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The Mental Health of George W. Bush
Books read recently by J. Zimmerman.
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Why read a book?
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"Sexual selection can explain why most people prefer fiction to non-fiction, religious myth to scientific evidence,
and political correctness to intellectual coherence."
[from Psycoloquy's multi-review of The Mating mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature by Geoffrey F. Miller]. |
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Not read
Not finish
Not defend your tastes
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{ December (diciembre (see also books on Spanish)) 2005 }
(12.31.2005) HAPPY NEW YEAR'S EVE
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Listened to a multi-accented reading (by British actor Nigel Planer) of
Hogfather (1999)
by Terry Pratchett.
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It was so great to hear this book last year that I listened to it all over again. And holds up even better than before as the funniest and most creative of the many books by Terry Pratchett.
On Hogwatch Night, the plump Hogfather in his red suit and white beard climbs into his sleigh pulled by four pigs (Gouger, Tusker, Rooter, and Snouter), and delivers gifts to the cargo-cult worshipping (i.e., Capitalist consumer) boys and girls.
This year the Hogfather is missing, and his stand-in is everybody's straight man, DEATH.
The Assassin's Guild is responsible for the disappearance of the Hogfather, and they have been hired by the humorless Auditors of the Universe. The Auditors, being literal-minded accountants, want people to stop believing in things that aren't real and thus causing cosmic disorder.
It's up to Death's adopted granddaughter Susan (the 'gothic governess') to save chaos, and she is aided by a raven (addicted to eating eyeballs), the small-scythe carrying Death of Rats ('the Grim Squeaker'), and Bilious, the God (actually the Oh-God) of Hangovers.
The textbook sociopath in Hogfather is Teatime:
| Teatime put a comforting arm around his shoulders. "Don't worry," he said. "I'm on your side. A violent death is the last thing that'll happen to you." |
Various help and hindrance is unleashed by Archchancellor Ridcully and fellow wizards at UU (Unseen University) of not only a practical but also a philosophical nature like:
| The UU Professor of Anthropics had developed the Special and Inevitable Anthropic Principle, which was that the entire reason for the existence of the universe was the eventual evolution of the UU Professor of Anthropics. But this was only a formal statement of the theory which absolutely everyone, with only some minor details of a 'Fill in name here' nature, secretly believes to be true. |
and Ridcully's:
| "That statement is either so deep it would take a lifetime to fully comprehend every particle of its meaning, or it is a load of absolute tosh. Which is it, I wonder?" |
and:
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Ridcully: "I'm just saying man is naturally a mythopoeic creature."
Senior Wrangler: "What's that mean?" Dean: "Means we make things up as we go along." |
Also recommended: Jingo and Thief of Time. (12.30.2005)
Was previously defeated by the same author's Eye of the Sun.
Yosemite Falls windswept into airy plumes the monk's orange robes |
the whole forest running through the winter river one water ouzel |
A disappointing science fiction. This (like the previous book, to which it is a sequel) centers on the mistakes of first contact with sentient beings: Jesuit missionaries to a planet around Alpha Centauri discover and miscommunicate with extraterrestrial life, where the population of one is controlled (eaten) by the other. Russell's The Sparrow was praised for addressing serious social issues (sexual abuse, sexism, racism, religion, oppression). But Children of God seems heavy handed and unsubtle.
Even if the abbreviated version on tape did not do justice to the whole, there was nothing in the tape version to take this reader to one of Russell's books.
His original short story, Ender's Game first appeared in the August 1977 issue of Analog: "There is no teacher but the enemy... No one but the enemy will ever tell you what the enemy is going to do." The 1977 World Science Fiction Convention nominated Ender's Game for a Hugo Award and gave to Card the John W. Campbell Award for best new writer.
I prefer Ender's Shadow, which pivots around Bean, the child that could have replaced Ender if Ender 'broke', to the book Ender's Game, which tells Ender's story.
A delight. One of Pratchett's best. Commander Sam Vimes, aided by his wife Lady Sybil, puts the country of Ankh-Morpork in to the Embassy in Uberwald, and spreads law, order, and a certain amount of mayhem among were-wolves, as well as helping the Low King of the dwarves ascend his (her?) throne.
