2015 Books

As I did last year, and the previous few before that, I'm posting the books I read last year.  More than a couple of doorstops in there. Couple of disappointments but mostly a reasonably good year.  I think the most enjoyable of the year were The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Water for Elephants and The Good Luck of Right Now.  

* = Recommended
X = Stay Away

• A Game of Thrones (Audiobook):  George R.R. Martin - liked it better than I thought I would, based on the opening.  I have to give it to Martin, he does have a respectful treatment of women and children, making them active, complex, full human beings and key players in the machinations of court life, present in realistic numbers, rather than as mere tokens.  I hated the zombie-based plot line, and am not thrilled at the prospect of a dragon-based.plot line that is hinted at as a teaser for the next volume.  I recognize the need for a formidable external enemy that might serve to temporarily re-unite the warring families, but in my opinion, resorting to supernatural forces weakens, not strengthens a plot about very human rivalries.  I might or might not work myself up to reading the next volume.  If I do, it will probably be because of interest in Tyrion Lannister, Jon Snow and possibly Arya and Bran Stark.  I don't really find any of the others very compelling.  I take a rather dim view, in general, of stories where characters are clearly on the side of "good" or "evil" and I find most of the characters in here a bit too cartoonish that way.  Tyrion and Jon have divided enough loyalties that my interest in them is piqued.  I may try to get the video of the series...I think my interest might be sustained a bit better in movie mode.
• Emma:  Jane Austen - I enjoyed this more than I have in the past (Emma is not one of my favorite Austens.)  I found it a bit more forgivable, this time, though I continue to be disappointed with the overly elitist ending for poor Harriet.
• Sense and Sensibility:  Jane Austen (most of it) - what can I say?  Comfort food.
• Pygmalion:  George Bernard Shaw
• The Yellow Wallpaper:  Charlotte Perkins Gilman
• Emergency Care and Transportation of the Sick and Injured, Tenth Edition (most of it):  American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons
• 1Q84 (Audiobook):  Haruki Murakami - kind of interesting.  Could have stood a bit of pruning, IMHO - a fair amount of redundancy and tell stuff.  And you kind of spoil the magical realism effect when your characters reflect on how weird things are getting for them.
• Snuff (Audiobook):  Terry Pratchett.  Enjoyed it a lot.  Not quite * material.  I love Pratchett's theme of tolerance that wends its way throughout his work.
• Mrs. Warren's Profession:  George Bernard Shaw
• * The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (Audiobook):  Michael Chabon - loved this. Started a little slow, but it really pulled me in.  I started it a bit reluctantly, not expecting to like it a lot, as I'm not much of a comic book enthusiast.
• Possession (Audiobook):  A.S. Byatt - Enjoyed it a lot, but I won't put it as a *, as it may not be for everybody.  I have to be entertained by the digs at academe, which
  some of you may understand :-) 
• The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby (Audiobook): Charles Dickens - Liked it better when I read it years ago. A little disappointing this time round.
• 100 Years of Solitude (Audiobook):  Gabriel Garcia Marquez
• * Water for Elephants (Audiobook):  Sara Gruen - really enjoyed it
• * The White Tiger:  Aravind Adiga - you know I liked it because I actually read the whole thing on paper.  (This is my second read of it...it still holds up, even knowing the punchline.)
• X Ann Veronica (Audiobook):  H.G.Wells - big disappointment...I normally like HG Wells a LOT, but this one...sigh.  I kept waiting for him to get to the point, and then...he neatly missed it.   There was so much potential in the premise.
• * The Good Luck of Right Now (Audiobook):  Matthew Quick - not the sort of book that you'd (I'd) expect me to like - full of spiritual themes.  But really the voice was so wonderful, characters so real, and the story and structure so good, that all-in-all it was one of the best reads I had this year.  Now I'll have to go read Silver Linings Playbook (I liked the movie a lot). The narrator of this one is a totally different voice/character than the protagonist of the Silver Linings Playbook movie, but I can see the connection in terms of the delicate and nuanced handling of emotionally damaged characters.
• Death Comes to Pemberley:  PD James - kind of a serious disappointment.  The premise and the historical fiction aspect were interesting, but I found the writing distractingly bad.  I liked the movie/miniseries, though, which I saw before I read the book.  Kept waiting for the character motivations/plot twists of the movie to appear in the book, which they didn't.  I say good job to the screen writers - they added a depth to the work that was entirely missing in the text.
• Oedipus Rex:  Sophocles
• The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime:  Mark Haddon - read it to discuss with Sidharta (who had strong negative reactions to it), as he was required to read it over the summer.  He found the narrator overly stereotyped and was confused/annoyed by the lack of consistency between  the narrator's behavior and his words (I had to remind him about unreliable narrators).  By a curious coincidence, it so happened that I was reading The Good Luck of Right Now at the same time, and while it isn't for the same audience, the narrators are very similar in some ways.  I liked The Good Luck of Right now much, much better.
• The All Girl Filling Station's Last Reunion (Audiobook):  Fannie Flag - sweet, but kind of predictable.  Some interesting historical detail on the WASPs - WWII women's flying unit.
• Reamde (Audiobook):  Neal Stephenson - the premise was so interesting (using gold farming to solve computationally difficult problems, and using this for economic benefit), but this was pretty much dropped in favor of more action, which was kind of disappointing to me
• * Americanah (Audiobook):  Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie - lovely reading
• Stones from the River (Audiobook):  Ursula Hegi - reading was a little annoying, interesting perspective on life in Germany from WWI on, including a feel for life in the days leading up to WWII and the holocaust, which felt eerily like modern US.

