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| 0140139397
| 9780140139396
| 0140139397
| 4.19
| 8,723
| 1943
| Mar 01, 1991
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it was amazing
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Towards the end of this epic story, Bruce Mason, who was a first year law student barely 20 years old (having skipped a few grades), began keeping a j
Towards the end of this epic story, Bruce Mason, who was a first year law student barely 20 years old (having skipped a few grades), began keeping a journal. It was not a log of his activities or thoughts on the issues of the day, but rather an attempt to understand a complicated family dynamic with a flawed father driving it. He said the journal was like author’s notes -- another of the many parallels between Bruce and Stegner himself. Both had a saintly mother, a combustible father, an athletic older brother who unlike Wally and Bruce did not skip grades, and a nomadic upbringing that included time in Saskatchewan, Montana, and Salt Lake City. Here’s Bruce, though, reflecting on how impossible it is to truly understand any such thing: "I suppose," he wrote, "that the understanding of any person is an exercise in genealogy. A man is not a static organism to be taken apart and analyzed and classified. A man is movement, motion, a continuum. There is no beginning to him. He runs through his ancestors, and the only beginning is the primal beginning of the single cell in the slime." Nevertheless, the book did track back to figure out what it could. In the process, Stegner said, he managed to offload some deep-seeded resentments. I’m reluctant to go into any detail, because Stegner should be given the chance to reveal important plot points his own way. Let me just say he’s good at it. Each vignette draws you in completely, magnified and made grand by his sense of time and place. And every character profile has human dimensions that only a genuinely talented, observant writer can convey. OK then. [Taking a deep breath before attempting the tightrope walk that keeps me from over-sharing while at the same time justifies why the book deserves all 5 stars.] One genealogical precursor in this story was the father’s father who lost an arm and any sense of humor he might have had as a prisoner in the Civil War. Another was the mother’s Norwegian heritage and farm upbringing that made her hearty and resilient. Each member of the immediate family gets POV treatment which helps the long story move at a more spritely pace. Bo, the dad, was testosterone personified. He was broad-shouldered, good with his hands, quick with his temper, energetic, charming (at times), respected by ruffians, good with guns, and for the most part loving towards his wife Elsa. He chased dreams of the big score, the easy money, or in metaphorical terms, the Big Rock Candy Mountain that’s surely just past the next rise. (BTW, the book shares its apt title with a that was featured in the movie O Brother, Where Art Thou. “And the bulldogs all have rubber teeth� being my favorite line.) Bo pushed boundaries, was confident (or maybe “delusional� is the better word), and liked signaling “big man� status when he could. In one case he paid more for the diamond stud in his tie than I do for 3 years-worth of clothes and accessories even before adjusting for inflation. (Hmm� I’m not sure if that says more about him or me.) Elsa was more practical, but rarely held sway. She was also, in contrast, consistently kind. The only knock against her is that she might have done more to protect the little birds in her nest. The older brother, Chet, was in many ways like his father. If Bo could be called a man’s man, Chet could be labelled a boy’s boy � physical, a ring-leader, adventurous, and at least half-full of mischief. Bruce was more of a mama’s boy. He did share one trait with his father, though: an intense willfulness. When the two were together, Bo’s manly standards and own intransigence made harmony as scarce as big money. Bruce’s reflections later in the book were powerful and wise (overlapping 99% with Stegner’s own). Father-son relationships often teeter lopsidedly between pride and disappointment depending on how the two generations reflect on each other and how reconciled they are to their differences. Stegner once said this was a book about motion. The family certainly moved a lot, with that B.R.C.M. always beckoning. There was movement of a different sort, too. Young Bruce, who was wise beyond his years, noted that people weren’t fixed points so much as lines, always changing a little from what they were “like the wiggly line on a machine used to measure earthquake shocks. […a man] moved along a line dictated by his heritage and his environment, but he was subject to every sort of variation within the narrow limits of his capabilities.� With Stegner drawing the plots, every wiggle was worth noting. The book was published in 1943 when Stegner was 34 years old, teaching at Harvard. The three other Stegner novels I read were written decades later. It was interesting to me to sample the young Wallace Stegner before the line of his life brought him to celebrated works like Angle of Repose and Crossing to Safety. In younger years he seemed to write with more raw power, hurt, and emotion. As he aged he became more refined and maybe more quotable. He was never less than great, though � marked by mature insights even as a young man and brimming with intelligence throughout. I’m giving this book 4.5 stars and rounding up to 5. The small demerit comes from descriptive passages that I sometimes felt could have been shorter. I also think that as Bruce/Wallace exorcised demons, there wasn’t enough elapsed time or self-awareness yet to say what would fill the void. A quote by Bruce near the end, though, hints at how both the protagonist and the writer thought the blanks should be filled. Perhaps it took several generations to make a man, perhaps it took several combinations and re-creations of his mother's gentleness and resilience, his father's enormous energy and appetite for the new, a subtle blending of masculine and feminine, selfish and selfless, stubborn and yielding, before a proper man could be fashioned. Knowing what I know of the writer to come, he iterated his way to that goal quite well, surpassing those candy mountains along the way. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Jun 2017
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Jun 09, 2017
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Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0385539460
| 9780385539463
| 0385539460
| 3.73
| 2,419
| May 05, 2015
| Nov 03, 2015
|
really liked it
|
Little Victories could be called a self-help book in the same way Caddyshack could be called a golf instruction video. Jason Gay’s light-hearted littl
Little Victories could be called a self-help book in the same way Caddyshack could be called a golf instruction video. Jason Gay’s light-hearted little book is nominally meant to give advice and rules of thumb for navigating the modern world, but we all know it’s just a format for making jokes. It’s not entirely airy, though. He adds ballast with topics like his bout with testicular cancer and his father’s failing health. And every once in a while we’re led to think. But for the most part it’s all about the humor. Gay’s current job is as a WSJ sports columnist. He’s also written for Rolling Stone, GQ, and Vogue. With everything of his I ever read, I end up cracking a smile. His humor is droll, observational, and self-effacing. He’s slightly edgier than Dave Barry, not as big into anecdotes as David Sedaris, and less of a suburban housewife than Erma Bombeck, but he correlates with them all. His likability index is high, too, which always helps. I realized only after I was most of the way done that the best way to sell this book to friends would be with examples. Since I was too lazy to backtrack, I hoped that whatever I underlined from then on would be enough. Here are a few I came up with. You be the judge. Asking a survey question to discern how smart phone-dependent you might be: Are you reading this copy of Little Victories as “an actual hardcover book, with printed pages, by candlelight, in a hayloft, above sleeping livestock, as people used to do in the 1990s?