See other reviewed books by Terry Pratchett, which include:
Having just 'completed' writing a novel in a month, I find that Kirkus Reviews nails it as: "A novel that might well have been more fun to write than it is to read."
William J. Cobb's review (Nov. 7, 2005), titled "Big, bloated and dated, The Diviners is sooo 2000" clarifies:
| "One of the conceits here is that film-world people (some of whom are labeled 'brilliant') cannot recognize a fake when their noses are rubbed in it. That this faux history is garbled (Attila lived in the 5th century, not 2,000 years ago, among other things) is most likely meant to be part of the fun, an inside joke at the dimness of film-world minds. After a while, however, readers may become impatient: Yes, I get it. And?" |
Michael Schaub (September 2005 review on Bookslut) can also save you some time: "with a few exceptions, you're left to wonder: Does Rick Moody know what people sound like when they talk?"
And in case you are still thinking of reading it, W. R. Greer at ReviewsOfBooks.com reports: "There's not a whole lot of dramatic plot involved in The Diviners. ... Rick Moody obviously intends The Diviners to be a satire. ... The problem with The Diviners being a satire is that, for the most part, it's not particularly funny. ... a whole lot of this novel never connects with you. There are chapters that are just painful to read." The Washington Post had a positive review, but not enough to get me to reopen the book, but enough to get me to write some notes on why to read and why to stop reading a book.
THE END.
{ November (noviembre (see also books on Spanish)) 2005 }
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The light, the light! ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!
See
nanowrimo.
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(11.1.2005)
Poet Lorna Dee Cervantes is there ... what about you?
I, also, am trying this Mental Marathon: check status of novel. Book Blog will be very quiet in November.
{ October (octubre (see also books on Spanish)) 2005 }
An amalgam of essays, quotes from Checkhov et al., and poems by Carver. While many of the poems could have used more editing -- and presumably would have got it from Ray, had he not been writing them at the end of his life -- "His Bathrobe Pockets Stuffed with Notes" (the poem of fragments) is completely worth the price of the book:
That time I broke a tooth on barbecued ribs. I was drunk. We were all drunk. ... Begin the novel with the young married couple getting lost in the woods, just after the picnic. ... The policeman whose nails were bitten to the quick. ... Remember Haydn's symphonies. Not all of them were great. But there were 104 of them. The rabbi I met on the plane that time who gave me comfort just after my marriage had broken up for good. ... Three men and a woman in wet suits. The door to their motel room is open and they are watching TV. ... I've got -- how much longer? Enough horsing around! |
Elsewhere, one can read Hayden Carruth's "Ray":
How many guys are sitting at their kitchen tables right now, one-thirty in the morning, this same time, eating a piece of pie? -- that's what I wondered. A big piece of pie, because I'd just finished reading Ray's last book. ... And how many had water in their eyes? Because of Ray's book, and especially those last poems written after he knew: the one about the doctor telling him, the one where he and Tess go down to Reno to get married before it happens ... I can just hear Ray, if he were still here and this were somebody else's book, saying, 'Jesus,' saying, 'This is the saddest son of a bitch of a book I've read in a long time,' saying, 'A real long time.' ... and his poems are good, most of them, and they made me cry, there at my kitchen table with my head down |
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Finished
The Secret Life of Bees
by Sue Monk Kidd.
Brilliant use of concealment and revelation, as the protagonist (Lily) gradually discovers and accepts who she is. As a special treat, instead of reading this book, I listened to the unabridged version read by Jenna Lamia. Her youthful, innocent voice resonates and enriches the brilliant The Secret Life of Bees. |
by Zadie Smith.
The main interest of this book, for me, ended up being that it is structured as three related novella, averaging 150 pages each, which is close to the 50,000-word draft recommended by No Plot? No Problem!
While Smith's book is smooth enough to be beyond the first draft, there is still a need for editing to reduce:
Clever, but ultimately not worth finishing.
Because Smith is addressing the interesting topic race, including mixed-race families, she does
narrowly escape the dreaded 
Blue Ball.