Started:

• Camille:  Alexandre Dumas
• Anna Karenina:  Leo Tolstoy - I loved it a lot when I was in grad school, rather less this time.  I'm just not finding much there in Anna.  I understand and sympathize with her inner conflict, but I don't find her an interesting enough person independent of her unpleasant social situation to warrant all this drama.  Kitty and Dolly seem to be deeper thinkers than she is.  I still love Levin, though I'm a little more irritated with his landowner perspective than I think I was the first time round.  But Tolstoy is still the Boss in my book for his creation of living, breathing, mixed up characters who change moods on a dime.
• * The Forsyte Saga:  John Galsworthy - well...just because...I read it only about 2 years ago, but...it's so well done...still working on it - I'm about 2/3 of the way through.
• Rashi's Daughters - Book 1:  Joheved:  Maggie Anton - interesting premise, kind of annoying writing; some interesting historical details of life in Medieval France
• The Daring Ladies of Lowell (Audiobook):  Kate Alcott - annoying reading and writing; trying to like it - it's got some interesting historical context of the life of mill workers in the 1830s, but there's a lot of stuff that feels tone-deaf about social mores in those times, not to mention annoyingly anachronistic turn of phrase.  Still working on it
• Logicomix:  Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos Papadimitriou - because who wouldn't like a graphic novel with the founders of computational logic, like Cantor, Russell, Godel, Hilbert, etc. as characters? 
• Age of Reason:  Thomas Paine - reading with Annapurna - I just love it!  

And with Sidharta:

• The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Willson:  Mark Twain (most of it...he finished it off, himself)
• The Three Musketeers:  Alexandre Dumas - well, actually, not the version I'm linking to, but rather the Children's Illustrated Library edition I read as a kid...I think it's just a little too racy, and slightly misogynist for him in the original...as I found out to my shock a few years ago when I read the grownup version, myself.  
• The Menaechmi:  Plautus - actually we read a much more modern translation than the one I'm linking to, which uses a much more modern voice.  I read this in college and loved it.  I figured it was just the right level of goofy slapstick that would appeal to Sidharta.  Next stop:  The Comedy of Errors :-)  Or maybe Lysistrata.
• Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass:  Lewis Carroll - actually we read from The Annotated Alice that I bought for Kumar many years ago, which includes some very interesting text by Martin Gardner (most of which Sidharta wanted nothing to do with :-)
• Watership Down:  Richard Adams (started) - I read this when I was a bit younger than Sidharta and loved, loved, loved it.
• For the Win:  Cory Doctorow (started - still working on it) - Annapurna loved this when she was about the same age...I read it a while ago and loved it.  Figured Sidharta's about ready.

2013 books

As I did last year, and the previous few before that, I'm posting the books I read this year.  Lot of good stuff this year, as well as a few fairly awful phone books that I can't quite explain why I felt compelled to plow through.

* = Recommended
X = Stay Away

• Please Look After Mom (Audiobook):  Kyungsook Shin - This one was very interesting, structurally, if a bit melodramatic and... ummm... yearning for a return to... well... the closest character to "Mom" that I can think of is O-Lan from The Good Earth.  Kind of Harriet Lerner meets Pearl Buck in Korea.
• Best of Jack London Short Stories (Audiobook):  Jack London - What can I say?  It's Jack London. Each story has a different reader, and the quality varies considerably.  I enjoyed many of them
• Sense and Sensibility:  Jane Austen
• *The Prisoner of Heaven (Audiobook):  Carlos Ruiz Zafon
• Several short stories by Saki
• * The Hunger Games:  Suzanne Collins - started it with Sidharta who quickly got bored (I don't know why - I think he just went in prejudiced against it)
• X Freedom (Audiobook):  Jonathan Franzen - Oy...Really???  Another one of those "Why didn't I just give up at page 75, as I wanted to, rather than wade through the other 500 pages?"   So much tell.  So much summary.  So few interesting people.  (Not that he doesn't tell us how interesting they are.  To each other.)  Lots of melodrama.  Lots of exposition on the politics of ecological conservation that would make a perfectly pleasing essay but draggy fiction.  I seriously don't understand all the positive reviews it got - is this a case of I'm dumb, or the reviewer has no clothes?  I'll accept either answer, so long as you explain it to me.
• * Broken Ballots:  Will Your Vote Count:  Douglas W. Jones and Barbara Simons (My review here)
• * The Phantom of the Opera:  Gaston Leroux -- Fluff, but I enjoyed it a lot  Ah, yes, we must needs pity the Opera Ghost.
• * A Kiss Before Dying (Audiobook):  Ira Levin
• * The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (Audiobook):  Rebecca Skloot - fascinating history of one of the most ubiquitous tools in modern biology, the HeLa cell, originated from Henrietta Lacks' tumor, circa 1950.  Skloot weaves the story of Henrietta and her family with the history of tissue culture and the breathtaking discoveries that have been enabled by these "immortal" cells, while raising many profound and intertwined ethical questions about the use and economics of human tissue, access to medical care and informed consent
• Of Human Bondage (Audiobook):  W. Somerset Maugham - I can't totally put my finger on why I liked this one and hated Freedom.  
• * The Emperor of All Maladies (Audiobook):  Siddhartha Mukherjee - some interesting underscoring of themes from The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, but more sciency and less human-interesty.  Lot of good history of science and illustration of the culture of scientific investigation.
• The Trial (Audiobook):  Franz Kafka - gosh, how much it sounded like things that are reported in the news
• The Jungle (Audiobook):  Upton Sinclair
• * Death of a Salesman:  Arthur Miller - surprisingly, I'd never read this before.  Very strange little piece, with very interesting technique in portraying simultaneous internal and external dialogue of a single character, without the use of monologue.
• Romancing Miss Bronte (Audiobook):  Juliet Gael - I'd like to put this as an X...the writing is fairly annoying, but the story is somewhat interesting.
• X Camilla:  Fanny Burney - I liked Cecilia a lot, but I think you could safely skip Camilla.  While the plots of both are driven by social conventions of that period and their heroines' internal conflicts are not very relevant to a modern audience, somehow I felt it less in Cecilia.  Camilla felt much more contrived and repetitive - same three or four gags repeated over and over.  Evelina falls somewhere in the middle for me - also irrelevant and contrived, but more natural (and shorter) than Camilla.
• Lolita (Audiobook):  Vladimir Nabokov - narrated by Jeremy Irons...oh, what a narration!
• Carrie (Audiobook):  Stephen King - disappointing narration by Sissy Spacek
• Scat:  Carl Hiassen - not with Sidharta, but inspired by Sidharta - as always with Hiassen, a sweet book about nutty characters motivated by environmental issues, appropriate for the PG-13 crowd.
• * Lady Windermere's Fan:  Oscar Wilde
• A Woman of No Importance:  Oscar Wilde - Silly Oscar!  Thinking Americans are so sensible and meritocratic!
• The Pickwick Papers(Audiobook):  Charles Dickens - I started reading this a number of years ago and found it rather insufferable - decided to try again.  I think I'd still think it was fairly insufferable if it weren't for the excellent narration.  So obsessed with sex, for a Victorian novel :-)
• And this year I'm going to claim the equivalent of at least one novel in the form of short stories and excerpts of works by members of my very talented writing group and Sharpening the Quill writers' workshop.  I'm sure it's been at least 150-200K words.