� Talking about how orderly an aunt’s place is where they regularly visit in the summer: My house, by contrast, feels as if a tribe of orangutans has gotten loose and opened up a case of Heinekens. Describing advice from an older sibling on parenthood: My brother, whose daughter is on the verge of her teens, treats me like I'm still in the first season of Breaking Bad. Wait until Season 4, he says, when it takes your kid two hours to dress before school. On curbing the time kids spend with digital devices: […] if you hand a child a phone in a public setting, people look at you like you’ve just given your kid a sack of enriched uranium. You are lazy, you are ceding parenthood to the machines, you are not actively building organic fun. The parenting magazines and blogs tell you to set limits, and this is useful advice, but I am not setting limits on, say, an airplane. If it means a peaceful cross-country flight without dirty stares from every other passenger, I will let a two-year-old watch Scarface. The book contains wise words about the value of friends, the joys of a good marriage, the excesses of youth sports and the importance of little things that should be appreciated for how they cumulate, even if imperfectly, into a life. At his best, he mixes earnest good intent with some chuckles. The only thing that didn’t wear well was a tendency to exaggerate with numbers. For example, he said, “I am so afraid of poisoning you that I will leave that chicken on the grill until 2042.� Or, once in a job he made �21 billion cheese sandwiches.� There must have been more than 16 thousand such instances and they ultimately made me cringe. If you’re looking for a little palate cleanser between courses, and you want it light but still flavorful, this is one to consider. My laugh tally was |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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May 2017
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May 22, 2017
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Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 1101904224
| 9781101904220
| 1101904224
| 4.14
| 632,105
| Jul 26, 2016
| Jul 26, 2016
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really liked it
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Few words, if any, can launch an imagination better than these: What if? Life in the real world moves awfully fast, and when considering th Few words, if any, can launch an imagination better than these: What if? Life in the real world moves awfully fast, and when considering the near-infinite set of causes and effects, it’s impossible to disentangle. That doesn’t stop us from trying, though. We love devising rewrites. What if Arsenal’s fluky long-range shot off the United defender’s back had not snuck into the goal? What if Rhett and Scarlett had had couples counseling? What if instead of Dark Matter Julia and Tomas had given me Dark Matter Heart (Cor Griffin Bloodsuckers, #1)? We all know from chaos theory that it doesn’t take a very big butterfly to make a profound difference in Naperville, Illinois's weather. Decades ago academics decided they wanted in on the fun. They called their “what-ifs� counterfactuals whereby two states of the world would be compared: one where an intervention occurred (like some policy change or the advent of railroads or the internet) and one where it didn’t. Studies like this can be speculative and over-reaching. The lack of rigor means they can be argued to the point where no one will agree. It’s best to think of these things as creative exercises only. I’m more willing to listen to what Clarence says a world without George Bailey would be like than to what some economist pictures as the competitive landscape had the Glass-Steagall Act not been rescinded. Blake Crouch asks “what if� quite a lot. And he does it creatively. I’m happy to report that the three reviews I’ve read of this book were able to resist blabbing about the premise. I won’t spoil the how of the what-ifs either. In fact, I may just turn this whole review into a series of my own what-ifs, with only vague references to the book. What if a reader like me who naturally questions the scientific plausibility of science fiction so much that he’s often driven to distraction finds one where the story and its philosophical implications are interesting enough that disbelief is cheerfully suspended? What if quantum physics allowed bizarre interpretations of superposition such that random subatomic events could lead to states that are simultaneously on and off, or dead and alive, or acted upon and not, until such time as the states are observed? (See Schrödinger’s cat.) What if a professor of physics in Chicago with a wife and teenage son he loves finds himself suddenly pitched in a battle of wits against an opponent as brainy as he is? What if the physicist turned out to be a good problem solver with a romantic streak as well? What if at no point did a what-if book consider going back in time to kill Hitler? (It’s virtually unprecedented, but conceivable.) What if the character development in a book seems pretty meager, but is deemed forgivable because the story moves well without it? What if in some bleak, dystopian version of Chicago the Cubs World Series glory was somehow erased? (Any such book would be given one star � that’s what!) What if in the process of reading a what-if book, you began thinking of your own identity, the mutability of it, the life-shaping decisions you almost didn’t make, and the metaphysics of what might be? What if you were excited to tell people about some page-turner, but there’s so little you feel you can say about it that you have to resort to yet another silly device to say anything at all? What if we all met for deep dish pizza after you’ve read this to discuss the premise more openly? ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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May 2017
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May 18, 2017
|
Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 0812995341
| 9780812995343
| 0812995341
| 3.75
| 166,860
| Jan 01, 2017
| Feb 14, 2017
|
liked it
|
You know those half-awake, half-asleep dreams where you’re working through your problems of the day? The first wakeful moments in the shower usually l
You know those half-awake, half-asleep dreams where you’re working through your problems of the day? The first wakeful moments in the shower usually let you know that any solutions you thought might apply were pure nonsense. Even more often you realize the things you were thinking about weren’t really problems anyway � it was all just anxiety for the hell of it. Anyway, last night I went to bed thinking about what I might say about this celebrated new Saunders book I just read. Even as I was falling asleep, I knew in the light of day this would end up being one of those non-problems. But then I started thinking about a request I got at work to give a presentation about statistical modeling to the 50 or so technologists in our firm. These are clever people � the types who could write episodes of Silicon Valley - so, warily, I began preparing slides in my head that might interest them. As soon as the REM sleep kicked in, I guess I conflated my two goals. I came up with mathematical breakdowns of Lincoln in the Bardo instead. Of course, the first drops of water from the shower should have told me to abandon such thoughts, but I was hard up for an angle as it was, which is a long introduction for what you’re about to see. [Note to self: Don’t mention ŷ reviews in stats preso.] I might as well start with the star rating. The input variables in this case, all ranging from 0 (lowest) to 1 (highest) were: Quality of writing = 0.88 Applying equal additive weights to each variable we get: Rating = 0.88 + 0.93 + 0.48 + 0.85 + 0.27 = 3.41 I’d read several rave reviews which enticed me. And the premise (Lincoln’s visits to the cemetery after his dear son Willie died at which time and place the transitioning souls there in the bardo encountered him) sounded interesting, too, even if a tad gimmicky. The multiplicity of stories and situations were a chance to place all of humankind on a platter for Lincoln (and us) to ingest. The bardo is a Buddhist concept pertaining to the state of being between death and rebirth � presumably a time of reflection and atonement. As Saunders envisioned it, the cross-section of inhabitants was a wide and noisy one. Still, a more enlightened understanding of one another’s ways was possible. Empathy and acceptance were the apparent goals. I give Saunders plenty of credit for highlighting these themes. (I give him even more credit for this commencement speech he gave a few years ago, making a related case for kindness.) My only disappointment was that the individual stories seemed too diffuse and too thin to really permeate. The book touched briefly on what life must have been like for Lincoln at that point. For someone who was said to be unusually kindhearted and sympathetic to begin with, the grief of Willie’s death along with the weight of the war were almost more than he could bear. Even so, as his country’s leader he knew he couldn’t wallow. Instead, he had to remind himself of the moral math (though he might not have thought of it in quite those terms) of suffering. His time in the cemetery reminded him that everyone has hardships of some kind at