Everything's Eventual
Stephen King
7/18/2008-7/20/2008
LT Rating: 4 stars
LT Review:
I very much enjoyed this collection of short stories by Stephen King. While some of the stories fall clearly within the realm of his reputation as a king of things that go bump in the night, others are more literary, and there are pieces in both categories that really shine.
The best of the bunch: "The Road Virus Heads North" was deeply creepy, and kept me awake and a little antsy for a good bit after I finished it. "The Little Sisters of Eluria" is a great little slice from the life of Roland, of Dark Tower fame, and makes this collection worth picking up for DT series fans. 'Everything's Eventual" is dark, complex, and simply excellent. "Riding the Bullet" is compelling, honest, and somehow finds a balance between feeling driven by a sense of love and feeling driven by a sense of dread.
There really weren't any stories in this collection that I didn't enjoy, although I think that "Luckey Quarter" was the weakest of the set.
Overall, an excellent collection. King says in the introduction that he mourns the short story as a dying art form, (something that he will claim with greater passion in his introduction to The Best American Short Stories: 2007.) With this collection, he laid a powerful reminder in front of me that the genre is a rich a lovely one. I certainly hope that the prognosis is not so bad as it may seem.
Maggie specific thoughts:
My thoughts on my new Stephen King habit are all included in the post for Four Past Midnight. Go find them there
Wednesday, July 23, 2008
Four Past Midnight
Four Past Midnight
Stephen King
7/20/2008 - 7/22/2008
LT Review: 3.5 stars
LT Review:
This is a collection of four short novels (although they are short only by King standards, each runs around 200 pages). Overall, it's quite entertaining.
The first, The Langoliers is the best of the bunch. The story of a group of passengers on an LA to Boston fight that manages to travel through time, it's suspenseful, exciting, and driven (as many of King's tales are) by fear of both supernatural and more human evils. It's 250 pages that readers like me will plow through in a single sitting.
Secret Window, Secret Garden is the basis for the recent Johnny Depp movie "Secret Window." And tells the tale of a writer accused by a stranger of stealing a story that he knows he wrote himself. While I suspected the twist ending well before I got there, I expect that at the time this was published (well before a more recent and absurdly popular tale with a similar twist) the thought would have occurred to few readers, and maybe it won't occur to you. Overall, it's good but not great.
The Library Policeman is a gripping read, and enough to make someone currently pretty deep into library fines (like yours truly) more than a little bit nervous. The characters are what makes the story work here, and they are all elegantly flawed. I have trouble when King gets too into the descriptions of his monsters, but perhaps this is because I am not much of a visual reader, but overall, I enjoyed this one very much.
The Sun Dog, the last in the collection is by far the weakest. Centered around a paranormal camera, the events of the story seem a little too random and confusing. While some of the moments and secondary characters have a wonderful textured existence, the story fell flat for me overall, and I found myself not nearly as wrapped up in the action as I was with the other three.
Overall, it's a satisfying bunch of stories, although I see no real reason why it has to be read or considered as a collection at all. All of the novellas stand independent of the others, and there is no real theme particularly connecting them. (Aside from their tendency to keep you up past midnight, by which standard we could combine a large percentage of King's work into a single monstrous volume.)
Unless you are a die hard fan, you can skip The Sun Dog. I would recommend reading The Langoliers and The Library Policeman, and Secret Window, Secret Garden is certainly worth the 150 pages for quick readers, but if plowing through it is going to take you more than an evening, your time could probably be better spent somewhere else.
Maggie Specific thoughts: **Complete with a SPOILER ALERT**
I stole this book from the basement of my house, I have no idea how long ago, but I've been lugging it around unread for quite a while now. The thing that I have finally really admitted to myself is that I very very very much enjoy reading Stephen King. Perhaps the collected works of the master of horror is a strange new pastime to pick up shortly after moving into an apartment all by myself for the first time (sounds like something that might end up in one of his stories) but I'm having fun. Thinking about it, my affection for these stories specifically, and the others that I have read and am reading more generally, goes to the base of what I want as a reader. I like to be told a story. I am reading not as some grand academic exercise (that's what the lab is for) but to be entertained, and while I see value in the literary greats, I also have started to come to terms with the fact that there is nothing wrong with loving an author because he tells stories that I can't help but get wrapped up in. I guess, in the end, I don't want reading to be hard, I want it to be powerful, and moving, and entertaining, but this is not work for me, this is pleasure. That attitude is something that I am just coming to terms with (as a perfectionist, I feel sometimes like perhaps it is a waste of my time to have read the complete works of say Dennis Lehane but not War and Peace, because I want to be "good" at all the things that I do), but if I really think about it, that is the thread that joins all the books and writers that I love most... plan old good story telling.
King is unashamed to admit that storytelling is basically his goal, that he's not trying to work great constructs of language, but rather to tell good tales. He accomplishes that, and I find that I like and respect him more for doing what he does, doing it well, and not trying to be something he's not. Thinking about it I think is helping me to let myself be the kind of reader that I am at my core, and I am having a most wonderful time with it.
I should note here that John Irving, who I also really love (to the point where I get a little excited thinking about all the John Irving books that I haven't read yet, like presents waiting to be opened) says something similar about his own writing in an interview included in my copy of A Widow for One Year. Irving claims that he is trying to persuade the reader emotionally, not intellectually, and that he writes "plot-driven" novels. Both Irving and King seem to think about the story in their work, think of themselves as someone setting out, by writing words on a page, to get their readers emotionally involved in the tale they are weaving. And sure, A Prayer for Owen Meaney is something very different from The Langoliers, but what they have in common is that they are both great stories with wonderful characters. Both stories that, as I read them, involved me so totally that I was most annoyed when anyone wanted me to pay attention to anything else.
So I'm going to read a bunch of Stephen King now, and then maybe some more John Irving, and I am sure a bunch of other things, with some non-fiction thrown in. And if I never get to Finnegan's Wake... well, I'm just not going to feel bad about that anymore.
As an aside, the "more recent and absurdly popular tale" that I am referring to in the review of Secret Window, Secret Garden is, of course, Fight Club. And knowing that should tell you how the whole thing ends. Right.
Stephen King
7/20/2008 - 7/22/2008
LT Review: 3.5 stars
LT Review:
This is a collection of four short novels (although they are short only by King standards, each runs around 200 pages). Overall, it's quite entertaining.
The first, The Langoliers is the best of the bunch. The story of a group of passengers on an LA to Boston fight that manages to travel through time, it's suspenseful, exciting, and driven (as many of King's tales are) by fear of both supernatural and more human evils. It's 250 pages that readers like me will plow through in a single sitting.
Secret Window, Secret Garden is the basis for the recent Johnny Depp movie "Secret Window." And tells the tale of a writer accused by a stranger of stealing a story that he knows he wrote himself. While I suspected the twist ending well before I got there, I expect that at the time this was published (well before a more recent and absurdly popular tale with a similar twist) the thought would have occurred to few readers, and maybe it won't occur to you. Overall, it's good but not great.
The Library Policeman is a gripping read, and enough to make someone currently pretty deep into library fines (like yours truly) more than a little bit nervous. The characters are what makes the story work here, and they are all elegantly flawed. I have trouble when King gets too into the descriptions of his monsters, but perhaps this is because I am not much of a visual reader, but overall, I enjoyed this one very much.
The Sun Dog, the last in the collection is by far the weakest. Centered around a paranormal camera, the events of the story seem a little too random and confusing. While some of the moments and secondary characters have a wonderful textured existence, the story fell flat for me overall, and I found myself not nearly as wrapped up in the action as I was with the other three.
Overall, it's a satisfying bunch of stories, although I see no real reason why it has to be read or considered as a collection at all. All of the novellas stand independent of the others, and there is no real theme particularly connecting them. (Aside from their tendency to keep you up past midnight, by which standard we could combine a large percentage of King's work into a single monstrous volume.)
Unless you are a die hard fan, you can skip The Sun Dog. I would recommend reading The Langoliers and The Library Policeman, and Secret Window, Secret Garden is certainly worth the 150 pages for quick readers, but if plowing through it is going to take you more than an evening, your time could probably be better spent somewhere else.
Maggie Specific thoughts: **Complete with a SPOILER ALERT**
I stole this book from the basement of my house, I have no idea how long ago, but I've been lugging it around unread for quite a while now. The thing that I have finally really admitted to myself is that I very very very much enjoy reading Stephen King. Perhaps the collected works of the master of horror is a strange new pastime to pick up shortly after moving into an apartment all by myself for the first time (sounds like something that might end up in one of his stories) but I'm having fun. Thinking about it, my affection for these stories specifically, and the others that I have read and am reading more generally, goes to the base of what I want as a reader. I like to be told a story. I am reading not as some grand academic exercise (that's what the lab is for) but to be entertained, and while I see value in the literary greats, I also have started to come to terms with the fact that there is nothing wrong with loving an author because he tells stories that I can't help but get wrapped up in. I guess, in the end, I don't want reading to be hard, I want it to be powerful, and moving, and entertaining, but this is not work for me, this is pleasure. That attitude is something that I am just coming to terms with (as a perfectionist, I feel sometimes like perhaps it is a waste of my time to have read the complete works of say Dennis Lehane but not War and Peace, because I want to be "good" at all the things that I do), but if I really think about it, that is the thread that joins all the books and writers that I love most... plan old good story telling.
King is unashamed to admit that storytelling is basically his goal, that he's not trying to work great constructs of language, but rather to tell good tales. He accomplishes that, and I find that I like and respect him more for doing what he does, doing it well, and not trying to be something he's not. Thinking about it I think is helping me to let myself be the kind of reader that I am at my core, and I am having a most wonderful time with it.