One of the more interesting reviews was by John Freeman, who is on average more admiring than I. He admires 'the portraits Smith paints of her main cast, in particular Kiki' while he sees problems with the plot, including where Smith has 'tackily plonked' a poem written by her husband, poet Nick Laird. He notes that, indeed, Smith is raising some interesting questions:
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"Perhaps the most interesting Belsey child is Levi.
Raised with underprivileged skin in a posh setting,
he feel born into the wrong body.
And so he quits his job at a record store to sell DVDs with Haitian street
workers in Boston.
...
Smith has great fun lambasting Levi and his type for fetishizing actual pain, but there is an edge of sadness to her cackle. What kind of country lures people to its shores with a promise and a dream, only to say success makes you inauthentic? What is the point of a university system that teaches students to make pets out of the downtrodden?" |
Nominated for the 2005 Booker Prize short list.
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Finished
No Plot? No Problem!: A Low-Stress, High-Velocity Guide to Writing a Novel in 30 Days (2004) by Chris Baty. |
(10.25.2005)
Check www.bestamericanpoetry.com for more information, including the list of poets and poems selected.
And note the search option at that site: it lets you (for example) enter the name of a poet and see which issue(s) contain her/his work.
Of this many quotes of interest, this is her report of advise from Nelson Mandella, around the time when Clinton's sexual betrayal of his wife had become public:
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"The greatest glory of living lies not in never falling,
but in rising every time you fall." Nelson Mandela. |
One of his best.
Tells you more than most books about what it is to be, like Commander Sam Vimes, a good copper. Vimes shows that not only can he be devious, but that he has some excellent Beserker genes.
See more at Thud!.
Also see other books by Terry Pratchett. They include:
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Midsummer Snowballs by Andy Goldsworthy (Introduction by Judith Collins). On Midsummer's Night (June 20 becoming 21) 2000, Andy Goldsworthy supervised the unloading and placement of 13 one-to-two-ton snowballs, each snowball almost as tall as an adult. [A 14th (with crushed red rock) was later allowed to melt in the Barbican's Curve gallery, to stain the floor in front of Goldsworthy's installation of a cracked-as-it-dried wall of mud.] He placed them in their planned sites actually on the sidewalks (British 'pavements') of the City of London. Yes, it's street art, which the book record in not just text but also 280 color pictures. At dawn their plastic wrappings were removed. Amid the growing bustle of the warming day, the snowballs began to melt, in a process that took some almost a week. |
While this scheme of transient art had been well planned and advertised, it was still a surprise to many, a delighted to most, and a target of attack to an affronted few.
The body of the book is a series of text and photographs. The text is mostly journal entries by Goldsworthy, who describing his own making of the snowballs in Scottish mountains during the winter of 1999, their transportation and storage, and then their presentation in London. After each section (a few pages) of text, many photographs show the work (including passersby reactions) just discussed, illustrating the points made without interrupting the text.
The biggest mystery to passersby was how had the snowballs arrived.
Then time began to work on the snow sculpture: sunlight came and went, as did wind, people's caresses and kicks, and that strongest enemy of snow: rain.
The snowballs commenced to weather and melt, and began to show there was more: Goldsworthy had placed a different type of object in each ball:
| Ash keys |
| Horse chestnut conkers |
| Scots Pine |
| Elderberries |
| Beech branches |
| Barbed wire!!! |
| Barley ears |
| Metal (agricultural-industrial archaeology) |
| Cow hair |
| Sheep wool |
| Crow feathers |
| Pebbles |
| Chalk |
| Red stone (ground up) indoor melt leaving a stained floor) |
Goldsworthy's earlier works, such as his 1989 Snowballs in Summer exhibit, add context. The latter was indoors in Glasgow, with snowballs two or three feet tall, also each holding a variety of objects. It would have been interesting if the pictures (four shown for each of 18 snowballs) were taken in the same four time slots. But in five (of 72) pictures, one can see another snowball in the background, which does not match the condition of its personal portrait in its own row:
by Joann Sfar.
The delights of a comic book for grown ups include both the resonances with excellent comic books in our youth as well as the spacious way in which the pictures let us experience the story not just as words but also as emotions and images.
The book comprises three separate and related stories, set in Algeria and Paris in the 1930s. It is presented like a comic strip, with six detailed and expressive drawings on each page, and a few lines of text in each picture.