some time, some far worse than others. His job was to make decisions to minimize the cumulative sum of it. So, which is the smaller amount? Cumulative suffering given war = Σ Misery[i, t | war] (summed across all individuals i, and future episodes t) or Cumulative suffering given no war = Σ Misery[i, t | no war] (summed across all individuals i, and future episodes t) The misery of slavery was given a suitably high weight, of course. In fact, Lincoln’s empathy for all was given a representational boost when certain of the souls discovered they could inhabit him and cross-absorb experiences � literally (for purposes of the story) walking a mile in his shoes. A former slave was notably included. Ancillary mathematical discussion: Certain traits seem to combine additively to produce a given effect. Others are multiplicative. In the example that comes to mind regarding Lincoln (hagiography alert), I’m positing an exponential relationship. Power ^ Empathy = Greatness One of the thornier issues we face as we endeavor to empathize is the amount of dispensation to assign. It’s easy to say that some higher moral authority has that job, but I still think the old “free will vs. determinism� debate is a good one. Several in the bardo argued that they may have done bad things, but were compelled by their natures and circumstances to do so. Expressing it in an equation, we might get something like this: Actions and Attitudes = function(Genetics, Brain chemistry, Upbringing, Outside influences like friends or books, Physical needs) + Residual The residual in this model is the part of our actions and attitudes that cannot be explained by the drivers. It’s what I’m imagining free will to be. So the question is, what portion, if any, is to be labeled a choice, superseding what the assigned factors would otherwise dictate? Is that what we’re to be judged by? I was coached once, when putting together a presentation, to go easy on the equations. Eyes for another half your audience will glaze over for each additional one you include. I guess he was saying: Remaining interest = Original interest * (0.5 ^ # of equations) How many of you does that leave? I’m not even sure I can include myself, having mentally checked out while summing the miseries of those potentially reading this review of a sort. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Apr 2017
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Apr 21, 2017
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Hardcover
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| 4.47
| 376,320
| Jun 07, 2016
| Jun 07, 2016
|
really liked it
|
When a book is as popular and praiseworthy as this one, it’s easy to join the chorus justifying why. It’s much harder to come up with anything new to
When a book is as popular and praiseworthy as this one, it’s easy to join the chorus justifying why. It’s much harder to come up with anything new to say. I’ll attempt the latter in a minute, but first here’s a recap of what others have already said: » Young, debut author born in Ghana, brought up in Alabama writes a brilliant novel spanning multiple generations, putting faces on the African and African-American experience. » The story begins with Effia (the beauty) who seemed destined to become a tribal big man’s wife who instead is married off profitably to a British officer there for the slave trade. Esi, a half-sister Effia knew nothing about, is captured in a neighboring village, brought to the horrific dungeon (with worse conditions than a caged chicken’s) at the Cape Coast Castle where Effia lived, and is ultimately shipped off to America. » The book proceeds to tell the stories of characters in each subsequent generation, alternating between Effia’s line in Africa and Esi’s in the states. » Projecting into slavery and racism in the abstract is bad enough, but when it’s personalized through characters we come to know and admire, it sucks even worse. » Life in Africa wasn’t always great either with raids on villages, battles against the Brits, my-way-or-the-highway missionaries, and complicity among the Asante in the slave trade. » Character profiles allowed Gyasi to hit on many endemic hardships. Among the most affecting were: difficulties in being mixed race, severe pain and scarring from the lash, trumped up charges forcing labor in the coal mines, the lure of an artificial escape (narcotics), and racism that may attenuate over time, yet still persists. » The only real criticism I’ve heard is that the characters can seem underdeveloped. With only twenty or so pages for each one, we don’t get to know them all that well. Reviewers who dock a star invariably cite this as the reason. » Nobody I’ve seen docks more than one star � for any reason. Hmm� did I really commit to saying something new? Let’s see [scratching head, looking simultaneously sheepish and stupid]� Uh, well, there’s this: » Skin tones of different characters were often mentioned, almost always as some combination of a caffeinated beverage and dairy, with proportions varying. » At times, other properties of flesh (e.g., fullness, jiggliness) were detailed as well. Looks were emphasized quite a lot. » This isn’t so much a new thought as it is an amplification on a previous one. With the brief time spent with each character, Gyasi does an impressive job of highlighting personal experiences that may well have applied to many at the time. Each had idiosyncrasies, too. But if I’m honest, generations are already fading from my memory, and I’m only a week removed from them. Too many faces come in too short a time to keep track. » Related to the previous point, the character vignettes often ended abruptly. After seeing this pattern repeated, it felt like a device. And it kind of broke the spell. » Again commenting on the brief stints with each character, individual dramas had little time to build. I appreciate that Gyasi could bring forth an epic feel in 300 pages, but certain characters deserved more, I felt, to really permeate. Like I said, it’s hard to find anything new to say since ŷ reviewers have already covered the relevant ground so well. As further evidence, I’m not the first to highlight the quote below. But it came from one of my favorite characters, a teacher in Ghana disfigured by fire, so I have to include it. […]when you study history, you must always ask yourself, whose story am I missing? Whose voice was suppressed so that this voice [from the one in power] could come forth? Once you have figured that out, you must find that story too. From there, you begin to get a clearer, yet still imperfect, picture. Nice take-away point, wouldn’t you say? Gyasi epitomized this view of history with her rousing historical fiction. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Apr 2017
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Apr 14, 2017
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Hardcover
| |||||||||||||||||
| 0312427808
| 9780312427801
| 0312427808
| 4.05
| 87,547
| Aug 29, 2003
| Feb 03, 2009
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None
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Notes are private!
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0
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not set
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not set
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Apr 12, 2017
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Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
| 0967313481
| 9780967313481
| 0967313481
| 4.00
| 8
| Mar 08, 2017
| Mar 08, 2017
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For POTUS (Sonnet 45) [with apologies to Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who might not have minded given the cause] How do I loathe thee? Let me count the w For POTUS (Sonnet 45) [with apologies to Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who might not have minded given the cause] How do I loathe thee? Let me count the ways. I loathe thy bravado and facts that aren’t real Like how you would make us a much better deal Walling the border, where Mexico pays. So, Signore Duce, some questions for you, Attempting to suss your unique point of view. Are women who thwart you all liars and fat? Is doubting earth’s warming like saying it’s flat? Could props be bestowed on a non-plutocrat? Has fate ever dealt you a Breitbart brickbat? We know a lot more of what Mrs. Trump waxes Than write-offs and dealings that went on your taxes. And why don’t we sit for a few frank discussions ‘Bout Putin and hackers and who talked to Russians. Your loose-cannon tweeting prompts many to say, “We’ll fly Maple Leaf flags and start saying ‘eh’�. Note: My politically astute friend Ian put me up to this. By his fine example, the more caustic the quill the better. The call to arms (or, rather, pens) from Ian's post: /review/show... ...more |
Notes are private!