I should note here that John Irving, who I also really love (to the point where I get a little excited thinking about all the John Irving books that I haven't read yet, like presents waiting to be opened) says something similar about his own writing in an interview included in my copy of A Widow for One Year. Irving claims that he is trying to persuade the reader emotionally, not intellectually, and that he writes "plot-driven" novels. Both Irving and King seem to think about the story in their work, think of themselves as someone setting out, by writing words on a page, to get their readers emotionally involved in the tale they are weaving. And sure, A Prayer for Owen Meaney is something very different from The Langoliers, but what they have in common is that they are both great stories with wonderful characters. Both stories that, as I read them, involved me so totally that I was most annoyed when anyone wanted me to pay attention to anything else.
So I'm going to read a bunch of Stephen King now, and then maybe some more John Irving, and I am sure a bunch of other things, with some non-fiction thrown in. And if I never get to Finnegan's Wake... well, I'm just not going to feel bad about that anymore.
As an aside, the "more recent and absurdly popular tale" that I am referring to in the review of Secret Window, Secret Garden is, of course, Fight Club. And knowing that should tell you how the whole thing ends. Right.
LibraryThing Wins
So since I got started on Librarything, I have been more obsessed with books than ever. I'm not sure if that is really a good thing. (Does anyone ever really NEED to be more obsessed with books that I have been for as long as I can remember? Probably not.) Either way, I'm enjoying it. It's keeping me reading, but I feel compelled to write about the things that I read (at least a brief review) and keep track of them in my posting for that purpose, so it's keeping me on track with those habits that I was trying to solidify.
That being said, writing those reviews is not really the same as what I do when I blog about books, since the things that I post on the site are seen by users outside the context of "me." Therefore, the things that I post don't always touch on the ways that the things that I am reading hit me personally or connect with the little goings on in my head and my life, or how I ended up with that particular book in my hand or anything like that. I like the reviewing, and I hope that the things I contribute help people out, but it's not the same. I want to do both maybe, both to synthesize my thoughts into something useful for the general non-Maggie knowing reader in terms of a well-thought out opinion of a book and how good or bad it is, and to take the time to organize my thoughts for the Maggie-knowing reader, or perhaps more importantly, for the Maggie herself to better know what I was thinking when I read something, and how it plays out with the other things in my life. I think doing both is important, and I am not sure that I know how to find time for both, but what are you going to do?
Anyway, I guess that I am going to post my reviews here as well, for the three people that might occasionally read this thing, and when a book touches me, or I have thoughts that just don't fit with a review, I'll put them in after the review. We'll see how that works for now. Cool.
That being said, writing those reviews is not really the same as what I do when I blog about books, since the things that I post on the site are seen by users outside the context of "me." Therefore, the things that I post don't always touch on the ways that the things that I am reading hit me personally or connect with the little goings on in my head and my life, or how I ended up with that particular book in my hand or anything like that. I like the reviewing, and I hope that the things I contribute help people out, but it's not the same. I want to do both maybe, both to synthesize my thoughts into something useful for the general non-Maggie knowing reader in terms of a well-thought out opinion of a book and how good or bad it is, and to take the time to organize my thoughts for the Maggie-knowing reader, or perhaps more importantly, for the Maggie herself to better know what I was thinking when I read something, and how it plays out with the other things in my life. I think doing both is important, and I am not sure that I know how to find time for both, but what are you going to do?
Anyway, I guess that I am going to post my reviews here as well, for the three people that might occasionally read this thing, and when a book touches me, or I have thoughts that just don't fit with a review, I'll put them in after the review. We'll see how that works for now. Cool.
Saturday, July 12, 2008
The Time Traveler's Wife
The Time Traveler's Wife
by Audrey Niffenegger
So I have had this book sitting on my shelf ever since I stole it from my mother long long ago on one of my visits home. (I really do just pillage her library...sorry Mom.)
Anyway, I had heard good things about it, but had never gotten around to picking it up, but it was one of the books that jumped out at me as having been on the shelf too long without attention being paid to it when I was making my TBR Challenge 2008 list. Once on the list, it was clear, to me at least, that I would get it read. Today, I realized that I very much needed a break of a little bit from The Wheel of Time (5 volumes and thousands of pages in) so I started this book sitting in Panera this morning...
... and finished it about 10 hours later.
I loved it. I'm not even sure how to explain why I loved it as I did, but I simply could not put it down. I adored the two central characters from the very first page, and felt compelled to know their story, in it's entirety, before I did anything else. (Although I did spend some quality time in Borders this afternoon, because I am a addict, and I needed a book fix.)
This is a love story of the highest caliber. More than that, a story of longing, and the compromises that are part of living and loving with imperfect people. It's a beautiful tale, and I must give Niffenegger credit for her ability to create little phrases just perfect for the moment at hand, five or six words ideally placed together... it's a gift.
I suppose that perhaps part of the reason that I loved this book is how deeply I related to Claire's sense of longing, of missing the one that she loves when he has gone where she can't follow. I feel that way a lot these days, missing Andrew. Time travel and war are perhaps not the same, but the emotion that she describes on the very first page was certainly a part of what pulled me in.
"It's hard to be the one who stays. I keep myself busy. Time goes faster that way. I go to sleep alone, and wake up alone. I take walks. I work until I'm tired... Everything seems simple until you think about it. Why is love so intensified by absence?"
Overall, I can say nothing more than that it is a beautiful book, one that left me feeling transfixed and transported, a story that demanded to be read so strongly that I simply couldn't put it down.
by Audrey Niffenegger
So I have had this book sitting on my shelf ever since I stole it from my mother long long ago on one of my visits home. (I really do just pillage her library...sorry Mom.)
Anyway, I had heard good things about it, but had never gotten around to picking it up, but it was one of the books that jumped out at me as having been on the shelf too long without attention being paid to it when I was making my TBR Challenge 2008 list. Once on the list, it was clear, to me at least, that I would get it read. Today, I realized that I very much needed a break of a little bit from The Wheel of Time (5 volumes and thousands of pages in) so I started this book sitting in Panera this morning...
... and finished it about 10 hours later.
I loved it. I'm not even sure how to explain why I loved it as I did, but I simply could not put it down. I adored the two central characters from the very first page, and felt compelled to know their story, in it's entirety, before I did anything else. (Although I did spend some quality time in Borders this afternoon, because I am a addict, and I needed a book fix.)
This is a love story of the highest caliber. More than that, a story of longing, and the compromises that are part of living and loving with imperfect people. It's a beautiful tale, and I must give Niffenegger credit for her ability to create little phrases just perfect for the moment at hand, five or six words ideally placed together... it's a gift.
I suppose that perhaps part of the reason that I loved this book is how deeply I related to Claire's sense of longing, of missing the one that she loves when he has gone where she can't follow. I feel that way a lot these days, missing Andrew. Time travel and war are perhaps not the same, but the emotion that she describes on the very first page was certainly a part of what pulled me in.
"It's hard to be the one who stays. I keep myself busy. Time goes faster that way. I go to sleep alone, and wake up alone. I take walks. I work until I'm tired... Everything seems simple until you think about it. Why is love so intensified by absence?"
Overall, I can say nothing more than that it is a beautiful book, one that left me feeling transfixed and transported, a story that demanded to be read so strongly that I simply couldn't put it down.
Saturday, June 07, 2008
The Dragon Reborn
The Dragon Reborn
by Robert Jordan
The third book in The Wheel of Time series, and I was just as involved as I was in the first two. In this volume, the characters are on separate journeys, and Jordan does a good job staying with each story long enough to keep the action moving, while still switching back and forth often enough to allow you to keep track of where everyone is and stay involved in all of the separate story lines.
What else is there to say, if you like epic fantasy, The Wheel of Time seems a great series to tackle, at least from my perspective four books in. I suppose it would be foolish to start if you don't think that you want to read the whole series, since the story makes no pretense of ending at the close of each volume, and if you start in the middle, I think you'll miss far too much. It almost seems silly to try to review books in the middle (unless one turns out somehow shocking bad). The epic continues, and continues well and interestingly, but this book was never intended to stand on it's own.
by Robert Jordan
The third book in The Wheel of Time series, and I was just as involved as I was in the first two. In this volume, the characters are on separate journeys, and Jordan does a good job staying with each story long enough to keep the action moving, while still switching back and forth often enough to allow you to keep track of where everyone is and stay involved in all of the separate story lines.
What else is there to say, if you like epic fantasy, The Wheel of Time seems a great series to tackle, at least from my perspective four books in. I suppose it would be foolish to start if you don't think that you want to read the whole series, since the story makes no pretense of ending at the close of each volume, and if you start in the middle, I think you'll miss far too much. It almost seems silly to try to review books in the middle (unless one turns out somehow shocking bad). The epic continues, and continues well and interestingly, but this book was never intended to stand on it's own.
Wednesday, June 04, 2008
TBR Challenge
Librarything is a dangerous place. There I can easily locate the blogs of other book obsessed people, who have come up with nifty reading related ideas.
Today's discovery: The TBR ("To Be Read") Challenge.
Basically, you make a list of 12 books that have been on your to-be-read list for more than 6 months, than you read them. It's supposed to be an annual challenge, but I am starting late, and I'm still going to do 12, because I am determined like that.
