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My chocolate of choice for a NaNoWriMo attempt:
Books read recently by J. Zimmerman.
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Disclaimer.
Links.
Booker Prizes
Chocolate.
Books read
Best books read in 2010.
Best writers of poetry and prose
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My chocolate of choice for a NaNoWriMo attempt:
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Reader's Bill of Rights [after Daniel Pennac in Better than Life
from November 2003 Utne Magazine] includes the rights to:
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"Like Machiavelli, I often sit among my books at night."
[Alberto Manguel (p. 193 of his The Library at Night)] |
{ December : diciembre (see also books on learning Spanish) 2010 }
(12.31.2010)
Also by Card:
Coming back to it after working on other aspects, it's not quite as overwhelmingly fast to listen to as it was initially. Still hard though.
Yikes -- more seriousness -- Lesson 2 is to memorize all the 46 basic katakana symbols plus variants.
This guy is serious -- Lesson 1 is to memorize all the 46 basic hiragana symbols plus variants.
I have not learned everything on its two casette tapes (four quarter-hour segments) of conversational Japanese before I must return this recorded book to the library: another person hoping to learn Japanese has requested it. But it's been very helpful to hear (and repeat hearing a half-dozen times) a different Japanese voice and at slower speed than on the scarily fast-spoken Pimsleur CDs.
Breezed through this slightly irritating faux-cute novel supposedly told from the point-of-view of a 9-year-old school girl. Baker's adult delight in oddball language kept taking me out of the language-learning tone of his protagonist: jarring. But the book has the important sub-text of school bullying, and the way that some children cope with it.
Books by Baker:
This is particularly excellent in entering in depth into the hearts and minds of about a dozen characters and following three main story threads in parallel and with clarity. I am particularly aware of Card's writing skills after my recent disappointment and abandonment of a book (admitedly in the weaker 'fantasy' genre, but that is no excuse for a boring book) by Terry Brooks: Genesis of Shannara: The Elves of Cintra.
Also by Card:
A non-fiction meditation and exercise in personal self-delight on Baker's engagement with the works of the author John Updike.
Surprisingly, this turns out to be an adorable book. Baker's savant-esque flourishes endear him to me as does his enthusiasm and his word choices.
As one who has read and disliked a lot of Updike's work, I was pleased to see Baker's lack of having read all that much (even though, unlike me, he is an Updike fan) and his intent to avoid reading any more during the writing of his own book. His cheerfully enthusiastic tone includes his later correction of his quotations of Updike from memory, and his commentary on those errors. And Baker is just so knowledgeable and so full of strange little events that he turns into psychodramas (e.g. getting his free hamburger).
Nothing this good comes from Baker until finally we get The Anthologist, his brilliant hymn to poetry (well, formal poetry) and to procrastination. Read it and learn!
Books by Baker:
Practical and helpful for trouble-shooting.
A wide-ranging and generously illustrated book that summarizes the main ideas of the main western philosophers and the sometimes scathing holes that they tore in each other's ideas and methods.
A Russian novel of a book, with innumerable characters and roles. But the story feels like a multi-dimensional board game, written with more interest in tactical details than in developing characters with depth.
Set in Pakistan primarily in the 1990s and early 2000s, it describes the lives of two independent cousins growing up in a family of strong women. Flashbacks to the 1947 birth of Pakistan and subsequent frequent changes of political leadership show the swirling events with which the family has to cope. Valuable for a world view; potentially a novel that will be understood better in future for a record of Pakistan's people during the building of their nation.
More informative (though less funny than) Salman Rushdie's well-received fantasy novel and 1981 Man Booker Prize winner, Midnight's Children (1981): In that, two children at born at midnight, 15 August 1947, are switched in the hospital to that the son of a wealthy Muslim family is raised in a Hindu tenement, while the Hindu child is raised with the Muslim family as their own.
He's dealing with the same issues (the trashing of the planet, over-population, and short-sighted greed) as Carl Hiaasen, but in a somber hectoring Walter-ish way: Franzen's male lead (stand-in for Franzen?) is called Walter.
The writing seems blockily scattered and misanthropic with no apparent humor. Franzen jumps between half-a-dozen viewpoints: such shifts were done much better by others, e.g. in Rashamon or in Durrell's The Alexandria Quartet.
Franzen shows everyone -- liberals, republicans, parents, children, students, rednecks -- to be dreadful except (but we meet them too briefly) the aging rural women protesting mountain-top removal. He hits all the worlds woes and his characters mostly respond with depression, 'justified' by the hard row they have each been assigned to hoe.
He is overly optimistic in having one of his characters compare her life to that of the heroine in War and Peace -- I wish I could hope this is a glimmer of his otherwise invisible humor and that he is thereby merely teasing his critics.
Techniques, tips, projects, and more! Practical and informative.
His 'pornography for gabby nerds' book. I guess that Baker enjoyed writing this more than I enjoyed reading it.
Several "spots I'll want to skip because they're ... boring or somehow irrelevant" [quotation from p. 73 of Vox].
Books by Baker:
{ November : noviembre (see also books on learning Spanish) 2010 }
(11.30.2010)
Outstanding day at the University Library where I discovered their thrilling section of books on
haiku and
tanka.