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0
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not set
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not set
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Apr 06, 2017
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Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
| 1400067693
| 9781400067695
| 1400067693
| 3.59
| 177,629
| Jan 12, 2016
| Jan 12, 2016
|
really liked it
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A book like this that’s short on words, but rich in meaning begs for a metaphor to describe it. As one I know I can flog, think of Strout’s profile he
A book like this that’s short on words, but rich in meaning begs for a metaphor to describe it. As one I know I can flog, think of Strout’s profile here as an artful little mosaic. She doesn’t use many tiles, but the ones she does display are carefully colored and placed. With enough distance, a picture does emerge. While it may be true that not every reader likes having the space between tiles, for me, squinting and mulling were part of the pleasure. Had the book fully revealed the miseries of Lucy’s early life and her complicated relationships as an adult, I might have found it too familiar or, heaven forfend, sentimental. What follows is a sample of what we do get from the tiles, followed by what we might ponder from the spaces. Tile Topic: Remember, this is a picture. It’s not an animation. Very little qualifies as a plot beyond the fact that Lucy has mysterious complications from an appendectomy and ends up in a hospital bed for nine weeks. She’s a young mother at the time. Lucy’s own mother flies out from rural Illinois to visit Lucy in New York after years of not seeing her. The five-day visit is mostly filled with gossip about people from town. Space Speculation: This is a “show, don’t tell� kind of book. Come to think of it, a corollary we might call “allude, don’t conclude� also applies. We sense that Lucy has something to forgive, but we’re not exactly sure what it may be. She’s careful to avoid making her mom feel bad, though, and in return, Lucy does seem comforted by the visit. Her mom does not express love in conventional ways, but might there be proxies (flawed though they may be) that Lucy seeks? TT: The book proceeds with vignettes years before and years after her illness. The most affecting ones showed very clearly that poverty sucks. Growing up, Lucy and her family lived in the garage of her uncle’s house. They wore ratty clothes, ate bread with molasses for most meals, had no indoor plumbing beyond a sink with tepid water, and spent too much time feeling cold. SS: Does that sense of being looked down upon ever dissipate? When, as a child, you see the looks on the faces of classmates on the bus hoping you’ll find a seat elsewhere ever fade away? Do the few acts of kindness you enjoy (e.g., a free Thanksgiving dinner offered with a smile, a teacher chastising certain fellow students� superior attitudes) tell readers how impactful even small gestures can be to those in need? TT: Among family members, Lucy was the lucky one. She spent hours in the library (partly just to stay warm) where she discovered books as a way to fight loneliness. As a side benefit, she got top marks in school and escaped with a college scholarship. Her brother and sister did not fare as well. He was too repressed to ever be whole and she was too resentful. Lucy’s dad had a temper, a bad war experience, and jobs that would never last. Her mom had issues of her own and at times would lash out indiscriminately. SS: Left unsaid was anything about a big event that capitalized the D in their family’s dysfunction. The shadow of a “thing� seemed to lurk, but what beyond general hardship might have cast it? Another dynamic we can only guess at is why Lucy and her siblings apparently preferred feeling ostracized in isolation rather than together as a team. TT: Lucy ultimately became a writer. Her motivation was a noble one: to help readers like herself feel less alone. A story that rings true emotionally creates an empathetic reader/writer bond. Truth can sound like "a child crying with the deepest of desperation," (though I doubt Lucy would allow it to appear overwrought). A fellow writer who served a short while as a mentor told Lucy we all have one story to tell. Lucy was told by another friend that she needed to write ruthlessly. SS: One question that occurred to me was whether “truth� is possible when there are lies of omission? It seems a relevant thing to ask in light of Lucy’s vague imputations. But then we may decide that reactions can feel real even when the causes are unknown. We may also wonder whether the “one story to tell� line suggests something the mentor may have had in common with Lucy � some sort of life-shaping trauma or sorrow. (One small tile showed how both Lucy and her instructor jumped out of their seats when a cat suddenly entered the room.) A clear-sighted vision of whatever this thing may be could inform an entire world view as well as the story one tells to represent it. And when that truth is an ugly one, a writer has to be ruthless to be honest. Coupled with that honesty, though � and this might just be the crux of it all for our protagonist, Lucy � is acceptance. TT: Thinking of this review as a kind of mosaic itself, it seems I’m working with even fewer tiles than Strout was. 1) I look at her themes and profiles and applaud the pixelation. 2) I like the greater truths that spring from fiction even when their roots are unknown. And 3), I argue that her book inspires in subtle, less clamorous ways. SS: OK, so maybe meta-mosaics don’t really work. Plus, I’ll admit that flogging a metaphor is one thing; but it’s quite another to maim it. ...more |
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1
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not set
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Mar 2017
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Apr 04, 2017
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Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 0316713902
| 9780316713900
| 0316713902
| 3.67
| 2,868
| 1962
| May 30, 1984
|
really liked it
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[image]
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Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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not set
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Apr 01, 2017
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Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0517223627
| 9780517223628
| 0517223627
| 4.03
| 394,757
| 1865
| Sep 07, 2004
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it was amazing
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People knocking on the door of their seventh decade don't typically get their first of these things at this point in their lives. But then the Cubs ha
People knocking on the door of their seventh decade don't typically get their first of these things at this point in their lives. But then the Cubs had never won the World Series any other year of my life. I got caught up in the moment. And as is often the case, supply created its own demand. When a smiling Kris Bryant threw the runner out at first to complete the impossible dream, we high-tailed it to Wrigleyville to join the celebration. An enterprising artist took advantage of the mood -- delirious, incautious and anesthetized -- and offered what seemed like a great souvenir of the season. Anyway, this is me with my ice breaking ink.: [image] I don't know how common this is, but am pretty sure I'm not the only one who had regrets afterwards. It wasn't so much the semi-permanent nature of the marking itself, it was the fact that I was somehow signalling that some stupid team whose success I almost nothing to do with (aside from a few extra bucks in ticket and t-shirt revenues) was more important than my sweetie. There was an obvious remedy for that. It was only a few days later that I got this one. [image] Tattoos, I suspect, are a lot like cats. Once you get a few of them, more seem to find their way to you. The next one I wanted to think about. As someone who considers himself the office book nerd (most of my colleagues are more numerically inclined), I thought maybe I could pay tribute to an influential book of my youth. I must have connected to this mathematically inclined author and his funny logic (akin to an all-white Rubik's cube perhaps?). Plus, the almost surreal times we live in suggest a certain kind of statement, too. Anyway, here's what I decided on: [image] [image] At this point, with the floodgates of ink now open, my dear wife thinks I should get one more. This is one that, in her mind, sets me apart. It marks this rather odd proclivity of mine to go to extreme lengths just to say, "April Fools!" [image] My arms, legs, back and buttocks remain unadorned, but I'm now thinking some of these do look pretty cool. ...more |
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Apr 01, 2017
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| 110194661X
| 9781101946619
| 110194661X
| 4.08
| 81,811
| Aug 30, 2016
| Aug 30, 2016
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really liked it
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First off, a confession. I took a quick look at Nathan Hill’s photo and immediately thought: young guy, kind of a bro, probably pretty full of himself