Started

• The Teaching Company's course Peloponnesian War (Audiobook):  Kenneth Harl
• Catching Fire:  Suzanne Collins
• * Remix:  Lawrence Lessig - interesting book...just suffered from being a paper copy
• House of the Spirits:  Isabel Allende - physical copy got taken away from me in the middle, by Annapurna, who was reading it for school
• The Autobiography of Mark Twain - Volume 1 (Audiobook): Mark Twain - I had to drop off after about disk 7 (of about 20)...apparently one of Mark Twain's reservations about writing an autobiography was that he was afraid he wouldn't be able to bring himself to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. "Any journal that is intended for publication – even in 100 years' time – is probably in some way compromised. The only person I can think of who got close to an unexpurgated truth is Samuel Pepys, and that's because his diaries were never meant to be read." Well...all I can say is...he was right, at least in his own case. The bits I read were pretty self-aggrandizing, veiled in a false modesty. Also, it seems that Twain made many attempts at autobiography, which the editors have tried to compile in a single authoritative collection, liberally doused with their commentary. The end result, in my opinion, is a choppy, unreadable mish-mosh that is more like a PhD thesis than autobiography. It's got a lot of Twain's entertaining writing, but it's no Huck Finn. And it bothers me that I can't even tell if I actually got to "the" autobiography, or if everything I was listening to was introductory/related text. I think I didn't get to the main corpus, but I can't be sure.
• Shirley:  Charlotte Bronte - still working on it - it's no Jane Eyre, but there's some interesting historical context
• The Reason I Jump:  Naoki Higashida/translation by David Mitchell of Cloud Atlas fame - sweet book by a 13 year old autistic boy, explaining his thought process, and a plea for patience and understanding
• The Island of Dr. Moreau:  H.G. Wells - read this mostly at the gym :-)  Gonna have to read it with Sidharta, next :-D
• The Angel's Game (audiobook):  Carlos Ruiz Zafon - I think this is going to be a *:  lovely writing, metafiction, tormented author as protagonist - what could be bad?  It came before The Prisoner of Heaven, but it doesn't seem to matter that I read them out of order, though I am having some maddening moments trying to remember details from the other one.

And with Sidharta:

• The Pinhoe Egg:  Diana Wynne Jones (started)
• The Pilgrims of Rayne (Book 8 of the Bobby Pendragon series):  D.J. Machale (Parts - he read a bunch of it himself and then got Bobby Pendragoned out, I think)
• Lots of Calvin & Hobbes (no year would be complete without this)
• Some Grimm's Fairy Tales
• Flush:  Carl Hiassen (part - he finished it himself)
• Hoot:  Carl Hiassen (part - he finished it himself)
• Biography of a Grizzly:  Ernest Seton-Thompson
• Things Not Seen:  Andrew Clements (started...he got bored...I don't know why...seems like a great story)
• The Prince and the Pauper:  Mark Twain - I was very surprised he allowed us to finish this one, but he really seemed to enjoy it.
• Alice's Adventures in Wonderland:  Lewis Caroll (started)
• The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn:  Mark Twain (Can't believe we got through this, but he loved it.  What can I say? He's a man of good literary taste.)
• The Adventures of Tom Sawyer:  Mark Twain (started - still working on it.)

The origin of evil genius

I guess I always assumed that the term "evil genius" was a Batman or James Bond kind of term, a reflection of the deranged excesses of 20th Century greed and technology.  Perhaps in the cartoon usage it is.  But I ran across a much older use of this phrase.

I am currently reading (make that slogging through) Camilla by Fanny Burney.  In it, the sweet young heroine, Camilla, in love with the wealthy, but apparently indifferent Edgar Mandelbert, is trying to fend off the advances of the wealthy and somewhat annoying Sir Sedley Clarendel, who is being egged on in his suit by their mutual friend Mrs. Arlbery.

'O, Mrs. Arlbery!' she cried, 'lend me, I beseech you, some aid, and spare me, in pity, your raillery! Sir Sedley, I fear, greatly mistakes me; set him right, I conjure you....' 

'Me, my dear? and do you think if some happy fatality is at work at this moment to force you to your good, I will come forth, like your evil genius, to counteract its operations?'

Wiktionary provides this sense as its first definition of evil genius: The spirit each person is believed to have in attendance, according to certain religious or mythological traditions, which tries to negatively influence him, and is opposed by one's good genius; loosely, someone who is a bad influence.

2012 books

As I did, for 2011, I'm posting a list of books read/listened to in 2012.  Reasonably good year.  Couple of groaners that I felt obligated to finish, in spite of my better judgment.

* = Recommended

X = Stay away! - No absolute musts, this year, so I've indicated groaners with an "Oy"

