Matthew's bookshelf: all en-US Mon, 06 Jan 2014 10:56:50 -0800 60 Matthew's bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg <![CDATA[Man Is Not Alone: A Philosophy of Religion]]> 345504 Man Is Not Alone is a profound, beautifully written examination of the ingredients of piety: how man senses God's presence, explores it, accepts it, and builds life upon it. Abraham Joshua Heschel's philosophy of religion is not a philosophy of doctrine or the interpretation of a dogma. He erects his carefully built structure of thought upon foundations which are universally valid but almost generally ignored. It was Man Is Not Alone which led Reinhold Niebuhr accurately to predict that Heschel would "become a commanding and authoritative voice not only in the Jewish community but in the religious life of America." With its companion volume, God in Search of Man, it is revered as a classic of modern theology.]]> 320 Abraham Joshua Heschel 0374513287 Matthew 4
For one thing, I'm about as qualified to comment seriously on a treatise on Jewish theology as I am to, let's say, fact-check a textbook about string theory. For another, it's the thought of Dr. Heschel himself that I find daunting: dear deceased A.J. with his mad prophet's beard and his saintly demeanor and his Walt Whitman stare, sadly shaking his head at my fumbling misunderstandings. (Take a look at the NYT article on Heschel at if you don't know what I mean -- yes, that's the good rabbi standing next to Martin Luther King, Jr. in the topmost photo.)

Nonetheless, I'm feeling exhausted and hazy enough today (see note re: baby, above) that somehow none of this is enough to stop me from giving this long-overdue review a try.

Although this volume is subtitled "a philosophy of religion," in many ways it reads more like poetry than a work of epistemology or metaphysics. This is intentional on Heschel's part: rather than being an argument for faith, Man Is Not Alone functions more as a description of faith and of the encounter between ourselves and the "ineffable." For example, Heschel writes:

There is no answer in the world to man's radical wonder. Under the running sea of our theories and scientific explanations lies the aboriginal abyss of radical amazement.... To live only on that which we can say is to wallow in the dust, instead of digging up the soil.... The essence, the tangent to the curve of human experience, lies beyond the limits of language.... All we know if the self is its expression, but the self is never fully expressed. What we are, we cannot say; what we become, we cannot grasp... the self is something transcendent in disguise.

In this excerpt, which begins to convey the beauty of Heschel's language, the outlines of his argument become visible. Actually, "argument" may be the wrong word here because Heschel contends that applying rational analysis to the divine is an intellectual error. Instead, he suggests, our awareness of the divine is an immediate, given, experiential fact; it doesn't need to be "proved" any more than our awareness of red needs to be proven.

This comparison -- between Heschel's descriptions of the divine and our awareness of the color red -- is in fact a useful one. When it comes to "red," we are able to scientifically demonstrate a number of facts: eg, that there is a spectrum of visible light in the wavelength range of roughly 625-750 nanometers, that seeing this wavelength causes certain sorts of neural activity in a majority of individuals, etc. etc. What these facts capture is not, however, the color "red" -- they capture a number of physical/chemical details about the universe. But everything that constitutes the redness of red -- how it evokes images of love, passion, violence, associations with roses, looks good with black and white, etc. -- all these things are products of our subjective experience, rather than externally demonstrable facts. Indeed, it is this tendency to have a certain kind of cognitive response to certain conditions that comprises the entire existence of "red" as an experiential phenomenon.

Similar to our experience of the color red, Heschel argues, each of us has experiences of the "ineffable" -- that is, something that the theory-inclined might call the sublime, while others might describe as the divine. To write off this experience as meaningless because it is "only" a subjective awareness would be as silly as writing off the color red (vs. a certain wavelength of light) as meaningless because it is "only" a product of our subjectivity.

This much of Heschel's argument is, to me, quite interesting and much more original than the standard tactic of trying to demonstrate the existence of God via some rational construct (eg infinity, absolute goodness, etc). And much of this book is structured like a koan, insofar as it is designed to elicit the kind of "ineffable" experience it describes.

At the same time, Heschel never adequately deals with the inconvenient fact that God, unlike red, seems to have no consistent physical correlate for our experience -- and things go from bad to worse when he makes the transition from "the ineffable" to "God," beginning to assign determinate attributes to what was, thus far in his argument, a private sparkle in the brain.

It may be, of course, that I am misunderstanding the nuances of Heschel's argument. From my admittedly simplistic reading however, I came away from this book deeply impressed with Heschel's commitment to understanding our unspoken yearnings, and his beautifully written descriptions of sensations that lie at the outer borders of language; less impressive, however, was his attempt to articulate these subjective subtleties in the terms of conventional monotheism. ]]> 4.40 1951 Man Is Not Alone: A Philosophy of Religion
author: Abraham Joshua Heschel
name: Matthew
average rating: 4.40
book published: 1951
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2014/01/06
shelves:
review:
It's been over half a year now since I last reviewed anything here on Ĺ·±¦ÓéŔÖ. There are a number of things that have kept me away (moving across the country, working on a novel, having a baby, etc.) but mainly -- if I'm honest -- the thing that's kept me silent has been the prospect of critiquing this book.

For one thing, I'm about as qualified to comment seriously on a treatise on Jewish theology as I am to, let's say, fact-check a textbook about string theory. For another, it's the thought of Dr. Heschel himself that I find daunting: dear deceased A.J. with his mad prophet's beard and his saintly demeanor and his Walt Whitman stare, sadly shaking his head at my fumbling misunderstandings. (Take a look at the NYT article on Heschel at if you don't know what I mean -- yes, that's the good rabbi standing next to Martin Luther King, Jr. in the topmost photo.)

Nonetheless, I'm feeling exhausted and hazy enough today (see note re: baby, above) that somehow none of this is enough to stop me from giving this long-overdue review a try.

Although this volume is subtitled "a philosophy of religion," in many ways it reads more like poetry than a work of epistemology or metaphysics. This is intentional on Heschel's part: rather than being an argument for faith, Man Is Not Alone functions more as a description of faith and of the encounter between ourselves and the "ineffable." For example, Heschel writes:

There is no answer in the world to man's radical wonder. Under the running sea of our theories and scientific explanations lies the aboriginal abyss of radical amazement.... To live only on that which we can say is to wallow in the dust, instead of digging up the soil.... The essence, the tangent to the curve of human experience, lies beyond the limits of language.... All we know if the self is its expression, but the self is never fully expressed. What we are, we cannot say; what we become, we cannot grasp... the self is something transcendent in disguise.

In this excerpt, which begins to convey the beauty of Heschel's language, the outlines of his argument become visible. Actually, "argument" may be the wrong word here because Heschel contends that applying rational analysis to the divine is an intellectual error. Instead, he suggests, our awareness of the divine is an immediate, given, experiential fact; it doesn't need to be "proved" any more than our awareness of red needs to be proven.

This comparison -- between Heschel's descriptions of the divine and our awareness of the color red -- is in fact a useful one. When it comes to "red," we are able to scientifically demonstrate a number of facts: eg, that there is a spectrum of visible light in the wavelength range of roughly 625-750 nanometers, that seeing this wavelength causes certain sorts of neural activity in a majority of individuals, etc. etc. What these facts capture is not, however, the color "red" -- they capture a number of physical/chemical details about the universe. But everything that constitutes the redness of red -- how it evokes images of love, passion, violence, associations with roses, looks good with black and white, etc. -- all these things are products of our subjective experience, rather than externally demonstrable facts. Indeed, it is this tendency to have a certain kind of cognitive response to certain conditions that comprises the entire existence of "red" as an experiential phenomenon.

Similar to our experience of the color red, Heschel argues, each of us has experiences of the "ineffable" -- that is, something that the theory-inclined might call the sublime, while others might describe as the divine. To write off this experience as meaningless because it is "only" a subjective awareness would be as silly as writing off the color red (vs. a certain wavelength of light) as meaningless because it is "only" a product of our subjectivity.

This much of Heschel's argument is, to me, quite interesting and much more original than the standard tactic of trying to demonstrate the existence of God via some rational construct (eg infinity, absolute goodness, etc). And much of this book is structured like a koan, insofar as it is designed to elicit the kind of "ineffable" experience it describes.

At the same time, Heschel never adequately deals with the inconvenient fact that God, unlike red, seems to have no consistent physical correlate for our experience -- and things go from bad to worse when he makes the transition from "the ineffable" to "God," beginning to assign determinate attributes to what was, thus far in his argument, a private sparkle in the brain.

It may be, of course, that I am misunderstanding the nuances of Heschel's argument. From my admittedly simplistic reading however, I came away from this book deeply impressed with Heschel's commitment to understanding our unspoken yearnings, and his beautifully written descriptions of sensations that lie at the outer borders of language; less impressive, however, was his attempt to articulate these subjective subtleties in the terms of conventional monotheism.
]]> The Moon and Sixpence 44795 215 W. Somerset Maugham 0099284766 Matthew 5
apart from its romantic appeal to the Quiet and Solitary Youth demographic (of which i was a card-carrying member) i think that's due to the simple fact that in a quiet, british sort of way, this is a nearly perfect piece of writing. and it's also, out of everything i've read, the novel that i would most liked to have written myself.]]> 3.97 1919 The Moon and Sixpence
author: W. Somerset Maugham
name: Matthew
average rating: 3.97
book published: 1919
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2013/12/28
shelves:
review:
my affection for this book may, in part, stem from the fact that it was one of those novels that i read at a period in my life when my tastes in both literature and life outlook were taking shape (that is, while playing hooky from high school) but its appeal has endured far more than the other usual suspects in that category (kerouac's meanderings, pirsig's pretentions, etc.)

apart from its romantic appeal to the Quiet and Solitary Youth demographic (of which i was a card-carrying member) i think that's due to the simple fact that in a quiet, british sort of way, this is a nearly perfect piece of writing. and it's also, out of everything i've read, the novel that i would most liked to have written myself.
]]> The Night Manager 1735330 New York Times bestseller (The New York Times Book Review) inspired an Emmy Award–winning series starring Olivia Colman and Tom Hiddleston! In the wake of the Cold War, British veteran Jonathan Pine collides with a powerful arms dealer � and will stop at nothing to bring down the dangerous criminal empire. Read by the author.]]> 597 John Le Carré 0340937688 Matthew 3 James Bond series is the fact that, although Bond is ostensibly a spy, he really doesn't do very much spying: he doesn't invisibly infiltrate enemy lines, doesn't uncover valuable hidden information. Instead, it would be more accurate to describe him as a kind of tuxedoed one-man death squad, dispatched to periodically fuck up the life of some eccentric megalomaniac or super villain.

By comparison, the spooks in LeCarre's novels really spend their time spying: an activity which is, according to LeCarre, bureaucratic, tedious, dangerous, unrewarding, and lonely. In other words, in LeCarre's novels, being a spy is much like being a police officer minus any of the redeeming aspects.

Given this job description, one of the most interesting questions about a spy is: why on earth do they do it? For LeCarre's characters, becoming a spy is less an act of heroism than one of self-abnegation, penance, or revenge, and the best of his novels focus on the forces that drive individuals to such acts.

The Night Manager is one of LeCarre's best novels, a thriller that is more interested in the unstable psyche and self-compromises of its protagonist than the plot events that are taking place around him. Of course, those events are fairly interesting in their own right, a complex tapestry of government corruption, international arms dealing, and interpersonal intrigue which suggest that in the wake of the Cold War, and in a post-national era, the lines between business and government, politics and crime, are so subtle that they no longer actually have meaning.

A smart, neatly written spy tale by a masterful nihilist at the top of his game.]]> 3.82 1993 The Night Manager
author: John Le Carré
name: Matthew
average rating: 3.82
book published: 1993
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2013/12/15
shelves:
review:
One of the more interesting aspects of Ian Fleming's James Bond series is the fact that, although Bond is ostensibly a spy, he really doesn't do very much spying: he doesn't invisibly infiltrate enemy lines, doesn't uncover valuable hidden information. Instead, it would be more accurate to describe him as a kind of tuxedoed one-man death squad, dispatched to periodically fuck up the life of some eccentric megalomaniac or super villain.

By comparison, the spooks in LeCarre's novels really spend their time spying: an activity which is, according to LeCarre, bureaucratic, tedious, dangerous, unrewarding, and lonely. In other words, in LeCarre's novels, being a spy is much like being a police officer minus any of the redeeming aspects.

Given this job description, one of the most interesting questions about a spy is: why on earth do they do it? For LeCarre's characters, becoming a spy is less an act of heroism than one of self-abnegation, penance, or revenge, and the best of his novels focus on the forces that drive individuals to such acts.

The Night Manager is one of LeCarre's best novels, a thriller that is more interested in the unstable psyche and self-compromises of its protagonist than the plot events that are taking place around him. Of course, those events are fairly interesting in their own right, a complex tapestry of government corruption, international arms dealing, and interpersonal intrigue which suggest that in the wake of the Cold War, and in a post-national era, the lines between business and government, politics and crime, are so subtle that they no longer actually have meaning.

A smart, neatly written spy tale by a masterful nihilist at the top of his game.
]]> VALIS 216377 VALIS is the first book in Philip K. Dick's incomparable final trio of novels (the others being The Divine Invasion and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer). This disorienting and bleakly funny work is about a schizophrenic hero named Horselover Fat; the hidden mysteries of Gnostic Christianity; and reality as revealed through a pink laser. VALIS is a theological detective story, in which God is both a missing person and the perpetrator of the ultimate crime.]]> 242 Philip K. Dick 0679734465 Matthew 3 Dune, Stranger in a Strange Land, etc.). It's also well known that crazy people make the best conspiracy theorists. So when Philip K. Dick, an extremely crazy, extremely talented sci-fi author writes a book about religion-as-conspiracy, it's a safe bet that some serious head-messing is about to ensue.

Someone (I think it was Ursula LeGuin) once remarked that Philip K. Dick was the American version of Borges, and this observation is at least half right. Like Borges, PKD is obsessed with themes of identity, memory, time and alternate realities. But where Borges' writing is a series of extraordinarily controlled thought-experiments, Philip K. Dick is one of the least controlled writers I've ever encountered; he seems to be at the mercy of his plots, the words pouring out of him helter-skelter, and the the identity and memory that he questions is clearly his own.

Valis is arguably his best book, and in every respect it's a wild -- and disturbing -- ride. To summarize the plot almost feels like an exercise in futility, but in brief it revolves around the experiences of one Horselover Fat, aka Philip K. Dick, who is shot by God, aka an ancient satellite orbiting Earth, with a beam of pure reason in the form of a pink laser which causes him to slip in time between 1970s California and ancient Rome. But this really doesn't do justice to the weirdness and occasional startling insight of the novel.

Theologically, Valis reads a little like Gnosticism for Dummies but that's not necessarily a bad thing, since Gnosticism for Serious People probably would involve lengthy passages in Greek, Latin, Aramaic, and various fiendishly elaborate codes developed by secretive monks with too much time on their hands. At the end of the day though, what makes this book interesting isn't it's theology or even its plot, but as a portrayal of one man's struggle with the possibility of having an immediate encounter with God -- a notion that, these days, seems far stranger than any acid trip.]]> 3.94 1981 VALIS
author: Philip K. Dick
name: Matthew
average rating: 3.94
book published: 1981
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2013/12/14
shelves:
review:
It's a well known fact that science fiction authors often do their best work when they're straying into quasi-religious territory (think Dune, Stranger in a Strange Land, etc.). It's also well known that crazy people make the best conspiracy theorists. So when Philip K. Dick, an extremely crazy, extremely talented sci-fi author writes a book about religion-as-conspiracy, it's a safe bet that some serious head-messing is about to ensue.

Someone (I think it was Ursula LeGuin) once remarked that Philip K. Dick was the American version of Borges, and this observation is at least half right. Like Borges, PKD is obsessed with themes of identity, memory, time and alternate realities. But where Borges' writing is a series of extraordinarily controlled thought-experiments, Philip K. Dick is one of the least controlled writers I've ever encountered; he seems to be at the mercy of his plots, the words pouring out of him helter-skelter, and the the identity and memory that he questions is clearly his own.

Valis is arguably his best book, and in every respect it's a wild -- and disturbing -- ride. To summarize the plot almost feels like an exercise in futility, but in brief it revolves around the experiences of one Horselover Fat, aka Philip K. Dick, who is shot by God, aka an ancient satellite orbiting Earth, with a beam of pure reason in the form of a pink laser which causes him to slip in time between 1970s California and ancient Rome. But this really doesn't do justice to the weirdness and occasional startling insight of the novel.

Theologically, Valis reads a little like Gnosticism for Dummies but that's not necessarily a bad thing, since Gnosticism for Serious People probably would involve lengthy passages in Greek, Latin, Aramaic, and various fiendishly elaborate codes developed by secretive monks with too much time on their hands. At the end of the day though, what makes this book interesting isn't it's theology or even its plot, but as a portrayal of one man's struggle with the possibility of having an immediate encounter with God -- a notion that, these days, seems far stranger than any acid trip.
]]> <![CDATA[The Tombs (Fargo Adventure, #4)]]> 13593559
The clues point to the hidden tomb of Attila the Hun, the High King who was reportedly buried with a vast fortune of gold and jewels and plunder... a bounty that has never been found. 

As they follow the trail through Hungary, Italy, France, Russia, and Kazakhstan � a trail that they discover leads them not to one tomb, but five � the Fargos will find themselves pitted against a thieving group of amateur treasure hunters, a cunning Russian businessman, and a ruthless Hungarian who claims direct descent from Attila himself... and will stop at nothing to claim the tombs� riches as his own.]]> 374 Clive Cussler 0399159266 Matthew 1
I picked up this novel in an airport mini-mart, en route from Portland to Los Angeles, and I was prepared to be pleasantly surprised. After all, many of my favorite novels are what the professorial crowd would call swashbuckling pulp: James Clavell, H. Rider Haggard, Burroughs, and so on. So buckled into my seat at 32,000 feet, watching the topographic splendor of the San Joaquin valley unfold below, I cracked the book open ready for a Ripping Good Yarn, and�.

Jesus. I mean�.

Jesus fucking Christ. I've read cereal boxes with more literary merit than this piece of shit.

I won't bother with a plot synopsis. Honestly, there's no point. The heros of this novel are incredibly rich, fantastically attractive, endlessly clever, relentlessly in love, possess a teflon-coated self-assuredness, and glide along defeating unsympathetic bad guys without a hint of self-doubt, real anxiety, or anything else resembling a human emotion. Some paranoid conspiracy-theorist part of me wants to believe that this "novel" was sponsored by TV execs, as a way of discouraging people from reading.

But let me get my breath here for a minute. Let's be rational about all this.

Okay. So this book is currently hovering around #9,000 in the Amazon sales rankings: which means, let's face it, that it's a success. Which means, in turn, that there's some version of enjoying a novel that many people participate in, but that feels as alien as, say, enjoying a root canal. And if I take a deep breath, step back for a moment, that's not so incomprehensible. In fact, it's a lot like bananas.

For as long as I can remember, I've hated bananas. The smell of a banana nauseates me, the taste -- which I'll essay about once a year -- comes, as close as I can describe, to biting into putrefying flesh. And yet, bananas are the most popular fruit on the planet. Which doesn't make me wrong per se (there's no accounting for taste, after all) but clearly indicates there's some category of experience that fundamentally doesn't work for me. And so this book, I can only conclude, is like a banana: there's something there that people like but, God help me, I can't fathom what it might be.]]> 3.96 2012 The Tombs (Fargo Adventure, #4)
author: Clive Cussler
name: Matthew
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2012
rating: 1
read at:
date added: 2013/09/09
shelves:
review:
The nicest thing I can say about this book is that I'm probably not the target audience.

I picked up this novel in an airport mini-mart, en route from Portland to Los Angeles, and I was prepared to be pleasantly surprised. After all, many of my favorite novels are what the professorial crowd would call swashbuckling pulp: James Clavell, H. Rider Haggard, Burroughs, and so on. So buckled into my seat at 32,000 feet, watching the topographic splendor of the San Joaquin valley unfold below, I cracked the book open ready for a Ripping Good Yarn, and�.

Jesus. I mean�.

Jesus fucking Christ. I've read cereal boxes with more literary merit than this piece of shit.

I won't bother with a plot synopsis. Honestly, there's no point. The heros of this novel are incredibly rich, fantastically attractive, endlessly clever, relentlessly in love, possess a teflon-coated self-assuredness, and glide along defeating unsympathetic bad guys without a hint of self-doubt, real anxiety, or anything else resembling a human emotion. Some paranoid conspiracy-theorist part of me wants to believe that this "novel" was sponsored by TV execs, as a way of discouraging people from reading.

But let me get my breath here for a minute. Let's be rational about all this.

Okay. So this book is currently hovering around #9,000 in the Amazon sales rankings: which means, let's face it, that it's a success. Which means, in turn, that there's some version of enjoying a novel that many people participate in, but that feels as alien as, say, enjoying a root canal. And if I take a deep breath, step back for a moment, that's not so incomprehensible. In fact, it's a lot like bananas.

For as long as I can remember, I've hated bananas. The smell of a banana nauseates me, the taste -- which I'll essay about once a year -- comes, as close as I can describe, to biting into putrefying flesh. And yet, bananas are the most popular fruit on the planet. Which doesn't make me wrong per se (there's no accounting for taste, after all) but clearly indicates there's some category of experience that fundamentally doesn't work for me. And so this book, I can only conclude, is like a banana: there's something there that people like but, God help me, I can't fathom what it might be.
]]> <![CDATA[Halting State (Halting State, #1)]]> 222472
The prime suspects are a band of marauding orcs with a dragon in tow for fire support. The bank is located within the virtual land of Avalon Four, and the robbery was supposed to be impossible. When word gets out, Hayek Associates and all its virtual "economies" are going to crash hard.

For Smith, the investigation seems pointless. But the deeper she digs, the bigger the case gets. There are powerful players -- both real and pixilated -- who are watching her every move. Because there is far more at stake than just some game-head's fantasy financial security . . .]]> 351 Charles Stross 0441014984 Matthew 2 Halting State is the second book by Charles Stross that I've read. The first, Accelerando, is (to steal a cliche) a flawed masterpiece -- a word which I don't use lightly -- and on its strength I was eager to dive into this novel.

Stross is a (apparently I'm stuck in reviewer-cliche land tonight) furiously imaginative writer, and half the fun of his novels is just keeping up with the barrage of new ideas about technology, culture, and the intersection thereof. That's certainly the case with Halting State, a whodunnit set in the newly independent EU-member state of Scotland in 2018, when gaming is a pervasive aspect of many people's lives, and the distinction between "virtual" and "real" seems ridiculous.

Halting State is brilliant in places (among my favorite geek-out quotes was "they're not using the game as a ludic universe to chat in, they're using it as a transport layer. They're tunneling TCP/IP over AD&D!"), and Stross, who has a degree in CS and worked as programmer, does a convincing portrayal of the similarly obsessive worlds of the startup hacker and hardcore gamer.

The most notable aspect of the book, though, is its narrative stance. Halting State is all written in the second person -- a revolving second person, with three mostly-reliable narrators (a programmer, a forensic accountant, and a cop). I don't think I've seen multiple second persons attempted before in a novel, and hats off to Stross for giving it a try. For me though, it didn't work: the second person is a tough sell, even with enormous finesse, and needing to remember which character's POV you're currently sitting in makes the whole thing feel forced. The somewhat untidy and vague plot, featuring a corporate-espionage double-cross, unnamed intelligence agencies, and Chinese hackers, doesn't make things easier.

I admire Stross's ambition to do something different, and the fact that he makes it work at all is a testament to his ability: still despite its originality, this book isn't his best.]]> 3.80 2007 Halting State (Halting State, #1)
author: Charles Stross
name: Matthew
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2007
rating: 2
read at:
date added: 2013/04/28
shelves:
review:
Halting State is the second book by Charles Stross that I've read. The first, Accelerando, is (to steal a cliche) a flawed masterpiece -- a word which I don't use lightly -- and on its strength I was eager to dive into this novel.

