In writing these reviews I’ve been trying to find a consistent voice, and I have been generally pleased with the results after a few months of trying. In fact I feel sort of embarrassed going back to read some of the early entries and seeing how short and uninspired they were. Not to be too critical, I guess I was falling back on old methods; in years past I’ve kept reading lists that weren’t really much more than bullet pointed lists with occasional elaboration. Writing more about each book has forced me to change slightly the way I read in the first place. When I am reading a book now, I’m not trying to force a story or a theme out of it, but I am trying to keep a part of my mind open for inspiration. Sometimes it comes to me early and easily, sometimes I have to work at it a bit. For a few reviews I have just started writing and seen where it goes, and for some I just stumble across it during a conversation, or I see a relevant point in some other medium to use as a jumping off point. But this month I have a new problem in that I’ve read things that I just can’t find a full topic to write about. It came up with the third book in the series by Larsson, which is not bad at all. I just don’t have anything to say about it in long form. I don’t want to write a 3 sentence review, but if I did it would go like this: Good read. A lot like the others. Too bad he wont write any more in the series. Also in this category are The internet is a playground by David Thorne, and Brian’s winter by Gary Paulsen. Respectively, the ultra short reviews would be: I really hope all of his emails are real correspondences, it makes them so much funnier that way, and yep, more hatchet, but really cold this time. On to the long ones.
Salt - Mark Kurlansky
I have a soft spot for a particularly dry sort of non-fiction, of which this book is a great example. My wife used to tease me about a book I read about how each of the states came to have its particular borders. To me it was an interesting look at how the balance between federal and state power in the u.s. has changed over time, but to her it was an almost comically dry book that would have been hard to read even at gunpoint. I tried to read her a little bit out loud once, and she made me stop after only a few sentences. It is her loss that she will never now know how it came to be that the southern border of Michigan didn’t incorporate the then booming port towns of Toledo and Gary in exchange for the land that would become the upper peninsula. Sometimes with books this dry the premise can sound good, and with what the author has to present it might make a really good and dense say, long form magazine article, or chapter in a larger book. However, once you try to make it into a full length book, and when you don’t have a narrative to rely on, it really slows down towards the end. You’ve already seen the same formula play out in all the earlier chapters, all the same general facts in the same general order. With the state boundary book, there are definitely interesting stories to be had concerning certain borders, but the author tells you every tale of every single border, regardless of if it even remotely worth telling or not. Salt suffers from the same problem, which is, I guess, one of editing. I was really interested in many of the historical aspects of salt throughout human history and I felt sort of dim for not realizing how important it was in ancient societies. But, sweet jesus salt, you need to pick and choose. I don’t need to know the type of salted fish that each society of man since the invention of writing has eaten in lean times. I think we could just have said in the beginning of the book: look, lots of people ate fish. Salted fish. Lots of times sardines, then later it was cod. Bang! I just eliminated 75 pages from the book. This is not to say the entire book suffered from editing problems, or repetition, I did learn quite a bit. The Chinese, Romans, and later the renaissance Italians all had major tax revenues from the sale of iron and salt. The control of salt mines or other salt works played a major part in the placement of early settlements, and was the crux of many military conflicts. The problem was that despite all the good stuff, the boring fish salting parts outweighed it, and I had to quit reading the book at seventy percent. That is probably the farthest I’ve ever been into a book without finishing it. I’m usually a stickler about finishing a book after a certain point, but I just couldn’t do it this time. I’m not even sure how we finally got salt to be such a easily available commodity in modern times, and I would really like to know. Maybe with some distance I’ll be ready to go back and find out the thrilling conclusion to how we now salt foods in the canning process, and which fish we currently salt the most.
