Talk to the Hand, by Lynne Truss (3.5)

Talk to the Hand: The Utter Bloody Rudeness of the World Today, or Six Good Reasons to Stay Home and Bolt the Door


I have to say, I did like the book, and I knew what it would be like going into it, which basically is like a long newspaper column or magazine article with (albeit British) humor somewhat on the lines of Erma Bombeck or Dave Barry. A very very quick read- enjoyable with some pretty good points and quite a few things to think about.

Whether it's merely a question of advancing years bringing greater intolerance I don't think that I shall bother to establish. I will just say that, for my own part, I need hardly defend myself against any knee-jerk "grumpy old woman" accusations, being self-evidently so young and fresh and liberal and everything. It does, however, have to be admitted that the outrage reflex ("Oh, that's so RUDE!") presents itself in most people at just about the same time as their elbow skin starts to give out. Check your own elbow skin. If it snaps back into position after bending, you probably should not be reading this book. If, on the other hand, it just sits there in a puckered fashion, a bit rough and belligerent, then you can probably also name about twenty things, right now, off the top of your head, that drive you nuts: people who chat in the cinema; young people sauntering four-abreast on the pavement; waiters who say, "There you go" as they place your bowl of soup on the table; people not even attempting to lower their voices when they use the Eff word. People with young, flexible elbow skin spend less time defining themselves by things they don't like. Warn a young person that "Each man becomes the thing he hates", and he is likely to reply, quite cheerfully, that that's OK, then, since the only thing he really hates is broccoli.
p. 4-5

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The Yellow Admiral, by Patrick O'Brain

The Yellow Admiral (Vol. Book 18) (Aubrey/Maturin Series)

Faith and Begorra- A new entry!

Mostly of quotes.

"The heart has its reasons that the... that the..."

"Kidneys?" suggested Stephen.

"That the kidneys know not." Jack frowned. "No. Hell and death, that's not it. But anyhow the heart has its reasons, you understand."

"It is a singularly complex organ, I am told."
p.58

"I do not have to tell you, Stephen, how wholly I long to receive the order requesting and requiring me, as rear-admiral of the blue, to proceed to the smallest of commands, to His Majesty's sloop of war Mosquito, say, with two four-pounders and a swivel, and to hoist my flag at her mizzen-mast. I should do anything for it. Anything."

"Does Simmon's Lea come within the limits of anything?"

"No, of course not, Stephen; how can you be so strange?"

"It is an elastic term, you know."
p. 106

"It had always astonished me that a woman with as much sense as Sophie- and she is no fool, you know- can be so influenced by her mother, who is a fool, a downright great God-damned fool, even where money is concerned, which is saying a great deal."
p. 185

"This liquid is technically known as soup," Jack went on, having taken off the cover. "May I ladle you out a measure?"

"It is pleasant enough to see the remnants of peas so aged and worn that even the weevils scorned them and died at their side, so that now we have both predator and prey to nourish us."
p. 214

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The Commodore, by Patrick O'Brian: 5 stars

"So she is the Bellona, the chief argosy of your command! Huzzay, huzza! I congratulate you, Jack. Why, I declare, she has a poop, which adds much to her dignity."

"And not only dignity but safety too. When you are on a quarterdeck in a hot action with a really malignant enemy firing great guns and small arms, it is a wonderful comfort to have a solid poop behind you." p. 70

Now, in the warm night, there was no one to be comforted, kept in countenance, no one who could scorn him for virtuosity, and he could let himself go entirely; and as the grave and subtle music wound on and on, Stephen once more contemplated on the apparent contradiction between the big, cheerful, florid sea-officer whom most people liked on sight but who would never have been described as subtle or capable of subtlety by any one of them (except perhaps his surviving opponents in battle) and the intricate, reflective music he was now creating. So utterly unlike his limited vocabulary in words, at time verging upon the inarticulate. p. 73

"I wish I could carve like that," said Jack, watching Stephen's knife slice the long thin strips. "My birds generally take to the air again, spreading fat in the most disastrous fashion over the table and laps of my guests."

"The only vessel I ever sailed turned ignominiously upside down," said Stephen. "Each man to his own trade, said Plato: that's justice." p. 161

"I have always prided myself on a perfect freedom from jealousy," said Jack.

"For a great while I prided myself on my transcendent beauty, on much the same grounds, or even better," said Stephen. p. 164

Plus we get to learn how the term "come to loggerheads" came about.

new dream journal

despite waking

Shared via AddThis

Hope you like the new look. :)

Please tell me if it blinds you.

The Wine-Dark Sea, by Patrick O'Brian: 5 stars

"Will I confess a grave sin?" he asked.

"Do, by all means," said Jack, looking at him kindly. "But if you managed to commit a grave sin between the gunroom and here you have a wonderful capacity for evil." p. 90

[T]hough which came first, the deed or the doer, the goose or the egg, I am not learned enough to tell."

"Would it not be the owl, at all?"

"Never in life, my poor Stephen. Who ever heard of a golden owl?" p. 106

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The Truelove, by Patrick O'Brian: 5 stars

I read the Nutmeg, the Truelove, and the Wine-Dark Sea all in an ecstatic rush, not stopping to post anything in my journal. Then came days of sick children who let no one in the house sleep. I thought this sleepless phase would pass sooner, but since it hasn't, I'm trying to add these in now, and sorry but my brain just isn't in it for clever literary review. Let's just say, these books are quite good and quote:

...and after a while he said, "He longed for a daughter, I know, and it is very well that he should have one; but I wish she may not prove a platypus to him." p. 9

"Navigators are notoriously short-lived, and for them middle-age comes sooner than for quiet abstemious country gentlemen. Jack, you have led an unhealthy a life as can well be imagined, perpetually exposed to the falling damps, often wet to the skin, called up at all hours of the night by that infernal bell. You have been wounded the Dear knows how many times, and you have been cruelly overworked. No wonder your hair is grey."

"My hair is not grey. It is a very becoming buttercup yellow." p. 17

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The Nutmeg of Consolation by Patrick O'Brian: 5 stars

quotes:

"A Barmecide feast, sir, I am afraid," said Jack.

"Not at all, sir," said Martin. "There is nothing I prefer to..." He hesitated, trying to find a name for salt beef, eighteen months in the cask, partly desalted, cut up very small and fried with crushed ship's biscuits and a great deal of pepper. "... to a fricasse." p. 223

"Sir," said Stephen, "I read novels with the utmost pertinacity. I look upon them- I look upon good novels- as a very valuable part of literature, conveying more exact and finely-distinguished knowledge of the human heart and mind than almost any other, with greater breadth and depth and fewer constraints. Had I not read Madame de La Fayette, the Abbe Prevost, and the man who wrote Clarissa, that extraordinary feast, I should be very much poorer than I am; and a moment's reflection would add many more." p. 253

"Obstruction at every infernal step," said Jack. "How I hate an official." But his face cleared when Stephen told him of the little girls' escape and asked whether he disliked having them aboard.

"Never in life," he said. "I quite like to see them skipping about. They are far better than wombats. Last time we touched here, you bought a wombat, you remember, and it ate my hat." p. 275

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TheThirteen Gun Salute, by Patrick O'Brian. 5 stars.

I told myself not to go through these (Aubrey-Maturin) books like so much candy. Make them last! Read one, then read a totally unrelated book; you know, to cleanse the palate. One can only read a series for the first time, um, once. Take your time and savor them.

Yet I have reached a point where I simply cannot restrain myself, and now I am reading them one after the other with no control whatsoever. XD I have decided that if I can find the audiobook versions at the library that I will listen to the series the next time through, which will be a new experience in a way, and that makes me feel a little better.

Quotes for everyone:

Jack Aubrey had little notion of his friend's mathematical or astronomical abilities and none whatsoever of his seamanship, while his performance at billiards, tennis or fives, let alone cricket, would have been contemptible if they had not excited such a degree of hopeless compassion; but where physic, a foreign language and political intelligence were concerned, Maturin might have been all the Sibyls rolled into one, together with the Witch of Edmonton, Old Moore, Mother Shipton and even the holy Nautical Almanack... (14)

Once again his mind turned to the question of integrity, a virtue that he prized very highly in others, although there were times when he had painful doubts about his own; but on this occasion he was thinking about it less as a virtue than as a state, the condition of being whole; and it seemed to him that Jack was a fair example. He was as devoid of self-consciousness as a man could well be; and in all the years Stephen had known him, he had never seen him act a part. (164)

Fox did not seek popularity, though he could be good company when he chose and he liked being liked; what he desired was superiority and the respect due to superiority, and for a man of his intelligence he did set about it with a surprising lack of skill. (164)

"I expressed myself badly. What I meant was that if he could induce others to believe what he said, then for him the statement acquired some degree of truth, a reflection of their belief that it was true; and this reflected truth might grow stronger with time and repetition until it became conviction, indistinguishable from ordinary factual truth, or very nearly so." (165)

[A] pale cobalt dome of sky, darkening imperceptibly as it came down to the sharp horizon and the true azure of the great disk of ocean- two pure ideal forms, and the ship between them, minute, real, and incongruous. (276)

Such descriptions! And, indeed, one found one could substitute "Foot" for "Fox" a fair amount of the time, and the description still apply perfectly.

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The Letter of Marque, by Patrick O'Brien. 5 stars.

"Star light, star bright, starboard is to the right."

Oh, it came in the mail! EARLIER than Amazon predicted, saints preserve us. Would you like some quotes?

"Hold hard, Stephen," he cried, catching Stephen as he fell again, this time from a standing position. "Where are your sea-legs?"

"It is not a question of sea-legs at all," said Stephen. "The ship is moving about in a very wild, unbridled manner. A crocodile would fall, in such circumstances, without it had wings." (73)

[Babbington] "What did [the Doctor, Stephen] do to you, sir?"

[Mr. X ;)] "Well, I am ashamed to say he took a pistol-ball out of the small of my back. It must have been when I turned to hail for more hands- thank God I did not. At the time I thought it was one of those vile [horses] that were capering about abaft the wheel."

"Oh, sir, surely a horse would never have fired off a pistol?"

"Yet fired it was: and the Doctor said it was lodged hard up against the sciatic nerve."

"What is the sciatic nerve?"

"I have no idea. But once it had recovered from being as I take it stunned, and once I had given the ball an unhandy twist, sending it closer still, the whole thing- I shall not attempt to describe how disagreeable it was, until the Doctor took it out." (231)

And a bit of a longer excerpt, in celebration?

[Stephen] walked up the slope to the rocky edge, and there spread before him and on either hand was the immeasurably vast calm sea. He was not very high above it, but high enough fro the busy puffins, hurrying out to sea or back with their catch, to seem quite small below him as he sat there among the sea-pink with his legs dangling over the void. For some time he contemplated the birds: a few razorbills and guillemots as well as the puffins- remarkably few gulls of any kind- the oyster-catchers' parents (he was confident of the chicks' well-being, having seen the neat shells from which they had hatched) - some rock-doves, and a small band of choughs. Then his eye wandered out over the sea and the lanes that showed upon its prodigious surface, apparently following no pattern and leading nowhere, and he felt rising in his heart that happiness he had quite often known as a boy, and even now at long intervals, particularly at dawn: the nacreous blue of the sea was not the source (though he rejoiced in it) nor the thousand other circumstances he could name, but something wholly gratuitous. A corner of his mind urged him to enquire into the nature of this feeling, but he was most unwilling to do so, partly from a dread of blasphemy (the words "state of grace" were worse than grotesque, applied to a man of his condition), but even more from a wish to do nothing to disturb it.

This importunity had hardly arisen before it was gone. A rock-dove, gliding placidly along before him, abruptly swerved, flying very fast northwards; a peregrine, stooping from high above with the sound of a rocket, struck a cloud of feathers from the dove and bore it off to the mainland cliff, beyond the Surprise. As he watched the falcon's heavier but still rapid flight he heard eight bells strike aboard, followed by the remote pipe of all hands to breakfast and the much more emphatic roar of the hungry seamen: a moment later he saw Jack Aubrey, mother-naked, plunge from the taffrail and swim out towards Old Scratch, his long yellow hair streaming behind him. When he was half way across two seals joined him, those intensely curious animals, sometimes diving and coming up ahead to gaze into his face almost within hand's reach.

"I give you joy of your seals, brother," said Stephen, as Jack waded ashore on the little golden strand, where the skiff now lay high, dry, and immovable. "It is the universal opinion of the good and the wise that there is nothing more fortunate than the company of seals."

"I have always liked them," said Jack, sitting on the gunwale and dripping all over. "If they could speak, I am sure they would say something amiable, but Stephen, have you forgot breakfast?"

"I have not. My mind has been toying with thoughts of coffee, stirabout, white pudding, bacon, toast, marmalade and more coffee, for some considerable time."

"Yet you would never have had it until well after dinner, you know, because your boat is stranded and I doubt you could swim so far."

"The sea has receded!" cried Stephen. "I am amazed."

"They tell me it does so twice a day in these parts," said Jack. "It is technically known as the tide."

"Why, your soul to the devil, Jack Aubrey," said Stephen, who had been brought up on the shores of the Mediterranean, than unebbing sea. He struck his hand to his forehead and exclaimed, "There must be some imbecility, some weakness here. But perhaps I shall grow used to the tide in time. Tell me, Jack, did you notice that the boat was as who should say marooned, and did you then leap into the sea?"

"I believe it was pretty generally observed aboard. Come, clap on to the gunwale and we will run her down. I can almost smell the coffee from here." (184-186)

Oh, and don't forget- Which it's Lobscouse and Figgy-Dowdy and Strasburg Pie!

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Exile's Gate, by C.J. Cherryh. 3.5 stars.

Morgaine and Vanye are back. You know, I like them, but it is not my favorite series of CJC. Always with the torture and being cold, and nobody talking to each other. The horses are a plus, though, of course.

This was more complicated (if possible) than the first three in the series), with surprising revelations and twists. I enjoyed it quite a bit. Again, though, not my favorite series.

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The Reverse of the Medal, by Patrick O'Brian: 5 happy little stars

How I love O'Brian. I thought I had the next book, The Letter of Marque, queued up and ready to go. Finished the last page of this, sprang forth to the shelf to pull out the other, and, God's my life, it wasn't there!

Now I have to wait until Amazon delivers (I can probably reread Cyteen at least in that time). But, but, Stephen! And Sir Joseph Blaine! And we still have to reach the ship before tide!

Gaaaah.


Well, there is always The Aubreyad to keep me until The Letter comes in- and some other lovely things to get me by enjoy!

And Quotes:

"No, sir," said Jack, "I shall speak to them like a sucking dove."
Pig, Aubrey: sucking pig. Doves don't suck." 25

Mr. Williamson brought back the answer that Captain Aubrey's visit would be convenient, and to this, on his own initiative, he added Captain Goole's best compliments. He would have made them respectful too, if a certain sense of the possible had not restrained him at the last moment; for he loved his Captain. 28

He cackled for a short while at his own wit, and in doing so (the exercise being unusual with him) choked on a crumb. 102

"Why do I feel such an intense pleasure, such an intense satisfaction?" asked Stephen. For some time he searched for a convincing reply, but finding none he observed "The fact is that I do." He sat on as the sun's rays came slowly down through the trees, lower and lower, and when the lowest reached a branch no far above him it caught a dewdrop poised upon a leaf. The drop instantly blazed crimson, and a slight movement of his head made it show all the colours of the spectrum with extraordinary purity, from a red almost too deep to be seen through all the others to the ultimate violet and back again. Some minutes later a cock pheasant's explosive call broke the silence and the spell and he stood up. 178- you simply must read the entire passage, starting on 176 through 179.

"This miserable sophistry, which disregards not only epistemology but also the intuitive perception that informs all daily intercourse, is sometimes merely formular, yet I have known men who have so prostituted their intelligence that they believe it." 226

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Forty Thousand in Gehenna, by CJC. 5 stars.

Ah, no, I don't have that copy or that cover.

But who can resist such obviously overdone scifi art? ;)

My copy is actually a two-in-one called Alliance Space. It contains both Merchanter's Luck and Forty Thousand in Gehenna, both of which I give 5 stars.

Forty Thousand in Gehenna is about a colony founded on a world in disputed territory- one of many such Union colonies on the borders of or somewhat within Alliance Space. Consisting primarily of azi workers, these colonies were headed up by "born-men" who relied on scheduled shipments of reinforcements and supplies every three years. Only, Union never sent out a single resupply ship. The colonies fell apart, forced to rely on the most basic of human technologies and skills as they faced permanent exile on planets hardly explored, much less known. The story covers the Gehenna mission from many different personal perspectives over generations of time. When the descendants of the colonists are rediscovered hundreds of years later, nobody quite knows what to make of them or the intricately symbiotic relationship they've developed with the surprisingly sapient native species, but their evolution makes them more valuable than anyone could have known.

Ah, the azi. Brainwashed happy clone slaves.

Quite an exploration of what it means to be human, or intelligent, in this book- from beginning to end.

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Tell Me About Yourself

Here

Picked this up at the library literally as I was checking out. It is about how to sell yourself through stories, in this case to get a job. I primarily was interested because I wondered if it would help me develop more positive self-talk.

Merchanter's Luck, by CJC. 5 stars.

Now, see, here I really *liked* the characters. I liked Sandor, I liked Allison, and I enjoyed the book in a completely different way than Downbelow Station.

BTW, This is not the cover I have; I have an omnibus edition.

Downbelow Station by C.J.Cherryh: 4.9999 stars

Ok, 5 stars. But darn it, I don't like any of the characters. The Konstantins are the best, oh well I mean besides Satin probably. I know that a lot of people like Signy, and I know she's better than the other Mazianni etc etc, but she's still a pig-headed narcissist with great gaping holes in her morality. It's utterly believable, but, MEH I hate her anyway.

And yet it's so well done that I give it 5 stars. Should have read this one long ago, but was clueless at the time that it sets up the entire Alliance-Union universe.

Conspirator by C.J. Cherryh (Foreigner Series)

Finally got to read Conspirator. I loved it.

Since I have not yet given much commentary on/a synopsis of the previous book (in the series), I will wait on Conspirator as well. Gives me an excuse to reread the series again- it will be two years before the next one is out, but I won't wait that long.

Early Spring by Amy Seidl- two and a half stars.

This is the first book I have ever received through LibraryThing's Early Reviewers program. And, damnably, I did not like the book. I could tell by the end of the first chapter that I would never have bought it for myself, and my feelings are quite strong due to the writing style of the author, the lack of real content, and what seems to be an underlying philosophical difference between the author and myself. I have rewritten this review several times trying to find a reasonable way to explain what I mean.

Early Spring is an introductory gloss on the local manifestations of global warming. Seidl alternates between rather detached scientific explanations and overly sensuous descriptions of her Vermont environs as she points out that global warming is apparent in one's own backyard. She asks, and prompts those who have obviously not been paying much attention until now to ask, what global warming means for traditions, communities, the future. The book never gets much further than this- posing the question- and could stand to be a great deal shorter for all it accomplishes.

I was looking forward to Early Spring, and I have to say I'm disappointed. The subject is important enough but never actually discussed- just set up. Over and over and over again.

Early Spring is done in a literary style- Seidl aims for aesthetic expression as much as the conveying of information. Unfortunately, her inflated style quickly reaches the point of overkill, and she does not manage to add much to the subject of global warming at all. I knew much of the subject matter going in- I do not live in Vermont, but neither do I live in a cave. I kept waiting for her to tie it all together and take it further, and she doesn't. Instead I get to hear about her sensuous rapture at the bounty nature created apparently for no other purpose but her pleasure, and, of course, I get to hear more about her darling children. Such passages went past the point of unnecessary all the way to disturbing at times- I nursed my children to the age of two and a half years each, mind you, and I was still weirded out by the overly familiar manner in which she described breastfeeding her own. And I'm still not sure exactly what that had to do with maple syrup traditions in Vermont, or the sap starting to run earlier with each passing year. Seidl's manner of suddenly switching between professional scientist mode and sensual mother mode made each seem the more exaggerated, and somehow exclusive of the other. This hardly needs to be the case...

Displaying an actual dead bird via overhead projector might have gotten the attention of her students, and it is surely a more engaging portrayal than a stick figure, but noticing the intricacy of the feathers is not the same thing as realizing the inherent value of the bird's life, and how the world is diminished by the loss of the bird. Knowing a bird's species name and habits is no substitute for entering into the actual experience of the bird itself. Handling a lifeless bird nonchalantly is not an expression of fearlessness or fellowship, but of a callous remove and a lack of respect for both the bird and the pathogens that might have killed it.

Seidl writes in one passage about her daughter catching a butterfly by the wings, and the thrill in her eyes as she feels her first sense of control over a wild creature. Seidl does not seem to realize that this self same butterfly could theoretically cause hurricanes simply by flapping those wings. Human control over the natural world is an illusion we have to outgrow if we are to acknowledge that our impact on the world is, far from a lordly management of things, endangering all life on the planet, including our own. Against our expectations. How can a book about global warming miss this point?

After the first third of the book, I wanted to put it down and walk away. Sadly, I wouldn't have missed much if I had. ( )

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The Paranoid's Pocket Guide to Mental Disorders You Can Just Feel Coming On, by Dennis Diclaudio.

This is a little gem of a book that was ridiculously fun to read. It presents a collection of mental disorders organized into the following groups: Anxiety Disorders, Dissociative Disorders, Factitious Disorders, Impulse-Control Disorders, Personality Disorders, Psychotic Disorders, Sexual Disorders, Sleep Disorders, and Somatoform Disorders. Each disorder is presented with a do-you-have-these-symptoms Quiz, a hilarious and very telling glimpse of Inner Monologue, an overarching description of the Diagnosis, the Causality, and the Treatment options, plus some cases Of Note.

At 207 pages long, including the appendices of phobias and manias, it's a breezy jaunt into the dark disturbing world of insanity.

I'll post this Inner Monologue from Narcissistic Personality Disorder (pps 138-139) so you can have a preview:

What is wrong with these people? How can they all just sit there and listen to that guy prattle on and on? Can't they see that you're wearing a brand new shirt? And such a nice shirt, in such a nice, subtle shade of blue - "Horizon Blue," the salesman called it - that really brings out your eyes and bespeaks a refined taste in garmenture. Why is nobody complimenting you on your excellent taste?

Wait! That lady over there with the veil - she may have looked over. Did she? The least she could do is give a thumbs-up for the shirt. No, there she goes, turning back to that boring minister and his incessant, depressing eulogies. Okay, we get it. The lady's dead. That's sad, but no amount of wailing is going to bring her back. Why doesn't everyone just get over it and focus on something good in life? Like this terrific shirt?

These morons wouldn't know a nice shirt if it wrapped its sleeves around their necks and squeezed the life out of their worthless bodies. How can you expect imbeciles to comprehend your acute sense of style? Why won't they notice?!

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mulya Pinkerton's Badly Written Stories (and Awful Poetry) by Gail Cali.

http://www.lulu.com/content/5866542

This book, written by the admittedly imaginary mulya Pinkerton, is a delightful romp in literary nonsense. It is nothing more than what it claims to be, which is wonderfully uninhibited journaling about things such as werechildren, pickles, and the undoing of reality. The humor is engaging and a bit dark, with shades of Shel Silverstein, Douglas Adams, Walter Moers. (Another reviewer mentioned, of course, Lewis Carroll, and I have to agree.) I thoroughly enjoyed it, and give it bonus points for using the word "isotropy" in a poem.