Stross is a (apparently I'm stuck in reviewer-cliche land tonight) furiously imaginative writer, and half the fun of his novels is just keeping up with the barrage of new ideas about technology, culture, and the intersection thereof. That's certainly the case with Halting State, a whodunnit set in the newly independent EU-member state of Scotland in 2018, when gaming is a pervasive aspect of many people's lives, and the distinction between "virtual" and "real" seems ridiculous.

Halting State is brilliant in places (among my favorite geek-out quotes was "they're not using the game as a ludic universe to chat in, they're using it as a transport layer. They're tunneling TCP/IP over AD&D!"), and Stross, who has a degree in CS and worked as programmer, does a convincing portrayal of the similarly obsessive worlds of the startup hacker and hardcore gamer.

The most notable aspect of the book, though, is its narrative stance. Halting State is all written in the second person -- a revolving second person, with three mostly-reliable narrators (a programmer, a forensic accountant, and a cop). I don't think I've seen multiple second persons attempted before in a novel, and hats off to Stross for giving it a try. For me though, it didn't work: the second person is a tough sell, even with enormous finesse, and needing to remember which character's POV you're currently sitting in makes the whole thing feel forced. The somewhat untidy and vague plot, featuring a corporate-espionage double-cross, unnamed intelligence agencies, and Chinese hackers, doesn't make things easier.

I admire Stross's ambition to do something different, and the fact that he makes it work at all is a testament to his ability: still despite its originality, this book isn't his best.
]]> I Am a Strange Loop 123471 I Am a Strange Loop argues that the key to understanding selves and consciousness is the “strange loop”—a special kind of abstract feedback loop inhabiting our brains. Deep down, a human brain is a chaotic seething soup of particles, on a higher level it is a jungle of neurons, and on a yet higher level it is a network of abstractions that we call “symbols.� The most central and complex symbol in your brain or mine is the one we both call “I.� The “I� is the nexus in our brain where the levels feed back into each other and flip causality upside down, with symbols seeming to have free will and to have gained the paradoxical ability to push particles around, rather than the reverse. For each human being, this “I� seems to be the realest thing in the world. But how can such a mysterious abstraction be real—or is our “I� merely a convenient fiction? Does an “I� exert genuine power over the particles in our brain, or is it helplessly pushed around by the all-powerful laws of physics? These are the mysteries tackled in I Am a Strange Loop, Douglas R. Hofstadter’s first book-length journey into philosophy since Gödel, Escher, Bach. Compulsively readable and endlessly thought-provoking, this is the book Hofstadter’s many readers have long been waiting for.]]> 436 Douglas R. Hofstadter 0465030785 Matthew 0 currently-reading 3.94 2007 I Am a Strange Loop
author: Douglas R. Hofstadter
name: Matthew
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2007
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2013/04/28
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet]]> 7141642
But Jacob’s original intentions are eclipsed after a chance encounter with Orito Aibagawa, the disfigured daughter of a samurai doctor and midwife to the city’s powerful magistrate. The borders between propriety, profit, and pleasure blur until Jacob finds his vision clouded, one rash promise made and then fatefully broken. The consequences will extend beyond Jacob’s worst imaginings. As one cynical colleague asks, “Who ain’t a gambler in the glorious Orient, with his very life?�

A magnificent mix of luminous writing, prodigious research, and heedless imagination, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is the most impressive achievement of its eminent author.]]> 479 David Mitchell 1400065453 Matthew 3
Like practically everyone (it seems) I've been a huge fan of David Mitchell's work for several years now. In particular I was amazed and humbled by Ghostwritten and Cloud Atlas, which seemed to offer a genuinely fresh take on what a novel can be. Both books functioned as powerful commentaries on the nature of identity and the sweep and strangeness of living in a globalized world -- and did these things without falling into the trap of nostalgia, which is the cheapest and easiest of writerly devices.

Unsurprisingly, given Mitchell's talent, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is beautifully written. The story opens in 1799 on Dejima, a tiny artificial island in Nagasaki harbor where the Dutch East Indies Company has a narrow perch for conducting trade with Shogun-era Japan. In this cramped universe, the Dutch traders scheme, worry, pine for their distant homes, and an unlikely love story develops between the eponymous hero and a Japanese midwife named Orito. Roughly midway through the novel, things take a turn for the strange: plot twists include the machinations of a sinister immortal abbot, a bizarre mountaintop nunnery where ritual baby-harvesting and murder are practiced, a daring midnight rescue-attempt, and the surprise arrival of British warships to challenge the isolated Dutch traders.

The entire book is written in a deft, economical style; each character's voice is vivid and compelling, and Mitchell's eye for detail is striking. With apparently effortless strokes he breathes life into the floating island-settlement, and the cast of Dutch traders anchored there like a barnacle on the hull of worryingly foreign Japan, an impossible distance from their homes. Although less formally ambitious than his earlier works (rather than remixing genres as he did in Cloud Atlas, Ghostwritten, etc., here Mitchell stays largely within the confines of traditional historical fiction), much of the novel is a pleasure to read: a smart, involving glimpse of a profoundly different world.

The least successful parts of the book are its action sequences in the second half of the novel. Although not bad per se (Mitchell may not be capable of writing a bad scene), these fail to deliver much punch or suspense, and at times suffer from muddy blocking so it's unclear how, exactly, the dramatics are unfolding.

Overall though, it's the conclusion of the Thousand Autumns that gave me the most trouble. In his denouement, Mitchell shifts gears: it's years later, Jacob de Zoet is back in Europe, and we're left with a quiet regret-filled meditation on loss, forgetting, and the passage of time. All of this is absolutely, breathtakingly lovely. It's also the easy way out.

Because here, for once, Mitchell allows himself to wallow (there's no other word) in the bittersweet soup of nostalgia -- which is the opposite of the vivid immediacy that makes the best historical fiction come to life. Where great historical writing breathes life into the past by imbuing it with the uncertainty and newness of the present, nostalgia is a kind of self-congratulatory sugar-coating. It is emotion based on the irrecoverable nature of the past, and the gap between now and then: through the tumult and transformations of time, nostalgia whispers, only the identity of the person remembering what has gone before remains the same. In this way, nostalgia functions as a celebration of selfhood, and allows us to imagine history as a set of external events that, fundamentally, reinforce our unique unchanging continuity. But that, of course, is a fantasy. Our selves change with time, as much as the world does, and the effects of the past continue to linger. As William Faulkner (possibly the greatest of historical novelists) put it, "The past is never dead. It's not even past."

Hopefully in his next novel, David Mitchell will remember that the last thing a historical novelist should be doing is making the past feel either distant, or safe.]]> 4.01 2010 The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet
author: David Mitchell
name: Matthew
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2010
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2012/06/17
shelves:
review:
What is it about the nostalgia trap that attracts so many writers?

Like practically everyone (it seems) I've been a huge fan of David Mitchell's work for several years now. In particular I was amazed and humbled by Ghostwritten and Cloud Atlas, which seemed to offer a genuinely fresh take on what a novel can be. Both books functioned as powerful commentaries on the nature of identity and the sweep and strangeness of living in a globalized world -- and did these things without falling into the trap of nostalgia, which is the cheapest and easiest of writerly devices.

Unsurprisingly, given Mitchell's talent, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is beautifully written. The story opens in 1799 on Dejima, a tiny artificial island in Nagasaki harbor where the Dutch East Indies Company has a narrow perch for conducting trade with Shogun-era Japan. In this cramped universe, the Dutch traders scheme, worry, pine for their distant homes, and an unlikely love story develops between the eponymous hero and a Japanese midwife named Orito. Roughly midway through the novel, things take a turn for the strange: plot twists include the machinations of a sinister immortal abbot, a bizarre mountaintop nunnery where ritual baby-harvesting and murder are practiced, a daring midnight rescue-attempt, and the surprise arrival of British warships to challenge the isolated Dutch traders.

The entire book is written in a deft, economical style; each character's voice is vivid and compelling, and Mitchell's eye for detail is striking. With apparently effortless strokes he breathes life into the floating island-settlement, and the cast of Dutch traders anchored there like a barnacle on the hull of worryingly foreign Japan, an impossible distance from their homes. Although less formally ambitious than his earlier works (rather than remixing genres as he did in Cloud Atlas, Ghostwritten, etc., here Mitchell stays largely within the confines of traditional historical fiction), much of the novel is a pleasure to read: a smart, involving glimpse of a profoundly different world.

The least successful parts of the book are its action sequences in the second half of the novel. Although not bad per se (Mitchell may not be capable of writing a bad scene), these fail to deliver much punch or suspense, and at times suffer from muddy blocking so it's unclear how, exactly, the dramatics are unfolding.

Overall though, it's the conclusion of the Thousand Autumns that gave me the most trouble. In his denouement, Mitchell shifts gears: it's years later, Jacob de Zoet is back in Europe, and we're left with a quiet regret-filled meditation on loss, forgetting, and the passage of time. All of this is absolutely, breathtakingly lovely. It's also the easy way out.

Because here, for once, Mitchell allows himself to wallow (there's no other word) in the bittersweet soup of nostalgia -- which is the opposite of the vivid immediacy that makes the best historical fiction come to life. Where great historical writing breathes life into the past by imbuing it with the uncertainty and newness of the present, nostalgia is a kind of self-congratulatory sugar-coating. It is emotion based on the irrecoverable nature of the past, and the gap between now and then: through the tumult and transformations of time, nostalgia whispers, only the identity of the person remembering what has gone before remains the same. In this way, nostalgia functions as a celebration of selfhood, and allows us to imagine history as a set of external events that, fundamentally, reinforce our unique unchanging continuity. But that, of course, is a fantasy. Our selves change with time, as much as the world does, and the effects of the past continue to linger. As William Faulkner (possibly the greatest of historical novelists) put it, "The past is never dead. It's not even past."

Hopefully in his next novel, David Mitchell will remember that the last thing a historical novelist should be doing is making the past feel either distant, or safe.
]]> Whirlwind (Asian Saga, #6) 42932 1231 James Clavell 0340766182 Matthew 2 Since I was in high school, James Clavell has loomed largely among my guiltier pleasures. Somewhere circa age sixteen I plowed through Shogun and Tai-Pan one summer, and came away from them heady with Orientalism: because these books are, really, Orientalism at its pulpy contemporary finest (if that isn't an oxymoron). In them, the European hero is thrown into an exotic, spice-scented eastern culture where, through a combination of courage, canny and luck, he is embroiled in conspiracies, admitted into the luxurious inner circles of power, beds beautiful women, and defeats his enemies.

Clavell isn't subtle, by a long shot. His villains are machiavellian pedophiles and sadists, his protagonists are manly and muscular, moral ambiguity never registers on his radar, and he's not one to hesitate at cheap gratification (for example, in at least three novels he goes out of his way to have women note the gigantic endowment of his hero). This is broad-strokes, primary-colors-only entertainment, but on that level it works fantastically. He has enough superficial understanding and genuine appreciation of Chinese and Japanese culture to make Shogun and Tai-Pan read like glossy action-movie tourist brochures to a compellingly different world, inhabited by (sort of) real people, that we'd like to leave behind our real lives to visit for awhile.

Unfortunately, this is far less the case for Whirlwind, Clavell's fictionalization of the 1979 Iranian Revolution led by Khomeini. The sprawling plot, which revolves around the various European and American employees of a charter helicopter company attempting to cope with, and later escape, the deadly upheaval caused by the Revolution, features Clavell's usual twists, turns, narrow escapes, tragic deaths, unexpected betrayals, irredeemable bad guys and unimpeachable good guys. But where his other novels depict the exotic settings of his stories, and the exotic characters who inhabit them, with a sensitivity that at least tries (in a limited kind of way) to shed light on the workings of another culture, here he has settled for caricature in the most unpleasant sense.

No genuine attempt is made here to understand, or empathize with, why the Revolution captured the hearts and minds of millions. By and large, Clavell's Iranians are illiterate brutes, rapists, and thugs. The only characters who have integrity are those who resist, or at least stand apart from, support for Khomeini, and the virtue of European values -- in particular, the heroic efforts of oil-company employees, who struggle to keep the black gold flowing at any cost -- are never questioned in the slightest.

True, on a paragraph-by-paragraph level, Whirlwind is a page-turner that dishes up sex, suspense and violence in heavy rotation. Take a step back though, and this novel emerges as a perfect example of the kind of insensitive, colonialist xenophobia that fueled the Revolution to begin with.]]> 3.84 1986 Whirlwind (Asian Saga, #6)
author: James Clavell
name: Matthew
average rating: 3.84
book published: 1986
rating: 2
read at:
date added: 2012/01/02
shelves:
review:

Since I was in high school, James Clavell has loomed largely among my guiltier pleasures. Somewhere circa age sixteen I plowed through Shogun and Tai-Pan one summer, and came away from them heady with Orientalism: because these books are, really, Orientalism at its pulpy contemporary finest (if that isn't an oxymoron). In them, the European hero is thrown into an exotic, spice-scented eastern culture where, through a combination of courage, canny and luck, he is embroiled in conspiracies, admitted into the luxurious inner circles of power, beds beautiful women, and defeats his enemies.

Clavell isn't subtle, by a long shot. His villains are machiavellian pedophiles and sadists, his protagonists are manly and muscular, moral ambiguity never registers on his radar, and he's not one to hesitate at cheap gratification (for example, in at least three novels he goes out of his way to have women note the gigantic endowment of his hero). This is broad-strokes, primary-colors-only entertainment, but on that level it works fantastically. He has enough superficial understanding and genuine appreciation of Chinese and Japanese culture to make Shogun and Tai-Pan read like glossy action-movie tourist brochures to a compellingly different world, inhabited by (sort of) real people, that we'd like to leave behind our real lives to visit for awhile.

Unfortunately, this is far less the case for Whirlwind, Clavell's fictionalization of the 1979 Iranian Revolution led by Khomeini. The sprawling plot, which revolves around the various European and American employees of a charter helicopter company attempting to cope with, and later escape, the deadly upheaval caused by the Revolution, features Clavell's usual twists, turns, narrow escapes, tragic deaths, unexpected betrayals, irredeemable bad guys and unimpeachable good guys. But where his other novels depict the exotic settings of his stories, and the exotic characters who inhabit them, with a sensitivity that at least tries (in a limited kind of way) to shed light on the workings of another culture, here he has settled for caricature in the most unpleasant sense.

No genuine attempt is made here to understand, or empathize with, why the Revolution captured the hearts and minds of millions. By and large, Clavell's Iranians are illiterate brutes, rapists, and thugs. The only characters who have integrity are those who resist, or at least stand apart from, support for Khomeini, and the virtue of European values -- in particular, the heroic efforts of oil-company employees, who struggle to keep the black gold flowing at any cost -- are never questioned in the slightest.

True, on a paragraph-by-paragraph level, Whirlwind is a page-turner that dishes up sex, suspense and violence in heavy rotation. Take a step back though, and this novel emerges as a perfect example of the kind of insensitive, colonialist xenophobia that fueled the Revolution to begin with.
]]> Captain Blood 158446 Short Description: Peter Blood, an Irish physician and soldier in England in the 1680's, is wrongly convicted of treason and sentenced to indentured slavery in the Caribbean. He escapes and becomes the most feared pirate captain on the Spanish Main, but all the glory of his adventures cannot help him, for the woman he loves cannot love a thief and pirate. Even when he destroys England's enemies, even at his most triumphant...but wait! What's that...

Long Description: Peter Blood, an Irish physician and former soldier is happily settled, in the 1680's, as the doctor in an English town, when the rebellion of the Duke of Monmouth catches him by accident. He saves a man's life, as a doctor must try to do, but the man is a rebel and the hanging Judge Jeffreys sentences him to ten years as an indentured slave in the Caribbean colonies. Once there, his knowledge as a physician is recognized, and thus he meets and falls in love with the daughter of the man who own his servitude; not likely to be a successful love story! A Spanish ship attacks the town, and while the Spaniards celebrate their victory he boldly steals their ship, and he and his fellow convicts sail off to become the boldest and most fearless of pirates among the islands and on the Spanish Main. But all the glory of his adventures cannot help him, for the woman he loves cannot love a thief and pirate. Even when he destroys England's enemies, even at his most triumphant...but wait! Is that... The classic novel of adventure and romance, and one of Sabatini's best.]]> 236 Rafael Sabatini 1406800163 Matthew 4 I've always been a sucker for a certain kind of swashbuckling adventure. As an awkward middle-school student, I found a kind of refuge in books like H. Rider Haggard's masterpieces King Solomon's Mines and Allen Quatermain; as an adult, the Tarzan books number among my guilty pleasures. So it's hardly surprising that, without knowing it, some piece of me was waiting forRaphael Sabatini's Captain Blood all along.

Captain Blood is, without question, one of the greatest pirate adventures ever written. A century before Jack Sparrow sashayed across the screen, Peter Blood was wreaking his own brand of stylish mayhem across the Caribbean. Sabatini's novel is a product of the same late-Victorian appetite for tales of adventure in foreign lands that gave us works like The Pirates of Penzance and Kim, but nothing about it feels imitative. Peter Blood is uniquely his own character (although he has spawned countless imitators): wrongfully convicted of treason and sold into slavery on a Barbados sugar plantation, he man who is "at war with humanity" and yet has "some rags of honor." His barbed wit and rakish charm are tempered with just enough self-doubt, and occasional self-hatred, to make him a riveting leading man.

This isn't, of course, to claim that Captain Blood is a profound study in human nature. This is an action-movie of a book, but done with so much intelligence and style that its fundamental contrivedness never feels like a problem. Sabatini's writing is crisp, enjoyable, and fast paced; consider the following account of a duel between Levasseur, a rival pirate captain, and Captain Blood:

The brute strength upon which Levasseur so confidently counted, could avail nothing against the Irishman's practiced skill. When, with both lungs transfixed, he lay prone on the white sand, coughing out his rascally life, Captain Blood looked calmly at [Levasseur's first mate] across the body. "I think that cancels the articles between us," he said.

Yes, it may not be Great Literature. But reading lines like that, my inner middle-school geek grins and cheers and I love every page of it, Great Literature be damned.]]> 4.17 1922 Captain Blood
author: Rafael Sabatini
name: Matthew
average rating: 4.17
book published: 1922
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2011/05/13
shelves:
review:

I've always been a sucker for a certain kind of swashbuckling adventure. As an awkward middle-school student, I found a kind of refuge in books like H. Rider Haggard's masterpieces King Solomon's Mines and Allen Quatermain; as an adult, the Tarzan books number among my guilty pleasures. So it's hardly surprising that, without knowing it, some piece of me was waiting forRaphael Sabatini's Captain Blood all along.

Captain Blood is, without question, one of the greatest pirate adventures ever written. A century before Jack Sparrow sashayed across the screen, Peter Blood was wreaking his own brand of stylish mayhem across the Caribbean. Sabatini's novel is a product of the same late-Victorian appetite for tales of adventure in foreign lands that gave us works like The Pirates of Penzance and Kim, but nothing about it feels imitative. Peter Blood is uniquely his own character (although he has spawned countless imitators): wrongfully convicted of treason and sold into slavery on a Barbados sugar plantation, he man who is "at war with humanity" and yet has "some rags of honor." His barbed wit and rakish charm are tempered with just enough self-doubt, and occasional self-hatred, to make him a riveting leading man.

This isn't, of course, to claim that Captain Blood is a profound study in human nature. This is an action-movie of a book, but done with so much intelligence and style that its fundamental contrivedness never feels like a problem. Sabatini's writing is crisp, enjoyable, and fast paced; consider the following account of a duel between Levasseur, a rival pirate captain, and Captain Blood:

The brute strength upon which Levasseur so confidently counted, could avail nothing against the Irishman's practiced skill. When, with both lungs transfixed, he lay prone on the white sand, coughing out his rascally life, Captain Blood looked calmly at [Levasseur's first mate] across the body. "I think that cancels the articles between us," he said.

Yes, it may not be Great Literature. But reading lines like that, my inner middle-school geek grins and cheers and I love every page of it, Great Literature be damned.
]]> Arabian Sands 825419 Arabian Sands is Wilfred Thesiger's record of his extraordinary journey through the parched "Empty Quarter" of Arabia. Educated at Eton and Oxford, Thesiger was repulsed by the softness and rigidity of Western life�"the machines, the calling cards, the meticulously aligned streets." In the spirit of T. E. Lawrence, he set out to explore the deserts of Arabia, traveling among peoples who had never seen a European and considered it their duty to kill Christian infidels. His now-classic account is invaluable to understanding the modern Middle East.]]> 347 Wilfred Thesiger Matthew 4 Arabian Sands, is without question the Real Deal. After being trained as a British secret agent and fighting behind enemy lines in the SAS during World War II, he set out to explore the Empty Quarter of the Arabian peninsula, the largest sand desert in the world. Travelling by foot and on camels with nomadic Bedouin tribes, he crossed and recrossed about 250,000 miles of the most inhospitable terrain on the planet. He was a man of deeds, not words; it took months of cajoling on the part of his friends to persuade him to write this book in which he recounts some of his adventures.

Seen from a distance, Thesiger seems like a caricature of the old-fashioned stiff-upper-lip British adventurer. His own hardships are noted with almost clinical disinterest. For example, almost as an afterthought, he mentions that in order to fit in with his native travelling companions he decided to walk across the desert barefoot and that this was "uncomfortable." Similarly, describing an episode in which he travelled 2,000 miles across the desolate dunes on starvation rations, drinking a few mouthfuls of water once a day and pursued by raiding parties intent on killing him, he restrains himself to noting that "it was hot."

Despite this terseness, Thesiger’s clear, concise prose is enormously readable and all the more evocative for its lack of ornamentation, much like the stark landscape he depicts. Through his eyes, we glimpse a world of almost unimaginable hardship and startling beauty. After travelling for miles through the desert with his companions, he writes:


…we saw a small boy, dressed in the remnants of a loin-cloth�. He led us back to the [camp] where three men sat round the embers of a fire�. They had no tent; their only possessions were saddles, ropes, bowls, empty goatskins, and their rifles and daggers�. These men would sleep naked on the freezing sand, covered only with their flimsy loin-cloths� After milking [their camels] our hosts brought us milk. We blew the froth aside and drank deep; they urged us to drink more, saying “You will find no milk in the sands ahead of you. Drink � drink. You are our guests. God has brought you here � drink.� I drank again, knowing even as I did so that they would go hungry and thirsty that night, for they had nothing else, no other food and no water.


Along with his bravery, reserve and occasional dry humor, Thesiger fits the mold of the classic T.E.-Lawrence-style British adventurer in another respect as well: his absolute admiration for the traditional Bedouin way of life, and a commensurate distain for all things "modern." Toward the end of this book, he writes: "I realized that the Bedu with whom I had lived and travelled, and in whose company I had found contentment, were doomed. Some people maintain that they will be better off when they have exchanged the hardship and poverty of the desert for the security of a materialistic world. This I do not believe."

Thesiger is a worshipper at the altar of Character, and for him Character is expressed through heroic endurance of hardship. In this sense, he is fundamentally a pessimist; change and progress are for the worse. In these sentiments, it is hard not to detect a whiff of "noble savage" ideology and its accompanying veiled racism. Certainly he is not hesitant to describe men as belonging to a “finer breed� (or an inferior one). It is an unforgiving view of the world, and one that lacks nuance. Given these things, there is perhaps a kind of poetic justice in the fact that, sixty years later, Thesiger himself seems quaint and old-fashioned, a fantastic remnant of a time when the world seemed at once larger and less complex.]]> 4.19 1959 Arabian Sands
author: Wilfred Thesiger
name: Matthew
average rating: 4.19
book published: 1959
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2011/01/31
shelves:
review:
Wilfred Thesiger, the author of Arabian Sands, is without question the Real Deal. After being trained as a British secret agent and fighting behind enemy lines in the SAS during World War II, he set out to explore the Empty Quarter of the Arabian peninsula, the largest sand desert in the world. Travelling by foot and on camels with nomadic Bedouin tribes, he crossed and recrossed about 250,000 miles of the most inhospitable terrain on the planet. He was a man of deeds, not words; it took months of cajoling on the part of his friends to persuade him to write this book in which he recounts some of his adventures.