After some time spend staring at my bookshelf, I have chosen the following 12 books:
1) A Passage to India
by E.M. Forster
2) Kim
by Rudyard Kipling
3) Nights at the Circus
by Angela Carter
4) Native Son
by Richard Wright
5) A Farewell to Arms
by Ernest Hemingway
6) American Psycho
by Easton Ellis
7) Invisible Man
by Ralph Ellison
8) One Hundred Years of Solitude
by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
9) Lord Jim
by Joseph Conrad
10) The Time Traveler's Wife
by Audrey Niffenegger
Read 7/12/08
11) Pale Fire
by Vladimir Nabokov
12) The Shipping News
by E. Annie Proulix
Now I promise not to edit this list, aside from linking the titles to the blog posts about those books once I actually read them and write about them. And we'll see how this goes.
Books are good. Decreasing the size of my to-be-read list is very good. Let's go!
Today's discovery: The TBR ("To Be Read") Challenge.
Basically, you make a list of 12 books that have been on your to-be-read list for more than 6 months, than you read them. It's supposed to be an annual challenge, but I am starting late, and I'm still going to do 12, because I am determined like that.
After some time spend staring at my bookshelf, I have chosen the following 12 books:
1) A Passage to India
by E.M. Forster
2) Kim
by Rudyard Kipling
3) Nights at the Circus
by Angela Carter
4) Native Son
by Richard Wright
5) A Farewell to Arms
by Ernest Hemingway
6) American Psycho
by Easton Ellis
7) Invisible Man
by Ralph Ellison
8) One Hundred Years of Solitude
by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
9) Lord Jim
by Joseph Conrad
10) The Time Traveler's Wife
by Audrey Niffenegger
Read 7/12/08
11) Pale Fire
by Vladimir Nabokov
12) The Shipping News
by E. Annie Proulix
Now I promise not to edit this list, aside from linking the titles to the blog posts about those books once I actually read them and write about them. And we'll see how this goes.
Books are good. Decreasing the size of my to-be-read list is very good. Let's go!
Tuesday, June 03, 2008
Library Thing
So joining LibraryThing.com has got me thinking. I am sort of in love with the site, and with reading the posts and thoughts of people who seem to be readers of the same obsessive sort that I am. Still, I have to ask myself how I want to use all the tools that they have there.
First of all, do I want my LibraryThing account to reflect books that I have read, or instead, the physical collection of books that I own? Sure, there is considerable overlap between the two, but there are also a tremendous number of books that I have read and do not own, books that I own but have not read yet. Since it would be fundamentally impossible to remember and list all the books that I have ever read (and I think not a useful exercise), I have decided, at least for now, that I want the list to reflect the books that I actually have in my possession as opposed to any sort of exhaustive reading list.
But this made me think about what it means to have a collection of books, as opposed to just having books. I own many many books, and I suppose, when I really think about it, I do consider myself a collector. But I realized that there are many books that I truly love that I do not have a copy of in my possession at the moment, either because I didn't bring them with me on some move, or because I lent them out and never saw them again, or because I read copies borrowed from the library or a friend and never got my own. Now, it doesn't make sense to me, as a collector, to have so many books that I haven't read (or even that I have read but don't really adore) when I don't have some that I really love. And the idea of logging all these books into my LibraryThing account and rating them and writing reviews, and not owning some that really matter to me, I find that distressing.
So, I'm going to try to think about this more, or at least, be more deliberate about choosing the books that I buy (as something distinct from the books that I read). For books that I just want to read, I have to remember that I have a wonderful library right around the corner from me, and I can get them there and save myself some money and space, if I am not sure that I will ever want to read a book again. Then I can focus on owning books that I love, or books from authors that I love, and having a collection that reflects my tastes and my personality more than the random whims that take me to the bookstore. I just need to keep track of all those books that I see and think "Oh! I want to read that!" and not allow that impulse to cause me to put out money. I need to learn how to separate wanting to read a book and wanting to own a book as distinct impulses. It might take some thinking, but I think that using LibraryThing in an act of cataloging might help me to do that.
So with deciding that I want to use it as a catalog for my collection, comes the question of choosing to pay for it. It's free to join, to use the message boards and communicate with other readers, and to list up to 200 books in your library. I have WELL over 200 books in my library, so I have to choose between having an incomplete catalog and paying a fee. ($10 a year or $25 for lifetime membership.) It seems to me that would be money well spent, but given my tendency towards fits of enthusiasm followed by an utter lack of attention, I think that I will spend a few weeks trying to get into a pattern of use, and answering the questions that the use brings up for me, before I put down the money for something and then just ignore it completely.
I’ve also got to ask myself questions about rating and commenting and reviewing, and how I want to go about blogging what I read and thinking about books that I really do want to own, but I have to let it be a process, or I’ll burn out too soon.
And with that, I’m going to stop writing for now.
First of all, do I want my LibraryThing account to reflect books that I have read, or instead, the physical collection of books that I own? Sure, there is considerable overlap between the two, but there are also a tremendous number of books that I have read and do not own, books that I own but have not read yet. Since it would be fundamentally impossible to remember and list all the books that I have ever read (and I think not a useful exercise), I have decided, at least for now, that I want the list to reflect the books that I actually have in my possession as opposed to any sort of exhaustive reading list.
But this made me think about what it means to have a collection of books, as opposed to just having books. I own many many books, and I suppose, when I really think about it, I do consider myself a collector. But I realized that there are many books that I truly love that I do not have a copy of in my possession at the moment, either because I didn't bring them with me on some move, or because I lent them out and never saw them again, or because I read copies borrowed from the library or a friend and never got my own. Now, it doesn't make sense to me, as a collector, to have so many books that I haven't read (or even that I have read but don't really adore) when I don't have some that I really love. And the idea of logging all these books into my LibraryThing account and rating them and writing reviews, and not owning some that really matter to me, I find that distressing.
So, I'm going to try to think about this more, or at least, be more deliberate about choosing the books that I buy (as something distinct from the books that I read). For books that I just want to read, I have to remember that I have a wonderful library right around the corner from me, and I can get them there and save myself some money and space, if I am not sure that I will ever want to read a book again. Then I can focus on owning books that I love, or books from authors that I love, and having a collection that reflects my tastes and my personality more than the random whims that take me to the bookstore. I just need to keep track of all those books that I see and think "Oh! I want to read that!" and not allow that impulse to cause me to put out money. I need to learn how to separate wanting to read a book and wanting to own a book as distinct impulses. It might take some thinking, but I think that using LibraryThing in an act of cataloging might help me to do that.
So with deciding that I want to use it as a catalog for my collection, comes the question of choosing to pay for it. It's free to join, to use the message boards and communicate with other readers, and to list up to 200 books in your library. I have WELL over 200 books in my library, so I have to choose between having an incomplete catalog and paying a fee. ($10 a year or $25 for lifetime membership.) It seems to me that would be money well spent, but given my tendency towards fits of enthusiasm followed by an utter lack of attention, I think that I will spend a few weeks trying to get into a pattern of use, and answering the questions that the use brings up for me, before I put down the money for something and then just ignore it completely.
I’ve also got to ask myself questions about rating and commenting and reviewing, and how I want to go about blogging what I read and thinking about books that I really do want to own, but I have to let it be a process, or I’ll burn out too soon.
And with that, I’m going to stop writing for now.
The Great Hunt
The Great Hunt
by Robert Jordan
The problem with the way I read is this: once I get started with a book (or series of books) that I find particularly interesting, it becomes all consuming. An epic fantasy series with 11 existing volumes all over 700 pages long might be a great summer project for me, but I also have to make sure that other things get done, like sleeping, which has suffered since I started reading The Wheel of Time. Such is life.
Anyway, this is the second book in the Wheel of Time series, an epic fantasy tale with all the usual features: a battle between good and evil for the fate of the world, magic, monsters and interesting creatures, a reluctant hero with a number of lovable sidekicks, and a tremendous number of strange names for people and places that will make you truly glad for the glossary at the end of each book (at least, if you are in any way like me, challenged in the remembering of these things). It's a very good book, good enough to suck me in and truly distract me, with a divinely detailed world that holds together and has a tangible realness to it providing the background for an adventure tale that makes 700 pages fly by. It is not The Lord of the Rings, but I can see where the comparison is made, and it is saying a bit that I don't think that Tolkien would roll in his grave at the thought.
But there's no point in recommending it unless you have already read The Eye of the World, and unless you believe that you are going to have the time to read at least The Dragon Reborn (the third book in the series). Jordan seems to make no accomodations for readers that decide to enter the series midstream, so I think that a reader would gain more confusion than enjoyment out of starting here. These are not so much separate books as volumes of one long story, there are no neat endings to make you feel like you completed something when you turn the last page. To be honest, I am grateful for that, I loathe spending my time reading catchup put in for people who didn't read the first book. So yes, I haven't read the whole series yet, so I can't promise that every book is as good as the first two, but I am going to dive right into volume 3, probably tonight, even though it's already 2:00am and I really (really, really) should be sleeping.
So if you have time for 11 volumes this summer (with a 12th forthcoming, and being finished by another author, since Robert Jordan passed away last year) dive right in and join me, if not, I should be getting to something that I could actually recommend to you in about a month.
Right. Obsessed.
by Robert Jordan
The problem with the way I read is this: once I get started with a book (or series of books) that I find particularly interesting, it becomes all consuming. An epic fantasy series with 11 existing volumes all over 700 pages long might be a great summer project for me, but I also have to make sure that other things get done, like sleeping, which has suffered since I started reading The Wheel of Time. Such is life.
Anyway, this is the second book in the Wheel of Time series, an epic fantasy tale with all the usual features: a battle between good and evil for the fate of the world, magic, monsters and interesting creatures, a reluctant hero with a number of lovable sidekicks, and a tremendous number of strange names for people and places that will make you truly glad for the glossary at the end of each book (at least, if you are in any way like me, challenged in the remembering of these things). It's a very good book, good enough to suck me in and truly distract me, with a divinely detailed world that holds together and has a tangible realness to it providing the background for an adventure tale that makes 700 pages fly by. It is not The Lord of the Rings, but I can see where the comparison is made, and it is saying a bit that I don't think that Tolkien would roll in his grave at the thought.