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re The Morgaine Saga

Sort of "found poetry", and yet not really true "found poetry".

What I usually do is, I open a book and try to make a poem out of the words nearest the left margin (or the right margin, or the center of the page, depending on my mood; these are all from the left margin).

I wrote these for April being National Poetry Month.

I.

Considered it,
man compelled at once-
no.

Take her orders and the door.
It closed questioningly.

He felt sick- and yet-
there, beginnings remain.

page 65 of The Morgaine Saga (omnibus edition)
Gate of Ivrel by C.J. Cherryh

II.

There-
deep places
often overgrown
in
passage-
the hills,
born to this land
without sleep and rest,
lag by several lengths
at dusk,
against the
sprawling and untidy
maps.

To learn the names
of the land
where spring flowed,
drink
from her hand,
drinking them.

He nodded,
and
little
came
down.

page 413 of the Omnibus edition The Morgaine Saga
Well of Shiuan by C.J. Cherryh

III.

Song was neither outcry nor sheltering.
Do not Lord now if we help that one left-
only sin and his kinfolk.

The hall was long and restless,
wings making fire at last,
quiet without armor,
the hour very well organized.

Eyes that had lain on wars came. "Is it?"
"Aye. Answered, known, and may it be."

Fifteen hundred years distressed him.

from page 529 The Morgaine Saga (omnibus edition)
Fires of Azeroth by C.J. Cherryh

Cherryh's The Morgaine Saga (3-1/2 stars)

(Backdating as I read The Morgaine Saga before I read mulya Pinkerton.)

The Morgaine Saga is science fiction-fantasy, and I do not really read a lot of fantasy, esp given that fantasy heroines tend to be decked out in chain mail bikinis or be token playthings. Morgaine, however, is neither. Course she is thought to be a witch, but that is because she is from a distant, technologically advanced world. The last surviving member of the task force sent out to close interplanetary Gates (portals/wormholes) which are undermining the fabric of the universe, Morgaine is stranded on a planet where feudal rules prevail. She proves quite capable of playing by these rules, even though the odds are much against her and her liegeman, Vanye.

The trilogy could just as well be titled The Vanye Saga, as it is told from Vanye's point of view and Vanye is a most interesting and sympathetic character. At first he is horrified that he has unwittingly entered into an unconditional allegiance to Morgaine, whom he views as a not-human who wields terrible magic. He is caught in a bind- break his oath to her, which would mean the damnation of his soul for all eternity, or keep his oath to her, which would likely mean the same thing. The situation is not unlike his entire life- such being the lot of a bastard son born of a powerful lord and a very unwilling, equally powerful lady of an enemy house. Cursed and cast out for killing his half brother in self-defense, Vanye choses to see his year commitment to Morgaine as a chance at atonement. Once the year is up, he is a free man with a clean slate- he can actually live a life free of the worst of his stigmas.

During the break-neck, miserable struggle for survival that Morgaine's mission becomes, however, Vanye becomes aware of the awful burden on her and of the secret she carries that could destroy his world and will most certainly destroy her. He realizes that she is oath-bound to something much larger than he has ever known, something beyond the pale of the medieval powers and alliances and forces that want desperately to have it for themselves. Something that another person from far away has come to gain, as well.

The trilogy's first book, Gate of Ivrel, is set in Vanye's world and time. Well of Shiuan follows up events, hundreds of years distant on a quite different world(and yet but a momentary hop for Morgaine and Vanye), which have carried over through the gate and become hopelessly entangled with local politics and a looming natural disaster. This most directly spills over into Fires of Azeroth as thousands flee through the gate into yet another world, seeking to take it and the unlimited, unreliable, and unstable powers of the gates for themselves.

The character development is nicely done if not brilliant, the action fast-paced, the plot believable, and the resolution satisfying. Early Cherryh, she's still learning, but quite enjoyable.

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oooh, another one came in today:

Set Your Voice Free : How To Get The Singing Or Speaking Voice You Want
Author: Roger Love, Donna Frazier

happy dance

See more progress on: Chronicle my addiction to books

Between March 1st and now,

my library (and to-read pile) increased by 9 books:

Camera Politica: The Politics and Ideology of Contemporary Hollywood Film
Author: Michael Ryan, Douglas Kellner

The Bonfire of the Vanities
Author: Tom Wolfe

Memory and Dream
Author: Charles De Lint

The Reverse of the Medal _{yay! finally}
Author: Patrick O’Brian

Afoot and Afield in San Diego County
Author: Jerry Schad

The forest and the sea: A look at the economy of nature and the ecology of man (Time reading program special edition)
Author: Marston Bates

A Perfect Spy
Author: John le Carre

mulya Pinkerton’s Badly Written Stories
Author: Gail Cali
http://www.lulu.com/content/5866542

Early Spring: An Ecologist and Her Children Wake to a Warming World
Author: Amy Seidl

In that same time, I read 5 books:

Literature and the Gods by Roberto Calasso

The OuT-of-Synch Child by Carol Stock Kranowitz

Gate of Ivrel
Well of Shiuan
and
Fires of Azeroth
by C.J. Cherryh

need to read more…

See more progress on: Chronicle my addiction to books

The Out-of-Sync Child by Carol Stock Kranowitz

The Out-of-Sync Child by Carol Stock Kranowitz 4 minutes ago

The Out-of-Sync Child: Recognizing and Coping with Sensory Integration Dysfunction

Read intro

How Sensory Processing Disorder (Sensory Integration Dysfunction) Affects Learning

I wish there was a book like this when I was growing up. I saw myself on every single page.

I already knew I had sensory processing problems, because some things are just obvious. They didn’t call me the Human Nerve Ending in high school for nothing. I’m incredibly hypersensitive to some things. However, I didn’t realize how undersensitive I am to some things, or how many of my difficulties were tied up with sensory processing. For example, florescent lighting drives my hypersensitive eyes and ears mad, and a half-hour trip to even a quiet, sedate store with those lights can wear me out for the rest of the day. But due to my low body awareness, I have a very high tolerance to (most) pain, and was hardly uncomfortable at all giving birth to my kids. And I knew that the reason I got motion sick so easily (as a kid, just by swinging) was because of my vestibular processing problems, but I didn’t realize that’s also why I have no sense of direction. Etc.

I also didn’t realize how many of my difficulties came from not being able to use my senses together well. I have great visual skills, and yet my depth perception is pathetic, even non-existent. That’s because my vestibular and proprioreceptive senses are not processed well. In order to have depth-perception, to know how far away things are, you need a good sense of body awareness and where you are in relation to gravity first of all- and I don’t have a good sense of that.

And I knew I had dyspraxia, but I didn’t realize how pervasive it really was. A lot of things I just wrote off as inattention on my part (or “brain spazzing”) could be explained by dyspraxia. (Everything from spoonerisms- “runny babbit”- to pulling ketchup out of the refrigerator, when you wanted milk for your cereal.)

My kids’ sensory problems are worse than mine, and by learning from their therapists I have seen improvement in both them and me. In fact, since I started teaching the kids myself, we have been doing an enormous amount of sensory work, and the results have been phenomenal. I see another post shaping up on that alone…

Whether you call it Sensory Integrative Disorder, Sensory Integrative Dysfunction, Sensory Processing Disorder, or just plain “indigestion of the brain”, The Out-Of-Sync Child is not only a good introduction to the problem, but is considered the unofficial bible on the subject. If any of the examples sound familiar to you, I recommend you check it out. There is treatment, and it is simple and effective. You may never be “cured”, but there is definite improvement. After living my entire life being frustrated, confused, depressed, and feeling clumsy, erratic, ineffectual, hopeless, and pathetic, I can tell you that the worst complications of SPD are its negative effects on your self-esteem and self-identity.

Knowing what the hell is going on in your head is a huge relief, and being able to do something about it is uplifting and empowering, whether it’s for you or your child.

The Spell of the Sensuous, and, Literature and the Gods

I would say that Literature and the Gods picks up on, and goes a similar direction with, a main premise of The Spell of the Sensuous: humanity doesn't live in the real world anymore. We live in a world of our own construction, based on ideas we came up with to help us deal with, not understand, the real world. Those ideas grew to beliefs to world views and into a world(s) of their own. And they change how we perceive and evaluate everything around us; so much so that we interpret them to be truer than the reality we physically live in.

Calasso says we've written off the myths of our past, but myth still controls us: we just live in a new myth now. On page 71, he quotes Nietzsche's piece "How the 'Real World' Ended up as Fable" from "Twilight of the Gods". I'm tempted to type the whole thing in here... I might do that later...

It's a strange and surprising thing, to take a good look around after reading those books.

One thing that really sticks in my mind is on page 36 of Literature and the Gods. Calasso quotes Leopardi on reason as a lethal power that "renders all the objects to which it turns its attention small and vile and empty, destroys the great and the beautiful and even, as it were, existence itself, and thus is the true mother and cause of nothingness, so that the more it grows, the smaller things get."

But if you call it Reason, it must be reasonable, right?

Literature and the Gods by Calasso

I will be the first to admit that when I read something that is complicated, or about which I know very little, I chunk through it. I just read it anyway, and worry about understanding it later. I had to do a bit of this with Literature and the Gods, because I am not very familiar with the 19th century French poetry scene. _{I’ve heard of Baudelaire, of course, but hadn’t thought of him in ages, except that EM rented Groundhog Day about a week ago, and the movie mentions Baudelaire। ;)}

I’m sure some of this book went right over my head। I’m fine with that. At least now it’s stored in my subconscious somewhere, and if I come across a related theme/trope/discussion later, I hopefully will think, Oh, that sounds like something from Literature and the Gods! And go look it up again. Or, I’ll read some of the works discussed in the book, and then whole sections of the book will be lit up with a sudden understanding of what Calasso was saying.

I’ve never understood why people think they have to understand everything the first time, or get it perfectly right before they move on. Oh, sure, I’m horribly guilty of that when it comes to
writing lol, but not when I’m reading or doing math or something else. It’s fine to have a sketchy comprehension that becomes more detailed and thorough over time, and then when you have a better understanding of it all, you can revisit your first thoughts and see how your thinking has progressed. Some of the first thoughts _{when you’re learning something} are very helpful as they tend to be more original and less pigeonholed than those later on।

Anyway. Even though I haven’t read some of the French poets discussed in Literature and the Gods _{yet ;)}, I have read/am familiar with the Greek and German thinkers mentioned। Nietzsche, god bless him, comes up fairly frequently. This is not at all surprising, as the subject of the book is literature and myth, gods, and the divine, and how that relationship has changed over time. Which is intimately related to how the relationship between myth and people have changed over time as well.

I am very interested in such themes. _{In fact, at one point रीडिंग this I thought: whereas EM is musically inclined, I am mythically inclined.} It’s part of why I enjoy C.J. Cherryh’s Rusalka trilogy and Neil Gaiman’s American Gods so much। The theme of myth and belief:

“People believe, thought Shadow. It’s what people do. They believe. And then they will not take responsibility for their beliefs; they conjure things, and do not trust the conjurations. People populate the darkness; with ghosts, with gods, with electrons, with tales. People imagine, and people believe; and it is that belief, that rock-solid belief, that makes things happen.”
[page 536, American Gods]

I’m afraid I have not fully digested the contents of his book enough to give you a play-by-play account of it। I am sure I have missed some points, and on others I gave the author the benefit of the doubt/my own ignorance. And yet I am surely inspired to learn more, to read more, and to say: Calasso is a delight to read, even if it takes a while to get used to his generous style. His easy wit and ready, familiar knowledge of his sources enables him to weave together a brilliant narrative of how humanity’s innate ability and overwhelming tendency to embellish and even invent the world around us has changed since the time of the ancients (and their gods), and yet not changed as much as we might have thought, and, indeed, how unaware we are of the power that myth and belief have over us.

The very idea that mythology is something one invents suggests an unpardonable arrogance, as if myth were at our beck and call. Rather, it is we, the will of each and every one of us, that are at the beck and call of myth.
[46, Literature and the Gods]

“In a remote corner of the sparkling universe that stretches away across infinite solar systems, there was once a star where some clever animals invented knowledge. It was the most arrogant and deceitful minute in ‘the history of the world’: but it lasted only a minute. Nature breathed in and out just a few times, then the star hardened and the clever animals had to die.”
[Nietzsche quoted on page 184 of Literature and the Gods]

I say, it is common knowledge that little girls in the West are often brought up on fairy tales that ultimately fail them when they mature into womanhood. And yet, boys are told fairy tales, too, of a fundamentally different kind. They are still tales that change what you expect from the world, and therefore what you see, only it never occurs to people that they might not be true. _{“And this is its supreme triumph, as the supreme aspiration of the Devil is to convince everyone he doesn’t exist। [72, Literature and the Gods]}

This book is quite academic in nature, _{again, fine with me, as I am an academia nut}, and is not what most people would think of as a light, breezy read. It requires attention and some sense of adventure and open-mindedness to follow. As early as page 5, Calasso introduces ancient ideas of “god” as a predicative (one shade away from proclaiming “god” to be a verb), and goes on to explore “god” as “divinity” where divinity is enmeshed and hidden within everyday reality, and touches on a popular modern interpretation of “god” as a mental event or disease. He presents how literature and verse were seen in some traditions as devotion and an escape from death, how they continued on as servants to and upholders of society, and then how, severed from those strong bonds of society and the myths society created, they became “closer to the underlying ground of our experience” and the myths that create societies. _{I hope this sentence, this review, still makes sense when I read it again in a month.} Towards the end, Calasso discusses how changes in the world changed not only literature and verse and language, but revealed their true natures and their relation to each other (and to the truth). Throughout it all is a marvelous discussion of _{some of} the writers involved in this process and their journeys to find the divine. _{I am especially off to seek out Stephane Mallarme। And, of course, absolute literature itself:}

irresponsible, metamorphic, carrying no identity card that a desk sergeant might examine, deceptive in its tone..., and, finally, subject to no authority.
[181, Literature and the Gods]

In which case it might be a good idea to end with a reminder:

“God,” Pyetr said. “I’m going to go talk to my horse. Books make you crazy, you know.” A motion at his head. “Thinking all those crooked little marks mean real things, that’s not sane, you know.” He waved the same hand toward the front door. “Out there is real. Don’t lose track of that.”
[42, Chernevog]

See more progress on: read all the books on my lists, type them up in my reading journal, and catalog them with LibraryThing

Fair Game by Valerie Plame Wilson & Courage For The Earth edited by Peter Matthiessen

Fair Game: How a Top CIA Agent Was Betrayed by Her Own Government

This was a surprisingly quick and easy read, made even quicker by the large swaths of blacked-out writing representing the text the CIA would not let Plame put into print in her own name. The afterword by Laura Rozen contains all the information blacked-out of Plame’s account, and demonstrates that it was all in the public domain. Plame is just telling a (more personable) side of the story which everyone already knows.

It is rather disturbing to think the Office of the President would blame a faulty military strategy on the “failure” of the intelligence community in general. How is that supposed to reassure the American people? Well, the President’s plan didn’t work, but that was nobody knew what they were talking about. ? It’s disturbing that this is the plan they came up with, and it’s even more disturbing how they tried to silence their detractors by actively undermining agents in the field and therefore the intelligence community itself. What part of the system did they not understand? Or, more likely, what part of the system did they think they were so powerful that they didn’t even need anymore?

I wish I could say I was surprised much by the government fiasco in general, but, not really. Those in charge, those few with power, often twist and distort things until it matches up with their version of reality. Which brings us to:

Courage for the Earth: Writers, Scientists, and Activists Celebrate the Life and Writing of Rachel Carson

This is a brilliant collection of essays and excerpts on one of the most important writers of literature of the 20th century. She is most famous for Silent Spring, which brought into public awareness the origins, dangers, and careless wide-spread use of pesticides, and which prompted brutal and personal attacks on her from all sides of government, industry, and the scientific community. The facts of the matter vindicated her and her firm resolve to make a stand, and thankfully the facts did come out before her death by cancer two years after Silent Spring was published.

But she was even more than the author of Silent Spring. She was one of the writers who made science accessible to the average person, who made it interesting and relevant. Her trilogy on ocean life (Under the Sea-Wind, The Sea Around Us, and The Edge of the Sea) were incredibly popular. She was a talented writer who refused to think of science as something in a little box on the shelf to be taken down and used during experiments. Science was part of our everyday life.

She said that “the aim of science is to discover and illuminate truth. And that, I take it, is the aim of literature, whether biography or history or fiction. It seems to me, then, that there can be no separate literature of science.”

She also refused to think of spirituality as something in a little box on the shelf to be taken down and used during church. She saw no need for science or modern life to be sterile and mechanical.

“The winds, the sea, and the moving tides are what they are. If there is wonder and beauty and majesty in them, science will discover these qualities. If they are not there, science cannot create them. If there is poetry in my book about the sea, it is not because I deliberately put it in there, but because no one could write truthfully about the sea and leave out the poetry.”

The essays in this collection show her influence on the world, person by person. Today many people who do not even know the name Rachel Carson believe in what she stood for and have taken her message to heart. She helped make the nation (and the world) aware of us all “as a very tiny part of a vast and incredible universe, a universe that is distinguished above all else by a mysterious and wonderful unity that we flout at our peril.” But she knew it wouldn’t be that simple, and, after all these years, we are still not fully awake. Oh, reading this book was very emotional for me. Many of her warnings- many of her scientifically documented cases of the poisons in our air, water, food, and environment- have been pushed aside, swept under the rug, covered up by those who don’t want to hear it, those who don’t want us to think about it, because they make too much money from the way things are. Try to go through the day without ingesting bleach, plastic, or pharmaceuticals. It should be easy, right? And yet, no. We are doing it everyday, and we aren’t even aware of the fact. It is hardly safe or sane to continue on this path. So why are we still on it, after almost 50 years?

If there is any hope for us at all, it may well come from a wish Rachel Carson made for the world herself,

that every child in the world have “a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life, as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantments of later years, the sterile preoccupation with things that are artificial, the alienation from the sources of our strength.”

I, too, wish that we reconnect with the real, living world around us, and see through our illusions of independent power and grandeur, and be made whole again by the very world we have demeaned and seem hell-bent on destroying. Let us understand what our everyday choices mean, let us choose our future more carefully. Let us have courage for the earth.

_{There is a whole trove of other books mentioned in this book that I need to go find now. And I want to reread her work again as well.}

right now I am reading

Spirituality for the Skeptic: The Thoughtful Love of Life

and

Courage for the Earth

don’t you like how the titles go together?

brief mentions of relatively recent reads, and commentary on A Short, Sharp Shock by Kim Stanley Robinson

brief mentions of relatively recent reads, and commentary on A Short, Sharp Shock by Kim Stanley Robinson. 6 days ago

Let’s see… I know I’ve read Eragon, Cloud’s Rider by C.J. Cherryh, and oh yes The Spell of the Sensuous by David Abram (5 stars! and a longer review later, probably after discussion with Kalibebti, who is reading it now). Eragon is great writing for a fifteen year old. Cloud’s Rider (sequel to Rider at the Gate) is interesting and compelling… if you can get past the set-up of the story, which drove me crazy.

me: “What? Don’t do that! You know what will happen if you do that! Oh well…”

That kills me.


That is why I can’t watch horror movies.

me: No, DON’T go investigate that growling sound outside your window on the full moon, carrying nothing but a plastic flashlight and/or a fly swatter. Hello??? Recent slayings in the neighborhood???”

But the rest of the story is so good… I think I’d give it a 3.5.

I finished A Short, Sharp Shock by Kim Stanley Robinson last night, and I have to wonder… Is it like The Wizard of Oz, full of symbolic political and social commentary (that I didn’t pick up on)? Is it a side story from another novel of his (that I haven’t read yet), that he explores more fully here? Or what?

It reminds me of a certain French movie I saw (I’m drawing a blank on the title) where some sort of apocalytpic collapse of civilization had occurred (you never find out what), and the main characters spend the entire movie trying to get to a safe place, interacting with other people as they come across them, and then the movie just ends, with absolutely nothing resolved and no one the wiser. Only, the movie was set in France. ;)

If it is a comment on the absurdity of life, I have to say I much prefer The Trial. That was just as bizarre in many respects, and yet I enjoyed it greatly. This book, I have no idea why anybody did anything that they did (except when Thel and co tried to reunite or escape murderous foes). SSS seemed very formulaic and convenient; the antagonists did what they did because it was what the author wanted them to do. I have to say I don’t think I cared for it very much at all. So, maybe I am missing something?

I really loved his Mars trilogy (4-5), which was very different, but I wasn’t expecting anything like that in this little book. Still, I wasn’t expecting what I read, either.

As my understanding of it is right now, I would give A Short, Sharp Shock two stars. and I haven’t rated anything that low since The Life of Pi.

:\

the allure of Cherryh's Assassins

those of you who don’t know what I’m talking about, god bless you. those of you who do know what I’m talking about, god bless you.

I am quite taken with C.J. Cherryh’s Foreigner series, space opera though it may be, for several reasons. one is the main character, Bren, who is an ENFJ and therefore very similar to me sometimes. so is his situation, at least symbolically. but one very important reason is the Assassin’s Guild.

and WHY, you ask, WHY?

part of it is the alien other. but, after struggling to define it, I came across a passage I had marked wherein Bren explains why the assassins fascinate him, and it’s perfect. Bren and I do have a lot in common.

I just feel like quoting it today:

There seemed a quality to people the Assassin’s Guild let in and licensed. He didn’t know what they had in common, except perhaps an integrity that touched chords in his shades -of -gray soul, a feeling, maybe, that one could do things that rattled one’s conscience to the walls and foundations and still – still own a sense of equilibrium.

Banichi was going to teach him about doors. It wasn’t what he wanted to learn from Banichi. What he wanted to understand was something far more basic. Invader, 388

there are other books I’ve read since my last entry, btw, I just haven’t logged them in yet. I’m sooo behind.

The Far Side of the World, by Patrick O'Brian: 5 stars

I have grown to realize that everything I am reading these days just gets sucked down immediately under the surface of my being, down into the bubbly depths, to be more fully digested and understood. My reading appetite is insatiable whereas I find any thoughts I have on what I’ve just read rather unformed, even though I’ve finished reading it.

I have decided to blame it on the changing of the seasons. Now that the harvest is over, it might be a long winter before I start writing anything much useful in the spring.

Treason's Harbour by Patrick O'Brian: 5 stars

finished this one last night.

started the next in the series, The Far Side Of The World, this afternoon.

_{I’ve decided not to review or try and summarize the books in this series the first time around. but they are AWESOME}

About Love by Robert Solomon (5 stars)

it has taken me over a month to read this book. why? every page, every half-page, every sentence of this book made me stop and think. and no, I wasn’t looking up all the words to see what he meant- the language is precise and candid. none of the puritanical jargon one expects from academia although he does mention phenomenology , and none of the oversimplified patter often offered up by relationship gurus or other love pundits, either. just a clear, sane voice, illuminating love in a way that reveals both new things and things you already knew but took for granted. and, by illuminating love, it illuminated everything from conversations I’ve had to whole portions of my life in a new light.

it is a fabulous read. a life-improving read, no doubt.

I am not sure I can sum it up nicely… the book builds from the first page to the very end, and there are so many important details. I will try maybe quoting bits and pieces, to just give you a brief, kaleidoscope idea of it all. although looking at all the poor pages I dogeared for that purpose, I doubt I can quote from all of them.

oh, and yes, I must point out, this book is on romantic love. he does briefly contrast it against other types of love, but he focuses on what romantic love is and how/why it works.