Seen from a distance, Thesiger seems like a caricature of the old-fashioned stiff-upper-lip British adventurer. His own hardships are noted with almost clinical disinterest. For example, almost as an afterthought, he mentions that in order to fit in with his native travelling companions he decided to walk across the desert barefoot and that this was "uncomfortable." Similarly, describing an episode in which he travelled 2,000 miles across the desolate dunes on starvation rations, drinking a few mouthfuls of water once a day and pursued by raiding parties intent on killing him, he restrains himself to noting that "it was hot."

Despite this terseness, Thesiger’s clear, concise prose is enormously readable and all the more evocative for its lack of ornamentation, much like the stark landscape he depicts. Through his eyes, we glimpse a world of almost unimaginable hardship and startling beauty. After travelling for miles through the desert with his companions, he writes:


…we saw a small boy, dressed in the remnants of a loin-cloth�. He led us back to the [camp] where three men sat round the embers of a fire�. They had no tent; their only possessions were saddles, ropes, bowls, empty goatskins, and their rifles and daggers�. These men would sleep naked on the freezing sand, covered only with their flimsy loin-cloths� After milking [their camels] our hosts brought us milk. We blew the froth aside and drank deep; they urged us to drink more, saying “You will find no milk in the sands ahead of you. Drink � drink. You are our guests. God has brought you here � drink.� I drank again, knowing even as I did so that they would go hungry and thirsty that night, for they had nothing else, no other food and no water.


Along with his bravery, reserve and occasional dry humor, Thesiger fits the mold of the classic T.E.-Lawrence-style British adventurer in another respect as well: his absolute admiration for the traditional Bedouin way of life, and a commensurate distain for all things "modern." Toward the end of this book, he writes: "I realized that the Bedu with whom I had lived and travelled, and in whose company I had found contentment, were doomed. Some people maintain that they will be better off when they have exchanged the hardship and poverty of the desert for the security of a materialistic world. This I do not believe."

Thesiger is a worshipper at the altar of Character, and for him Character is expressed through heroic endurance of hardship. In this sense, he is fundamentally a pessimist; change and progress are for the worse. In these sentiments, it is hard not to detect a whiff of "noble savage" ideology and its accompanying veiled racism. Certainly he is not hesitant to describe men as belonging to a “finer breed� (or an inferior one). It is an unforgiving view of the world, and one that lacks nuance. Given these things, there is perhaps a kind of poetic justice in the fact that, sixty years later, Thesiger himself seems quaint and old-fashioned, a fantastic remnant of a time when the world seemed at once larger and less complex.
]]> <![CDATA[Memories of Ice (Malazan Book of the Fallen, #3)]]> 175983 925 Steven Erikson 0765348802 Matthew 3 Memories of Ice: The Malazan Book of the Fallen, Book III by Steven Erikson.

To be specific I was on vacation in Hawaii, in December, when I stumbled across this book. I'd finished the last of the novels that I brought with me on the trip, and something about the tropical lassitude left me unwilling to dive into the Serious Tome that was slated to be next on my list. But someone had left a copy of Erikson's hefty mass market paperback in the rental house were I was staying, and out of curiosity I picked it up and, as these things happen, without quite meaning to I ended up passing the next few days in a blur of swords and sorcery and ancient evil and noble but flawed heroes.

More full disclosure. Although I was an occasional fan of "fantasy novels" (whatever that means) during middle school and highschool, I am by no means familiar with the current state of that literary movement. Nor have I read anything else by Steven Erikson, nor have I read Books I, II, or IV-X of The Malazan Book of the Fallen, and it's possible that I don't actually know what I'm talking about here. On the other hand, that's never stopped in the past, and I don't see why it should now.

So:

Memories of Ice is essentially a novel about geopolitical conflict. It centers around the political and military struggles between the several quasi-national groups that populate Erikson's imaginary world; most centrally, it focuses on a clash between an evil empire of religious zealots and a loose confederation of free-spirited (and free market) adventurers. Oh, and to complicate matters both sides have allied themselves with different armies of undead genocidal zombies.

Erikson is, without question, a very good writer. His sword-weilding heroes are complex enough to feel (sort of) like real people, his monsters are genuinely frightening, and the world he has constructed contains enough unique aspects (like a messy pantheon of squabbling divinities and semi-divinities based on the tarot deck) to surprise and engage the reader, rather than feeling like a copy-paste of standard fantasy genre tropes.

But...

But for all of that, the truth is that nothing about this novel struck me as profoundly original, profoundly insightful, or (to be honest) profound at all. This is an enjoyable action movie of a book, designed to read while lying on the beach, only half-focused on the printed words, semi-skimming between episodes of violence, sensuality, or sentimentality.

And this is what makes it so interesting.

Because Memories of Ice is 944 pages long. In total, the Malazan Book of the Fallen series is 7,705 pages long. 7,705 pages! I can't claim familiarity with Mr. Erikson's writing habits, but assuming that he can write (and edit) 2 pages a day -- which would be astonishingly fast -- that would come to around 10 years of total effort to complete this series. Make that 20 years if, like most writers, his output is more like one finished page per day.

That is, to say the least, a very long time to spend on a single creative project. The more so because, while Erikson's work is well crafted and has received substantial praise in sci-fi/fantasy circles, these are not books for the ages: I would be astonished if anyone was reading these novels in 50 years. Nor are they books that do anything substantially new, or attempt to venture into any unexplored territory. Which raises the question: why does an obviously intelligent person devote 20 years and 7,000+ pages to this sort of thing, which has virtually no hope of leaving a lasting mark or garnering the accolades of the literary world?

The cynical answer, of course, would be money. Erikson has clearly made a tidy pile on the Mazalan books, but I think this is more happy accident than anything else. To become a novelist in order to get rich is pretty much like taking up taxidermy as a means of becoming famous: hardly the most direct route from A to B. Instead, I'd suggest the answer here is love of the genre, of the project itself and the characters in this story, that renders the criticisms of the world or the standards of the orthodox literary establishment meaningless. And that kind of dedication, more than anything else about this book, is inspiring and admirable.]]> 4.46 2001 Memories of Ice (Malazan Book of the Fallen, #3)
author: Steven Erikson
name: Matthew
average rating: 4.46
book published: 2001
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2010/03/26
shelves:
review:
It's been a good while since I posted a review on this site. The fact is, I've been fairly busy (my novel was published, book signings up and down the west coast, work of various sorts including many hours spent on the next novel, the rigors of family life, life in general) and as a result I fell off the reviewing wagon. So in the interest of full disclosure, I should admit that it's been some time since I read Memories of Ice: The Malazan Book of the Fallen, Book III by Steven Erikson.

To be specific I was on vacation in Hawaii, in December, when I stumbled across this book. I'd finished the last of the novels that I brought with me on the trip, and something about the tropical lassitude left me unwilling to dive into the Serious Tome that was slated to be next on my list. But someone had left a copy of Erikson's hefty mass market paperback in the rental house were I was staying, and out of curiosity I picked it up and, as these things happen, without quite meaning to I ended up passing the next few days in a blur of swords and sorcery and ancient evil and noble but flawed heroes.

More full disclosure. Although I was an occasional fan of "fantasy novels" (whatever that means) during middle school and highschool, I am by no means familiar with the current state of that literary movement. Nor have I read anything else by Steven Erikson, nor have I read Books I, II, or IV-X of The Malazan Book of the Fallen, and it's possible that I don't actually know what I'm talking about here. On the other hand, that's never stopped in the past, and I don't see why it should now.

So:

Memories of Ice is essentially a novel about geopolitical conflict. It centers around the political and military struggles between the several quasi-national groups that populate Erikson's imaginary world; most centrally, it focuses on a clash between an evil empire of religious zealots and a loose confederation of free-spirited (and free market) adventurers. Oh, and to complicate matters both sides have allied themselves with different armies of undead genocidal zombies.

Erikson is, without question, a very good writer. His sword-weilding heroes are complex enough to feel (sort of) like real people, his monsters are genuinely frightening, and the world he has constructed contains enough unique aspects (like a messy pantheon of squabbling divinities and semi-divinities based on the tarot deck) to surprise and engage the reader, rather than feeling like a copy-paste of standard fantasy genre tropes.

But...

But for all of that, the truth is that nothing about this novel struck me as profoundly original, profoundly insightful, or (to be honest) profound at all. This is an enjoyable action movie of a book, designed to read while lying on the beach, only half-focused on the printed words, semi-skimming between episodes of violence, sensuality, or sentimentality.

And this is what makes it so interesting.

Because Memories of Ice is 944 pages long. In total, the Malazan Book of the Fallen series is 7,705 pages long. 7,705 pages! I can't claim familiarity with Mr. Erikson's writing habits, but assuming that he can write (and edit) 2 pages a day -- which would be astonishingly fast -- that would come to around 10 years of total effort to complete this series. Make that 20 years if, like most writers, his output is more like one finished page per day.

That is, to say the least, a very long time to spend on a single creative project. The more so because, while Erikson's work is well crafted and has received substantial praise in sci-fi/fantasy circles, these are not books for the ages: I would be astonished if anyone was reading these novels in 50 years. Nor are they books that do anything substantially new, or attempt to venture into any unexplored territory. Which raises the question: why does an obviously intelligent person devote 20 years and 7,000+ pages to this sort of thing, which has virtually no hope of leaving a lasting mark or garnering the accolades of the literary world?

The cynical answer, of course, would be money. Erikson has clearly made a tidy pile on the Mazalan books, but I think this is more happy accident than anything else. To become a novelist in order to get rich is pretty much like taking up taxidermy as a means of becoming famous: hardly the most direct route from A to B. Instead, I'd suggest the answer here is love of the genre, of the project itself and the characters in this story, that renders the criticisms of the world or the standards of the orthodox literary establishment meaningless. And that kind of dedication, more than anything else about this book, is inspiring and admirable.
]]> <![CDATA[Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies]]> 1842
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and a national bestseller: the global account of the rise of civilization that is also a stunning refutation of ideas of human development based on race.

In this "artful, informative, and delightful" (William H. McNeill, New York Review of Books) book, Jared Diamond convincingly argues that geographical and environmental factors shaped the modern world. Societies that had a head start in food production advanced beyond the hunter-gatherer stage, and then developed writing, technology, government, and organized religion—as well as nasty germs and potent weapons of war—and adventured on sea and land to conquer and decimate preliterate cultures. A major advance in our understanding of human societies, Guns, Germs, and Steel chronicles the way that the modern world came to be and stunningly dismantles racially based theories of human history.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the Phi Beta Kappa Award in Science, the Rhone-Poulenc Prize, and the Commonwealth Club of California's Gold Medal]]> 498 Jared Diamond 0739467352 Matthew 2 4.04 1997 Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
author: Jared Diamond
name: Matthew
average rating: 4.04
book published: 1997
rating: 2
read at:
date added: 2009/12/17
shelves:
review:
this would have been a wonderful book if it was shorter by about 2/3. as it stands, the not-so-new insights of the ideas here are buried under a tedious mountain of supporting evidence.
]]> House of Meetings 18826
House of Meetings is a love story, gothic in timbre and triangular in shape. In 1946, two brothers and a Jewish girl fall into alignment in pogrom-poised Moscow. The fraternal conflict then marinates in Norlag, a slave-labor camp above the Arctic Circle, where a tryst in the coveted House of Meetings will haunt all three lovers long after the brothers are released. And for the narrator, the sole survivor, the reverberations continue into the new century.

Harrowing, endlessly surprising, epic in breadth yet intensely intimate, House of Meetings reveals once again that “Amis is a stone-solid genius . . . a dazzling star of wit and insight� ( The Wall Street Journal ).]]> 241 Martin Amis 1400044553 Matthew 4 3.43 2006 House of Meetings
author: Martin Amis
name: Matthew
average rating: 3.43
book published: 2006
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2009/12/17
shelves:
review:
this is the russian novel that dostoevsky and solzhenitsyn always wanted to write, but never quite managed to
]]> The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter 37380 359 Carson McCullers 0618084746 Matthew 5 3.99 1940 The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
author: Carson McCullers
name: Matthew
average rating: 3.99
book published: 1940
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2009/12/17
shelves:
review:
one of those books that makes most other writing seem pointless and amateurish. more quintessentially american than mark twain, more southern gothic than faulkner, more heartbreaking than harper lee
]]> The Emperor's Children 3648 The New York Times Book Review) and "a literary intelligence far surpassing most other writers of her generation" (San Francisco Chronicle), The Emperor's Children is a dazzling, masterful novel about the intersections in the lives of three friends, now on the cusp of their thirties, making their way—and not—in New York City.

There is beautiful, sophisticated Marina Thwaite—an "It" girl finishing her first book; the daughter of Murray Thwaite, celebrated intellectual and journalist—and her two closest friends from Brown, Danielle, a quietly appealing television producer, and Julius, a cash-strapped freelance critic. The delicious complications that arise among them become dangerous when Murray's nephew, Frederick "Bootie" Tubb, an idealistic college dropout determined to make his mark, comes to town. As the skies darken, it is Bootie's unexpected decisions—and their stunning, heartbreaking outcome—that will change each of their lives forever.

A richly drawn, brilliantly observed novel of fate and fortune—of innocence and experience, seduction and self-invention; of ambition, including literary ambition; of glamour, disaster, and promise�The Emperor's Children is a tour de force that brings to life a city, a generation, and the way we live in this moment.]]> 431 Claire Messud 030726419X Matthew 3
Ultimately though, the novel aspires to something more, as it culminates in the World Trade Center attacks: a study, maybe, in what happens when our privileged fantasies run up against brutal and undeniable reality. Unfortunately, this philosophizing feels like an afterthought tacked onto an otherwise enjoyable novel with the result that neither the souffle-lightness of the book's first sections, or the reflective aftershock of it's second, are completely successful.]]> 2.96 2006 The Emperor's Children
author: Claire Messud
name: Matthew
average rating: 2.96
book published: 2006
rating: 3
read at: 2007/09/01
date added: 2009/12/17
shelves:
review:
Claire Messud's writing glides along without a hitch, so smoothly that it's often difficult to see the artistry going on behind the scenes. Her greatest talent is her feeling for characterization, and it serves her well here. The Emperor's Children is a comedy of manners, populated by believably self-absorbed 30-somethings in pre-9/11 NYC.

Ultimately though, the novel aspires to something more, as it culminates in the World Trade Center attacks: a study, maybe, in what happens when our privileged fantasies run up against brutal and undeniable reality. Unfortunately, this philosophizing feels like an afterthought tacked onto an otherwise enjoyable novel with the result that neither the souffle-lightness of the book's first sections, or the reflective aftershock of it's second, are completely successful.
]]> 2666 63032 1128 Roberto Bolaño 843396867X Matthew 5
Since the success of GGM's fables, a generation of latin american authors (and others) have pursued this trite formula at the expense of literary innovation. Their devotion to the cult of magical realism has produced a few bestsellers but little in terms of work that seems capable of addressing the painful realities of life in the often impoverished, repressive and bloody context in which these works are grounded. Which brings me to Roberto Bolano's sprawling opus, 2666.

Despite our best efforts it's not often that a work of fiction genuinely contributes something new to the technology of literature. What I have in mind here is the kind of constructive experimentation embodied in, say, Ernest Hemingway's spare precise sentences. Whether or not you like Hemingway, he was doing something new, something which confronted the self-involved lyricism and pretension of his era. In a similiar way, Bolano's writing is utterly original and fearless.

At this point, it's hard (for me at least) to articulate exactly what makes 2666 an important book. I expect that like most artistic innovation, its effects can be described but its significance will only become clear with the passage of time. This significance, I think, probably has something to do with dreams. Dreams play a central role in Bolano's narrative and a dreamlike intensity and urgency runs through the pages of this novel. Bolano captures the sense of veiled significance that inhabits our dreams better than any other writer I have encountered, and extends this nameless allusiveness to waking life as well. In this respect, 2666 is the opposite of magical realism: its symbols defy comprehension or human agency, and create a world that is pregnant with nonhuman meaning.

The significance of 2666 also has something to do, I think, with the limits of narrative. Rather than expanding to encompass the world in magical realist tradition, this novel is given shape by the things which it cannot tell. Specifically, the interlocked narrative segments of 2666 center around a series of brutal killings in the fictional border-town of Santa Teresa. These events are seen mainly in terms of negative space; they exist in the peripheral awareness of various characters and exert a kind of gravitational pull, distorting the paths of unrelated lives in unexpected and subtle ways although they themselves remain unseen, outside the scope of the novel. When, finally, Bolano attempts to directly narrate these crimes the story breaks down: in place of character and motive we are left with a clinical list of the gruesome facts, anatomy and police forensic reports, the only language -- the author seems to suggest -- that can stand up to the horror of these events without excusing them. In this way, Bolano's novel can be read as an argument that some things cannot, or should not, be comprehended in narrative terms

Over the last year there has been a great deal of discussion about whether 2666 is a masterpiece (which it effectively alleges itself to be). Personally I'm not sure if this is a worthwhile, or even meaningful, question to ask. What, after all, is a masterpiece? What does seem relevant is that 2666 is a work which does something genuinely new and interesting. This is a book whose echoes will be with us for a long time.
]]> 4.22 2004 2666
author: Roberto Bolaño
name: Matthew
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2004
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2009/10/26
shelves:
review:
I've never been a fan of magical realism. Notwithstanding Gabriel Garcia Marquez's formidable powers as a writer, magical realism has always seemed to me basically like a cheap parlor trick, in which emotional metaphors are projected onto the external world. Happiness gives you wings and love makes flowers bloom; anger brings darkness and hatred is a poisonous toad crouching in someone's throat. The net result of this projection is to anthropomorphize the world itself. This is wish-fulfillment taken to its narcissistic extreme, creating a narrative universe in which nothing occurs outside the realm of human psychology.

Since the success of GGM's fables, a generation of latin american authors (and others) have pursued this trite formula at the expense of literary innovation. Their devotion to the cult of magical realism has produced a few bestsellers but little in terms of work that seems capable of addressing the painful realities of life in the often impoverished, repressive and bloody context in which these works are grounded. Which brings me to Roberto Bolano's sprawling opus, 2666.

Despite our best efforts it's not often that a work of fiction genuinely contributes something new to the technology of literature. What I have in mind here is the kind of constructive experimentation embodied in, say, Ernest Hemingway's spare precise sentences. Whether or not you like Hemingway, he was doing something new, something which confronted the self-involved lyricism and pretension of his era. In a similiar way, Bolano's writing is utterly original and fearless.

At this point, it's hard (for me at least) to articulate exactly what makes 2666 an important book. I expect that like most artistic innovation, its effects can be described but its significance will only become clear with the passage of time. This significance, I think, probably has something to do with dreams. Dreams play a central role in Bolano's narrative and a dreamlike intensity and urgency runs through the pages of this novel. Bolano captures the sense of veiled significance that inhabits our dreams better than any other writer I have encountered, and extends this nameless allusiveness to waking life as well. In this respect, 2666 is the opposite of magical realism: its symbols defy comprehension or human agency, and create a world that is pregnant with nonhuman meaning.

The significance of 2666 also has something to do, I think, with the limits of narrative. Rather than expanding to encompass the world in magical realist tradition, this novel is given shape by the things which it cannot tell. Specifically, the interlocked narrative segments of 2666 center around a series of brutal killings in the fictional border-town of Santa Teresa. These events are seen mainly in terms of negative space; they exist in the peripheral awareness of various characters and exert a kind of gravitational pull, distorting the paths of unrelated lives in unexpected and subtle ways although they themselves remain unseen, outside the scope of the novel. When, finally, Bolano attempts to directly narrate these crimes the story breaks down: in place of character and motive we are left with a clinical list of the gruesome facts, anatomy and police forensic reports, the only language -- the author seems to suggest -- that can stand up to the horror of these events without excusing them. In this way, Bolano's novel can be read as an argument that some things cannot, or should not, be comprehended in narrative terms

Over the last year there has been a great deal of discussion about whether 2666 is a masterpiece (which it effectively alleges itself to be). Personally I'm not sure if this is a worthwhile, or even meaningful, question to ask. What, after all, is a masterpiece? What does seem relevant is that 2666 is a work which does something genuinely new and interesting. This is a book whose echoes will be with us for a long time.

]]> Intimacy 1788388 118 Hanif Kureishi 0571194370 Matthew 1
Intimacy unfolds over the course of 24 hours as its protagonist, a middle-aged screenwriter named Jay, prepares to leave Susan, the mother of his two young sons. Not that he has told her he's going; he intends simply to pack his bag and slip out the door in the morning after she goes to work.

This is a case of art imitating life if there ever was one. Like his protagonist Jay, Kureishi himself is in his forties; like Jay, Kureishi has been nominated for an Academy Award, and has a weakness for psychopharmacology. And like Jay, shortly before the publication of this novel Kureishi left his wife and two sons.

The release of Intimacy saw a brief flurry of reviews which lambasted the book as thinly-veiled self-confession. Among the most vocal critics of the novel were Kureishi's sister and ex-wife both of whom condemned the author for, essentially, airing private dirty laundry on the international stage.

Subsequently, the furor over Kureishi's novel subsided somewhat; the majority of reviewers have been reluctant to make grand pronouncements about what a novelist should, and shouldn't, be empowered to write about. This is an understandable impulse: nobody wants to be viewed as guilty of censorship or small-mindedness; indeed, being unshockable and accepting when it comes to art is generally accepted as synonymous with sophistication.

But let's consider this outlook for a moment. Sure, it's easy to say that in principle that a great work of art could emerge from the examination of any given subject. But granted that it's not possible to take the stance, a la Jesse Helms, that certain topics should be artistically off-limits a priori, what about applying ethical standards to specific cases? It is unreasonable to believe that, like doctors or politicians, artists can be guilty of unethical behavior in the practice of their chosen profession? And, if so, what might that mean?

Rather than leaping headlong into these thorny questions, it's instructive to start by looking at some of the things that are wrong with Kureishi's novel. To begin with, for a novel ostensibly about -- well, intimacy, and interpersonal relationships -- virtually all the characters in Intimacy are shallow to the point of being ciphers. Susan, Jay's wife, appears only in terms of Jay's dislike for her "fat, red weeping face" and his sour quips along the lines of "she thinks she's a feminist but she's just bad-tempered." As for Jay's sons, although our protagonist is ostensibly tormented over the hurt he may cause them by disappearing without a word of warning (what, you think?) they receive, if anything, an even more cursory treatment than his wife, cropping up mainly as background scenery and noise for Jay's self-pitying observations.

And, make no mistake, Jay is a champion of self-pity. "I have lost my relish for living," he announces. "I am apathetic and most of the time want nothing, except to understand why there hasn't been more happiness here." He is a navel-gazing, self-indulgent child at heart; the few insights which occur to him are depressingly generic exercises in justification which shed no light on the situation at hand. For example, he points out that "Desire is naughty and doesn't conform to our ideals ... Desire is the original anarchist and undercover agent." Yeah, sure, and...?

So where do all of Jay's lucubrations get him? Predictably, the answer is not very far. As scheduled, he leaves his wife and sons to be with Nina, a club girl who combines (here's a twist) elements of mother and whore in one fuzzily-drawn, idealized package. As our hero traipses off into the bliss of Nina's embrace, still unenlightened and tearful (it's not easy, being the father who leaves his children) one gets the distinct sense that nothing has changed and that the sordid little drama we have just witnessed is, or will be, only one in a series of similar dismal incidents.

