7 posts tagged “books”

A new feature: a listing of funny things that people say to me, which need no further elaboration.

"I can't even imagine what it's like to support a National League team."
"It usually means there's a small part of your brain missing."

Happy Fall! This is my favorite time of year, for reasons I have never fully addressed; perhaps this can be the subject of another post. No matter, we have more pressing issues at hand. It is time for me to lay my cards on the table: here's what I ended up reading this summer.

As some of you may remember, on May 22 I responded to the Question of the Day by constructing a summer reading list for myself. What you may not know, unless you are unfortunate enough to live with me, is that I adopted, in my trademark reasonless manner, an almost cultish rigidity to this list. Strange, then, that I didn't actually manage to read very much of it. There are a few reasons for this.

First, I foolishly forgot to calculate Harry Potter into my original list. This meant allowing not only a week for the new book, but the week preceding it for re-reading The Half-Blood Prince. This didn't take too much of a bite out of my time as did various other bizarre flights of fancy (I was suddenly and inexorably gripped with a desire to re-read Fight Club, of all things) and a general complete lack of time to read. Here, then, is how my summer reading shamefully came down:

Children of Men - turned out to be ridiculously boring next to the movie, which is fucking brilliant. Took forever to get through.
Slaughterhouse-Five - just as amazing as I remembered; inspired a breif desire to read nothing but Vonnegut, which I suppressed in the interest of sticking to The List
The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat - started reading, but found it to be too dry to read in one go. The cases being unrelated, I decided I would read it intermittenly with other reading. Really fascinating, though, I'm still making it through.
J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club
Back Talk
Special Topics in Calamity Physics - I've been stuck on this for over month, just broke page 200. I can only speculate at the reasons for this giving me so much trouble, but I suspect it has to do with the effect that The Man Who/Back Talk/The Bible had on my momentum
The Bible - Slow going. Extremely slow going.

I have just discovered from current obsession SModcast that none other than Dear Leader Kim Jong-il has written a book entitled The Art of Cinema. An excerpt:

"In capitalist society, the director is shackled by the reactionary governmental policy of commercializing the cinema and by the capitlaist money, so that he is a mere worker who obeys the will of the filmmaking industrialists whether he likes it or not."

I'm sort of fascinated.

Alright, I'm doing it. After months or maybe years of intention, I have been prompted by several factors to face the daunting task I have set myself. I'm reading the Bible.

My religious leanings, or distinct lack thereof, I feel are completely irrelevant to this endeavor. This is the most widely published and most widely read book in history. It is at the root of modern storytelling, record keeping, historical scholarship, and the spread of literacy, not to mention the basis of law. It is arguably the foundation of all of Western culture. Like it or not, this is the most important book in our society.

I decided that, as someone who loves philosophy and history, study, discussion, someone who revels in thought, I simply had no choice in the matter; I must tackle the Bible. It seems almost irresponsible not to, it's everywhere you turn. The question was "How," which segued into the more visible "When."

I had tried several times to just sit down and open the thing up. Perhaps I was derailed by the fact that I already knew the general throw of the first page (God creates creeping things, and swimming things, and a surface to keep them on, and Man and Woman, and tells them that they're in charge, not at all in that order); whatever it was, I just couldn't do it. I couldn't figure out how to approach it.

After some research I finally asked Fernando to come to the book store with me to investigate Bible guides. He immediately answered, "No need to investigate. Get Asimov's Guide to the Bible." I trust Fernando on these issues, so I ordered a copy a few months ago. After that, it was a simple matter of my saying, "I'm going to start reading the Bible" a requisite four million times before I actually got started.

I'm going a little wacky with it, really. I started a notebook so I can keep track of what I'm learning, and I bought the Cliffs Notes and Bible for Dummies. I dug out this fifty-year-old commentary book that I salvaged from the upstairs neighbors' discard pile from when Wendy lived at Spine.

I will, it goes without saying, document my progress here. I can't imagine how long this will take -- I had once calculated that, if I read one book a day, it would take me just over two months, but I think that plan's a bit ambitious. Once I'm done, I'm going to read the Apocrypha, Judas, all those books about Mary Magdalene; pretty much anything I can put my hands on. I am going to be the most well educated heathen ever.

Part of this has to do with the fact that I'm not actually going to law school this fall, and a deep corner of my being simply insists that I do some ridiculous reading.

The second issue weighing heavily on my mind today is that which is shared by millions of crazy people the world over: Harry Potter mania.

I love the Harry Potter books, in that way that I love things, wherein explanation is completely unnecessary. They're fun. Rowling isn't, by any stretch, an especially elegant writer, but the stories are intricate and beautifully constructed and totally engaging, which is more than enough for me. The prospect of reading them to my kids is a thought I cannot wait to make a reality.