...[L]ove is not a mysterious “union” of two otherwise separate and isolated selves but rather a special instance of the mutually-defined creation of selves. Who and how we love ultimately determines what we are. (24)

We too easily tend to conclude that great feeling constitutes love, and the greater the feeling, even if incapacitating, the greater the love. But this is dangerous nonsense. Feelings follow, they do not lead the psyche. They are the body’s attempt to keep up with the mind and its intentions. Feelings are not the whole nor even the measure of love. (81)

Perhaps this is also the place to say something about the familiar query, whether it is better to love or be loved. My answer, very quickly, is that to be loved is not an emotion or an experience at all. Without loving, it is at best a compliment or a convenience, often an unwanted obligation, and at worst a burden or a curse. It is loving that counts, and then being loved is the most important thing in the world. (85)

It is tragic and absurd that our idealized storybook romance should be so different and so detached from the real story of love and our conception of love should, consequently, be so divided into two wholly separate parts, one romantic and exciting but unrealistic and the other a dull tale of domesticity and endurance, devoid of the excitement that many of us now insist upon to make life worthwhile… The romantic story is all about the thrill of newfound love, but it is so filled with suspense and excitement or pathos that it cannot bear the weight of the future. “Forever” is thus an evasion of time rather than a celebration of it. The infinitely less romantic part of the story is about the formation and working out of a partnership, legally defined as such by marriage. It is a topic fit for accountants, advisers and counselors, in which the market virtues of honest and fair exchange and the business skills of negotiation and compromise are of great value… In other words, first there is the thrill, then there is the coping. (100-1)

Fantasy is an extension, an embellishment, an enrichment of reality, not an alternative to it. Fantasy should be opposed only to that dull, practical planning that is too often rationalized as “realism.” Love, like music, lives in the imagination, but it is no less real for that. (163)

The essential thing to remember is that it is the identity itself that is crucial to love and its lasting and not one or two of the dimensions that may contribute to it. Sex may hold love together for a certain period but then get superseded by less passionate shared experiences and roles which nevertheless bind love with no less success, and it is tragic that we should so often confine our definitions of love to sexual passion and ignore the fact that the bond of love may be equally served by any number of shared and reciprocal activities and attitudes. (238)

We have said a great deal about the creation of self, but the simplest formula for self-creation is that, insofar as we create ourselves, we do so by caring… Life has meaning not because of what we have or what we know or what we are “in ourselves” but because we care about something. (260-1)

Intimacy is an experience of mutual availability. It is not just openness of expression but an openness of the self to share and to change. (278)

The need to rethink the rules of love and reinvent love for ourselves is in fact one of the most powerful inspirations of love. Love thrives by being thought about; it is not just a feeling that goes on its way whether we pay attention to it or not. .... Love must be reinvented, but it is being so right now, by all of us, two at a time. (349)

I am sad all over again that I never got to meet him. I had the chance but as usual didn’t realize how short time is for us. I wish he were still in the world; it needs people like him, I think.

ब्रेइफ्ली

The Pursuit of Loneliness 8/15-8/24
The Ionian Mission 8/25-8/30
The Vulnerable Observer8/31-9/02
Weapons of Choice 9/03-9/06

started Kinship and Gender on 9/07

I'm Proud of You: My Friendship with Fred Rogers, by Tim Madigan. 3-1/2 stars.

Madigan shares some of the most trying times of his life and his most difficult hurdles to overcome, and celebrates the friend who was there with him through it all: Fred Rogers. unlikely as it seemed to him, a newspaper reporter who had never watched the Mister Rogers children’s show but who was sent to interview the icon, Tim and Fred bonded almost instantly and remained very close until Fred’s death in 2003. by honestly and openly telling of his marital problems, difficulties with his father, minor setbacks, the slow death of his brother to cancer- and how it affected him and how he, with Rogers as his mentor, made it through them all a better person, he touches on the deep common humanity in us all and gives us hope.

and in this way he continues the work of Fred Rogers. as one reviewer put it: Fred Rogers inspired people because he saw the good in them; he challenged people because he wanted them to see the good in themselves. even just reading about Rogers’ friendship with Madigan reinforces the idea that there is good in you, and that at least one someone out there somewhere knows that, and will believe in you no matter what happens.

the style is straightforward prose, much like one would expect from a newspaper article, but the story is moving and revealing as well.

See more progress on: read all the books on my lists, type them up in my reading journal, and catalog them with LibraryThing

Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson: 5 stars

Housekeeping was a very haunting book. Gilead certainly seems haunting at times, and Robinson’s main character is leaving this life, which lends palpably to its ethereal quality. but Gilead seems more revealing and mature somehow, and, whereas I lent my copy of Housekeeping back out to the world, I’m keeping Gilead for a reread or two, right here on my shelf.

John Ames is a preacher who married young, but lost his wife and child young too. he remarried very late in life, and now he is 80 years old and dying, with a 7 year old son. this book is written as if a letter to that son, who otherwise will never know his father.

it tells about his [John Ames’] childhood, and his father the pacifist (who was also a preacher), his grandfather the radical abolitionist (who was a preacher as well), and his best friend (you guessed it- also a preacher)’s son, who was named John Ames in his honor and grew up to break the hearts of all who loved him. three wars are encompassed in this tale, as well as the Great Depression, the advent of television, and the ending of a way of life.

John Ames’ reflection on all of this, his personal struggles with all of this, and his all-encompassing joy and love of life, even with its terrible sufferings and inexplicable turnings, is highly original and ultimately universal at the same time.

Gilead is earthier and more hopeful really than Housekeeping, with greater insight (if possible), and evokes shades of Faulkner while written in that resounding poetic bliss that is Robinson’s style.

I have so many pages marked for quotes that I cannot possibly type them all out here, but opening the book randomly to one of those pages, this is what I will share:

In every important way we are such secrets from each other, and I do believe that there is a separate language in each of us, also a separate aesthetics and a separate jurisprudence. Every single one of us is a little civilization built on the ruins of any number of preceding civilizations, but with our own variant notions of what is beautiful and what is acceptable- which, I hasten to add, we generally do not satisfy and by which we struggle to live. We take fortuitous resemblances among us to be actual likeness, because those around us have also fallen heir to the same customs, trade in the same coin, acknowledge, more or less, the same notions of decency and sanity. But all that really just allows us to coexist with the inviolable, untransversable, and utterly vast spaces between us. (page 198)

See more progress on: read all the books on my lists, type them up in my reading journal, and catalog them with LibraryThing

The Surgeon's Mate, by Patrick O'Brian: 5 stars

this is a novel in the Aubrey-Maturin series, which just gets better and better. I am trying so hard not to read them all in a row, as I can only read them for the first time once, and I will have the rest of my life to reread them in a row if I wish (and I bet I could do that forever). I’m trying to make the excitable tension of wondering what comes next last as long as possible, and O’Brian never fails me.

See more progress on: read all the books on my lists, type them up in my reading journal, and catalog them with LibraryThing

since last entry I have read Watership Down, The Surgeon's Mate, Gilead, and I'm Proud of You.

Watership Down: 5 stars

honestly, I put off reading this for a long time. not outright, but I always had other books higher in the to-read pile. that and somebody once told me that they had to read it for school and absolutely hated it; but there is no way they were talking about this book. and I wonder how much attention they were paying in school, as I went back and asked someone else in the class, and they said the book they had read was Animal Farm!

I did not know what the book was about, except that it had to do with rabbits, and perhaps a boat. there is a boat, of sorts I guess, but that’s not where the “Ship” in the title comes from. for moon-calf Americans like myself, I will explain that Watership Down is a place name. it’s a hill.

so the book is about rabbits on a hill? well, yes, but no, of course not. honestly this is one of the best books I’ve ever read, and I immediately went out and ordered it in hardcover as I know I will be rereading it at least once every two years for the rest of my life. that’s how amazing it is. so, no, not just rabbits on a hill.

and the rabbits are not Disney rabbits, or Lewis Carrol rabbits, wearing waistcoats and top hats or helping a princess with the household chores. Adams, with fantastic storytelling, weaves you into the world of real rabbits in a delightful, astonishing, and sometimes quite harrowing way. oh, if you only know rabbits to be fluffy little poopsies, you can think again. and you might not feel so comfortable wearing bunny slippers after this, either!

this book is an adventure unlike anything I was expecting. I was laughing; I was on the edge of the bed with my eyes wide open; I was even crying, and it takes one hell of a story to make me cry. I was practically blissful at the end of the book, even though it was over.

yay, Watership Down :D

I'd give it 7 stars, but my rating system only goes up to 5.

The Art of Happiness, by the Dalai Lama and Howard C. Cutler, M.D.

_{and “happiness” doesn’t mean a cheerful facade or mindless puppylike feelings. it means real happiness; joy.}
.

the site

In this book, a typical western psychiatrist (Cutler) comes to understand the philosophy of the Dalai Lama, through a series of personal meetings with, and by attending teachings and lectures of, the Dalai Lama over the years. he doesn’t become a Buddhist or change any religious views as far as I can tell, but then again the Dalai Lama is committed to religious toleration and the working together of people of all faiths.

Cutler was trained in the Hobbesian tradition so pervasive in western society, which basically states that the nature of a human being is like that of a cornered wild animal: hateful, fearful, and vicious. We are miserable, guilty wretches. Self hatred is rampant and inborn, and you have to accept your anger and fear and misery and just try and make it less unbearable. Until the very recent movement of Positive Psychology in 2000, this was basically what most psychologists and psychiatrists were taught. Of course there are exceptions (this is a very broad picture I paint), but this is the underlying theme of most of western thought.

the Dalai Lama, on the other hand, obviously comes from the Tibetan Buddhist tradition: where it is a given that the nature of a human being is good and kind, and that suffering, in terms of how you deal with the circumstances you have, can be completely eliminated through awareness of the situation and changing of negative patterns of thought/cultivating positive patterns of thought. the Dalai Lama himself had never heard of self hatred at all, and wondered if he had understood the concept correctly because it was antithetical to anything he’d ever experienced.

so it was interesting to see Cutler start to come around. of course he was curious about the philosophy in the first place, and rather open, but he still had his reservations and wanted to be convinced.

the Dalai Lama comes across as a very warm and open person, very honest and self-assured yet not afraid to admit his faults. this is so refreshing. (and inspiring, personally.) the basic philosophy (towards attaining happiness and living a happy life) is simple, pragmatic, and powerful. the book takes special care with how to apply the philosophy to real life, regardless of your religious preferences, and also to show how this eastern philosophy is being supported more and more by western medical and scientific studies (even as the more traditional theories based on mechanistic or hydraulic views of the self are overturned).

The art of happiness has many components. As we’ve seen, it begins with developing an understanding of the truest sources of happiness and setting our priorities in life based on the cultivation of those sources. It involves an inner discipline, a gradual process of rooting out destructive mental states and replacing them with positive, constructive states of mind, such as kindness, tolerance, and forgiveness. In identifying the factors that lead to a full and satisfying life, we conclude with a discussion of the final component: spirituality. (293)

The Art of Happiness has strains in common with some of the books on Toltec tradition (Carlos Castaneda’s books and The Four Agreements), especially on seeing your enemies positively as opportunities for personal growth. (I am not really surprised, as such ideas might be much more common in non western philosophies in general; I don’t know.) however, I think The Art is by far a much more inspiring yet practical guide, and also easier to apply to life than those books.

the book is written by Cutler, with excerpts from the Dalai Lama’s speeches and their dialogue together. the wording is not particularly graceful or imaginative, but it is clear and precise. it communicates the material quite well.

I know there are those who roll their eyes at “the power of positive thinking”, but when it’s based on a fearlessly honest and realistic view of life, it does wonders. it does wonders for me. I am by no means very advanced in this kind of thing, but I started making consistent efforts down this road several years ago, and I am much happier and calmer and balanced now than before. (and we won’t even talk about when I was a teen.) a lot of life really is the way you see it. The Art of Happiness goes into this in more detail than I’d ever thought about before, and makes some very elegant points (which point out areas I still need to work on, but that I’d been completely unaware of before now).

a bit more here .

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The Prince, by Niccolo Machiavelli

it’s a remarkably short book. the whole thing with introduction by translator and glossary of important people to know is less than 150 pages. and reading it in the modern age, it doesn’t seem near the scandal that it caused previously. if Machiavelli was a devil, he was at least an honest devil.

nothing very surprising in it, infamy and distortion aside _{much of it I already read quoted anyway. a related book is The 48 Laws of Power – wonderful read}. I read it to know firsthand what it says, and as a counterpoint for the next book up: The Art of Happiness.

Yvgenie, by C.J. Cherryh, and The Professional Stranger, by Michael H. Agar, and Colleges That Change Lives, by Loren Pope

I finished Yvgenie (the third in the trilogy) towards the end of June, just as I was coming down with a cold. I think this may have affected my brain because I’m still not quite sure about the ending.

and I want to reread it a bit later before I do a review or anything.

I went ahead and read The Professional Stranger, which is an informal introduction to ethnography/how to go about writing an ethnography, directed towards anthropology students, and those who wonder about the methods anthropologists use when learning about a group to whom they’re a complete stranger.

it was written in the 70s, and I haven’t read many other such books yet, so I don’t know how up to date or comparable it is. it was recommended, though, and pretty interesting.

I skimmed through Colleges That Change Lives (I read the main premise and skimmed through the actual colleges) last night. it was really eye-opening, and I wish I had read it twenty years ago! (sadly, none of the colleges mentioned were in California. the only ones on the west coast were in Oregon and Washington.) I had no idea there were colleges like St. John’s and Reed and Antioch out there. if you’re interested, the web site is: http://www.ctcl.com/

The City of Dreaming Books, by Walter Moers. 3-1/2

The City of Dreaming Books reads like an overnight collaboration between Dr. Seuss Theodore Geisel, Shel Silverstein, Roald Dahl, and maybe even Robin Williams. Wacky and whimsical, this parody of everything to do with books is inspired and sometimes extremely bizarre. Moers recounts the adventures of a prospective young Zamonian author on his quest to the legendary city of Bookholm to find the world’s greatest writer, personal fame, and the ever-elusive Orm.

A humorous delight for all who like to spend their time reading, or writing too.

The Fortune of War, by Patrick OBrian: 5

I finished this book May 30, but just now got around to typing anything in। I want so much to share these books with you but I don’t want to disclose any of the plot, as there are so many twists and turns along the way, so I hope the following is a somewhat satisfactory summary of why I believe them to be wonderful:

O’Brian pulled off another sensational book, a tale set during the Napoleonic wars but which engenders such a strong human connection to the characters one would never think of the story happening long ago and far away। With that in mind, all the more amazing then is the attention to historical detail and accuracy:

It seems to me that where the Royal Navy and indeed the infant United States Navy are concerned there is very little point in trying to improve the record … and the only liberty I have taken is to place my heroes aboard. And even so, although they are not quite as peripheral as Fabrice on the field of Waterloo, they do not play a decisive part nor bend the course of history in any way. [Author’s note]

As much as microscopic interactions between atoms are what constitute the chair you sit upon, and as interaction between subatomical particles constitute those atoms, and all of these levels _{chair, atoms, subatomic particles} exist at the same time and to the same extent of importance, so the Aubrey-Maturin novels can indeed serve as a reminder that personal experiences _{adventures, calamities, and otherwise- plenty of all!} of individual people are indeed what make up any kind of historical event, and that intrapersonal conflict, struggles, and growth make up those individual people. Layers upon splendid, splendid layers.

O’Brian is a master of the English language, and I always thoroughly enjoy how he administers it and how the characters themselves play around with it _{especially Aubrey and Maturin, who often mix metaphors in jest}. Also I love the shipspeak almost as much as the plot and the characters, which are all so well done- but the shipspeak to me is a new and vibrant way of using language to describe and communicate, and therefore it is poetry. Quoting a section for you here, with Captain Jack Aubrey and the surgeon and intelligence agent _{but not mariner!} Stephen Maturin:

“Boat your oars,” said Jack. “Clap on to the halliard- no, the halliard. God’s death- haul away. Bear a hand, Stephen. Belay. Catch a couple of turns around the kevel- the kevel.”

The scow gave a violent lurch. Jack dropped all, scrambled forward, caught two turns round the kevel and slid back to the tiller. The sail filled, he brought the wind a little abaft the beam, and the scow headed out to sea.

“You are cursed snappish tonight, Jack,” said Stephen. “How do you expect me to understand your altumal cant, without pondering on it? I do not expect you to understand medical jargon, without giving you time to consider the etymology, for all love.”

“Not to know the odds between a halliard and a sheet after all these years at sea: it passes human understanding,” said Jack.

“You are a reasonably civil, complaisant creature on dry land,” said Stephen, “but the moment you are afloat you become pragmatical and absolute, a bashaw- do this, do that, gluppit the prawling strangles, there…” (p. 272)

The Arm of the Starfish, by Madeleine L'Engle.

a gifted American sixteen year-old named Adam gets the opportunity to work for a prominent scientist whose lab is on a little island south of Portugal. his innocence (along with his ability) is the reason he has been chosen for such an internship, but it’s also the reason other forces target him as a way to get to the scientist’s secretive work. dangerous and baffling events keep him wondering who is telling him the truth, what is really going on, and what he should do next.

sometimes I found it a little incredible that the adults in charge of him would let him into some of those situations at all, or leave him alone and unattended as often as they did. sure, it is a coming of age story, but he is a sixteen year old boy in their care.

the story is not particularly amazing, and certainly it does not compare very well to the Time Quartet or even And Both Were Young, but the plot is fast-paced and should keep the younger readers surprised and suspenseful until the dramatic conclusion.

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Desolation Island, by Patrick O'Brian. rating= 5

http://www.wwnorton.com/pob/pobtitles.htm#aubrey

I finished Desolation Island today.

Makes me happy, and sad. I am always happy to be reading such books but never want them to end- even when I have the sequel right there on the shelf and know it already to be a great one.

O’Brian has such descriptive powers and plumbs the depth of the human soul as well as he weaves his myriad threads of war, espionage, family life, politics, the natural world, and survival at sea. Honestly, he blows me away every time. I feel a resounding urge to visit the harbour.

Housekeeping, by Marilynne Robinson: 5

this is a stunning book, ostensibly about two sisters being raised by their eccentric aunt. the language and story-telling is simply brilliant: amazingly poignant, natural, surprising, and poetic.

a quote to show what I mean:

Water is almost nothing, after all. It is conspicuously different from air only in its tendency to flood and founder and drown, and even that difference may be relative rather than absolute.

The morning that my grandmother did not awaken, Lucille and I had found her crouched on her side with her feet braced against a rumple of bedclothes, her arms flung up, her head flung back, her pigtail trailing across the pillows. It was as if, drowning in air, she had leaped toward ether. What glee there must have been among the few officials who lingered, what a tossing of crepe-banded hats, what a hearty clapping of gloved hands, when my grandmother burst through the spume, so very long after the clouds had closed over the disaster, so long after all hope of rescue had been forgotten. And how they must have rushed to wrap their coats around her, and perhaps embrace her, all of them no doubt flushed with a sense of the considerable significance of the occasion. And my grandmother would scan the shores to see how nearly the state of grace resembled the state of Idaho, and to search the growing crowds for familiar faces. (p. 164-165)

the story itself starts as matter-of-fact as the small Idaho town it is set in, and proceeds (in a manner immeasurably disconcerting to me and as strange as that same small Idaho town) towards a counterintuitively inevitable conclusion. the themes of life and death, loss and memory, reality and imagination are beautifully interwoven and expressed amid an otherworldly sense of nature.

this book should be read and experienced like a poem:

Introduction to Poetry
by Billy Collins

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem’s room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author’s name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

_{From The Apple that Astonished Paris by Billy Collins.
Copyright © 1996 by Billy Collins.}

Chernevog, by C.J. Cherryh. 4.5

In Rusalka’s sequel Chernevog, we are once again transported via historical fantasy to pre-Christian Russia with Sasha and Pyetr, who had thought their adventures were over. Sure, they were still living in an enchanted forest whose population included wizards, magical river-things, house-things, yard-things, forest spirits, banniks, and people in various states of being dead... but things had pretty much settled down, and so had Pyetr with his new wife, whom Sasha was ever dutifully trying to appease.

Sasha was not a young boy anymore, and felt out of place in the young couple’s house, and yet he would not leave his best friend Pyetr, and even if he did, there was nowhere for him to go. This, however, was not the reason Pyetr’s wife felt increasingly uncomfortable with him; nor was it because both she and Sasha were wizards, and wizards find it hard to get along together. Rather, she had a most disturbing premonition about who Sasha reminded her of more with each passing day: Uulamets, the wizard who had stifled and tormented her, and who had healed Pyetr just to use him for his own purposes. And yet, as Sasha and Pyetr looked on, she herself was becoming more and more like someone from her past.

A series of unexpected and seemingly trivial occurrences takes a cataclysmic turn, separating the three of them in a forest gone suddenly wrong. Their usual protections failing, doubts proliferate and undermine their alliances, and a most bizarre and unnerving exchange of hearts threatens Sasha and Pyetr’s friendship and the life of them all. One thing becomes resoundingly clear as they struggle to survive: once a wish has been made, it lives on, no matter if the one who made it is now dead and gone…

;)

here is a very apt quote to end with, I think:

“God,” Pyetr said. “I’m going to go talk to my horse. Books make you crazy, you know.” A motion at his head. “Thinking all those crooked little marks mean real things, that’s not sane, you know.” He waved the same hand toward the front door. “Out there is real. Don’t lose track of that.” (p.42)

_{and I note a beautiful wish on page 141.}

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The Grass is Always Greener Over the Septic Tank, by Erma Bombeck

Erma Bombeck, the legend. I didn’t realize how old she was, either. ;) In this book she chronicles her family’s move from a cramped city apartment to the wonders of Suburbia.

mind you, this was back when Suburbia was brand-spanking new, a wild frontier. before there were post offices and schools there. they actually moved in before television became popularly available, which, when you think about it, is a huge cultural change. and fodder for some delightful parodies.

I can relate to her completely in some instances:

“Let me lay it on you, Cleavie, the high spot in my day is taking knots out of shoestrings- with my teeth- that a kid has wet on all day long.” (p. 29)

“For a moment, there was only the silence of a toilet being flushed consecutively, two dogs chasing one another through the living room, a horn honking in the driveway, a telephone ringing insistently, a neighbor calling to her children, the theme of “Gilligan’s Island” blaring on the TV set, a competing stereo of John Denver, one child at my feet chewing a hole in the brown-sugar bag, and a loud voice from somewhere screaming, ‘I’m telling.’” (p. 94)

oh, can I ever relate. ;)

but in other ways, I’m too atypical to relate to her. it really hit home when she was parodying/conveying her desperate loneliness to her friend, who was sitting with her in the house having coffee, and she was constantly interrupted by friends calling her on the phone and showing up on her doorstep out of the blue. and I thought, wow, that is so not my life. that is so not my life that if I dreamt something like that at night, I’d frame it and put it on the wall as it would be the most unrealistic thing I’d dreamt all year, even compared to the dancing rhinoceroses.

it’s brilliant, mind you, but you have to be close enough to her experience for the humor to really shine through. and I never realized how different my personality was from Erma Bombeck’s. (I only read her all the time when I was growing up.) I’m just such an odd duck.

