From October 2010 to October 2011 I challenged myself to read fifty books. It was more than I had attempted in any year and at the time the number seemed a bit ridiculous and arbitrary. However, I trudged through it and on the even of October 1, 2011, completed my goal.
At times I was perhaps a bit too ambitious with my material. Saying that you’ve read fifty books sounds nice, but I didn’t want to do it just to say it. I wanted to develop a more consistent habit of doing something which I love to do and which I believe is enriching and rewarding. Plus it was an incentive not do other things that waste massive amounts of time and brainpower.
I chose books that stretched my range: Nabokov and Julio Cortazar for fiction, tomes about The British Empire and North Korea and Randomness Theory for education. Some of these books were massive and some were just difficult, but halfway through the year I found that I was getting behind schedule. Far behind schedule. So I had to fill my list with some books which certainly don’t entail bragging rights for reading prowess, including Roald Dahl and two of the Twilight books. (This is still a dark period for me to look back on.) However, I did find that the breadth of books—heavy, light, big, small, interesting, booooring—added an diverse topography which enhanced the experience.
I would like to present the full list of books I read this year and give a brief description and/or critique of each. Because I began to write the reviews after the year was over, it was an exercise in focused recollection to try and but down details, themes, character names, theories I had learned, and the myriad elements of different books, into my reviews. But it also made those books ultimately more memorable to me.
A book is one of the few private places we can escape to in order to find ourselves yet transport ourselves at the same time. I hope to encourage others to try a similar reading goal and not to be discouraged by their ability or lack thereof. In my experience reading is like working out—the more often you get into it, the easier and more rewarding it becomes. Living through philosophies and characters and history and science is a means to becoming a more aware human being, more attuned the potential of the world.
Here is the list of books (books in a series are listed together under one number). Please scroll down to read the reviews:
1. A Tale of Two Cities—Charles Dickens
2. Slaughterhouse Five—Kurt Vonnegut
3. Blink—Malcolm Gladwell
4. Eleven Minutes—Paulo Coelho
5. A Widow for One Year—John Irving
6. Great Expectations—Charles Dickens
7. The Plot Against America—Philip Roth
8. American Pastoral—Philip Roth
9. Alice in Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass—Lewis Carroll
10. Escape from Freedom—Erich Fromm
11. Outliers—Malcolm Gladwell
12. When you are Engulfed in Flames—David Sedaris
13. Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea—Barbara Demick
14. The Great Gatsby—F. Scott Fitzgerald
15. Foucault’s Pendulum—Umberto Eco
16. Teachings on Love—Thich Nhat Hanh
17. The Count of Monte Cristo—Alexandre Dumas
18. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo; The Girl Who Played with Fire; The Girl who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest —Stieg Larsson
19. The Catcher in the Rye—J.D. Salinger
20. Hopscotch—Julio Cortazar
21. Justice: What’s the right thing to do?—Michael Sandel
22. I Am a Cat—Natsume Soseki
23. Lolita—Vladimir Nabokov
24. The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules our Lives—Leonard Mlodinov
25. Boy—Roald Dahl
26. Demons—Fyodor Dostoevsky
27. Fantastic Mr. Fox—Roald Dahl
28. Matilda—Roald Dahl
29. The Decline and Fall of the British Empire—Piers Brendon
30. The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six Others—Roald Dahl
31. Nausea—Jean Paul Satre
32. Twilight; New Moon—Stephanie Myer
33. One Minute for Yourself—Spencer Johnson
34. Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader—Bradley K. Martin
35. Norwegian Wood—Murakami Haruki
36. For One More Day—Mitch Albom
37. Writing Without Teachers—Peter Elbow
38. Nine Stories—J.D. Salinger
39. On Writing—Stephen King
40. Lord of the Flies—William Golding
41. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich—Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
42. Just So Stories—Rudyard Kipling
43. Bad Samaritans: The Guilty Secrets of Rich Nations and the Threat to Global Prosperity—Ha Joon Chang
44. Fahrenheit: 451—Ray Bradbury
45. Narrative of Frederick Douglass—Frederick Douglass
46. Night—Elie Wiesel
47. Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother—Amy Chua
I give a brief account of the content and impact a book had on me. I also give a recommended readership and a star rating—six asterisks out of six being reserved for those books which I find are almost transcendently good; five stars for those books which are really great; four stars for those books which are almost great or really, really good; three for most others that range from okay to a bit flawed (and for shitty page-turners); two for books I really didn’t like much at all; no books are so low as to get one star. I’m happy to say I didn’t read many bad books this year. I know a rating system might annoy some people, but I find it to be useful, especially when I have qualified my positions about the book.
1. A Tale of Two Cities—Charles Dickens
--I started with this one and a few other classics because classics seem to be the thing to read when you are trying to absorb good literature. And I find this truism to be true. Dickens is one of my favorite authors ever and I had read this novel in high school, but I’d forgotten the depth and detail of the story. It is intricately layered and captures the frenzy of a time and place (the French Revolution period in both France and England) without resorting to being overly historical. One thing that I found missing from this book was the abundance of dark humor that was in Great Expectations and other Dickens works. Perhaps it’s because he’s painting on such a large canvas and conveying the darkest of human capacities; but there is still a comical lightness to be found in the evil Dufarges and in the miserable hero Sydney Carton. Recommend for lovers of classic literature and intro to Victorian Lit. *****
2. Slaughterhouse Five—Kurt Vonnegut
--Can’t believe I hadn’t read this book. The most famed of Vonnegut’s books, it chronicles the journey of Billy Pilgrim in his senile and drooping old age as he recollects the most vivid and sordid memories of the past, specifically those of fighting in World War II. A large portion of the novel is also a sort of dreamscape spent on a faraway planet in the literal bosom of a space goddess. It’s a weird book and it’s far more surreal than some of his others (at least Player Piano and God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater). At times you feel as detached from the events in the story as the main character is. He’s like a victim of fate, a complacent pawn in somebody’s universal folly. But ultimately the book is hilarious and succeeds as a universal indictment against war, and it does so by showing the effects on those sensitive beings that are forced into the hell of combat and sanctioned killing of other humans. Recommended for someone looking for a war story that isn’t quite a war story; a weird back comedy that you aren’t supposed to laugh at. *****
3. Blink—Malcolm Gladwell
--Interesting book about the decisions we make in the blink of an eye and how often these split second assessments turn out being more accurate than a more studied, cerebral analysis. Gladwell looks at a case of art fraud, a case of mistaken identity in a police shooting, the faces of married couples fighting, and a cola taste test, among other examples, and makes startling conclusions about the nature of judgment. He also links this split second decision-making with the idea of expertise and finds that experts more often have this ability and it is when they trust their instincts that they are most often right. I found myself reevaluating my gut feeling after this and having more respect for intuition. Gladwell is not a scientist, but he’s really good at linking ideas together to make a theory that, under some kind of conditions, could be tested. Recommended for those who want to know more about how we make decisions. ****
4. Eleven Minutes—Paulo Coelho
--Having read The Alchemist last year—a book which I had mixed feelings about—I wasn’t sure what kind of book I was in for. This was recommended to me as a book about love and sex (eleven minutes being the worldwide average amount time for copulation supposedly) and I knew very little else about it. It is basically about a young woman’s journey towards discovering her own sexual powers and ultimately her grander desires in life. She comes from a small town in the middle of Brazil; naïve and poor she moves to Rio, meets a shady European guy and then relocates to Switzerland, where she becomes a dancer and a sort of escort. She finds herself loving the pleasure she gives men and even more the release she gets from talking to them and helping them. In short, the book is about a sort of a female Alchemist character: her quest for enlightenment leads her back home.
I hate to elaborate too much on a book I didn’t like, but I just have to say why I didn’t like it. After reading two Coelho books I’m convinced he doesn’t know how to write prose well. His writing is full of clichés and shortcuts and “aha” moments that just come off as weakness in the imagination of the author. The reader has to spend half of the novel reading the diary of this vacuous character that is becoming more and more confident—it’s like she’s a guru who just has to fuck guys and talk to them to grow and transcend. Give me a break. Also, the writing is wooden and the dialogue is almost nonexistent. I’m pretty sure Coelho avoids dialogue because it’s not in his range, so he just tells tells tells and shows nothing. Of course, I could be misled by the English translation and the book is really beautiful and deep in the original Portuguese. But I doubt it. I won’t pick up another book by this author (although there are DOZENS of different ones on the shelves, go figure) and I’ve let his poor writing be a lesson to me: In the short amount of time I have to read, I am not going to waste much on authors who indulge in clichés and come up with nothing in terms of a good story or characters.
The one thing that I liked about the book was the idea—that it is written from the vantage of a prostitute is interesting. That it is about her transformation and interaction with lonely men is interesting. That she remains shallow and eschews love in order to fly away home at the end of her journey is not so interesting. I felt her transformation, unlike the alchemist’s, wasn’t a true unfolding of her abilities and knowledge of herself, but a misstep that she ultimately feels the needs to correct, even after she falls in love with a good man. In more capable hands this could be an amazing book. But in this best-selling author’s ham fists, it doesn’t go anywhere special. ***
5. A Widow for One Year—John Irving
--This complex book is about a daughter’s love for a salacious father and pining for an absent mother; it is about not letting go of the past at the expense of your present and future happiness; it is about learning about love through highly unorthodox escapades. I loved this book and it has stayed with me in the months and months since I read it. John Irving’s talents as a writer are manifold—he can turn a phrase, create vivid and incredible characters, write a strong narrative, and interweave several storylines that are capable of a sort of climax. There aren’t many authors who can do it. Dickens comes to mind (and he is often called America’s Dickens).
The book first follows Eddie O’Hare, a sixteen year old who winds up working for a children’s book author as a summer job and sleeping with that author’s wife, learning the ways of love from this much older woman. Many years later, when this woman has run away and Eddie is still in love with her, we catch up with Ruth Cole, the successful author and daughter of the aforementioned children’s book author who is dealing with life and starting to wonder about her mother. I won’t go into too much of the story (on this or others), otherwise I will never finish this book list synopsis. But I will say the characters are awesome, the story covers a lot of time (as in his A Prayer for Owen Meany) and the writing is full of warmth and humor and intelligence.
Of course, there are flaws in the novel. It starts to feel overlong in the third part when Ruth is sent to Amsterdam to write a story and meets a policeman, etc. etc. It meanders and loses its footing when it tries to spawn new story lines. Also, although Ruth feels like a real person, we really don’t get enough time with her as an adult to appreciate her. This is unfortunate because I think Irving writes women better than most male authors; the only other one I like more (so far) is Murakami. I would recommend this book to anyone who enjoys a pastoral—a uniquely American story that spans lifetimes and is wrapped up in the flaws and devotions of characters. It’s a beautiful book. *****
6. Great Expectations—Charles Dickens
--The second Dickens book I read this year was one I had started in grade school and just couldn’t get through. This is a story that gets more accessible as you age. The yearnings of young Pip for Estella, the bitterness of Miss Havisham, the eerie coincidence of Pip’s run-in with the convicts on the marshes and his extended dealings with the two women. Of course it WASN’T coincidence at all, was it? In some ways, Dickens is kind of a teller of ghost stories. His characters are products of their time, and as such they are scary—coal monsters, soggy villains drenched in the soot and soil and grit of their environment. Even their names sound like some kind of demons carved out of wood. This makes them seem otherworldly, and it gives a kind of urgency to the situations, such as when Pip hides his at-large benefactor Magwitch and tries to help him to safety all those years later. He is fighting against his environment, against his fate, against death and the inevitable. It seems that most of Dickens’ characters are embattled in this fight against their positions in Victorian England, only to become victims of overwhelmingly powerful societal mechanisms, namely class structure and the unfairness and heavy-handedness of the law. Dickens more or less creates the consummate gothic novel here.
There is everything in this book—adventure, mystery, terror, drama, love, tragedy. Great Expectations is the best novel from the Victorian period I have read thus far (admittedly, I have a lot more to read). Recommended for anyone who likes classic literature and a good story. ******
7. The Plot Against America—Philip Roth
--Philip Roth is my favorite modern American realist, mostly because he is a genius with words, with capturing the perfect language to express a complex emotion—ennui or bitterness or regret or fear. His language is always pensive and farseeing. In this novel, however, Roth uses luminaries of the 1930s and 1940s to create an alternate version of history, one where Charles Lindberg is elected President and subsequently courts the Nazi party and starts disenfranchising Jews, just as was happening in Central Europe at the same time.
He starts slow and ramps up the events and tension to a frenzied pace, both focusing on the woes and happenings of a Jewish family in New Jersey, while simultaneously creating a media history—complete with fabricated speeches from politicians and radio gurus—and reflecting the frenzy that would have taken place in society (in favor of the new rules or against them) if Lindberg had really been elected President.
Roth shows his talents run in several directions and he keeps this book a true novel. The idea is clever; the execution is cutting and real. Because of the difficultly in creating this world and maintaining a story and great characters (something which historical or pseudo-historical novels sometimes fail to do) I think that this book deserves a lot of praise. The climax is a bit swift and the denouement non-existent, but we can overlook it because the build-up is so well done. There are obviously a hundred moral questions that beg alongside the events going on in the novel, and Roth doesn’t ignore them. But neither does he moralize or go out of his way to answer them. He doesn’t sacrifice the emotion and momentum of his fictionalized 1940’s America to address moral concerns because they are self-evident or have already been addressed in our discussions of the Nazis and of hate and racism in America. Recommended for connoisseurs of American history and those interested in “what if?” scenarios. *****
8. American Pastoral—Philip Roth
--In sweeping novel form, Roth examines the breakdown of a middleclass family from New Jersey. The father had been a hero, a legend as a high school athlete. And afterwards his winning personality and spirit and generosity open all kinds of career doors. But he opts to stay in Newark and continue to run the glove company that has been in his family for generations. This is a symbol of his hard work and dedication to the Dream. However, the demons that overtake his life are not his own, but those of his family. His daughter becomes the focus after she descends into hippiedom and radical activism in the 1960s. Working for a terrorist liberation organization similar to the Weather Underground, she carries out several bombings on local businesses. When she is fingered as the culprit she goes into hiding. In the meantime, the scars from this horrible shock run deep in her father (who still goes by his affectionate high-school name “The Swede”). He remains stoically poised as his resolve and will inwardly crumble. In the face of the domestic tragedy he breaks down and expresses a deep desire to see his daughter, whose crimes have forced her into hiding. He ultimately achieves this and finds her living in a state of filthy, homeless anonymity. It is worse than anything he could have imagined and, despite his lifelong heroism, he cannot pull her out of her mess.