Divergent - Veronica Roth
There seems to be quite a lot of science fiction/fantasy young adult novels of varying degrees of quality lately that have become very popular. On one hand you have your harry potters, and your hunger games, while on the other hand you have your twilights, and all of your, I’m assuming, even lower quality twilight derivatives. Seriously, have you been to a bookstore lately? The young adult section is preposterous, lousy with sexy vampire knockoffs. Sometimes I feel conflicted about reading these (not the sexy vampire knockoffs, the regular YA books), almost like if I read them and like them that it reflects poorly on me and my taste in books. This book skirts the line for me between books that are acceptable for children to read but are written well enough to have value for adults, and books that are just for kids. I enjoyed reading it, and would probably read a sequel if it came out, but it didn’t grab me the same way the hunger games did. There was more adolescent pining, and more doe eyes, more swooning than in that. Not that I am made of stone; it was in part, a pleasant reminder of days past. I remember what it was like to feel an electric thrill just to be holding someones hand, or the rush you felt throughout your whole body when you were just talking to, or looking at someone you had feelings for. Maybe I’m being too critical of the writing, saying it is so youthful, when all that was really happening was that I was feeling old while reading it because I was remembering how far removed I am from that mindset.
Despite generally liking this new wave of science fiction, some of the problems I have with it stems from my personal feelings towards that genre as a whole. I think a lot of these YA scifi books are intended perhaps not exclusively for new readers, but readers who are new to books featuring magic, or future technology. My problem with them is that I usually want more background information on the world itself. I come to these worlds for the details, the history, all the little details. I feel like with this book, you are given some background, but not the whole picture. The world is sort of fucked in this book, but I want to know why. How did it get this way? There exists a brand new society. OK, again, how did that come to be? Was it a war, a peaceful revolution? Did we go full caveman for a while before building this new thing from the ashes? Instead of it just being a story that happens to be set in this new and fanciful place, I want to know about this new place and how it affects the characters who occupy it. I want it to seem like a real and plausible place, and I want to see how the people reflect the world in their actions. A story set in a place and time I know is going to have all of that back and forth already, and even one set in an unfamiliar place but in my time is going to have a lot of contextual clues for me to work with. A story, even one that isn’t fantastic in nature, but that is set in a different time and place than I know has to be as much about the place as it does the people. It doesn’t do me any good to know about Frank Mccourt, without getting a feel for what Ireland of the 1930’s was like. It didn’t do me any good to get to know Francie Nolan without learning how she related to Brooklyn of 1912. I don’t feel like I can really get to know a character without some context, and I don’t mind having to work at learning about the world they live in, but in order to do that the world they live in has to be made real enough for me to feel like I can place them in it.
Kurt Vonnegut - Man without a country
Kurt Vonnegut is a special author to me, I discovered him at a time in my life where it seemed like I was just waiting to hear what he had to say. I remember reading cat’s cradle while on vacation with my mom in Florida, I had picked it up on a whim from a very agreeably priced local used bookstore. His blend of dark humor and wit was one I was instantly in love with, and I have read most of his books more than once. I read his final work on a whim as a palette cleanser between other books, and as always, he has quite a lot to say. Some of it is great and timeless, but a few of his opinions sound old fashioned. However, for a man who has seen and done so much, I think we can forgive him his old fashioned-ness.
I could write a lot about him, or about most of the topics in his book, but Instead I’ll just relay a point he made that had not occurred to me about a popular saying. The saying he talks about is a quote taken from Karl Marx, that religion is the opiate of the masses. The context I usually hear this quote used in is as a critique of modern Christianity. The way it usually seems to be used is to compare religion to opiate addiction: it is easy to get into, hard to kick, and all encompassing while you are under its spell. I myself have used it in this context before, and I still think there is some truth in that comparison, and certainly not limited to Christianity. The point that Vonnegut makes was one I had never considered before, and it was this: at the time of Marx’s writing, opiates were one of, if not the only truly reliable pain killer available to doctors. It seems that this may be the missed point about this quote - that it isn’t the addictive qualities we have come to associate with the opiate family, but the relief of pain it and only it can truly provide. As I have grown away from my brash youth, I have come to realize that despite the fact that it plays no role in my life, religion does provide comfort to millions of other people. It is easy to sit outside and criticize those who have faith, but it is missing the point entirely that organized religion, despite its many (many) faults can provide a very serious relief of metaphysical angst to people in a way that for them, nothing else can. This was a very insightful look at a quote I have heard so many times without giving it any real critical thought, and it reminded me to always think twice about the things you hear or read, and to try to look beneath the surface for what else might be in there.