First off, a confession. I took a quick look at Nathan Hill’s photo and immediately thought: young guy, kind of a bro, probably pretty full of himself. And when I learned this was his first novel � a long one at that � I figured on narrative sprawl and other excesses. Would he be judicious enough to drop weaker scenes? Could he bear eliminating superfluous modifiers? Would every perceived insight seem indispensable? But the book was producing a buzz, one Santa figured would suit me. I’m glad. It was clear early on that Hill would breathe real life into his characters. He’d be thorough, but not boring. He’d span quite a few years, mostly 1968, 1988, and 2011, doing enough homework to get the details of each setting right. I was especially impressed by his account of Daley cops thumping heads in �68. And those insights I was afraid he might overvalue? They turned out to be genuine, even vital. The plot is hard to summarize so I’ll just touch on the highlights. Samuel Andresen-Anderson is a failed writer in his 30s teaching English at a liberal arts school near Chicago. He’s getting more disenchanted by the year. His solace is an online role-playing game called World of Elfscape, though as solaces go, it’s a hollow one. Much of his angst stemmed from childhood when his mother abandoned him. A more immediate problem is a student he caught plagiarizing � one talented at working the system, meaning more trouble for him than for her. (My wife who used to be in academics got a jolt of déjà vu from this section.) Then there’s news of his mom. National news. She had been arrested for throwing gravel (or rocks, depending on who’s reporting it), at some reactionary, nut-job politician. Faye (his mom) was suddenly back in his life. The news teams were quick to find photos of Faye among the protesters in Chicago in �68, all unbeknownst to Samuel. He had thought she’d lived a quiet life in Iowa, marrying her high school sweetheart soon after graduating. Now she needs help that he’s wary of giving. That’s the launching pad. The plot shoots off in multiple directions from there, much of it backwards in time. Among other things, you get a boyhood friend into war games, the friends� twin sister (a violin virtuoso and object of Samuel’s devotion), Faye’s undeserved miseries growing up, her father’s story dating back to his youth in Norway, Samuel’s gaming friend with an online addiction that’s plausible and scary, and Samuel’s literary agent who has his finger on the pulse of a nation replete with schlock, cynicism, and sanctimony. Oh, and I almost forgot. You get the Nix. This is a kind of house spirit that means different things to different people. I thought of it as combination of folklore and conscience, prejudicially deciding whether you deserved a pat on the back or a boot in the pants. Young Faye’s was quick to accuse and slow to let go. It’s a big, multi-themed book that some have labelled a mess. But in my mind the ambition paid off. For a while, I’ll admit, I felt like certain sentences could have been honed. For instance, when you read that “she was accommodating, docile, self-effacing, compliant, easy to get along with,� does it feel like the thesaurus was overworked, drained, exhausted, worn out? That feeling of excess soon went away, though. I’d lost myself in the story and thought not a whit about style. I’m sure I’m not the first person to notice a recent reviewing phenomenon where any societal ill that a book tackles is interpreted with orange-colored glasses. That Trumpian tincture now shades everything, it seems. We may well expect to hear how frightening and dire the darkness to come will be in Goodnight Moon given the looming shadows of the current administration. Even so, I feel like the applicability in this case is worth mentioning. Hill finished writing The Nix in 2014, a time when real estate and reality TV were enough to sustain Trump’s ego. While it may not seem as remarkable as Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here, Hill’s preconceptions do seem uncanny. His Republican presidential hopeful was an anti-elitist, anti-immigration demagogue, not above "callously milking this minor distraction (Faye’s gravel) for all it's worth." (Or was he "bravely continuing his campaign despite tremendous personal risk?" It depended on the cable news personality doing the reporting.) And how about this quote by Samuel’s agent for describing a balky electorate? "...it's way easier to ignore all data that doesn't fit your preconceptions and believe all data that does. I believe what I believe, and you believe what you believe, and we'll agree to disagree. It's liberal tolerance meets dark ages denialism. It's very hip right now." As for the assortment of other themes, Hill had plenty of thoughts covering those, too. Samuel’s aforementioned agent was entertaining as he attempted to justify commercialism in the arts. Selling out is honest when your stated goal is financial success (or something to that effect). Then there was a mini-motif on the vacuity of social media. The plagiarizing student had an app that allowed her to state which among a predefined set of emotions she was feeling. Friends could then respond accordingly with a feeling of their own, presumably something like “glad you’re happy� or “sorry you’re sad.� For convenience, there was an auto-response mode where the app would choose reactions for you. I’m sure I’m not the only one who would want an option for feeling cynical. Samuel’s gaming buddy, Pwnage, gave Hill a chance to expand on yet another theme: the perils of online addiction. (Hill said he had once been a World of Warcraft junkie, enough so to know the type.) The alternate realities can impinge on the primary ones pretty easily when you like your avatar better than yourself. Pwnage did offer Samuel some useful advice from his gaming experience. He would approach each problem as either a trap, an obstacle, or a puzzle. Applying this to people, Samuel figured “if you see people as enemies or obstacles or traps, you will be at constant war with them and with yourself. Whereas if you choose to see people as puzzles, and if you see yourself as a puzzle, then you will be constantly delighted, because eventually, if you dig deep enough into anybody, if you really look under the hood of someone's life, you will find something familiar.� This homage to empathy reverberated. In fact, had this willingness to dig into each character been Hill’s only accomplishment, it still would have been quite a book. On top of that, though, we get top-notch storytelling, some strong commentary, a bit of fun and entertainment, and maybe enough hope for the future that even those wearing orange-colored glasses may feel encouraged. I’m giving this a very solid 4.5 stars. Evidently J.J. Abrams really liked it, too, since he now has the TV rights to produce it. What’s more, Meryl Streep has signed on to play Faye. But hey, Goodreading friends, do read the book first. ...more |
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Mar 17, 2017
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Mar 31, 2017
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| 0770436420
| 9780770436421
| 0770436420
| 4.12
| 55,192
| May 07, 2013
| Feb 04, 2014
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really liked it
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We all know, as William Tecumseh Sherman once noted, that “War is Hell!� Later, Jean-Paul Sartre concluded that “Hell is other people.� It therefore s
We all know, as William Tecumseh Sherman once noted, that “War is Hell!� Later, Jean-Paul Sartre concluded that “Hell is other people.� It therefore stands to reason that war is other people. Good thing for me that it's about others because what Marra described in this book sounded awful. We got chopped off fingers, burned down houses, torture-induced ratting, and a whole host of other atrocities. It was set in Chechnya in 2004 with much of the story backfilled from the prior decade of war. Russian politics and regional dynamics were deemphasized, though, so it was somewhat generically about any oppressed, occupied state. The focus was clearly on the human side. Three main characters filled the pages. The story began as eight-year-old Havaa watched her house burn down from the relative safety of the forest she was told to hide in when the Russian soldiers arrived. She became far safer when neighbor Akhmed, a kindly but inept doctor, walked her to a hospital where there was one remaining doctor, a Russian named Sonja. His best hope for Havaa was that the brusque but talented Sonja would take the girl in. Havaa was precocious, and was maybe one of the few people in Sonja’s league intellectually, so that helped her odds. But these things have to develop at novel-length pace, right? The cumulative conflict along the way has to reach a tipping point. A secondary set of characters got POV spotlights as well, including Akhmed’s physically and mentally compromised wife, Havaa’s loving father who had just been taken away, Sonja’s beautiful (better liked, now missing) sister, and an old villager named Khassan who had written a massive history of the Chechen people. Khassan’s son, a pariah for informing on his neighbors, had a story, too � a sad, multi-sided one. The title came from an old medical textbook Sonja owned. “Only one entry supplied an adequate definition, and she circled it with red ink, and referred to it nightly. Life: a constellation of vital phenomena--organization, irritability, movement, growth, reproduction, adaptation.� Marra no doubt wanted this to apply more widely to his entire book, with life intensified by perils of death. Did he succeed? Well� I’ve been trying to sort that out. It’s safe to say that he’s a young man with promise. And I give him plenty of points for ambition. The parts I’d criticize are really a matter of taste. I know, too, given all the stars this one gets from discerning friends that my own view is not the popular one, but I did find it a tad overdone. This may seem odd coming from a guy whose catch-phrase is “Nothing exceeds like excess,� but at times I felt that A Constellation of Vital Phenomena was an entanglement of florid descriptors or maybe an agglomeration of symphonious hyperbole. More than once I got a sense of him in a creative writing class, vying for teacher’s pet status. The structuring was fine, with the to-and-fro in time generally adding interest. He did have this quirk, though, were he’d randomly fast-forward the life of some insignificant character, telling us for no apparent reason that, say, twenty-eight years after the war a nameless sentry we just met retired from his career as a teacher. It was a device that called attention to itself, and risked breaking the spell. Better to crawl deeper into the skin of someone we’re meant to care about. I’m giving this 3.5 stars and rounding to 4. The vitality is there, as is the poignancy. The fact that I debated my own feelings about it meant that he made me think, which I should count as a good thing. I’ll be interested to see what a few years of ripening will do to Marra as a writer. It's a good bet his book of short stories, The Tsar of Love and Techno, will influence my eventual view. ...more |