All told, if Intimacy has a message it seems to be this: that sometimes people do stupid, confused, hurtful things.

The question then arises: what does all of this mean in terms of the ethics of fiction? If one believes that novels are nothing more than entertainment, then Intimacy is nothing more than a case of bad writing. But any serious author must realize that stories are more than just diverting sentences on paper. In a literal sense, the stories we tell ourselves form the basis for our understanding of our selves and of the world. And as such, they have lasting significance as epistemological acts. This subject quickly moves beyond book-review territory, and I'll leave it to the judgment of Kureishi's readers as to whether this book offers any meaningful insights about the human condition. But apart from such lofty standards, let me throw out an off-the-cuff suggestion about the minimal ethical responsibilities of a novelist, taken from the Hippocratic Oath: first, do no harm.

It is on this count that, most plainly, Intimacy seems to me like a basically irresponsible piece of writing. Whether or not Kureishi intended this book to be taken as autobiography (which seems difficult to deny), the fact is that his family and the public at large will read it as such. Kureishi is an internationally recognized author who has used his pulpit to smear his ex-wife and publicize what appears to be the private tragedies of his family. I would argue that writer with a modicum of decency would have attempted to minimally disguise the real circumstances about which he is writing. What would it have cost Kureishi to depict Jay as, let's say, an academic rather than a fiction writer? Or to give him a daughter rather than two sons? This minimal kindness would have given Kureishi's ex-wife and sons at least a chance to avoid being preemptively framed as the characters in this novel.

Regardless of the theoretical standards which we apply to art, it seems little enough to ask of an author that they refrain from defaming the people who are close to them, and Intimacy fails even this modest benchmark. Mr. Kureishi, you should be ashamed of yourself.]]> 3.37 1998 Intimacy
author: Hanif Kureishi
name: Matthew
average rating: 3.37
book published: 1998
rating: 1
read at:
date added: 2009/03/08
shelves:
review:
If I was ever (God forbid) asked to teach a course on the ethics of fiction, this slim novel would surely be on the assigned reading list.

Intimacy unfolds over the course of 24 hours as its protagonist, a middle-aged screenwriter named Jay, prepares to leave Susan, the mother of his two young sons. Not that he has told her he's going; he intends simply to pack his bag and slip out the door in the morning after she goes to work.

This is a case of art imitating life if there ever was one. Like his protagonist Jay, Kureishi himself is in his forties; like Jay, Kureishi has been nominated for an Academy Award, and has a weakness for psychopharmacology. And like Jay, shortly before the publication of this novel Kureishi left his wife and two sons.

The release of Intimacy saw a brief flurry of reviews which lambasted the book as thinly-veiled self-confession. Among the most vocal critics of the novel were Kureishi's sister and ex-wife both of whom condemned the author for, essentially, airing private dirty laundry on the international stage.

Subsequently, the furor over Kureishi's novel subsided somewhat; the majority of reviewers have been reluctant to make grand pronouncements about what a novelist should, and shouldn't, be empowered to write about. This is an understandable impulse: nobody wants to be viewed as guilty of censorship or small-mindedness; indeed, being unshockable and accepting when it comes to art is generally accepted as synonymous with sophistication.

But let's consider this outlook for a moment. Sure, it's easy to say that in principle that a great work of art could emerge from the examination of any given subject. But granted that it's not possible to take the stance, a la Jesse Helms, that certain topics should be artistically off-limits a priori, what about applying ethical standards to specific cases? It is unreasonable to believe that, like doctors or politicians, artists can be guilty of unethical behavior in the practice of their chosen profession? And, if so, what might that mean?

Rather than leaping headlong into these thorny questions, it's instructive to start by looking at some of the things that are wrong with Kureishi's novel. To begin with, for a novel ostensibly about -- well, intimacy, and interpersonal relationships -- virtually all the characters in Intimacy are shallow to the point of being ciphers. Susan, Jay's wife, appears only in terms of Jay's dislike for her "fat, red weeping face" and his sour quips along the lines of "she thinks she's a feminist but she's just bad-tempered." As for Jay's sons, although our protagonist is ostensibly tormented over the hurt he may cause them by disappearing without a word of warning (what, you think?) they receive, if anything, an even more cursory treatment than his wife, cropping up mainly as background scenery and noise for Jay's self-pitying observations.

And, make no mistake, Jay is a champion of self-pity. "I have lost my relish for living," he announces. "I am apathetic and most of the time want nothing, except to understand why there hasn't been more happiness here." He is a navel-gazing, self-indulgent child at heart; the few insights which occur to him are depressingly generic exercises in justification which shed no light on the situation at hand. For example, he points out that "Desire is naughty and doesn't conform to our ideals ... Desire is the original anarchist and undercover agent." Yeah, sure, and...?

So where do all of Jay's lucubrations get him? Predictably, the answer is not very far. As scheduled, he leaves his wife and sons to be with Nina, a club girl who combines (here's a twist) elements of mother and whore in one fuzzily-drawn, idealized package. As our hero traipses off into the bliss of Nina's embrace, still unenlightened and tearful (it's not easy, being the father who leaves his children) one gets the distinct sense that nothing has changed and that the sordid little drama we have just witnessed is, or will be, only one in a series of similar dismal incidents.

All told, if Intimacy has a message it seems to be this: that sometimes people do stupid, confused, hurtful things.

The question then arises: what does all of this mean in terms of the ethics of fiction? If one believes that novels are nothing more than entertainment, then Intimacy is nothing more than a case of bad writing. But any serious author must realize that stories are more than just diverting sentences on paper. In a literal sense, the stories we tell ourselves form the basis for our understanding of our selves and of the world. And as such, they have lasting significance as epistemological acts. This subject quickly moves beyond book-review territory, and I'll leave it to the judgment of Kureishi's readers as to whether this book offers any meaningful insights about the human condition. But apart from such lofty standards, let me throw out an off-the-cuff suggestion about the minimal ethical responsibilities of a novelist, taken from the Hippocratic Oath: first, do no harm.

It is on this count that, most plainly, Intimacy seems to me like a basically irresponsible piece of writing. Whether or not Kureishi intended this book to be taken as autobiography (which seems difficult to deny), the fact is that his family and the public at large will read it as such. Kureishi is an internationally recognized author who has used his pulpit to smear his ex-wife and publicize what appears to be the private tragedies of his family. I would argue that writer with a modicum of decency would have attempted to minimally disguise the real circumstances about which he is writing. What would it have cost Kureishi to depict Jay as, let's say, an academic rather than a fiction writer? Or to give him a daughter rather than two sons? This minimal kindness would have given Kureishi's ex-wife and sons at least a chance to avoid being preemptively framed as the characters in this novel.

Regardless of the theoretical standards which we apply to art, it seems little enough to ask of an author that they refrain from defaming the people who are close to them, and Intimacy fails even this modest benchmark. Mr. Kureishi, you should be ashamed of yourself.
]]> My Name Is Red 2517 My Name Is Red is a transporting tale set amid the splendor and religious intrigue of sixteenth-century Istanbul, from one of the most prominent contemporary Turkish writers.

The Sultan has commissioned a cadre of the most acclaimed artists in the land to create a great book celebrating the glories of his realm. Their task: to illuminate the work in the European style. But because figurative art can be deemed an affront to Islam, this commission is a dangerous proposition indeed. The ruling elite therefore mustn’t know the full scope or nature of the project, and panic erupts when one of the chosen miniaturists disappears. The only clue to the mystery–or crime? –lies in the half-finished illuminations themselves. Part fantasy and part philosophical puzzle, My Name is Red is a kaleidoscopic journey to the intersection of art, religion, love, sex and power.]]> 417 Orhan Pamuk Matthew 3
There's a kind of writerly skill that almost never gets mentioned in book reviews, because it precedes anything that appears on the page. It's the process of choosing a plot and structure for the as-yet-nonexistent novel: part inspiration and part calculation, a kind of half-conscious gestation during which the writer chooses a quarry that matches their particular strengths and weaknesses. We can call this the cunning of the author, which consists of (to revisit the maxim above) knowing what you can't do well, and avoiding it -- or better yet, turning that shortcoming to your advantage.

My Name Is Red is possibly the best example of "writerly cunning" I've ever encountered. Ostensibly, the plot is a kind of stylized murder-mystery: at the Ottoman court in Constantinople, a miniaturist (manuscript illuminator) is killed while working on an innovative, possibly blasphemous book, and everyone scrambles to find out whodunnit. Within this "frame story" however, My Name Is Red is something much more: narrated by something like seven primary characters (with voices from a few secondary characters, and even inanimate objects, chiming in), it's a debate about individuality vs. tradition, and the nature of selfhood.

According to Ottoman tradition, a miniaturist should not have a recognizable painting style, and should not even sign their own work: they should function as anonymous clerks, revealing God's creation. Contact between this tradition and Venetian (western European) painting, in which individual style was highly valued, inevitably led to upheaval within the Ottoman artistic world. Each of the characters in this novel is torn between the "old way" of doing things, in which the significance of individuals (both in art and in life) is minimized, and the tempting (but perhaps blasphemous) idea that individual style has value and should not be hidden. In a reductionist sort of way, we might call this a tug-of-war between group- and individual-based notions of identity.

All of this is interesting enough, but Pamuk's stroke of genius is this: he simply cannot (it seems) convincingly write from multiple distinct points of view.

Brilliant.

By writing a novel told by multiple characters, each of whom longs to have an individual style -- but all of whom sound exactly the same -- Pamuk illustrates dramatically the pathos of these characters, and the cognitive distance between the worlds they hope to bridge. This is a feat of writerly cunning and ingenuity that left me, quite simply, in awe.

On the other hand, as a reader, much of My Name Is Red left me cold. The sameness of all the voices in the novel does begin to grow tedious after awhile, and the stories-within-a-story told by various characters felt like contrived digressions. This is more a writer's book than a reader's -- but as a work of authorial architecture, it is a masterpiece.]]> 3.87 1998 My Name Is Red
author: Orhan Pamuk
name: Matthew
average rating: 3.87
book published: 1998
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2009/01/07
shelves:
review:
Someone or other once said that "self-confidence is knowing what you can't do well, and avoiding it." While that perspective sounds like a recipe for a fairly limited life, there's an element of truth to it -- particularly when it comes to writing.

There's a kind of writerly skill that almost never gets mentioned in book reviews, because it precedes anything that appears on the page. It's the process of choosing a plot and structure for the as-yet-nonexistent novel: part inspiration and part calculation, a kind of half-conscious gestation during which the writer chooses a quarry that matches their particular strengths and weaknesses. We can call this the cunning of the author, which consists of (to revisit the maxim above) knowing what you can't do well, and avoiding it -- or better yet, turning that shortcoming to your advantage.

My Name Is Red is possibly the best example of "writerly cunning" I've ever encountered. Ostensibly, the plot is a kind of stylized murder-mystery: at the Ottoman court in Constantinople, a miniaturist (manuscript illuminator) is killed while working on an innovative, possibly blasphemous book, and everyone scrambles to find out whodunnit. Within this "frame story" however, My Name Is Red is something much more: narrated by something like seven primary characters (with voices from a few secondary characters, and even inanimate objects, chiming in), it's a debate about individuality vs. tradition, and the nature of selfhood.

According to Ottoman tradition, a miniaturist should not have a recognizable painting style, and should not even sign their own work: they should function as anonymous clerks, revealing God's creation. Contact between this tradition and Venetian (western European) painting, in which individual style was highly valued, inevitably led to upheaval within the Ottoman artistic world. Each of the characters in this novel is torn between the "old way" of doing things, in which the significance of individuals (both in art and in life) is minimized, and the tempting (but perhaps blasphemous) idea that individual style has value and should not be hidden. In a reductionist sort of way, we might call this a tug-of-war between group- and individual-based notions of identity.

All of this is interesting enough, but Pamuk's stroke of genius is this: he simply cannot (it seems) convincingly write from multiple distinct points of view.

Brilliant.

By writing a novel told by multiple characters, each of whom longs to have an individual style -- but all of whom sound exactly the same -- Pamuk illustrates dramatically the pathos of these characters, and the cognitive distance between the worlds they hope to bridge. This is a feat of writerly cunning and ingenuity that left me, quite simply, in awe.

On the other hand, as a reader, much of My Name Is Red left me cold. The sameness of all the voices in the novel does begin to grow tedious after awhile, and the stories-within-a-story told by various characters felt like contrived digressions. This is more a writer's book than a reader's -- but as a work of authorial architecture, it is a masterpiece.
]]> Out Stealing Horses 398323
Trond’s friend Jon often appeared at his doorstep with an adventure in mind for the two of them. But this morning would turn out to be different. What began as a joy ride on “borrowed� horses ends with Jon falling into a strange trance of grief. Trond soon learns what befell Jon earlier that day—an incident that marks the beginning of a series of vital losses for both boys.

Set in the easternmost region of Norway, Out Stealing Horses begins with an ending. Sixty-seven-year-old Trond has settled into a rustic cabin in an isolated area to live the rest of his life with a quiet deliberation. A meeting with his only neighbor, however, forces him to reflect on that fateful summer.]]> 258 Per Petterson Matthew 4
It was almost underground, down a flight of stairs from the street in a simple room that contained a dozen tables below the low rough-beamed ceiling. Each course of the meal followed the previous one in a leisurely rhythm; my sense of hurry, and time in general, evaporated. The food was very simple and utterly perfect. Asparagus with sea-salt. Bread and tomatoes. A lamb chop with rosemary. The highlight of the meal was pasta with olive oil, garlic and shaved truffles. Simple things, perfected.

More than any other novel I've read in recent memory, Out Stealing Horses felt like the literary equivalent of that meal. It is a book of simple pleasures. An old man living in the woods, walking with his dog. A trip to the store. Memories of a childhood summer. The writing is unornamented but the quality of each sentence is palpable. Not a word too many, or too few. (Hemingway would be envious.)

Despite these virtues, it must be said that Petterson's novel is in some ways a slight book. Not very much happens, and although the journey from beginning to end is a delight I was ultimately left wondering whether I had really gone anywhere at all. From a certain perspective this felt like a refreshing change from the many books which are propelled by angst-mongering and insist on conveying Big Messages: without a doubt, Petterson is more emotionally honest, and a better writer, for his insistence on clarity and staying close to the nature of his character. Still this sense of slightness will make me remember Out Stealing Horses, above all, not as a great novel but as one of the best long-short-stories I've ever read.]]> 3.79 2003 Out Stealing Horses
author: Per Petterson
name: Matthew
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2003
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2008/12/23
shelves:
review:
Possibly the best meal I ever ate was at a small restaurant in Florence whose name I can't remember. In the midst of a typically hectic family vacation, whose days were crammed with rushing from one tourist attraction to the next, this restaurant stands out in my memory as an island of calm.

It was almost underground, down a flight of stairs from the street in a simple room that contained a dozen tables below the low rough-beamed ceiling. Each course of the meal followed the previous one in a leisurely rhythm; my sense of hurry, and time in general, evaporated. The food was very simple and utterly perfect. Asparagus with sea-salt. Bread and tomatoes. A lamb chop with rosemary. The highlight of the meal was pasta with olive oil, garlic and shaved truffles. Simple things, perfected.

More than any other novel I've read in recent memory, Out Stealing Horses felt like the literary equivalent of that meal. It is a book of simple pleasures. An old man living in the woods, walking with his dog. A trip to the store. Memories of a childhood summer. The writing is unornamented but the quality of each sentence is palpable. Not a word too many, or too few. (Hemingway would be envious.)

Despite these virtues, it must be said that Petterson's novel is in some ways a slight book. Not very much happens, and although the journey from beginning to end is a delight I was ultimately left wondering whether I had really gone anywhere at all. From a certain perspective this felt like a refreshing change from the many books which are propelled by angst-mongering and insist on conveying Big Messages: without a doubt, Petterson is more emotionally honest, and a better writer, for his insistence on clarity and staying close to the nature of his character. Still this sense of slightness will make me remember Out Stealing Horses, above all, not as a great novel but as one of the best long-short-stories I've ever read.
]]> The Picture of Dorian Gray 5297 Apaixonado pela sua própria imagem na tela, Dorian deseja que esses traços imutáveis de beleza fiquem para sempre no seu rosto e que seja o retrato a envelhecer. É este o parti-pris narcisista, ou fáustico, do romance de Oscar Wilde.]]> 272 Oscar Wilde Matthew 1
Sure, some people will argue that The Picture of Dorian Gray is a classic, etc. etc., but it doesn't take a genius to sort out that canonization isn't any more indication of a novel's quality than it's present-day popularity. (In fact, one could argue, canonization is just a form of present-day popularity, but that's another story.)

At it's core, The Picture of Dorian Gray revolves around a fairly trite Gothic plot that could sustain a reasonably entertaining tale of, say, 8-12 pages. Unfortunately, Wilde decided to continue writing for another 200-odd pages motivated, apparently, by his need to wedge in a certain number of witty one-liners and convey some Big Ideas.

There's no denying that Wilde's one-liners are, indeed, witty: the only problem is that they often come at the expense of what little naturalness existed in his incredibly melodramatic, overwrought prose, so that the direction of a scene or conversation is horribly distorted to accommodate a certain bon mot. Worse yet, in the context of Serious Writing, these quips often fall flat under their (supposed) intellectual burden rather than existing as they should: as pretty, essentially empty ornamentation, which is one reason why Wilde's comic plays succeed far better than this atrocity of literature.

Allegedly, The Picture of Dorian Gray is a complex novel of ideas but apparently I was too dense to find those Deep Thoughts. Ultimately this book is nothing more than a paean to cynicism and despair. Conventional morality and society, Wilde argues, is hollow and hypocritical; the few "good" characters in this book (Basil Hallward, etc.) are weak and sentimental. At the same time, rejecting morality in favor of hedonism leads inescapably to guilt, punishment and ruin (the fate of Dorian Gray). Thus, ultimately, the only reasonable course of action (according to Wilde) seems to be that of Lord Henry Wotton: disdain for the world and detachment from line, punctuated by the occasional witticism along the way.

In short, both as an ideological treatise and a (so-called) work of art The Picture of Dorian Gray reads most of all as an advertisement for suicide.]]> 4.13 1890 The Picture of Dorian Gray
author: Oscar Wilde
name: Matthew
average rating: 4.13
book published: 1890
rating: 1
read at:
date added: 2008/10/29
shelves:
review:
Let me cut to the chase: this is a terrible book, written for bad people.

Sure, some people will argue that The Picture of Dorian Gray is a classic, etc. etc., but it doesn't take a genius to sort out that canonization isn't any more indication of a novel's quality than it's present-day popularity. (In fact, one could argue, canonization is just a form of present-day popularity, but that's another story.)

At it's core, The Picture of Dorian Gray revolves around a fairly trite Gothic plot that could sustain a reasonably entertaining tale of, say, 8-12 pages. Unfortunately, Wilde decided to continue writing for another 200-odd pages motivated, apparently, by his need to wedge in a certain number of witty one-liners and convey some Big Ideas.

There's no denying that Wilde's one-liners are, indeed, witty: the only problem is that they often come at the expense of what little naturalness existed in his incredibly melodramatic, overwrought prose, so that the direction of a scene or conversation is horribly distorted to accommodate a certain bon mot. Worse yet, in the context of Serious Writing, these quips often fall flat under their (supposed) intellectual burden rather than existing as they should: as pretty, essentially empty ornamentation, which is one reason why Wilde's comic plays succeed far better than this atrocity of literature.

Allegedly, The Picture of Dorian Gray is a complex novel of ideas but apparently I was too dense to find those Deep Thoughts. Ultimately this book is nothing more than a paean to cynicism and despair. Conventional morality and society, Wilde argues, is hollow and hypocritical; the few "good" characters in this book (Basil Hallward, etc.) are weak and sentimental. At the same time, rejecting morality in favor of hedonism leads inescapably to guilt, punishment and ruin (the fate of Dorian Gray). Thus, ultimately, the only reasonable course of action (according to Wilde) seems to be that of Lord Henry Wotton: disdain for the world and detachment from line, punctuated by the occasional witticism along the way.

In short, both as an ideological treatise and a (so-called) work of art The Picture of Dorian Gray reads most of all as an advertisement for suicide.
]]> Lost Illusions 25932 656 Honoré de Balzac 1406506583 Matthew 2 Lost Illusions as a work in and of itself is a bit like critiquing a rock album based on a single track. After all, Rather than a novel, in many ways it makes more sense to regard this book as a single episode in Balzac's insanely ambitious life-long project, La Comedie Humaine.

Consisting of 95 finished works (and around 50 more unfinished volumes), La Comedie Humaine was intended to be something like a a sociological encyclopedia of Restoration-era France. Balzac viewed himself, apparently, "a secretary who is transcribing society's history... a history of 'moeurs'" (customs, manners and morals).

In the face of the staggering scale of this undertaking, which makes Proust look terse by comparison, what is a poor reader to do? The responsible approach, I suppose, would be to start with the first few volumes of La Comedie and read a few books before passing judgement. I, alas, am not a responsible reader and Lost Illusions was the first work by Balzac that I've read, plucked more or less at random from the middle of Balzac's oceanic endeavor. It will also, I expect, be the last.

This isn't because of Balzac's writing per se. Lost Illusions is filled with delightful moments and sentences: for example, the following description of a pompous, elderly dim-witted provincial nobleman:

When the evening was in full swing, and he saw everybody happily occupied [in his drawing room] he was perfectly content to stand there on his two long legs like a swan balanced on both feet, with the air of a man listening to a conversation on politics; or we would go and study the hand of one of the card-players, without its conveying anything to him, for he did not play any games.

Balzac's reputation as a writer is well deserved; sentence for sentence, he could stand in as the French version of Dickens. The problem, rather, is his overall project.

Although it would take an essay to do this subject real justice, in brief the issue I see is this: that if your project is to write -- say -- A Guide to Nineteenth Century France For the Visiting Extraterrestrial, then a set of novels is probably not the best medium (as opposed to, for example, a nonfiction work of sociology). This is because, by their nature, successful novels tend to subordinate logical precision and clarity of explanation to the dramatic needs of plot, tone, and characterization. Although novels do convey profound insights about the world, they do so by means of illumination rather than explanation.

Due to the demands of his undertaking, Balzac's narration is continually disrupted by explanations of subjects ranging from the economics of publishing to the correct technique for handling a civil trial. As a result, the deeper significance that ought to emerge from the narrative act -- that sense of being in another time and place, walking around in another character's skin -- never materializes.

I am perfectly willing to concede that my judgment of Balzac may be premature and based on insufficient evidence or understanding. But by the end of Lost Illusions the main sense I had was one of tragedy for the author -- as the scale of his ambitions undermine exactly the thing that he set out to accomplish.]]> 4.19 1843 Lost Illusions
author: Honoré de Balzac
name: Matthew
average rating: 4.19
book published: 1843
rating: 2
read at:
date added: 2008/09/13
shelves:
review:
To write a review of Lost Illusions as a work in and of itself is a bit like critiquing a rock album based on a single track. After all, Rather than a novel, in many ways it makes more sense to regard this book as a single episode in Balzac's insanely ambitious life-long project, La Comedie Humaine.

Consisting of 95 finished works (and around 50 more unfinished volumes), La Comedie Humaine was intended to be something like a a sociological encyclopedia of Restoration-era France. Balzac viewed himself, apparently, "a secretary who is transcribing society's history... a history of 'moeurs'" (customs, manners and morals).