This book reminded me of so many things. It’s just so detailed and subtle and real somehow in its feelings and characters that I felt like there was a movie or a memory somewhere I was recalling every page. Unfortunately this didn’t really make up for some big flaws, among which is an irksome repetition of themes about characters’ traits, about the loneliness and despair of post-industrial America, of the shell of Americana. It really is a pastoral (n. A landscape painting) that he creates; a view of a decimated American landscape seen through the eyes of one strong and self-reliant man. However, the degradation of society is reflected in his daughter’s downfall and he shows himself powerless to these changes. This book was great in places, but it was hard to put the pieces together into a coherent work of beauty. In many ways it is more of a character study or a still life of modern urbanity than anything else. Recommended for Roth readers, for avid readers with patience or people who like character studies more than story. ****
9. Alice in Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass—Lewis Carroll
--Before I write anything about this book, full disclosure: I read the abridged version (by mistake). I’m sure the original isn’t any more complete, though. And I’m not sorry I picked up the short version. I’ve been hearing about Alice, I’ve know Alice in a way, since I was young. Haven’t we all? And the story, just if someone told you the gist quickly, is so quirky and cool and weird. It can’t be BAD. It’s fantasy and it’s nonsense and there are quirky children’s games and even some adult language games to be found.
Overall, though, neither book is enthralling. Perhaps it was influential for entire genres, though (fantasy and quest novels), and it has a place in the pantheon of literature. One reason that I wasn’t grabbed was that the imagery didn’t really seem symbolic. I think my expectations were too high here. Carroll was a simple schoolteacher, a devout Christian and perhaps a pedophile (that last one maybe throwing some significant light on Alice herself) who was in love with the real life ten-year-old Alice. He was also a mathematician and photographer and all of these hobbies and interest intertwine in interesting ways and inform his books, especially in Through the Looking Glass. Also, there are gems of characters, such as the smoking caterpillar and the Cheshire Cat, not to mention the awesome poem The Jabberwocky, which as a child sent my mind to new dimensions of imagination.
These books are, if nothing else, blueprints for whole new worlds of fantasy, of language games, or possibilities. I’m not an avid fantasy reader, but I can see the value of stretching reality a little or even a lot to create a story or inject a subtle “main theme” or moral. Alice isn’t moralizing, which is a really, really good thing. However, there is something pretty cool about this world of fantasy being allowed to co-exist with the dozens of moralizing realist novels that were being churned out by Carroll’s contemporaries. It’s a great juxtaposition—perhaps the rabbit hole was dug in the right place at the right time. Recommended for children and nostalgic fantasy readers. ****
10. Escape from Freedom—Erich Fromm
--I feel that I read this book in too much of a rush and I might go back and hit it again soon. Essentially, Fromm argues that the problems of the modern age stem from the desire to attain freedom. However, freedom in the sense we currently conceive it is consumerist, is self-interested and will not elevate us out of the ethical and psychological mire in which we find ourselves. Fromm’s perspectives are a mixture of Marx, Jung and Buddhism. (I’ve read that Alan Watts’s writing style was influenced by Erich Fromm—his writing is easy, clear and yet profound.) I really love how he brings spiritual notions to the psychological and philosophical, and in a way he furthers some of Kant’s views on authentic autonomous choice versus synthetic heterogeneous options. I may be making a very superficial critique of this writing now, but I would recommend it to anyone interested in philosophy, eastern and western, and also anyone curious about the impact of consumer society on our psyche. Fromm is a visionary whom I would like to read more of and many times. *****
11. Outliers—Malcolm Gladwell
--The second Gladwell book I read had a wide range and sought to explain how people become successful. He brings up a great many anecdotes, personal stories of successful people from Bill Gates to the Beatles, and he connects these disparate stories of success with another one of his theories (more nebulous and un-testable then that in Blink, however). He argues that the key to success is, get this, WORK! To be specific, he says that no one becomes a true expert at anything unless they put in the magic amount of time: 10,000 hours.
So in his chronicling of toil and experience from these well known experts, we are also shown how small instances of luck turned the tide for these people. For example, Bill Gates was lucky enough to live next to the first and best computer lab of the time and get hours of free time on the computers. The Beatles were lucky enough to catch a break and play in Hamburg some twenty shows a week (or a similar outrageous figure). When the elements of tireless work and a lucky break combine, he says, you have the formula for success. The true thesis of this book was that the old-fashioned story of rags to riches in America, doing it without any help, is a farce, an improbability if not impossibility. He then applies the model to his own life and finds that he also caught some lucky breaks which endowed him with the place among science and society writers he enjoys today.
Gladwell’s books are quite fun, easy, and interesting. They challenge some assumptions you might have had; his theories fly in the face of conventional wisdom and uncover hidden truths about our society and ourselves. That being said, there is something to be desired in the rigor of his theories. He acknowledges this himself, however, and I don’t think it would be possible for him to do what he does in such an interesting way if he had to be a scientist about everything. He is part of a new kind of journalism (along with the authors of Freakonomics and others) that widens the scope on our world and goes beyond the boundaries of observe-and-report journalism. It’s like an investigation of something underground that everyone can benefit from. Recommended to people interested in experts and looking to be inspired by novel connections. ****
12, When you are Engulfed in Flames—David Sedaris
--Like “Me Talk Pretty One Day”, this book is an account of random and somewhat unrelated events in the life of the author. The things that happen to and around David Sedaris aren’t nearly as funny as the way he writes about them. Some of the better stories include his pilgrimage to Japan to quit smoking (there are a few subplots to this main story about tobacco cessation); getting a ride from a truck driver who requests a blow job; and various recollections about men’s apparel, weird and mundane, and weird for their mundaneness.
The stories here are less nostalgic, more brooding on the minutiae of the present and the bleakness of the future, and most of them deal with death and dying at least in some small way. Perhaps this was the editor’s way of tying the stories together with a theme? It’s unclear. But unlike those wacky tales of childhood and the strangeness of he spins in “Me Talk Pretty”, here he seems to be drawing us closer to tell us a secret: we are all going to die—you, me, and all those crazy people we meet along the way on this strange trip. Especially surreal is his recounting of learning Japanese in Hiroshima. I think this felt so morbid because it was an actual attempt to quit that road to certain agonizing death (that killed some of his relatives). He isn’t being funny anymore but rather candid, and his struggles show through in the nevertheless hilarious details he recounts of his day-to-day life. Recommended to humor essay readers and people who like relatable, bizarre material. ****
13. Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea—Barbara Demick
--I had heard about this book on NPR a few months before picking it up. It was described as a true account of the least understood country and regime in the world through the eyes of ordinary people who escaped. One thing that it is not is a book on foreign policy, on details of the inner workings of the Kim regime, or a historical piece on the cleaving of North Korea from the rest of the world since 1953. (For a book that DOES cover these topics see “Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader, by Bradley Martin.) This book distills interviews that the author conducted with defectors living mainly in South Korea and China and it shows the cold and terrifying world that the Kim regime has created through isolation, “Juche” (self-reliance) and authoritarian oppression.
The book contains so many stories, beautiful and disturbing. And it recounts them beautifully, starting with one story of a young couple meeting in the dark forests of North Korean night (there is no constant electricity in most places) and moving to stories of teachers, government workers, children, prisoners, and even the guards that beat and tortured their fellow North Koreans. The book strips North Korea bare of politics and policy and lets us see the misery of the masses, the fear of speaking against anything of the State of the regime, the executions and institutional starvation of the prison camps, the fearful treachery of neighbors, and above all the complete and total indoctrination of citizens into the cult of personality of Kim Il-Sung and his son Kim Jong-Il. Read this book if you are interested in the way many North Koreans made it through the hell that was their life in the fatherland. Recommended for everyone who wants to know what’s behind the barbed wire. *****
14. The Great Gatsby—F. Scott Fitzgerald
--There are some books that need no introduction. This is one of them. A masterpiece of literature by any definition, The Great Gatsby captures America at a time when everything was interesting and nothing had limits. But even in this still life, things are not still. People love and fight, the rich are ignoring the poor, and the cruel wheels of progress grind many underneath like those of the car which tore apart poor Myrtle. Many critics find lots of symbolism in Gatsby, and I’m sure that it exists. There are repeated references and hints to time, money, poverty, class, and decadence. But when you read the novel, I sincerely hope that those themes aren’t at the front of your mind.
What is present is a beautiful and terrible scene, a story of Gatsby’s loss and longing despite the wealth and fame he has accumulated; the roaring of the cars and elevators and the clinking of martini classes in penthouses and the mystifying pull of the sea separating East and West Egg, old names for Great Neck and Manhasset Neck in Long Island, New York. Old Money and New Money. Deep reverence for class and upbringing and social relations collide with entrepreneurs (like the mysterious Gatsby) who make their fortune by any means necessary and represent American ingenuity.
It feels like a story of America being told by an author who doesn’t appreciate the profoundness of his account. Nick Caraway’s character is the perfect intermediary for these events—he calmly tells of the decadence of Daisy and Tom, the demure thoughtlessness of Jordan, the obsequious mewing of Myrtle, the shrewd and callous attitude of Meyer Wolfsheim, and the single-mindedness of Gatsby, who is portrait of that wistful, rich, ambitiously unsatisfied American. And when he is murdered, the flippant reaction of all his party guests who so enjoyed his parties speaks volumes about what he amounted to as a man. It is a vaguely tragic ending that leaves Nick changed for good and able to tell us the tale of his summer on Long Island.
The story is perfect—tension, rising action, a tragic climax, denouement. All a model for a perfect novel. But the poetry of the writing transcends the story and the characters and setting are as if painted into this story, sewn to it seamlessly. The Great Gatsby is one of the few “Great American Novels.” Recommended for people who need reminding why we still read novels. ******
15. Foucault’s Pendulum—Umberto Eco
--Before Dan Brown’s “Davinci Code” and “Angels and Demons” there was an Italian by the name of Umberto Eco, whose “The Name of the Rose” and “Foucault’s Pendulum” gave millions a view into the occult of the Rosicrucian, the Knights Templar, and the Masonic Order, and managed to make these dusty and esoteric subjects come alive and be the basis for thrilling quest novels. In these novels—including “Foucault’s Pendulum”—the knowledge of a few exceedingly important people can move the world. Having secret knowledge of Jesus Christ or the Pope or the King can threaten a person’s life if he finds out too much. And as we see in this novel, the quest to know all such secrets can drive a person insane and create danger where there none existed before, open doors into new dimensions of truth and treasure. Foucault’s Pendulum is a compendium of secret and intellectual stuff that the author has amassed and mixes together like some sort of crazy souse-chef, so that in the end the sauce is very rich and creamy and interesting, though no one can tell what the hell happened or how it got that way.
The novel is a monster, 700 dense pages that read like a Cabbalist’s diary (and some of them are literally pictures of binary codes and puzzles, a precursor to those in Davinci Code). In many ways it borders on science fiction or fantasy. And perhaps I don’t know where this line is drawn exactly, but I feel that so many of the secret orders and machines and conspiracies that drive the novel are so many creations in the mind of the author. But I have a feeling I’m wrong. However, after reading it I really have no more desire to know—it is just too complicated. Besides, secret orders get a bit boring after awhile when you realize how seriously people are taking themselves in guarding these secrets. There is a plot underneath all of the secret orders, and at times you can feel the humanity struggling to come to the top. The protagonist is always running, hiding, digging for the truth, but still trying to protect his pregnant wife and dearest friends with whom he is digging. What they are digging for…well, that is just too convoluted to summarize.
Many compare Dan Brown’s work with Eco’s and see a lesser yet more accessible story in Brown, and they are probably right. Foucault’s Pendulum has many interesting points. However, I do feel that Eco’s writing and narrative is ultimately overburdened with esoterica and intellectualism so that the technical jargon of these secret societies confuses the story, confuses EVERYTHING. At least with Dan Brown you can tell what’s going on, even if he is a cliché machine and a far inferior wordsmith. Recommended for people interested in Masonic orders and weird stuff that knights did a long time ago. (And for those who can stand 700 page quest novels.) ****
16. Teachings on Love—Thich Nhat Hanh
--A meditation on the healing power of love by a famed Vietnamese Buddhist teacher, this book reads sort of like a daily affirmation, but in much more repetitive and “meditative” ways. We are used to books these days in Western cultures which attempt to help people feel better about their selves, usually in some brief time span. (“In just 60 seconds a day!!”) Often we deride those who seek out these books for being overly sentimental or naïve, and it is true that often the “help” inside is not very focused or effective. However, the roots of self-healing are found in Buddism and meditation, and this book is a great example of how focusing on the positive and ridding yourself of negative feelings—especially anger—can direct you to see things in the moment, as they are, and to dwell in this most peaceful of states.