Still love her, though.

---

between the reaction I had to her and to Dave Barry (a growing melancholy!), I think I will just not even pick up Lewis Grizzard’s work. he used to be my favorite of all. but I’m not in the South anymore, and I’m afraid to look and spoil the good memories. ever since he wrote once about being in an airport in the North and being brought Pepsi instead of Coke, and the waiter saying, “It’s the same thing”, and him jumping up out of his seat with “No, By God, it’s not!”... that endeared me to him forever. ;) so, I guess I’ll leave him be, at least for now. even though I’ve always wanted to read his book Elvis Is Dead And I Don’t Feel Too Good Myself.

sounds like my kind of book. but I'll wait.

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Dave Barry Turns 40

or, he turned 40. about 20 years ago! jeesh, I didn’t realize it had been so long.

as usual, Dave Barry had me laughing out loud on and off throughout the book:

on marriage
“Because all of the grand claims your husband made, back when you were dating, about how you two were going to be Equal Housework Partners, turned out to mean in actual practice that he occasionally, with great fanfare, refills the ice-cube tray.” (p. 37)

on politics
“But the biggest problem I have with both major political parties is that they seem to be competing in some kind of giant national scavenger hunt every four years to see who can find the biggest goober to run for President.” (p. 124)

on memory
“If you surveyed a hundred typical middle-aged Americans, I bet you’d find that only two of them could tell you their blood types, but every last one of them would know the theme song from “The Beverly Hillbillies.” Right? Even as you read these words, your brain, which cannot remember more than two words of your wedding vows, is cheerfully singing:

Come and listen to my story ‘bout a man named Jed…” (p.165)

and on the aging body. etc.

Yet.

and yet. I don’t read the paper anymore, and I hardly ever read Barry’s column online (though sometimes gems are sent my way), so it had been a while. and I realized reading through it now that his humor works because he is, in his own words, his own description of his humor here, “irresponsible and vicious”. and it was funny but it was way too true sometimes to be really funny, you know? so I had mixed feelings all the way through.

Barry is not always just making jokes, and there is a short section of the book in which he is deadly serious, and makes a brutal point, and I’m glad he did that; what he said was important. but it lead me even further into this strange melancholy.

what a strange creature I am if I get depressed reading Dave Barry. I think it is a sign of how detached I’ve become from my “own” culture…

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The Four Agreements, Don Miguel Ruiz.

ok, this could take a while to discuss, as it is meant to be how to change your life and is meant to provide you with a practical philosophical guide for doing so.

even if the book is incredibly short.

I have a goal just for this book.

first off I will say that, yes, I’ve read Carlos Castaneda’s books and, no, I don’t consider them to be very anthropological! they are also an exploration of and discussion of the Toltec tradition that The Four Agreements draws from. I consider all these works to be a kind of grand thought experiment which is highly interesting to read sometimes and always gives you something to think about, including your own cultural assumptions that you might not even have been aware of before. that is about as anthropological as it gets.

I don’t really want to go into the whole nagual thing; primarily as it isn’t necessary to the rest of the discussion.

The four agreements (through which it is said you can change your life from being a passive victim/active judge caught up in a never-ending cycle of condemning yourself and everyone around you for not attaining some mystical perfection that is the cultural ideal… to being more in control of your own thoughts, emotions, actions, and reactions and therefore free to live your life in love and contented peace even in the midst of this crazy world of ours… are, basically, one agreement. with three more specific aspects of the first agreement.

So, really, for the sake of honesty and felicity, the book should be entitled: The Agreement. ;p

Be impeccable with your word. That’s the main agreement.

What am I talking about, agreement? Ruiz says that we are conditioned in childhood to agree to things that we don’t really want to, but as children cannot argue much with, and that we come to think of those ways of thinking as the only possible or real ways. In fact, we forget that we ever agreed to anything at all, we just think there is only one way and that’s the way it’s always been. Mostly they are a lot of small agreements that even cancel each other out or are in conflict with each other. The example is given how a small child is happily singing and playing and her tired mother snaps at her because of a headache. The child unwittingly believes that yes, her singing must be horrible, or her mother wouldn’t have snapped. And so she no longer sings in that carefree childlike manner, ever again, because in the back of her head she thinks she sings badly, and this causes her doubt and grief. She doesn’t sing around other people, or even just for the joy of it, but only reluctantly, and if anyone overheard her, they’d hear how timid and uncomfortable she is with her singing, and so reinforce the idea she cannot sing well.

And yet, the idea that she sings badly has no real ground. Her mother just had a headache and snapped mindlessly at her. She actually sings fine. Or she used to, before she became hesitant and guilty about it, before she started comparing herself unfavorably to those who sang very well.

By agreeing with her mother’s comment, and notice the mother did not even do that on purpose, she would never have done that on purpose, the girl has actually changed the way she sings (except she doesn’t even sing anymore). As an adult she may not even remember the incident or know why she feels so self-conscious about singing. But she still has this agreement in her head (that she sings badly).

There are billions of such agreements we make in the course of a lifetime, and this book discusses how to become aware of them, change them, or get rid of them altogether.

It is, rather obviously, a formidable task.

Yet the first, and main, agreement can eventually, when followed diligently, change those other agreements which are holding us down.

Be impeccable with your word. This means using what you say, including your self-talk, positively for the best for yourself. It also includes not lying, gossiping, or saying hurtful things to others, as this can only come back to hurt you, and therefore isn’t the best for yourself.

This agreement includes the other three (basically,):
Don’t take things personally
Don’t assume
and
Always do your best

Don’t take things personally. Nothing belongs to you, you belong to no one… in the context that death could take you (or your loved ones) at any moment (all the more reason to be alive). Also because all of us literally live in our own little worlds. We interpret reality subjectively and then project that subjective reality onto everything and everyone around us. (This is actually WHY the four agreements can change your life; the way you interpret things is how you experience them.) Nothing anybody ever does is because of you and your reality, but is always because of their interpretation of reality and events, even their interpretation of your behavior.

It really isn’t about you, so don’t take it personally.

I am trying to find a thought I posted about that before, about taking things personally. I asked something about, if you aren’t supposed to take the things your friends do personally, then how does that affect your relationship with your friends? Can you have any real connection to other people if you don’t take it personally? as this post is already huge, if I find that previous thought I’ll tack it on as a comment.

I am still wondering a bit about that one…

I think the idea is more that, another person’s behavior (good or bad) is not based on you or your behavior or even objective reality. it’s based on their own subjective interpretation of things. and when you interpret their behavior, keep that in mind. you have control over how you interpret what they say, think, and do; and you certainly don’t let to need their behavior dictate your response.

The way you live your life should be, well, like the prayer: with acceptance for the things you cannot change, with courage for the things you can change, and with the ability (by not assuming) to know the difference. The idea is toward a joyful acceptance of life and an unconditional love towards all life.

So, maybe you don’t have the same kind of connection with certain people (???) but you have more of a connection with everyone in general…?

Don’t assume includes don’t assume what others mean, and also don’t assume what others know… which has been my personal dilemma. I have (hopefully had as I’ve been working on this for months now and I don’t do it near as often anyway) been in the habit of assuming that other people knew what I was thinking or feeling, especially those close to me. They don’t. You have to tell them, show them. You have to make the effort, just like you have to make the effort of finding out what others mean or how they feel, by asking them, etc. You can’t know their reality any other way, and they can’t know yours any other way either.

Don’t assume also includes not assuming anything about yourself, either. Find out how you sometimes gloss over your abilities or weaknesses and be more honest with yourself, ask yourself the right questions about these things. Certainly I need more work in this department, as I usually think I can either walk through walls or can do nothing at all. At least, that is something I’ve been working on.

Always do your best. As Mr. Rogers often told us, your best will vary from day to day, under different circumstances. When you are hot, hungry, and sleep-deprived, your best will not be as good as when you are comfortable, well-fed, and well-rested. But by always doing your best, the best you can at any given moment, you need never feel guilty again. If a voice in your head says, You yelled at the dog again and you know better than that, you ought to be ashamed yelling at a dog, who doesn’t even understand and only wants to please you… You can stop all that negative self-talk with “I did my best, and my best will get better.” It also works when others judge you or speak down to you; you can always answer “I did my best”.

And, your best will get better, because practicing putting these agreements into action makes it easier to do over time.

This book leaves questions but perhaps that is a good way to get started on the road to reinventing your life: asking questions. Not saying it is a philosophical masterpiece, but surely an interesting think.

3-1/2 stars?

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The Mansion, by William Faulkner (5)

wow.

this is the third of the Snopes trilogy, which follows the life of a certain Flem Snopes in his rise from a crook-in-the-road tenant farmer to bank president in Jefferson, Mississippi. in the first two books, we got a good look at what makes Flem Snopes in particular and the Snopes clan in general tick, through various characters including the incredibly interesting V.K. Ratliff (he’s my favorite of them all). we were witness to various shenanigans, adventures, and plots; the shifting of power in a family dynasty, a hamlet, and a city; and one especially cold-blooded and disturbing murder. it is in turns bizarre, horrible, hilarious, and utterly believable because it’s just too absurd to be made up.

in this perfect conclusion, Flem’s wife Eula (easily the most disturbing character, to me) is gone but not forgotten as the daughter Linda has come of age. the city attorney Gavin Stephens cannot seem to wrest his fate away from the course Eula set it on; the ubiquitous, inscrutable V.K. Ratliff cannot seem to wrest Gavin back on the right track either; and the reader cannot help but wince knowing something is going to come down. but, after all, that is why it’s called fate.

together with Gavin’s now-grown nephew Charles, Gavin and V.K. maintain their vigil against all things Snopes (including a battle to keep one out of Congress itself) as the second World War changes the economy, the voting demographics, and the way of life in Jefferson.

shut away from the world and all its upheavals is the deceivingly diminutive Mink Snopes, serving life in the penitentiary for the murder mentioned above. but Mink has unfinished business on the outside, and he is just biding his time surely, steadily, with an unearthly patience and simple-minded insanity.

but with Snopeses, one never knows what exactly to expect: Gavin isn’t the only one caught up in fate, and Mink isn’t the only one with a score to settle…

See more progress on: read all the books on my lists

Mozart's Brain and the Fighter Pilot, by Richard Restak (3.5)

Finished this last night (March 30). (and I actually finished Faulkner’s The Mansion before that on Friday night, March 28; so that’s coming soon.)

First of all, is it just me, and if so what does this say about my brain, but I didn’t find any passage explaining the title in the whole book. Did I miss something? I mean, I get it. Both Mozart and fighter pilots have practiced their skills and so developed their brains to be quite different from each other; the brain is very plastic and has the potential for one or more of a vast array of “intelligences”... That’s what he meant, right? Or did is there a big old paragraph right at the
front that compares the right/left hemispheres of the brain to Mozart/fighter pilots?

Well, anyway.

The book is about understanding how your brain works in order to better facilitate learning and memory. There are many exercises he mentions to improve your memory and help you from being scatter-brained or attention-deprived (so just about all the current generation could sign up, especially me). There are exercises to use one part of the brain and then the other. etc.

The most illuminating thing for me in the whole book was the revelation that, if your brain is “tired” from too much reading, say, and you need a break, then what you need a break from is not just the book/screen but language in general, especially written. It’s a certain part of your brain that’s tired. Switching the tv on and watching a soap opera isn’t going to help. You’re still listening to language (albeit corny melodramatic language). (That would be like, if your eyes got too tired to read anymore so you decided to watch tv. You’re not giving your eyes a break that way.) What you really need to do is to close your eyes and listen to some music (without lyrics), or maybe do a puzzle, or, in short, use another part of your brain and let the language part catch
up with whatever it’s processing.

A break of just five to fifteen minutes doing something else, using a different part of your brain, and you probably can go back to reading and feel fine again. (Unless you were reading something really hairy, in which case, maybe you should take an hour off!)

A related bit of information was that there are two types of tired: one type of tired (mostly just kind of drowsy) should be dealt with different that another (cranky and grouchy). If you are getting cranky, the only thing that is going to help is to sleep (or, at least, lying down with your eyes closed and relaxing in that way for about 20 minutes, just as if you took a nap).

Another important thing I learned (which I already knew but this put it into perspective) is that you need to use all these different parts of your brain, not just once in a while, but all the time. Take time to listen to music, do crossword puzzles, play chess, play a musical instrument, do some exercise that requires balance; without getting technical, learn what different parts of your brain do and then make sure to exercise all the different parts of your brain.

Being “smart” or intelligent is not just about learning geometry or speaking 12 languages. There are all kinds of smart, and, the more you practice each part of your brain, the better your overall brain will function. This is because when you learn something or reinforce something you’ve learned through practice, then your brain is stimulated to create new synaptic pathways and reinforce old pathways, not only in that specific part of the brain, but in the entire brain.

Play on your strengths in life, to be sure. But also try and practice those areas in which you consider yourself to be average at best and weak at worst. Your goal is not to heroically overcome these weaknesses, but to encourage your brain to build more pathways and make things overall easier for you, even those things you’re not so good at. Never good at band? Try to pick up a musical instrument now. Try something different. Planning to go to Hawaii some day? Who knows? The ukulele might be your thing. But it’s just for fun, for a change, for the betterment of your brain.

Which reminds me that I am woefully behind in learning how to paint, how to play chess, how to speak Russian, how to make a birdhouse, how to balance with both feet on the ground much less do yoga or tai chi… But now that I know how all of this could work together to my advantage, I’m going to look at my schedule and see how I can revamp it to my benefit. Hell, I might even get something done.

He (a neurologist, neuropsychiatrist, and clinical professor of neurology) advises keeping a journal. I’m not great at that, although I have become much better since I started 43things (I’m on LiveJournal). You can sit down and look at an entry from, say, two years ago, and what you’re actually doing is looking at you two years ago and how you were thinking. Just reading the entry will jog your memory about other things that were happening in your life then. Also, it helps you to keep track of your ideas and how they evolve over time.

He also recommends doing a reading journal. _grins Yes, like mine, which I never thought of as a reading journal but that’s a great name for it. I have to say, I hadn’t really thought about it, but writing my thoughts down about what I read and reviewing what I read has lead me to be a more critical and involved reader overall. He recommends wide reading and also reading more slowly the important things, maybe reading them aloud or listening to audio recordings of the books. And I have to say, that listening to the audio lectures I have for the last two years or so has slowed down my reading so that I’m not just skimming through everything.

Ok well I shouldn’t just tell you the whole book; and I haven’t, I assure you. Restak explains the workings of the brain quite simply, with ideas and exercises to help you better develop your brain, and with resources at the end of the book to help you even further. It’s a quick read at 200 pages, and I enjoyed it.

See more progress on: read all the books on my lists

The Trial, Franz Kafka. 4.5

I finished this one a while ago, actually. 2nd of March.

This is a hard one to review… it seems so much has already been said about it. In fact, the introduction basically states that nothing more could possibly be added to the conversation revolving around The Trial, because it has been analyzed and discussed for so long among so many people, and because the novella introspectively analyzes itself.

Joseph K, a high-ranking bank clerk, wakes up one morning to find that he’s under arrest. We never learn what the charge is, and neither does Joseph K. Yet he can live out his daily life (going to work, etc) as normal, and the court is very polite about accomodating his schedule as to when he needs to show up for interrogations. This entire court system, which is separate from the normal court system, is such an underfunded sprawling bureaucracy that the lower courts don’t know anything about the higher courts, the court magistrates confuse one defendant for another, and the entire process is carried out in the attics of the poorest tenant housing in the city, where the air itself is unbreathable.

All very symbolic of course.

Joseph K. progresses from completely dismissing the importance of any such trial (seeing the state of the courts), to gradually becoming so obsessed (and mesmerized) with it and the special court system that he willingly, almost mindlessly, accepts the fate they hand out as inevitable and desirable. Perhaps it is because they are so quiet and polite about it, while they are leading him to a barbaric end.

An exploration of the absurdity of the individual’s conformity to culture, and yes of life itself (the major statement), this book examines the main character as ruthlessly as it does the society.

Bill Watterson of Calvin and Hobbes once drew a comic that would sum up Joseph K. Imagine Calvin here as Joseph:

You get the idea.

The bizarre and astonishing description of the trial procedure (what we can ever know of it, told through the character of Joseph K’s lawyer and also a portrait painter of the judges), (which sadly presages terrors in the real world later) is, unbelievable but true, completely outdone by a parable told by the court’s parishioner (since WHEN do courts have their own affiliated parishioners?), which could make one severely question the idea of blind faith in anything.

This is a book that will leave you thinking for a long, long while, and have you rereading it again and again to see if possibly you can get a better grasp on it this time around. You never will; it’s absurdity, and Kafka’s statement on the point of life.

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Never in Anger, by Jean L. Briggs: 4.5

http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/BRINEV.html

this book might be alternatively titled: Misadventures in Anthropology.

When grad student Jean L. Briggs signed on for an extended stay in the Canadian arctic with the Inuit Utku (Utkuhikhalingmiut, in full), she brought entirely too much baggage with her, both literally and figuratively speaking. Her head filled with a strange combination of romanticized notions of the Inuit, horror stories of arctic cold and famine, and Western cultural predispositions, she found it increasingly hard to study, much less understand, what was going on in the camp around her. It was only after her 17 month sojourn as an adopted Utku daughter was over that she could look past her frazzled attempts to speak the horribly complicated language, learn necessary survival skills, eat frozen raw fish, scales and all, and type up field notes without the igloo (iklu) dripping on them, as well as past her burgeoning depression; and see how her inward refusal to actually adopt the role of daughter as the Utku saw it, her inability to conform (or even to see the need to conform) to the cultural expectation of calm, happy behavior, and her insistance on every bit of her overwhelming load of supplies being carried during every move, all played a part in making her a burden to the society that eventually ostracized her in response.

_{I think I need to put more clauses in that last sentence. it needs to be longer. :P brain not quite up to par today}

To be sure, Briggs was working between 1963 and 1965, when there were no standards of ethics so to speak regarding being up front and honest with the people you want to study… by telling them you want to study them. Briggs surely was more ethical than some of the kaplunas (the Utku word for, roughly, “whitey”) they encountered during her stay; but when she said she wanted to learn the Utku skills, it lead to misunderstandings when she did not follow through, when she later said she only wanted to write about the skills and ways of life, instead of practicing the skills herself. (It is much different to adopt a grown daughter who will be another helper around the house and lighten the workload than it is to adopt a grown daughter who is as helpless and moody in many ways as a child.)

Also to be sure, she learned much about the Utku that had not previously been understood, and in some cases, she would have had no way of knowing the egregious mistakes she was committing beforehand. (In other cases, however, she was blinded by misconceptions and her own biases.) Her most fatal misunderstanding, and, later, insightful revelation, led to the title of the book.

In a small, isolated community surrounded by a merciless environment, being angry serves no good purpose. Life is full of hardships and sorrows, but taking it personally is childish and absurd. The blizzard did not descend upon you because it was trying to get you. The starving dogs did not break into your cache of fish to flout your authority. Your sibling did not get sick and die because of anything you did. Life just happens. Raging at life not only doesn’t change anything for the better, but it makes your view of the world darker and less enjoyable. Also, anger at any of the few people who share your life can only drive them away from you, or cause hostilities between you, and cause you more grief and pain. In Utku society, where people depend on each other for life and death, disruption of society is an unacceptable risk. A person who cannot accept the ups and downs of life (including generously and happily doing the work that such hardships entail or incur, and laughing good naturedly at the disjointed humor of it all) is childish at best and a danger to other people at most.

The Utku way of gradually teaching children to control their emotions (so that nobody over the age of 10 would dare be caught crying even at a death or losing their temper over anything) and their way of dealing with aberrations (at least during the time the book was written) is impressive as well.

This is a fascinating book, both because of what went right and because of what didn’t. Definitely worth reading.

_{Reading through, especially the last chapter where she explains in hindsight her snowballing faux pas, I kept thinking of Bren. Paidhis truly are a combination of anthropologists, ambassadors, linguists, and field agents.}

I am really losing steam now; I have to go to bed. It’s pretty bad if I’m falling asleep during my own review ;D

See more progress on: read all the books on my lists

Silent Spring by Rachel Carson

finished it last Monday, before the flu.

what an eye-opener. I’d think that if, in an effort to get rid of mosquitos, an area was sprayed, and then ALL the birds and fish and small animals in the area DIED of obvious chemical poisoning, and people got sick, and the MOSQUITOS WERE FINE… then you’d stop spraying and try something else, not spray again and again year after year with same results. that’s the government for you.

yes, I know, they’ve banned DDT. but the same attitudes and lack of scientific method prevail overall. and specifically, they still use chemicals on our food (to the extent of genetically modified roundup ready crops)and there are still chemicals in the water that we don’t even know the effects of… or, we KNOW that they’re harmful, which is worse… organic, anyone?

chemical mutagens indeed. and when the book was written, in the 60s, predictions of a substantial increase in children born with developmental problems and defects, which has btw come true.

thank god she got the ball rolling. it’s not rolling real fast, mind you, but at least it’s rolling.

See more progress on: read all the books on my lists

H.M.S. Surprise and The Mauritius Command, by Patrick O'Brian. rating = 5

what wonderful, delightful reads O’Brian provides! you get all the real-life accuracy a historical novel can afford, the in-depth character studies that are rarely achieved without stream-of-consciouness (unless you are O’Brian or Achebe and their level), all the action of a thriller, and the suspense, plot twists, and carefully deliberated story of a spy novel. with such living and colorful prose!

I feel like I can’t tell you what they are all about, though, more than that… what if I gave something away? some absolutely dreadful things happen, along with some normal yet brilliantly wonderful things, as happens in life. I thoroughly enjoy these books and am glad I’ve only read 4 out of the 21 in the series. so many more to look forward too!

and then I can read them all again! :)

here is one bit from The Mauritius Command, that can’t give anything away:

“A capital notion,” said Jack. “It has always seemed absurd to me, that islands should not be English- unnatural.”

_{and I had to smile about St. Jago on 134 of HMS Surprise.}

And Both Were Young, by Madeleine L'Engle. 4.5- 5

I finally got to this one yesterday, and once I picked it up, I had to finish it all the way through. Ok, I did have to actually make supper and such, but it was only reluctantly that I did so.

One of L'Engle's earliest works, this edition rewritten once the traditional taboo against mentioning things like death and sexual attraction in young adult literature was lifted, and basically restored to the original manuscript L'Engle had in mind. Truly a delightful story for young readers from a young writer. A young girl from Connecticut matures into her own self-confidence and begins to understand greater social realities through the loss of her mother, the finding of a soulmate, and a year in a Scandinavian boarding school, not long after the horrors of World War II.

Someday I will make it to Scandinavia; I just know it. And I might even learn how to ski without impaling myself on my own said skis. If Flip can do it, surely I can too.

(I'm a name nerd, and I love the name Philippa. Yet I wouldn't call her Flip, Flippet, and certainly never Pill. The appropriate nickname is Pippin! Oh, well...)

The Town, by William Faulkner. 5

Jefferson, Mississippi, meet Flem Snopes.

And yet, can it be that Jefferson and Flem might actually get along?

