The baby storm looms, dark on the horizon. I plan on finishing the next martin book before she gets here, and we’ll see how I do after that.
George R.R. Martin - A Feast For Crows
This book is the first of the series that is a chore to finish, and to me that speaks highly of the three previous books, being as long as they are, and yet being so propulsive. It is the sort of book you’ll only like if you are already deeply engrossed in the world, and still, you’ll enjoy it begrudgingly. This is the book that a song of fire and ice hipster would claim as their favorite. The story with this book is this: the author realized as he was writing it that it was getting too long, and decided to split it into two books. In order to avoid an awful cliffhanger ending, and a fractured and unfinished book, he decided to split the two books in half by character, focusing on a handful of characters in book 4, and saving the rest of the characters for the fifth book. His misstep was that he picked (and introduced new) almost all shitty and grating characters for this book. In its defense, there are a lot of things that get set up that will surely have serious consequences later on. This is still, however, the slow point in the middle of the series, after all the good set up, but before all the interesting resolution starts to unfold. The good news is that by using up all the boring bits in this book, he has saved all the good characters for the next book. So let’s all keep our fingers crossed that he hasn’t lost it, and that book four was just sort of bland.
Daniel Keyes - Flowers for Algernon
I would recommend this book to anybody who has ever worked with children or adults with special needs, it raises a number of interesting ideas about the nature and consequences of intelligence. Another of the “heard of it but never read it” types of classics, the story focuses on a mentally retarded man (Charlie) who receives an experimental surgery that hopes to dramatically increase his brain function. One of the things I found myself thinking about the most during the book is about how much truth there is in the old adage “ignorance is bliss”. The surgery makes him much smarter than before, but this new found cognitive ability gives him not only the ability to remember facts and analyze higher forms of argument and logic, but also to reflect on the possibly awful nature of the people who he knew when he was retarded.
I used to work at a summer camp for children and adults with disabilities, and one of the things I felt was that the more profoundly mentally challenged people were happier than the people who only had mild to moderate disabilities. The mild cases were much more likely to not only know what was wrong with themselves, but also be able to compare how they acted in relation to “normal” people. The most self aware and mildly disabled seemed to me to usually be the most likely to be unhappy, because they were the people who could recognize when they were being mocked, or when they were being excluded based on their differences. I knew a number of children and adults who were mildly disabled, and bristled at being treated as inferiors, or became easily frustrated at their lack of skills in certain areas because they could see where others succeeded, and it tore at them. Now, to be clear, this is by no means a rule. I also knew many people who were severely disabled who seemed quite unhappy, or people who were mildly disabled but had a cheerful demeanor and positive outlook on life. Lots of it came down to personality, and could not be classified or defined by levels or types of disability, but it was still a general pattern I saw.
In the book, Charlie has much the same train of thought. He sees interactions from his past in a new light, whereas before he might have thought that the people he worked with were laughing with him, he could now see clearly that they were laughing at him. One of the other side effects of his surgery is that along with his intellectual growth comes an equal level of emotional growth, which seems logical enough. He goes through a crash course of emotions that most of us get to deal with slowly throughout adolescence and young adulthood in the course of a few weeks. He stumbles through a romantic relationship or two, not knowing how to conduct himself, or how to act on all the new feeling he has . He has to come to terms with his growth from generally childlike to full adult emotions too fast, and as a result his personality changes from generally cheerful to cynical and callous.
I don’t think that the author intends to give you the impression that ignorance is indeed bliss, but it at least shows that it isn’t a simple issue, and that sometimes more knowledge can be as hurtful as it is enlightening.
Daniel Quinn - Ishmael
I have read this book before, maybe 6 or 7 years ago. At the time I remember feeling strongly about it, that it was an important book, with a strong and well argued point. The book is about man’s environmental impact on the earth, and how this problem is larger than just America, China and the rest of the major industrial powers of the world; the claim is that it has been a large scale societal problem for most of humankind sine the rise of planned agriculture in the fertile crescent. The book does not suggest that we drop steady agriculture in favor of hunting and gathering, but more that we acknowledge that we can’t keep consuming and growing at the rate we do without there being dire consequences. It also makes some interesting suggestions about the biblical story of cain and abel (among others) being an allegory for the dominance of agrarian societies at the time over the pastoral way of life. In the story, cain is shunned for his sins, and is marked as a sinner and driven away. The standard reading of the story makes cain the farmer out to be the villain, and it is suggested that it is told this way because it is originally a myth told from the point of view of the nomadic shepherds of the region. This is noted as ironic because the early Jews who adopted this story in the old testament were most certainly part of an agrarian society, and had adopted somebody else's denouncement of their way of life into their central creation myth.
Many of the ideas in the book are valid and worth discussing, but they are delivered in what now seems to me like a cheap and juvenile manner. I think it would have come across as a more well reasoned book if it had critically analyzed some of its own assertions, instead of just having a one sided discussion often bordering on lecture. It seems comparable to some of the old greek philosophical works, where an idea is presented as a false dialogue by having an “opponent” try to take the idea apart with mostly straw-man arguments, only to be continually rebuffed by the expert on the subject. It might have come across as better written if it had been just a book of non fiction about what the author thinks about the modern ecological movement, or if it was more deeply rooted in a better worked piece of fiction, and you took the ideas from the book in a less direct manner. Instead it seems like the book it beating you over the head with these ideas, all the while sort of weakly pretending to be a work of fiction. Doing some reading about the book after I had finished it to see if my sentiments was shared by anyone else who had come back to the book (they were), I was surprised to find that many people reported that this book was presented to them in a college level course. This is, in my opinion, not college level discourse. Not that i think it is without merit - quite the opposite in fact, there are many good points of discussion presented, I just think it is better suited for critical evaluation by a younger audience. Though I read it and felt moved by it in my post college years, looking back on it now it seems so different, so much less important. I think this is a book best read during that critical impressionable part of your life, where you are open to big, sloppy world changing ideas regardless of how well formed they are. It serves as an excellent reminder to me that while many things in the world have stayed the same, I have changed.
Gary Paulsen: Hatchet
After revisiting Ishmael, I decided to try to read something else I had already read, but from much farther back. I remember being deeply attached to this book at a very young age, some time in grade school. As with the previous book, this is one that needs to be read in the right age range to leave the maximum impression, that range being maybe 8 to 12. This is the first time I have re-read anything aimed at such a young audience, and the thing I was the most surprised at was how short the book was. I finished it in what seemed like less than one sitting, having only 1700 or so kindle mystery pages (conversion rate to real book pages not known). This is a great book for any emerging readers, a story of a child’s self sufficiency in the wild using just a small hand axe and his accumulated knowledge. It was a pleasant change of pace in its simplicity compared to the moral quagmires i usually read, there was very little awful soul crushing shit happening all the damn time, yes I’m looking at you mister Martin and mister McCarthy. There really isn’t much to say about this one, it is competently written, straightforward and to the point. Not much going for long form subtext here. Though one time at work one of my co-workers said, during a conversation about books we had read and loved as kids, that she very specifically did not like this book. Not indifference, not apathy - no. She said it was boring and stupid, who would want to read about someone out in the woods? I guess it takes all kinds. Even the doesn’t like a good book kind.