But there's no point in recommending it unless you have already read The Eye of the World, and unless you believe that you are going to have the time to read at least The Dragon Reborn (the third book in the series). Jordan seems to make no accomodations for readers that decide to enter the series midstream, so I think that a reader would gain more confusion than enjoyment out of starting here. These are not so much separate books as volumes of one long story, there are no neat endings to make you feel like you completed something when you turn the last page. To be honest, I am grateful for that, I loathe spending my time reading catchup put in for people who didn't read the first book. So yes, I haven't read the whole series yet, so I can't promise that every book is as good as the first two, but I am going to dive right into volume 3, probably tonight, even though it's already 2:00am and I really (really, really) should be sleeping.
So if you have time for 11 volumes this summer (with a 12th forthcoming, and being finished by another author, since Robert Jordan passed away last year) dive right in and join me, if not, I should be getting to something that I could actually recommend to you in about a month.
Right. Obsessed.
Friday, May 30, 2008
Back to Blogging: Booklist and New Tool
OK, so I live in Cincinnati now, and I have been thinking that I wanted to get back to blogging (since summer is PRIME TIME for basking in the sunshine and reading my afternoons away) but "the road outside my house, is paved with good intentions" as it were.
Anyway, today I was sitting at my desk in my new lab, feeling somewhat overwhelmed by the sheer volume of work related reading that I have to do, so I decided to take a break and find something else to read.
So I went to the blogger website. In blogs of note for the month, they have listed Women in Science, which seemed interesting... since I suppose I am one. From there, I checked out Neurosciencegirl... since I suppose I am one of those too. There I found the list below, which I thought was interesting.
This is the list of the 100 or so books most often listed as "unread" by LibraryThing users. You're supposed to bold the books you've read, underline the ones you read for school, and italicize the ones you started and didn't finish. Interestingly, blogger doesn't seem to have an underline feature, I assume because that implies that something is a link, so I'm just bolding what I've read, no matter what the reason. I'm also putting a (*) next to the ones that I own but haven't read, (**) for books that are in my digital book's library but not yet read. Here's my list:
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina**
Crime and Punishment**
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude*
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick**
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities**
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel
War and Peace**
Vanity Fair**
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books*
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex*
Quicksilver*
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man*
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch**
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo**
Dracula**
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible
1984
Angels & Demons
Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility**
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist**
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune*
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere*
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners**
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed*
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame**
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield**
So a couple of things I think are slightly interesting: There are 102 books on this list, and I have read only 36 of them, (which doesn't seem like so very many). I traced the list back as many blogs as I could (turned out to be four) and 36 seems better than average. Also, I seem to be a lot less likely to start but not finish.
Of course, the other intriguing thing about this is : "Where does this list come from again? What exactly is Library Thing?" And it turns out that LibraryThing.com is a very cool little website where you can create a personal profile with all the books in your own library, rate and review them, and then connect with people that have similar taste in books or get recommendations for things to read. So I joined up, and while my library is not even sort of started yet, here it is.
So that makes this list make a little more sense to me, because it didn't seem like a real "Top 100" by any criteria I can think of, but it totally makes sense to me as the "100 books that people that really love books are most likely to have bought, be willing to admit that they own, but not gotten around to actually reading." If that's the criteria, then a list that combines classics (cult and literary) with a bunch of fairly recent popular fiction and some interesting but general non-fiction makes perfect sense. A list of books that would lead readers to think, "I really should read that..."
And by that standard, I am a pretty boring, normal reader. Because there are only about three books here that I have not at least picked up and considered at one point or another... such is life.
Anyway, I'll get internet access back on Monday, and then spend a couple of days playing with my LibraryThing bookshelf, and writing some reviews and figuring out what standards I am going to rate books by, and hopefully using this all as a reason to get back to blogging. We'll see how that goes.
Anyway, today I was sitting at my desk in my new lab, feeling somewhat overwhelmed by the sheer volume of work related reading that I have to do, so I decided to take a break and find something else to read.
So I went to the blogger website. In blogs of note for the month, they have listed Women in Science, which seemed interesting... since I suppose I am one. From there, I checked out Neurosciencegirl... since I suppose I am one of those too. There I found the list below, which I thought was interesting.
This is the list of the 100 or so books most often listed as "unread" by LibraryThing users. You're supposed to bold the books you've read, underline the ones you read for school, and italicize the ones you started and didn't finish. Interestingly, blogger doesn't seem to have an underline feature, I assume because that implies that something is a link, so I'm just bolding what I've read, no matter what the reason. I'm also putting a (*) next to the ones that I own but haven't read, (**) for books that are in my digital book's library but not yet read. Here's my list:
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina**
Crime and Punishment**
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude*
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick**
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities**
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel
War and Peace**
Vanity Fair**
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books*
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex*
Quicksilver*
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man*
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch**
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo**
Dracula**
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible
1984
Angels & Demons
Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility**
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist**
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune*
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere*
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners**
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed*
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame**
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield**
So a couple of things I think are slightly interesting: There are 102 books on this list, and I have read only 36 of them, (which doesn't seem like so very many). I traced the list back as many blogs as I could (turned out to be four) and 36 seems better than average. Also, I seem to be a lot less likely to start but not finish.
Of course, the other intriguing thing about this is : "Where does this list come from again? What exactly is Library Thing?" And it turns out that LibraryThing.com is a very cool little website where you can create a personal profile with all the books in your own library, rate and review them, and then connect with people that have similar taste in books or get recommendations for things to read. So I joined up, and while my library is not even sort of started yet, here it is.
So that makes this list make a little more sense to me, because it didn't seem like a real "Top 100" by any criteria I can think of, but it totally makes sense to me as the "100 books that people that really love books are most likely to have bought, be willing to admit that they own, but not gotten around to actually reading." If that's the criteria, then a list that combines classics (cult and literary) with a bunch of fairly recent popular fiction and some interesting but general non-fiction makes perfect sense. A list of books that would lead readers to think, "I really should read that..."
And by that standard, I am a pretty boring, normal reader. Because there are only about three books here that I have not at least picked up and considered at one point or another... such is life.
Anyway, I'll get internet access back on Monday, and then spend a couple of days playing with my LibraryThing bookshelf, and writing some reviews and figuring out what standards I am going to rate books by, and hopefully using this all as a reason to get back to blogging. We'll see how that goes.
Wednesday, January 23, 2008
Gone Baby, Gone
Things that are dangerous for Maggie to decide:
"Oh, since I have this $100 bill that I need to break, I'll just let myself buy a book when I get to the airport at that Boarders in the terminal, and they'll give me change and I'll have something to read..."
Three books later, I dove into Gone Baby, Gone while sitting and waiting for the plane to Minneapolis to take off. Since I got there super early, and since the plane was delayed, and since I read rather quickly, and since this book is addictive to the point that I am not sure I so much as looked up more than once an hour or so while reading it, I was done with the whole thing with enough time to take a nap before the wheels touched down in Minnesota. Allow me to say that there is not better way to spend a snowy day trapped in an airport/on a plane than with a good thriller like this one.
And a good thriller it is. I have not seen the movie, although I will now be adding it to my netflix, but I can see how an amazing movie could come out of this book. (I should point out, that the bar's pretty high, since Lehane is also responsible for the book that is the basis for one of my favorite movies, Mystic River.)
Anyway, the plot is fast paced without being overwhelming or making the action hard to follow. The characters are reasonably complex and realistically, likably, flawed. There are true villians, and sort of villians, and people who do bad things for good reasons, and I truly didn't have it figured out before the end.
I'm not saying that I would classify this as a great acheivement in literature. It's not. I don't think that it aspires to be. What it does, though, it does well. And there is something to be said for airport the day before the interview ficton. This one makes you think just enough to keep you very busy, but not enough to make you very tired.
Want to see what else I've been reading, or track just how much a bookworm I am:
The 2008 Booklist and Tally
"Oh, since I have this $100 bill that I need to break, I'll just let myself buy a book when I get to the airport at that Boarders in the terminal, and they'll give me change and I'll have something to read..."
Three books later, I dove into Gone Baby, Gone while sitting and waiting for the plane to Minneapolis to take off. Since I got there super early, and since the plane was delayed, and since I read rather quickly, and since this book is addictive to the point that I am not sure I so much as looked up more than once an hour or so while reading it, I was done with the whole thing with enough time to take a nap before the wheels touched down in Minnesota. Allow me to say that there is not better way to spend a snowy day trapped in an airport/on a plane than with a good thriller like this one.
And a good thriller it is. I have not seen the movie, although I will now be adding it to my netflix, but I can see how an amazing movie could come out of this book. (I should point out, that the bar's pretty high, since Lehane is also responsible for the book that is the basis for one of my favorite movies, Mystic River.)
Anyway, the plot is fast paced without being overwhelming or making the action hard to follow. The characters are reasonably complex and realistically, likably, flawed. There are true villians, and sort of villians, and people who do bad things for good reasons, and I truly didn't have it figured out before the end.
I'm not saying that I would classify this as a great acheivement in literature. It's not. I don't think that it aspires to be. What it does, though, it does well. And there is something to be said for airport the day before the interview ficton. This one makes you think just enough to keep you very busy, but not enough to make you very tired.