• Mike and Psmith: P. G. Wodehouse (I'm tempted to put this as a *, but it's such fluff :-))
• An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge: Ambrose Bierce
• Death of Ivan Ilych: Leo Tolstoy
• * The Greatest Show on Earth (audiobook, narrated by the man, himself): Richard Dawkins (I'm putting this as a * -- it's pretty accessible, but at times it gets a little technical -- stick with it, though.) I think I still prefer Sapolsky for writing style, and coverage of a lot of the same kinds of concepts.
• Persuasion: Jane Austen (what would a reading year be without an Austen?)
• The Life of Pi (audiobook): Yann Martel - didn't get it - can someone please explain it to me?
• Mansfield Park: Jane Austen (Mostly because I saw the 1999 movie and was like...really??? She didn't write that...did she?)
• * Last Man in Tower (audiobook): Arvind Adiga
• * Plugged (audiobook): Eoin Colfer - may not be for everyone...a bit heavy on the violence, but darkly charming
• Nation (audiobook): Terry Pratchett
• The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (audiobook): David Mitchell
• The Complete Stories of Dorothy Parker (audiobook):  Dorothy Parker
• Wives and Daughters:  Elizabeth Gaskell (This was a re-read, mostly because I discovered the lovely BBC miniseries based on it, by Andrew Davies, the same screenwriter as did my very favorite Pride and Prejudice production - it's almost as good, though nothing can ever compare, really.)
• Between the Assassinations (audiobook): Aravind Adiga
• Next (audiobook):  Michael Crichton - Oy...
• Fairest (audiobook):  Gail Carson Levine - think I liked Ella Enchanted better, but this was good, too.
• Mrs. Dalloway (audiobook): Virginia Woolf - very strange, though I enjoyed it - never really saw a woman writing stream of consciousness like that
• Return of the Native (audiobook):  Thomas Hardy
• Daniel Deronda:  Mary Ann Evans (aka George Eliot) - kind of Oy
• Pillars of the Earth (audiobook):  Ken Follett - Oy...but now I'm really, really comfortable with the difference between a transept and a chancel and a nave.  Also clerestory.
• Psmith in the City:  P. G. Wodehouse
• Hard Times (audiobook):  Charles Dickens - Oy
• The Girl Who Played With Fire (audiobook):  Stieg Larsson - bit of a disappointment...I loved the other two, and it was a mistake to read them out of order, but honestly, I think this one could probably be dropped completely or have at least 30% excised.  Still hoping to meet this Blomqvist guy.
• * The Kitchen God's Wife:  Amy Tan (inspired by Annapurna, who read it for an English project) It is a testament to how much I enjoyed the story that I was willing to read it on paper.  Helped that I had an upstairs copy and a downstairs one, courtesy of a donation of a spare copy from my mother :-)
• * The Time Traveler's Wife (audiobook): Audrey Niffenegger - I'm putting this as a *, but it's kind of chick lit, though writers will find it an interesting study, as well - lot of structural and point of view technical challenges handled nicely here.  Actually, I'm not done with it yet, but I'm close enough that I'll claim victory.

Started:

• Fixing my Gaze: Susan R. Barry
• Moby Dick: Herman Melville
• Little Brother: Cory Doctorow
• Assorted essays from The Best American Science and Nature Writing (2011 edition) -- some quite good.
• Interpreter of Maladies:  Jhumpa Lahiri  (inspired by Annapurna, who read it for English class)
• Broken Ballots:  Will Your Vote Count:  Douglas W. Jones and Barbara Simons
• Harry Potter 4 - with Annapurna and Sidharta - parts
• The Great Gatsby: F. Scott Fitzgerald (inspired by Annapurna, who read it for English class)
• Moll Flanders:  Daniel Defoe - still working on it
• Rakshasa's Ring:  Visakhadatta - still working on it - I read it years ago and loved it...talk about royal skullduggery...it's like Philippa Gregory on steroids

And with Sidharta:

• Heidi: Johanna Spyri -- surprisingly, he really enjoyed it, though he got bored and abandoned it after 80%
• Lots of Calvin and Hobbes, as always
• Lots of his 1000 page tome on Mammals (aka The Princeton Encyclopedia of Mammals which I got a couple of years ago in a lucky purchase on sale for $20 on one of the outdoors tables at Labyrinth.  It normally goes for about $40...ask me why I know that :-)
• Lots of Asterix
• Children's abridged version of Time Machine: H.G. Wells -- he wanted to read it a second time after we finished it - he had read parts of it himself, and wanted to hear it again
• Some Grimm's Fairy Tales and Yellow Fairy Book
• Son of Neptune:  Rick Riordan (parts - he read most, himself)
• The Hobbit:  J.R.R. Tolkien (part - I think the language got a little highfalutin for him)
• * Robin Hood: (As retold by Roger Lancelyn Green) - one of my all time favorite children's books

And a good chunk of Harry Potter 4 with Annapurna and Sidharta.

And I feel I also deserve credit for having read a couple of additional 1000 page novels by virtue of having watched the Forsyte Saga (seasons 1 and 2), Downton Abbey (seasons 1 and 2) and the Wives and Daughters series :-)  Also a couple of excellent Coursera classes (especially Alex Halderman's Securing Digital Democracy)

Like a Bat Out of Hell

No, I am not a Meat Loaf fan. To tell the truth (shhh...don't tell anyone)...I don't think I've ever heard anything by Meat Loaf. Well, I take it back...I did watch Rocky Horror Picture Show...once...many years ago...many, many years ago. Maybe I would be a Meat Loaf fan if I tried.

But I digress.

I had always assumed that the expression " bat out of hell" originated with Meat Loaf's song of the same name. I was, therefore, surprised to run across it in one of Dorothy Parker's short stories from a 1932 edition of Harper's Bazaar, "Dusk Before Fireworks". In it, a young woman, jealous of another woman, says to her putative boyfriend, "She'll shoot out of Greenwich like a bat out of hell, if she thinks there's a chance of seeing you."

The Word Detective tells us that this expression first appeared in print in 1921, but does not provide a source.  Wordwizard says it was used in the novel The Three Soldiers by John Dos Passos, and supposedly it started up in WW I.  The Wiki page on Meat Loaf's song mentions a reference to a bat coming out of hell in Aristophanes' The Birds, so that takes it back a little further.  Kind of like that Homer reference to biting dust.

Just thought you ought to know.

Better than Mansfield Park

I just finished watching the 1999 version of Mansfield Park. (I started watching it on Netflix and then they did a weird bait and switch on me, and decided it was no longer available as a Watch Now option. But the movie was so intriguing that I had to get it out of the library.)

Now, I think I've mentioned previously, that I kind of hate Mansfield Park. I'm very sorry to say such a thing about an Austen piece, but so it is. What I hate most about it is that Fanny is such a prissy, passive, mousy, helpless thing, unlike most of her other heroines. So I was roped in by the movie on seeing an utterly different sort of creature, a girl with imagination, wit, and spirit.

Unfortunately, despite the inspiring take on Fanny and fabulous acting by all, I found the movie a little annoying. It took huge liberties with the plot and characterizations, which would have been fine, had the script been stronger. Since I kept comparing it to the book, it's a little hard for me to say, but I think the plot would not quite stand on its own.