In the first of story, "The Bar Mitzvah," the cat eats a parrot: "I don't like him because he is noisy." His mistress, Zlabya, "is the rabbi's daughter. Her name sounds like a honey-drenched pastry." She "says that if cats could talk they would tell incredible stories. She also says that if the parrot would shut up from time to time it would give us a break."
After the cat eats the parrot, he can talk. As he has a higher IQ than not only the parrot but also most humans, the cat lies, argues, and blasphemes. The cat asks the rabbi to convert him to Judaism because "if I am a good Jew, the rabbi will let me spend time with his daughter." And essentially the theme of this section in particular, and the book in general, is what it means to be a good Jew. The cat, who is throughout the devil's advocate, thinks he has figured out one of the rabbi's students, when he discovers that the youth is cheating; but the cat comes to realize:
But the theme of the book may well be what the rabbi says elsewhere:
| Blessed art thou, who allow us to transgress. |
In the second section, "Malka of the Lions", the rabbi receives a letter from Malka, his cousin, who is coming to visit and bringing his lion. He also receives a letter from Paris, telling him that he can be tested to become the official rabbi for his community - but he has to take dictation in French. The cat wants to help him out:
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"I'm coming along on the day of the dictation and I'll do it for you."
"How dare you suggest that. That's cheating." "Listen, my beloved master, we don't need to respect crazy people's laws." |
However, things do not go as planned, so the cat has to ask the Lord Adonai for a miracle of the rabbi's success. And in exchange, he again loses his power of speech. The story goes through many turns of a lion's tail, of racism and acceptance, and of a cat's jealousy.
The third section, "Exodus," shows the rabbi's visit to Paris with his daughter and new son-in-law. After the dramas of traveling, and seeing many different ways of being Jewish, the rabbi returns, asking his traditional and rebellious congregation to consider:
| "Why should we exhaust ourselves to apply all these precepts that make life so complicated?" |
Favorite poems:
A series of "Aphorisms" by Don Paterson includ:
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"Beware the obsessive ... : if his brain doesn't eat itself, it will eat yours"
and "The audience will always feel far more generous if, at some point in the evening, a little time has been found for them to applaud themselves." |
Garry Wills waxes unenthusiastic about Sherod Santos' book: Greek Lyric Poetry: A New Translation and Michael Schmidt's The First Poets: Lives of the Ancient Greek Poets
The first five pages of Letters to the Editor condemn and praise the Poetry July/August 2005 Humor Issue. David Fenza is particularly irate about Kay Ryan's "I Go To AWP".
There are several lost children:
The story has many contrasting themes, in addition to the loss of a child and the nature of our response to such a loss, particularly
Other worthwhile books by McEwan include:
Vendler is concerned not so much with how "we are initially drawn to poems by their passions, their questions, and their tonal urgencies [still trying to understand what are those]", but with how "we are convinced by them, finally, insofar as they can invent formal means for their impelling motives."
Time and again, Vendler qualifies her statements, as if she wants to claim not only a statement but also its opposite, e.g. "one's heart, reproducing these poems, almost found a new way to beat." This is saying that she thought hers did, but then found it didn't. As a further hint to reading Vendler, ignore such statements: don't worry about her feebleness; don't waste time speculating what Vendler really thinks (and is shy of claiming); what matters is what you think, so simply use her book as a tool for your own opinions.
This book records the Richard Ellmann Lectures (1994) given by Vendler at Emory University. It is presented as a set of three essays analyzing the changes in the work of three poets, the changes being on a scale of decades (Hopkins), days (Heaney), and instances (Graham):
This book has got good press, but it's overrated.
The Patrician Vetinari recognizes the thief and swindler Moist von Lipwig as a Machiavellian not unlike himself. So Vetinari sends an unstoppable and indestructible Golem to capture Moist. Then he offers the captive Moist a simple choice: die or resurrect the Ankh-Morpork Post Office.
The book is primarily an exploration of technical serfdom - for down-sized clacks engineers, read down-sized anyone.
The deus ex machina that involves a city's supply of sail cloth is not credible. I mean significantly less credible than Pratchett usually is.
See more at Going Postal.