Want to see what else I've been reading, or track just how much a bookworm I am:
The 2008 Booklist and Tally
Thursday, January 10, 2008
The 2008 Booklist
Welcome to 2008. I'm going to do better this year. I know I've never said anything like that before. ;-)
This year, there will be a slight change in the nature of my reading. Andrew gave me a Sony Digital Book for Christmas (Best Present Ever!) so while I will be doing some of my reading in the traditional way, I will also be reading the classics (100 free books!) digitally. I'll be blogging those the same way as other books, but I will note which ones are digital and which are the more traditional page turning sort.
I'm also keeping a tally, because I think that it will be interesting, and because maybe if I have the motivation of keeping an accurate count it'll get me to do this blogging thing with slightly greater regularity.
With that:
2008 Paper Books Read: 16
2008 Digital Books Read: 3
2008 Total Books Read: 19
January 9, 2008
The Rebels of Ireland
By Edward Rutherfurd
863 pages
January 11, 2008
Pride and Prejudice
By Jane Austin
Sony Digital Book
Good Dog, Stay
By Anna Quindlen
82 pages
January 17, 2008
Gone Baby, Gone
By Dennis Lehane
443 pages.
January 22, 2008
The Green Mile:
The Complete Serial Novel
By Stephen King
544 pages
February 9, 2007
Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Perfection
by Atul Gawande
257 pages
February 17, 2007
Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell
by Susanna Clarke
846 pages
February 18, 2007
Final Exam: A Surgeon's Reflections on Mortality
by Pauline Chen
222 pages
The Monsters of Templeton
by Lauren Groff
357 pages
Wuthering Heights
by Emily Bronte
Sony Digital Book
March 20, 2008
The House of God
by Samuel Shem
397 pages
March 23, 2008
A Drink Before the War
by Dennis Lehane
277 pages
March 25, 2008
Darkness, Take My Hand
by Dennis Lehane
355 pages
This year, there will be a slight change in the nature of my reading. Andrew gave me a Sony Digital Book for Christmas (Best Present Ever!) so while I will be doing some of my reading in the traditional way, I will also be reading the classics (100 free books!) digitally. I'll be blogging those the same way as other books, but I will note which ones are digital and which are the more traditional page turning sort.
I'm also keeping a tally, because I think that it will be interesting, and because maybe if I have the motivation of keeping an accurate count it'll get me to do this blogging thing with slightly greater regularity.
With that:
2008 Paper Books Read: 16
2008 Digital Books Read: 3
2008 Total Books Read: 19
January 9, 2008
The Rebels of Ireland
By Edward Rutherfurd
863 pages
January 11, 2008
Pride and Prejudice
By Jane Austin
Sony Digital Book
January 13, 2007
The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon
By Stephen King
272 pages
Good Dog, Stay
By Anna Quindlen
82 pages
January 17, 2008
Gone Baby, Gone
By Dennis Lehane
443 pages.
January 22, 2008
The Green Mile:
The Complete Serial Novel
By Stephen King
544 pages
February 9, 2007
Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Perfection
by Atul Gawande
257 pages
February 17, 2007
Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell
by Susanna Clarke
846 pages
February 18, 2007
Final Exam: A Surgeon's Reflections on Mortality
by Pauline Chen
222 pages
The Monsters of Templeton
by Lauren Groff
357 pages
Wuthering Heights
by Emily Bronte
Sony Digital Book
March 20, 2008
The House of God
by Samuel Shem
397 pages
March 23, 2008
A Drink Before the War
by Dennis Lehane
277 pages
March 25, 2008
Darkness, Take My Hand
by Dennis Lehane
355 pages
March 26, 2008
Shutter Island
by Dennis Lehane
369 pages
March 28, 2008
Sacred
by Dennis Lehane
358 pages
March 30, 2008
Prayers for Rain
by Dennis Lehane
375 pages
March 31, 2008
1st To Die
by James Patterson
462 pages
April 1, 2008
2nd Chance
by James Patterson (with Andrew Gross)
Sony eDigital Book
Thursday, September 13, 2007
Go Ask Alice
Go Ask Alice
Annoymous
So Andrew gave me this book. He picked it up for some reason, and when he was done he passed it on. Last night I was looking for something easy and distracting while I was cleaning my room (which for me is neither easy nor distracting) and I picked this up off my bookshelf. I know that some people will veiw it as some sort of blasphmey that even as a coompulsive reader in my tween and early teen years I'd never read it... but I hadn't. What are you going to do? Now I have.
Anyway. The point of this book is pretty clear. She's a pretty normal teenage girl who gets into drugs, has a hard time leaving them behind, finds herself in a number of regrettable situations, and ends up dead. Drugs are bad. I think that we can all understand this.
The thing is, I'm not sure that this girl is a particularly great example of the whole "drugs are bad" motif. Her story has a lot of things in it that are not quite typical of your teenage drug addict, and the message would be anything but encouraging for a kid who had tried drugs but was trying to stop.
First of all, she doesn't make a consious choice to take drugs the first time. Instead, she is given a coke laced with LSD at a party and that starts her down the path to destruction. Somehow, I'm not sure that the warning "don't take coke's from kids you only kind of know" is not the same kind of warning as "don't take drugs." And while I suppose that the message might be something along the lines of "just trying drugs can set you off in the wrong direction." And clearly she makes a number of (VERY) bad choices in the period that follows this first experience, that little bit of trickery made me feel bad for her.
Second, her descriptions of the experience of drug use are enough to make even a psychopharmacology nerd a little curious. Even though she clearly states about a million times toward the end of her diary that the experience isn't worth it, I'm not sure the descriptions of complete and utter bliss and drug induced euphoria would be particularly helpful in the hands of especially curious preteens. I suppose here the message that trying it once can mess you up is justified... since she makes being high sound pretty damn great. Too bad that one LSD trip leads inexorably to scratching your own face off and premature death.
Finally, at the end of the diary she seems to be well on the path to recovery. She's made new friends that aren't into drugs. She's got herself a responsible college boyfriend who is not into drugs and who has a relationship with her parents as well as with her. All of the last journal entries are those of a hopeful young woman who has left a dangerous and destructive past behind her.
And then in the epilogue, she's dead.
What happened? I mean really. I don't think that this is the message that you want to give to young people. "You'll be on the right track, you'll make new friends and make every effort to start a new life, but really there's no hope. Just when it seems that you are on the path to a full recovery and a useful life, your parents will find you dead when they get home from the movies!"
This is not helpful. Especially not helpful for any child that had tried drugs, as in "Well, now that I've tried drugs, I might as well not waste the effort to get off them, I'm screwed anyway, so I might as well enjoy myself!"
But I suppose the anti-drug message lives on. The way things turn out for her while she's on drugs is clearly not the life that people would wish for, her later resistance of some extraordinarily intense peer pressure is admirable, and her description of her "bad trip" and it's aftereffects are enough to scare the living daylights out of some of those previously discribed especially curious preteens. I suppose.
I think that the real problem with this book is that it seems too forced. Too constructed.
Young girl starts diary about how hard it is not to be accepted, and 20 pages in, she's a drug addict rolling her way straight towards death. Repeated use triggered by neatly spaced traumatic life events. Tries to clean up, fails, faces increadible peer pressure and has a bad trip, but parents always love her. Nice boy that she meets accepts her and even *kisses* her! Doesn't care that she's a former addict, or when she goes crazy, or when she's institutionalized. People that don't use drugs are good and loving. Drugs are bad.
It reads like not terribly well created propoganda. (Which according to the reviews on Amazon it just might be.) I even looked back at some of my journalling from around the same age that this girl is supposed to be. They read more like the journals of a 10 year old than a 16 year old. (And no, I am not just hyper-mature, I assure you.) To me that reeks of adult that has no recollection of what it was like to be 15 or 16. Maybe.
I suppose if I had read it in middle school it would be different. The reviews on Amazon are clearly clustered into jeers from jaded adults and raves from teen readers to whom it seemed honest and dramatic and real. Perhaps if I had read this in maddle school this would be one of those essays about returning to a childhood favorite and finding it lacking.
But I don't think that I would give this to my 13 year old to read, because it is a single minded message about destruction with the utter absence of hope, and if you believe, as I do, that addiction is an illness, than what we need is stories imbued with some element of hope.
***************************************************
Four other notes about reading, books and Barnes and Noble:
1.) On a re-reading childhood favorites note: Madeline L'Engle died this past weekend. I certainly hope that I don't have to write the "returning to a childhood favorite and finding it lacking" essay about any of those books, since I am certainly going to have to return to them once I finish my little ten book run... or maybe during the ten book run. Kids books make a great little distraction sometimes, and the library will have those. I do own them all, even if they are up in an attic somewhere, so I have no reason to visit Barnes and Noble for this rereading project.
2.) This book doesn't count towards the 10 that I have to read before I return to my wanton bookbuying ways. a.) Because it's not on the list that I made when I made the resolution and b.) because I read it so fast and it was so little that counting it would feel like cheating.
3.) Barnes and Nobel sent me an e-mail on Friday in which they explained that they are going to send me a book for *free.* Apparently, they have this book club thing, and because I signed up for one in the past they have me pegged as a reader type. They are clearly trying to create some buzz around a new author by sending out a bunch of advance reading copies of her book and getting us to talk about them. While this does mean that there is a new book on its way to me in the mail... it does not count as a trip to Barnes and Noble because I neither visited the store or gave them money in exchange for it.
and 4.) We stopped at a Barnes and Noble for coffee last week (since it was the nearest coffee selling place to where we were), and I didn't buy ANYTHING. (Well, execpt coffee, but that doesn't count.) GO ME!