I found it particularly hilarious that on the DVD cover, it says, "For everyone who loved 'Emma' and 'Sense & Sensibility' comes the story Jane Austen loved best." I am 99.9% certain that Jane would have disapproved of this movie.

Inspired by the film, I'm re-reading the book, and I still dislike it. However, I did notice that it used the phrase "life of the party," which I would have guessed to be of much more recent origin.

So regardless of its faults, on balance, I still think I like the movie better than the book. Which is something I can rarely say.

2011 books

As I did, last year, I'm posting a list of books read/listened to this year.

It's been a rather dark reading year, but very good for the most part. My best reads for the year ranged from depressing to horrifying, including Revolutionary Road, Invisible Man, and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo/Girl Who Kicked A Hornet's Nest. I don't know why the list was so down -- I wasn't looking for downers. But I enjoyed it, anyway. Mostly. When I wasn't crying.

* = Recommended

X = Stay away!

• Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: Mark Twain (I'd put this as a *, but it may not be for everybody)
• How to Read and Understand Poetry, Part 2 (audiobook): Willard Spiegelman, via The Teaching Company
• The Year of the Flood (audiobook): Margaret Atwood - followup to Oryx and Crake -- there's one of them downers!
• Our Kind of Traitor (audiobook): John le Carre - I've loved a lot of le Carre's books, but this wasn't one of my favorites. Of course, an OK le Carre is better than a lot of other things.
• The Island Beneath the Sea (audiobook): Isabel Allende (I'm tempted to put this as an X...I liked a lot about it, but it kind of crashed-and-burned at the end, and was mediocre in many ways elsewhere...pity...I generally like Allende.)
• The Mayor of Casterbridge: Thomas Hardy -- and another downer
• The Sea Gull: Anton Chekhov -- and another downer
• * Revolutionary Road (audiobook): Richard Yates -- I'm putting this as a *, though it may not be for everyone...it's very dark
• Burning Bright (audiobook): Tracy Chevalier -- this one was a disappointment -- Blake is such an interesting character, she could have done much more with him in the story.
• Witness: Vicki Weisfeld (Lot of fun -- I was honored to function as an alpha tester -- can't wait for the release!)
• A Tale of Two Cities (audiobook): Charles Dickens -- Gotta love Sydney Carton! Poor Carton!
• The Red Queen (audiobook): Philippa Gregory -- I think I'm about Gregoried out...they're all starting to feel the same.
• * Invisible Man (audiobook): Ralph Ellison -- I'm putting this as a *, but it's sometimes a little difficult read...it's a bit like Henry Miller prose...beautiful, but often hard to follow stream-of-consciousness
• Madame Bovary (audiobook): Gustave Flaubert -- I know it's a classic, but it really didn't do much for me -- there was just nobody I really cared much about in there. And talk about down!
• * The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (audiobook): Stieg Larsson -- Loved it, down and all!
• * Sense and Sensibility: Jane Austen (for only about the 6th time) -- one of the few uppers...that's what I love about Austen...the smart girl always gets the good guy
• On Civil Disobedience: Henry David Thoreau -- I guess I'd have to disagree with his arguments for anything much less heinous than slavery. But since slavery was his beef, you have to admire him for his intellectual honesty in following through with them.
• * The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest (audiobook): Stieg Larsson -- Loved it, in spite of the downer!
• Emma: Jane Austen -- doesn't hold up as well after multiple readings as P&P or S&S, but at least it was up :-)
• A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court: Mark Twain -- now there's an upper on the virtues of technology! If only it were all that easy!
• * The Rubaiyat: Omar Khayyam
• Dr. Zhivago (audiobook): Boris Pasternak -- I'm not actually quite done with it -- I dragged my heels a bit. This has got to have been one of the most difficult books to follow that I have ever read...I have a feeling the audio didn't help -- pretty poor narrator -- but I think it would have been hard even in print. It's a very interesting book, artistically and historically -- though the history is some of what's really hard to follow. And down we go again!

Started

• The Art of Subtext: Beyond Plot: Charles Baxter
• * The Cuckoo's Egg: Clifford Stoll (I'd read this before...it's still one of my alltime favorites...but it's on paper...doesn't follow me around as electronic does)
• Don Quixote: Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra -- I enjoyed it at first, but it got very repetitive. Also the translation was lovely in many ways, but I think it probably lost the voice of Sancho Panza who sounded almost as courtly as Don Quixote, rather than bumpkinish which I'm sure would have been there in the Spanish -- this was distracting to me.
• 1984: George Orwell -- just didn't do too much for me - I found it a little cartoonish, which in my mind detracted from its point, unlike Animal Farm, which I reread a couple of years ago, and found absolutely prophetic, despite its deceptively simple fable-like voice.
• Wandering Stars: Sholem Aleichem
• Our Daily Bread: Lauren B. Davis (working on it right now -- fits in perfectly with that downer trend for the year)

And with Sidharta

• Adventures of Tom Sawyer (parts): Mark Twain (I'd put this as a *, but despite the humor and lovely, light voice, it's surprisingly difficult vocabulary for a kid, and it's really hard to explain the all the cultural context and satire)
• * The Phantom Tollbooth: Juster Norton (one of my all time favorite kid books)
• Interworld: Neil Gaiman and Michael Reaves (parts -- was probably too advanced for him)
• All sorts of Calvin and Hobbes: Bill Watterson
• Kenny and the Dragon: Tony DiTerlizzi (very sweet)
• Varjak Paw: SF Said (parts -- he finished up, himself)
• Odd and the Frost Giants: Neil Gaiman (parts -- he finished up, himself)
• Harriet the Spy: Louise Fitzhugh (parts -- sadly it didn't do much for him)
• The Lost Hero: Rick Riordan (audiobook we listened to on summer vacation trip)
• The Spiderwick Chronicles and Beyond the Spiderwick Chronicles: Tony DiTerlizzi (parts -- he read most of them on his own)
• * The Graveyard Book: Neil Gaiman (part -- he lost interest at some point...pity, it's a fun book)
• The Report Card: Andrew Clements

And with Annapurna

• Johnny Tremain: Esther Forbes (as a young adult I was totally obsessed with her extremely off-beat A Mirror for Witches)
• To Kill a Mockingbird: Harper Lee (parts -- she read most of it herself for school; I LOVE this book, though it was a little hard for Annapurna to get -- I think kids now look for a lot of action, and it's a challenge slowing down to Lee's subtlety and pace of a 1930's southern town. Or maybe it demands more than teenage maturity. I'm not sure.)