The teacher shows us time and again through simple artful metaphors how we trick ourselves into frustration and anger and how these feelings hurt everyone, most of all the bearer of these feelings. I found that while reading this book I was serene, relaxed, and felt incredibly good. The trick is to follow the daily meditations. I think I need to give it another go and try harder. But I recommend any form of Buddhist teachings (even that new-age crap, though it won’t be as pure, may be modernized and repackaged) to anyone out there who doesn’t feel at peace with their existence. It’s a good way to heal oneself. ****
17. The Count of Monte Cristo—Alexandre Dumas
--The classic adventure tale of treachery, escape and redemption. This novel was waaay more entertaining than I was prepared for. I expected that, having been written in the early 19th century, it would have some very long-winded passages from characters, mainly self-referential, or sort of boring social conventions that take up time (I see this in Dostoevsky novels at times, though I love his work). Admittedly, I read the abridged version, which was still some 600 pages (the original is about 1100), so I think they might have cut to the good stuff. At any rate, I found the book to live up to its reputation as a fun story of adventure, etc. etc.
One of Dumas’s best devices is embellishment. He makes the characters quite one-sided and strong—clearly evil, clearly good, exceedingly rich or desperately poor. But this adds to the fairy-tale element. The Count of Monte Cristo is a sort of hardened figure with a heart of gold whose long years in prison as a falsely accused supporter of Napoleon lead him to plot his escape and revenge in painstaking detail, so that once he returns to society, he can strike those who have wronged him in clever and majestic ways, and save those whom he loves with equal majesty. It is a bit silly when you tell it this way; but the writing bears it out and the English translation in the Signet Classics version is quite good. Recommended for readers who want action and intrigue in their classic literature. *****
18. “The Millennium Trilogy”:The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest—Stieg Larsson
--I realize these are three separate books, but they are chronological and cohesive—one follows directly from another. They deal with largely the same cast of good guys (and some of the same bad guys) and some of the same crime issues: sexual violence and enslavement of women, organized crime, and government cover-up conspiracies. The main characters Mikael Blomkvist and Lisbeth Salander form a sort of double helix of crime fighting—one, Blomkvist, wages war on the bad guys in his media milieu and the other, Salander, kicks ass in all sorts of ways, usually with computers or kickboxing.
I thoroughly enjoyed all three of these novels and I don’t want to attempt a summary at the risk of creating a monster with spoilers and such. But here are some of the elements I really appreciated:
The characters. Larsson invests a lot of time in each of his characters, especially the protagonists. In fact, about a fifth of the first book (they are all fairly long books) is taken up just getting to know Blomkvist and getting a peek at Lisbeth. The author’s journalistic origins are visible as he builds us these fine specimens whose later decisions in the novel we can clearly understand because we know their characters so well. Character motivation was an important aspect of all three novels.
The setting and plot devices. It’s Sweden, which could have been a boring place to stage a violent crime saga. But somehow it is never boring. Larsson is also the only author I’ve read that throws so many contemporary items in his novels. This includes brand names and electronic devices: Netbook, Macbook Pro, MacDonald’s, coffee chains, etc. The world is believable because we know these things up close. However, it is a bit distracting at first to see specific brands mentioned because it feels like a running advertisement. We quickly get used to this, though. Larsson also uses the streets of Stockholm, his home turf, to his advantage. We feel a little more intimate with this place when we finish each book. The movement of the characters to and from certain towns is well done. It feels like the Bourne Identity in this way, or perhaps other spy thrillers.
The narrative. It is complex and beautiful and unfolds at a surprising pace. Slow at first when meeting characters, it’s almost like a stretched out Agatha Christie book (the first of the trilogy is anyway) and the mystery deepens, but not the tension. Then the various flashes of action come like a hot knife out of a snow bank and you see how this or that character was led to take this or that seemingly crazy action. The relations between characters are highly developed, and even though we know a lot about Lisbeth’s (eponym of the English language titles) likes and interests, we don’t know her motivations fully until the end of the second book. This uncertainty about why she is so volatile (and such a genius) piques our curiosity and, along with the suspenseful Scandinavian-style action and mystery (I’ve heard this book compared to a couple others from Sweden and Denmark in key ways), makes the pacing incredibly quick despite the fact that, in each of the books, the action stretches over the course of nearly a year.
It just feels REAL enough, just borderlines on true literature enough with its character motivations, its themes of violence and self-preservation, and the prose (but doesn’t quite get to that point of true literature), that it exceeds what I have read by Tom Clancy, Michael Crichton, Dan Brown, Dean Koontz, etc. by miles. I’m sure there are even more capable authors out there in the crime mystery/thriller genre but I haven’t read them yet. This trilogy was meant to be the first in a series of ten—sadly the later books were preempted by the death of the author. But as a thrilling three-piece it deserves the recognition it has received in the last few years. The movies could in no way capture the complexity and richness of the characters Larsson has created in his books (although Fincher does a damn good job). But what’s new? Recommended for crime mystery enthusiasts who like a little violence and realism…or a lot of it. *****
19. The Catcher in the Rye—J.D. Salinger
--This is one of those books that you are “supposed” to read because…well just because. After all, it got a president assassinated, didn’t it? So what’s so special about it? In a word: Holden. Holden Caulfield might be the most distinctive voice in all of American literature. Sure he is whiny sometimes, and cynical, and deceptive, and self-interested. In other words, he is a typical teenager. This definition of Holden has been explained to death, so I won’t say too much more on it. Instead, I want to look at how his unique voice captures his optimism.
We are allowed a glimpse of New York in the 50’s that rivals Gatsby’s New York of the 20’s. It is textured and littered with phonies and the underclass—whores, pimps, stupid teachers, nerdy roommates, hard cases, little sisters, unfair parents—and yet the structures that contain these people—the buildings, the parks and park benches, the schools, the hotels and bars and carousels—are never picked on, never criticized for being less than perfect. New York is the city of Holden’s childhood and adolescence and even for his cynicism he seems full of hope for the future.
He is perhaps misguided right now. But someday he might do great things, help kids realize that life gets better, that we can learn to live with phoniness in our society but that we don’t have to succumb to it. We can live through art and museums and poetry. We can uphold our ideals—after all, Holden sees himself as the “catcher in the rye,” the imagined character who jumps out and stops kids from falling off of a cliff when they can’t see how close they are to the edge. Perhaps his cynical, foul-mouthed voice is just a growing pain, a symptom of that age of life between wide-eyed innocence and jaded adulthood. Maybe he is screaming and rebelling because he wants it both ways—to have his youth and eat it too. Or maybe Salinger’s teenager is telling us what we all know but refuse to accept—that we have all become irretrievably phony. The charm of Holden Caulfield is that he is still innocent enough to have ideals. It is a glimpse into our past crossroads and that’s why we love this book and laugh so sympathetically at Holden’s caustic rant. Recommended for anyone over the age of seventeen, or at least fifteen year-olds who look a couple years older. *****
20. Hopscotch—Julio Cortazar
(Extended Review from shortly after I read the book a few months ago)
I really would like to do a review on the magnificent book I finished yesterday, “Hopscotch”, by Julio Cortazar. The problem is that I am really not sure how to go about doing it. Sure, I could read a dozen other reviews, of the same book or another one equally intellectual. I could try to find some formal thread or technique that might encapsulate the best and worst about the novel and give great detail to my verdict. I could set it up and take my time so that it is ready for display, to be read and admired by hundreds, or at least to persuade a few to pick it up and give it a go. The problem with this route is that I might copy another reviewer's musings on the characters or the landscape, or even plagiarize the expressions the other reviewers use (how does one avoid doing that anyway?). Or maybe the effect I am looking for is more of a personal satisfaction that I can write about such a erudite work, such a monstrosity of prose and intellect and philosophical meanderings and moral surface-skimming, and the wonder if and fear that I cannot do the book justice, to be some stupid formalistic and vapid write-up that really catches some of the finer set pieces but misses the resonance of the novel’s sign wave. So I’ll just try, and only for myself, and only with a half-effort. It’s a difficult book for my first review after all.
Hopscotch is the story of a purposefully displaced intellectual. Horacio Oliveira, who spends the majority of his time seeking out answers to our moral questions through pure intellectual exercise. The novel is split into two main books. In the first book, we find Oliveira in Paris, essentially jobless, a bohemian who surrounds himself with somewhat like-minded bohemians, forming what they refer to as “The Club”. Their aim is to get lost in endless streams of consciousness, so long as they lack heaviness or too much attachment to the “real world.” Amidst a constant backdrop of 1950’s jazz music and enshrouded in a haze of cigarette smoke, the diverse group of seekers—among them a painter, a writer, and a couple of philosophers—find themselves in a pleasurable routine of academic parley, moving from the significance of ancient Chinese torture rituals to the formal and/or content constraints of literature throughout time, to the moral lassitude that seems to beset several of the more abstract-minded characters. Among this group there is one beloved member who does not quite fit in, Lucia. The hostess of the Club’s meetings (to the ire of her crazy old upstairs neighbor) and Oliveira’s lover, she plays a central role in the group’s proceedings but is unable to participate much of the time due to her severe lack of knowledge of much of the work the group references in its discussions. She is the victim of much high-browed snubbing in the form of sighs and condescending explanations from the other members, and as a result she has a much better relationship with each of the characters individually then with them as a unified force. For all her failings as an intellectual, she is clearly the most concrete, grounded and filled with common sense of anyone in the group. She also has a son named Rocamadour.
Much of the first book involves in great detail the discussions of the group—the jazz records flip from one to the next, the philosophy and smoke and calls for mate and rum and other alcohol on top of the music. Also described in great detail is the passionate and somewhat sordid relationship between Oliveira and Lucia, whom Oliveira refers to as La Maga. Both originally came from South America (Oliveira from Argentina and La Maga from Uruguay), but they ended up in Paris for different reasons. Him out of some Bohemian drive to dissect the universe and society. Her because it is simply where she washed up and decided to stay. This dichotomy of intellectual quest and materialist existence is a constant theme between the two lovers, yet the raw sexual passion that they share together is seemingly transcendent.
Oliveira eventually moves in with La Maga and their apartment becomes quite crowded with books, records and the like. The situation seems tolerable enough, until La Maga’s young son moves in with them owing to some contingent circumstances with the child’s father. Oliveira is quite displeased with this situation and acts petulant towards La Maga, complaining in an indirect way by pointing out the lack of space and acting nauseated every time the boy cries or needs to be changed. The strain finally comes to a head one night and he threatens to leave the house. They argue for hours until he finally picks up and leaves the apartment. Having no idea where to go or what to do, he wanders the streets of Paris in search of himself, contemplating his feelings (or lack of feelings) towards La Maga. Eventually he finds a piano concert debut in some small out of the way performance hall and decides to see. The scene becomes surreal and the crowd eventually dwindles down until he is the only one left in the audience. He tries his best to cheer up the crestfallen performer by shouting “bravo” and inviting her to go on a walk with him. He seems to be happy, even satisfied emotionally for a short time while walking with the pianist, and he imagines himself in a cozy apartment with she and her husband, drinking wine and having pleasant, human conversation next to the fire. However, the night ends in disaster and humiliation for Oliveira, due to some unfortunate misunderstanding.
Meanwhile, back at the apartment, Oliveira’s rival in the Club, a shady and arrogant man called Ossip Gregorovious, is at La Maga’s apartment consoling her. He is obviously in love with her, but she feels no reciprocal interest towards him. After a long discussion between the two of them, Oliveira suddenly returns to the apartment, soaking wet and miserable, angry and suspicious to find them together. The three of them chat for awhile (again, in dense philosophical quips, intellectual bursts). At some point in the night he sees Rocamadour sleeping in the corner of an adjacent room and brushes his fingers against his head. He realizes the child is dead but doesn’t want to alert La Maga for fear of her overreaction. Soon thereafter, the rest of the group begins showing up at the house and the night carries on per usual, only the news of the child’s death winds its way around everyone in the group, all except La Maga. When she discovers that the child is dead, she is inconsolable.
Later, there is a wake for the small boy which all of the Club members attend except for Oliveira, who feels his presence would not be welcome. When he returns to La Maga’s apartment a few days later, he discovers Ossip is living there and the house has been stripped bare of its possessions—she has taken everything. However, Oliveira discovers a sentimental note addressed to Rocamadour in the drawer of a desk. He knows, however, it is addressed to him. This signals the end of his dealings with the Club. He wanders around the streets once more and finds a familiar vagrant lady with whom he shares a bottle of wine and talks to for some time. Eventually they both get drunk and she performs a sex act on him. However, the police show up as this is taking place and haul him off in the patrol wagon. This is the end of book one.
The second book sees Oliveira returned to Argentina by ship. We meet two new essential characters, Traveler and Talita, his wife. Both are involved in the circus, though Talita is trained as a pharmacist. Oliveira and Traveler were close friends before his departure to Paris and so they are both somewhat happy to see each other, though slightly resentful in their own way because of their current situation. Oliveira ends up moving into an apartment directly across from the couple and eventually disrupts their lives. Oliveira ends up working first as a traveling salesman of fabric, then working in the circus with Traveler, and ultimately finding a position in an mental institution which the pair take stewardship of as a business venture after their stint in the circus comes to a close. The latter part of the novel chronicles the adventures and reconciliation of the three characters, and ultimately of Oliveira’s mental breakdown as he begins to have hallucinations of La Maga (who has disappeared from the novel after book one) and yearnings for things from his life in Paris. (Wow, that synopsis was a bit lengthy!)