Annoymous
So Andrew gave me this book. He picked it up for some reason, and when he was done he passed it on. Last night I was looking for something easy and distracting while I was cleaning my room (which for me is neither easy nor distracting) and I picked this up off my bookshelf. I know that some people will veiw it as some sort of blasphmey that even as a coompulsive reader in my tween and early teen years I'd never read it... but I hadn't. What are you going to do? Now I have.
Anyway. The point of this book is pretty clear. She's a pretty normal teenage girl who gets into drugs, has a hard time leaving them behind, finds herself in a number of regrettable situations, and ends up dead. Drugs are bad. I think that we can all understand this.
The thing is, I'm not sure that this girl is a particularly great example of the whole "drugs are bad" motif. Her story has a lot of things in it that are not quite typical of your teenage drug addict, and the message would be anything but encouraging for a kid who had tried drugs but was trying to stop.
First of all, she doesn't make a consious choice to take drugs the first time. Instead, she is given a coke laced with LSD at a party and that starts her down the path to destruction. Somehow, I'm not sure that the warning "don't take coke's from kids you only kind of know" is not the same kind of warning as "don't take drugs." And while I suppose that the message might be something along the lines of "just trying drugs can set you off in the wrong direction." And clearly she makes a number of (VERY) bad choices in the period that follows this first experience, that little bit of trickery made me feel bad for her.
Second, her descriptions of the experience of drug use are enough to make even a psychopharmacology nerd a little curious. Even though she clearly states about a million times toward the end of her diary that the experience isn't worth it, I'm not sure the descriptions of complete and utter bliss and drug induced euphoria would be particularly helpful in the hands of especially curious preteens. I suppose here the message that trying it once can mess you up is justified... since she makes being high sound pretty damn great. Too bad that one LSD trip leads inexorably to scratching your own face off and premature death.
Finally, at the end of the diary she seems to be well on the path to recovery. She's made new friends that aren't into drugs. She's got herself a responsible college boyfriend who is not into drugs and who has a relationship with her parents as well as with her. All of the last journal entries are those of a hopeful young woman who has left a dangerous and destructive past behind her.
And then in the epilogue, she's dead.
What happened? I mean really. I don't think that this is the message that you want to give to young people. "You'll be on the right track, you'll make new friends and make every effort to start a new life, but really there's no hope. Just when it seems that you are on the path to a full recovery and a useful life, your parents will find you dead when they get home from the movies!"
This is not helpful. Especially not helpful for any child that had tried drugs, as in "Well, now that I've tried drugs, I might as well not waste the effort to get off them, I'm screwed anyway, so I might as well enjoy myself!"
But I suppose the anti-drug message lives on. The way things turn out for her while she's on drugs is clearly not the life that people would wish for, her later resistance of some extraordinarily intense peer pressure is admirable, and her description of her "bad trip" and it's aftereffects are enough to scare the living daylights out of some of those previously discribed especially curious preteens. I suppose.
I think that the real problem with this book is that it seems too forced. Too constructed.
Young girl starts diary about how hard it is not to be accepted, and 20 pages in, she's a drug addict rolling her way straight towards death. Repeated use triggered by neatly spaced traumatic life events. Tries to clean up, fails, faces increadible peer pressure and has a bad trip, but parents always love her. Nice boy that she meets accepts her and even *kisses* her! Doesn't care that she's a former addict, or when she goes crazy, or when she's institutionalized. People that don't use drugs are good and loving. Drugs are bad.
It reads like not terribly well created propoganda. (Which according to the reviews on Amazon it just might be.) I even looked back at some of my journalling from around the same age that this girl is supposed to be. They read more like the journals of a 10 year old than a 16 year old. (And no, I am not just hyper-mature, I assure you.) To me that reeks of adult that has no recollection of what it was like to be 15 or 16. Maybe.
I suppose if I had read it in middle school it would be different. The reviews on Amazon are clearly clustered into jeers from jaded adults and raves from teen readers to whom it seemed honest and dramatic and real. Perhaps if I had read this in maddle school this would be one of those essays about returning to a childhood favorite and finding it lacking.
But I don't think that I would give this to my 13 year old to read, because it is a single minded message about destruction with the utter absence of hope, and if you believe, as I do, that addiction is an illness, than what we need is stories imbued with some element of hope.
***************************************************
Four other notes about reading, books and Barnes and Noble:
1.) On a re-reading childhood favorites note: Madeline L'Engle died this past weekend. I certainly hope that I don't have to write the "returning to a childhood favorite and finding it lacking" essay about any of those books, since I am certainly going to have to return to them once I finish my little ten book run... or maybe during the ten book run. Kids books make a great little distraction sometimes, and the library will have those. I do own them all, even if they are up in an attic somewhere, so I have no reason to visit Barnes and Noble for this rereading project.
2.) This book doesn't count towards the 10 that I have to read before I return to my wanton bookbuying ways. a.) Because it's not on the list that I made when I made the resolution and b.) because I read it so fast and it was so little that counting it would feel like cheating.
3.) Barnes and Nobel sent me an e-mail on Friday in which they explained that they are going to send me a book for *free.* Apparently, they have this book club thing, and because I signed up for one in the past they have me pegged as a reader type. They are clearly trying to create some buzz around a new author by sending out a bunch of advance reading copies of her book and getting us to talk about them. While this does mean that there is a new book on its way to me in the mail... it does not count as a trip to Barnes and Noble because I neither visited the store or gave them money in exchange for it.
and 4.) We stopped at a Barnes and Noble for coffee last week (since it was the nearest coffee selling place to where we were), and I didn't buy ANYTHING. (Well, execpt coffee, but that doesn't count.) GO ME!
Tuesday, September 11, 2007
The Great Mortality
The Great Mortality
by John Kelly
I believe that this is the "free" book from the "Buy Two Get One Free" trap that sucked me in during that last fateful Barnes and Noble trip. What can you do? I blame it all on Andrew.
Anyway, this is a book about the Black Death. Not the most cheerful topic, but an interesting one. In case anyone hasn't noticed, I am literally and totally obsessed with medicine. It's a problem. It will hopefully be less of a problem when I get my happy self into medical school. Fingers crossed.
Anyway. The man that wrote this book has made his living writing about science and medicine, but it seems from his bio at the end of the book that he also has something of a history obsession. The combination makes for a pretty good book on a topic that falls somewhere along the intersection of medicine and history. He seems to understand more than enough about the science to talk about it (as much as anyone can, since the science of a epidemic so long ago is fuzzy at best anyway) but clearly the history is what excited him. More specifically, the detailed and horrific personal accounts written during the plague.
He says that he started this book "for a very modern reason. In an age of the avian flu, Ebola and AIDS, I wanted to take an anticipatory glance backward at the greatest pandemic in human history." In looking back, he has focused on the human story of the plague. He seems determined in the face of the destruction to see the strength of human character, and in that, I think that he's right. It truly is amazing that people kept writing wills, that they managed to bury bodies, that people got out of bed in the morning as the population was cut in half by something that they simply did not understand.
The destruction that the Black Death brought really is well outside the realm of comprehension. We're talking about a time in which, in most of Europe, one out of every two people died horribly. That's hard to wrap your head around. Even though Kelly makes every effort to keep the humanity of these residents of the Middle Ages intact by quoting their own words or focusing on the story of a single family or village to represent one area, I think that at some point, one has to become desensitized, at least I felt like I did. You can only read a sentence like "And in such and such a place in 1348 the Black Death claimed 40-50% of the city." so many times before it just starts to feel like "yep. That's what happens. Oh well." I know that sounds callus, but that's the way it is. Especially since as shocking as the level of devastation is, even with Kelly's great and admirable effort to keep the victims human, these are still people that died 800 years ago, and that helps to keep a certain distance.
Anyway, I do have to say that this is decidedly a book more for the history buff than the science buff, since the science is a little ambiguous. Kelly's writing is focused on the routes the plague travelled and how the character was slightly different in different places. (The English managed to bury everyone facing the same way in neat little rows, some other places failed to manage burials at all really.) He devotes a chapter to the anti-Semitic reactions as well as to the Flagellants, but the majority of the story is just following the plague from place to place.
At times it gets a little repetitive. The story may be slightly different in France than in England, but not too too much, and sometimes it seems as if the same little vignettes are repeated. Maybe that's meant to say something about how we're all really the same, but I could have done with a little less of it.
Of course, the history leaves the scientist in me staring at closed doors, because while Kelly is very clear on the PATH that the plague travelled around Europe, the actual METHOD of that travel is a little more ambiguous. The virulence and movement patterns of the plague of the great mortality are very different and much more frightening than those of the third pandemic of plague, which was in the late 1890s and studied with the technology of that day. Of course for me the question is "what is the difference?!" They have extracted plague DNA from these Black Death burial pits, but understandably I would assume that it's not enough to do an in depth analysis of virulence factors. Of course that is the stuff that I would be more interested in.
But what can you do when you're reading about something that happened about 800 years ago?
I'm not sure how much learning about the Black Death can inform us about the way that our world today would look in the face of a deadly pandemic. At least in today's world (or the part of today's world that anyone reading either this blog or this book lives in) people understand that disease is caused by microbes. This one belief I believe dramatically changes the way that we would experience illness even on a massive level. While there are certainly some ignorant bigots that will blame AIDS on gay people or other such foolishness, I like to believe that we are past the point of burning Jews because they must have poisoned the wells. I think that in the face of understanding what we are fighting, as we certainly would at least in part in the face of a pandemic would give people something to hold on to and something to hope for (a cure, a vaccine, etc.).
That's what's really amazing about the fact that the society in many places continued to function in the face of this pandemic. In their world there was no reason for it, there was no microbe to fight or protect against, no real way to treat symptoms or limit transmission. There was nothing to do but wait for death, and the fact that people held it together to the extent that they did in the face of something like that gives us a lot to hope for on down the road.