2010 books

Just as a prompt to my own memory, I'm going to list the books I've read in 2010, in more-or-less chronological order. It's been a very good year. Some real winners in there, and even most of the non-winners were quite good (unlike 2009 which was, for the most part, a disappointment)

*=Recommended

X=Stay away

• The Brothers Karamazov: Dostoevsky
• Things Fall Apart: Chinua Achebe
• X Snuff: Chuck Palahniuk (audiobook)
• * The White Tiger: Aravind Adiga (my review here)
• Ethan Frome: Edith Wharton (my review here)
• * An Enemy of the People: Henrik Ibsen (my review here)
• Hedda Gabler: Henrik Ibsen
• * Fear of Flying: Erica Jong (I'd read it maybe 20 something years ago...it's so much more meaningful now :-)
• The Wild Duck: Henrik Ibsen
• X Lovers' Vows: Elizabeth Inchbald (my review here)
• * Good Omens: Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett (audiobook) (Probably the most fun read I had this year -- my review here)
• X The Story of Edgar Sawtelle: David Wroblewski (audiobook)
• Herland: Charlotte Perkins Gilman
• For the Win: Cory Doctorow (I'd put this as a * if you're willing to put up with a lot of discussion about computer gaming -- excellent intro for teens to a lot of economic concepts -- Annapurna loved it; very thought provoking)
• Unaccustomed Earth: Jhumpa Lahiri (audiobook)
• Up in Honey's Room: Elmore Leonard (audiobook)
• The Graveyard Book: Neil Gaiman (audiobook)
• * Remarkable Creatures: Tracy Chevalier (audiobook) (my review here)
• X High Plains Tango: Robert James Waller (audiobook) (I'm a little hesitant to put an X -- there was a lot I liked in this one, but...where was the editor???)
• The Odyssey: Homer, via Butler (with Annapurna)
• Delivered from Distraction: Edward Hallowell and John Ratey (I'd put this as a *, but it's really for the ADD/ADHD crowd)
• The Lady and the Unicorn: Tracy Chevalier (audiobook)
• The Mission Song: John LeCarre (audiobook)
• Disobedience: Jane Hamilton (audiobook)
• Helen: Euripides, via E.P. Coleridge
• X A Way With Words IV: Understanding Poetry: Michael Drout (audiobook) - Very focused on the syntactic, and organized purely chronologically...very shopping list feel to it.
• Babbitt: Sinclair Lewis (audiobook)
• Tropic of Capricorn: Henry Miller (audiobook) (Not sure I can really claim to have read this one...the prose is lovely, but it's only marginally easier to follow than Quentin's portion of The Sound and the Fury -- I confess my mind wandered more than a little.)
• Northanger Abbey: Jane Austen (for only about the 3rd time...it's my second least favorite Austen)
• Ghosts: Henrik Ibsen
• The History of Tom Jones, a foundling: Henry Fielding (I'd put this as a * if you're willing to put up with 18th Century-speak)
• A Mercy: Toni Morrison (audiobook) (This one could probably stand another round of reading, to really say I've read it. It's got a fairly complex structure. And it's a little hard to follow on audio for two reasons: first, the narrative keeps shifting points of view, without much of a cue; second, it is read by Morrison, herself, with a lovely poetic voice, but with phrase breaks that made it hard for me to parse.
• How to Read and Understand Poetry (audiobook): Willard Spiegelman, via The Teaching Company (I liked this one much better than the one by Michael Drout, though I'm still stumped)
• About 6 zillion OMB memoranda and NIST Special Publications from the 800 series...especially 800-53 (Many are quite good, really -- highly recommended if you're in the IT Security business, or even just IT.)

Started:

• Neuromancer: William Gibson -- just haven't been able to get into this one...it's been recommended to me several times...I'll keep trying
• Nuclear Jellyfish: Tim Dorsey (audiobook) -- too many in jokes about Lynyrd Skynrd and Florida for me to follow...just wasn't compelling enough for me.
• Transmission: Hari Kunzru (whose "The Impressionist" I loved) -- nothing wrong with this one...just it's on paper, and my life does not permit much paper reading
• Malgudi Days: R.K. Narayan -- I absolutely loved the parts I read...just it's on paper
• Vindication of the Rights of Woman: Mary Wollstonecraft -- I'm sure it was controversial and exciting in its time, but it harped a bit too much on the moral and chastity advantages of educating women to get me really worked up enough to plow through it.

And with Sidharta:

• * Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH: Robert C. O'Brien
• * lots and lots and lots of Calvin and Hobbes: Bill Watterson
• The Lightning Thief: Rick Riordan
• The Titan's Curse: Rick Riordan
• The Battle of the Labyrinth: Rick Riordan
• The Last Olympian: Rick Riordan
• lots of Asterix
• Assorted "educational" books on UFO's and cryptids
• Assorted Amar Chitra Katha comics on various characters from the Ramayana and Mahabharata
• Part of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (he read most of it himself -- Thank You, Rick Riordan, for waking him up to the joys of reading!)

And with Annapurna (who has very little time for stories these days) parts of:

• The Wee Free Men: Terry Pratchett
• Grimm's Fairy Tales
• Frankenstein: Mary Shelley

On friendship

I am reading The History of Tom Jones, a foundling by Henry Fielding. It's a lot of fun, in an 18th Century sort of way. Full of witty quotes. I just ran across this one, though, which I really like.

I hope my friends will pardon me when I declare, I know none of them without a fault; and I should be sorry if I could imagine I had any friend who could not see mine. Forgiveness of this kind we give and demand in turn. It is an exercise of friendship, and perhaps none of the least pleasant.

Yes, indeed.

Some words from the Tropic of Capricorn

Ok...yes...I know...it's weird...Dawn is listening to Tropic of Capricorn...when did that ever stop me? Lovely prose...bit too male-existential-crisis/stream of consciousness for my taste, though he expresses many thoughts that I can relate to. Likewise Babbitt (minus the stream of consciousness) which I listened to immediately before this. What can I say? I'm having an accidental run of early 20th century men's midlife crisis books...I didn't know what I was getting into. But that's not what I want to talk about.