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - J.K. Rowling
My wife Has a special relationship with the harry potter series, they are without a doubt her favorite books. She has read the series through in its entirety at least 6 or 7 times, though her super fan-dom ends there, falling well short of the robe wearing, slash fiction writing, brewing your own butter-beer sort. I was the one who introduced her to the books, though in a roundabout fashion. I read the books in college, receiving the first four as a gift from my mother, who knew I liked to read, and sent me them after hearing all the hullabaloo. After giving them the sort of look Ron might have given his christmas sweater (BOOM!) I decided to give them a try, reasoning it would have been rude to exchange them without reading them at all. So I laid down in bed and opened up the first book, pledging to stop no sooner than two chapters in. As you may have seen coming, I read all four straight through, only breaking for food and sleep. I got the remaining three as they came out, narrowly dodging spoilers for all three later books, as they came out in the summer and I was working at camps for all those years. When the sixth book came out I was dating my wife to be at the time, and she asked me if I thought she would like that book. I said yeah, but you should start with the first one. What I did not realize at the time was that this suggestion was almost like putting her on the rack and demanding under duress of bodily harm that she ignore me and start with the sixth one, like a wang. Which she did. She than turned around and read the whole series, from the beginning, and then number six again. Which made her want to start over. So, when the last book came out, we were both eagerly anticipating it. We went out the morning after release, and each bought our own copy so that we could both power through it simultaneously, in order to avoid one of us knowing more than the other, and possibly having the long awaited ending get ruined for us when we went back to camp on Monday. This was the only time I had read the seventh book, and she requested that I read it again, so that I could actually take my time and enjoy it. She also though I might have a different opinion about it this time. We made a deal, a book exchange, where I agreed to read this if she read a book of my choice. I had her read slaughterhouse five, she hated it. Go figure.
As it turns out, this is a really good book. It wraps up one of the most popular book series of all time, and it does it in a totally satisfactory way, which is much more than can be said of the endings of many otherwise great series that shit out towards the end. It has been since the seventh book was first released that I have read any harry potter, and in the meantime I have seen the movies a number of times. The movies, while good, aren’t as good as the books, and some of the characters creep in and take over their novelized counterparts in your head. In their defense, the movies have some really incredible casting choices in them, many more good than bad. The problem is that this seems to make the bad ones stick out that much more. Yes, Hermione is a bit more shrill than I thought she was in the books, but what I am really talking about is Dumbledore in movies three through seven. He is the worst. THE WORST. Dumbledore is one of my most beloved characters across all literature, just the perfect mixture of dad, grandpa and teacher. It’s not just that the actor doesn’t do him justice, its that he gets him the opposite of right. He yells, and loses his temper, he isn’t warm or caring. He misses out on all the things that make the character right and good. It was nice to get the real character, the one I remember from the books back in my head as the gold standard.
******* YARRRRR, HERE BE SPOILERS FOR BOOK SEVEN *******
So, there are three main things I didn’t like when I first read the seventh book. The first was the sequence where Harry, Ron and Hermione are all stuck in the tent, searching for horcruxes. I remember feeling like it dragged, and was poorly paced. It didn’t seem that way at all this time. Even though it is slower than some of the other parts of the book, it still seemed well paced, and appropriate for that part of the story. It gave me a better feeling of how cut off they were from everybody else during their search, and how alone they were in the fight, or at least how alone they felt. The second issue I had the first time through was that I felt like the sequence where harry goes to meet voldemort in the woods felt contrived and poorly explained afterwords. Again, I did not feel the same way this time through. Even though I couldn’t now draw you an exact set of instructions on how to set up a proxy horcrux in a target of a killing spell that puts a part of your soul into them, it all seemed appropriate for the end of the book. For some reason this time through I didn’t need iron clad logic, or it just made more sense to me; or I wasn’t at the end of a day long reading binge, with eyes on the finish line. The last point I had a change of heart on was the last chapter of the book, set 20 odd years after the battle of hogwarts. I have a very clear memory of disliking that chapter, feeling like it sounded juvenile after the relative seriousness of the seventh book. This time through, again, I just didn’t have that criticism. It felt like a fine coda to a serious book. It was economical in the way it gave you just enough bits of post-school harry potter to give you an impression of the world. You knew the world had to be peaceful enough to get all the kids back to school, and that various wizarding families were still going strong. So, the short version here is that my wife was right in telling me to re-read this, and that I do have a renewed appreciation for what Rowling has created with this series.