In addition to the two main books, there are also about one hundred short chapters at the end of the novel, mostly fragments—poems, found poetry, marginalia, notes from the fictitious author Morelli, newspaper clippings, etc. Thus, the novel can be read in two ways. One way is to read straight through Chapter 1-Chapter 56 without going to any of the random passages in the back. The other way to read it—and which I believe makes the title of the novel an appropriate one—is to follow the prescribed chapter order given by the author. In this way, the reader finds himself bouncing back and forth, physically flipping through the pages and finding the given chapter, and moving from linear narrative to fragment of life, to intellectual crumb or fixation, or even to intriguing-yet-derivative plot points.
I should first say unequivocally that, on the whole, I really loved this novel. I was astounded by the beauty of the language, by the erudition of the author, by the novelty of some of the sentence and story forms. Every word, every sentence, character expression, description, basically every passage in the novel, felt newly minted, not like anything that was written before anywhere else. I realize that using different words throughout the whole novel—the lexicon here is ENORMOUS and I would recommend both a dictionary and some kind of cultural guidebook (internet) to anyone serious about following all the references; it surpasses “Ulysses” or works by Huxley in its references to history, literature, music, pop culture, mythology, etc—but it does make for a unique reading experience. It’s as if the characters are constantly having breakthroughs, seeing things from a different vantage, even if the vantage has been taken by someone else before.
“Hopscotch” is a book about a lot of things, but essentially about ways of being towards the world, towards fellow humans, towards oneself, towards art and literature, towards society. Oliveira’s character is the embodiment of overt intellectualism, a mind that is abstract and flexible but which cannot really grasp human feeling or common sense. He can quote any poet but knows not about what poets write. He finds his opposite in La Maga, a somewhat off-center woman with more than enough common sense and emotion, but with a whimsical notion of life, one that eschews intellectualism even as she herself tries to become more familiar with the academic names and ideas bandied about in the Club. Even though their relationship is lustful and enjoyable, he is adamant that they not be in love, that he be allowed to be “free”. But free from what? It is not exactly commitment that Oliveira is afraid of, but of lowering his guard and becoming someone who is not in pursuit of that highest intellectual ideal. Ironically, he seems to have no understanding of what he is searching for as he grabs at thousands of diffuse or interconnected straws. He finds no real peer within the Club, even though they are the most elite group of thinkers (speaking about potential) one can imagine. When he’s challenged with one argument, he turns it on its head and calls for the opposite. He claims to be searching even for a moral key by being amoral. He seems to want himself to be a representative of an ideal or argument.
His quest leads him to a sort of desperation, on the verge of which he discovers himself capable of human emotions, but he appears to be afraid of these emotions. For example, when he is wandering the streets thinking of La Maga he becomes frustrated at some of the sentimental misgivings he has about leaving, about their past, about her situation. Later, when he accompanies the pianist in the rain and is fantasizing about drinking wine by the fire, he seems sad and upset that his humble and human desire cannot come to pass. But then a slap on the face from the scandalized pianist sends him right back into his standard stoic mood. He rebukes himself for these feelings and says “I must be getting soft in my old age.”
Later in the novel, when Oliveira is reunited with his old friend Traveler, he doesn’t display affection but recognizes a brotherly connection between them. Traveler has everything the Oliveira cannot have—a wife, love, common sense about responsibilities and obligations. At this point in his saga, Oliveira seems to have reached the end of his rope, and because he has somewhere deep down a desire which he can’t justify by his abstractions, he begins to hallucinate about reality, to see Talita as he wants her to be, that is, as La Maga. Because he has no way to resolve this despair intellectually, he goes a bit crazy.
I have to admit that much of this novel was probably lost on me, though I tried by best to concentrate and commit. There was just an overwhelming amount of references, of linguistic gymnastics, of modernist and surrealist and beat style that, although constantly entertaining and beautiful in their own way, made it difficult to focus on the “plot” or even on the theme of the novel. If I had to venture some a guess as to the conflicts in the novel, I would say that there is intellectualism versus material and emotional connection to the world; modern man’s attempt to achieve a feeling of significance amongst an ocean of cultural, historic, and scientific achievements; an individual’s ability to reconcile his ideals with the concrete reality of life; a compelling and painful need to examine the world metaphysically, to arrive at an answer through questions which might be the wrong ones, but which we keep asking because we don’t know what the right ones are.
There are several formal and stylistic elements that pervade the novel. One that has been mentioned a lot and which informs the writing of a lot of artists of this generation is that of jazz. From Allen Ginsberg to Jackson Pollock, artists drew inspiration from the improvised nature of jazz; from the stream of consciousness that pours out seemingly chaotically but which eventually has some kind of meaning, meaning that can be determined if one pays attention. “Hopscotch” is peppered heavily with jazz, with leaps from one character’s mind to another, with segues from one line of discussion or thought to another. And the beauty of Cortazar’s writing is that it is all done effortlessly, as if that’s how the composition were intended to be played exactly. It is inspiring to read a novel that feels so intellectual yet so expressive. The lines ooze poetry and excitement, perhaps naïveté, but never apathy. It isn’t an apathetic generation or group, but perhaps a cynical one, that chooses to spend it’s evenings getting winedrunk and listening to jazz, discussing things they know they’ll never resolve but discussing the same. It is a kind of mental vigor on display, if that means “action” is deferred or not attempted at all. But it is not a wasted group of minds, no matter how devastating the consequences of their actions might be. These are not Gatsby’s West Eggers—they are bohemians with ONLY mental excursion at their disposal and they put it to full use.
Among the other stylistic effects present is one that occurs in other Latin American writers of this period, although it’s more of a genre: magical realism, a way of writing without complete adherence to physical or biological laws. It is on display here as characters can make amazing leaps of reality without explanation. Unlike realist novels, there is no need to give every detail about HOW something occurred; that’s not so important. For example, the surreal fact of the disappearing crowd in the performance hall in book one, though outlandish and a bit magical, is less important than its effect on Oliveira’s humanity. Also, the latter part of book two has some odd scenes which are not explained—how does the couple come to acquire the mental institution? Why does a pharmacist work in the circus? It is surreal. How does Oliveira’s mental breakdown precipitate exactly? We are not given these details. In that regard, the real “magic” here is not in having characters defy gravity, but in omitting the explanation of some incredible facts and moving from one action to the next, from one event to the next as if we are jumping on lily pads. In that respect, Cortazar’s narration is less like Dostoevsky and more like Kafka—things just “are” that way.
In sum, the novel is brilliant; a collage of short stories fused into a cohesive narrative which is carried by the sheer elegant brilliance of its language if by nothing else. The plot is not the heart of the artichoke. Rather, it is the feel of the mate on the back of our Oliveira’s throat, the satisfaction and searching and captivating set pieces, which make this one of the best books I’ve yet read. ******
21. Justice—Michael Sandel
(I wrote a twenty page review of this one and seem to have lost it somewhere in the electronic void. But hey, if you wanted that much text you would read the book, right?)
Harvard Philosophy Professor Michael Sandel sets out to construct a primer for moral philosophy centered around concrete issues in our modern world. Some major questions he asks: What is fairness? What is a good society? Egalitarianism, Libertarianism, Utilitarianism? Why are the controversial laws in our society so controversial? He will argue that it is because they hang upon basic assumptions about morality and freedom.
This book is so wonderful because it can engage both layperson and philosopher. Sandel at once takes us to the works of John Stuart Mill and explains Utilitarianism (“greatest good for the greatest number”). Then he introduces us to Libertarianism, the idea that we should be allowed to do anything in society with personal consent, undertake any kind of contract no matter how objectionable, and that we should not be subject to the rule of government or the demands of others. Later we meet John Rawls the radical egalitarian, who conceives of a kind of “blind social contract” that we would all enter into in order to construct the fairest society. This is sort of like everyone drawing names from a hat: everyone has equal chances to win or lose. So the participants must agree upon the conditions about who gets what before the lots are drawn. This is a conception of justice where there is no “solitary achievement”—no act done by one individual with only strong will and hard work at his disposal. Everyone who has succeeded has been blessed with some kind of benefit, whether by birthplace or family or by living in a time in which certain skills are valued more than others (he uses Michael Jordan as an example—one-hundred years ago it wouldn’t have mattered how fast he could run or high he could jump because there wasn’t a market for these skills).
We are also introduced to Immanuel Kant, whose Categorical Imperative tells us how we “ought” to act morally in any situation. And Aristotle underlines the virtues of teleology (“telos” being a term meaning the “use” of something—for instance, the telos of public school might be to train students for vocations, or it could be to create an environment of diversity and a community of social-minded thinkers. The use depends on what we want to get out of it.) and provides us with some arguments for what constitutes a “good society.” Whew.
The beauty of this book lies in its scholarship and readability. Sandel expertly analyzes modern scenarios that involve issues of justice, such as affirmative action or the volunteer versus conscripted nature of our military. He then applies the logical arguments of the differing camps that he has introduced us to upon the given issues. I don’t believe he gives short shrift to any of the views—you may feel yourself pulled one way by a utilitarian argument, another way by the egalitarian, and perhaps a third by the argument of telos or good society. Sandel must be a brilliant teacher in his classroom; he teaches the controversy at a fundamental level, earnestly playing devil’s advocate with differing philosophies.
This divide that we feel over serious issues should not make us feel spineless or lacking in resolve. In fact it is a testament to the power of philosophical inquiry that we are moved by such basic ideas, such principles. But along with the power of argument comes the importance of counterargument and consideration of the merits of each camp. By inquiring into the basic rights of smaller aspects of society (the individual) and questioning abstract foundational values by which we measure the justice of our laws and mores (notions of a “good society”, telos, categorical imperative, utilitarianism) we can have a real discussion about those actual institutions and laws which govern our rights, boundaries, and duties as citizens.
Sandel’s synthesis of all these moral viewpoints is very interesting. His personal notion of justice comes to rest closer to Aristotle, that eminent ancient Greek sage, on his views about duty and a good society. According to Sandel we are not only entitled to rights in a society, but we are bound by duties as well. Both are essential. He calls this complex moral position “Communitarianism”, as in what’s good for the community will benefit the individual and vice-versa.
I only wish he would have devoted more time to the implications of such a conception. What exactly make up a “community”? Do our duties stop at the borders of our city? Our nation? Our hemisphere? Our language? Sandel does raise these questions and concedes that ultimately there are divisions in the world, but by acting as dutiful citizens of a community we bear responsibility for the welfare of everyone; therefore we will necessarily consider our actions carefully. As it is we are a nation of people who think mainly of ourselves and want only for ourselves, an inversion of duty which erodes fidelity in the state—we are not a part of the state but rather wards of the state…or perhaps prisoners of it, depending on your views. Recommended for anyone interested in moral philosophy or looking to sharpen their arguments about public policy. *****
22. I am a Cat—Natsume Soseki
--As a first-person narrator, this eight week-old kitten seems well versed in the ways of the middle and upper classes of the Meiji period in Tokyo around the turn of the twentieth century. The entire book is beautifully satirical, a cat listening into absurd conversations between the schoolteacher master of the house and his wife; between rich uppity neighbors; between false philosophers full of themselves and the often indulgent master, who lazily spends his time eating, reading and trying to cure his dyspepsia.
It is hard to put my finger on why I loved this book, but I think it was the way that the cat, as a cat and ultimately as a fly on the wall, captured the details of scene. I know very little about the Meiji period in Japan or about Japan itself, but this book transcends time periods and cuts right to the heart of the ridiculousness of the classes and their self-importance. The book is also filled with some delightful incidences that could only happen to a cat. But the cat’s observations are far from inexperienced or naïve. He writes like a cat about the world, speaking to us as though we were his best friends or some trusted confidant. Through the eyes and ears of this domestic pet we learn the textures of Japanese society—in the spas, in money matters, about weddings and schools and prostitution districts, and most importantly about the motivations of people which, as proved in this book—in a very Mark Twain fashion—are the same in humankind throughout time and space. Recommended for cat lovers and satire enthusiasts. *****
23. Lolita—Vladimir Nabokov
--This is a book (like many others) that I had wanted to read for quite some time, hearing so much of its evocative beauty—and of course of its provocative content. The knowledge that it was about a pedophile’s lust for a “nymphet” didn’t make me skeptical, but it did lead me to believe that Lolita would be nothing more than an ode, though perhaps a beautifully written one. What I wasn’t expecting was such a profound love story, such a twisted infatuation, and a narrator with such a lucid voice.
Humbert Humbert is scary in his sincerity, in his handsome mien and calm manner. Attracting older women with his dark, movie star good looks, he is able to position himself close to their young daughters. And he comes closer and closer to the daughter of one woman, an old flame, he pretends to be seeing romantically. Of course, his advances towards Dolores must be stealthy, must seem innocent and sincere, and cannot upset the mother, who is his lifeline to the precious Lolita. When Humbert finally sees what he must do to make Lolita his, that he must kill the mother, the story turns into some kind of psychodrama that the reader can hardly anticipate. But the sweaty hands of the pedophile might give away his willingness to do ANYTHING for a taste of the light of his life, the fire of his loins.
I’m not sure how Nabokov pulls this book off, and that he does is a testament to his staggering genius as a writer (plus the novel was written in English, which was his third language). I found myself rolling, lolling, lorring, rorring in Humbert’s lush lexicon, which abounds with neologisms and odd idiomatic aphorisms and onomatopoeia, and it makes me wonder whether it’s easier to write in a language other than your native tongue. I was unfamiliar with so much of the vocabulary till I finally had a dictionary on my lap while I read this book.