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Feb 2017
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Feb 14, 2017
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| 0143036378
| 9780143036371
| 0143036378
| 3.86
| 112,419
| 1999
| Aug 30, 2005
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really liked it
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It’s a little-known fact (where “fact� is understood in the contemporary, alternative sense) that the title of this book was originally an acronym tha
It’s a little-known fact (where “fact� is understood in the contemporary, alternative sense) that the title of this book was originally an acronym that Coetzee used as a guide for writing it: Dishonor-Inducing Sex & Glaring Racial Antipathy Corroding Emotions David Lurie, a white South African professor in his fifties, had taught communications and poetry in Cape Town. An ill-advised affair with a student spoiled all that. David sought refuge with his daughter Lucy who experienced some conflicts of her own living in the country’s interior. With its setting in post-apartheid South Africa, a race angle was virtually inevitable. I have to say, the emotions packed a real punch, including some you don’t see coming. As far as I know, Disney had no role in producing the movie version of this raw and hard-edged book. Despite the lack of uplift, I did appreciate the writing and the plausibility of the angst. Evidently, the Booker committee did, too, since they gave this one their fiction prize in 1999. This has been another entry in the KISS series -- Keep It Short, Steve. Note that “Steve� itself is an acronym: Severely Testing Every Vٴǰ’s Equanimity ...more |
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Jan 2015
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Feb 03, 2017
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| 0007205236
| 9780007205233
| 0007205236
| 4.15
| 646,451
| Sep 05, 1996
| Oct 03, 2005
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really liked it
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There once was a lad reared in Limerick, Quite literally without a bone to pick. His da used scant earnings To slake liquid yearnings; In American parlanc There once was a lad reared in Limerick, Quite literally without a bone to pick. His da used scant earnings To slake liquid yearnings; In American parlance � a dick. To get past a father who drank In a place that was dismal and dank, He wrote not in rhymes, But of those shite times A memoir that filled up his bank. ...more |
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Jan 1998
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Jan 23, 2017
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| 4.15
| 422,830
| 1963
| 1999
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really liked it
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Another review in the KISS series (Keep It Short, Steve) In Anne Fadiman’s superb book about books called Ex Libris, she divides readers into two categ Another review in the KISS series (Keep It Short, Steve) In Anne Fadiman’s superb book about books called Ex Libris, she divides readers into two categories: those who keep their books in pristine condition (courtly lovers) and those who delight in marginalia (carnal lovers). I started out as one of the former (conditioned, no doubt, by fear of library fines), but became one of the latter. Cat’s Cradle was my first prurient experience, dating back to high school. Part of the reason was that I snagged my copy at a garage sale for a dime � cheap even then. But the real motivation was to highlight this great little rhyme: Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly; That one deserved stars, a yellow marker, and the granddaddy of all desecrations � a dog-ear. I liked how it was framed as such a natural conclusion to the activity of thinking. We tell ourselves that our efforts to understand have paid off. If I’m honest, I don’t recall much of the book’s premise. I remember thinking Vonnegut was one of those cool, sort of counter-cultural writers who wielded his satirical axe well. He may have been a bit darker than Tom Robbins, and less playful with his words, but he was similarly entertaining, incisive and free-wheeling. The book tracks the unusual offspring of the man who invented the A-bomb. They possess a substance called ice-nine that can make water freeze at room temperatures. And you can imagine what might happen if it fell into the wrong hands. The Russians and Americans procured some as did the dictator of a secluded Caribbean island where a religion called Bokononism is practiced despite being illegal and, according to Bokonon himself, based on lies. Still, anything that sells “living by the harmless untruths that make you brave and kind and healthy and happy� will have its appeal. Vonnegut would poke fun at religion, politics, and just about any other human institution where our base natures hide in some gussied up form. And he may well have had a point. If I remember this cautionary tale correctly, a follow-up poem of my own might apply: Monkey got to play, fish got to swim; And it may give us pause. ...more |
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Jan 1974
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Jan 16, 2017
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| 0307959538
| 9780307959539
| 0307959538
| 3.77
| 8,182
| Nov 01, 2012
| Oct 30, 2012
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liked it
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[Reminder to self: KISS � Keep It Short, Steve.] Richard Russo is a great writer. His stories are fast-moving, his characters are recognizable, and his [Reminder to self: KISS � Keep It Short, Steve.] Richard Russo is a great writer. His stories are fast-moving, his characters are recognizable, and his words entice without adornments. In fact, I like him so much I read this to become a completist. You might imagine that a memoir by a writer of his caliber would be a crowning achievement, and you’d be right for parts. But he chose a fairly narrow focus that in my mind weakened the whole. While I don’t doubt that his main subject � mother Jean � was a profound influence, I found myself wishing that the other drivers shaping him weren’t crowded out by her dominance. Jean had a “nervous condition� that impacted young Rick more than anyone else. Rick’s dad, a gambler with little tolerance for the home situation, had run off early on. Jean, while supportive in a collusive sort of way, learned to manipulate her son well enough to pull his strings even into adulthood. Russo’s wife must have been a saint to put up with all the different do-overs they provided for Jean. Her condition, a severe inability to cope, was undiagnosed during her life, but was later discovered to have been OCD. It certainly gave young Rick a writer’s feel for emotional hardship and conflict. After reading this, I concluded that Russo comes by his empathy honestly. And he’s constitutionally incapable of a bad sentence, though he can write a redundant one. The number of times Jean would buck herself up saying, “I’ll just have to give myself a good talking to,� was well into double figures. As big a fan as I am of Russo, I was hoping for more. There was so little of anything other than these difficult interactions that would count as character-shaping. An interesting exception was when he described his hometown in upstate New York. Gloversville, known in better days for its tannery and ladies� gloves, was the kind of place he has written about so convincingly in Mohawk, The Risk Pool, and Nobody’s Fool among others. Conclusion: great writing, limited purview, should have been Part 1 of a better rounded memoir. ...more |
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Jan 2015
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Jan 11, 2017
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Hardcover
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| 193555428X
| 9781935554288
| 193555428X
| 3.55
| 741
| Jan 25, 2011
| Jan 25, 2011
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liked it
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I’m a big fan of bringing the new year in with a kiss. It’s a tradition I’ve enjoyed with my dear wife, family and friends (with my old neighbor, Mrs.