In the face of the staggering scale of this undertaking, which makes Proust look terse by comparison, what is a poor reader to do? The responsible approach, I suppose, would be to start with the first few volumes of La Comedie and read a few books before passing judgement. I, alas, am not a responsible reader and Lost Illusions was the first work by Balzac that I've read, plucked more or less at random from the middle of Balzac's oceanic endeavor. It will also, I expect, be the last.

This isn't because of Balzac's writing per se. Lost Illusions is filled with delightful moments and sentences: for example, the following description of a pompous, elderly dim-witted provincial nobleman:

When the evening was in full swing, and he saw everybody happily occupied [in his drawing room] he was perfectly content to stand there on his two long legs like a swan balanced on both feet, with the air of a man listening to a conversation on politics; or we would go and study the hand of one of the card-players, without its conveying anything to him, for he did not play any games.

Balzac's reputation as a writer is well deserved; sentence for sentence, he could stand in as the French version of Dickens. The problem, rather, is his overall project.

Although it would take an essay to do this subject real justice, in brief the issue I see is this: that if your project is to write -- say -- A Guide to Nineteenth Century France For the Visiting Extraterrestrial, then a set of novels is probably not the best medium (as opposed to, for example, a nonfiction work of sociology). This is because, by their nature, successful novels tend to subordinate logical precision and clarity of explanation to the dramatic needs of plot, tone, and characterization. Although novels do convey profound insights about the world, they do so by means of illumination rather than explanation.

Due to the demands of his undertaking, Balzac's narration is continually disrupted by explanations of subjects ranging from the economics of publishing to the correct technique for handling a civil trial. As a result, the deeper significance that ought to emerge from the narrative act -- that sense of being in another time and place, walking around in another character's skin -- never materializes.

I am perfectly willing to concede that my judgment of Balzac may be premature and based on insufficient evidence or understanding. But by the end of Lost Illusions the main sense I had was one of tragedy for the author -- as the scale of his ambitions undermine exactly the thing that he set out to accomplish.
]]> The Yiddish Policemen's Union 16703
But homicide detective Meyer Landsman of the District Police has enough problems without worrying about the upcoming Reversion. His life is a shambles, his marriage a wreck, his career a disaster. He and his half-Tlingit partner, Berko Shemets, can't catch a break in any of their outstanding cases. Landsman's new supervisor is the love of his life—and also his worst nightmare. And in the cheap hotel where he has washed up, someone has just committed a murder—right under Landsman's nose. Out of habit, obligation, and a mysterious sense that it somehow offers him a shot at redeeming himself, Landsman begins to investigate the killing of his neighbor, a former chess prodigy. But when word comes down from on high that the case is to be dropped immediately, Landsman soon finds himself contending with all the powerful forces of faith, obsession, hopefulness, evil, and salvation that are his heritage—and with the unfinished business of his marriage to Bina Gelbfish, the one person who understands his darkest fears.

At once a gripping whodunit, a love story, an homage to 1940s noir, and an exploration of the mysteries of exile and redemption, The Yiddish Policemen's Union is a novel only Michael Chabon could have written.
(front flap)]]> 414 Michael Chabon 0007149824 Matthew 5 The Yiddish Policeman's Union looks like a mess. Situated in the alternate universe of Sitka, Alaska -- a temporary safe haven for Jews created in the wake of the Holocaust -- and revolving around a noir-inflected whodunit tale that ultimately leads to a U.S. government conspiracy, the novel would appear to be an ungainly hybrid of disparate parts: a mishmash of Big Ideas (geopolitics, the fabric of history) and small ones (the breakup of a marriage, family grudges, Orthodox Jewish minutia). In other words it seems a safe bet that, as the doctor said, this turkey will not fly.

Except, it does.

In fact, this turkey soars.

I've been a fan of Michael Chabon for years, not only for his writing but for his ideological stance towards so-called literary fiction. And to my mind, The Yiddish Policeman's Union is Chabon's best work yet exactly because of the risks it takes in defying our expectations about genre boundaries. Chabon draws on the resources of mystery, science fiction, and personal-redemption quest narratives and the result is more than the sum of its parts. I'd say this was one of the best mysteries I've read, or that this is one of the best works of speculative fiction I've read, but either statement shortchanges the uniqueness of this novel.

Okay, in the interest of honesty I will admit that the book has it's shortcomings. In particular, the ultimate answers to the mystery Chabon poses never feel entirely plausible. But these failures almost feel irrelevant beside the pleasure of stepping into the world of Sitka, one of the most vivid fictional settings I have ever encountered, the companionship of Chabon's hardboiled protagonist Meyer Landsman, and the sheer joy of this author's prose.]]> 3.72 2007 The Yiddish Policemen's Union
author: Michael Chabon
name: Matthew
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2007
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2008/09/06
shelves:
review:
From a distance, The Yiddish Policeman's Union looks like a mess. Situated in the alternate universe of Sitka, Alaska -- a temporary safe haven for Jews created in the wake of the Holocaust -- and revolving around a noir-inflected whodunit tale that ultimately leads to a U.S. government conspiracy, the novel would appear to be an ungainly hybrid of disparate parts: a mishmash of Big Ideas (geopolitics, the fabric of history) and small ones (the breakup of a marriage, family grudges, Orthodox Jewish minutia). In other words it seems a safe bet that, as the doctor said, this turkey will not fly.

Except, it does.

In fact, this turkey soars.

I've been a fan of Michael Chabon for years, not only for his writing but for his ideological stance towards so-called literary fiction. And to my mind, The Yiddish Policeman's Union is Chabon's best work yet exactly because of the risks it takes in defying our expectations about genre boundaries. Chabon draws on the resources of mystery, science fiction, and personal-redemption quest narratives and the result is more than the sum of its parts. I'd say this was one of the best mysteries I've read, or that this is one of the best works of speculative fiction I've read, but either statement shortchanges the uniqueness of this novel.

Okay, in the interest of honesty I will admit that the book has it's shortcomings. In particular, the ultimate answers to the mystery Chabon poses never feel entirely plausible. But these failures almost feel irrelevant beside the pleasure of stepping into the world of Sitka, one of the most vivid fictional settings I have ever encountered, the companionship of Chabon's hardboiled protagonist Meyer Landsman, and the sheer joy of this author's prose.
]]> Fury 4836 But fury is all around him. An astonishing work of explosive energy, Fury is by turns a pitiless and pitch-black comedy, a love story of mesmerizing force, and a disturbing inquiry into the darkest side of human nature.]]> 259 Salman Rushdie 0099421860 Matthew 2
It's hard to say whether, with Fury, Salman Rushdie exerts too much or too little control over his material -- and the answer I'm tempted to go with is, at various times, both.

Ostensibly the story of how Solly Solanka, a celebrity dollmaker, overcomes his middle-aged alienation and youger-woman lusts, Fury reads like several half-conceived project stuck haphazardly together into an unwieldy whole: there's a sci-fi space-opera, a social-commentary-via-serial-killer subplot, a government coup on a remote island that gives rise to a kind of action-adventure and, oh yeah, the semi-autobiographical central narrative of an angry, aging man grappling with the existential difficulties of leaving his wife to chase women half his age. Even Rushdie's wordplay-filled writing feels contrived at many points throughout this book: an airy froth of words that has little to do with the real action or substance of the novel. Although it aspires to depth and complexity, in the end Fury feels like a mass of sound and -- well, you know -- signifying nothing.]]> 3.33 2001 Fury
author: Salman Rushdie
name: Matthew
average rating: 3.33
book published: 2001
rating: 2
read at:
date added: 2008/08/25
shelves:
review:
Authorial control in works of fiction is a curious thing. If an author exerts too much control over their writing, the story usually remains mired in the constructed, overly-reasoned, essentially static world of authorial ideology and intention: the characters never wake up, look around, and start doing the sorts of mad, wonderful, unplanned-for things that make great literature speak powerfully about the human condition. On the other hand, if the author has too little control over their narrative then usually Things Fall Apart; the story devolves into the chaos and purposelessness of raw experience, without the elements of structure and insight that makes storytelling worthwhile.

It's hard to say whether, with Fury, Salman Rushdie exerts too much or too little control over his material -- and the answer I'm tempted to go with is, at various times, both.

Ostensibly the story of how Solly Solanka, a celebrity dollmaker, overcomes his middle-aged alienation and youger-woman lusts, Fury reads like several half-conceived project stuck haphazardly together into an unwieldy whole: there's a sci-fi space-opera, a social-commentary-via-serial-killer subplot, a government coup on a remote island that gives rise to a kind of action-adventure and, oh yeah, the semi-autobiographical central narrative of an angry, aging man grappling with the existential difficulties of leaving his wife to chase women half his age. Even Rushdie's wordplay-filled writing feels contrived at many points throughout this book: an airy froth of words that has little to do with the real action or substance of the novel. Although it aspires to depth and complexity, in the end Fury feels like a mass of sound and -- well, you know -- signifying nothing.
]]> Geek Love 13872 Geek Love is the story of the Binewskis, a carny family whose mater- and paterfamilias set out � with the help of amphetamine, arsenic, and radioisotopes � to breed their own exhibit of human oddities. There's Arturo the Aquaboy, who has flippers for limbs and a megalomaniac ambition worthy of Genghis Khan . . . Iphy and Elly, the lissome Siamese twins . . . albino hunchback Oly, and the outwardly normal Chick, whose mysterious gifts make him the family's most precious � and dangerous � asset.

As the Binewskis take their act across the backwaters of the U.S., inspiring fanatical devotion and murderous revulsion; as its members conduct their own Machiavellian version of sibling rivalry, Geek Love throws its sulfurous light on our notions of the freakish and the normal, the beautiful and the ugly, the holy and the obscene. Family values will never be the same.]]> 348 Katherine Dunn 0375713344 Matthew 2
Geek Love reads in many ways like a smarter version of Tom Robbins: this is a darkly surreal tall-tale for grownups, propelled by Dunn's gift for characterization and her bubble-gum readable prose. The premise of the book is that Art and Lily, owners of Binewski's Fabulon, a traveling carnival, decide to breed their own freak show by creating genetically altered children. "What greater gift could you offer your children than an inherent ability to earn a living just by being themselves?" muses Lily.

If this sounds like a veiled reference to celebrity and its consequences, that's because it is: the novel quickly turns into a parable about the cult of personality, what it means to be "normal," and the dangers of playing God. As the "geek" children grow up the family turns on itself and eventually Things Fall Apart: by the time the novel ends, we feel as if we've witnessed one of the wackier Greek tragedies or an excerpt from some pop-culture Book of Revelation.

It's no coincidence that Geek Love is particularly popular with a highschool/college readership, since the concerns of the book are exactly those of adolescence: individuality (vs. "normal" society), insiders vs. outsiders, the pain and difficulty of having a self. The solution that Dunn suggests to all of these issues is that the most important thing is Being Special. In turn, Specialness comes from being Different And Proud Of It. (Of course, the route to being special recommended here -- cutting off all your limbs -- isn't about to become a nationwide fad; still, it would be interesting to research how many teens got their noses or eyebrows pierced after reading this book.)

Don't get me wrong: unlike, say, the books of Ayn Rand, there's nothing actually toxic or evil about Dunn's ideology. It's just that Specialness is a fairly limited view of what makes life worthwhile (what happened to things like fulfillment, or intimacy, or accomplishment?) at least beyond some mid-twenties Hipster threshold. But for those at an impressionable age, it's easy to see how this novel would be utterly compelling.]]> 3.96 1989 Geek Love
author: Katherine Dunn
name: Matthew
average rating: 3.96
book published: 1989
rating: 2
read at:
date added: 2008/08/18
shelves:
review:
I somehow narrowly escaped reading this book in highschool or college, and boy am I glad that I did.

Geek Love reads in many ways like a smarter version of Tom Robbins: this is a darkly surreal tall-tale for grownups, propelled by Dunn's gift for characterization and her bubble-gum readable prose. The premise of the book is that Art and Lily, owners of Binewski's Fabulon, a traveling carnival, decide to breed their own freak show by creating genetically altered children. "What greater gift could you offer your children than an inherent ability to earn a living just by being themselves?" muses Lily.

If this sounds like a veiled reference to celebrity and its consequences, that's because it is: the novel quickly turns into a parable about the cult of personality, what it means to be "normal," and the dangers of playing God. As the "geek" children grow up the family turns on itself and eventually Things Fall Apart: by the time the novel ends, we feel as if we've witnessed one of the wackier Greek tragedies or an excerpt from some pop-culture Book of Revelation.

It's no coincidence that Geek Love is particularly popular with a highschool/college readership, since the concerns of the book are exactly those of adolescence: individuality (vs. "normal" society), insiders vs. outsiders, the pain and difficulty of having a self. The solution that Dunn suggests to all of these issues is that the most important thing is Being Special. In turn, Specialness comes from being Different And Proud Of It. (Of course, the route to being special recommended here -- cutting off all your limbs -- isn't about to become a nationwide fad; still, it would be interesting to research how many teens got their noses or eyebrows pierced after reading this book.)

Don't get me wrong: unlike, say, the books of Ayn Rand, there's nothing actually toxic or evil about Dunn's ideology. It's just that Specialness is a fairly limited view of what makes life worthwhile (what happened to things like fulfillment, or intimacy, or accomplishment?) at least beyond some mid-twenties Hipster threshold. But for those at an impressionable age, it's easy to see how this novel would be utterly compelling.
]]> The Wretched of the Earth 66933 Orientalism or The Autobiography of Malcolm X, and it is now available in a new translation that updates its language for a new generation of readers.

The Wretched of the Earth is a brilliant analysis of the psychology of the colonized and their path to liberation. Bearing singular insight into the rage and frustration of colonized peoples, and the role of violence in effecting historical change, the book incisively attacks the twin perils of post-independence colonial politics: the disenfranchisement of the masses by the elites on the one hand, and intertribal and interfaith animosities on the other.

Fanon's analysis, a veritable handbook of social reorganization for leaders of emerging nations, has been reflected all too clearly in the corruption and violence that has plagued present-day Africa. The Wretched of the Earth has had a major impact on civil rights, anticolonialism, and black consciousness movements around the world, and this bold new translation by Richard Philcox reaffirms it as a landmark.]]> 251 Frantz Fanon 0802141323 Matthew 2 Black Skin, White Masks, as a middle class caucasian male (MC^2, if you will) it's difficult to offer a critique to The Wretched of the Earth that feels either relevant or responsible. After all, in Fanon's terms, I am (at least through complacency) part of the problem that this work tries to solve: writing this review is a bit like a 1950's Republican critiquing The Feminine Mystique. (Is there really anything to learn here, apart from what form the self-justification will take?)

Of course, at least in part, a strength of this book comes exactly from its unwillingness to concede anything, to concede any kind of legitimate authority -- even as a reader -- to colonialism, and the citizens of colonial powers. Uncompromising: it's a word that's thrown around a lot, but in this case really fits. There are echoes of Marx here, and Sun Tzu and Machiavelli, but these influences are really incidental as with chilling logic, and singleminded purpose, Fanon discusses the need to oppose colonialism through armed resistance and the challenges facing nascent post-colonial states. His agenda is pragmatic, not theoretical; specific to a time and place, rather than aspiring to the universal. This book is a psychological how-to manual for insurgency and revolutionary warfare.

Although it's difficult to find counter-arguments to Fanon's conclusion that armed revolt is essential to ending colonialism, it's also difficult (at least, sitting here in my comfortable middle class apartment) to approve of his conclusions. Easy to say, Fanon would argue, and also the predictable response of the established colonial power. True, but in the clarity of historical hindsight it also seems apparent that -- in most cases -- violence only breeds further violence, and that the most successful revolutions, like those of Gandhi and MLK, were the (relatively) bloodless ones.]]> 4.35 1961 The Wretched of the Earth
author: Frantz Fanon
name: Matthew
average rating: 4.35
book published: 1961
rating: 2
read at:
date added: 2008/08/06
shelves:
review:
Like Fanon's previous (and, from my perspective, better) work Black Skin, White Masks, as a middle class caucasian male (MC^2, if you will) it's difficult to offer a critique to The Wretched of the Earth that feels either relevant or responsible. After all, in Fanon's terms, I am (at least through complacency) part of the problem that this work tries to solve: writing this review is a bit like a 1950's Republican critiquing The Feminine Mystique. (Is there really anything to learn here, apart from what form the self-justification will take?)

Of course, at least in part, a strength of this book comes exactly from its unwillingness to concede anything, to concede any kind of legitimate authority -- even as a reader -- to colonialism, and the citizens of colonial powers. Uncompromising: it's a word that's thrown around a lot, but in this case really fits. There are echoes of Marx here, and Sun Tzu and Machiavelli, but these influences are really incidental as with chilling logic, and singleminded purpose, Fanon discusses the need to oppose colonialism through armed resistance and the challenges facing nascent post-colonial states. His agenda is pragmatic, not theoretical; specific to a time and place, rather than aspiring to the universal. This book is a psychological how-to manual for insurgency and revolutionary warfare.

Although it's difficult to find counter-arguments to Fanon's conclusion that armed revolt is essential to ending colonialism, it's also difficult (at least, sitting here in my comfortable middle class apartment) to approve of his conclusions. Easy to say, Fanon would argue, and also the predictable response of the established colonial power. True, but in the clarity of historical hindsight it also seems apparent that -- in most cases -- violence only breeds further violence, and that the most successful revolutions, like those of Gandhi and MLK, were the (relatively) bloodless ones.
]]> Black Skin, White Masks 274392 Black Skin, White Masks is the unsurpassed study of the black psyche in a white world. Hailed for its scientific analysis and poetic grace when it was first published in 1952, the book remains a vital force today.]]> 232 Frantz Fanon 0802150845 Matthew 4
Fanon's exegesis of the impact of colonialism on colonized peoples, and the psychological displacement and cultural violence that arises from such interactions, is compelling and exact. Although his interpretations largely stem from a fairly elementary Freudian model, his approach transcends the psychoanalytic as he brings personal experience, anthropological fragments, and a rich epistemology (rooted loosely in Hegel, and decidedly influenced by phenomenology) to bear on his analysis.

In some ways, reading Black Skin, White Masks is similar to reading Freud: so many of the concepts introduced here have become commonplaces that it's at times difficult to discern their originality. Notions like "wounded identity" (eg, attachment to an injurious sense of self and history), cultural hegemony, and "post traumatic stress" are all here in nascent form, and should be counted among Fanon's contributions to our understanding of the self.

A powerful, difficult book that (unfortunately) remains all to relevant today.]]> 4.29 1952 Black Skin, White Masks
author: Frantz Fanon
name: Matthew
average rating: 4.29
book published: 1952
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2008/07/12
shelves:
review:
As someone without much formal training in psychology or sociology, and (more significantly) as a white middle-class male, it difficult for me to find a comfortable vantage from which to discuss this book -- and perhaps that uneasiness is part of the point.

Fanon's exegesis of the impact of colonialism on colonized peoples, and the psychological displacement and cultural violence that arises from such interactions, is compelling and exact. Although his interpretations largely stem from a fairly elementary Freudian model, his approach transcends the psychoanalytic as he brings personal experience, anthropological fragments, and a rich epistemology (rooted loosely in Hegel, and decidedly influenced by phenomenology) to bear on his analysis.

In some ways, reading Black Skin, White Masks is similar to reading Freud: so many of the concepts introduced here have become commonplaces that it's at times difficult to discern their originality. Notions like "wounded identity" (eg, attachment to an injurious sense of self and history), cultural hegemony, and "post traumatic stress" are all here in nascent form, and should be counted among Fanon's contributions to our understanding of the self.

A powerful, difficult book that (unfortunately) remains all to relevant today.
]]> <![CDATA[Devil's Waltz (Alex Delaware, #7)]]> 172944
Cassie is bright, energetic, and the picture of health - most of the time. Yet her parents rush her to the E.R. night after night with medical symptoms no doctor can explain. Her parents seem sympathetic and deeply concerned. Her favorite nurse is a model of devotion. Child psychologist Alex Delaware is called in to investigate, and his instinct tells him that one of the parents may be a monster. Then a physician at the hospital is brutally murdered. And a second shadowy death is revealed. Alex and his friend, LAPD detective Milo Sturgis, have only hours to uncover the link between these shocking events and the fate of the innocent child.]]> 528 Jonathan Kellerman 0345460715 Matthew 1 3.93 1993 Devil's Waltz (Alex Delaware, #7)
author: Jonathan Kellerman
name: Matthew
average rating: 3.93
book published: 1993
rating: 1
read at:
date added: 2008/07/12
shelves:
review:
This novel made me embarrassed to call myself a writer.
]]> Gentlemen of the Road 587638 204 Michael Chabon 0345501748 Matthew 2
As a poster-boy for the literary establishment, Chabon is an ideal candidate to champion the fight against lit. snobbery, but, alas, in Gentlemen of the Road he falls short. Although the novel has its share of beautiful phrases and moments like all of Chabon's work, it fails to live up to the swashbuckling predecessors it attempts to emulate -- books like H. Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines or Dumas' The Three Musketeers.

The problem may simply be that Chabon is new to this kind of writing, or that he hasn't read deeply enough in the genre (as you can tell, I'm itching to give the man the benefit of the doubt) but in Gentlemen his characters remain too mired in their own seriousness, and his vision of far-off lands too pedestrian, to achieve the kind of thrilling recklessness and bonhomie that marks the best of the adventure genre.

That said: I'm hopeful that Chabon will continue working in this vein, and look forward to reading his next effort at broadening our collective literary horizons.]]> 3.45 2007 Gentlemen of the Road
author: Michael Chabon
name: Matthew
average rating: 3.45
book published: 2007
rating: 2
read at:
date added: 2008/05/28
shelves:
review:
I wanted badly to love this book, since I'm a deep admirer of the project Michael Chabon has taken upon himself and which is embodied in this novel: that is, to move beyond the strictures of "literary fiction" and demonstrate that there's a place for serious writing in any genre.

As a poster-boy for the literary establishment, Chabon is an ideal candidate to champion the fight against lit. snobbery, but, alas, in Gentlemen of the Road he falls short. Although the novel has its share of beautiful phrases and moments like all of Chabon's work, it fails to live up to the swashbuckling predecessors it attempts to emulate -- books like H. Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines or Dumas' The Three Musketeers.

The problem may simply be that Chabon is new to this kind of writing, or that he hasn't read deeply enough in the genre (as you can tell, I'm itching to give the man the benefit of the doubt) but in Gentlemen his characters remain too mired in their own seriousness, and his vision of far-off lands too pedestrian, to achieve the kind of thrilling recklessness and bonhomie that marks the best of the adventure genre.

That said: I'm hopeful that Chabon will continue working in this vein, and look forward to reading his next effort at broadening our collective literary horizons.
]]> Nostromo 448918
In 1998, the Modern Library ranked Nostromo 47th on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. It is frequently regarded as amongst the best of Conrad's long fiction; F. Scott Fitzgerald once said, "I'd rather have written Nostromo than any other novel."

Conrad set his novel in the mining town of Sulaco, an imaginary port in the western region of the imaginary country Costaguana.

In his "Author’s Note" to early editions of Nostromo, Joseph Conrad provides a detailed explanation of the inspirational origins of his novel. There he relates how, as a young man of about seventeen, while serving aboard a ship in the Gulf of Mexico, he heard the story of a man who had stolen, single-handedly, "a whole lighter-full of silver". As Conrad goes on to relate, he forgot about the story until some twenty-five years later when he came across a travelogue in a used-book shop in which the author related how he worked for years aboard a schooner whose master claimed to be that very thief who had stolen the silver.]]> 474 Joseph Conrad 014018371X Matthew 3 Lord Jim I looked forward to diving into Nostromo which, according to the introduction of my edition, is the best of Conrad's novels. And it's not hard to see why this book would be a darling of reviewers. With its sweeping scope that combines a rich cast of characters with history-in-the-making style swashbuckling and its willingness to tackle issues of morality, social responsibility, colonialism and the corrupting influence of wealth, Nostromo is a Big Novel in every way. Unfortunately, these ambitions coincide with the not inconsiderable flaws of this work (and Conrad's writing in general).