Faulkner's stream of consciousness style does wonders for realism. The story is always being told by one character at a time, and when it switches to another character's point of view we may get an amazingly different take on events, and yet no point of view is much more believable than another. Ah, the human mind, as it imbues the world around it with subjective meaning. As it fugues along sometimes in self-argument, so that the premise or action which was completely dismissed out of hand a page or so ago has now been accepted as a wonderful solution and why didn't I think of that before? (I am never like that ;) ) Indeed it wouldn't be far from the truth to say that we all live in our own little worlds sometimes, from the lawyer Gavin to his kid nephew Charles to the ubiquitous V.K. Ratliff.

I have to say that I am quite relieved Faulkner did not try to write from a feminine perspective in this book (I believe he did in As I Lay Dying, though I can't remember, that was ages ago). Mostly because of the opinions of his characters regarding women. I don't know (probably don't want to know) if those opinions were Faulkner's own, but I'm still relieved. I think it is hard for an author to write such a personal, in-depth point of view as stream of consciouness from the other gender's perspective, man or woman; such that it may only be possible if the character in question is quite slow or eccentric or sick. And I certainly don't want to know what Eula Snopes was thinking... she quite disturbs me!

The names, a word about the names. I'm not sure that Faulkner was thinking, because I myself have lived in the South and, um, yes, back out in the sticks there are sometimes names like this. Especially from people like the Snopes. Still... Flem and Eck as given names? First and middle combinations like Wallstreet Panic, Montgomery Ward, and Admiral Dewey? Plus the lovely sibling combination of Clarence and the twins Vardaman and Bilbo. or the sibs Byron and Virgil. Although we do get one lovely Russian name hidden in there, unsuspecting. Certainly never a dull moment in nomenclature...

Or descriptions, as I said in The Hamlet, and will likely say again for every single Faulkner work. One long quote, permit me, please (and you can't know how perfect it is until you know the character and the situation):

There are stars now, just pricking out as you watch them among the others already coldly and softly burnin; the end of day is one vast green soundless murmur up the northwest toward the zenith. Yet it is as though light werenot being subtracted from earth, drained from earth backward and upward inot that cooling green, but rather had gathered, pooling for an unmoving moment yet, among the low places of the ground so that ground, earth itself is luminous and only the dense clumps of trees are dark, standing darkly and immobile out of it.

Then, as though at signal, the firelflies---lightning-bugs of the Mississippi child's vernacular---myriad and frenetic, random and frantic, pulsing; not questing, not quiring, but choiring as if they were tiny incessant appeaseless voices, cries, words. And you stand suzerain and solitary above the whole sum of your life beneath that incessant ephemeral spangling. 315

on Poetry:

But then, poets are almost always wrong about facts. That's because they are not really interested in facts: only in truth: which is why the truth they speak is so true that even those who hate poets by simple natural instince are exalted and terrified by it. 88

on Berets:

... and a black thing on his head kind of drooping over one side like an empty cow's bladder made out of black velvet... 120

on Courtly Love (not Courtney Love):

"By Cicero, Gavin," Father said. "You're losing ground. Last time you at least picked out a Spanish-american War hero with an E.M.F. sportster. Now the best you can do is a Golden Gloves amateur with a homemade racer. Watch yourself, bud, or next time you'll have a boy scout defying you to mortal combat with a bicycle." 187

on Childhood (ok, this is long, too. so just part of it, then):

...when it occurs to you that maybe the sensible and harmless things they won't let you do really seem as silly to them as the things they seem either to want to do or have to do seem to you. No: it's when they laugh at you and suddenly you say, Why, maybe I am funny, and so the things they do are not outrageous or silly or shocking at all: they're just funny; and more than that, it's the same funny. 304 (& the rest of that paragraph)

A few last words (go read it yourself):

...that no man deserves love since nature did not equip us to bear it but merely to endure and survive it... 305

She didn't sound like a snake because snakes can't talk. But if dentist's drills could talk she would have sounded just like one. 180

The last little vingette of the story was really bizarre, and almost seemed like an add-on, but it was out-and-out Snopes for sure.

Oh, and, yes, this is where Snopes.com gets its name: from Faulkner's Snopes.

so in 2007 I read:

in order:

Anthills of the Savannah, Chinua Achebe (5)
Foreigner, C.J. Cherryh (CJC)
Invader, CJC
Inheritor, CJC
Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte
Precursor, CJC
Defender, CJC
Explorer, CJC
Destroyer, CJC
Pretender, CJC
Deliverer, CJC (I was re-reading the series up to this new release here)
Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte
Shirley, Charlotte Bronte (5)
Villette, Charlotte Bronte
The Professor, Charlotte Bronte
A Rage to Live, John O’Hara (5)
Bambert’s Book of Missing Stories, Reinhardt Jung
read part of Orlando Furioso, Ludivico Ariosto/Guido Waldman
Hunter of Worlds, CJC
No Future Without Forgiveness, Archbishop Desmond Tutu (5)
Too Far From Home, Chris Jones
Rider at the Gate, CJC
Hammerfall, CJC
Master and Commander, Patrick O’Brian (5)
The Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka (5)
The Secret Sharer, Joseph Conrad
The Stranger, Albert Camus (5)
The Time Machine, H.G. Wells
Arrow of God, Chinua Achebe (5)
The Hamlet, William Faulkner (5)
Post Captain, Patrick O’Brian (5)
The World According to Mister Rogers & The Mister Rogers Parenting Book
The Overcoat, and The Nose, Nikolai Gogol (5)
Rusalka, CJC

which makes a grand total of… about 35.

of those, 11 got my highest rating (5). it was a good year :)

Rusalka, by C.J. Cherryh. Be careful what you wish for...

Just ask Sasha Misurov. At five years old, he wished that his father would not beat him anymore. Soon thereafter, a fire burned down his house, claiming both his parents’ lives, and damning him in the eyes of the community of Vojvoda as a dangerous jinx- because nothing in Pre-Christian Russia ever happens by chance. That such a good-hearted innocent kid could be regarded as a danger is almost laughable, until you realize that his wish did indeed come true.

Not that Pyetr Kochevikov believes in such nonsense. Or that Pyetr had had a better relationship with his father, either. Born in the gutter to a notorious thief who kept trying to lose him, Pyetr had to rely on his wits and an uncanny ability to figure the odds in order to rise up to the social stratum he now enjoyed, befriended by youth of the nobility and, increasingly, wives of the nobility too.

But when one such wife needs to cover her own tracks regarding a suddenly and mysteriously dead husband, Pyetr goes from being her illicit lover to being the scapegoat. Charged with murder by sorcery, teenagers Pyetr and the practically complete stranger but supposed accomplice Sasha flee the city; Pyetr suffering from a horrid sword wound, and Sasha wishing they would make it safely to help.

The tail end of winter is no time to be running around Russia without so much as a coat, much less if you are bleeding to death and being chased by the tsar’s law. Taking a shortcut through a long-dead forest is probably not a good idea either. They don’t have much choice, however, and Sasha’s wishing pays off as they finally come across a cabin on the river, and the only thing that can help the dying Pyetr at this point: a sorcerer. A sorcerer with an even worse relationship with his father, and, oh yes, who was not such a good father himself.

(One does wonder about CJC’s relationship with her father, even though most likely she just took a theme and ran with it.)

This sorcerer has spent the last hundred years trying to reconcile his failed relationship with his daughter, who was drowned trying to run away, and who became Rusalka: a vengeful spirit who desperately wants to avoid death, and who does so by draining the life out of those around her.

And of course it follows that Pyetr, who thinks there is a rational explanation for everything, and Sasha, who imposes no such qualifications on reality, grow increasingly more and more entangled in a struggle neither of them understand, in a place where nothing and nobody is what it seems, where no one can trust anyone else, and where someone must die for a wish to come true.

Indeed, a Rusalka is itself just a wish, a rather innocent wish, with very bad consequences: a wish to live.

Don’t worry; that’s just the set-up for the story, with no real spoilers. It’s just the beginning. I didn’t give away any of the rest, involving raising the dead, battles with river demons, a desperate attempt to escape, a climactic showdown between master and apprentice, and snake-handed elephants. :p

a few quotes:

”... aunt Ilenka came flying out of the kitchen waving her spoon and calling on the Sun, the tsar, and all his magistrates.” (pg. 1)

“He’s over all kinder than sane folk know how to be.” (pg. 39)

“Once at hours like this, Pyetr told himself, he had been lazing about in a soft, warm bed no magician was goig to chase him out of.” (pg. 252)

That being said, it’s really not so much of a ghost story as, er, a traditional ghost story. It just happens to have ghosts etc as characters. :D Case in point, the cover blurb:

A grim but warmly human story of courage, sacrifice, and desperate love between a tormented spirit and a mortal man.

And no, it’s not that kind of love. That’s over in the romance department, I’m sure. Look for the vampire on the cover.

See more progress on: read all the books on my lists

The Overcoat, and The Nose, by Nikolai Gogol. rating =5.

Some have called The Overcoat the greatest short story ever; certainly it is one of the best from the Russian tradition. It vies in its own way with The Metamorphosis.

These stories are so short that you really need to read them; I’d hate to give more away than I already have. Gogol is prodigious at the absurd and the everyday; it is not only his wit, but the depth behind his wit, that provokes readers everywhere.

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The World According to Mister Rogers; The Mister Rogers Parenting Book. 4

There is more to this man than many people know; I invite you to investigate. He has a way of saying things that you might take for granted, but that in many ways go against the dogma of our modern American society: it isn’t a good idea to maintain a cheerful facade all the time; people feel freer to be themselves when they are assured of rules and boundaries than when they are allowed to do anything with no responsibility; every now and again you need to stop and recharge and rethink- you can’t keep going 100% all the time.

There are many things to stop and think about from a man who dedicated his life to helping future generations develop their potential to the fullest and recognize the connection between all human beings.

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Post Captain, by Patrick O'Brian. rating = 5

You know, when you read a really, really good book, you are quite afraid to read the sequel sometimes, for fear that it will not be as good. Not only is Post Captain as good as Master and Commander, some might say it’s even better.

Most of the book actually takes place on land, hopefully dispelling the myth that these books are only about sailors who like to drink and shoot cannons at other ships. Aubrey and Maturin are spending some time in the countryside of England following the peace agreement which ended the war, but an amazing amount of trouble soon falls upon Cptn. Aubrey, whose prize agent has run off (the modern equivalent of one’s tax preparer running off with money you owe the govt), making Aubrey responsible for an enourmous sum which he does not have. This blow comes at a particularly bad time for Aubrey, who has no ship during the peace and is not earning an income, and who has also fallen in love with a local girl and wishes to marry. To make things even more complicated, he ends up falling in love with another girl as well (oh it’s complicated I tell you ;) ), who has also caught the eye and heart of Dr. Maturin.

Fleeing England, only to arrive in France right before Napolean declares war again, and so forced to flee France incognito, they end up in Maturin’s holdings in Spain before making it back to a port where Aubrey can beg command of a ship, to help pay off his debts. That is only the first half of the book and I will not reveal more, just know that it twists and, yes, there are ships, and battles, and an attack in a dark alleyway, a betrayal, and more lovelorn twists to come. O’Brian sets up the romantic follies especially well (I am not one for romances much), and things are not always what they seem. Indeed, many people are not what they may seem, either.

a couple of quotes, but the entire book is worth quoting, line by line:

”... Oh, wish me joy!”

“Why, so I do,” said Stephen, wincing in that iron grip, “if more joy you can contain- if more felicity will not make your cup overflow. Have you been drinking, Lieutenant X? Pray sit in a chair like a rational being, and do not spring about the room.”
p.199

“There are days,” he reflected, “when one sees as though one had been blind the rest of one’s life. Such clarity- perfection in everything, not merely in the extraordinary. One lives in the very present moment; lives intently. There is no urge to be doing; being is the highest good. However,” he said, guiding the horse left-handed into the dunes, “doing of some kind there must be.”
p. 350

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what a little gem

I’m the kind of person who can take a lot of stress, you know, and I seem fine with big, important matters, for a long time, and then something stupid sets me off, and people wonder how that could get me in a lather. and that’s what this is. it’s just the last straw for all the recent days, is what.

right now, though, it seems like the author is a troll. (so I shouldn’t let it get to me, right?) if it is trolling, then I can almost understand Discover magazine running it, but then Utne picked it up too? if Utne thinks that is balance… I used to subscribe to them, years ago, but they’ve got way too much crap lately. they used to do a better job, I thought. maybe I was just even more naive…

science fiction is obsolete

really, the author amazes me. stereotype, stereotype, stereotype… I’m surprised he didn’t finish the article with a round of wedgies…

oh, haven’t you seen it? well, probably that’s for the better. I advise you to avert your eyes, in order to spare you.

this is a jock VS nerd fest. he uses dripping sarcasm throughout, with no professionalism at all, and this is supposed to be made okay by the few instances in which he turns the sarcasm inside-out (re Jules Verne and the launch of the Columbia)(and aren’t we so impressed that he knows Jules Verne’s middle name?). Fictional Reality indeed, the man lives in a world of stereotypes and indoctrination.

has the quality of science fiction gone down since Wells and Verne? well, sure… when you average all the science fiction works of the year together! when there was only Wells and Verne, both masters in their own way, of course the median standard of the genre was higher than now when we have all kinds of things being published under the scifi umbrella. god save us all; math, did we learn math in school? now if you compared the works of two current masterminds with that of Wells and Verne, I think you’ll find the quality to still be much the same.

not that Maddox would probably know; once he gets past Wells and Verne, he draws solely on… Michael Crichton for examples!

Would we even be bothered by the proliferation of surveillance cameras if we didn’t recognize the phenomenon as “Orwellian” and know, therefore, that it is bad? Probably, but I think you see my point.

ok, the point of all science fiction is not to predict the future, but apparently he has missed this. he thinks that because Wells did not “correctly” predict the future of the Soviet Union (????) 1984, that the work was a failure. did he get nothing of the essence at all?

and ARE WE any different than the citizens in 1984? examples abound, people, they truly do. they had a propoganda division called the Department of Truth. because it was called the Department of Truth, well, it must be telling the truth, right? we have legislation that undermines the human rights of Americans and non-citizens, and weakens the framework for promoting human rights internationally. but it’s called the Patriot Act, so, well, it must be a good, wholesome thing designed to protect the citizens as long as they are patriotic. and if you argue against it, you must be unpatriotic. and yet, I don’t see Bruno Maddox bothered by this at all…

For one, it was around that time, the mid-1990s, that fiction— all fiction —finally became obsolete as a delivery system for big ideas.

this is along the lines of: “Everything that can be invented has been invented.” Charles H. Duell, U.S. Commissioner of Patents, in 1899. it is as ridiculous and small-minded as almost anything I can think of, and I’d never be caught dead saying such a thing, much less attach my name to it and publish it across the country.

can you imagine anyone saying: Music is obsolete as a delivery system for big ideas. Art is obsolete as a delivery system for big ideas. ??? I hope not. and yet it’s the same stretch… how blatantly wrong and exacerbatingly ignorant can a person be?

Why would I spend my money on a book about amazing-but-fake technology when we’re only a few weeks away from Steve Jobs unveiling a cell phone that doubles as a jetpack and a travel iron?

yes, because scifi is just about predicting the future and blinding us all with technogadgetry.

the Utne article actually is shorter but has some different passages in it (?). among the first thing that upset me was his complaint that the convention was not being held in a futuristic pavillion, etc, etc, no; and he then went on to complain how the salsa was being served directly out of the jar… don’t think I am taking only those comments, but, to sum up, the whole mood behind it all made it clear that he honestly didn’t see the point of anything less than a phantasmagorical, materialistic, consumeristic display of wealth and priviledge and American-style corporate jet-setting… that anything less was a sign of failure. truly, he’s still entirely entrenched in the doctrines of the industrial revolution! the environment doesn’t matter, other cultures and people don’t matter, even the disadvantaged of one’s own culture don’t matter. that was the underlying vibe. plus an amazing misunderstanding of science itself and scientists as people…

this is exactly the type of mind that needs to be broadened by literature. the kind that eschews not only science fiction, but also fiction, and indeed even science itself. but he was never taught to appreciate it in school; and apparently there’s enough people all across the country to agree with him and give him an audience.

:\

ok I’m going to chuck e cheese now.
really I’m fine ;)

See more progress on: Post random thoughts, observations, and events of the day...

The Hamlet, by William Faulkner. rating = 5

I could go on, maybe I shouldn't. really, the man did not win a Nobel prize for nothing. I'm sure you already know why I liked it :)

but I've got to share with you some of this absolutely magnificent description! wow, what descriptions!

41. The horse made one swirl, it looked round as a ball, without no more front or back end than a Irish potato.

105. It was a forensic face, the face of invincible conviction in the power of words as a principle worth dying for if necessary. A thousand years ago it would have been a monk's, a militant fanatic who would have turned his uncompromising back on the world with actual joy and gone to a desert and passed the rest of his days and nights calmly and without an instant's self-doubt battling, not to save humanity about which he would have cared nothing, for whose sufferings he would have had nothing but contempt, but with his own fierce and unappeasable natural appetites.

205. He was not wild, he was merely unbitted yet; not high-spirited so much as possessed fo that strong lust, not for life, not even for movement, but for that fetterless immobility called freedom.

211. Geography: that paucity of invention, that fatuous faith in the distance of man, who can invent no better means than geography for escaping; himself o fall, to whom, so he believed he believed, geography had never been merely something to walk upon but was the very medium which the fetterless to-and fro-going required to breathe in.
(I wonder what the atevi would make of that remark...)

231. For an instant he saw it, spinning slowly. Then it splashed, not sinking but disintegrating amoung that shattered scurring of broken stars.

277. The pear tree across the road opposite was now in full and frosty bloom, the twigs and branches springing not outward from the limbs but standing motionless and perpendicular above the horizontal boughs like the separate and upstreaming hair of a drowned woman sleeping upon the uttermost floor of the windless and tideless seas.

Ah, the South. the story? the story is of a small little crook in the road really, in Mississippi, right at about the time of the beginning of the Great Depression. not that anyone there knew it was the Great Depression; they were too poor to tell. When your entire worldly belongings consist of one set of clothes to a person, one set of mismatched shoes for five people to share, a pot, a brush with no handle, and a hammer head with no claw tails set upon a stick of firewood... yeah, well, Wallstreet is nothing but a name to you. literally ;)

there is not really a main main character, but ostensibly one could claim this is the chronicle of the origins of Flem Snopes, a crusty frog-like individual who raises himself from an incredibly impoverished and common enough beginning to the highest possible level in that society, by way of his own bootstraps and heartless, almost soulless, manipulation of other people and their expectations. since the trilogy is called the Snopes trilogy, and since the last scene of the book includes Flem and his new wife and child leaving to set up in Jefferson, I'm pretty sure I'm justified in saying so.

oh, and yes I did pick up the accent again just by reading the books. I found myself saying "Sholy" several times in the past week or so. although this is not as noticeable as when, after a long stint of Bronte, I was cut off in traffic and shouted, "dog in the manger". /embarrassed to death...

70. "Here. Bring me a piece of pie while I'm waiting."
"What kind of pie, Mr. Bookwright?" the counterman said.
"Eating pie," Bookwright said.

Arrow of God, by Chinua Achebe. rating: 5

right now I have a fever and all I can say is, Chinua Achebe is awesome. I’ve read three books by him (Things Fall Apart, Anthills of the Savannah, and Arrow of God) and they are all first-rate, #5, everyone should read these books.

repeating myself:

the man is amazingly talented with words, world-building, and characterization. he can be very economical in his writing, straight to the quick and every word, every image is exactly what is necessary to convey his meaning and carry the story. he can also be very philosophical and soul-searching, when his characters are and when the situation calls for it. his stories are very human and real--- there's no real heroes or villains or any "correct" viewpoints involved (though a character might think of his viewpoint as supreme) or preaching of a moral. you feel as if you know the people personally somehow, as if they are quite real, and correspondingly complicated without being constructedly so. you come to understand the world they populate in a short time, as if you've been there, as if you could put the book down and find yourself there.

amazingly talented.

Arrow of God is told primarily from the viewpoint of a chief priest of an Igbo village (Umuaro; several villages as one, really), but also from that of the British man on the spot and his subordinates. the reality each person experiences (not only each side- ie, white/black- but also, yes, each person) is very different, and yet as they interact more and come to their own (often bizarre yet predictable) understandings of each other, their realities began to converge. not that either side ever really fully and truly understands each other, but they go from being separate entities to sharing in a common future.

Achebe's thorough discussion of the events brings the reader to realize many aspects of life and truth in the story. for just one example,the book documents the disintegration of the traditional religion (again, not total disintegration, but the toppling from its dominance in the community and taking a diminished and quite secondary or even forgotten role) , and in a way that makes total sense in the context of that religion (and the accompanying culture). not just, the Christians came and the Christians shone their truth forth and yeah verily we all converted. no, we get the real, complicated story of how the priest and even the god itself misstepped and fell from power, with the white religion as a context, but not as the defining factor.

he's such an engaging writer. I actually picked this book up after I had already started The Hamlet (see next), and I couldn't put it down. even though I had already started in on William Faulkner! yes, if I may be so bold, I think Chinua Achebe is the William Faulkner of Nigeria. truly great, truly great.

The Time Machine by H.G. Wells (4.5-5)

I’d read Jules Verne before (Journey to the Center of the Earth esp), but you think I’d have read the other author who founded the field of science fiction as well. but I’d never read The Time Machine, or The Island of Dr. Moreau, or The Invisible Man. good gravy, what have I been up to all these years?!

ok. I’d seen the movie. even the recent movie that by Wells’ descendant that scandalized everyone. but I’d never read the book.

it’s not the same (shock!) as the movie; of course I knew that, but I didn’t realize how much they added in the movies. I didn’t realize they’d added the clothes shop bit with the changing manequin. and I hadn’t thought about it, but of course they added the part where the stopped during a World War (can’t remember which movie, but the old one I guess)- the book was written long before the World Wars.

in the book, he doesn’t stop at all before he reaches the land of the Eloi & Murdocks.

I didn’t realize they’d cut out part of the ending, either. he actually goes further into time and sees the ultimate fate of the planet, in the book.

and Weena’s fate is a bit different, as well.

his prose is intriguing and engaging. here are a couple quotes to show you what I mean, and I’ll leave you with an urging to read the book:

(1) ”...there was that luxurious after-dinner atmosphere when thought runs gracefully free of the trammels of precision.”

(78) “Looking at these stars suddenly dwarfed my own troubles and all the gravities of terrestrial life. I thought of their unfathomable distance, and the slow inevitable drift of their movements out of the unknown past into an unknown future.”

See more progress on: read all the books on my lists

The Stranger, by Albert Camus (5)

from the back cover: “A terrifying picture of a man victimized by life itself”

wow. apparently the reviewer/publisher missed the point of the book. ???

the French philosopher (and great writer, btw) Albert Camus gives us a main character, the narrator, who feels no attachment to the world, no real emotions to speak of at all. he is a man that lives entirely in the present, with hardly any thought to the future, and no real thought to the past. he is very “in the moment”, or rather, caught up in the physical sensations of the moment, and, even though he is an educated, intelligent, hard working man- he does not reflect on his world or his actions or his own self.

and because of this, his life takes what at first seems to be a dramatic turn, leading to his ultimate undoing. looking back, however, it was hardly inevitable after all.

Camus is making a point. it is not enough to live “in the moment”. the moment is connected to the past and future; the moment exists in a greater context with all of time and with all other people in the moment. and emotions play a great role in this; they are our connections to the world.