But that it is wordily intellectual only adds to the richness of the experience of reading it. The powerful language builds up Humbert into a sort of superman whose kryptonite is…well, his weak point should be obvious. And what happens when he finally acquires his love and then loses her for good? This cannot end well. His soliloquy shows how bound to her he is forever; how immutable is the arrow of his heart and how enduring is his obsession. Lolita is a novel that shook me to my foundations. It showed me what tunes language can dance to with hypnotic rhythm, with what rapture literature can fly to a word’s flame, and still hold that stream of story which is paramount. It is a truly remarkable novel. Recommended for language lovers. ******
24. The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules our Lives—Leonard Mlodinov
--This book is basically an introduction to the theory of randomness, the domain of economists and actuaries. The author gives us an historical tour of statistics and moves into modern times with how they are applied. His main thesis is that success is somewhat random. The genius we attribute to successful CEO’s, sports coaches, star stockbrokers, and movie-house producers can be, according to Mlodinov, distilled down to pure luck. People are in the right place at the right time and reap the benefits or the scorn of the results that flow out from their fate. For examples he looks at Roger Maris, a sort of slightly above-average homerun hitter who beat Babe Ruth’s single season homerun record, and he determines that the same record could have been achieved by any number of players; it was simply statistically probable that one hitter or another would reach the record when you took a look at the stats of all the batters and pitchers. Maris was, in a very big sense, lucky.
If this book has done anything for me it has given me a greater knowledge of statistics and probability (although owing to my deficiencies in math I feel that this knowledge is rather porous). And like “Freakonomics” and Malcolm Gladwell’s books, “A Drunkard’s Walk” really does make you look differently at events all around you. Owing to chance, one man is president of a company while he could just as easily have ended up penniless or been hit by a bus. Despite the American notion that we are always masters of our own destiny, the chances are staggeringly low for so many occurrences in our lives. But the author doesn’t let us off the hook as victims solely of circumstance. He asserts that by putting ourselves in the right place at the right time, giving ourselves enough “flips of the coin”, we raise our chances of success. And this is exactly what has happened in the cases of most successful people. Recommended for those who liked Freakonomics—strange and hidden connections (or disconnections) in the world around us. ****
25. Boy—Roald Dahl
--I had of course known Roald Dahl for his “delightful” (this seems to always be the most appropriate adjective for his work) children’s books about witches and giants and magical chocolate factories or girls with magic powers. We have all read at least one of his stories as children. But I was quite unfamiliar with his autobiographical work and his short stories for adults until recently. I borrowed a few of his books from the “reading café” at the middle school I used to work at and set off on a short but…err...delightful adventure getting to know a bit more about the author.
Boy is the true account of many wonderful and strange and hilarious things that happened to Roald Dahl as a child; many of these funny things he made happen with his cleverness and well-meaning ornery nature. The stories of his exploits read like so many of his kids’ books, one can’t help but wonder at the imaginative landscape that formed this genius of childhood fantasy and nostalgia. His tricks—including putting a dead mouse into a bowl of candies at a shop and replacing his older sister’s boyfriend’s tobacco with goat droppings and watching with the whole family as the boyfriend smoked and remarked on its extraordinary flavor—are naughty and clever, yet they are always just in view of the transgressions of some of the more evil characters that Dahl encountered in his childhood years—including a headmaster who caned boys until their bottoms bled and a shop lady who showed undue hatred towards all male children. One can really see glimpses of the characters in his books (for example, Trunchbull and the various witch-like people). His account is a beautiful glimpse into the formative years of imagination and storytelling. Recommended for anyone who likes Roald Dahl books. ****
26. Demons—Fyodor Dostoevsky
--Like his other famed novels The Brothers Karamazov and the Idiot, Demons is a complex social and political critique that uses characters as philosophical set pieces and their interactions as allegory of the broader problems Dostoevsky perceived in Russia during the reign of Tsar Alexander II. Like Crime and Punishment and the others, there are threads of existentialism, and overtures made to celebrate free thinking in the times of a pervasively thoughtless ideology.
The “demons” in this novel are not supernatural, nor are they flesh and bone. Instead they are the ideological memes that drive the characters to take drastic actions that, in Dostoevsky’s view, are not justified by the ends they desire. In the novel he chronicles the upheavals that would precipitate the Bolshevik revolution. Dostoevsky was prescient in his view of politics and social trends—he seemed to write history before it happened. And the character Pyotr Stepanovich could be seen as a sort of Lenin figure, vanguard of the Slavophile movement that peaked in the mid to late 19th century. There was a push to return to traditional “Russian culture” which would exist “by and for the people”. Sound familiar?
But to his contemporary readers there were other humorous tropes that would have resonated. The mawkishly elitist yet impotent Stepan Trofimovich, who speaks French often but only for dramatic effect; the arrogant and vain novelist Karmazinov, who uses his fame to boost his ego; Stavrogin, who is the “hero” of the novel who nevertheless makes all kinds of decisions that are merely willful and seemingly devoid of thought. The characters take complex roles in society, and it is quite helpful to have an annotated version of the novel to further understand the historical significance of so many of the people, places and statements made in the book.
The narrative at times seemed meandering (as Dostoevsky’s narratives often do), but the psychological realism of his characters and the sharpness of his eye for social critique is unsurpassed. His writing is masterly and can be read in ways that transcend the novel and move into politics and philosophy—in fact, large swathes of the novel ARE philosophical musings, debates on political courses of action, etc. But after all these historical and political elements have been considered, we are still left with characters cut from living stone, well-defined, unyielding and yet organic; and we have a tale that will make the keen observer laugh and give chills to the reader who is interested in the depths of depravity to which “mere ideas” can pull us. Recommended for people who can handle history, politics and philosophy in their literature. *****
27. Fantastic Mr. Fox—Roald Dahl
--I pulled this off the shelf of our school’s “reading café” for two reasons: It was very short and it had been made into a movie. I was expecting it to be quite a clever book, like the BFG or the Witches. However, it did not meet my expectations. Short and lacking in substance even for a kid’s book (it’s not for four year olds, after all), we have no reason to connect to Mr. Fox at all or to any of the other animals. Why is he so fantastic? He seems kind of like a thieving asshole.
The one good thing the book does it create quite loathsome villains. In this case the farmer, the orchard keeper and the hen-raiser are just nasty bachelors. I have to say that Quentin Blake’s drawings really bring this book (and all of Roald Dahl’s children’s books) to life. Without them the story wouldn’t have enough cleverness and flash to go anywhere or maintain the interest, even of a very young reader. I prefer almost every Roald Dahl book to this one. Recommend for very young kids or for those interested in how far the author progressed from his lackluster first works. ***
28. Matilda—Roald Dahl
--I read Matilda when I was twelve or thirteen and really enjoyed it. What’s not to enjoy about a kid who suffers at the hands of adults and later gets sweet revenge on them? And on top of that, she has secret super powers to help her achieve this! Sounds like Harry Potter was taking lessons from someone…
Matilda is just such a heroine, and Dahl paints her beautifully as a sweet-tempered and precocious child who is unfortunately stuck in a family from the shallow end of the gene pool. Her genius is neglected and she is treated even worse when it shines through (such as when her parents discover she can read novels at the age of four). When she starts school she meets a kindred spirit in the kind Miss Honey who is meek and has been abused by her brute of an aunt, Miss Trunchbull, who also happens to be the psychopath of a headmistress at Matilda’s school. We don’t discover this until the end of the book, however, and around that time we find out Matilda’s talents can be put to good use.
When you are young, your mind can fill in a lot of blanks. Everything is expansive. Trips in a car that last two hours seem to take days and days. Such is the case with books. A child can dig into a book that really doesn’t have too much substance. Maybe that’s why it is all the more remarkable that an adult can write a book that keeps the frequency tuned just right for children. Roald Dahl is such an author. When you read them as an adult, the magical effects have subsided somewhat. But the memory of how they affected you in youth is still strong. I would recommend this book to all children because it captures that certain something about being a child and wanting to make grownups aware of your existence and uniqueness. ****
29. The Decline and Fall of the British Empire—Piers Brendon
--How should I go about summarizing/evaluating/assessing an historical novel that spans two centuries and six continents? For starters, I could do what the author of this tome of a book has done and make comparisons to the most well-known history book of all time “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”. In his revered series, Edward Gibbon goes into seemingly every nook and cranny of the Empire to find out how nooks and crannies added up to the eventual crumbling of the edifice. He looks at military policy, cultural shifts, economic trends, and even portrays Roman rulers as if he were doing a character study, bringing these characters to life. This is how I feel Piers Brendon conducted his research while writing this book.
The breadth is fantastic and the detail mindboggling. He chronicles the decline, starting with the American Revolutionary War and ending with the repatriation of Hong Kong to mainland China. In between were some utterly remarkable wars, conquests, routes, governments, infrastructure projects, and ultimately the cornerstone of the first Industrial Revolution the world has ever seen. Brendon spends a lot of time in India and Africa, where Britain has a dark and mixed legacy. I was not aware of the extent to which the British Empire was imbedded in Africa, in the Middle East, in Asia. It boggles the mind when one considers the size of the Indian subcontinent, the size of America and Australia and South Africa, and then the fact that all of these countries speak English as either a first or an official language.
Brendon doesn’t portray the Brits as benevolent (although there is an argument to be made that they did have “civilizing influences” on many cultures), but he examines claims to that effect. Usually he finds them wanting. But he does not condemn the Empire for their poor decisions or even inhuman treatment of native populations. Instead he widens the lens of history and chooses to show this in the light of progress and change. That is, this Imperialist attitude that Britain flaunted for hundreds of years, the arrogance and pomp, though today seen to be in poor taste at best, anathema to freedom and human rights at worst, was a necessary period of transition for the world in general. Without this Empire, we might not have such a moral platform from which to look back and say “this is wrong; we shouldn’t do this to other nations and cultures”. But the fact is that colonialism happened and we thus have perspective. However, this view does indeed make America look blameworthy for much of the ills in the world in the past seventy-five years of American dominance.
But Brendon is an historian, not a pundit. His research is exceptionally scholarly, his writing erudite and brilliant and competent. One of the only flaws that I could point to in this book is the tendency to avoid quoting laypeople, to not give perspectives of natives or common peoples, to focus on the lionized or demonized officers and generals and viceroys and prime ministers and nabobs. One gets a sense that Brendon has followed the line down from Kipling and might gladly take the Union Jack and march it down Westminster if it nationalism weren’t in such poor taste these days; if the sun hadn’t set on the Empire already. But in terms of the amount that is in this book, of how much one stands to learn about the grandest Empire the world has ever seen (and probably ever will see), I’m not sure how such a task could be more competently achieved. Recommended for history buffs and those who should know more about history (i.e., everyone). ******
30. The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six Others—Roald Dahl
--One of Dahl’s collections of short stories for adults, these readings are light and fun. They have substance but they aren’t overburdened with too serious topics. The story of Henry Sugar, the man who learned how to see with his eyes closed, is a breezy fable about a man who uses his extreme talents to serve the poor rather than make himself wealthy. Others include a real-life story about the discovery of Roman silver in an English field (fascinating story that brings characters into it—better than most newspaper pieces); a boy who saves a giant sea turtle and rides him out to sea; and a pack of bullies who torment a boy so much he becomes a bird and flies away before they can kill him. Dahl’s writings have a very human quality. Even heavy topics are made into sorts of fairy tales. After all, so much of his books deal with the supernatural, with abuse and even with murder by monsters in some cases. But none of his works are ever labeled “horror”. He makes the surreal seem real. And there are a lot of facile elements of magical realism in these stories, which are great fun to read. Recommended for adolescents or as light reading for adults who want a little escape. ****
31. Nausea—Jean Paul Sartre
Although JPS is much better known for his masterpiece of existentialist philosophy, “Being and Nothingness”, what he accomplishes in Nausea is a real-world instance of existentialist angst, of bad faith, of anxiety and a sense of disconnect from the world around him. It is, more or less, the story of a man who begins to feel the inauthentic quality of his life—in how he identifies himself, in what he pretends to love and hate, in what he does from day to day.
Similar to Camus’s The Stranger (and other of his works), Sartre’s character is somewhat stripped of emotion. Instead, an analytical voice takes over, judging everything in his life, from his work on literature to his unrequited love of a woman who returns after decades gone from his life (a very strong instance of bad faith, she eschews her real feelings for love because they might somehow “violate her principles”), to his red hair, which several characters latch onto and choose to identify him by, and which he often times contemplates as if it signifies some deep and meaningful part of his psyche. Being a redhead myself, I could identify with this last one without too much imagination.
The mood of the piece is gloomy, and when “the nausea” takes over—the nausea being an unbearable feeling of “otherness” and “non-reality” or insignificance as a unified being, which causes him to feel not only sick but also as if he is being led toward the grave by life itself—all of life’s details fail to have significance, or worse, become significant in showing to him his in-authenticity.
There are some eerie vignettes in this book, including one in which he watches a man come to the library fairly often and finally sit next to some youths. Eventually the shy man works up the courage to talk to the youths, but they see his entreaties as perverse—they think he is a pedophile—and begin to shout all kinds of nasty things at him, whereby strangers begin to physically assault him and throw him out of the library. Months on he is still identified by some as “the pedophile from the library”. The hero of our story seems unsure what to make of this lesson but that we are alone with our own desires and the knowledge of our desires, dreams, secrets, will always be ours no matter how we wish or try to share them with the Other.
This book struck me as a kind of psychological piece that has elements which are fairly common these days, such as first-person narrative with train of thought, plus a sense of despair and the everyday activities that novels up until this point might have left out. It’s the ultimate noir novel and transmits the dark truths that lie in Sartre’s philosophy, that we are now and always by definition in a state of anxiety over our existence, towards death, towards the world and people around us. We must make choices and choose identities which will never fully capture the “essence” of who we are, or who we think we are. Recommend to readers of noir and existentialism; those bent on a course of self-awareness or self-negation. *****
32. Twilight and New Moon—Stephanie Meyer
The vampire saga of the decade was, by the time I decided to pick up these books (that my aunt had sent to me out of some case of mistaken identity perhaps), already hitting the theaters. In my defense, the only reason I decided to read this “literature” was that I was running out of things to read in my house and also running out of money to buy books. Soooo, I figured, “why not?” The writing is, as I had expected, pretty dismal. The sentences teen-book simplistic, full of clichés, full of tired repeated wisdom by Bella, the heroine of the novel, and really, all in all, not such a great story in any respect.