No...I bring this up because I was struck by some cultural aspects of these two books. Namely, that though they both describe events that took place nearly 100 years ago (1920s), they nevertheless describe lifestyles and technologies that are remarkably recognizable in modern terms. I get the sense that if you dropped me in the middle of those novels, I'd be able to function pretty well (except for the internet part). Unlike, for example, dropping me into a Jane Austen book, where I suspect that I wouldn't know how to use the bathroom. (Sorry...couldn't resist...too much Tropic of Capricorn, I guess.)

These novels also used a number of terms that I would have expected to be more modern, such as in Babbitt "boneheaded", and in Tropic of Capricorn "bimbo" and "daffy". According to the Word Detective, bimbo (derived from Italian bambino) first showed up in English around the 1920s, and didn't come to mean a ditzy female until somewhat later than that, so that this reference in Tropic of Capricorn (published 1938) would have been one of the relatively early uses, I guess. "Daffy", on the other hand, from "daff" (meaning fool) apparently showed up around 1400. Word Detective has references to "bonehead", but does not actually comment on it, so I don't know when it arose, but it would never have occurred to me that it was as old as 1920s.

Interview with John Le Carre

I accidentally tuned in to Democracy Now yesterday and was surprised to hear someone talking about Bukavu, which I was reading about last week in The Mission Song. Surprise, surprise...who should be speaking but John le Carre, himself?

It turned out to be a very nice hour-long interview by Amy Goodman. It covered all sorts of stuff, from his experiences visiting Africa (he says he is a follower of "Graham Greene's dictum" that "if you're reporting on human misery, you do well to share it") to politics to his writing process. Having read a number of his books with interest (I really enjoyed "A Most Wanted Man" last year), I found this interview put the books into a nice context.

I will add that le Carre has a lovely voice. He sounds like a man half his age.

I'm adding him to the list of people I'd like to make friends with.

John LeCarre says...

"A good writer is an expert on nothing except himself. And on that subject, if he is wise, he holds his tongue."

His bio on his own website is crafted to this ideal.

I'm currently listening to "The Mission Song". Enjoying it, though it's a bit pedantic, and hard to follow some of the logic, given that I'm not as well acquainted with the politics of the Congo and Rwanda as I might be. Some of my difficulty might also have to do with the abridgment for audio -- I suspect they may have cut some critical details in the interest of recording time. However, the audio rendering is quite good...I really like the narrator.

Mary Anning, Revisited

I just got done listening to another great audiobook: Remarkable Creatures, by Tracy Chevalier. A friend recommended it, and I'm so glad he did. It combines two themes dear to my heart: A Jane Austen set-up and, if you can believe it, the problems of women in science.

This is the story of icthyosaur and plesiosaur discoverer Mary Anning (1799-1847), of whom I wrote a while back. It is more-or-less a novelization of her life. That is to say, most of the events and characters in the book are historical, but the narrative alternates between first person accounts provided by Mary, herself, and her friend Elizabeth Philpot, an expert fossil hunter in her own right.

Elizabeth is a typical Jane Austen heroine: born into the gentry, but with a very meager inheritance of her own. Mary is accustomed to living hand-to-mouth, the daughter of a cabinet maker, who dies highly in debt when she is about 11. The two women met soon after Elizabeth and two of her unmarried sisters moved to Lyme Regis to live cheaply, after the marriage of their brother who held the bulk of the family's wealth. Elizabeth had become interested in fossil hunting and Mary, who was only about 10 at the time, contributed to the family's income by supplying a fossil knick-knack ("curie", short for curiosity) stand that the family ran alongside the cabinet-making business. Elizabeth encouraged her to get an education, and to take a scientific, systematic approach to documenting her finds. Over time, the two became friends, and apparently spent significant time together collecting and studying the fossils. Along the way, they developed connections with, and taught or led a number of the well-known geologists and biologists of the time, including apparently, Cuvier (one of the acknowledged pioneers of paleontology).

Of course, scientific expertise is no excuse for gender, and though their contributions were first rate, neither Mary nor Elizabeth were recognized by any of the scientific establishment, on anything but a personal level. They were friends with the "great men", they sold fossils to the men, they corresponded with the men on scientific matters, they led the men on fossil hunts, but they could not publish papers or attend scientific meetings. And Mary had the double whammy of being of a different social class, as well, and living on the brink of starvation for much of her life.

The story reads like a pure novel. The narrative is wonderful, as are the voices of the two women. (I will say, too, that as audiobooks go, this was a lovely one, with two readers who provide excellent voices of their own.) The historical events are woven in nicely with the plot. And throughout you feel all of the pathos of the difficulties faced by two serious scientists in the context of their gender, poverty and class.

My informant tells me that The Lady and the Unicorn is good, too. It's on my queue.

Good Omens

Just got done listening to a fantastic audiobook, Good Omens, by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett. And because the narration is so awesome, I'll mention it was narrated by Martin Jarvis.

I was first introduced to Terry Pratchett's work reading The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents to Annapurna a few years ago. It is one of my favorite kid books.

Pratchett's sense of humor and lovely, light voice are a pleasure to read. It has a distinctly Wodehouse/Douglas Adams feel. But he has more to say, a deeper philosophical message than either Wodehouse or Adams. (I say "Pratchett" though it is co-authored with Gaiman...I haven't read Gaiman, but there is a strong Pratchett feel, and I've read that he did most of the actual writing.)

Good Omens is, if you can believe it, a farcical rendering of the days leading up to Armageddon. There are two things you need to know about this story. First, Pratchett is a fairly vocal humanist. Second, the story was published in 1990, which is around the time that the Soviet Union was breaking up, and no one knew which way it was going to go. Though the story does not directly refer to the unfolding world drama, the parallels are obvious in the interaction between the two main earth-based agents of Armageddon: angel Aziraphale and demon Crowley. Through their scheming conversations, Gaiman and Pratchett manage to pose many deep philosophical questions about entrenched mindless animosities, good vs. evil, theodicy (God's goodness in the face of evil), the intentions of creation, innateness vs. acquisition of evil, determinism vs. free will, etc.