Meursault (Mer-soh) _{(Camus= ca-moo)} is, from the start, a very odd fellow because of his disconnection from life, even as he is immersed in the sensations of the moment. what he is disconnected from, ultimately, is any kind of purpose whatsoever. he makes choices passively, not kenning moral issues or what most of us would call basic humanity. but he is not a victim. Meursault makes choices, and he faces the consequences of his choices and his actions. to think of him as a victim is to misunderstand as much of Meursault’s life as Meursault did himself.

this is a very thought-provoking piece; if it interests you, you might read also The Fall by Camus (wherein the main character reflects too much and is thus out of balance with his life ina different way). or look up existentialism in general :D

See more progress on: read all the books on my lists

The Secret Sharer, by Joseph Conrad. rating=4ish

The Secret Sharer, by Joseph Conrad (in same book as Heart of Darkness)

It is a good story, and good writing, if a bit heavily underscored. Joseph Conrad is a bit dark for my tastes (gasp!) but I recommend it :)

The Metamorphosis, by Franz Kafka. rating=5

click above for story

or here: http://www.mala.bc.ca/~Johnstoi/stories/kafka-E.htm

this is another 5 :)

it’s very short; not even a hundred pages. (and as such I don’t want to quote it much.) it’s a perfect example of the absurd, and of our absurd human tendencies in life.

the story is about Gregor Samsa, who, in the very first sentence, wakes up to find that he has been transformed into a hideous bug.

in fact, it is very like Nikolai Gogol’s story The Nose, in which a man wakes up to find that his nose is not on his face. The Nose is about the man looking all over to find his nose, because he just cannot figure where it has gotten off to, and we are never enlightened as to how this could have come about, really, only that apparently it could happen to anyone. and when the man finally does find his nose, it’s dressed in a uniform [etf freudian slip: I put it was wearing an overcoat; this was the title of another of Gogol's short stories!] walking down the street. the man says, in effect, “Hey, aren’t you my nose?!?”, but, poor fellow, he is of such a low station in life that even his own nose is of higher rank than he is, and it does not deign to stop and talk with him.

in The Metamorphosis, Gregor has been turned into a hideous vermin, some sort of monstrous beetley-cockroach thing, but keeps his human, travelling-salesman, dutiful son and brother mind. and we never know how or why he was changed into a bug, and it doesn’t seem to serve any purpose whatsoever. but Gregor, who has slept through the alarm, what with being changed into a different life form and all, is of course very concerned with the most pressing of urgencies: getting to work and apologizing for missing the early train. and, of course, Gregor is quite depressed and melancholy: about the rainy weather.

the scene where the manager comes to Gregor’s house to find out what’s going on is horrible and amazingly comic: here we have Gregor as a giant roach trying to convince his boss that he really is a good employee, and he’ll be back on the job at no time at all.

the second half of the work is perhaps a bit darker but all the more enlightenting and bizarre. for such a ridiculous prospect, Kafka makes very bold and enduring statements about family, self-identity, alienation, guilt, and literature/ being a writer.

apparently people have built careers around analyzing Franz Kafka’s work, esp this story, and I can see why. I say read it :)

this might come in handy later on --- longueur

The Word of the Day for September 10 is:

longueur \lawn-GUR (approximation -- this word comes from French and has sounds with no English equivalents)\ noun
: a dull and tedious passage or section (as of a book, play, or musical composition) -- usually used in plural

Example sentence:
“This production has its occasional longueurs, but glorious singing and energetic choreography quickly rope us back in." (Rick Rogers, _The Oklahoman_, June 28, 2007)

Did you know?
You’ve probably come across long, tedious sections of books, plays, or musical works before, but perhaps you didn’t know there was a word for them. English speakers began using the French borrowing “longueurs” in the late 18th century. In French, “longueurs” are tedious passages, and “longueur” literally means “length.” The first recorded use of “longueur” in English comes from the writer Horace Walpole, who wrote in a letter, “Boswell’s book is gossiping;… but there are woful longueurs, both about his hero and himself.”

Master and Commander, Patrick O'Brian. rating= 5.

Master and Commander by Patrick O'Brian


ok, I must admit: I just wrote this entire long review about how brilliant the book and the author are, and then the computer froze up and I lost it all and now I'm very frustrated.

I saw the movie in the theater; I loved the detail of the story and how they filmed it. I'd never heard of it otherwise. I realized that my friend had read the books and recommended them, so I put it on my reading list. I didn't know there were over 20 books in the series and that the first was published before I was born! I also didn't realize that the movie was not the same as the book. how innocent I was.

the movie is called Master and Commander: Far Side of the World. there is a book in the series called The Far Side of the World; I thought they had just skipped to that story (ten books in, no less!) and started there. but no, they combined story elements from the first book with places and events from the tenth book. quite ridiculous and totally unnecessary: Master and Commander stands very well on its own, thank you, and needs no cinematic reinterpretation.

here we have the young Jack Aubrey, in 1800, promoted to Master and Commander and given his first ship in the British Navy, right after he has just met the coincidentally Irish Dr. Stephen Maturin, and right away things manage to run quite sprightly. the book follows several trips and tours; battles at sea and on land, both won and lost; as well as a court-marshalling. we get to see the inner workings of several different characters (I of course esp find Dr. Maturin interesting), the development of the haphazhard collection of men into a well-honed crew, the political realities between esp Aubrey and his superiors and equals. for starters.

the detail is damn near immaculate, even if there is a little acknowledged liberty taken, the humanity of the characters is profound, the flow of the story sweeps you up and carries you away just like the proverbial ship. the language is attractive and O'Brian shows such deep insight... read it :)

(and btb, I must add that I love the idea of "calms". oh please do forgive me; I grew up in the middle of the United States, the desert no less, and seafaring terms are a new world as far as I'm concerned. well, if we have "storms", then we most certainly can have "calms". and in fact in my house, a "calm" is just as useful a term as it is rare an occurence. )

173. ... I have had such a sickening of men in masses, and of causes, that I would not cross this room to reform parliament or prevent the union or to bring about the millennium. I speak only for myself, mind - it is my own truth alone - but man as part of a movement or a crowd is indifferent to me. He is inhuman.

177. I have never yet known a man admit that he was either rich or asleep: perhaps the poor man and the wakeful man have some great moral advantage. How does it arise?

250. "You danced?" cried Jack, far more astonished than if Stephen had just said "as we ate our cold roast baby."
"Certainly I danced. Why would I not dance, pray?"
"Certainly you are to dance - most uncommon graceful, I am sure. I only wondered... but did you indeed go about dancing?"

309. ... and after Stephen had been bumped into once or twice and had "By your leave, sir" and "Way there - oh parding, sir" roared into his ear often enough, he walked composedly into the cabin, sat on Jack's locker and reflected upon the nature of a community - its reality - its difference from every one of the individuals composing it - communication within it, how effected.

336. A blur, and a sense of oppression; a feeling more of the x's defeat than of the Sophie's victory; and exhausted perpetual hurrying, as though that were what life really consisted of. A fog punctuated by a few brilliantly clear scenes.

341. He had seen looks of unfeigned respect, good will and admiration upon the faces of seamen and junior officers passing in the crowded street; and two commanders senior to him, unlucky in prizes and known to be jealous, had hurried across to make their compliments, handsomely and with good grace.
He walked in, up the stairs to his room, threw off his coat and sat down. "This must be what they call the vapours," he said, trying to define something happy, tremulous, poignant, churchlike and not far from tears in his heart and bosom.

390. I was strangely upset today, I must confess, and I need what is it? The knitting up of ravelled care?

(and now I'm off to add the other twenty books to my "to-read list". I hope they are all as good as this!)

Next up: Master and Commander, by Patrick O'Brian.

Master and Commander by Patrick O'Brian

:)

Hammerfall, by CJC

Hammerfall, by C.J. Cherryh
coming soon :)

Rider at the Gate was a sci-fi western. Hammerfall is a sci-fi desert caravan adventure. see, sci-fi doesn't always have to be about robots and tribbles! lol.

the main character, Marak Tain --- I kept reading his name as Mark Twain. which added yet another layer I'm sure. ;)

but here are the quotes already:

110. "It's my choice! It's become my choice, and I may not do choose what they want me to choose!"

340. He tried to call what he felt in his soul responsibility; but it was beyond any sense of responsibility: it was simply doing what he could do, as long as he could do it, like a man walking on his last strength.

Rider at the Gate, by C.J. Cherryh. 4.5

Rider at the Gate

(but first things first: Sheri S. Tepper's premise for Grass (1998) sounds a whole hell of a lot like the basic premise of Rider at the Gate (1995)---"horses" and all! the two are very very dissimiliar in the writing styles etc, and the stories are different too. but my god the basic premise of the planetary situation is not an original of Tepper's at all. boo on Tepper.)

ok, now, Rider at the Gate. it's rather like an old-fashioned western, really, only on a far-away planet with telepathic, bacon-eating "horses". lol. (in fact I jut referenced something from Hank the Cowdog, and it fit right in ;) ) of course they're not horses at all, but the human population just seems to have named the native creatures after the familiar, Earth creatures they most resemble. and the spook-bears, goblin-cats, and nighthorses (as well as all the other native creatures) are different from Earth creatures in a very substantial way: they are telepathic, and use mind games both to protect themselves and to lure unwitting prey to their doom. it's a good thing that the powerful nighthorses are also rather curious, because if they hadn't investigated the human colonists and found them rather compelling, then the colonists wouldn't have had any defense against the other predators. entire villages went insane or were killed off with the help of telepathic manipulation before the nighthorses chose human companions called Riders. the Riders protect the villages, but the people's fear of the beasts outside the village walls includes the Riders themselves, beast-influenced as they are.

the story is about, in short, a late convoy trying to make through the mountains and to a village before winter; a nighthorse gone Rogue- insane- murdering people; a Rider who will stop at nothing to take down the Rogue who killed his partner; history between him and the other Riders converging on the same territory; a kid in way over his head trying to be of help. about not quite ever knowing what is truth, what is a trick, and what is just a dream.

it's a very good read. on a side note, I've been craving (bacon) and thinking in (brackets) for the past few days too lol.

quotes for me:

100- Humans had a need to know the connections of things, and human minds made them up if they didn't get them.

183- You could blame practically any craziness on the fact they didn't know, never knew, only guessed what another man wanted, or what he was about to do.

Hell of a way to live.

294- Burn's rider crossed the last gap above the rocks and mountainside and tottered to a rock-sheltered spot to sit down, dizzy, dry-mouthed with exertion, and feeling his skull trying to explode.

Which wasn't something he'd regret at the moment.

Too Far From Home, by Chris Jones. rating: 2.5-3

ok, the story itself is a 4.5, but I'm not fond of his style at all. his style gets a 2.

Too Far From Home recounts the story of three astronauts (two American astronauts and one Russian cosmonaut) that were stranded on the International Space Station when the space shuttle Columbia broke up on re-entry, killing all seven aboard. beyond the amazing loss of those seven who died, this left NASA with no vehicle with which to retrieve the station residents for at least two or three years. this is the story of how those station-bound astronauts finally got home.

but more than that, it's a story about the first American astronauts, and how the world viewed them when they returned to the Earth (afraid they would die just from going to space, or that they would give everyone Moon plague picked up from the dust on their boots, etc.), the American and Soviet space race, and the realities of space exploration, both for the spacemen and for those left behind on the ground.

the history provided is fascinating, and often not the aspects you hear in the media, the character background is fine, and the flow of the story is compelling. but. the writing is also very sensationalistic to the point of sounding hokey at times (page 12: "He was a chemical engineer, an inventor, a man who couldn't help wondering how engines worked, why clouds formed, what lived in the hearts of volcanoes. In his endless quest to understand more about the inner workings of the universe, he had tried and failed to become an astronaut three times; the fourth time around, he was finally given the chance to dissect the stars." --- honestly, I'd be ashamed to turn that in to a publisher. "dissect the stars"?) , quite unneccessarily. and he shows an obvious disdain and prejudice against the Russian people, which sounds like a misplaced attempt at drumming up Nationalistic pride, and is completely uncalled for and out of line. imho.

(nationalism is almost always out of line, but this, moreso, since Russia and America get along fine now. the KGB has stopped being the bad guy in all the spy movies; this should clue him in!)

(I mean, I come from Big Sky country myself. as do the Russians, which he completely ignores, insinuating that they are all "cold-souled" robotic slaves of the Soviet state. ouch! the author makes allowances for the one cosmonaut on the ISS (Nikolai Budarin) (in order for us to want to find out how he gets home) by saying that he acts more "American" than the others??? sorry, but I find the stereotypes too cliche and moronic. where's his reality check? has he never been to Big Sky country? esp the little towns in the desert-like surroundings? cultural norms notwithstanding, we from Big Sky ALL have a tendency to appear cold--- to outsiders. to those inside our group, we can be open, honest, fun-loving, and very affectionate. but each to its proper time and place. have you ever seen an old Western where the stranger walks into town and is immediately slapped on the back by people who don't know him? I think not.)

(and no, I don't usually call it Big Sky country. it's too tempting to shorten that to BS country lol.)

ignoring the storyteller, however, it is a great story.

and, hey, the town I was born in was mentioned on page 72! (my "hometown" is now San Diego; I've been a "native" of San Diego since 2001 :) ) also, one person in the book has my surname as well. won't say who, but they work at NASA. silly things, silly things, I know. but in their own way, they are "goldfish moments" too.

116 "Still learning their way, the Americans governed the lives of their astronauts by a high holy document known as Form 24, which structured the course of their mission, minute by minute, day by day." (Form 24 sounds a lot like the schedules my autistic son draws up for us to abide by.)

154-5 "They came to appreciate how their days unfolded exactly as they wanted them to. They liked never having to alter their routine to make room for someone else in it. They were never caught in traffic or in the rain, bumped into on the sidewalk, jostled on the subway, tied to a desk for hours each day. They never caught colds. They never had to keep appoitnments of cut the grass. They were never rushed. They were never late."

also discussed is how Skylab rebelled against ground control, and actually went on strike. on page 178 the astronauts watch their first movie in space and realize how oversensitized they've become to sudden motion, flashing lights, violence, and gore (or how callous they were to it on Earth). when they return to Earth, it is mentioned how they are oversensitive to even a temperature change of a few degrees etc. I read this and thought, "I wonder how many people CJC has inside NASA!" lol

No Future Without Forgiveness by Desmond Tutu (again) --- 5

No Future Without Forgiveness

***first review of this book (please read)***

when I first tried to read this book, I had just finished a broad review of the history of sub-Saharan Africa (including the complete history of South Africa) and Nelson Mandela's autobiography Long Walk to Freedom (which I just realized I never reviewed! gaah). so I was familiar with the history---the long, sorted history of relations between the Dutch settlers who came to call themselves Afrikaaners, the various black African native peoples, the "coloureds" (of mixed Dutch-African descent from very early in the colony's history), and the Indians (yes, that's the country of India, thank you). I was familiar with apartheid, the resistance to and armed struggle against apartheid, and the amazing dissolution of apartheid and a democratically-elected new government.

after centuries of internal conflict, South Africa could have easily (and indeed was fully expected to) become yet another battleground of the world: like Northern Ireland, Bosnia-Hertzogovenia, Israel and Palestine, Afghanistan, Angola. this kind of conflict does not just go away. even if people try to smooth it over, forget about it, and move on, if you don't deal with the foundations and results of that conflict, it will rise again to drag you back down.

however, if you hold the equivalent of war tribunals or the Nuremberg Trials, in South Africa, well then you'd be hunting down literally thousands of people who participated in apartheid; and running up enormous court and jail costs in a country that had serious economic concerns including food, medicine, and housing; and really then you run the risk of just reversing the oppressed and the oppressor. none of this is conducive to long-term healing of a nation where people have to live and work with each other, and same with their descendants, and their descendants after them. this does not serve the peace.

so South Africa tried a different way. after a new Constitution was approved, one of the first things the new government did was to try to deal with the anger and hurt of people throughout the country by setting up a Truth and Reconcilliation Commission. they made it where if you had committed a gross human rights violation under apartheid (with certain cut-off dates and restrictions), you could apply for amnesty, and if you received amnesty, you couldn't be prosecuted for that offense in criminal or civil court. but. you had to confess in full, in public, and you had to hold yourself accountable.

that way no one could say they "didn't know" any more. the whole country would be made very well aware of what had been going on, and the people responsible would have to accept their accountability, and the people who had not dared ask questions or who had looked the other way had to accept their own kind of accountability too.

victims of apartheid (meeting requirements, because otherwise there'd be just too many people to deal with) could also come forward and tell their stories and receive reparations to help them heal and move on.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu was the Chairperson of the Truth and Reconcilliaton Commission, and in this very expressive book explains the thinking behind such an experiment, as well as its successes, drawbacks, and crises that almost derailed the whole thing.

I knew this when I started reading, and again I knew what kinds of things had been going on during apartheid (including routine torture and abductions), but when I got to part where the book quoted a person who was applying for amnesty, saying what he had done, and he was torturing someone for information, and shoved a knife up the victim's nose... well, then I felt a knife going up my nose. and I had to leave the book for another time!

finally I have come back to it, with enough distance but not too much, and I'm glad I read it. (and no, it wasn't full of that kind of thing (examples of torture), but of course it had to have some in there so the reader had an inkling of what they were dealing with.) it is a book full of promising ideas and concepts that I hope make people think. it gives options that are too often overlooked in the world today, and sadly they're the options that might just work. nobody is going to say that South Africa is a perfect place now, with rivers of chocolate and fields of lollipops, but they have a peace that is working. and that's saying something.

I give it a 5, because I think it is so important and needs to be read. and thought about. and applied to our lives. I think we could all find a little more peace if we tried.

quotes:

the concept of Ubuntu is introduced on page 31- "My humanity is caught up, is inextricably bound up, in yours... A person with ubuntu... has a proper self-assurance that comes from knowing that he or she belongs in a greater whole and is diminished when others are humiliated or diminished, when others are tortured or oppressed, or treated as if they are less than who they are."

54 "In the spirit of ubuntu, the central concern is the healing of breaches, the redressing of imbalances, the restoration of broken relationships, a seeking to rehabilitate both the victim and the perpetrator, who should be given the opportunity to be reintegrated into the community he has injured by his offense."

83 "The point is that, if perpetrators were to be despaired of as monsters and demons, then we were thereby letting accountability go out the window because we were then declaring that they were not moral agents to be held responsible for the deeds they had committed. Much more importantly, it meant that we abandoned all hope of their being able to change for the better."

141, included in a PBS documentary by Bill Moyers ("Facing the Truth") : "She said she survived by taking her spirit out of her body and putting it in the corner of the cell in which she was being raped. She could then, disembodied in this manner, look on as they did all those awful things to her body, intending to make her hate herself just as they had told her she would. By doing this she could then imagine that it was not she herself but a stranger suffering this ignominy. With tears in her eyes she told Moyers that she had not yet gone back to that room to fetch her soul and that it was still sitting in the corner where she had left it.

263 (a thing I took to heart, even out of this context) "So I told those dedicated workers for peace and reconcilliation that they should not be tempted to give up on their crucial work because of the frustrations of seemingly not making any significant progress, that in our experience nothing was wasted, for in the fullness of time, when the time was right, it would all come together and those looking back would realize what a critical contribution they had made."

270"Forgiving and being reconciled are not about pretending that things are other than they are... True reconciliation exposes the awfulness, the abuse, the pain, the degredation, the truth. It could even sometimes make things worse. It is a risky undertaking but in the end it is worthwhile, because in the end dealing with the real situation helps to bring real healing."

"There but for the grace of God go I."

guilty as sin --- further comment on Pretender

(review of Pretender, C.J. Cherryh)

so I pick up Pretender, and, yes, Bren-ji is still stuck in that same awkward place I left him. there's nothing for it but just be brave and read. the hard part is... he doesn't seem to think he's in an awkward place. I feel like he's making a monumental fool of himself in some instances, or just that he's not with the program, and he apparently doesn't pick up on this at all. it about kills me. it seems especially bad for this to happen in Pretender, because by now he really should know better... right?

....

especially all his internal postulations involving hiding the heir out of harm's way until everything has been taken care of and decided? Bren does seem to have problems (still) thinking in atevi terms---unless he's explaining the atevi culture to someone else. then, he has little problem. when he is just thinking to himself, however, he doesn't seem to engage that regulatory check, that but-they're-not-human catch, as often as he should.

hmmm. I mentioned that I think of Bren as an ENFJ, because he's so freakin' like me (an INFJ). and guess what? oh yes that's right...

I'm guilty as sin of doing the same thing as Bren Cameron.

now, indulge me, because this is as close as I can get to Bren's situation, okay? but I have two autistic children. when I am advocating for them or interacting with them and the community at large, I have no trouble whatsoever reminding everyone that autistic people think, communicate, and perceive the world differently than neurotypicals do, and that doesn't make the autistic right or wrong or the neurotypicals right or wrong, and that accomodations must be made that honor the intrinsic humanity of both sides in such a way that we can all get along. I mean, I've been living with this reality for nigh-on ten years, so I know this, right?

so why is it when I am alone with my autistic kids, all summer, that this kind of thinking starts to slide away? why do I find myself thinking, "really it shouldn't be so difficult; why do I always have to change everything for them?" I honestly forget, for periods of time, that maybe I make accomodations for them, but that's Nothing compared to the effort they put forward as autistic people in a non-autistic world. it's nothing. and they do try. and I should know that. I do know that. why in the world do I forget? why do I not remember when it seems most critical?

let's see; would this fit the situation?

I seem to have problems (still) thinking in autistic terms---unless I'm explaining autism to someone else. then, I have little problem. when I am just thinking to himself, however, I don't seem to engage that regulatory check, that but-they're-not-typical catch, as often as I should.

my hat goes off to you, CJC. you really know your characters. even if your readers have a hard time putting up with them lol :)

Hunter of Worlds, C.J. Cherryh. rating = 3 (but see review)

I've noticed how, in Cherryh's earlier works, she didn't explain much. she mentioned something a few times and it was up to the reader after that (if she gave you that much of a headstart). these stories tend to be shorter overall: more concise and self-containing.

I've noticed how, in Cherryh's latests works, the opposite is true. she explains the living daylights out of things---but not in a straightforward fashion! she hints and cajoles the reader down certain ways of thinking, towards the next revelation, and re-examines related key issues over and over and over from different aspects, but she never comes out and says what the reader is expecting her to say. that is, of course, one way to keep your readers in suspence. but I'm sure she is quite aware that when her many fans clamour for her attention and beg for more details, they mean they want a more straightforward look at the worlds she creates. the paradox is, if she gave that to them, the effect would be ruined and nobody would want to read the books. so, this giving of many explanations without actually revealing anything that she wouldn't traditionally reveal, is a compromise. an exacerbating compromise, because it puts the reader through the ringer even more so than her earlier works, and Cherryh is very good at putting the reader through the ringer. these stories tend to be longer, and divided into triologies (not three stories in a trilogy, but one story in a trilogy arc that includes three books). tend a bit more towards space opera.

