestrians, and buildings of the other city. To screw up — to breach, in the novel’s parlance (think “breach of etiquette”) risks invoking a police force that exist hidden from both cities: the aptly named Breach.
Our first person narrator is Inspector Tyador Borlú of the Extreme Crime Squad, a Beszel native investigating the murder of a young woman whose body, we soon learn, has been transported from Ul Qoma and dumped in Beszel. This should be a clear case for Breach, and Borlú would like nothing better than to make his case for Breach and wash his hands of the case. But of course others have different plans.
The prose at times is often spare to a fault, but lush at other times, and full of idiomatic and dictional oddities that suggest translation from another language. Miéville’s comments indicate emulation of Raymond Chandler, but I think Hemingway may be a more apt comparison. Borlú’s a likable enough protagonist, but we’re given precious little window into his thoughts beyond the working of the case. Chandler’s Marlowe was far more revealing: we knew the man’s value system, after all, and I’d argue that if we didn’t, he wouldn’t be Marlowe. Borlú wants to see justice done, but aside from that, I don’t know what he wants out of life.
That quibble aside, Miéville has done some remarkable world-building, and his characters live and breathe, and his plot is as well crafted as any jigsaw puzzle. What more could you want? Yes, I wish I cared more about Borlú. Emotional distance must have been a conscious decision on Miéville’s part since it would have been easy enough to humanize the man.
Oh, and Miéville didn’t answer every last question his novel raised . . . which would be fine if he intended a sequel, but his interview discusses only the possibility of prequels. But I guess I don’t need to know everything, since the mystery itself was explained in full.
Now I’m wondering whether to go back to Miéville, perhaps give him a chance with his new book Kraken, which seems to be an homage to H. P. Lovecraft. Guess that’s what Amazon’s “Look Inside” function is good for, right?
D.
Currently reading . . .
Let Me In by John Ajvide Lindqvist (NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE!) Interesting vampire foo. Eli is 12. She’s been 12 for two hundred years, but she’s not one of those old-and-jaded child vamps, adults in a bag of kid-bones. She’s really just a kid. Who needs blood to live. And she’s a he.
Hmm, is that a spoiler? I doubt they kept that little detail for the American version of the movie. The Swedish version, Let The Right One In, was quite good, and can be streamed on NetFlix.
Lamentation by Ken Scholes. Far flung future where the one library storing what’s left of human knowledge has just gone up in smoke, along with the city around it. The characters are more archetypes than flesh-and-blood creations, but well drawn nevertheless. Scholes relies heavily on the device of one character somehow intuiting another’s inner thoughts via a facial expression or careless (or careful) gesture. And yet I’m still captivated by it all.
Dexter is Delicious by Jeff LIndsay. Oh, how very different Dexter is in the books than in the TV show! Rita’s alive, Dexter’s brother is alive, Deb knows of Dex’s dark desires, and Rita’s kids are budding Dexters. The one thing in common with the show: there’s a baby! Fun so far but it hasn’t hooked me yet. Like Let Me In, Dexter is Delicious pads a bit too much for my taste. Leave out what your readers skip, dontcha know.
SO what are you reading?
D.
So I finished the trilogy today
I don’t often go for the top 100 stuff, but Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games trilogy intrigued me. I don’t think I’ve ever read such a dark story from the YA genre. On the one hand, it’s surprisingly chaste (enough soulful kissing and hand-holding to make a Twilight fan happy, but not even a hint of anything warm and slippery). On the other, the trilogy often wallows in depression and despair.
Premise: post-apocalyptic Earth, not much left in the world except for a relatively tiny group of Americans. SF readers won’t like this bit because Collins doesn’t bother with set-up or detailed explanations. Who knows what trashed 99% of the world’s population or why only Americans have survived. Anyway, here they are, the fascistic, oppressive Capital and its 12 liege states, the Districts. And since the Districts are heir to a failed rebellion nearly 75 years earlier, they must forever be punished in the annual Hunger Games, in which a male and female teen (12 to 18 years old, to be precise) from each District are obliged to hunt one another to the death until only one of the 24 remain.
Classic crucible-type novel, heavy inspiration from Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery,” a certain old Star Trek episode (if he has the time . . . if he has the time), and Roman gladiatorial bloodsports. Collins may not get points for originality, but she does run with the premise and squeeze quite a lot of good drama (some would say melodrama) with a minimum of deus ex machina saves. Think Survivor Man with kids, many of them ill-equipped for the challenge. Kids with nasty sharp weapons.
And it’s all televised. The humiliation of the Districts requires that the citizenry including family and friends of the players are obliged to watch the Games play out to their bloody end. The Capital’s rich, privileged class eat up the Games, of course. It’s great entertainment for them.
The trilogy follows its protagonist, Katniss Everdeen, through her first Games, and of course it would be telling to give you much insight into books two and three. I will say that with regard to who lives and who dies, the conclusion of book three didn’t surprise me, but the way Collins arrived at that conclusion was a bit startling. But do I recommend it? I’m not sure. The first two books were a hoot, and I was impressed that book two didn’t fall prey to the usual middle-book sophomoritis. But the third book was tedious. Look, I understand that the protagonist is being stage-managed, but should the novel feel stage-managed too? Does the author’s heavy hand need to appear on the page again and again?
But it’s YA, I tell myself, and the author’s craft needn’t be at its peak for the book to be successful. Otherwise J. K. Rowling would still be living out of her car.
D.
Bukowski
Charles Bukowski has been on my must-read list for some time now. Perhaps it was an offhand comment by some author I admired — Michael Chabon, perhaps — how depressed he was when he realized he’d peeled through all of Bukowski’s work and would never again have the pleasure of reading one he’d never read before. Or, much earlier, someone told me Bukowski was the author behind Drugstore Cowboy. He wasn’t, but the name still stuck with me.
Tonight, while busting it on the elliptical trainer at the gym, I ripped through the first sixty pages of Bukowski’s semi-autobiographical Ham on Rye. Usually I don’t gravitate toward memoirs, since I prefer to think my own childhood was appalling and it always humbles me to discover that someone else had it much worse. Cue the Four Yorkshiremen. But Ham on Rye is something else altogether: a memoir with narrative drive.
Where does this narrative drive come from, that’s what I want to know. Is it my desire to see someone kick the narrator’s father’s brutal ass? Hopefully the narrator, Henry Chinaski, will do the kicking. Is it my secret wish to see his mother grow a spine, knowing full well that such people never grow a spine? No. Mostly, I want to see how a kid so damaged by his parents turns into a person who somehow, even if only tangentially, fits into society.
Below the cut, a poem by Bukowski that I found on some other guy’s blog. Enjoy.
Unsentimental
Do you want to know what to read if you’re dying to get the taste of The Lovely Bones out of your mouth? (Um. What an unfortunate image.) Jonathan Lethem’s Fortress of Solitude, that’s what. It’s a thoroughly unsentimental look at childhood and it’s refreshing as hell after that awful Bones.
I’ll write more when I finish . . . Still barely 1/4 of the way through . . .
I opened my mouth and said something stupid today at work. I do this with fair regularity, it seems. This time I apologized at once, did some back pedaling, tried to make good. I’m already in minor hot water over another indiscretion. Hopefully this one won’t come back to haunt me.
Good thing I’m not a school teacher. Who knows what kind of trouble I’d make for myself.
D.