I must give some credit to the author for the IDEA here: modern day vampires living in the Pacific Northwest of America, feeding on the blood of animals instead of people. As far as I know, this is a twist on what we know about vampires from literature on the undead. However, this new take on feeding wasn’t enough to make this book worthy in any other respect. Written in Bella’s voice, it sounds like the diary of a girl who is not so much in a struggle, but rather like a leaf blowing in the wind. She seems to have little or no will of her own. Her each and every thought is directed towards Edward, the vampire hero of the series. Edward is absent from the scene in most of the second book and threatens to be replaced by Jacob, the kind werewolf who seems to stay uncomfortably in Bella’s friend zone. There are shreds of sexual tension that are never resolved (the books were written by a devout Mormon).
There is the promise of action in scenes where Bella meets Edward’s vampire family, where Jacob and Edward meet each other, and where the evil vampire in the first novel is hunting Bella (very mysteriously chasing her as if only she can slake his deadly thirst). And action comes, but it is always with such large doses of absurdity and magic-hat coincidences that we lose touch with the characters—we can’t sympathize with someone who is in real danger when suddenly she’s thrown in a funhouse of horror that seems so annoyingly contrived just for that scene. Meyer uses inconsistent logic in the scenes where there is action: Bella take a flight very far away and then is pursued, but she’s too far away for Edward to come and save her; the especial superpowers of the vampires always seem to serve the exact purpose that a given situation requires, such as telepathy, but only on certain people; tense and dangerous situations are rarely precipitated by anything that connects itself to the danger, and the someone, whether Edward or Jacob or any other of the supernatural beings, is always there at the right place and the right time. This makes it hard to believe that anything bad could really happen to Bella.
But these flaws in the action sequences are rather minor issues in the novel. What makes it a dreadful kind of writing is the LACK of story elements: the lack of character development; the lack of motivation behind character actions; the lack of a narrative that could hold the attention of anyone other than a teenage girl, whose emotions about love (the irrational feeling of being “head over heels” for someone) might supersede the need a for story.
Furthermore, why does Bella fall for Edward? Why he for her? What is there about them? The way she describes him and being with him…well, it doesn’t matter, I suppose, WHY someone loves someone else. What’s more important is HOW this love interest develops or fails to develop. In Jane Austen novels there is a kind of dance between pairs, potential loves, where they size each other up and get a feeling for this person they are becoming attracted to (or repulsed by). In these books there is a dance, one of glances and breaths and pauses, but neither Bella nor Edward acknowledge that they like each other. This dance could be graceful, delicate, but instead it’s just boring and goes nowhere. Listening to Bella’s diary-like narrative one wonders why anyone would be interested in her as a person. There is so little remarkable about her, about someone whose will is so feeble yet whose heart is so desirous….Well, that shouldn’t matter either I suppose. But then what are we left with besides an adolescent’s sexual urges masquerading as true love? What is left for the reader but to watch this awkward sexual tension play out? Can the reader really identify with Bella the character? I don’t see how. It’s reminiscent of the Harlequin romance novels where the reader “knows how she feels”, but doesn’t see that there should be a subjective difference between her feelings and those of the heroine. Perhaps this diminution of complexity in a character is a good thing; it becomes easier to identify with her. But don’t we need to know a little more about her to feel that she stands as a person worthy of our interest?
In addition to the faults (or strengths to some readers) there is the issue of language, which could be summed up with the words “trite” and “cliché”. There isn’t much more to say than that. If these books hadn’t each spent five-hundred pages leading me in circles with tired emotive expressions that go nowhere and aren’t expressed in language I can identify with, then they could at least have had more action in them. In short, they would have been tolerable if they were much shorter. I look forward to seeing the movies, mostly because I won’t have to sit through Bella’s hormone-fed lovey-dovey monologue. Instead I can see it play out naturally in the way two people look at each other, in the subtle shifting of faces, in the awkward bumbling and ramblings that the smitten portray. Meyer somehow failed to capture the basic maneuvers lovers make when falling in love. For that the book cannot rise above bad romance novel status. Recommended for teenagers and for adults who have regressed to their teenage years. **1/2
33. One Minute for Yourself—Spencer Johnson
This book was very short. In fact it took me about one minute to read. I think it had something to do with taking time for yourself, though that’s a fairly ironic title since my whole concentration during that minute was consumed trying to figure out what the author was talking about. But in the end I have to say that it was probably effective because I was really bored and hungry and started thinking only of myself and my own needs. Recommended for those with a minute to spare and who don’t want to get too deep into that “Buddhism” stuff. *1/2
34. Under the Loving care of the Fatherly Leader—Bradley K. Martin
So many books and articles have been published on North Korea for the Western reader that one would suspect the market might be saturated with all the most important details of the country and the long-standing regime, from the lurid to the mundane. However insatiable our appetite for works about the Hermit Kingdom to the north (as I write this I am living in South Korea), most of the articles that I have read and documentary films I’ve seen—though none of the books so far fortunately—belabor the fact of North Korea’s constant oppressive state. Far from being simply a “Big Brother” society, it is in fact its own sort of hell, or perhaps purgatory—citizens not knowing what the outside world is like (or even if there IS a world outside North Korean borders). Most articles report about starvation, economic backwardness, stagnation, militarism, and a singularly repressive brand of totalitarianism, all of which characterize the West’s (and much of the East’s) view of the State.
All of these bleak realities notwithstanding, we all too common see a very one-dimensional image of North Korea. It becomes for us a place stripped of its humanity; a wicked social experiment with humans living as animals in the cages of Spartan cities and rural labor camps. We cannot associate with those that live there and so we discuss socioeconomic and foreign policy for them by proxy. We talk of attacking the regime, overthrowing Kim and those who maintain his throne. We still entertain the nuclear option—a supposed antidote to the nuclear THREAT that North Korea seems to pose to the world. The problem with this sort of one-way conversation is that our solutions cannot take into account many of the factors at play and we therefore cannot negotiate the delicate situation and all the hierarchical, Confucian, self-defensive attributes of Korean culture.
Brad Martin writes about many details which we have seen in other places (including the glimpses into North Korean life as told by defectors in South Korea in the book “Nothing to Envy”). But he goes well beyond this rough sketch, giving what feels like a total and accurate picture of the nation, fleshing out the policies with personal narratives, explaining the history of the two Koreas, the country’s relationship with China and the war that would divide Korea in two for at least half a century. He gives deep insight into the cult of personality built up around Kim Il-Sung and Kim Jong-Il and makes it possible to understand how a population of 23 million can be swayed and moved and controlled by these gluttonous, cruel dictators. The idea of “juche”, or self-reliance, is one that should a great deal of promise thirty or forty years ago. Many around the world looked at North Korea as a potential model for national sovereignty and self-guidance. Lurking below the surface, though, was the poverty, the utter corruption, and the usurping of the nation’s resources and people by those at the very top of the party.
In this great historical profile, Martin succeeds in presenting us with the facts as they stand, and the philosophical and geopolitical forces that coalesced to create such a unique dystopia possible. If one is looking to read a book only about the cruelty and failures of the North Korean state (which is, to be sure, a very significant aspect of this country’s character), there are many resources that one can go to. However, this must be the definitive work about this country. It will be very interesting to see how the political tension is handled by the other actors in play, how accurate the prophecies in this book prove to be.
Martin also has much to say on this front, arguing that with regard to China, the most important in North Korea’s very small cadre of friends, the United States and Japan should work quite diplomatically to ensure that no one makes a unilateral move. The results could be very costly indeed, be it in the loss of life and materials (in the case of a war or attack) or in a severe economic catastrophe (in the case of a refugee exodus into China and South Korea if the regime is toppled quickly). What is needed to bring the country down, Martin argues, is more holes within the borders, more information passed into and out of the country. The more the people know, the more power they have against the regime and the more the Kims (now a bonafide dynasty with the death of Kim Jong-Il and the ascension of his son to the top leadership position) will lean towards capitalistic models to bring some kind of prosperity to the country and prevent an all-out uprising. This would be similar to the way in which China eased its citizens into a capitalistic communism after the events at Tiananmen Square in 1989.
For all the author’s insight into the country and detailed information about the leaders and the history of the state (Martin was lucky and was allowed to visit the country an astounding eight times), one still gets the notion that nobody outside knows much about this place. Either that or they DO know and aren’t telling. The upper echelons of the Party are entangled and informing on ones fellow party member is very common, as is relocation of Party officials to different positions around the country. Such moves makes the political hierarchy sort of like a combine—it becomes very difficult to pin down who is in charge of what However, this book does make the reader feel like they understand the landscape a lot better, putting it in sharp relief with other global political issues that occupy our time and attention. Recommended for anyone deeply interested in everything there is to know about North Korea. ******
35. Norwegian Wood—Murakami Haruki
My first foray into the strange and beautiful world of Murakami made me realize that I had been missing out on something special for a long while. And having read another of the author’s works since this one, I believe that Norwegian Wood is a great introduction to the surrealistic textures of beauty and pain Murakami uses as his palate.
It is the story of a young man, 20 years old, who once had two very best friends, a boy and a girl. The boy and girl were quite close, lovers from a very young age. Then one day, in early teenage years, the boy killed himself and everything changed. It was the suddenness of the tragedy and the callousness with which the boy erased his life without considering the love he was leaving behind that made the event so significant, and so tragic. The girl ends up in a sanatorium and the other boy becomes listless, a survivor wandering his university campus like a ghost, a reader and devourer of art and books without a goal or a dream, or any visible emotional affects towards his environment.
The way Murakami writes in this novel, the flat affect of the protagonist in the face of all kinds of events—tragic, sexual, violent, surreal—seems to give insight into the way the world is conceived by his characters, not the way it “actually” is. In fact, there might not be any objective reality at all. The man finds himself sexually involved with several women, while making a sort of companion out of a fellow intellectual student who shows him the hedonistic side of life (although he decides hedonism isn’t for him). Throughout these events, he recalls love, beauty, the past, images of family and friends that he cherishes. But he is never really in the moment or enjoying the fruits of life. It’s as if he is stuck in some kind of fog or dream.
In Murakami’s world, we aren’t to be concerned with finding some intrinsic meaning in the events that take place. Shit happens. It is how the characters deal with the adverse situations that reveals their character. It does seem that at times Murakami delights in the most mundane, prosaic events, writing in sharp detail about them but also with a kind of frankness, as though he must mention them in order to tell the story but that we needn’t dawdle or read anything symbolic into them (“He ate a coffee and a sandwich and washed it down with a glass of chocolate milk. “He ordered two coffees and a hazelnut bagel which he ate at the store.” “He showered and changed into a fresh pair of clothes, drying his hair and brushing his teeth.”) It is an interesting technique and one that does not distract from the writing, but rather adds a subjective quality to the narrative. These are things that the guy just does because, well hey, we all gotta eat. I suspect much of it is just an idiosyncrasy of the author, but it does color the dreamlike nature of the writing with shades of reality. Perhaps telling about a simple lunch is just a way of reminding us that this surrealism is just a figment of someone’s imagination. The real world still exists in all its bland familiarity.
Norwegian Wood is a true artistic attempt to express love and pain, loss and the search for meaning in our lives in the wake of terrible events. Murakami is a brilliant, singular novelist who is perhaps one of the greatest authors writing today. Recommended for those who love a sad story beautifully penned. *****
36. For One More Day—Mitch Albom
Sports writer Mitch Albom takes on an assignment to chronicle the life of a washed-up baseball player who would give it all up just to get one more day back with his deceased mother. This book is reminiscent of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol—an elderly self-centered codger is visited by ghosts and realizes that he’s done everything wrong. In this story it is the love from a mom, so taken for granted, that the man so desperately yearns for and which love, now existing only in his memory, can be both his torment and his salvation.
Chick Benetto is just your average shooting star, a player in the majors for some years. Then the troubles came—the injuries, the adjusting to normal life after stardom, the aches and pains of marriage and kids and the overriding responsibilities that go with these. Finally a fateful event happens—his mother dies while he is away doing a charity baseball game to earn some extra cash. He literally leaves her deathbed to play this game and is so racked with guilt after her passing that he slips into depression, alcoholism, despair, which ultimately wrecks his well-made life and leaves him poor and alone. What he recollects in this story is all the beautiful, sweet things his mother used to do for him and how, beginning in childhood, he rebuffed these motherly affections as so many of us do.
I was very surprised by the effect this book had on me; there were actual tears on my cheeks after some passages. A homey vignette with the word “mom” thrown in is a powerful combination. It evoked memories of MY home; I saw MY mom’s face. As I read his recollections—his mother fussing over him about food or school or friends or health and the dour faces he used to give her, the shameless flippant words he used on her—it struck a chord within me. It may be a universal theme but Albom does a splendid job or painting these scenes with the simple words an everyman might use. It is poignant, sweet but not saccharine. It almost felt as if I were being admonished through this characters behavior. Ultimately, when I finished reading it I really felt the need to call my mom. It’s not often that a book reaches me in that way, holds a mirror up to me and says “Look at what you are missing; look at the beauty you refuse to cherish. It will all be gone someday.”