Hunter of Worlds was published in 1977, and fits the first description. in it, we are introduced to an alien universe with three different alien species complete with their own cultures and languages and beliefs. Hunter of Worlds is a bit linguistics-heavy... it is what I call a concept book.

if in some sci-fi, the author coins a word for an alien animal (say, garblio), and we see this word used off and on throughout the book, well, it's expected. there aren't any creatures that look like a cross between an armadillo and a penguin here on Earth, so we don't have a name for that. of course the author has to make up the word garblio. it's best of course if they actually include a picture of a garblio or at least a very brilliant passage describing this creature, but this is all to be expected in much of sci-fi.

if we are asked to learn what a garblio is, that's not a real problem. we can remember that. what becomes confusing is if most or all of the animals there on planet/spaceship X have no Earthly comparisons. yes, it's when the characters make their way through and interact with a field full of garblios, nekwitetters, modoneds, and jesuviars that the reader starts getting lost. which was the man-eating carnivore again? which one was the long-lost pet of the mad scientist?

it's not impossible to learn the new words and keep them all sorted, and in fact for some of us it's rather fun lol, but it is quite a task.

especially when we're not talking about animals but instead symbolic things like justice, honour, beauty, truth, or some combination of those that only occurs in an alien culture (or, well, we might have it but we don't have a word for it, whereas that alien culture reveres it as much as we do our justice). those kind of symbolic words are hard to define and pin down when they're ones we actually know (truth, justice, the american way). but when it's supposed to be an innovative concept... oi vey! a whole new level of challenge.

for example: kastien - being oneself; virtue, wisdom; observing harmony with others and the universe by perfect centering in one's giyre toward all person and things.

oh, wait. what was giyre again? recognition of one's proper place in the cosmic Order of things; also, one's proper duty to another. it is ideally mutual.

but those are just two concepts here, and they're only representative of one species. there are three species (not counting humanity) in the book, remember?

so we've also got arastiethe, shakhshoph, vaikka, elethia... etc. those are (some of) the symbolic words, but we've also got new words for new technology (ex: chiabres), different relationship-types (ex: asuthe, kamethi, nasul, orithain, sra), different place names (ex: Esliph, Kesuat, Kej), and then of course the names of the species (Kalliran, Amaut, Iduve) and the ships and the characters!

there is a glossary at the back of this book. you will need it.

in her later works she is much more skillful about adding the new words in there at a more approachable pace... however, most everything that makes me love Cherryh's writing is there, if not developed to its full fruition. this is a book that you reread, and reread, and then when you realize you don't have to look anything up anymore, then its craft unfolds completely (and not in the satisfying yet broken way it did during all the previous reads).

399:
"I prefer to proceed toward infallibility at my own unhurried pace..."

(and yet, if she had just listened to them and secured the loose cannon, so to speak, that would have kept the obvious from happening. oh, you know it's going to happen, you just don't know when. Cherryh is ALWAYS doing that. just for once can't we lock the psychopath up or eliminate them completely? it's like suspending James Bond over a lake full of hungry crocodiles. for goodness sakes, just shoot him already! at least give him a tranquilizer or something. you know he's going to get away!)

450:
He was bitterly ashamed of the grief his perverted emotion had brought her in all things, for in one private part of his thoughts he knew absolutely what he had done, saw through his own pretenses... The contradictions were madness; they gathered about him like a great darkness, in which nothing was understandable.

Orlando Furioso, by Ludovico Ariosto, translated by Guido Waldman. mixed: 3-5.

Orlando Furioso is an epic poem written in 1532 as the culmination of the chivalric legends of Charlemagne and the Saracen invation of France, and develops three principal stories:
*the knight Orlando(Roland)’s love for the princess Angelica
*the war between the Franks and the Saracens
*the love of Ruggerio(Roger), a Saracen, for Bradamant, a Christian

Voltaire himself said that Orlando Furioso was a combination of the Iliad, the Odyssey, and Don Quixote, only better.

what Voltaire forgot to mention was another ingredient here: 1001 Arabian Nights.

have you ever read the original 1001 Arabian Nights? I tried. the university library had the whole set (many multiple volumes) and I thought, hey I should read those. only, it’s really quite difficult to follow. not that it isn’t immensely interesting for the most part, or funny, or witty, but that there’s a story within a story within a story within a dream within another story. literally. and the stories go on and on and on. forever. in sometimes archaic wording in always small print in volumes of 600+ pages.

I have no doubt in my mind that if I sat down and read one story a night for the next, um, 1001 nights, that I would be thoroughly entertained. but I just couldn’t ever finish it otherwise.

it’s the same with Orlando Furioso. I wondered why it ook Ariosto over 20 years to write this epic poem (translated in my version into English prose), but once I started reading, I wondered no more. there are over 40 Cantos, something equivalent to chapters for the sake of our discussion, and each of them could be a full-fledged novel in its own right. details and details and action and plot twists and then checking up on the other knight, so-and-so, who when we left him last was battling a magician astride a flying horse. several decades of intertwined stories ago.

in Ariosto’s time, the stories of these knights were more than well-known; as well-known as the legends of Arthur and the Round Table were then and even more well-known than those legends are known today. so the details, to readers in the 1600s, were not something they had to absorb upon first hearing. they were just expounding on what legends everyone already was familiar with.

and they are interesting stories, and they are funny and smart. and I love the Iliad, the Odyssey, and Don Quixote. heck I love 1001 Arabian Nights, just not quite as much. so yes I do enjoy Orlando Furioso. but it might take me a thousand years to remember and understand all the twists.

for light reading, no, no, no. definitely not light reading.

for my purposes of enjoyment, it rates a 3 (worth reading).

for appreciation of the poet’s genius, it rates a 5 (don’t miss it). so, if you’re going to study literature for a course, I’d suggest this. if you’re just looking to pass the time, you might want to keep looking, unless you’ve got a thousand years to spare ;)

See more progress on: read all the books on my lists

more on A Rage To Live by John O'Hara

this one has spoilers.


*******


do I need to say, just because I think a book is well-written and enjoyable, it does not immediately follow that I am in league with the characters and their questionable behavior? I hope people already know that. I applaud a writer who can make a work of fiction seem, well, not like fiction but, instead, real. and if the work seems real, then it's usually because the characters seem like real people. and real people make mistakes and behave badly, some moreso than others.

it bothered me that Sidney died when he did. it honestly didn't affect Grace much, as she had lost him anyway. Sidney did not deserve to die; but perhaps it was more merciful to die than to have his means of leaving-with-cover (army/navy) withdrawn from him, or for him to go on living in his incredibly lonely, alienated way, completely disillusioned now with the one thing in his life that had made him happy. or maybe that's just an excuse; I mean, getting over it and moving on (no matter what "it" is) is always hard, but it is doable and there are great rewards for success.

Grace, no I do not think that Grace was just an independent soul blah blah blah. she knew the rules of the game, esp back then, and she broke them, and went on breaking them. she knew the price and she kept on. I know she says she couldn't help it, but just because something is hard isn't an excuse to stop resisting. in fact, that's when you need to resist the most. honestly I think Grace was spoiled more than independent; she never seemed to think much for herself at all, and even less did she think about other people. she never learned how to restrain her id, and never tried. you can't be independent if you're not even in control of yourself. that's just being a different kind of slave. I have no real respect for Grace; if she hadn't money, then she and more importantly her children could easily have ended up in destitute circumstances.

not to say that the men in the novel were angels, either. I think there is something to the idea that Roger Bannon was homosexual, and trying to compensate. he certainly was full of hate for women (I'm not saying that gay men are all misogynists) which seemed to stem from an unconscious hate of cultural expectations regarding gender roles, or hate for himself for failing to naturally want what his culture expected him to want.

Hollister... ot, that name had me thinking of The Happy Hollisters all the way through the book... I'm not sure what was his problem. he seemed full of hate as well. why? he had the wife and kids that he always set out to have, and the job that he'd always wanted too. he had the respect and the attention of the community and into the wider world. maybe he did just get a swelled head, thinking that he was not just better than everyone else but that they were beneath him, because he surely set out to have it all, including wife and mistress. but at the same time, he knew that he was destroying his relationship with his wife, kids, and that whole side of the family, and that he was ruining the future of a girl he sometimes claimed to love--- he seemed determined to destroy them, and in so doing, destroy his reputation, his means of livelihood, and himself, utterly. it seems to simple to say that power corrupts. maybe power did corrupt, and he hated himself for that, and turned against himself in the end. although we never know what happened to them in the long run, no matter how that turned out, the damage was done, irrepairably.

all that blarney about "principles"---coming from Jack Hollister! a man of no principles at all! and Amy's father trying to believe it, because he thinks he's supposed to? does it make you a better person when you knowingly let people use you? do you think the kids ought to grow up knowing that that's okay, that's the way to go? bah. oh I know, I know, believe me I know. most male-dominated cultures have (in the past at least) taken that line. the woman is not the authority and no matter what the man does, she should forgive him and try to make him a better person through her own example (or butt the hell out, either way). the man-man connection here in this context (trying to get Amy's father on his side just because they're both men)(and damn it, did it not work?) always reminds me of something Charlotte Perkins Gilman might say---why should the males compete against the males when it's so much easier for the males to compete with and dominate over the females instead?

moving on.

Sidney now, what a sad one. did he actually believe in this courtly love? seeing her at first sight and wanting nothing else but to worship her and give her everything she wanted? did he actually think that? that's very sad to me. that is the source of his loneliness more even than his foreigness to Fort Penn. did he choose that for himself, this exclusion from the world, knowingly? he wanted a fantasy life, and in order to have that, the real world must always be far away.

Charlie Jay and Brock, my goodness. what is there to say? who could be worse except maybe Miles, Roger's friend. how can you be friends with someone who rapes your sister or beats the mahen hell out of an unarmed woman, for no reason? don't you have to believe in the kind of person your friend is, in order to actually be real friends? I'm not saying people in general shouldn't have the chance to be forgiven and to have a second chance, in general... but if those crimes stem from an innate part of the personality or a still-cultivated mindset, etc, if, in short, the wellspring of the trouble is still well and sprung (if you'll forgive me), then you know damn well what kind of "friend" you have there, don't you? how can you be friends unless you are just as bad and, furthermore, don't care? what, nobody wants to be a better person anymore? everyone is so disillusioned and full of apathy and dislike for themselves and their fellows that this is acceptable?

the other women characters confound me. oh, I understand Amy Hollister, all right (maybe not the part about going back, but that's a difference in our times; I'll give her that). but the others... Connie, I can see how she ended up in a relationship with another woman. I wondered why the hell she always hung around Grace like that; who would? she didn't really seem to be wanting favor or priviledge; it was probably just a crush (or maybe a bit more, since it lasted so long). but in short the other women sound like the apathetic bunch I just mentioned. we really do talk ourselves into believing whatever we want, don't we? ("you keep on building the lies
that you make up for all that you lack")

well, 700 pages. I'm sure there's more to say. but for nowI should probably wrap this up. I know when I start to quote lyrics--- that's my cue lol

Bambert's Book of Missing Stories by Reinhardt Jung, rating =4/5.

lovely, lovely little book about 175 pages. very reminiscent of The Little Prince in some ways and A Wrinkle in Time in others. written for children, but a great read for adults too!

since it is such a short read, I’ll save it all for you to discover on your own.

See more progress on: read all the books on my lists

A Rage to Live, by John O'Hara. rating = 5.

I couldn’t sleep, so I put the Encyclopedia on hold for a while :p and finished A Rage to Live.

wow.

there is an introduction in my edition here, which states that O’Hara was considered in the same circle as Faulkner and Hemingway and Fitzgerald during his time. I was immediately intrigued, as I’m a huge fan of Faulkner, and of course I’ve studied Hemingway and Fitzgerald, but I hadn’t so much as heard of O’Hara.

more’s the pity! what an excellent author! I should have known; the read was suggested by none other than John McWhorter , who also suggested The Murder of Helen Jewett . I loved that book as well. they’re not the same kind of book, by any means, but this linguist knows his literature!

thank you Professor McWhorter ;)

A Rage to Live is an epic, to say the least. 700 pages. but more than just length… it’s not just length that blabs on and on and on and tries to impress the reader with big words or endear its characters by means of archetypal dramas. no, this is 100% pure, real Americana. straight-forward, undiluted, real people, the way real people act, talk, and go about their lives justifying their actions and their behavior to themselves.

the setting is the turn of the century, 1900, Pennsylvania. I’ve never been to Pennsylvania, and pardon me but I’ve never thought much about it either. not that I think much about New York or Vermont or the West Indes. it just hadn’t come up. but O’Hara puts you there. and the vista from which you experience it is not just from the upper class, not just the middle class, not just the poor and the servants. you experience life from all levels, and it’s just like you’ve grown up there watching it unfold before your very eyes. from life on the farm to life in the city, perfectly natural. from the eyes of the craftsman to the eyes of the newspaperman to the eyes of the idle gentry. from the native’s perspective to the foreigner’s perspective. from the Irish view point to the Pennsylvanian Dutch view point to the Black American view point. from the child to the adult.

if there is a universal truth about Americans, it is that we are all so darn independent and we all have our own views, independent from each other (comparatively, considering other cultures in the world), and that there are so many different kinds of us. O’Hara captures this perfectly and conveys it in a straight-shooting manner that makes no character evil or pure (but sometimes both); in other words: real.

the Caldwells are a prominent, practically the founding, family in the fictional Pennsylvanian capital of Fort Penn. (O’Hara’s replacement for Harrisburg.) to sum up very very quickly, the story covers their daughter, Grace Caldwell, from early childhood to her later life, and documents the events leading to the inevitable fall of the Caldwell family; and also how at no point in time does Grace herself ever consider herself fallen or defeated, or even, one might interpret, responsible. O’Hara starts the narrative in media res, and then, when our attention has been seized by the collar, backs up and explains things (very deftly) while building up momentum towards the revelation of secrets we just almost guessed and, even though we see where it all must lead in the end, we read on in apt fascination.

highly recommended!

O’Hara was highly praised for his short stories especially; I’ll have to go read them all now :D

some of my favorite quotes, trying for no spoilers…

page 25: They would all go on doing what they wanted to do and what they didn’t want to do, without him, for the next few minutes and for as long as the war would last, and afte the war when he came back he would try to fit himself into the place he had occupied before the war, but that would be easy and impossible. It would be easy because there had been no place for him and because there had been no place for him it would be reimpossible for him to reinstate himself in the place he had occupied before the war.

page 143: Emily Caldwell, an Episcopalian by membership, held the private opinion that churches got between the individual and God, and she was not at all sure that she did not regard Christ as part of the Church and therefore in the way. Her religion was between herself and God the Father, with whom she felt on good terms.

page 157: the important weddings in Fort Penn always had followed the system of taking care of the sheep and the goats by inviting the persons of goat status to the church but not to the reception.

page 324: ...so I walked in here and immediately am accused of doing something that’s so against my principles that it’s as though you never knew me. As though we’d never had any intimacy of body or mind, Grace. I don’t know how many million words we’ve spoken to each other, but apparently not one word, or not ten million word had the effect of showing you what I believe in. All this time you haven’t been listening! Nothing I said, or did! for that matter, has taught you what kind of person I am.

page 341: But there it is, the fact that you need one other person, just one, that shows that—-well, I tell you what it does. It breaks the ice. It breaks the illusion of satisfactory solitude.

page 395: Billy turned his face away from them and put his head in his arms and lay on the floor, weeping in the inconsolable, desperate, eternal way of a child who no longer is a baby but has not yet grown up into anything else. There is nothing to say to him, nothing to do for him, nothing that will stop him, and until he does stop it is the most awful sound we can hear because it is the eternal cry without hope, plea and protest to nobody and nothing.

the death on page 415.

page 421: The world’s still one-sided, in favor of the men, because the women like it that way too. They like the men to fetch and carry and make the money, and it’s a small price the women pay, to be taken care of after they lose their prettiness and their teeth and run to fat.

page 604: She smiled. “My normal self? I wish I knew what that was.” / “Now, now, now,” he said. “Now, now.”

agh! the audacity and hypocrisy of 665,666. planned, no doubt; a commentary, a message to those who would hear. but agh!

page 688: It was like a small circle, the mouth of the pistol, getting larger and larger. Invisible, but you knew it was there. It got bigger and bigger until we were all in it. Not only the three of us, but [“X”] too. And that was the world. <--- this is friggin brilliant

page 693, for the linguists! ”...to bear the brunt of the whole thing,” said Brock. / “What is this brunt?” said Renee [from France]. / “To bear the brunt,” said Brock. “It’s an expression, like, uh, carrying the load. At least that’s what I think it means.” / “A brunt is a load? A brunt of coal, for instance?” said Renee. / Brock stood up. “God damn it, this is the way I’m learning to speak English. I say something I’ve been saying all my life, and she wants to know what it means and I have to look it up in the dictionary. Edgar, do you know what a brunt is? How many tons in a brunt? How many cubic yards in a brunt of sand?”

5= must read

See more progress on: read all the books on my lists

a word on the Brontes; esp the novel Shirley

obviously there are more books to go; I have not read all the Bronte novels... but a couple of brief comments in general.

the prejudice towards other nationalities in the books are not to the Brontes' credit. I did not comment on them in the reviews because I dismissed them out of hand, but I don't want anyone to think I in any way agree with that nonsense.

I was greatly surprised to find that er the whole world seems to like Jane Eyre the best, and then Villete, which they consider to be a masterpiece, and they dismiss Shirley as badly-written due to the death of Emily during its completion.

wow. I wonder what planet they are all on... but then again, it's probably me, and I'm on Anuurn, or the earth of the Atevi, by default.

they seemed to think that naming it Shirley even though Shirley was not introduced until several chapters into the story was an indication that Charlotte had changed her focus (as if the book were intended at first to be "Caroline") midway through the writing. um, no. it seems obvious to me that she titled it Shirley and then made us really want to find out who this Shirley was by delaying her entrance. it piques the curiousity. Caroline is the foil. she is the Normal. she is the Typical nineteenth-century English female. and we get so caught up in Caroline that when Shirley does come into play, we can't help but at least temporarily believe that it isn't for the better. Shirley is the Atypical here.

yes, Caroline is (said to be) like Emily. but Charlotte is not a simpleton; she is not going to just write a book about her sister. she instead makes a statement by comparing the Typical with the Atypical, and what better foil for Shirley (a powerful, wealthy, independent woman unafraid to stand up for herself) than Caroline/Emily? Charlotte paints the Typical first so that we can truly appreciate the Atypical!

and what was this business about how the other readers seemed to be bothered when ~ "they were dragged out of matters of the heart and into the riots"? what are they talking about? Charlotte did an Excellent job of placing her characters into real history. every love story has a background, people. all those "matters of the heart" don't just float around in nothingness. and I think Charlotte described the action scenes in a very attention-getting way. no, the girls did not join the fray or anything (alas, that would have been interesting! but Shirley is no Pyanfar or Jago), but it was realistic and exciting. especially for the kind of novel it was.

Jane Eyre has real flaws to me. she just happens to fall ill outside of her long-lost cousins' house? she just happens to come into a fortune? Bertha just happens to commit suicide? Her blind husband just happens to partially regain his eyesight? or, moreso than that, he happens to be so wounded in the first place as to bring him down a notch into her economic class? to say nothing of St John! bah. (her father, Patrick Bronte, went to a seminary called St John's... I wonder---no, I hope, I believe, she was making more of a pointed reference to that and to religion in general... but god that St John was enough to kill it for me.)

Villette.... as I said, it doesn't even have an ending! that is a serious crime to me. ok, so Dead Souls didn't have an ending, but part of the manuscript was missing; and in any case, you KNOW what happens. in Villette, you don't. you can guess, but either way you guess would be equally valid. it's just very odd. it would have been much better if Charlotte had ended it right as Paul Emmanuel left on the voyage and Lucy was setting out on her new employment. we wouldn't have known for sure THEN either, but it would have been more artfully done than saying his ship was returning but did it run into storms or did it come safely into the harbor? well, I'll let you guess, dear reader. ... obnoxious.

and I understand about Lucy wanting to find a husband that would be a good life partner for her, but all her other heroines had that going on as well. it's not a new concept.

of course in all the books, the girl ends up married anyway (or, in Villette, engaged to be married). which is so beyond the current experience that it is hard for me to really be happy for them... Wuthering Heights, well, they had an abominable time of it, for sure, but, it ended with a marriage and a happily ever after.

so, basically, Shirley is the best :p and I need more sleep

The Professor, by Charlotte Bronte. rating = 3.

this is the first book that Charlotte Bronte ever wrote. it was submitted for publication at the same time as Emily's first book, Wuthering Heights, and Anne's first book, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. what a loss that Emily and Anne did not live long enough to write more than they did... sigh. Wuthering Heights as a first novel? I will forever think that is impressive. especially when you take into account that, as great a novelist as Charlotte became, her first book, The Professor, was refused for publication.

The Professor was only published after Charlotte wrote Jane Eyre etc, more as a favor to her public who were by then curious what her first novel was about.

it IS a nice book; I do recommend it. but it is obviously her first book, and the pacing is off, and the storytelling needs work, and some things seem rather odd. she uses many of the same themes in her other, successful novels, which means that there is substance here, but she handles it much better in her later works. this is also the only novel where Charlotte writes from the perspective of a man. when she writes as a woman, it is so much more natural and she can do more with it, comfortably and fluently.

favorite quotes:

how dreadful to find a lump of wax and wood laid in my bosom, a half-idiot clasped in my arms, and to remember that I had made of this my equal---nay, my idol---to know that I must pass the rest of my dreary life with a creature incapable of understanding what I said, of appreciating what I thought, or of sympathising with what I felt! (1106)

I went to bed, but somoething feverish and fiery had got into my veins which prevented me from sleeping much that night. (1108)

God knows I am not by nature vindictive; I would not hurt a man because I can no longer trust or like him; but neither my reason nor feelings are of the vacillating order---they are not of that sand-like sort where impressions, if soon made, are as soon effaced. Once convinced that my friend's disposition is incompatible with my own, once assured that he is indelibly stained with certain defects obnoxious to my principles, and I dissolve the connection . (1108-Charlotte is perhaps an INFJ? lol)

Fate! thou hast done thy worst, and now thou standest before me resting thy hand on thy blunted blade. Ay; I see thine eye confront mine and demand why I still live, why I still hope. Pagan demon, I credit not thine onmipotence, and so cannot succumb to they power. (1118)

"Down, stupid tormentors," cried she; "the man has done his duty; you shall not bait him thus by thoughts of what might have been; he relinquished a temporary and contingent good to avoid a permanent and certain evil; he did well. Let him reflect now, and when your blinding dust and deafening hum subside, he will discover a path." (1149)

(and yes this now completes my reading of the omnibus Charlotte and Emily Bronte: the complete novels. I want to see The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, and Agnes Gray, etc, but that might have to wait a while...)

Villette, Charlotte Bronte. rating = 3.5

bah I'm having to type this again. let's hope Netscape doesn't close on me for every passing plane... it puts me out of countenance; it's disconcerting and disheartening to try and reweave all the tangents again.

first I must (since I haven't done so before now) throw out there that it is very nice to be aware of small changes that have taken place in the English language between now and Bronte's time. otherwise one might be confounded when somewhat puritanical characters publicly speak of "making love" etc. the changes are not so great as between now and Shakespeare's time (wherefore art thou Romeo = why are you Romeo? not where are you, Romeo? and silly = innocent and deserving of compassion, not a dingbat; and wit = knowledge, not just clever funny sayings) but they can throw you off if you are unaware.

second I say that it is also very nice to be aware of events in Bronte's life, as much of her work is either autobiographical or at least stems from direct experience. in Villette, a young (English) country girl makes her way to the Continent, to live in the city as a teacher. I knew before hand that Charlotte herself attended and later taught at a school in Belgium for a number of years, and her few visits to London did include watching an Opera, and I was already interested in what she would write of that.

third... I like Shirley better; Shirley was more well-rounded and seamless. Villette is engaging but seems quite disjointed. the main character, Lucy Snowe, does not tell all about her life, and only the interesting bits are relayed, with some gaps in between, and even then I know there are interesting bits that she just never revealed. what happened exactly in the past, in her childhood, to which she often and vaguely refers? I guess we just won't know, as she never says. it's none of our business yet she will taunt us with it. in terms of the basic story, it is as if Lucy is just being mischievous for not telling us certain things and keeping us in suspense, or not letting on that she knows something that the reader (or, indeed, the other characters) would expect her to mention. and (I'm not sure I can forgive her for it) , there is no ending. she takes you right up to the ending, and then says oh it looks like it might not happen after all, but I will just stop here so that the reader can imagine it whichever way they choose. bah!