The action of the novel shifts between multiple time frames and perspectives as it chronicles a revolution in a fictional South American country, Costaguana. Over the course of the book we learn about the local legends of the province where the narrative is set, Sulaco, including tales about the disappearance of two thieving gringos who haunt the mountains due to their greed. We meet characters like the stalwart Charles Gould, who controls a silver mine and is trying to save it from the corrupt government; Dr. Monygham, an embittered survivor of torture at the hands of a previous corrupt government; Martin Decoud, a Constaguanan-turned-Parisian flaneur who becomes a firebrand journalist in the cause of revolution; an unready figurehead president named Ribiera and a delusional tyrant-in-waiting named Montero; and, incidentally, a heroic man-of-the-people called Nostromo.

If this list seems slightly overwhelming that's because, well, it is. (It would also be considerably longer, but my copy of the book is currently in storage, so these are only the bits that stand out im memory). Nostromo has the scope and complexity of magical realist works like One Hundred Years of Solitude but is burdened with Conrad's obsession with psychological nuance which robs this book of the light touch that allows writers like Marquez to skim over the history of an entire nation without leaving the reader bewildered.

The result, at its best, is a formidable War and Peace-style sense of great events unfolding. More often though, what remains is a mess of beautifully written episodes that never quite harmonize, or create a sense of forward momentum. In the end, I'd file this one under the "magnificent failure" category.]]> 3.84 1904 Nostromo
author: Joseph Conrad
name: Matthew
average rating: 3.84
book published: 1904
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2008/05/17
shelves:
review:
After reading Lord Jim I looked forward to diving into Nostromo which, according to the introduction of my edition, is the best of Conrad's novels. And it's not hard to see why this book would be a darling of reviewers. With its sweeping scope that combines a rich cast of characters with history-in-the-making style swashbuckling and its willingness to tackle issues of morality, social responsibility, colonialism and the corrupting influence of wealth, Nostromo is a Big Novel in every way. Unfortunately, these ambitions coincide with the not inconsiderable flaws of this work (and Conrad's writing in general).

The action of the novel shifts between multiple time frames and perspectives as it chronicles a revolution in a fictional South American country, Costaguana. Over the course of the book we learn about the local legends of the province where the narrative is set, Sulaco, including tales about the disappearance of two thieving gringos who haunt the mountains due to their greed. We meet characters like the stalwart Charles Gould, who controls a silver mine and is trying to save it from the corrupt government; Dr. Monygham, an embittered survivor of torture at the hands of a previous corrupt government; Martin Decoud, a Constaguanan-turned-Parisian flaneur who becomes a firebrand journalist in the cause of revolution; an unready figurehead president named Ribiera and a delusional tyrant-in-waiting named Montero; and, incidentally, a heroic man-of-the-people called Nostromo.

If this list seems slightly overwhelming that's because, well, it is. (It would also be considerably longer, but my copy of the book is currently in storage, so these are only the bits that stand out im memory). Nostromo has the scope and complexity of magical realist works like One Hundred Years of Solitude but is burdened with Conrad's obsession with psychological nuance which robs this book of the light touch that allows writers like Marquez to skim over the history of an entire nation without leaving the reader bewildered.

The result, at its best, is a formidable War and Peace-style sense of great events unfolding. More often though, what remains is a mess of beautifully written episodes that never quite harmonize, or create a sense of forward momentum. In the end, I'd file this one under the "magnificent failure" category.
]]> Lord Jim 12194
Joseph Conrad (1857-1924), was a Polish author who wrote in English after settling in England. Conrad is regarded as one of the greatest novelists in English, though he did not speak the language fluently until he was in his twenties. He wrote stories and novels, often with a nautical setting, that depict trials of the human spirit in the midst of an indifferent world. He was a master prose stylist who brought a distinctly non-English tragic sensibility into English literature.

Contents:

Lord Jim

Memoirs & Letters:

A Personal Record; or Some Reminiscences

The Mirror of the Sea

Notes on Life & Letters

Biography & Critical Essays:

Joseph Conrad (A Biography) by Hugh Walpole

Joseph Conrad by John Albert Macy

A Conrad Miscellany by John Albert Macy

Joseph Conrad by Virginia Woolf]]> 455 Joseph Conrad 1551111721 Matthew 4
This novelistic approach seems to have fallen into disfavor -- maybe because it doesn't provide sufficient opportunities for navel-gazing on the part of the narrator, or maybe because, by necessity, it lends itself to narratives which are incomplete and ultimately open-ended. But these shortcomings can also be virtues, insofar as they echo how we experience stories in everyday life (partially, in disconnected pieces) far more elegantly than most PoMo or stream-of-consciousness efforts at narrative self-awareness and naturalism, without any of the look-at-me pyrotechnics which are often confused these days with literary talent.

Somerset Maugham's The Moon and Sixpence is probably the preeminent example of this literary style, but Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad comes in a close second as the novel's narrator -- a retired sea-captain -- recounts the career of Jim, an extraordinary, and extraordinarily flawed, young man.

In addition to its stylistic merits, Lord Jim may be the most perfect depiction of a romantic hero that I've ever come across. Conrad's grasp of the aspirations, shortsightedness, and appeal of the romantic (we're talking Byron here, of course, not Danielle Steele) is dazzling. He writes:

"Are not our lives too short for that full utterance which through all our stammerings is of course our only and abiding intention? I have given up expecting those last words, whose ring, if they could only be pronounced, would shake both heaven and earth. There is never time to say our last word � the last word of our love, of our desire, faith, remorse, submissions, revolt. The heaven and the earth must not be shaken, I suppose � at least, not by us who know so many truths about either."

Here, in a nutshell, is the romantic hero and the death of romanticism that comes with maturity. A tour de force that perfectly exemplifies Conrad's gift for seamlessly combining literary and psychological sophistication with swashbuckling action and pure storytelling.]]> 3.63 1900 Lord Jim
author: Joseph Conrad
name: Matthew
average rating: 3.63
book published: 1900
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2008/05/17
shelves:
review:
There's a certain school of novel-writing I've always loved, which thrived around the beginning of the 20th century. It's a style characterized by narrators who are trying to recount a story that they understand only incompletely and who piece together bits of hearsay, guesses, and a few scraps of first-hand knowledge, into a narrative about some largely-mysterious third party. The general format goes: "X was an extraordinary person who I hardly knew, but here is my attempt at recounting their history."

This novelistic approach seems to have fallen into disfavor -- maybe because it doesn't provide sufficient opportunities for navel-gazing on the part of the narrator, or maybe because, by necessity, it lends itself to narratives which are incomplete and ultimately open-ended. But these shortcomings can also be virtues, insofar as they echo how we experience stories in everyday life (partially, in disconnected pieces) far more elegantly than most PoMo or stream-of-consciousness efforts at narrative self-awareness and naturalism, without any of the look-at-me pyrotechnics which are often confused these days with literary talent.

Somerset Maugham's The Moon and Sixpence is probably the preeminent example of this literary style, but Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad comes in a close second as the novel's narrator -- a retired sea-captain -- recounts the career of Jim, an extraordinary, and extraordinarily flawed, young man.

In addition to its stylistic merits, Lord Jim may be the most perfect depiction of a romantic hero that I've ever come across. Conrad's grasp of the aspirations, shortsightedness, and appeal of the romantic (we're talking Byron here, of course, not Danielle Steele) is dazzling. He writes:

"Are not our lives too short for that full utterance which through all our stammerings is of course our only and abiding intention? I have given up expecting those last words, whose ring, if they could only be pronounced, would shake both heaven and earth. There is never time to say our last word � the last word of our love, of our desire, faith, remorse, submissions, revolt. The heaven and the earth must not be shaken, I suppose � at least, not by us who know so many truths about either."

Here, in a nutshell, is the romantic hero and the death of romanticism that comes with maturity. A tour de force that perfectly exemplifies Conrad's gift for seamlessly combining literary and psychological sophistication with swashbuckling action and pure storytelling.
]]> Gravity’s Rainbow 415 776 Thomas Pynchon 0143039946 Matthew 5 4.01 1973 Gravity’s Rainbow
author: Thomas Pynchon
name: Matthew
average rating: 4.01
book published: 1973
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2008/04/27
shelves:
review:

]]> The Big Clock 166912
Janoth knows there was one witness to his entry into Pauline’s apartment on the night of the murder; he knows that man must have been the man Pauline was with before he got back; but he doesn’t know who he was. Janoth badly wants to get his hands on that man, and he picks one of his most trusted employees to track him down: George Stroud, who else?

How does a man escape from himself? No book has ever dramatized that question to more perfect effect than The Big Clock, a masterpiece of American noir.]]> 175 Kenneth Fearing 1590171810 Matthew 3
Examined more closely though, most of the obvious elements that seem to define a mystery fall away. There are mysteries that don't involve murders (a number of Sherlock Holmes stories come to mind), that don't feature detectives as protagonists (like most of Jim Thompson's novels), and that don't even culminate in the solving of a crime (for example, Andrea Camilleri's The Shape of Water.) So if a novel can be a mystery without a corpse, a detective, or a criminal brought to justice, what exactly defines the genre?

If I had to take a stab at some kind of definition, I'd suggest that maybe two kinds of things characterize mystery novels. The first is that in such books, the essential and overt struggle of the protagonist is with the limits of their own understanding. Of course, one could argue that in most modern literature the awareness of the main character grows in some way over the span of the book, often culminating in a moment of self-realization. But in general this growth is subtextual, a byproduct of other plot activities. In a mystery, on the other hand, the struggle for knowledge becomes the overt goal of the protagonist and the driving factor of the narrative.

The second thing that seems to characterize mystery novels is that, as a result of the protagonist's struggle for understanding, the difference between essential and incidental details is erased. As the characters in a mystery try to decipher whatever puzzle is confronting them, they (as we as readers) have no way of knowing what facts may ultimately prove to be essential to that solution. The fact that a man is wearing a red shirt, or that there are footprints on a lawn, or the way that the wind rattles the shutters of a house, all may become vital clues. This means that we tend to read mystery novels with a kind of heightened state of awareness, since no passage can be safely skimmed over.

I'm bringing this up here because although The Big Clock is certainly a mystery, it doesn't conform to most expectations about the genre. Alternating between the perspective of multiple narrators, there's no clear detective/protagonist in this book, and although there is a murder there's never any question about who committed it: virtually all of the characters are aware of the guilty party from the start. This means that the mystery is never really "solved" -- it would be more accurate to say that it becomes irrelevant as the story reaches its conclusion.

In part because of this structural originality, and in part for the sheer quality of the prose, The Big Clock is a noir classic that deserves to be on the shelf alongside Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler: highly recommended for fans of detective fiction in general, and particularly those interested in all the strange and wonderful places where the genre can go.]]> 3.85 1946 The Big Clock
author: Kenneth Fearing
name: Matthew
average rating: 3.85
book published: 1946
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2008/03/08
shelves:
review:
What, exactly, is a mystery novel? From a distance the genre seems like an obvious one: it's about Sam Spade tracking down a murderer, or Phillip Marlowe lurking in the foggy shadows with a pistol in hand.

Examined more closely though, most of the obvious elements that seem to define a mystery fall away. There are mysteries that don't involve murders (a number of Sherlock Holmes stories come to mind), that don't feature detectives as protagonists (like most of Jim Thompson's novels), and that don't even culminate in the solving of a crime (for example, Andrea Camilleri's The Shape of Water.) So if a novel can be a mystery without a corpse, a detective, or a criminal brought to justice, what exactly defines the genre?

If I had to take a stab at some kind of definition, I'd suggest that maybe two kinds of things characterize mystery novels. The first is that in such books, the essential and overt struggle of the protagonist is with the limits of their own understanding. Of course, one could argue that in most modern literature the awareness of the main character grows in some way over the span of the book, often culminating in a moment of self-realization. But in general this growth is subtextual, a byproduct of other plot activities. In a mystery, on the other hand, the struggle for knowledge becomes the overt goal of the protagonist and the driving factor of the narrative.

The second thing that seems to characterize mystery novels is that, as a result of the protagonist's struggle for understanding, the difference between essential and incidental details is erased. As the characters in a mystery try to decipher whatever puzzle is confronting them, they (as we as readers) have no way of knowing what facts may ultimately prove to be essential to that solution. The fact that a man is wearing a red shirt, or that there are footprints on a lawn, or the way that the wind rattles the shutters of a house, all may become vital clues. This means that we tend to read mystery novels with a kind of heightened state of awareness, since no passage can be safely skimmed over.

I'm bringing this up here because although The Big Clock is certainly a mystery, it doesn't conform to most expectations about the genre. Alternating between the perspective of multiple narrators, there's no clear detective/protagonist in this book, and although there is a murder there's never any question about who committed it: virtually all of the characters are aware of the guilty party from the start. This means that the mystery is never really "solved" -- it would be more accurate to say that it becomes irrelevant as the story reaches its conclusion.

In part because of this structural originality, and in part for the sheer quality of the prose, The Big Clock is a noir classic that deserves to be on the shelf alongside Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler: highly recommended for fans of detective fiction in general, and particularly those interested in all the strange and wonderful places where the genre can go.
]]> Thieves Like Us 1148823 - Raymond Chandler

Somewhere between the hardboiled talk of Dashiell Hammett and the dustbowl poetry of John Steinbeck lies the doomed romanticism of Edward Anderson's 'Thieves Like Us'. When three small-time country gangsters break jail, they return, like moths to a flame, to the only life they know - smalltown bank-robbing. And when Bowie, the youngest of them, falls in love with Keechie, one of the older gangster's cousins, it becomes a classic tale of love with nowhere to hide and no hope of reprieve.

First published in 1937, 'Thieves Like Us' was powerfully adapted for the screen by Nicholas Ray in 1948 as 'They Live by Night' and once again under its original title by Robert Altman in 1973.]]> 206 Edward Anderson 1853753114 Matthew 2
A kind of low-budget version of The Grapes of Wrath, and a thematic -- if not actual -- inspiration for movies like Terrence Malick's Badlands.]]> 3.66 1937 Thieves Like Us
author: Edward Anderson
name: Matthew
average rating: 3.66
book published: 1937
rating: 2
read at:
date added: 2008/03/08
shelves:
review:
Although nicely written, the dragging pace of this book -- exacerbated by the looming sense of doom that weighs down every page -- made it a difficult novel for me to finish.

A kind of low-budget version of The Grapes of Wrath, and a thematic -- if not actual -- inspiration for movies like Terrence Malick's Badlands.
]]> <![CDATA[The Postman Always Rings Twice]]> 25807 The Stranger - is the fever-pitched tale of a drifter who stumbles into a job, into an erotic obsession, and into a murder.]]> 116 James M. Cain 0752861743 Matthew 1 Raymond Chandler (possibly the most romantic of the lot) wrote in his essay The Simple Art of Murder:

"...down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero; he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor.... He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world."

In short, noir fiction generally takes the form of an exercise in finding the heroic -- or at least, the uplifting -- in an otherwise squalid universe.

Theoretically, this aim is often problematic both insofar as it lends a repetitive quality to much of the genre and -- more importantly -- as it tends to glamorize and distort the "gritty" reality these fictions portray. The latter of these problems is particularly noticeable in James M. Cain's novel The Postman Always Rings Twice.

The protagonist of the book, Frank Chambers, is about as horrifying a main character as I've ever encountered: apart from being a murderer, he's also a self-pitying misogynist and a racist. (Conveniently, all the ethnic minority characters in this story are caricatures and all the woman are masochists.)

To make an uplifting figure out of such a character seems like an exercise in perversity, yet this is what James Cain sets out to do in this wooden, two-dimensional thriller. In the end however, more than demonstrating the nobility of poor misunderstood Frank, this book conveys the sense that its author is -- coincidentally -- just as self-pitying, cruel, and unpleasant as his hero.

If it weren't for the quality of the writing (which is, at moments, pure noir classic: terse, punchy, and wire-taut), I'd give this novel zero stars and consider it a reason to revisit my views on book-burning. The one-star rating is a reflection of the fact that I've always been a sucker for a pretty sentence, regardless of its context.]]> 3.79 1934 The Postman Always Rings Twice
author: James M. Cain
name: Matthew
average rating: 3.79
book published: 1934
rating: 1
read at:
date added: 2008/02/23
shelves:
review:
For me, one of the more interesting aspects of "noir" fiction is the persistent romanticism of the genre. As Raymond Chandler (possibly the most romantic of the lot) wrote in his essay The Simple Art of Murder:

"...down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero; he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor.... He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world."

In short, noir fiction generally takes the form of an exercise in finding the heroic -- or at least, the uplifting -- in an otherwise squalid universe.

Theoretically, this aim is often problematic both insofar as it lends a repetitive quality to much of the genre and -- more importantly -- as it tends to glamorize and distort the "gritty" reality these fictions portray. The latter of these problems is particularly noticeable in James M. Cain's novel The Postman Always Rings Twice.

The protagonist of the book, Frank Chambers, is about as horrifying a main character as I've ever encountered: apart from being a murderer, he's also a self-pitying misogynist and a racist. (Conveniently, all the ethnic minority characters in this story are caricatures and all the woman are masochists.)

To make an uplifting figure out of such a character seems like an exercise in perversity, yet this is what James Cain sets out to do in this wooden, two-dimensional thriller. In the end however, more than demonstrating the nobility of poor misunderstood Frank, this book conveys the sense that its author is -- coincidentally -- just as self-pitying, cruel, and unpleasant as his hero.

If it weren't for the quality of the writing (which is, at moments, pure noir classic: terse, punchy, and wire-taut), I'd give this novel zero stars and consider it a reason to revisit my views on book-burning. The one-star rating is a reflection of the fact that I've always been a sucker for a pretty sentence, regardless of its context.
]]> <![CDATA[What Came Before He Shot Her (Inspector Lynley, #14)]]> 2727047 0 Elizabeth George 0340827505 Matthew 2
It's a mild snobbishness that's probably at it's worst when riding the subway: far more than what they're wearing, or the color of their skin, a quick glance at the cover of the books my fellow passengers are holding is often all that's required to cement my snap-judgment. If someone is reading, say, Don Quixote, they'll rise a notch in my estimation. If their book has puffy letters or neon colors, if the name of the author is in larger print than the title, or if a depiction of one of the characters appears on the cover, my silent condemnation is virtually guaranteed.

From any number of conversations I know that I'm not alone in this bad habit. And surely, I've thought on various occasions, this the least harmful of -isms. The only problem is that, like most vicious stereotypes, it happens to be appallingly shortsighted. Even putting aside the old saw of not judging a book by its cover, simply judging a book by its genre blinds us to the possibilities inherent in any form, and of words in general.

Reading What Came Before He Shot Her was a welcome reminder of that fact for me, not least because of the contemptuous glances I garnered on the J/M/Z train, directed at the neon-puffy-letter title (above a bodice-ripper photograph) which ornamented the front of my edition. Because, in all honesty, the pages inside this nightmare binding were an engaging, expectation-defying surprise.

This novel is less a "whodunit" than a "whydunit," chronicling the sequence of misunderstandings and circumstances that led an intelligent, sensitive 12-year-old boy, living in the worst public-housing slums of London, to shoot the pregnant wife of a police officer.

Although Elizabeth George writes about inner-city black poverty with all the intimacy of a xenobiologist (Ms. George herself is white and middle class), her ability to move a plot efficiently forward and her ability to weave a sense of unease into the simplest of details make this book a compelling, addictive read -- not to mention an experiment in breaking the rules of a well-established genre.

I expect that this isn't one of those books that will hang around on my shelves, and that I'll be referring to years from now, but at a minimum it was a novel that broadened my narrow-minded lit-snob horizons.]]> 3.37 2006 What Came Before He Shot Her (Inspector Lynley, #14)
author: Elizabeth George
name: Matthew
average rating: 3.37
book published: 2006
rating: 2
read at:
date added: 2008/02/17
shelves:
review:
There's a curious unspoken hierarchy among serious readers, or at least among the sort of readers I seem to hang out with.

It's a mild snobbishness that's probably at it's worst when riding the subway: far more than what they're wearing, or the color of their skin, a quick glance at the cover of the books my fellow passengers are holding is often all that's required to cement my snap-judgment. If someone is reading, say, Don Quixote, they'll rise a notch in my estimation. If their book has puffy letters or neon colors, if the name of the author is in larger print than the title, or if a depiction of one of the characters appears on the cover, my silent condemnation is virtually guaranteed.

From any number of conversations I know that I'm not alone in this bad habit. And surely, I've thought on various occasions, this the least harmful of -isms. The only problem is that, like most vicious stereotypes, it happens to be appallingly shortsighted. Even putting aside the old saw of not judging a book by its cover, simply judging a book by its genre blinds us to the possibilities inherent in any form, and of words in general.

Reading What Came Before He Shot Her was a welcome reminder of that fact for me, not least because of the contemptuous glances I garnered on the J/M/Z train, directed at the neon-puffy-letter title (above a bodice-ripper photograph) which ornamented the front of my edition. Because, in all honesty, the pages inside this nightmare binding were an engaging, expectation-defying surprise.

This novel is less a "whodunit" than a "whydunit," chronicling the sequence of misunderstandings and circumstances that led an intelligent, sensitive 12-year-old boy, living in the worst public-housing slums of London, to shoot the pregnant wife of a police officer.

Although Elizabeth George writes about inner-city black poverty with all the intimacy of a xenobiologist (Ms. George herself is white and middle class), her ability to move a plot efficiently forward and her ability to weave a sense of unease into the simplest of details make this book a compelling, addictive read -- not to mention an experiment in breaking the rules of a well-established genre.

I expect that this isn't one of those books that will hang around on my shelves, and that I'll be referring to years from now, but at a minimum it was a novel that broadened my narrow-minded lit-snob horizons.
]]> <![CDATA[The Shape of Water (Inspector Montalbano, #1)]]> 163166 The Shape of Water is the first in Andrea Camilleri's wry, brilliantly compelling Sicilian crime series, featuring Inspector Montalbano.

The goats of VigĂ ta once grazed on the trash-strewn site still known as the Pasture. Now local enterprise of a different sort flourishes: drug dealers and prostitutes of every flavour. But their discreet trade is upset when two employees of the Splendour Refuse Collection Company discover the body of engineer Silvio Luparello, one of the local movers and shakers, apparently deceased in flagrante at the Pasture. The coroner's verdict is death from natural causes - refreshingly unusual for Sicily.

But Inspector Salvo Montalbano, as honest as he is streetwise and as scathing to fools and villains as he is compassionate to their victims, is not ready to close the case - even though he's being pressured by VigĂ ta's police chief, judge, and bishop.

Picking his way through a labyrinth of high-comedy corruption, delicious meals, vendetta firepower, and carefully planted false clues, Montalbano can be relied on, whatever the cost, to get to the heart of the matter.

The Shape of Water is followed by the second in this phenomenal series, The Terracotta Dog.

]]> 224 Andrea Camilleri 0142004715 Matthew 3 lightness what we mean is something along the lines of 'written without careful craft,' or sometimes, more simply, 'trivial.'

It's difficult to describe The Shape of Water (or really, any of Camilleri's novels) without invoking this word, but in a sense far different from its usual usage. The 'lightness' that pervades his books is more like that of an Olympic skater executing a triple axel: something incredibly sophisticated and difficult, performed in such a way as to appear effortless. This is writing that glides along without a hitch, an elegant lucidity that never calls attention to itself.

In terms of plot, Camilleri's books are mysteries; as far as their substance goes, they're equal parts whodunit, philosophic meditation, and love-poem to the people and landscape in which they are all set, a sleepy village on the sun-drenched coast of Sicily.