Perhaps most people in the world are afraid to face the fact of a parent’s death and that’s why this theme is so important: it is life affirming. We needn’t beat ourselves up for our failings. And if we do, well, our mothers will always be there with their nagging and haranguing and unconditional love. This book manages to get this message across in a simply written parable. Another of Mitch Albom’s books, Tuesdays with Morrie, also strives to promote a similar lesson about cherishing life but fails completely to do so in my opinion. I had strong reservations about this book because I figured it would be as cloying as that one was. I was wrong and pleasantly surprised. Recommended for everyone who needs to call their mom more often. ****
37. Writing Without Teachers—Peter Elbow
I picked up this book used at the bookstore about a year before I read it. It wasn’t that I had that many other books preceding it in the queue so much as I was afraid that, if I read it and tried to absorb it, I would have all the keys to write well and no excuses to fall back on. Although of course I imagined, like always, that if I tried I might fail, and so I put off even gaining the knowledge-power that the book tempted me with. When I finally picked it up I found a fair amount of familiar advice about writing: do it, do it, do it. And then, when you think you are done, do it some more.
To be sure, I had written some things in my time, but most of them were tasks for school or for projects that had a deadline and demanded some kind of form and content requirements. I had taken writing classes that instructed such a tenacious approach. Paradoxically, this radical notion of the writer as generator of ideas without regard to the consequences was almost always followed up with an assignment to write, which had guidelines. Perhaps it was the guidelines I was both afraid of and comforted by. Without guidelines, where and how can I proceed? What’s the goal?
As I am finding out in life, the most important goals come not from without but from within. It is simple enough to conform to the dictates of society, even when it is uncomfortable. However, creating for its own sake, for your own sanity, is a very different story. I found Elbow’s story of himself as a fledgling writer comforting. He tells you of his struggles with his pre-conceptions about how one should write (indeed, the domain’s common wisdom on “how writing is achieved”) and his efforts to peel away this false edifice of authoritarian wisdom. Writing, according to him, is an act of immersion and production. But the production is not planned; it is spontaneous. It must be and must come from within and by the seat of your pants. But also, your pants must be glued to the seat long enough to actually get some good freewriting in. And freewriting, this time-heavy, editing-free period of flow and creation is very, very important for writers. Stephen King writes about it as well. It loosens him up and gets him into the milieu of being “the writer” without stress, without pressure, and usually without awareness that this transition is taking place.
Of course, freewriting is only one aspect of the creative process. We must still keep the mantle of “editor in chief” if we are to create something readable. Elbow suggests that during the initial process of freewriting, we sublimate the editor and “leave the door closed” to both inside and outside distractions. The point is to write. What’s difficult about that? Nothing, to my mind. The real work comes in with revising, erasing some things, re-drafting. Of course, in my opinion, this is the easy part. It’s only when you think about all of these steps when you sit down to your keyboard that the hard work of the task becomes clear..
The lengthiest part of Writing Without Teachers chronicles the author’s experience with setting up teacher-less writing groups—autonomous clubs, if you will, that meet regularly and discuss writing and in which everyone must submit some writing each session. There are many rules that Elbow outlines, and I’m not sure just how many of these are strictly advised by the National Writer’s Coalition (or whoever the hell would be the authority in such matters) and how many are just personally advocated by Elbow. Either way, he gives a lot of great ideas that one could use to create his or her own writing group. I still intend to set one up (or join one if possible) and see collaboration as essential in promoting artistic output. The idea of the loan genius evaluating everything by himself is a bit of a fiction. The artist needs an audience, a sounding board, a group of critics and confidants.
My favorite part of the book is near the beginning. It’s a metaphor about freewriting. Elbow says writing is not like “turning on the faucet and pouring out only good ideas into a bucket that will become a great piece of writing”, but rather it is like “turning on that faucet and letting it run into a swimming pool. Many ideas will be muddy and unclean at first, and as the pool fills, the water becomes cleaner, the writing better, and those murky ideas will spill out as your swimming pool overflows with good writing.” Recommended aspiring writers finding the whole business more difficult than they imagined. ****
38. Nine Stories—J.D. Salinger
At this point in my year, in my goal, I had a strong desire to begin writing, or at least to begin understanding about writing. I wanted a book that would inspire me to write, and so this collection of short stories was a perfect follow up to a book about the writing process. It shows how great writing can be—even when it is in very short story form—when done with years of diligence and practice. Like Catcher in the Rye, these stories, written in the 1940s and 1950’s, gravitate around the beautiful subtleties of their characters. Salinger writes almost exclusively about people—people with subtle expressions, idiosyncratic ways of speaking, absurd philosophies. And the small adventures they take us on are like forays into some sepia photograph brought into vivid color by humor, awkwardness and the universal romanticism of childhood.
Some stories, like “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” and “Just Before the War with the Eskimos” are little more than vignettes, brief flashes of a scene in a day in the life of a character or three. But even in the shortest of stories, so much life and depth of character is captured that one feels as if Salinger might have pondered about writing a novel based upon the characters or even the situation but was simply too lazy. To the contrary, he was more often packing novella levels of character development into five or ten pages of writing. It is a remarkable feat.
He extends the character-driven motif in slightly longer stories such as “For Esme, with Love and Squalor”, about an American soldier on shore leave who meets a charming little English girl, more precocious than composed despite her knowledge of the world. He writes a story for her that contains heavy doses of “love and squalor”, two fundamental elements to any interesting story in her esteemed opinion.
Salinger’s most interesting characters also tend to be children. They are the ones that see the world in all its shimmering potential. Whereas the adults are jaded and miss the point most of the times, the kids spit and grin, and prognosticate and play, and philosophize with a grandeur known only to themselves and perhaps the mentally infirm. I love this collection of stories and hope to return to it again many times for inspiration and a reminder of what perfect characters are. Recommended for almost everyone. *****
39. On Writing—Stephen King
This is King’s memoir about the craft of writing and the trials that led him into success and into dark periods of his life. I’m not sure if there are any other autobiographical quite like this. This book explains many important concepts for writers in a small amount of pages.
King chronicles the start of his writing period, from the advice given to him by a sports editor of a local magazine during his high school years, to the apocryphal (or perhaps we can assume it is true) nailing of rejection letters to the wall of his room during his formative writing years. He shows just how resilient he was and is as a writer and describes to the reader just how important this quality of tenacity is to make it as a writer or artist of any kind. It was inspiring to read about a writer as prolific and digestible as King looking back on his days as a nobody. But even in those trying times he had so much love for what he did and so much hope and faith in himself that it inspires a wannabe writer with a similar stick-to-itiveness,
Some of the more important things King imparts are along the lines of following certain stylistic rules (e,g., those laid out in “The Elements of Style” by Strump and White), following a monastic daily writing routine, reading a lot, reading some more, and then writing a lot, writing some more. Of course, all of the problems that come with being published and becoming famous maybe be easy to overcome if you have gotten that far already. King’s words seem wise.
A large section tells of his problems with alcohol addiction. He questions whether the caricature of the lonely drunk sitting in his room with a bottle writing poetry is really the right light in which writers should be captured. He argues that drugs and alcohol, although trappings of a lifestyle for some writers, do nothing for the writing itself. If anything, these writers write DESPITE their addictive distraction (distracting addiction).
Towards the end of the work King tells his own miniature horror story—that of getting run over by a van by a drunk driver (a hit-and-run) and the subsequent effect on his writing and recuperation. What I found uplifting about this was that, despite his extensive injuries (many broken bones and lacerated organs) his mind was always on his writing and he only stopped working for a total of about two weeks. According to King, this is the longest he’d gone without writing since he was sixteen years old. Now this is a man to whom every amateur writer should bend his ear and listen. Recommended for writers and for those curious about a master storyteller. *****
40. Lord of the Flies—William Golding
To discuss this book is to first address the notoriety of the title as a meme in society, as it is such a common tagline to many situations (usually in hyperbole). The thematic situation of child savages battling it out to the death on a deserted island is one that resonates with us because it exposes a primeval scenario in which we might take similar actions. It is firstly a moral psychological or sociological tale and the obvious allegory here is that we as a civilization are the children and the deserted island with no parents is lawlessness. By stripping the situation of law, which we take for granted in a society, Golding is holding a mirror up to society and asking “What are the moral decisions here? Should we respect fear? Leadership? Timidity? Intelligence?” Which are the qualities that make us human, and which undermine our humanity.
The terrifying issue underlying this story is that of death—death is inevitable for these children, whether it be later in adulthood should they survive or on the island, a death from starvation. But it is somehow more horrible that death could come from the hands of the fellow marooned boys. These are supposed to be brothers in arms, comrades, survivors that depend on each other. However, when the specter of death is announced in the form of some horrific unseen beast-serpent (and then confirmed by the sighting of a dead paratrooper on a hilltop), their imaginations turn in all kinds of directions, leading some towards rational thinking, others towards democracy, and still others towards blindly following a ruthless and powerful leader.
With these symbolic camps in play, Golding’s characters use the terrain of the island to attack, evade, or die, depending on their position and status. After an unknown amount of time has passed the island has descended into a kind of bloodsport chaos where boys are playing at being men by dent of their ability to hunt and kill pigs and traitors. The “Lord of the Flies” refers to the head of a pig that Jack, the evil Pooh-Bah, impales on a pike to appease the Beast, which has become a kind of demi-god. The head had belonged to a mother sow; what began as something innocent, natural, nurturing, became a crucible of fear and division amongst the boys,
It could be argued that this is supposed to be the natural state of humanity within civilizing influences, without structures to protect man from man. But judging by Golding’s line of work—he was an elementary school teacher, which allowed him great insight into pre-adolescent boys—we cannot easily label him a cynic or misanthrope. If his allegory is to be useful to us, we must see the boys as different options we can choose among to save our society. If we take the wrong path and blindly follow leaders it can spell disaster, as we see all too often. However, a democracy must be combined with a kind of intellectual vanguard if we are to make decisions as a group which are in our best interest. Recommended for anyone who can follow allegory with care and still love a great tale. *****
41. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich—Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Chronicles the life of a man in a Soviet labor camp in the Stalin era. It was published in 1962 when the Soviet literary world was still very pro-Stalin, yet perhaps finally prepared to face some realities about the harshness of life in the camps that sent so many hundreds of thousands of men and women to their deaths. It was a huge event, however, as the Soviets were not especially renown for allowing dissent or criticism. The piece comes through in such stark and objective pictures of life that it could hardly be called propaganda. However, despite the realism and despite the authors lived experience, he would later be accused by Soviet literary publications for not abiding by Soviet principles.
Although the politics of the time are complex and hard to fully understand, we can envision the harsh life inside the camp. The 104th was a team of camp laborers whose jobs included manual construction of buildings, electrical engineering, plumbing and the like. They were responsible for going into branches of the camp and fixing, replacing, doing whatever it was they had been assigned to do that day. They wake up before dawn and finish work at sunset. They endure the unendurable and pay dearly for any kind of mistakes or failure to follow the rules to a tee.
Because he was a former prisoner himself, Solzhenitsyn is able to capture in excruciating detail the horrors of forced labor under these conditions: frostbite, beatings, starvation, hoarding, informing on fellow prisoners. Little things found at the worksites like a screwdriver or a piece of wood can be used to barter for an extra crust of bread or ladle of soup at dinner. Minor infractions such as waking up late or coming back to camp after the bell could mean a week in solitary confinement, a box in which the prisoner wasn’t able to stand nor to sit and isn’t provided with enough food to last him the duration of his sentence. Therefore, it was often a death sentence.
Throughout all the agonies, the narrator reckons that the only thing that can really keep a man going is to look forward to the next day. Not to his release date; not to the next year; not to the next month. One never knew when the authorities would extend or commute a sentence, but to have too much hope would spell disastrous disappointment; to have too little would mean despair. So monk-like and in martyrdom the brave men march and work and line up and sleep in shoebox barracks and spend energy until they have none left to give.
This legacy of imprisonment during Stalin’s time is instructive. As a society we can take this picture of life and use it for empathy, for understanding, use it to raise questions about human valuation, about the effectiveness of hard labor penal systems, about the endurance of the human spirit. One gets the sense that despite the profound gloom filling the lives of these people every day, their camaraderie and gratefulness for the tiniest material graces lifted them up and transcended them to a place where authoritarian cruelty could not reach them. Recommended for people who want to see the truth about prison camps written in a powerful, plaintive voice. *****
42. Just-So Stories—Rudyard Kipling
Many people will recognize the kind of folk traditions that run throughout these origin stories. Notable among the stories are “How the leopard got his spots”, “How the elephant got its trunk”, and “The cat who walked alone.” They are famous for their appeal to children as explanations and for fun situations with animals. They are loved by adults out of a kind of nostalgia for ABC books, Dick and Jane and the like, and a sense of play and lightness that pervades the tales.
Kipling is also known for his love of the Indian wilderness, which goes along—although perhaps incongruously—with his support of strong British Imperialism at the turn of the 20th century. However, here there is only the obvious love of words and the support of lighthearted stories about the origins of animals found in the Empire’s darker realms.
I read Just-So Stories as a child and loved it. I have to say, sadly, that because of my age I am a bit jaded and a little less enchanted to these stories. The myths don’t ring as “true” as they used to. That is just-so, and just as it should be. But Kipling’s imagination strikes one as vivid and flexible, holding strict views about society in one corner of his mind and fantastic notions of life and anthropomorphic character in another.
I also notice elements of cultural and gender chauvinism in some stories. But I have to remind myself, nearly rebuke myself, that I am a child of the politically correct age. It is much too easy to focus on faults in terms of taste and conformity to what suits our current culture of parity. Also, I am touch by Kipling’s dedication of these stories to his beloved daughter, who tragically would die before the age of ten. It is a good thing to keep in mind as you read them, since you can almost hear the tender words spoken by the father to his little girl just before he kisses her goodnight and turns out the light. Recommended for those interested in children’s books and language play. ****
43. Bad Samaritans—Ha Joon Chang
The premise of this book is that small and developing economies of the world have been led astray by powerful, developed nations who tout the virtues of having a “free and open market” as a gateway to economic success. The truth lies much in the reverse direction, as author and South Korean transplant (to Oxford and Berkeley) Ha Joon Chang argues.