I do forgive her for it, because I know what she was going through at this time of her life, but I know she could have done better and that disappoints me. I can forgive the author, but I don't think I can forgive the work.

I still say you should read it though; it is still engaging in its own way. Bronte not at her best is better than many others. I am puzzled by the main character, but also by a Mr. Paul Emmanuel. and the first time I saw the name Dr. John, I did a double-take, thinking that St. John had wormed his way back in there somehow! no, I guess he's in India or somewhere, not France, thank God. Bronte turned her talent more towards describing the people in this story, and there was not near as much about nature or weather. the people were interesting, but again just not as interesting (to me) as (or maybe just more at odds with me than) the characters of Shirley.

the story does have a ghost, though. as well as some very witty passages (esp the exchanges between Dr. John and his mother, and esp the turban). and a most awesome quote!

quotes:

so peril, loneliness, an uncertain future, are not oppressive evils, so long as the frame is healthy and the faculties are employed; so long, especially, as Liberty lends us her wings and Hope guides us by her star. (800)

got all the above except the wings; Liberty must be off lunching with Human Justice (1000)... I've tried substituting a cape, but with mixed results.

Wise, firm, faithless; secret, crafty, passionless; watchful and inscrutable; acute and insensate---withal perfectly decorous---what more could be desired? (811)

that could almost be discussing the Guild

"Shall I do?" was her question.

"Do?" said I. "There are different ways of doing; and, by my word, I don't understand yours." (818)

not a living thing save herself was in the room, except indeed some gold fish in a glass globe, some flowers in pots, and a broad July sunbeam. (827)

"Who is inthe wrong, then, Lucy?"

"Me---Dr. John---me; and a great abstraction on whose wide shoulders I like to lay the mountains of blame they were sculpted to bear: me and Fate."

" 'Me' must take better care in future..." (874)

here is the most awesome quote:

No mockery in this world ever sounds to me so hollow as that of being told to cultivate happiness. What does such advice mean? Happiness is not a potato, to be planted in mould, and tilled with manure. Happiness is a glory shining far down upon us out of Heaven. She is a divine dew which the soul, on certain of its summer mornings, feels dropping upon it from the amarnth bloom and the golden fruitage of Paradise. (912)

yes, indeed my friends, Happiness is no potato!

I should give it a 4 just for that quote!

Shirley, Charlotte Bronte. rating = 5

it really isn't about Shirley at all. first we meet three curates, and then the rector, and then the miller, Robert Moore, and then eventually we get around to Caroline, the rector's niece and Moore's cousin. just when we think that Caroline and Robert are becoming close, oops, reality. no time for whims. then enters Shirley, finally, and she brings other people in with her as well. just when you think you've gotten everybody figured out, something new becomes obvious, and the relationships between the characters shift. again. everything, though, is superbly realistic (if sometimes a bit convenient), and all is based and firmly set in historical context.

I don't know; is it just me? I thoroughly enjoyed this book. much more than Wuthering Heights, and more than Jane Eyre too. I wish I had read Shirley, oh, a decade or two ago...

I especially like how the reader has no idea who "Shirley" even is until about? halfway through the book. and, back in Bronte's time, one would assume Shirley to be a man, so that would come as a surprise as well. a brilliant stroke.

there are so many view points and little stories within the story; the tale really comes alive. I can picture this place, which apparently even by Bronte's day was much changed. the social commentary is interesting without being too preachy, as different characters have different ways of seeing things. it rather balances out. Charlotte knows how to write... I wonder, since Wuthering Heights was Emily's first attempt at a novel, how very superb SHE would have become as well. both of them are very inventive in how they spin their yarns.

Charlotte does seem to write very long sentences. she also seems to discuss more about the fine points of nature, both mother nature and the nature of the characters... in contrast to Emily. this is mostly why I prefer her of the two, I suppose.

I definitely liked the ending of Shirley (romantic as it is) over that of Jane Eyre. I like how the endings suited the characters... as this story isn't just about one person, but several. actually, a whole slew of them ;) it is slightly eyebrow-raising when people turn out to be/ end up related to each other... I think though that Charlotte pokes fun at that a bit herself, when Robert teases Caroline that Shirley's mysterious lover must be none other than Caroline's uncle, and that they will soon be married, and Shirley will be her aunt.

here are some favorite quotes. the page numbers are from the omnibus I'm reading Charlotte and Emily Bronte: The Complete Novels.

"Against legitimacy is arrayed usurpation: against modest, single-minded, righteous , and brave resistance to encroachment, is arrayed boastful, double-tongued, selfish, and treacherous ambition to possess. God defend the right!"

"God often defends the powerful." (462)

"I mean to say nothing: but I can think what I please, you know, Mr. Helstone, both about France and England; and about revolutions, and regicides, and restorations in general; and about the divine right of kings, which you often stickle for in your sermons, and about the duty of non-resistance, and the sanity of war, and---" (463)

imagination discussed (sarcastically, I do hope) on 467.

"You seem a fine fellow," said Moore, quite coolly and drily; "you don't care for showing me that you are a double-dyed hypocrite, that your trade is fraud: you expect indeed to make me laugh at the cleverness with which you play your coarsely farcical part, while at the same time you think you are deceiving the men behind you." (511)

from the beginning of Chapter Ten on 528 to "Long may it be ere England really becomes a nation of shop-keepers!" on 529--- sounds way too much like modern capitalist America.

"...other people solve it by saying, 'Your place is to do good to others, to be helpful whenever help is wanted.' That is right in some measure, and a very convenient doctrine for the people who hold it; but I perceive that certain sets of human beings are very apt to maintain that other sets should give up their lives to them and their service, and then they requite them by praise: they call them devoted and virtuous. Is this enough? Is it to live? Is there not a terrible hollowness, mockery, want, craving, in that existence which is given away to others, for want of something of your own to bestow it on? I suspect there is. Does virtue lie in abnegation of self? I do not believe it. Undue humility makes tyranny; weak concession creates selfishness. .... Each human being has his share of rights. I suspect it would conduce to happiness and welfare of all, if each knew his allotment, and held to it as tenaciously as a martyr to his creed." (532)

"...I know certain lonely, quite untrodden glades, carpeted green. I know groups of trees that ravish the eye with their perfect, picture-like effects: rude oak, delicate birch, glossy beech, clustered in contrast; and ash trees stately as Saul, standing isolated, and superannuated wood-giants clad in bright shrouds of ivy. Miss Keeldar, I could guide you." (550)

"Obtrusiveness is a crime; forwardness is a crime; and both disgust: but love!--- no purest angel need blush to love! And when I see or hear either man or woman couple shame with love, I know their minds are coarse, their associations debased. Many who think themselves refinded ladies and gentlemen, and on whose lips the word 'vulgarity' is forever hovering, cannot mention 'love' without betraying their own innate and imbecile degradation: it is a low feeling in their estimation, connected only with low ideas for them."

"You describe three-fourths of the world, Caroline." (603)

"Shirley, you chatter so, I can't fasten you: be still. And after all, authors' heroines are almost as good as authoress's heroes." (620)

"Say, Mr. Yorke!" was the answer, the speaker meantime walking fast from wall to wall of the oak-parlour. "Say? I have a great deal to say, if I could get it out in lucid order which I never can do." (628)

"My consolation is, indeed, that God hears many a groan, and compassionates much grief which man stops his ears against, or frowns on with impotent contempt. I say impotent, for I observe that to such grievances as society cannot readily cure, it usually forbids utterance, on the pain of its scorn: this scorn being only a tinselled cloak to its deformed weakness. People hate to be reminded of ills they are unable or unwilling to remedy: such reminder, in forcing on them a sense of their own incapacity, or a more painful sense of an obligation to make some unpleasant effort, troubles their ease and shakes their self-complacency." (639)

I intend to finish the rest of the omnibus I'm reading before I compare the Bronte novels too much or discuss much else about them... I want to read Anne's The Tenant as well, if I can... I don't have it but it might be available to read online... anyway, I'm trying for just first impressions in these entries here.

ok ok and THEN I'll write something about Deliverer...

Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte. rating: 4

I wonder at myself: why did I start the habit of using a ratings system for what I read? it is quite random at times what I rate a book---especially the first time I read a certain one. subsequent rereads tend to give a more accurate feeling for me.

and how can I rate one writing style or genre against another? well, I can't... I can't directly compare a novel published in 1847 with one published in 2007... I can only say "I think this is great stuff" and give it a 4.

Wuthering Heights may well deserve a 5; if I still think so in a year or a decade, after subsequent rereads, then it is true. but I will hedge a bit and say 4 for now, because I tend to be over enthusiastic right after reading.

Wuthering Heights has a bit of a ghost story around the campfire feel to me. I read it all in two sittings, and I would have read it in one if the real world would just have left me to it! the people or culture or SOMETHING about that time period fascinates me... in part because it seems to me that everyone is so capricious with their emotions. love is vowed to be utter and for ever, and everything is a flurry of kisses and eponyms, that is, until the other smiles in a funny way or misunderstands a word and then the heart is cold and dead to the world. people are outrageously angry and then suddenly laugh it all away; people are amazingly cruel but then call you naughty for not being fond of them. it amazes me. they seem particularly detached about suffering. I guess they are surrounded by it. if a person is crying out in pain, they complain about the noise and then shut them off in a room alone. same with their own baby or mother as any stranger. other people's pains seem an inconvenience to them, as if there were no connection whatsoever on a human level. they'll smack a kid til he's bleeding out of the ears and permanently brain damaged, and then blame the kid forever more about the consequences.

not quite charming by my standards, so I find it hard to be really drawn into any love story in such a setting.

somebody told me this was about the love between Catherine and Heathcliff and how that love destroyed themselves and everyone around them... but love seemed to have very little to do with it. cruelty and revenge for said cruelty seems to bulk of it. obsession, on Heathcliff's part, but hardly love. one wonders what they meant by Love at all.

that said, the way Emily Bronte told the story is quite creative and well-done. I wanted to find out what happened even when I was completely dispossessed of any real feelings for the characters: I had to find out how the plot concluded and how it was revealed.

a fine story!

also of course I am a linguaphile, and I loved seeing some "new" words and different usages of familiar ones. I love it when she wrote that the rain "plashed". it didn't splash, it plashed. I get a little chill on such encounters. and then names! I'm so odd lol. and then of course, Emily Bronte is a quite talented wordsmith:

He was, and is yet most likely, the most wearisomest self-righteous Pharisee that ever ransacked a Bible to rake the promises to himself and fling the curses on his neighbors. (p. 296 of the omnibus Charlotte and Emily Bronte: the complete novels)

yes, I finished Deliverer

quite a while ago. I don't want to write a review or jot down my thoughts just yet; I'd rather give it a re-read. I have been trying to re-read it, and cannot bring myself to do so. I realize this is acutely pathetic, but I've decided to read some Bronte and then get back to it.

maybe I just need a break.

and, like I've said before, the Brontes' works are not so different from Cherryh's planetary romances, so it's nothing out of left field.

coming soon: Wuthering Heights.

and THEN: Deliverer.

Pretender, Foreigner Series #8, by C.J. Cherryh. rating: 4

this is likely to be a longer review because this book irks me. in a good way.

(ETA: I've posted a new and very relevant comment about this book, *here* --- the review is not complete without it. ty)

I am the kind of person who watches the Olympics, on pins and needles the whole time. not because I am eager to find out who wins; no. because I am thinking how very very hard some of those events are, and how long and hard the athletes practiced and trained for this, and how this could be the emotional and professional culmination of their lives to-date, and how very easily every hope and dream they'd ever had could be dashed. I especially like to watch the figure skating, and I know that I'm probably more entertaining to watch at some points than the actual event. me, leaning this way and then that on the couch; me, suddenly leaping into the air; me, dropping to my knees and clenching my hands... yep. well, Jase does that (much more moderately) while on aircraft, and Bren does that with space craft. They try to help the machines fly, bodily, through the air, and I try to help the athlete do a triple Salchow or a flawless gymnastic floor routine. (and no I am not at all as graceful!)

I can't help it. if something goes wrong for that athlete, I feel it. I feel so embarassed or ashamed or completely overwhelmed it's like it happened to me personally. it's just how I am... about certain things.

for instance: when Bren Cameron says or does something that seems to me to be clueless (and/or possibly having dramatic social consequences). I feel it. several times (too many to count, really, if I can say that about a Foreigner book and not be a heretic) I found myself closing Pretender, tossing it to the other side of the table/couch/etc, and then covering my face---as if that could stop anything from happening. I haven't tended to do that with the other books in this series, so it really bothered me this time around. in Foreigner (meaning #1), one has ample ocassion to think Bren, you fool!, but he's an honest fool; it's all ignorance. how is he supposed to know? by Pretender, you think he's probably supposed to know.

and it's like something Gary Larson (The Far Side) once said... in a cartoon, the mouse can drop an anvil on the cat's head and pull out all his whiskers, and then the cat can tie the mouse to the tracks of the model train set, aiming the engine at him, but they instantly recover and you can see they're all right. in a comic, you can put the paper down and then three hours later pick it back up, and, yep, those dogs are still playing tethercat. does it never end?

so I pick up Pretender, and, yes, Bren-ji is still stuck in that same awkward place I left him. there's nothing for it but just be brave and read. the hard part is... he doesn't seem to think he's in an awkward place. I feel like he's making a monumental fool of himself in some instances, or just that he's not with the program, and he apparently doesn't pick up on this at all. it about kills me. it seems especially bad for this to happen in Pretender, because by now he really should know better... right?

when I first read Pretender (this is my second read), I was so thrown off by Bren's apparent continuing mistakes and/or misinterpretations that I couldn't enjoy the book at all. I was mad as hell, really, because I didn't enjoy the book one iota. I spent the whole time thinking (and ocassionaly saying aloud): Bren Cameron, you fool, you fool! What are you thinking? Get it together! and I couldn't focus on the plot or anything else going on in the book because of this.

I know he's a human and he always will be the outsider and he will never understand it all, but it seems he slips and forgets things he already knew... ok, he's been out of the loop, out saving the galaxy, for two years, and he's been preoccupied with surving several battles and attempts on his life more recently, and he's terminally short on sleep. so there is plausible excuse. I have to give him (&Cherryh) that. still, it is acutely painful for me to see Bren's mistakes when I know how good he can be, when I have previously known him to get it right. this is what Pretender was for me: Bren, from cover to cover, seriously off his stride, still reeling from the guilt he assigns himself for the upset at home, and therefore not being able to follow the plot. yes, you read that right; and how familiar it sounds: Bren takes the circumstances very personally and it throws him off quite profoundly. see, I can fugue just almost as badly as he can lol. I knew there was a point in there somewhere--- it took me until just now to see it clearly: I'm so much like Bren that, on the first read, I did *exactly* what Bren did. I was thrown off so much by Bren's mistakes (albeit different ones than what threw him off) that I couldn't follow anything else that was going on.

(except for Algini... I can always follow Algini ;) ).

well, enough for that irony. back to the specifics:

at the beginning of Destroyer (#7), the ship captains et al wonder at the thinking behind the aiji-dowager, the aiji-meni, AND the paidhi-aiji all getting on a space shuttle and making themselves a very tempting target, much less all of them heading straight for the heart of the fray. Bren explains to them, in a matter-of-fact way, that the aiji-dowagers follwers would never respect her (or follow her) if she sat up on the station, safe and protected. atevi only follow leaders who actually, physicaly, at the place and in the moment, lead.

so why is it that he keeps thinking, once they're on the planet, that the best course of action is to lay low and hide? especially all his internal postulations involving hiding the heir out of harm's way until everything has been taken care of and decided? Bren does seem to have problems (still) thinking in atevi terms---unless he's explaining the atevi culture to someone else. then, he has little problem. when he is just thinking to himself, however, he doesn't seem to engage that regulatory check, that but-they're-not-human catch, as often as he should. Cajeiri is not a human child, not even a "regular" atevi child. Cajeiri is aijiin, and as such, especially since he is coming into his majority in a tangible way, and can no longer completely hide behind his nonage, he must be present and seen.

but Bren thinks himself to death about how to get Cajeiri out of there, etc. and later he has even convinced himself they should all go back to the station (173)! what the heck, Bren? eh anyway.

and on 52, Bren even says to himself that Tabini has everything in hand and knows what he's doing, and yet Bren goes on for still most of the book about trying to get the report to Tabini, knowing that is not in Tabini's plans... ? sheesh Bren! and Bren has always been forward, and almost without shame, but temerity indeed on 54. I had to take a break at that point. he really talks himself into it, and out of sense, on 90. Jago has to spell it out for him on 145. Bren is always outmaneuvered by Tabini, and yet he never seems to be able to fathom that Tabini-aiji is the absolute paradigm of a quick-thinking, quick-moving leader of absolute action and absolute power.

(mia stops to sigh over Tabini-aiji. esp Tabini-aiji on 307. sigh. sigh.)

Bren has never quite looked ahead to what Tabini-aiji would, predictably, ask him to do. Bren doesn't seem to have that knack. not that anyone can get one up on Tabini, hah, I laugh at such a foolish thought, but Bren should be able to at least keep up on what Tabini would ask the paidhi-aiji to do... and know that Tabini would not leave his followers and go kiting off in an airplane.

ok I'll move on.

problems within the Assassin's Guild itself... very troubling. this idea is especially alarming. great idea for a story and well carried-out. ;)

Murdi. very important theme, almost as much so if not moreso than man'chi. explored more here, and given to Bren at the end. this hopefully is good, since it is *within* man'chi, but it still seems a bit ominous, because man'chi can sometimes change. gratitude and favors are discussed much, as on 167.

in Explorer we had a fight on a space station. in Pretender we have a fight in a train station.

in Foreigner, innocent Bren was schooled in the mortal realities of assassins and military engagements (get away from the window, Bren). In Pretender, innocent Cajeiri is schooled in the mortal realities of assassins and military engagements (get away from the window, Cajeiri).

extraordinary quotes:

"I shall try to deserve you..." (29)

(which reminds me of the Sound of Music/Foreigner dream I had: "I might have had a wicked childhood..." ;) )

Algini nodded. "A point of certainty. You are stability in these matters. More than the dowager herself, you represent a sure, simple number in all calculations. This reassures even your enemies, nandi." (115)

indeed ;D

"One is very tired, Banichi-ji. One is ever so tired, and Bren-ji is an ever so much warmer blanket."

"Is it?" Banichi was amused. An eyebrow moved.

"Than nandi, yes, it is." He managed a smile. "One appreciates a warm blanket, now and again, Nichi-ji."(266)

(and might I add, if Bren-ji is a warm blanket, then Lord of the Heavens is a bucket of cold water. I positively cringe any time I read that title. one can never tell if it is a matter of high regard or just a bad joke on Tabini-aiji's part. cringe, I say.)

not just man'chi, but specificially aijiin, pg. 82.

Algini, 111-116. 123. 177. ah, I have always loved Algini, and now you start to see why. tall, dark, handsome, unreachable, unknowable. and he's an assassin (or should I say, the assassin?) to boot. 221. 259.

one of the best parts of the Foreigner series occurs when Bren knocks Tabini to the floor because of an attempted assassination--- and Cenedi just *stands* in front of Ilisidi, and stares down the entire joint session. I don't talk about Cenedi overmuch, but he's such an amazing character.

and we finally do have more Banichi (and not just Jago, whom I also venerate). 29 and 267 especially. ah. Bren has a staff of Genies. and I mean that rather magically, but in the English sense of the word, which is not derived from djinn but actually from the word Genius. they are all such wonderful characters.

Cajeiri & Tristen (Lord of Ynafel etc)... one sees abundant similarities.


bugs:


we know Banichi is from Talidi province... I guess we might not know which district of Talidi province? (271)

the matter of the apartments, on 259. hmmm... what happened to Bren's own apartments, given to him by Tabini? he wasn't staying in the Ategeini apartments recently... unless the other apartments had been reappropriated for some reason while he was in space. who knows? you'd think they would at least have been mentioned though.


possible spoilers of sorts:

regarding Cajeiri having rooms of his own, my conjecture is that Cajeiri might be staying in Ilisidi's apartments while she is not in residence. I first thought the Atageini apts, since they are next door to Tabini's, but not with that midland staff they wouldn't. they shouldn't. I hope they don't! Ilisidi's apts would be better, and I hope they mean that she is just going to Malguri etc, and that this is not Tabini's way of trying to break Ilisidi's pending mortality to his son... I greatly fear this may be the case.

also, Bren thinks that bringing Algini down from the station changed something in the Guild/ the status of the upheaval in the Guild somehow. but he doesn't seem to put together that it wasn't only Algini that just got back from the heavens... Tano, Algini, Banichi, Jago, and... Cenedi. Cenedi, I tell you. and didn't Tano and Algini go with the aiji-dowager (and therefore with Cenedi) when they were retaking the Bu-javid? and didn't Banichi and Algini coordinate with Cenedi when they took out the other Guild agents at Tirnamardi? well, I still say that it would take a damn lot to beat Algini, but Cenedi is senior at least in age, and there is a very good chance that one or the other is the Guildmaster himself. and if Cenedi is, then probably only Algini knows for sure. I'd guess Cenedi... just from the seniority of age and experience. but Algini would not surprise me in the least either. he's very high up there, if not at the tippy top.

(mia sighs over them all, especially Algini, but all of them really, once again.)

Destroyer, Foreigner Series #7, by C.J. Cherryh. rating: 4.5

we're back from space now. as much as romanticize about space, I much prefer a fracas with the Assassin's Guild over one with the Pilot's Guild. I find Guild Assassins much more interesting. I find non-warehouse-lifestyle culture much more interesting.

and I find planets much more interesting. they have trees.

Bren & co, having completed a strange but passably successful mission, return with potential problems in tow... to find actual and overwhelming problems at home. the government's collapsed, an ambitious fool is in charge, and nobody can find Tabini, or even knows if he is alive. lovely. well, it had to be something of cataclysmic proportions.

Destroyer (#7) is a counterpoint to Explorer (#6), much as the dynamic cornucopia of events in Explorer (#6) contrasted with the slow-paced pyschological intrigue of Defender (#5).

Explorer(#6) was very much Cameron-ci, Cameron-la, Cameron, Cameron, CAMeronnnnn... ah, to be a paidhi of quality! busy, confident Bren Cameron saving the universe and all. Destroyer (#7) pretty much turns that on its head as Bren comes to realize that he has indeed made some egregious mistakes in his thinking and now there is hell to pay (so, he hasn't gotten it, re:enculturation vs biological imperative, not nearly as well as he though