In this story, it seems that the "Adversary, Destroyer of Kings, Angel of the Bottomless Pit, Great Beast that is called Dragon, Prince of This World, Father of Lies, Spawn of Satan and Lord of Darkness" is mistakenly placed at birth in a stuffy middle class British family (think of a dad somewhat like Hyacinth Bucket), instead of with a US ambassador, where he could have gotten up to a lot of good mischief. Neither side realizes the mistake until it becomes apparent that none of the expected harbingers of the apocalypse are appearing in the vicinity of the putative Spawn. It then becomes a race between Aziraphale and Crowley on one side, trying to save the Earth they have come to enjoy, versus the assembled hosts of heaven and hell who are determined to have it out.

And meandering through the text we have the "nice and accurate predictions of Agnes Nutter", a book full of correct but cryptic (and ultimately pointless) predictions from the seventeenth century, including the actual location of the actual Spawn.

The book mainly pokes fun at the concept of "our side vs. their side" and the myriad ways in which people have found to misunderstand and abuse it. There is a theme of tolerance that seems to pervade Pratchett's work, at least as much as I've read. Which is another reason I like it so much.

And finally, I will say this is one of the best audio renditions I've listened to lately. Jarvis is brilliant at creating distinct (and funny) voices and accents for each of the characters. The only one that I found a little off was that of the young Spawn, but I suspect there was a deliberate decision to make him sound like his stuffy adoptive father, rather than the 11 year old boy leader he is supposed to be. And interestingly, he puts on an American accent for the characters War and Pollution (two horsemen of the apocalypse), though as far as I could tell there is nothing in the text that calls for this.

Listen to the book.

Lovers' Vows

Warning: it's not as interesting as the title might suggest. And that's true on several levels.

In the only Jane Austen novel that I actually dislike (and I'm not the only one who feels this way about it), Mansfield Park, one of the plot drivers is a performance to be staged by some of the characters. The characters go through contorted farcical relationships that mirror or ironically contrast with the contorted farcical relationships in the play they choose to stage. That play?

Lovers' Vows by one Elizabeth Inchbald, published 1798.

I've thought, for some time that I ought to read it. The characters make such a fuss about the play and so much is made about how risque it is to stage it for the neighbors that I thought it surely must be juicy.

Wrong!

It wants to be Gilbert and Sullivan and Pope John Paul, but has all of the Gilbert and Sullivan implausibility with none of the Gilbert and Sullivan wit and all of the good morals of John Paul but none of his charisma. You get the idea: preachy, implausible and failing to be funny with great effort.

The story revolves around Frederick, the illegitimate son of Agatha Friburg, who was seduced in her youth by Baron Wildenhaim, who abandoned her and went off and married an unnamed Baroness, and produced a lovely daughter, who fell in love with her poor but virtuous tutor. Through an implausible series of events, Frederick meets the Baron, attempts to kill him, reveals himself to the Baron, is instantly accepted as his son, and refuses to be accepted as said son unless the Baron also agrees to marry Agatha. Which the Baron does, on the advice of the virtuous tutor. And as a bonus, throws in permission for said tutor to marry his daughter. Because she loves him.

Lots of internal conflict, yes?

Other literature that I've read because it was referenced by Jane Austen I've enjoyed a lot: Cecilia, The Mysteries of Udolpho. You safely can skip this one. At this point I'm no longer sure what she was trying to convey when she chose it to base her plot on, except possibly forcing the device. She had some characters express moral concern over the content of the play, but it was so preachy I can't see what there was to object to, unless it was considered too titillating to mention illegitimacy at all.

As I warned you, neither the play nor this post is as exciting as its title.

An Enemy of the People

Last week I read An Enemy of the People (Ibsen, 1882). I must say, I'm taking a liking to Ibsen. (I read A Doll's House last year, and loved it, though it went right by me in high school.)

This one concerns a politically naive, but conscientious doctor who discovers that the Baths he was instrumental in having brought to his small town are actually so polluted as to endanger human life. The town, it seems, has invested significant resources into building the baths, but is poised, at the moment of his discovery, to reap significant economic benefits from them. I think you can guess the rest. I'll just say that it involves an orchestrated villification of the good doctor.

The players are Dr. Stockmann, innocent but honest; his brother the mayor, the quintessential politician; Hovstad, the editor of a supposedly progressive periodical, in reality more interested in the economic stability of his paper, whether it be from muckraking or preserving the status quo; Aslaksen, the printer, representing small business interests; and Morton Kiil, the wealthy father-in-law of Stockmann, whose property is responsible for the pollution. Room for conflict? I think so. Sound like the kind of interests at play today? You bet. Though it was written in 1882, it felt like you could replace "poisoned water" with any one of half a dozen modern issues (health care crisis, financial crisis, for starters), and it would be perfectly relevant today.

I was completely with Dr. Stockmann until the middle of the 4th act. At that point, he veered off into what seemed like an elitist blast against the common man. Basically, he is very pissed off with the masses who had elected such a bonehead as his brother and allowed themselves to be swayed by such rabble rousers as Hovstad. He concludes

"The majority never has right on its side. Never, I say! That is one of these social lies against which an independent, intelligent men must wage war. Who is it that constitute the majority of the population in a country? Is it the clever folk, or the stupid? I don't imagine you will dispute the fact that at present the stupid people are in an absolutely overwhelming majority all the world over. But, good Lord!--you can never pretend that it is right that the stupid folk should govern the clever ones I (Uproar and cries.) Oh, yes--you can shout me down, I know! But you cannot answer me. The majority has might on its side--unfortunately; but right it has not. I am in the right--I and a few other scattered individuals. The minority is always in the right."

This seems to me the wrong conclusion, and blaming the victim. But I suppose I can't totally blame him, either. Look at our tea parties. And I was slightly relieved, by the end, where he decides to set up a school for poor children. He says,

"I am going to experiment with curs, just for once; there may be some exceptional heads among them."

I've read that Ibsen was very bitter at the time he wrote this one, at the reception of an earlier work which may have contributed to the cynical feel.

The play is very powerful in its conciseness. The personalities and interests of the characters are made clear within just a few lines. It is extremely painful to watch Stockmann's wonderful ideals stripped from him by the cynical self-interests who have no qualms at twisting or ignoring truth.