The hysteria over the ending (and the New York Times' apparent disregard for, you know, childhood) is something of a point of annoyance for me. With Half-Blood Prince, some jerk who undoubtedly hates Christmas posted the ending two days after its release in a bulletin on the MySpace. I promised him I would kick him in the nuts the next time I saw him. To think that just knowing the facts of the ending is the only reason for reading a book is beyond confounding for me; if I wanted that, I could just wait till Monday morning and ask any eight-year-old on the street.

My problem is precisely underlined here. By Monday morning, every eight-year-old on the street, along with about a million other people, will know the ultimate outcome of the Harry Potter story. It's like walking through a minefield. Being a decidedly slow reader, I'm worried that I won't get through the book before I accidentally find out the ending, as happened last time. I have to say, devastated as I will surely be after the book (if not Harry, somebody's going to die, we know this much for sure), it would be incomparably worse to have this information ahead of time. What's the point of reading, then? Then this event that I've been waiting for for a year (or, six years, come to that) will be completely ruined.

My answer is to get Wendy to drop off a copy for me at my parents' house, so that I can try to finish it during Karsa. High-school Harith would have been delighted to know I was turning this mandated seclusion to my advantage.

That I can't go to the release is something of a disappointment. This being only the third release since I started reading the series, I missed the fifth because I hadn't gotten through the first four books yet, the sixth because I had to work at Borders the following morning, and now this one for Karsa. It's not the end of the world, but it's a piece of pop culture I would have liked to experience. As is evidenced by my affinity for opening-night movies, I love crowds and I love chaos.

Wendy wanted to go to the release event at the library, so I told her she didn't have to deliver my copy until tomorrow morning. Then the clock will start ticking.

I hope she brings it tonight, anyway.

What modern book do you think will be read in high school by the next generation of kids? 
Submitted by Tom.

I have to say that the wording of the question makes me think they're referring to some new-fangled book device. That's relatively amusing.

This is a question I've pondered many times, and I keep running into one major problem: maybe today's great authors haven't done their best work yet. It's impossible to say, from the present vantage point, what the next generation of teachers will value.

With that said, there are some works that have come out in recent years that are fairly undeniable. I'd like to think that they're the obvious choices, but really my kids will probably still be reading Jane Eyre or some crap.

Absolutely top of the list is The Corrections. This book is so huge as to demand immediate admittance into the American literary canon. It follows the story of a family in which each member is individually falling apart at the seams, and chronicles their lives so thoroughly and beautifully as to make you come to think of them as your own family. This thing is what the art of novel writing is all about; it is expansive and personal, huge and delicate, dense and engaging. The guy introduces new characters two hundred pages in, and it all fits. There is no way to read it without realizing it is one of the most important works of our time.

Jonathan Safran Foer is the perfect example of my problem with this question. Reading Everything is Illuminated, I felt like it was one of the best modern American works, no question. The way he toys with storytelling and metacognition, the ideas of personal history and its transmission, and the process of writing in the voice of someone with only the vaguest knowledge of the English language is all mind blowing. But then I read Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.

It's not that this work trumps Everything is Illuminated outright; there can be compelling arguments for either one's supremacy. It's the relevance to our culture that sets it apart, and actually makes it a good set piece for teaching turn of the century literature or even history. It's one of those works that captures the feeling of the society at the time and suspends it. It deals with the post-9/11 world in an incredibly moving way without being totally condescending and schmaltzy. And it too contains the examinations of language and the effects of stories that Foer seems to love, but they're not addressed as directly. I guess I would teach these books in two different classes.

I would be remiss not to mention my hero in these proceedings. How do I pick one Dave Eggers work as better than the others? Everything he touches is gold in my eyes. I guess, for the sake of argument, I'll focus on A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius. Aside from being the one that made me and so many others fall in love with Eggers' writing, it really encapsulates something indescribable about our generation. All of our insecurities are folded up in this work, centering around our biggest problem: acting like grownups. If nothing else, this work defines the current moment in writing, and marks the first significant advancement in autobiography in I don't know how long.

For anyone, this will turn into more of a list of their favorite books than anything else, because, as I said, there are too many variables to say what's important. But that's always the case with literature, really. Someone obviously likes Jane Eyre.

Books: Show us your summer reading list.
Submitted by marvel is my pen name.

Following is a list of books I'm planning on reading. I may or may not get to them all this summer, but this is what I have on tap, anyway:

• PD James, Children of Men - currently reading
• Joseph Campbell, The Hero With A Thousand Faces - currently out of the Albany Public Library. Clock ticking, will probably end up just buying it.
• Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five
• Sylvia Plath, Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams
• Michael Chabon, The Yiddish Policeman's Union
• Alex Richards, Back Talk
• Julie Powell, Julie and Julia
• Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat
• Naguib Mahfouz, The Cairo Trilogy
• Marisha Pessl, Special Topics in Calamity Physics

As always, the Bible is on my reading list, and falling fast. I just have to sit down and do that one of these days.