Countries such as America, England, and many of the richest nations in the world give out ample economic advice to smaller countries. The usual lines go something like this: “Open up your markets to foreign competitors; don’t use protectionism as it will stifle growth; remove the barriers to entry such as import tariffs and specialty goods fees; do not subsidize your products as that hampers trade; join our regional free-trade pact that we have drafted and already begun to implement.” They might as well add, “Just sign on the dotted line and all your troubles will disappear.”
As Ha points out, however, these same countries that are so willing to lend a helping hand to the newcomers grew their own economies by undertaking some of these very practices that they are now condemning as backwards and anti-globalization. This two-faced nature of the big economies is where the name of the book comes from. However, they are still Samaritans in that their intentions aren’t necessarily as bad as their advice. Looking directly at the macroeconomics experts, it is not clear that they are preaching anything contrary to what they actually believe, to what the data set about open-market growth entails in their minds. There appears to be a kind of disconnect between the minds of the wealthy economies and the reality of the way these economies actually grow in real life—there is some cognitive dissonance at play perhaps. The bottom line is that the wealthy countries are now advocating free markets for smaller, growing economies because it suits the interests of the wealthy nations and its citizens, NOT those of the developing countries.
Some of the specific models that Ha points out are those involving protectionism. He reminds us that the US was heavily protectionist in the decades before World War I and this led to a sanctuary zone, in which other, more viable and robust competitors could not negatively impact the growth of the American companies, which were of course so important to the economic security and future of the country.
Ha also deals with tariffs and copyright laws, which he says have been extended into the realm of the absurd by Americans, to the point where intellectual property rights extend 75 years beyond the death of their creator in some cases (Mickey Mouse being one famous case). However, Ha argues that copycatting and counterfeiting—two things that come to mind when we think of economies as they were and are developing in East Asia—are important steps to not only figuring out how to manufacture original products in the future but also in growing a consumer base that will, once they have the income, become some of the most loyal purchasers of the original brand. This has proven true in South Korea and Hong Kong and will likely be the case all over China and in Southeast Asia as well, provided these countries can raise their economies enough.
The main thesis of this book is that Milton Friedman’s idea of free-market economics trumping any kind of “tampering” with markets is patently wrong. The successful nations of the world have proven that historically. But by urging these developing nations to engage in free-trade agreements and stop tariffs and protectionist practices, the rich countries are cornering the market everywhere. Such acts pave the way for homogeneity and cultural imperialism and will make it impossible for small businesses to grow and thrive because of all the tall-growing and established companies in the neighborhood.
This is an important book for many reasons. First, it is instructive for growing economies. Second, it can disabuse citizens of first-world nations of the notion that their country’s products and culture are superior just because they dominate markets in foreign and developing countries. Third, it contains ideas about the kind of diversity we might see in the markets if we allow growing countries to engage in protectionism and other practices that will insulate their economies from undue competition. This diversity will be beneficial to consumers around the world as more and more avenues will be created for marketing, modifying, purchasing. Insulated economies allow a safe space that recognizes creative thinking and innovative ideas, rather than just a cost-benefit ratio in play. Because great ideas take awhile to implement and monetize, they need room and time to grow. In time they might be viable enough to be opened up to the free market. I recommend this book for anyone interested in global economy. *****
44. Fahrenheit:451—Ray Bradbury
A dystopian future where life is planned for us, where a central government controls every aspect of the society we live in, where knowledge is worthless and following the rules is the key to getting by. If one gets the sense that this is a moral tale, one would be partially correct. However, the additional element in this novel is one that we might come to expect in a dystopia but which figures centrally in this story: all books must be burned.
The book chronicles the days of “firefighter” (a job title for one who finds and destroys books) Guy Montag who lives in a world where drugs are taken to ease the pain and boredom of daily existence, where the television is the most important, the ONLY really important object in the house, where one conforms to the ideals of society, which pretty much seem to amount to nothing else but conformity itself. One day Guy meets a little girl whose free-thinking ideals and liberating spirit force him to question his life, his ideals, and his own perceived happiness. Later he learns she has been killed in a hit-and-run, victim of the ruthless brutality of youth gangs that roam the streets in search of something to do (reminiscent of A Clockwork Orange). This knowledge throws a switch in him somewhere and he begins to rebel, stealing some books from a house that they were called up to burn down.
When he starts to read he discovers the unfettered joy of the imagination, the possibilities of scenarios and characters and themes and philosophies. His wife is, understandably, terrified and orders him to get rid of the books. Eventually she informs the fire brigade who come to burn Guy’s house down and unleash “The Hound”, (a mechanical dog that terminates its targets) upon him. He manages to evade the dog and escape the city, a refugee of a cultureless urban hell.
Fahrenheit:451 is often cited as being among those works that oppose censorship, that warn of the dangers we can run up against if we allow “dangerous” ideas to be destroyed at the command of the authorities. This seems plausible. But as there seems to be no motive presented for WHY the books must be destroyed—as opposed to “1984” where the central government needs citizens to be in the dark and so would have resorted to such measures—so we can’t assume that censorship is to blame. In fact, when interviewed about this question Bradbury claimed that it was not about censorship but about society’s dependence on television, which destroys the desire to read and learn. Even in the early 1950’s TV was becoming a force to be reckoned with. Bradbury says that the problem with TV is that it posed an alternative to books, whose reputation was now reduced to being “factoids without any context” and not having anything to offer humanity. A sort of anti-intellectualist reductionism that sounds like our own modern version of “truthiness”, a word Stephen Colbert uses to explain his disdain for books.
Bradbury observed a scene in the late 1950’s which sums up why his views about the obsolescence of books in the public mind were actually more truth than fiction:
“…In Beverly Hills one night, a husband and wife passed me, walking their dog. I stood staring after them, absolutely stunned. The woman held in one hand a small cigarette-package-sized radio, its antennae quivering. From this sprang tiny copper wires which ended in a dainty cone plugged into her right ear. There she was, oblivious to man and dog, listening to far winds and whispers and soap-opera cries, sleep-walking, helped up and down curbs by a husband who might just as well not have been there. This was not fiction.”
Keep in mind that this was an observation from the 1950’s, well before our current era of constant smart-phone and tablet attachment, lack of social interaction among real people on the streets. It seems quaint to us in our era of technology, but that is because the scene of a person on the street oblivious to his or her surroundings is too familiar to seem surreal as it did to Bradbury in the 1950’s. What do you think? Is our constant interaction with techno-gadgets a serious detriment to our social welfare? To our acquisition of new ideas of substance and meaning? Recommended for anyone who likes dystopian novels that hit close to home. *****
45. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave—Frederick Douglass
Every American of high school age knows a little about Frederick Douglass, the slave who escaped in the years leading up to the civil war and went on to become an intellectual, author, speaker and one of the strongest voices in the abolitionist movement. But I wager that even though most have heard of his narrative of his years as a slave, most have not ventured to read it. Relatively short and not long on details of early life or life after slavery, the trials Douglass writes about are some of the most gripping, horrendous experiences imaginable. And yet it is written in such an eloquent voice, such inspiring words and with a voice of certain resolve, the reader has no choice but to step into the shoes of this intelligent, sensitive, suffering man who lived the prime of his years breaking his back and eating his pride doing the bidding of his “owners”.
Most of the narrative revolves around Douglass’s different masters, their characters and what made them popular or unpopular with the slaves. Also he describes in detail the kind of work on the plantations in Georgia and Maryland, the ways that slaves passed time and endured such unendurable hardships, the tactics used by the white owners to get the maximum work out of the slaves, and the myriad methods of brutality that was inflicted upon slaves for misconduct or insubordination.
In one particular passage, Douglass tells about how he got the better of one of the field masters, saying that if he laid a hand on him it would be the last thing he ever did in his life. I almost leapt for joy at this retribution, at the slave taking the whip in his hand and saying “treat me like a human.” And Douglass’s words truly make such victories seems relative, grand achievements in such dark times. We cannot judge the success of overriding a master from today’s vantage where we strive for equality among all races, sexes and creeds.
Other inspiring moments included Douglass learning to read and write from a mistress when he worked inside the mansion in Maryland. He later held clandestine classes with other slaves who were eager to learn, teaching them the basics of spelling and writing. It was truly a triumph of will, the desire to learn and go beyond the boundaries allowed for slaves. Later, Douglass tells about his escape to the North and how he changed his name to evade the slave-catchers.
His subsequent contribution to the Unitarian movement, his vaunted place as hero among their numbers, is the one thing most remember about this man. But what needs telling is what is told in this book in such stark and yet beautiful terms: the struggles that slaves—EVERY slave—endured during a period of American history that our nation is to eager to forget about, to gloss over. It is blight on our national conscience (among others that we tend to ignore). To my mind, every student should be made to read this book in high school, Not only would they be rapt by the adventure, the pain, the realistic scenes that the author portrays, but they would perhaps gain a deeper level of empathy and understanding about the dehumanizing effect that bondage and servitude have on the human spirit. Recommended for all Americans. ******
46. Night—Elie Weisel
A Holocaust memoir in flits and fragments of pain and survival, despair and hope, Night reads like a prose poem that, like some nightmare roller coaster, becomes more and more terrifying with each chapter.
The horrors of the holocaust were manifold and have been well documented. And Night was part of this documentation—Weisel won the Nobel Peace prize partly for the impact that this book had on readers. It calls to mind elements of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in the way that small found objects mean so much. Human beings are reduced to surviving on what they find, who they can convince to let them sleep near the stove, how they can increase their rations for the day and thus stave of infection and disease for that much longer.
Weisel watches everyone die—his mother, his sister, and finally his father. Separated and obliterated in the death camps of Buchenwald and Auschwitz. He says that people died mostly of lack of something important to cling to. For the religious this was prayer; Orthodox Jews were heard saying a prayer for the dead for themselves, something Weisel had never heard before, just before they were sent to the incinerator. For the professionals it was to their work, to ideas and formulas that they clung. For so many others it was images of home or family or love, though many of these things even the survivors would never see again.
The premise of this book, if there is one, seems to be that in recounting the absolute evil that people are capable of, we can also bear witness to the incredible resilience of mankind. Even reduced to flesh and bones, food for lice and bacteria and eventually, faggots for the fire, humans can hold on to that which makes them human, and some can survive. The compassion of some of the guards in the camps does not go unnoticed as well. There is evil everywhere; there is good everywhere. Weisel’s story shows the death of innocence and the discovery of a radical self buried deep below our banal world. In one particularly beautiful passage he acknowledges that great suffering can indeed be terrible, the most terrible thing in the world. But he adds as a lesson that, some of the greatest moments of his life, the most happy, before or after the war, were those spent in quiet solitude, warming himself by the small heater for a few hours. A flicker of warmth is the epitome of bliss to a man trapped in a barren freezing hell.
Elie Weisel’s speech to the Nobel Prize committee is printed at the back of the book. Among his brief words of acceptance is this dedication to all survivors of the evil deeds of humankind: “Our lives no longer belong to us alone: they belong to all those who need us desperately.” Recommended for everyone, to build a more crucial understanding of the depths to which we can descend as a society and the despair which we can overcome. *****
47. Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother—Amy Chua
This book created a sensation when it came out and seemed to split critics into two camps. One embraced the strict lessons of the Tiger Mom; the other decried them as inhumane and unnecessary. What could have been written about Chinese parenting that was so controversial that it divided a country down the middle?
Perhaps it was Chua’s firm assertion that American parents are not the best kind of parents. Her argument is that leniency and early independence in choosing activities is not healthy for children’s development and leads to later problems in life, such as laziness, rebellious and anti-social behavior, and rejection of work. In contrast, she uses the Chinese (or perhaps more broadly, East Asian) model for parenting, which is infamously directed towards discipline, hard work, achievement, and above all respect for parents.
There is much truth to what Chua says. At the beginning of the book, when she states her divisive thesis about American versus Asian kids’ achievement and ability, I blanched a bit. Steeped in cultural relativism and strong notions of “progress through Liberalism”, we Americans like to think that we are doing our kids and society a favor by letting them get what they want. We introduce fairness; we let everyone have a chance to win; we allow ourselves and our kids lots of downtime and playtime; and we think we are happier and better for it. In some ways, this is also true. Studies show that American kids have very high levels of confidence. But where they are lagging is in achievement.
Chua chronicles the years she spent raising her daughters in California, teaching them Chinese values, making them practice their musical instruments for hours each day, forbidding them from sleepovers and extracurricular activities. To many Americans this sort of restrictive parental policy is tantamount to child abuse. Which is laughable when we actually take a look around the world at how other societies push their kids to work as hard as possible.
There is something to be said for leniency and independence, and as Amy Chua finds out, being a stickler all the time means you may develop an inflexibility towards the ones you love that may, in an American context, make them resentful of your overbearing ways. She discovers this with her younger daughter, who rebels against playing the violin after years and years of being pressured to play and begins to excel at tennis, a sport she herself has chosen and which she loves.
Finally, it is great just to see that other methods of parenting can co-exist in the U.S. I’m sure there are dozens more: the Indian Moms, Iranian Dads, German Stone-Fisted Babysitters, etc. etc. (and perhaps we’ll see them all in book form in the future). That we have a culture which can accommodate different levels of achievement and different kinds of knowledge and backgrounds and interests is what makes America unique. It is hard to imagine a truly pluralistic landscape of parenting styles in East Asian societies like the one that exists in the U.S. Recommended for those interested in a different method of parenting and its ramifications. ****