Also see other books by Terry Pratchett. They include:
(10.10.2005)
John Sutherland, chair of the Booker judges, cast a tie-breaking vote between Banville's book and Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go. The latter was the popular favorite of readers.
Perhaps Sutherland's vote was (in part) to rebalance the see-saw of history: Banville was short-listed for the 1989 Booker Prize for The Book of Evidence; but he lost out to Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day.
Banville is a former literary editor of The Irish Times. The BBC web site reports that The Sea is "about a man who confronts his past in a town where he spent a childhood holiday", and that John Sutherland called it "a masterly study of grief, memory and love recollected". Also that Banville says he will spend the prize money on "Good work and strong drink".
For the record, the Booker site had received these votes by the time they closed the poll (at prize announcement):
... Coming
in November ...
Guidelines at
| I notice on the blog of Lorna Dee Cervantes that her hat is in the NaNoWriMo ring: Lorna Dee Cervantes to Write a Novel In November. Yes folks, 30 days and 50,000 words: that's the goal of hundreds - and perhaps thousands - of authors around the world in National Novel Writing Month. |
Guidelines include:
A fascinating exploration of the power of the 'system' and the corruption of 'ordinary' people.
How interesting that Mitchell claims it's a novel. In fact, it is a tour de force of six voices and forms:
Each tale is interrupted by being broken, usually abruptly, so that the book moves forward in time from the 1850s to the Apocalypse, and then unpacks itself backward. Sometimes the break is 'explained'; for example, in the crime novella, the character that had received half of the letters from the composer half a century earlier hides half of them in a Gideon Bible before taking the remainder with him.
The six stories interweave in more ways than that each refers to the text of earlier stories. There are links between the characters, such as the comet-shaped birthmark that appears on the shoulders of at least Robert Frobisher (the composer), Luisa Rey (the journalist), and Sonmi-451.
Mitchell's command of voice is remarkable and his creation of the future languages of the Sonmi world and the post-Sonmi world (where Sonmi is a god) hold together well. The Sonmi language (with its nouning and verbing of today's registered names) makes amusing sense.
It is the world of the future that has one of the most horrifying sections. Fabricant Sonmi-451 has been disguised as a fullblood or Soul, and is on the run. By chance (maybe), she meets a bickering rich couple on a high bridge. They have a pet carrier containing a knee-high fabricant doll that they bought their daughter. This clone, a living, speaking, feeling, thinking model of a famous star, is no longer fashionable: the new fashion is for the Marilyn Monroe clones. People are supposed to euthanise their unwanted clones, but that is expensive so they bring the clone up to the bridge where she has a falling accident. [The book, of course, has other falling accidents from bridges.]
A very rich and strange book. Worth reading.
This is one of the more scary of the Pratchett books. The vampires in this book are the baddest of the bad and sadly King Verence of Lancre is the weakest of the weak. Verence does Mistake Number One in dealing with vampires: he invites them in.
So the book gets off to a dismal start, and the puns and the interest do not pick up till a third of the way through. But eventually there is enough momentum that Interestin' Things Start Happening. And along the way, there is considerable discussion about what religion is and what a religious symbols are and how (see this being done on p.281; don't try this at home) you create them.
See more at Carpe Jugulum.
Also see other books by Terry Pratchett. They include:
The book is indeed well written, and there are adventures and mysteries and revelations. The language is mostly brilliant without being self-consciousness. And half of the book is set in a nostalgically familiar yet made-new territory.
So why, I ponder, is the book ultimately dissatisfying.
Is it the willingness of the Electric Michelangelo (a tattoo artist) to be a servant to so many people that are so much stronger than he is, from the time that (as a youngster) he lets his two pals nearly drown him in quicksand? The sadness of his life? The sordidness of his life? Is it my lack of a tattoo? Is it the immersion in the sordidness and body fluids of one alcoholic then another? Well, I'm glad I read it, but it was hard to take, so I read the first few pages, read the last section, then made another run at it and skimmed my way through.
Perhaps I will be haunted by it and have to read it more slowly ...
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Related pages:
Books on Buddhism.
Books on Learning Spanish.
Poetry - Learn How to Write Your Own.
Forests of California and Trees of the World.
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