Three down, seven to go.
by John Kelly
I believe that this is the "free" book from the "Buy Two Get One Free" trap that sucked me in during that last fateful Barnes and Noble trip. What can you do? I blame it all on Andrew.
Anyway, this is a book about the Black Death. Not the most cheerful topic, but an interesting one. In case anyone hasn't noticed, I am literally and totally obsessed with medicine. It's a problem. It will hopefully be less of a problem when I get my happy self into medical school. Fingers crossed.
Anyway. The man that wrote this book has made his living writing about science and medicine, but it seems from his bio at the end of the book that he also has something of a history obsession. The combination makes for a pretty good book on a topic that falls somewhere along the intersection of medicine and history. He seems to understand more than enough about the science to talk about it (as much as anyone can, since the science of a epidemic so long ago is fuzzy at best anyway) but clearly the history is what excited him. More specifically, the detailed and horrific personal accounts written during the plague.
He says that he started this book "for a very modern reason. In an age of the avian flu, Ebola and AIDS, I wanted to take an anticipatory glance backward at the greatest pandemic in human history." In looking back, he has focused on the human story of the plague. He seems determined in the face of the destruction to see the strength of human character, and in that, I think that he's right. It truly is amazing that people kept writing wills, that they managed to bury bodies, that people got out of bed in the morning as the population was cut in half by something that they simply did not understand.
The destruction that the Black Death brought really is well outside the realm of comprehension. We're talking about a time in which, in most of Europe, one out of every two people died horribly. That's hard to wrap your head around. Even though Kelly makes every effort to keep the humanity of these residents of the Middle Ages intact by quoting their own words or focusing on the story of a single family or village to represent one area, I think that at some point, one has to become desensitized, at least I felt like I did. You can only read a sentence like "And in such and such a place in 1348 the Black Death claimed 40-50% of the city." so many times before it just starts to feel like "yep. That's what happens. Oh well." I know that sounds callus, but that's the way it is. Especially since as shocking as the level of devastation is, even with Kelly's great and admirable effort to keep the victims human, these are still people that died 800 years ago, and that helps to keep a certain distance.
Anyway, I do have to say that this is decidedly a book more for the history buff than the science buff, since the science is a little ambiguous. Kelly's writing is focused on the routes the plague travelled and how the character was slightly different in different places. (The English managed to bury everyone facing the same way in neat little rows, some other places failed to manage burials at all really.) He devotes a chapter to the anti-Semitic reactions as well as to the Flagellants, but the majority of the story is just following the plague from place to place.
At times it gets a little repetitive. The story may be slightly different in France than in England, but not too too much, and sometimes it seems as if the same little vignettes are repeated. Maybe that's meant to say something about how we're all really the same, but I could have done with a little less of it.
Of course, the history leaves the scientist in me staring at closed doors, because while Kelly is very clear on the PATH that the plague travelled around Europe, the actual METHOD of that travel is a little more ambiguous. The virulence and movement patterns of the plague of the great mortality are very different and much more frightening than those of the third pandemic of plague, which was in the late 1890s and studied with the technology of that day. Of course for me the question is "what is the difference?!" They have extracted plague DNA from these Black Death burial pits, but understandably I would assume that it's not enough to do an in depth analysis of virulence factors. Of course that is the stuff that I would be more interested in.
But what can you do when you're reading about something that happened about 800 years ago?
I'm not sure how much learning about the Black Death can inform us about the way that our world today would look in the face of a deadly pandemic. At least in today's world (or the part of today's world that anyone reading either this blog or this book lives in) people understand that disease is caused by microbes. This one belief I believe dramatically changes the way that we would experience illness even on a massive level. While there are certainly some ignorant bigots that will blame AIDS on gay people or other such foolishness, I like to believe that we are past the point of burning Jews because they must have poisoned the wells. I think that in the face of understanding what we are fighting, as we certainly would at least in part in the face of a pandemic would give people something to hold on to and something to hope for (a cure, a vaccine, etc.).
That's what's really amazing about the fact that the society in many places continued to function in the face of this pandemic. In their world there was no reason for it, there was no microbe to fight or protect against, no real way to treat symptoms or limit transmission. There was nothing to do but wait for death, and the fact that people held it together to the extent that they did in the face of something like that gives us a lot to hope for on down the road.
Three down, seven to go.
Tuesday, September 04, 2007
The Female Brain
The Female Brain
By Louann Birzendine, M.D
Two down. Eight to go.
So Andrew picked this up and suggested it to me during the last Barnes and Noble trip. I've been sort of eyeing it for a while, unable to decide if I wanted to read it or not. These psychology books have the potential to make me frustrated and angry or happy and interested, and sometimes, it is very hard to predict which will happen before you open it up. I was skeptical of this one because of the cover image, which is one of those white curly phone cords made into the shape of a brain. This suggested to me that there might be a little too much perpetuation of female stereotypes going on. But ultimately, I decided to let the degrees of the author persuade me that she might be legit (Yale Medical School tends to put out some smart people) and give it a shot.
I enjoyed it for the most part, it was fairly interesting, and I think that the author did a very good job presenting sometimes very complicated information in a way that will be approachable to the average person, which is certainly something that I aspire to someday. In each of the chapters, (which were all titled for stages in a woman's life, things like "The Mommy Brain") she introduced a patient, and fit the neurochemical and hormonal changes she was talking about into the story of what was happening in that person's life. (I am guessing since there was no little note about how names were changed or patients agreed, they might have all been composites, making it easier to fit them to her points more exactly, but that's allowed, I suppose.)
I do feel like there were a couple of glaring problems. First of all, some things were made to seem like secrets that really are not. For example, in the very beginning she had a list of "Hormones your doctor might not know about." This list included oxytocin. Now I admit that might be a hormone that the average American isn't super-familiar with (i.e. any hormone other than estrogen and testosterone), but I am very skeptical of the assertion that anyone could make it through medical school anywhere without knowing all about it. It's silly (and maybe dangerous) to make people think that just because you are doing some interesting information synthesis you have some special knowledge that their doctors might not know about, especially when it's related to things you are about to assign importance to. Sure a specialist might know more, but there isn't an OB/GYN in practice (or there shouldn't be) that can't tell you at least a little bit about oxytocin.
There's a fine line between making things approachable to the average person and oversimplification. I think that she may have stepped on the wrong side of that line a couple of times. My real pet peeve I suppose is the way that she talked about MRI research. As if, we put people in the scanner when they're in love and see what they are feeling instantly, when really it's not quite that simple (or at all easily applied to real world situations.) The stuff we have people do in the scanner is carefully structured and in reality a little more artificial than "imaging love." But she makes it seem sometimes like the MRI scanners can be used to see emotions. (Ummmm. Not quite.) I am also put off by the language that she (and many other people) used taking about results of MRI scans. "We do this or ask the person to think about this and such and such part of the brain lights up."
I know that I have been guilty of describing it that way too, but I have tried to stop ever since a kid asked me if we would be able to see the lights through his skull. People tend to take doctors literally, and sometimes it's best to tell them literally what is happening. There are no little lights in your skull people, when they say "such and such part of the cortex lights up" what they mean is "more blood flows to such and such a part of the cortex."
If we told people that way, not only would it be more true and more helpful, but also perhaps the work that we're doing might seem less mystical and a little more like science. We're measuring the flow of blood in your brain, not the intensity of mystical in head chirstmas lights. I don't think that the other way of taking about it is helpful at all.
Sorry for that little vent.
Anyway, despite the oversimplifications. I did enjoy the book. I think that I am a little bit too close to the field to fit in as a member of her target audience, but that's not really her fault. She clearly didn't set out to write a book for the academic circle. I do think that I know a member of her real target audience thought, so I left the book with my mother. She'll enjoy it more than I did.
Woot. Eight more books until my next Barnes and Noble Trip.
By Louann Birzendine, M.D
Two down. Eight to go.
So Andrew picked this up and suggested it to me during the last Barnes and Noble trip. I've been sort of eyeing it for a while, unable to decide if I wanted to read it or not. These psychology books have the potential to make me frustrated and angry or happy and interested, and sometimes, it is very hard to predict which will happen before you open it up. I was skeptical of this one because of the cover image, which is one of those white curly phone cords made into the shape of a brain. This suggested to me that there might be a little too much perpetuation of female stereotypes going on. But ultimately, I decided to let the degrees of the author persuade me that she might be legit (Yale Medical School tends to put out some smart people) and give it a shot.
I enjoyed it for the most part, it was fairly interesting, and I think that the author did a very good job presenting sometimes very complicated information in a way that will be approachable to the average person, which is certainly something that I aspire to someday. In each of the chapters, (which were all titled for stages in a woman's life, things like "The Mommy Brain") she introduced a patient, and fit the neurochemical and hormonal changes she was talking about into the story of what was happening in that person's life. (I am guessing since there was no little note about how names were changed or patients agreed, they might have all been composites, making it easier to fit them to her points more exactly, but that's allowed, I suppose.)
I do feel like there were a couple of glaring problems. First of all, some things were made to seem like secrets that really are not. For example, in the very beginning she had a list of "Hormones your doctor might not know about." This list included oxytocin. Now I admit that might be a hormone that the average American isn't super-familiar with (i.e. any hormone other than estrogen and testosterone), but I am very skeptical of the assertion that anyone could make it through medical school anywhere without knowing all about it. It's silly (and maybe dangerous) to make people think that just because you are doing some interesting information synthesis you have some special knowledge that their doctors might not know about, especially when it's related to things you are about to assign importance to. Sure a specialist might know more, but there isn't an OB/GYN in practice (or there shouldn't be) that can't tell you at least a little bit about oxytocin.