But more than the twists and turns (and there are plenty) that the protagonist, Inspector Maltabano, navigates while uncovering the truth, what has stayed with me about these books is the sense of having sat, for the time I spent in their pages, on the patio of a trattoria overlooking the ocean, leisurely eating amazing food and watching the slow Italian light. Highly recommended for anyone who needs a vacation, but is short on airfare.]]> 3.73 1994 The Shape of Water (Inspector Montalbano, #1)
author: Andrea Camilleri
name: Matthew
average rating: 3.73
book published: 1994
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2008/02/17
shelves:
review:
When a book is described as 'light,' there's usually a negative connotation to this adjective: by lightness what we mean is something along the lines of 'written without careful craft,' or sometimes, more simply, 'trivial.'

It's difficult to describe The Shape of Water (or really, any of Camilleri's novels) without invoking this word, but in a sense far different from its usual usage. The 'lightness' that pervades his books is more like that of an Olympic skater executing a triple axel: something incredibly sophisticated and difficult, performed in such a way as to appear effortless. This is writing that glides along without a hitch, an elegant lucidity that never calls attention to itself.

In terms of plot, Camilleri's books are mysteries; as far as their substance goes, they're equal parts whodunit, philosophic meditation, and love-poem to the people and landscape in which they are all set, a sleepy village on the sun-drenched coast of Sicily.

But more than the twists and turns (and there are plenty) that the protagonist, Inspector Maltabano, navigates while uncovering the truth, what has stayed with me about these books is the sense of having sat, for the time I spent in their pages, on the patio of a trattoria overlooking the ocean, leisurely eating amazing food and watching the slow Italian light. Highly recommended for anyone who needs a vacation, but is short on airfare.
]]> Journey into Fear 46430 Journey Into Fear is a classic suspense tale from one of the founders of the genre.]]> 288 Eric Ambler 0375726721 Matthew 2
Still, overall, I didn't think this book was anything to write home about. On the other hand, neither is this review.]]> 3.93 1940 Journey into Fear
author: Eric Ambler
name: Matthew
average rating: 3.93
book published: 1940
rating: 2
read at:
date added: 2008/02/08
shelves:
review:
Workmanlike, readable WWII spy novel, that does a surprisingly good job of allowing its characters to climb on various soapboxes and declaim about things like Justice, Statehood, and the Ethical Quandry of War, without getting in the way of the plot too much.

Still, overall, I didn't think this book was anything to write home about. On the other hand, neither is this review.
]]> <![CDATA[The New York Trilogy (New York Trilogy, #1-3)]]> 431 The remarkable, acclaimed series of interconnected detective novels � from the author of 4 3 2 1: A Novel

The New York Review of Books has called Paul Auster’s work “one of the most distinctive niches in contemporary literature.� Moving at the breathless pace of a thriller, this uniquely stylized triology of detective novels begins with City of Glass, in which Quinn, a mystery writer, receives an ominous phone call in the middle of the night. He’s drawn into the streets of New York, onto an elusive case that’s more puzzling and more deeply-layered than anything he might have written himself. In Ghosts, Blue, a mentee of Brown, is hired by White to spy on Black from a window on Orange Street. Once Blue starts stalking Black, he finds his subject on a similar mission, as well. In The Locked Room, Fanshawe has disappeared, leaving behind his wife and baby and nothing but a cache of novels, plays, and poems.

This Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition includes an introduction from author and professor Luc Sante, as well as a pulp novel-inspired cover from Art Spiegelman, Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic artist of Maus and In the Shadow of No Towers.]]> 308 Paul Auster 0143039830 Matthew 2 The Locked Room, the last volume in this trilogy of novellas, Paul Auster writes: "I read steadily for almost an hour.... If I say nothing about what I found there, it is because I understood very little. All the words were familiar to me, and yet they seemed to have been put together strangely, as though their final purpose was to cancel each other out."

In many ways, my assessment of this book coincides with Auster's own evaluation. In these stories, Auster decomposes the mystery genre, giving us enigmas that elude any clear solution, where the act of "solving" a mystery leads only to a deeper set of riddles.

It's an interesting, if ultimately frustrating, intellectual exercise, and Auster's writing -- lucid, precise, strangely detached -- is well suited to these kinds of meta-games. But like his protagonists, the overall impression I was left with after reading this book was that of wrestling with a poorly articulated theoretical question, one whose terms and consequences were never made clear. My guess is that these stories represent some kind of personal exploration for Mr. Auster, a quest undertaken more for the benefit of the author than the reader (although arguably that's always the case). In the end, all I can say is that I hope all this effort brought Mr. Auster closer to something that he needed to understand. Certainly that's more than I can say for myself.]]> 3.93 1987 The New York Trilogy (New York Trilogy, #1-3)
author: Paul Auster
name: Matthew
average rating: 3.93
book published: 1987
rating: 2
read at:
date added: 2008/02/06
shelves:
review:
In The Locked Room, the last volume in this trilogy of novellas, Paul Auster writes: "I read steadily for almost an hour.... If I say nothing about what I found there, it is because I understood very little. All the words were familiar to me, and yet they seemed to have been put together strangely, as though their final purpose was to cancel each other out."

In many ways, my assessment of this book coincides with Auster's own evaluation. In these stories, Auster decomposes the mystery genre, giving us enigmas that elude any clear solution, where the act of "solving" a mystery leads only to a deeper set of riddles.

It's an interesting, if ultimately frustrating, intellectual exercise, and Auster's writing -- lucid, precise, strangely detached -- is well suited to these kinds of meta-games. But like his protagonists, the overall impression I was left with after reading this book was that of wrestling with a poorly articulated theoretical question, one whose terms and consequences were never made clear. My guess is that these stories represent some kind of personal exploration for Mr. Auster, a quest undertaken more for the benefit of the author than the reader (although arguably that's always the case). In the end, all I can say is that I hope all this effort brought Mr. Auster closer to something that he needed to understand. Certainly that's more than I can say for myself.
]]> <![CDATA[Down and Out in Paris and London]]> 393199 213 George Orwell 015626224X Matthew 4 mean to me. Despite the inconsistent brilliance of books like Point, Counter Point, The Devils of Loudon, and of course Brave New World, in all these works Huxley has about as much compassion and warmth towards his characters as a lepidopterist fixing a butterfly on a pin, and about as much sympathy for humanity writ large as, well, any of those other great nihilists.

George Orwell, on the other hand -- who often seems to get paired with Huxley in some kind of Dystopian Authors Cabal -- was, by comparison, a profoundly humanist writer. He cared deeply for his characters and abhorred unnecessary suffering in any form: facts which make books like 1984 and Animal Farm that much scarier to read.

Down and Out in Paris and London is Orwell's most personal book and, to my mind, his most powerful. Its contents are so autobiographical that they hardly qualify as fiction, as Orwell describes his year of living (almost literally) penniless and starving in the worst slums of these two European cities. This book is, in a sense, 1984 set in real life: with amazing clarity, compassion, and insight he details the lives of the poorest of the poor along with the set of prejudices and laws that deprives them of any prospects in life.

This is one of the finest examples of how writing can be -- and perhaps should be -- a powerfully ethical act, and a flashing reality-check to the nincompoops who deny that true progress exists.]]> 4.10 1933 Down and Out in Paris and London
author: George Orwell
name: Matthew
average rating: 4.10
book published: 1933
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2008/01/23
shelves:
review:
There was always something about Aldous Huxley that seemed basically mean to me. Despite the inconsistent brilliance of books like Point, Counter Point, The Devils of Loudon, and of course Brave New World, in all these works Huxley has about as much compassion and warmth towards his characters as a lepidopterist fixing a butterfly on a pin, and about as much sympathy for humanity writ large as, well, any of those other great nihilists.

George Orwell, on the other hand -- who often seems to get paired with Huxley in some kind of Dystopian Authors Cabal -- was, by comparison, a profoundly humanist writer. He cared deeply for his characters and abhorred unnecessary suffering in any form: facts which make books like 1984 and Animal Farm that much scarier to read.

Down and Out in Paris and London is Orwell's most personal book and, to my mind, his most powerful. Its contents are so autobiographical that they hardly qualify as fiction, as Orwell describes his year of living (almost literally) penniless and starving in the worst slums of these two European cities. This book is, in a sense, 1984 set in real life: with amazing clarity, compassion, and insight he details the lives of the poorest of the poor along with the set of prejudices and laws that deprives them of any prospects in life.

This is one of the finest examples of how writing can be -- and perhaps should be -- a powerfully ethical act, and a flashing reality-check to the nincompoops who deny that true progress exists.
]]> <![CDATA[His Dark Materials (His Dark Materials #1-3)]]> 18116
These thrilling adventures tell the story of Lyra and Will—two ordinary children on a perilous journey through shimmering haunted otherworlds. They will meet witches and armored bears, fallen angels and soul-eating specters. And in the end, the fate of both the living—and the dead—will rely on them.

Phillip Pullman’s spellbinding His Dark Materials trilogy has captivated readers for over twenty years and won acclaim at every turn. It will have you questioning everything you know about your world and wondering what really lies just out of reach.]]> 1088 Philip Pullman 0440238609 Matthew 5
since then (several weeks ago) i've wrestled with the problem of what i can possibly write about these books, since the kind of praise that immediately comes to mind is so hyperbolic and lavish that everyone will probably think i'm deluded and/or on drugs.

the His Dark Materials trilogy makes most other young adult fantasy, like the Harry Potter books, seem pointless, unoriginal, and irrelevant. Pullman's masterpiece reads like C.S. Lewis' Narnia series re-written by a hyper-literary madman with a grudge against organized religion, a solid grasp of quantum mechanics, and more childlike wonder than a busload of Little Princes. in these volumes, different imaginative genres -- from sci-fi to Middle Earth, Arthurian legend to steampunk dystopias, and everything in between -- are seamlessly blended into a tapestry of alternate worlds that left me giddy and overwhelmed.

it's stories like this that turned me into an avid reader as a child, and that make me a devotee of the written word to this day.

]]> 4.26 2000 His Dark Materials (His Dark Materials #1-3)
author: Philip Pullman
name: Matthew
average rating: 4.26
book published: 2000
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2007/12/29
shelves:
review:
although i first enjoyed Philip Pullman's trilogy several years ago, the release of The Golden Compass as a movie (which i have no intention of seeing -- there's virtually nothing i like less than watching a film version of a book that i love) sent me scurrying back to this series for a second read.

since then (several weeks ago) i've wrestled with the problem of what i can possibly write about these books, since the kind of praise that immediately comes to mind is so hyperbolic and lavish that everyone will probably think i'm deluded and/or on drugs.

the His Dark Materials trilogy makes most other young adult fantasy, like the Harry Potter books, seem pointless, unoriginal, and irrelevant. Pullman's masterpiece reads like C.S. Lewis' Narnia series re-written by a hyper-literary madman with a grudge against organized religion, a solid grasp of quantum mechanics, and more childlike wonder than a busload of Little Princes. in these volumes, different imaginative genres -- from sci-fi to Middle Earth, Arthurian legend to steampunk dystopias, and everything in between -- are seamlessly blended into a tapestry of alternate worlds that left me giddy and overwhelmed.

it's stories like this that turned me into an avid reader as a child, and that make me a devotee of the written word to this day.


]]> Wonder Boys 16707 The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Chabon presents a hilarious and heartbreaking work—the story of the friendship between the "wonder boys"—Grady, an aging writer who has lost his way, and Crabtree, whose relentless debauchery is capsizing his career.]]> 383 Michael Chabon 3423124172 Matthew 3
i read this novel the first time while living in the pacific northwest, where the pot-induced fuzziness of my perspective nicely echoed the mossy contours of the roof under which i made my home. years later, in NYC, i vaguely remembered having enjoyed the book (and also, astonishingly, the movie notwithstanding the presence of michael douglas) and picked it up for a second read.

there's little doubt, to my mind, that chabon is one of the more talented writers working today. his prose is smart, funny, insightful, and glides along without a hitch. this is a character-driven book and at least two of his dramatis personae (the narrator, along with a disreputable sidekick who seems to have been filched from Bright Lights, Big City) are beautifully rendered and believable.

that said, the essential problem i had with this novel was its conventionality: it felt, in many ways, like a piece of formulaic workshop fiction, delivering exactly the sort of plot structure (the life-changing weekend in small town america) and epiphany (vague moment of belated realization, never quite articulated, which arrives while the narrator is walking alone in the rain) that has come to be the default framework for mainstream literary fiction today. which meant that, even with the help of my marijuana-assisted amnesia, reading this book felt like watching a re-run of something i've seen elsewhere (albeit in slightly less polished form) many times before.]]> 3.94 1995 Wonder Boys
author: Michael Chabon
name: Matthew
average rating: 3.94
book published: 1995
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2007/12/25
shelves:
review:
one of the nice things about being a stoner is that, since your memory goes to hell, it's possible to re-read books any number of times and still have them feel unexpected and new.

i read this novel the first time while living in the pacific northwest, where the pot-induced fuzziness of my perspective nicely echoed the mossy contours of the roof under which i made my home. years later, in NYC, i vaguely remembered having enjoyed the book (and also, astonishingly, the movie notwithstanding the presence of michael douglas) and picked it up for a second read.

there's little doubt, to my mind, that chabon is one of the more talented writers working today. his prose is smart, funny, insightful, and glides along without a hitch. this is a character-driven book and at least two of his dramatis personae (the narrator, along with a disreputable sidekick who seems to have been filched from Bright Lights, Big City) are beautifully rendered and believable.

that said, the essential problem i had with this novel was its conventionality: it felt, in many ways, like a piece of formulaic workshop fiction, delivering exactly the sort of plot structure (the life-changing weekend in small town america) and epiphany (vague moment of belated realization, never quite articulated, which arrives while the narrator is walking alone in the rain) that has come to be the default framework for mainstream literary fiction today. which meant that, even with the help of my marijuana-assisted amnesia, reading this book felt like watching a re-run of something i've seen elsewhere (albeit in slightly less polished form) many times before.
]]> I, Claudius (Claudius, #1) 18765
I, Claudius and its sequel, Claudius the God, are among the most celebrated, as well the most gripping historical novels ever written.

Cover illustration: Brian Pike]]> 469 Robert Graves 067972477X Matthew 3 4.24 1934 I, Claudius (Claudius, #1)
author: Robert Graves
name: Matthew
average rating: 4.24
book published: 1934
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2007/12/18
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Death on the Nile (Hercule Poirot, #18)]]> 131359
Who is also on board? Christie's great detective Hercule Poirot is on holiday. He recalls an earlier outburst by a fellow passenger: â€I’d like to put my dear little pistol against her head and just press the trigger.â€� Despite the exotic setting, nothing is ever quite what it seems…]]> 352 Agatha Christie Matthew 2
I must admit that this is the first Agatha Christie mystery I've read and, honestly, it will probably be the last as well. Christie is a skillful writer, and she has a gift for quick and convincing characterization. For all I know, she might have a gift for human psychology as well -- but she never gave me the chance to find out. Any kind of realism is sacrificed here in the interest of "the formal problem" of constructing a whodunnit scenario with as many twists, turns, alibis, complications, and possible suspects as possible. All of which made Death on the Nile seem, to me, more like a riddle (or chess problem) in a kind of literary brown-paper-wrapper than as a novel per se.]]> 4.13 1937 Death on the Nile (Hercule Poirot, #18)
author: Agatha Christie
name: Matthew
average rating: 4.13
book published: 1937
rating: 2
read at:
date added: 2007/11/25
shelves:
review:
I have a feeling that a substantial percentage of hard-core mystery lovers also enjoy wrestling with a good chess problem now and then. And while I was in the business of speculating without much real evidence, I'd also wager that the chess-problem-loving-mystery-fan demographic also coincides pretty neatly with fans of Agatha Christie. Because in the end, Death on the Nile really feels more like a literary logic puzzle than a novel.

I must admit that this is the first Agatha Christie mystery I've read and, honestly, it will probably be the last as well. Christie is a skillful writer, and she has a gift for quick and convincing characterization. For all I know, she might have a gift for human psychology as well -- but she never gave me the chance to find out. Any kind of realism is sacrificed here in the interest of "the formal problem" of constructing a whodunnit scenario with as many twists, turns, alibis, complications, and possible suspects as possible. All of which made Death on the Nile seem, to me, more like a riddle (or chess problem) in a kind of literary brown-paper-wrapper than as a novel per se.
]]> <![CDATA[Pattern Recognition (Blue Ant, #1)]]> 22320
Still, Cayce is her father's daughter, and the danger makes her stubborn. Win Pollard, ex-security expert, probably ex-CIA, took a taxi in the direction of the World Trade Center on September 11 one year ago, and is presumed dead. Win taught Cayce a bit about the way agents work. She is still numb at his loss, and, as much for him as for any other reason, she refuses to give up this newly weird job, which will take her to Tokyo and on to Russia. With help and betrayal from equally unlikely quarters, Cayce will follow the trail of the mysterious film to its source, and in the process will learn something about her father's life and death.]]> 367 William Gibson 0425198685 Matthew 3
Since then, I've been less and less impressed with Gibson's novels until finally (somewhere late-90s) I stopped reading them altogether. The problem wasn't his writing: Gibson has always been able to put together a sentence better than anyone else writing SF today. It was, rather, that some freshness of vision was missing. It felt like the man had gotten lost in his own hype.

Pattern Recognition, it's safe to say, is Gibson's best novel since Neuromancer -- but, in many ways, that's because it IS Neuromancer all over again. Shift the characters and settings by a few degrees, and you'd have the same book. This is both a good thing (because a skillful remix of a wonderful story is nothing to sneeze at) and a disappointment -- since SF, if anything, is supposed to show us something new.]]> 3.87 2003 Pattern Recognition (Blue Ant, #1)
author: William Gibson
name: Matthew
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2003
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2007/11/12
shelves:
review:
Back in high school, I was one of those malnourished future computer nerds for whom the experience of reading William Gibson's masterpiece, Neuromancer, came as a kind of revelation: here was a vision of the future that felt utterly new, at once chilling and exhilirating and near enough to touch: the literary equivalent of Bladerunner (and no, I'm not forgetting about the Phillip K. Dick story on which the movie was based).

Since then, I've been less and less impressed with Gibson's novels until finally (somewhere late-90s) I stopped reading them altogether. The problem wasn't his writing: Gibson has always been able to put together a sentence better than anyone else writing SF today. It was, rather, that some freshness of vision was missing. It felt like the man had gotten lost in his own hype.

Pattern Recognition, it's safe to say, is Gibson's best novel since Neuromancer -- but, in many ways, that's because it IS Neuromancer all over again. Shift the characters and settings by a few degrees, and you'd have the same book. This is both a good thing (because a skillful remix of a wonderful story is nothing to sneeze at) and a disappointment -- since SF, if anything, is supposed to show us something new.
]]> <![CDATA[Free Cash Flow and Shareholder Yield: New Priorities for the Global Investor]]> 539423 ―Rob Brown, Chief Investment Officer, Genworth Financial Asset Management, Inc. This graph tells a singularly compelling story of the changing order of the drivers of total equity returns. In Free Cash Flow and Shareholder Yield , you will learn how this story is the key to informed investing in an evolving global marketplace.]]> 192 William W. Priest 047012833X Matthew 5 3.52 2007 Free Cash Flow and Shareholder Yield: New Priorities for the Global Investor
author: William W. Priest
name: Matthew
average rating: 3.52
book published: 2007
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2007/10/28
shelves:
review:
After reading this book, everything else that has ever been written feels redundant and pointless. If the publishing houses had any sense, they would have closed their doors the day after this was released.
]]> Memoirs of Hadrian 12172 347 Marguerite Yourcenar 0374529264 Matthew 4
In her autobiographical end-notes, describing the process of writing this book, Yourcenar says: "Time itself has nothing to do with the matter. It is always surprising to me that my contemporaries, masters as they consider themselves to be over space, apparently remain unaware that one can contract the distance between centuries at will."

After reading this book, for me at least, her claim doesn't seem entirely far-fetched.]]> 4.27 1951 Memoirs of Hadrian
author: Marguerite Yourcenar
name: Matthew
average rating: 4.27
book published: 1951
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2007/10/15
shelves:
review:
Possibly the most ambitious, and certainly one of the greatest, historical novels I have ever read. Marguerite Yourcenar spent more than three decades imagining her way into the world of the ancient Roman emperor, who narrates this book in an uncannily intimate, fluid, and culturally foreign first person.

In her autobiographical end-notes, describing the process of writing this book, Yourcenar says: "Time itself has nothing to do with the matter. It is always surprising to me that my contemporaries, masters as they consider themselves to be over space, apparently remain unaware that one can contract the distance between centuries at will."