I’m a big fan of bringing the new year in with a kiss. It’s a tradition I’ve enjoyed with my dear wife, family and friends (with my old neighbor, Mrs. Sundquist, as the exception after she’d been hitting the pickled eel jar). I can also make KISS a mnemonic to apply here � a reminder to Keep It Short, Steve. (My original version was KISSSSSSSS for “Keep It Short, Spiel-Spewing Soapbox-Spouting Stupor-Stretching Stupidass,� but that would be silly and self-controverting.) Anyway, I hope to start clearing the backlog from my to-be-reviewed list with a few abbreviated remarks. Spurious is easy to summarize. You know the expression about the excitement of watching paint dry? Well, this one was a variation where the narrator, Lars, watched mold grow on the walls of his flat. That, and he’d philosophize (though not deeply or well) with his academic friend and rival known as W. They’d go on at length about the nature of their own idiocy, and how meaningful insights would be theirs if only a proper (absurd) set of conditions would prevail. It was a kind of running joke about academia and the over- examined life. I smiled more often than you might think. The put-downs were often clever since Lars and W. knew their shared vulnerabilities well. Here is but one of the countless examples: W., as usual, is reading about God. God and mathematics, that's all he's interested in. Somehow everything has to do with God, in whom W.'s not capable of believing, and mathematics, which W. is not capable of doing. And he's reading about God and mathematics in German, W. says, which means he doesn't really understand what he doesn't understand. Other reviewers have likened this to Waiting for Godot, and I can see that. There’s meant to be something beyond the inactivity. I can’t be sure, but I think the “something� is a sort of meta-existentialism. (I also can’t be sure if I’m joking here or not.) It’s a slim, seemingly insubstantial book, but anything fueled by heavy drinking and references to Kafka has got to have abstract, fuzzy, and metaphorical foundations, right? I opted for three stars, though at times thought it warranted four. In the end it seemed like whatever the point was, it was belabored. I remember thinking of those more experimental Saturday Night Live skits late in the show that would go to senseless extremes flogging the same basic joke. At least Iyer’s target was a fun one: his own chosen profession. He’s a philosophy prof at the university in Newcastle. ...more |
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Jan 2015
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Jan 11, 2017
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Paperback
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| 0330426648
| 9780330426640
| 0330426648
| 4.26
| 116,688
| Jul 05, 2002
| Oct 26, 2010
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Jan 04, 2017
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| B0DTWY6PY7
| unknown
| 4.23
| 1,172
| 2016
| 2016
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liked it
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Some of you may recall that for my year-end review of 2015 I enlisted the services of a highly regarded polling agency. They surveyed a wide cross-se
Some of you may recall that for my year-end review of 2015 I enlisted the services of a highly regarded polling agency. They surveyed a wide cross-section of people to provide unbiased reactions to my reading list. I figured their feedback would be more honest than what I’d hear from my kind friends on ŷ who might be reflexively and/or uncritically supportive. Well, imagine my surprise when I learned that this same polling agency no longer exists. When I visited their website it basically said, “Blank you and the white, non-urban, non-college-educated horse you rode in on.� So my format has to be different this time. I’ve been busier and more backlogged than usual this year and haven’t reviewed many books. What I’d like to do, then, is to use Fionnuala’s inspired vehicle for sharing to provide capsule reviews of the handful of books I didn’t get around to writing about previously. 2016 by George Orstradamus � This famous dystopian allegory written in 1984 tells the story of how pigs became the ruling class of a society in decline. An orange-tinted pig with unusually small trotters emerged as the leader. Many females, regardless of species, were castigated (ironically) as sows. Despite valid environmental concerns within the sty, foul odors were denied. The protagonist was an official within the Dept. of Post-Truth Politics responsible for news releases that may not have been in all cases wholly factual. A consistent theme seems to have been the thirst for power entirely for its own sake � well, that and maybe a little profit. The book also featured dogs who would respond in a Pavlovian way to various tones coming from small devices that had become their primary source of communication and entertainment. The rest of the book was just as far-fetched. How Not to Downsize by Susan Ho � This was quite a timely read for me and my wife. We moved from our family-sized house in the suburbs to a high-rise apartment in the city last spring, and needed advice on how not to do it. Then we pretty much did exactly what Ho said not to do. The first what-not-to-do tip was not to make it a fast and furious affair. By the time you’re to the fourth box in the fifth closet, the “does it give you joy� criterion goes out the window, because there’s precious little joy to be had at that point. We were also told to dispose of old tax returns and financial statements with care. Contravening her wisdom, the flames of the fire I built with them were licking the fireplace mantel. Ho also mentioned that a dog in a high-rise is not the same as a dog with a fenced backyard. The biggest difference, though, was in reading advice as opposed to following it. The Goat, Bound and Gagged by Theo Epstein and Joe Maddon, with forward by Steve Bartman � In case you hadn’t heard, the Cubs finally won a World Series. It had been 108 years of futility and occasional near-misses. Oh, and that damned . This riveting account came out two days after the deciding game. It may seem surprising that they were able to piece the book together so quickly, but drama like this (a seven game series, decided in extra innings of the final game with a fateful rain delay allowing the Cubs to collect themselves after blowing a big lead) writes itself. Even so, I’m still impressed by their timeliness. Champagne hangovers are some of the worst. Monkey Fixiones by Collectively Anonymous � The Jorge Luis Borges Society decided to follow up the great master’s thoughts concerning infinite time, infinite libraries, and infinite turns in the labyrinths of life with a bold experiment. It’s actually a rather clichéd speculation: that a sufficiently large number of monkeys typing away over a sufficiently long period of time would eventually reproduce Shakespeare. Monkey Fixiones is attempt number 5,288,314,159,654, and was deemed to be the closest one yet. My favorite line was one Goodreaders should appreciate: “To thine own shelf be true.� If I’m honest, though, most of the rest was just gibberish. Pemberley’s Groom by Elinor Bennington � As proliferated as the space of Jane Austen fan fiction now is, I was surprised to find that the P&P perspective from the stables had not yet been covered. Miss Bennington has remedied that, with the verbal aplomb of a Regency Period parlor. I leave it to the reader to discover whether the horse whispering at the end was an incandescently happy encounter or not. Slight of the Invisible Hand by Adam Schmeichel � According to the author, modern financial markets are now entirely synthesized by a cloud computing network in New York, a giant data warehouse in Silicon Valley, a small cabal of rogue traders in Chicago, and an algorithm written by an autistic French physicist co-located on servers in Tokyo and London. And anyone who isn’t connected in to this is bound to be a chump. Fillmore by Ron Manuel Mirandow � For those of you who are not as familiar with opera, Mirandow is the librettist who put the Millard Fillmore story to song. The drama crescendos when Zachary Taylor dies and Fillmore becomes lucky President number 13. Be sure to find the version with the accompanying CD of the opera itself. The famous aria highlighting the endorsement the Know Nothing Party gave him in 1856 is not to be missed. Hunch: Thinking With Your Gut When Your Gut Has Mush for Brains by Malachi Tidwell � The basic premise of this book is that much of human progress comes from trials that are mostly errors. A sort of decision-making Darwinism plays out whereby the people who are bad at playing their hunches (the majority) become less likely to have many options left, meaning that the less faulty minority will make a greater number of the important calls. Books like this succeed or fail based on the examples they give. Fortunately for Tidwell, he hit the mother lode with reality TV. In the end, though, I couldn’t help thinking of the book’s implications for my own life. Having read it puts me on what’s sure to be a less consequential decision-making path. And now I’m second-guessing my decision to hit “Save.� Oh, what the hell. It’s been that kind of year. ...more |
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not set
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Dec 19, 2016
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Unknown Binding
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| 0374260508
| 9780374260507
| 0374260508
| 3.75
| 72,426
| Mar 03, 2015
| 2015
|
really liked it
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As an urban commuter I felt that pulling a book out with lawn jockeys on the cover should come with a disclaimer. Hey everybody, it’s meant to be � yo