Read:
Began to read and set aside for a return visit:
Erhlich lived in Greenland during much of 1993 to 2001, during every season — the four winter months of perpetual dark, the four summer months of perpetual daylight, and the two brief seasons of spring and autumn. This book tells of her love for traveling in Greenland (especially by dogsled) and of her beloved Inuit friends, whose harsh and austere and passionate lives she shared. She interweaves her own story with that of Knud Rasmussen, the Inuit-Danish explorer, and his hazardous expeditions between 1917 and 1924.
Erhlich's lyrical writing praises the ice landscape and the Inuit hunter lifestyle, while it mourns for its accelerating passing.
Careful editing could have avoided several places of unnecessary repetition.
A deeper introduction into Santōka's poetry than that given by John Stevens (1980 and 2009).
A pdf of this book appears at this time at: the Haiku Foundation.
Set mainly in Japan at and around the American air base in Yokota, Japan, a sad story of a prodigal daughter, an absent father, and a lost love. Bitter-sweet.
See also Swofford's Iraq War memoir Jarhead: Jarhead: A Marine's Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battles.
And for another view of life at that air base, see Sarah Bird's The Yokota Officers Club (2001).
The introduction concentrates on Santōka's life; it says little about his poetry; the introduction for Hiroaki Sato's 2002 translation is much more informative in that area.
Continuing the NB romp, and going back to his first novel, I discover his novel-long book in praise of things, a nerd's meditation on his obsessions and compulsions, footnoted as needed. No one but a determined speed-reader could skip through this book in an hour-long lunch-break.
Through the protagonist analyzes every sight and gesture in his hamster-wheel-spinning mind the ride he provides to the reader is quite charming. Though on p. 135 when he finally returns to his mezzanine floor, I am happy enough to never hear from him again.
Books by Baker:
Long but brave and historical biography of this politician peace and social activist, novelist, journalist, and WWI nurse.
Another excellent book: 33 mornings of the protagonist's lighting an early-morning hearth fire (hours before his wife and daughter arise but his pet duck is ready for its warm water mash) and meditating on his somewhat obsessive life. Something sweetly innocent and haiku-like about this book.
Includes hints on how to start and not start your day:
| If the first thing you do is stump to the computer in your pajamas to check your e-mail, blinking and plucking your proverbs, you're going to be in a hungry electronic funk all morning. So don't do it. If you read the paper first thing you're going to be full of puns and grievances — put that off. For a while I thought that the key to life was to read something from a book first. The idea was to reach down, even before I'd fully awakened, to a pile of books by the bed and haul one up and open it. ... But now, see, now ... I read nothing when I wake up, I just put on my bathrobe and come down here. Nothing has happened to me when I sit down in this chair, except that I've make coffee and rinsed an apple and, at least on this unusual morning, washed a casserole dish. I am the world, or perhaps the world is a black silk eye mask and I'm wearing it. This whole room warms up from the fire I've made. |
And hints on how to fall asleep:
| For some years I relied on suicidal thoughts to help me get to sleep. By day I'm not a particularly morbid person, but at night I would lie in bed imagining that I was hammering a knitting needle into my ear, or swan-diving off a ledge into a black void at the bottom of which were a dozen sharp slippery stalagmites. Wearing a helmet and pilot's gear, I would miniaturize myself, and wait for a giant screwdriver to unscrew the hatch at the nose of the bullet. I would be lowered into the control room of the bullet, ... when the bullet dove into my brain I would fall asleep. |
Books by Baker:
A complex Adam Dalgliesh murder mystery. Awash with Means, Motive, and Opportunity.
Others by P.D. James:
Could Gaiman possibly be adapting a Harry Potter story? A young boy is the only survivor when the rest of his family is slain. He is hidden and protected for a decade. He is schooled by a werewolf and a witch and others. He keeps pushing boundaries. Eventually he takes on the Evil Doers that are trying to kill him. He overcomes them by guile and bravery and with the aid of his loyal friends.
Good, but it would have been more impressive if it were more original, less derivative. However, it did win the John Newberry Award for children's literature.
The Miss Marple's detective novel on the list of recommended reading as prototypes for the weekend novelist.
Other Christie's enjoyed:
{ October : octubre (see also books on learning Spanish) 2010 }
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Kalooki Nights (2008)
by Howard Jacobson (narrated by by Steven Crossley).
One of the best books read in 2010.
Essentially Jacobson's novel shows how desperate humor is used as a coping mechanism,
particularly for the impossible horrors of the Nazi-inflicted Holocaust
and for the difficulties of the close 1-to-1 relationships of cross-cultural marriages.
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(10.29.2010)
Previously read: The Story of Philosophy: Volume 2.
See also: The Story of Philosophy: Volume 1.
The Best American Poetry 2010.
A particularly good issue this year!
Voted the Best new American Play for 1985 by the Outer Critics Circle. A delightful romp.
Read in conjunction with a class on Existentialism.
Includes essays by:
The lack of quotation marks make this book hard to read as it is too often unclear when something is being said aloud versus being thought versus being commentary by the protagonist. Set it 17th England and then the Plymouth colony. While the historical detail comes highly recommended I did not find the tale well told.
A rambling tale of a white boy self-educating in literature and commerce, gambling and fighting, while being adopted by a Cherokee chief. Interesting but I found myself skimming in many places. His brilliant Cold Mountain was a more focused story.
A novella that retells a hundred different versions of the Sleeping Beauty story. Fractured and a little repetitious; an amusing quick read.
Clear, concise, great illustrations: a gem.
Highly specialized but not quite what I'm looking for.
One of the finest translations of the generous and inspiring letters by Rainer Maria Rilke.
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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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