After reading this book, for me at least, her claim doesn't seem entirely far-fetched.
]]> Nostromo 115476 ]]> 336 Joseph Conrad 0486424529 Matthew 0 to-read 3.81 1904 Nostromo
author: Joseph Conrad
name: Matthew
average rating: 3.81
book published: 1904
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2007/10/15
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Killshot 85210 New York Times bestselling author the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette once called, “the Alexander the Great of crime fiction,� Elmore Leonard is responsible for creating some of the sharpest dialogue, most compelling characters (including U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens of TV’s Justified fame), and, quite simply, some of the very best suspense novels written over the past century. Killshot is prime Leonard—a riveting story of a husband and wife caught in the crossfire when they foil a criminal act and are forced to defend themselves when the legal system fails them from the murderous wrath of a pair of vengeful killers. When it comes to cops and criminals stories, Killshot and Leonard are as good as it gets—further proof why “the King Daddy of crime writers� (Seattle Times) deserves his current place among John D. MacDonald, Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain, and the other legendary greats of the noir fiction genre.
]]> 334 Elmore Leonard 0060512245 Matthew 2 Raymond Chandler et al. If I'd sat down to read Killshot (my first and probably last Leonard novel) without those expectations, I'd probably have come away satisfied by this workmanlike but generally unremarkable thriller. As it was, I found myself holding him to a standard against which he doesn't even begin to compete: Leonard is decent at characterization and has a nice ear for local idiom, but otherwise he definitely belongs in the supermarket-checkout-aisle minor leagues.]]> 3.74 1989 Killshot
author: Elmore Leonard
name: Matthew
average rating: 3.74
book published: 1989
rating: 2
read at:
date added: 2007/10/15
shelves:
review:
Part of the problem here is that Elmore Leonard is hyped as an Important Writer, a kind of second-coming of Raymond Chandler et al. If I'd sat down to read Killshot (my first and probably last Leonard novel) without those expectations, I'd probably have come away satisfied by this workmanlike but generally unremarkable thriller. As it was, I found myself holding him to a standard against which he doesn't even begin to compete: Leonard is decent at characterization and has a nice ear for local idiom, but otherwise he definitely belongs in the supermarket-checkout-aisle minor leagues.
]]> <![CDATA[Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West]]> 394535 Blood Meridian is an epic novel of the violence and depravity that attended America's westward expansion, brilliantly subverting the conventions of the Western novel and the mythology of the Wild West. Based on historical events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, it traces the fortunes of the Kid, a fourteen-year-old Tennesseean who stumbles into a nightmarish world where Indians are being murdered and the market for their scalps is thriving.]]> 351 Cormac McCarthy Matthew 4 4.18 1985 Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West
author: Cormac McCarthy
name: Matthew
average rating: 4.18
book published: 1985
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2007/10/14
shelves:
review:
Blood Meridian is to western novels the equivalent of what The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly is for western film: a work that expands the scope of the genre in every way, and affirms that (rather than being the stuff of cookie-cutter adventure narratives) the wild west is a mythology capable of sustaining a literary masterpiece. The American equivalent of Dante's Inferno.
]]> <![CDATA[Prisoners: A Muslim and a Jew Across the Middle East Divide]]> 139269

From the Trade Paperback edition.]]> 336 Jeffrey Goldberg 0375412344 Matthew 3 4.08 2006 Prisoners: A Muslim and a Jew Across the Middle East Divide
author: Jeffrey Goldberg
name: Matthew
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2006
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2007/10/14
shelves:
review:

]]> The Places in Between 95643 299 Rory Stewart 0156031566 Matthew 4 3.94 2004 The Places in Between
author: Rory Stewart
name: Matthew
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2004
rating: 4
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date added: 2007/10/14
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]]> The House of Mirth 17728
Lily Bart, beautiful, witty and sophisticated, is accepted by â€old moneyâ€� and courted by the growing tribe of nouveaux riches. But as she nears thirty, her foothold becomes precarious; a poor girl with expensive tastes, she needs a husband to preserve her social standing and to maintain her in the luxury she has come to expect. Whilst many have sought her, something â€� fastidiousness or integrity- prevents her from making a â€suitableâ€� match.]]> 351 Edith Wharton 1844082938 Matthew 3 3.97 1905 The House of Mirth
author: Edith Wharton
name: Matthew
average rating: 3.97
book published: 1905
rating: 3
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]]> The Age of Innocence 53835 The Age of Innocence is Edith Wharton’s masterful portrait of desire and betrayal during the sumptuous Golden Age of Old New York, a time when society people “dreaded scandal more than disease.�

This is Newland Archer’s world as he prepares to marry the beautiful but conventional May Welland. But when the mysterious Countess Ellen Olenska returns to New York after a disastrous marriage, Archer falls deeply in love with her. Torn between duty and passion, Archer struggles to make a decision that will either courageously define his life—or mercilessly destroy it.]]> 293 Edith Wharton 159308143X Matthew 4 3.96 1920 The Age of Innocence
author: Edith Wharton
name: Matthew
average rating: 3.96
book published: 1920
rating: 4
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]]> <![CDATA[The Murder Room (Adam Dalgliesh, #12)]]> 443291
Commander Adam Dalgliesh is already acquainted with the Dupayne—a museum dedicated to the interwar years, with a room celebrating the most notorious murders of that time—when he is called to investigate the killing of one of the family trustees. He soon discovers that the victim was seeking to close the museum against the wishes of the fellow trustees and the Dupayne's devoted staff. Everyone, it seems, has something to gain from the crime. When it becomes clear that the murderer has been inspired by the real-life crimes from the murder room—and is preparing to kill again—Dalgliesh knows that to solve this case he has to get into the mind of a ruthless killer.]]> 415 P.D. James 1400076099 Matthew 3 3.82 2003 The Murder Room (Adam Dalgliesh, #12)
author: P.D. James
name: Matthew
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2003
rating: 3
read at: 2007/06/01
date added: 2007/10/14
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Sometimes, very rarely, when reading a book I will get a glimpse of the profound intelligence and -- for lack of a better word -- *sanity* of the author behind the scenes, and this was one of those occasions. Throughout this mystery novel, with all its twists and turns, there is a sense of wisdom about the human psyche and a belief in the possibility of a well-ordered world, that makes the crime believable, and the notion of justice one that's worth fighting for.
]]> <![CDATA[Busman's Honeymoon (Lord Peter Wimsey, #13)]]> 116971
Dramatised by Alistair Beaton for BBC Radio 4 with Ian Carmichael as Lord Peter Wimsey, Sarah Badel as Harriet Vane and Peter Jones as Bunter. It was first broadcast from 2 January to 7 February 1983.

2 CDs. 2 hrs 25 mins.]]> 409 Dorothy L. Sayers 0061043516 Matthew 3 4.23 1937 Busman's Honeymoon (Lord Peter Wimsey, #13)
author: Dorothy L. Sayers
name: Matthew
average rating: 4.23
book published: 1937
rating: 3
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date added: 2007/10/14
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This is the first Dorothy Sayers mystery that I've read, but I'm eager to start another after enjoying this book. Sayers' whodunnit reads like a comedy of manners, with pitch-perfect dialog, wonderfully realized characters, and nuances that bring interwar-Britain to life. She makes most contemporary mystery writers, who rely on fistfights, chases and foul language to build tension (yes, Walter Mosley et. al., this means you) look like plodding duffers; only Hammett, Chandler, and P.D. James are in the same league.
]]> <![CDATA[Little Scarlet (Easy Rawlins #9)]]> 102847 325 Walter Mosley 0446612715 Matthew 1 4.02 2004 Little Scarlet (Easy Rawlins #9)
author: Walter Mosley
name: Matthew
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2004
rating: 1
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It's the fact that books like this become popular that makes me question the idea of being a writer. The average Bugs Bunny cartoon has fewer plot holes than this novel.
]]> The Razor’s Edge 31196 314 W. Somerset Maugham 1400034205 Matthew 4 4.20 1944 The Razor’s Edge
author: W. Somerset Maugham
name: Matthew
average rating: 4.20
book published: 1944
rating: 4
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like most of maugham's other novels (esp. The Moon and Sixpence), this slender narrative is perfectly formed, flawlessly written, and profound without being pretentious. the only reason i've refrained from giving it five stars is the fact that (in terms of subject matter) it's a little too close for comfort to that most loathsome of all authors, hermann hesse.
]]> Bright Lights, Big City 86147 Bright Lights, Big City in 1984, Jay McInerney became a literary sensation, heralded as the voice of a generation. The novel follows a young man, living in Manhattan as if he owned it, through nightclubs, fashion shows, editorial offices, and loft parties as he attempts to outstrip mortality and the recurring approach of dawn. With nothing but goodwill, controlled substances, and wit to sustain him in this anti-quest, he runs until he reaches his reckoning point, where he is forced to acknowledge loss and, possibly, to rediscover his better instincts. This remarkable novel of youth and New York remains one of the most beloved, imitated, and iconic novels in America.]]> 208 Jay McInerney Matthew 3 3.80 1984 Bright Lights, Big City
author: Jay McInerney
name: Matthew
average rating: 3.80
book published: 1984
rating: 3
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so you and your friends in 80s nyc spend a lot of time doing coke, and you decide that this fact is worth writing a novel about. except you're an avant-garde kind of guy so you decide to write the book in the second person. but you get so caught up in the sheer edginess of it all that you sort of forget about things like plot and character development, so the end result is a kind of tired self-realization narrative dressed up in literary clothing. and looking back on it all, if there is a moral to this whole thing, it's probably that literary devices which have no clear function in your narrative end up making your book less like great literature, rather than more.
]]> Of Human Bondage 31548
Marked by countless similarities to Maugham’s own life, his masterpiece is “not an autobiography,� as the author himself once contended, “but an autobiographical novel; fact and fiction are inexorably mingled; the emotions are my own.”]]> 684 W. Somerset Maugham 0451530179 Matthew 3 4.13 1915 Of Human Bondage
author: W. Somerset Maugham
name: Matthew
average rating: 4.13
book published: 1915
rating: 3
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it's not clear to me why people describe this as maugham's classic or why, among all his wonderful novels, this relatively mediocre work is the one that winds up on required reading lists. my best guess is that, among his books, this one comes closest to meeting conventional expectations about how a novel should be shaped -- conventions which work best for maugham when he's breaking them.
]]> The Rules of Attraction 9912 From the bestselling author of American Psycho comes this satirical black comedy about the death of romance.

Set at an affluent liberal arts college during the height of the Reagan eighties, The Rules of Attraction follows a handful of rowdy, spoiled, sexually promiscuous students with no plans for the future—or even the present. Three of them—Sean, Paul, and Lauren—become involved in a love triangle of sorts within a sequence of drug runs, "Dressed to Get Screwed" parties, and "End of the World" parties.

As Bret Easton Ellis trains his incisive gaze on the kids at the self-consciously bohemian Camden College, treating their sexual posturing and agonies with a mixture of acrid hilarity and compassion, he exposes the moral vacuum at the center of their lives.]]> 283 Bret Easton Ellis 067978148X Matthew 4 3.74 1987 The Rules of Attraction
author: Bret Easton Ellis
name: Matthew
average rating: 3.74
book published: 1987
rating: 4
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bret easton ellis is an acquired taste, and probably one that says unfortunate things about anyone who comes to possess it. still there's no denying that in spite of all the detestable things about the man, his writing, and his books, they're a lot of fun to read and may (just maybe) be doing something genuinely interesting with notions of poetic language and characterization.
]]> Zeno's Conscience 84737 Zeno’s Conscience is a miracle of psychological realism.]]> 437 Italo Svevo 0375727760 Matthew 4 3.90 1923 Zeno's Conscience
author: Italo Svevo
name: Matthew
average rating: 3.90
book published: 1923
rating: 4
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]]> Success 18831 Success Martin Amis pens a mismatched pair of foster brothers--one "a quivering condom of neurosis and ineptitude," the other a "bundle of contempt, vanity and stock-response"--in a single London flat. He binds them with ties of class hatred, sexual rivalry, and disappointed love, and throws in a disloyal girlfriend and a spectacularly unstable sister to create a modern-day Jacobean revenge comedy that soars with malicious poetry.]]> 224 Martin Amis 0679734481 Matthew 2 3.68 1978 Success
author: Martin Amis
name: Matthew
average rating: 3.68
book published: 1978
rating: 2
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if this weren't by martin amis, i'd probably give it 3 stars. as it is, demerits for not working up to ability.
]]> Dead Babies 18833 London Fields. The residents of Appleseed Rectory have primed themselves both for a visit from a triad of Americans and a weekend of copious drug taking and sexual gymnastics. There's even a heifer to be slugged and a pair of doddering tenants to be ingeniously harassed. But none of these variously bright and dull young things has counted on the intrusion of "dead babies" � dreary spasms of reality. Or on the uninvited presence of a mysterious prankster named Johnny, whose sinister idea of fun makes theirs look like a game of backgammon.

]]> 206 Martin Amis 067973449X Matthew 2 3.39 1975 Dead Babies
author: Martin Amis
name: Matthew
average rating: 3.39
book published: 1975
rating: 2
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]]> Money 18825 Time Magazine included the book in its list of the 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005. The story of John Self and his insatiable appetite for money, alcohol, fast food, drugs, pornography, and more, Money is ceaselessly inventive and thrillingly savage; a tale of life lived without restraint, of money and the disasters it can precipitate.]]> 394 Martin Amis 0099461889 Matthew 3 3.72 1984 Money
author: Martin Amis
name: Matthew
average rating: 3.72
book published: 1984
rating: 3
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]]> London Fields 18830 This is an alternative cover edition. The main entry for ISBN 9780099748618 can be found here.

London Fields is Amis's murder story for the end of the millennium. The murderee is Nicola Six, a "black hole" of sex and self-loathing intent on orchestrating her own extinction. The murderer may be Keith Talent, a violent lowlife whose only passions are pornography and darts. Or is the killer the rich, honorable, and dimly romantic Guy Clinch?]]> 526 Martin Amis Matthew 5 3.70 1989 London Fields
author: Martin Amis
name: Matthew
average rating: 3.70
book published: 1989
rating: 5
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in terms of sheer architectural intricacy, nuance of everyday language, and black humor, only nabakov really comes close
]]> Time's Arrow 23031 Time's Arrow the doctor Tod T. Friendly dies and then feels markedly better, breaks up with his lovers as a prelude to seducing them, and mangles his patients before he sends them home. And all the while Tod's life races backward in time toward the one appalling moment in modern history when such reversals make sense.

]]> 165 Martin Amis 0679735720 Matthew 4 3.78 1991 Time's Arrow
author: Martin Amis
name: Matthew
average rating: 3.78
book published: 1991
rating: 4
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]]> The Catcher in the Rye 5107 It's Christmas time and Holden Caulfield has just been expelled from yet another school...

Fleeing the crooks at Pencey Prep, he pinballs around New York City seeking solace in fleeting encounters—shooting the bull with strangers in dive hotels, wandering alone round Central Park, getting beaten up by pimps and cut down by erstwhile girlfriends. The city is beautiful and terrible, in all its neon loneliness and seedy glamour, its mingled sense of possibility and emptiness. Holden passes through it like a ghost, thinking always of his kid sister Phoebe, the only person who really understands him, and his determination to escape the phonies and find a life of true meaning.

The Catcher in the Rye is an all-time classic in coming-of-age literature- an elegy to teenage alienation, capturing the deeply human need for connection and the bewildering sense of loss as we leave childhood behind.

J.D. Salinger's (1919�2010) classic novel of teenage angst and rebellion was first published in 1951. The novel was included on Time's 2005 list of the 100 best English-language novels written since 1923. It was named by Modern Library and its readers as one of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. It has been frequently challenged in the court for its liberal use of profanity and portrayal of sexuality and in the 1950's and 60's it was the novel that every teenage boy wants to read.]]> 277 J.D. Salinger 0316769177 Matthew 4 3.81 1951 The Catcher in the Rye
author: J.D. Salinger
name: Matthew
average rating: 3.81
book published: 1951
rating: 4
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]]> Nine Stories 77532
The stories are:

"A Perfect Day for Bananafish"
"Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut"
"Just Before the War with the Eskimos"
"The Laughing Man"
"Down at the Dinghy"
"For Esmé � with Love and Squalor"
"Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes"
"De Daumier-Smith's Blue Period"
"Teddy"]]> 198 J.D. Salinger 0316769509 Matthew 3 4.12 1953 Nine Stories
author: J.D. Salinger
name: Matthew
average rating: 4.12
book published: 1953
rating: 3
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]]> <![CDATA[Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters & Seymour: An Introduction]]> 18794 213 J.D. Salinger 0606288384 Matthew 4 4.04 1955 Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters & Seymour: An Introduction
author: J.D. Salinger
name: Matthew
average rating: 4.04
book published: 1955
rating: 4
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]]> On Truth 3493
Our culture's devotion to bullshit may seem much stronger than our apparently halfhearted attachment to truth. Some people (professional thinkers) won't even acknowledge "true" and "false" as meaningful categories, and even those who claim to love truth cause the rest of us to wonder whether they, too, aren't simply full of it. Practically speaking, many of us deploy the truth only when absolutely necessary, often finding alternatives to be more saleable, and yet somehow civilization seems to be muddling along. But where are we headed? Is our fast and easy way with the facts actually crippling us? Or is it "all good"? Really, what's the use of truth, anyway?

With the same leavening wit and commonsense wisdom that animates his pathbreaking work "On Bullshit," Frankfurt encourages us to take another look at the truth: there may be something there that is perhaps too plain to notice but for which we have a mostly unacknowledged yet deep-seated passion. His book will have sentient beings across America asking, "The truth—why didn't I think of that?"]]> 101 Harry G. Frankfurt 030726422X Matthew 1 3.52 2006 On Truth
author: Harry G. Frankfurt
name: Matthew
average rating: 3.52
book published: 2006
rating: 1
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]]> On Bullshit 385
Frankfurt, one of the world's most influential moral philosophers, attempts to build such a theory here. With his characteristic combination of philosophical acuity, psychological insight, and wry humor, Frankfurt proceeds by exploring how bullshit and the related concept of humbug are distinct from lying. He argues that bullshitters misrepresent themselves to their audience not as liars do, that is, by deliberately making false claims about what is true. In fact, bullshit need not be untrue at all.

Rather, bullshitters seek to convey a certain impression of themselves without being concerned about whether anything at all is true. They quietly change the rules governing their end of the conversation so that claims about truth and falsity are irrelevant. Frankfurt concludes that although bullshit can take many innocent forms, excessive indulgence in it can eventually undermine the practitioner's capacity to tell the truth in a way that lying does not. Liars at least acknowledge that it matters what is true. By virtue of this, Frankfurt writes, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.]]> 67 Harry G. Frankfurt 0691122946 Matthew 1 3.58 2005 On Bullshit
author: Harry G. Frankfurt
name: Matthew
average rating: 3.58
book published: 2005
rating: 1
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]]> The Road 6288
A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray. The sky is dark. Their destination is the coast, although they don’t know what, if anything, awaits them there. They have nothing; just a pistol to defend themselves against the lawless bands that stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food—and each other.

The Road is the profoundly moving story of a journey. It boldly imagines a future in which no hope remains, but in which the father and his son, “each the other’s world entire,� are sustained by love. Awesome in the totality of its vision, it is an unflinching meditation on the worst and the best that we are capable of: ultimate destructiveness, desperate tenacity, and the tenderness that keeps two people alive in the face of total devastation.]]> 241 Cormac McCarthy 0307265439 Matthew 4 3.99 2006 The Road
author: Cormac McCarthy
name: Matthew
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2006
rating: 4
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]]> <![CDATA[The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion]]> 7628 The Good Soldier relates the complex social and sexual relationships between two couples, one English, one American, and the growing awareness by the American narrator John Dowell of the intrigues and passions behind their orderly Edwardian facade. It is the attitude of Dowell, his puzzlement, his uncertainty, and the seemingly haphazard manner of his narration that make the book so powerful and mysterious. Despite its catalogue of death, insanity, and despair, the novel has many comic moments, and has inspired the work of several distinguished writers, including Graham Greene. This is the only annotated edition available.]]> 368 Ford Madox Ford 1551113813 Matthew 4 3.69 1915 The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion
author: Ford Madox Ford
name: Matthew
average rating: 3.69
book published: 1915
rating: 4
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]]> Vineland 59721
An old nemesis, federal prosecutor Brock Vond, storms into Vineland at the head of a heavily armed strike force. Soon Zoyd and his daughter, Prairie, go into hiding while Vond begins a relationship with Zoyd's ex-wife and uses Prairie as a pawn against the mother she never knew she had.

Part daytime drama, part political thriller, Vineland is a strange evocation of a twentieth-century America headed for a less than harmonic future.]]> 480 Thomas Pynchon 3499136287 Matthew 1 3.75 1990 Vineland
author: Thomas Pynchon
name: Matthew
average rating: 3.75
book published: 1990
rating: 1
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]]> Against the Day 409
With a worldwide disaster looming just a few years ahead, it is a time of unrestrained corporate greed, false religiosity, moronic fecklessness, and evil intent in high places. No reference to the present day is intended or should be inferred.

The sizable cast of characters includes anarchists, balloonists, gamblers, corporate tycoons, drug enthusiasts, innocents and decadents, mathematicians, mad scientists, shamans, psychics, and stage magicians, spies, detectives, adventuresses, and hired guns. There are cameo appearances by Nikola Tesla, Bela Lugosi, and Groucho Marx.

As an era of certainty comes crashing down around their ears and an unpredictable future commences, these folks are mostly just trying to pursue their lives. Sometimes they manage to catch up; sometimes it's their lives that pursue them.

Meanwhile, the author is up to his usual business. Characters stop what they're doing to sing what are for the most part stupid songs. Strange sexual practices take place. Obscure languages are spoken, not always idiomatically. Contrary-to-the-fact occurrences occur. If it is not the world, it is what the world might be with a minor adjustment or two. According to some, this is one of the main purposes of fiction.

Let the reader decide, let the reader beware. Good luck.

--Thomas Pynchon

About the Author:
Thomas Pynchon is the author of V., The Crying of Lot 49, Gravity's Rainbow, Slow Learner, a collection of short stories, Vineland and, most recently, Mason and Dixon. He received the National Book Award for Gravity's Rainbow in 1974.]]> 1085 Thomas Pynchon 159420120X Matthew 3 4.01 2006 Against the Day
author: Thomas Pynchon
name: Matthew
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2006
rating: 3
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]]> Mason & Dixon 413
We follow the mismatch'd pair—one rollicking, the other depressive; one Gothic, the other pre-Romantic—from their first journey together to the Cape of Good Hope, to pre-Revolutionary America and back, through the strange yet redemptive turns of fortune in their later lives, on a grand tour of the Enlightenment's dark hemisphere, as they observe and participate in the many opportunities for insanity presented them by the Age of Reason.]]> 773 Thomas Pynchon 0312423209 Matthew 4 4.12 1997 Mason & Dixon
author: Thomas Pynchon
name: Matthew
average rating: 4.12
book published: 1997
rating: 4
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]]> V. 5809 640 Thomas Pynchon 2020418770 Matthew 3 3.97 1963 V.
author: Thomas Pynchon
name: Matthew
average rating: 3.97
book published: 1963
rating: 3
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]]> The Crying of Lot 49 2794 The Crying of Lot 49 opens as Oedipa Maas discovers that she has been made executrix of a former lover's estate. The performance of her duties sets her on a strange trail of detection, in which bizarre characters crowd in to help or confuse her. But gradually, death, drugs, madness, and marriage combine to leave Oedipa in isolation on the threshold of revelation, awaiting the Crying of Lot 49.]]> 152 Thomas Pynchon 006091307X Matthew 2 3.70 1966 The Crying of Lot 49
author: Thomas Pynchon
name: Matthew
average rating: 3.70
book published: 1966
rating: 2
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]]> Sentimental Education 2183 460 Gustave Flaubert 0140447970 Matthew 4 3.86 1869 Sentimental Education
author: Gustave Flaubert
name: Matthew
average rating: 3.86
book published: 1869
rating: 4
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]]> Cloud Atlas 49628
Cloud Atlas begins in 1850 with Adam Ewing, an American notary voyaging from the Chatham Isles to his home in California. Along the way, Ewing is befriended by a physician, Dr. Goose, who begins to treat him for a rare species of brain parasite. . . .

Abruptly, the action jumps to Belgium in 1931, where Robert Frobisher, a disinherited bisexual composer, contrives his way into the household of an infirm maestro who has a beguiling wife and a nubile daughter. . . . From there we jump to the West Coast in the 1970s and a troubled reporter named Luisa Rey, who stumbles upon a web of corporate greed and murder that threatens to claim her life. . . . And onward, with dazzling virtuosity, to an inglorious present-day England; to a Korean superstate of the near future where neocapitalism has run amok; and, finally, to a postapocalyptic Iron Age Hawaii in the last days of history.

But the story doesn't end even there. The narrative then boomerangs back through centuries and space, returning by the same route, in reverse, to its starting point. Along the way, Mitchell reveals how his disparate characters connect, how their fates intertwine, and how their souls drift across time like clouds across the sky.

As wild as a videogame, as mysterious as a Zen koan, Cloud Atlas is an unforgettable tour de force that, like its incomparable author, has transcended its cult classic status to become a worldwide phenomenon.]]> 509 David Mitchell 0375507256 Matthew 4 4.02 2004 Cloud Atlas
author: David Mitchell
name: Matthew
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2004
rating: 4
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]]> To Kill a Mockingbird 2657 "Shoot all the bluejays you want, if you can hit 'em, but remember it's a sin to kill a mockingbird."

A lawyer's advice to his children as he defends the real mockingbird of Harper Lee's classic novel - a black man charged with the rape of a white girl. Through the young eyes of Scout and Jem Finch, Harper Lee explores with exuberant humour the irrationality of adult attitudes to race and class in the Deep South of the 1930s. The conscience of a town steeped in prejudice, violence and hypocrisy is pricked by the stamina of one man's struggle for justice. But the weight of history will only tolerate so much.

"To Kill A Mockingbird" became both an instant bestseller and a critical success when it was first published in 1960. It went on to win the Pulitzer Prize in 1961 and was later made into an Academy Award-winning film.]]> 323 Harper Lee 0060935464 Matthew 5 4.25 1960 To Kill a Mockingbird
author: Harper Lee
name: Matthew
average rating: 4.25
book published: 1960
rating: 5
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]]> <![CDATA[Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings]]> 17717
Labyrinths is a representative selection of Borges' writing, some forty pieces drawn from various books of his published over the years. The translations are by Harriet de Onis, Anthony Kerrigan, and others, including the editors, who have provided a biographical and critical introduction, as well as an extensive bibliography.]]> 260 Jorge Luis Borges 0811200124 Matthew 5 4.48 1962 Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings
author: Jorge Luis Borges
name: Matthew
average rating: 4.48
book published: 1962
rating: 5
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]]>