As an urban commuter I felt that pulling a book out with lawn jockeys on the cover should come with a disclaimer. Hey everybody, it’s meant to be � you know � ironic. It’s written by a black guy; it’s satire. And just so you know, my iPhone doesn’t have one word of Breitbart News on it. Satires, to me, are like hoppy craft beers. The natural skew to the bitter side should be balanced out for optimal flavor. Paul Beatty’s deft touch with a joke made the astringency you’d expect from charges of racism something other than a straight diatribe. Smiles open more minds than they close. The premise of the book is actually sort of absurd. Bonbon, the narrator, farms the land in the “agrarian ghetto� neighborhood of LA called Dickens. His father was a sociologist who performed half-crazy, race-centric experiments on him when he was young that never amounted to meaningful research, but did mess with his mind a bit. When his father died (shot in a police snafu), the son inherited the farm, a funeral bill, and a legacy of racial awareness. Then, since it was an embarrassment to the city of LA, Dickens just disappeared from the map. At that point our narrator mounts an informal campaign to bring Dickens back. He makes signs announcing that a driver is entering, draws lines surrounding the area, then hits on the idea of segregating it to really stand out. He had an accomplice named Hominy Jenkins, a celebrity of sorts, known for being the last surviving cast member from The Little Rascals. Hominy, like the more famous Buckwheat, was a "pickaninny" who could “black it up� with bug eyes and electrified hair on cue. Somehow Hominy had it in his increasingly senile head that race had more meaning to him then and that a way to recapture this feeling was to offer himself up as a slave doing light labor (he was old) on the farm. The book opens out of order, with this voluntary slavery case being heard by the Supreme Court. Like I said, it’s kind of ridiculous, but it does allow a very full discussion of race � the stereotypes, the archetypes, and a panoply of attitudes from subtle to extreme. What the book lacked in plausibility it made up for in presentation. It’s like a serious essay on black consciousness as presented by Dave Chappelle at his edgy, observational best. Let my try to convince you by way of example. § As Bonbon’s court case was making its way up the judicial ladder, he said: “In neighborhoods like the one I grew up in, places that are poor in praxis but rich in rhetoric, the homies have a saying -- I'd rather be judged by twelve than carried by six. [...] I'm not all that streetwise, but to my knowledge there's no appellate court corollary. I've never heard a corner store roughneck take a sip of malt liquor and say, ‘I'd rather be reviewed by nine than arbitrated by one.�" § He wondered why a certain successful type would mostly “talk black,� dropping g’s in their gerunds, but when it came to their public television appearances, they’d sound like “Kelsey Grammer with a stick up his ass.� § Opining about another black intellectual: “Come on, he cares about black people like a seven-footer cares about basketball. He has to care because what else would he be good at.� § Foy Cheshire was a prominent archetype who hosted a dying cable show focusing on black issues, had become successful stealing ideas from the narrator’s father, and had no original thoughts of his own. Foy was the one who had dubbed Bonbon ‘the sellout� for not buying into a very particular brand of racial animosity. Someone speculated that “If he (Foy) was indeed an ‘autodidact,� there's no doubt he had the world's shittiest teacher.� § In one of the few non-race-related comments, Bonbon said: “I've always liked rote. The formulaic repetitiveness of filing and stuffing envelopes appeals to me in some fundamental life-affirming way. I would've made a good factory worker, supply-room clerk, or Hollywood scriptwriter.� § Hominy was actually pretty lucid for someone who sought beatings and servitude. One example: “You know, massa, Bugs Bunny wasn't nothing but Br'er Rabbit with a better agent.� § Here’s a great rejoinder to all who suggest, “You'd rather be here than in Africa. The trump card all narrow-minded nativists play. [...] I seriously doubt that some slave ship ancestor, in those idle moments between being raped and beaten, was standing knee-deep in their own feces rationalizing that, in the end, the generations of murder, unbearable pain and suffering, mental anguish, and rampant disease will all be worth it because someday my great-great-great-great-grandson will have Wi-Fi.� § I also liked the name that Bonbon imagined for the white-only school in his planned segregation � Wheaton Academy. In contrast, nonwhites had Chaff Middle School. The Wheaton/Chaff distinction was a big one. I laughed every time I picked this book up. And I’m certainly sympathetic to the essential plight, despite the anaesthetizing humor. In addition, though I didn’t catch every reference, my street smart IQ is now at least a little closer to triple digits. Plus, its recognition in winning the National Book Critics Circle award for fiction as well as the Booker Prize speaks to the quality of the writing. Beatty’s background in poetry comes through with great word choices and cadences. Even so, I had to dock one star. While it’s easy enough to see the satirical poke at wrong-headedness, it was harder to figure the purpose of Bonbon’s ironic prescription. I wouldn’t presume that the segregation was meant to provide more motivation for Blacks and Latinos, though the Chaff School’s rising performance numbers were cited as though they were a consequence of having been separated. (The fact is, though, there weren’t any white kids there to begin with.) Was it more like the arguments you sometimes hear about the advantages of an education at a traditionally black university? I couldn’t say. Nor do I think the counterintuitive premise was meant just for a laugh. My best guess is that the extreme actions � slavery and segregation orchestrated by a black man � were meant to draw attention to the still existing, more subtle forms of racism. There was a line in the book about how it’s illegal to shout fire in a crowded theater. Bonbon went on to say that he whispered ‘Racism� in a post-racial world. Beatty himself, in interviews, is tight-lipped when asked what he thinks it all means. Maybe the discussions the book inspires are what matter most. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Dec 2016
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Dec 12, 2016
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Hardcover
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my rating |
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|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
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| 4.19
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it was amazing
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Jun 2017
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Jun 09, 2017
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|||||
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| 3.73
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really liked it
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May 2017
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May 22, 2017
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|||||
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| 4.14
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really liked it
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May 2017
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May 18, 2017
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|||||
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| 3.75
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liked it
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Apr 2017
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Apr 21, 2017
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|||||
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| 4.47
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really liked it
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Apr 2017
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Apr 14, 2017
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|||||
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| 4.05
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not set
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Apr 12, 2017
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||||||
|
| 4.00
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not set
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Apr 06, 2017
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||||||
|
| 3.59
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really liked it
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Mar 2017
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Apr 04, 2017
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|||||
|
| 3.67
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really liked it
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not set
|
Apr 01, 2017
|
|||||
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| 4.03
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it was amazing
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not set
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Apr 01, 2017
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|||||
|
| 4.08
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really liked it
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Mar 17, 2017
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Mar 31, 2017
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|||||
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| 4.12
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really liked it
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Feb 2017
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Feb 14, 2017
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|||||
|
| 3.86
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really liked it
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Jan 2015
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Feb 03, 2017
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|||||
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| 4.15
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really liked it
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Jan 1998
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Jan 23, 2017
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|||||
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| 4.15
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really liked it
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Jan 1974
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Jan 16, 2017
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|||||
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| 3.77
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liked it
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Jan 2015
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Jan 11, 2017
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|||||
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| 3.55
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liked it
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Jan 2015
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Jan 11, 2017
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|||||
|
| 4.26
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not set
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Jan 04, 2017
|
||||||
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| 4.23
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liked it
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not set
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Dec 19, 2016
|
|||||
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| 3.75
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really liked it
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Dec 2016
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Dec 12, 2016
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