There's a fine line between making things approachable to the average person and oversimplification. I think that she may have stepped on the wrong side of that line a couple of times. My real pet peeve I suppose is the way that she talked about MRI research. As if, we put people in the scanner when they're in love and see what they are feeling instantly, when really it's not quite that simple (or at all easily applied to real world situations.) The stuff we have people do in the scanner is carefully structured and in reality a little more artificial than "imaging love." But she makes it seem sometimes like the MRI scanners can be used to see emotions. (Ummmm. Not quite.) I am also put off by the language that she (and many other people) used taking about results of MRI scans. "We do this or ask the person to think about this and such and such part of the brain lights up."
I know that I have been guilty of describing it that way too, but I have tried to stop ever since a kid asked me if we would be able to see the lights through his skull. People tend to take doctors literally, and sometimes it's best to tell them literally what is happening. There are no little lights in your skull people, when they say "such and such part of the cortex lights up" what they mean is "more blood flows to such and such a part of the cortex."
If we told people that way, not only would it be more true and more helpful, but also perhaps the work that we're doing might seem less mystical and a little more like science. We're measuring the flow of blood in your brain, not the intensity of mystical in head chirstmas lights. I don't think that the other way of taking about it is helpful at all.
Sorry for that little vent.
Anyway, despite the oversimplifications. I did enjoy the book. I think that I am a little bit too close to the field to fit in as a member of her target audience, but that's not really her fault. She clearly didn't set out to write a book for the academic circle. I do think that I know a member of her real target audience thought, so I left the book with my mother. She'll enjoy it more than I did.
Woot. Eight more books until my next Barnes and Noble Trip.
Tuesday, August 28, 2007
The Queen's Fool
The Queen's Fool
By Philippa Gregory
If you want Maggie to remember history. Just put it all into a nice story with some memorable characters and she'll have it all wrapped up.
For example. By reading The Queen's Fool, I am now clear on the succession of English royalty following Henry VIII (a character himself in The Other Boleyn Girl the book that made that little period of history clearer) all the way through to Elizabeth I.
This story starts after Henry is dead and his son Edward VI is on the throne (in name only, he's a child, so the country is being ruled by a regency council.) The narrator of the novel is Hannah Verde, a Jewish girl, who with her father has fled Spain to hide (and fake Christianity) in England after her mother was burned at the stake in the Spanish Inquisition. Hannah also happens to be able to occasionally see the future, a useful skill at a time like this.
She meets Robert Dudley (central character of The Virgin's Lover the other Gregory novel that taught Maggie history) and he takes Hannah to court to be a holy fool to the king, who is young and clearly ill. After a short while, she is sent, basically as a spy for the Dudleys, to the Princess Mary. Hannah spends the rest of the novel as friend and confidant to Mary both as princess and as Queen and later also to Princess Elizabeth.
What's great about this book is not only the history. (Edward VI to Jane Grey (8 days) to Mary I (aka Bloody Mary) to Elizabeth I... better than I knew it for AP European History.) But the complexity of the characters. Hannah is a brilliantly created, and genuine seeming person. A young woman who is forced to reconcile herself with conflicting feelings and web of complicated loyalties. The story takes her from a young girl who questions the value of her Jewish faith in the face of what it has already cost her, to a grown woman who agrees wholeheartedly to commit to a life as "One of the Children is Israel." She is loyal to Robert Dudley from the beginning, and for a time also in love with him. But she also has a deep and undying love for Mary, even in the face of the religious persecution that she inflicts upon England in a quest to return it to the Catholic Church. Hannah even shows affection, loyalty, a sense of duty and a deep admiration for the Princess Elizabeth, even as she plots to overthrow the Queen that she so loves.
But that fits. It's a complicated character for a complicated time. A character faced with a deep religious challenge at a time when nobody in England really knew what they were allowed to believe, or if they were safe in their practice. A character faced with conflicting loyalties in a time of political turmoil. It works. I loved it.
Gregory paints all the characters, even the royalty, as human, flawed but likable. Perhaps none more so than Mary. It's an interesting choice for a Queen who is known for executing large numbers of her own people. Yet, in this novel at least, Mary is sincere. She wishes nothing but happiness for England, and her devotion to the Church and returning England to her faith comes from a devout belief that her view of God is the true one. She is a woman tortured by the complications of court from her youngest days, when Henry VIII tossed her mother aside for Anne Boleyn. The story makes it clear how she has progressed from a girl forced to swear the oath calling herself a bastard to a woman who can rally the troops to her cause as Queen not once, but twice. But the novel also shows how her strength is tested, and how she is changed from someone so loved by her people that she can easily put down a rebellion to a queen that was so feared. How she moves from someone so merciful that she initially refused to execute Jane Grey, who was put on the throne before her, to someone who would so willingly bring down a brutal inquisition on her own people. The strength that she shows when she is ready to fight for her throne is contrasted sharply to the broken sobbing woman that we see before she dies. It's a compelling portrait.
The side plot to all the royal activity is the love story between Hannah and the young Jewish man that she is betrothed to. It's a nice story, and while it certainly serves to help us see how Hannah grows, to me it did not ring with the same intensity as her times at court. Still charming though.
In short, I liked this as much as the other two Gregory novels, both books that I could not put down. Reading this makes me want to go through and read all the books in this unofficial series in order, to see how the continuity flows. It seems now that Gregory has made the English royalty into complicated and beautiful characters spanning from young Catherine of Aragon to Elizabeth in what's now five books. We'll see when I get around to that, I'm certainly not allowed to buy the ones that I haven't read yet right now. ;-)
One book down, nine more to go before I can make my triumphant return to Barnes and Noble.
P.S. I'm going to try this label thing and see if it works. We'll sort by genre I think.
By Philippa Gregory
If you want Maggie to remember history. Just put it all into a nice story with some memorable characters and she'll have it all wrapped up.
For example. By reading The Queen's Fool, I am now clear on the succession of English royalty following Henry VIII (a character himself in The Other Boleyn Girl the book that made that little period of history clearer) all the way through to Elizabeth I.
This story starts after Henry is dead and his son Edward VI is on the throne (in name only, he's a child, so the country is being ruled by a regency council.) The narrator of the novel is Hannah Verde, a Jewish girl, who with her father has fled Spain to hide (and fake Christianity) in England after her mother was burned at the stake in the Spanish Inquisition. Hannah also happens to be able to occasionally see the future, a useful skill at a time like this.
She meets Robert Dudley (central character of The Virgin's Lover the other Gregory novel that taught Maggie history) and he takes Hannah to court to be a holy fool to the king, who is young and clearly ill. After a short while, she is sent, basically as a spy for the Dudleys, to the Princess Mary. Hannah spends the rest of the novel as friend and confidant to Mary both as princess and as Queen and later also to Princess Elizabeth.
What's great about this book is not only the history. (Edward VI to Jane Grey (8 days) to Mary I (aka Bloody Mary) to Elizabeth I... better than I knew it for AP European History.) But the complexity of the characters. Hannah is a brilliantly created, and genuine seeming person. A young woman who is forced to reconcile herself with conflicting feelings and web of complicated loyalties. The story takes her from a young girl who questions the value of her Jewish faith in the face of what it has already cost her, to a grown woman who agrees wholeheartedly to commit to a life as "One of the Children is Israel." She is loyal to Robert Dudley from the beginning, and for a time also in love with him. But she also has a deep and undying love for Mary, even in the face of the religious persecution that she inflicts upon England in a quest to return it to the Catholic Church. Hannah even shows affection, loyalty, a sense of duty and a deep admiration for the Princess Elizabeth, even as she plots to overthrow the Queen that she so loves.
But that fits. It's a complicated character for a complicated time. A character faced with a deep religious challenge at a time when nobody in England really knew what they were allowed to believe, or if they were safe in their practice. A character faced with conflicting loyalties in a time of political turmoil. It works. I loved it.
Gregory paints all the characters, even the royalty, as human, flawed but likable. Perhaps none more so than Mary. It's an interesting choice for a Queen who is known for executing large numbers of her own people. Yet, in this novel at least, Mary is sincere. She wishes nothing but happiness for England, and her devotion to the Church and returning England to her faith comes from a devout belief that her view of God is the true one. She is a woman tortured by the complications of court from her youngest days, when Henry VIII tossed her mother aside for Anne Boleyn. The story makes it clear how she has progressed from a girl forced to swear the oath calling herself a bastard to a woman who can rally the troops to her cause as Queen not once, but twice. But the novel also shows how her strength is tested, and how she is changed from someone so loved by her people that she can easily put down a rebellion to a queen that was so feared. How she moves from someone so merciful that she initially refused to execute Jane Grey, who was put on the throne before her, to someone who would so willingly bring down a brutal inquisition on her own people. The strength that she shows when she is ready to fight for her throne is contrasted sharply to the broken sobbing woman that we see before she dies. It's a compelling portrait.
The side plot to all the royal activity is the love story between Hannah and the young Jewish man that she is betrothed to. It's a nice story, and while it certainly serves to help us see how Hannah grows, to me it did not ring with the same intensity as her times at court. Still charming though.
In short, I liked this as much as the other two Gregory novels, both books that I could not put down. Reading this makes me want to go through and read all the books in this unofficial series in order, to see how the continuity flows. It seems now that Gregory has made the English royalty into complicated and beautiful characters spanning from young Catherine of Aragon to Elizabeth in what's now five books. We'll see when I get around to that, I'm certainly not allowed to buy the ones that I haven't read yet right now. ;-)
One book down, nine more to go before I can make my triumphant return to Barnes and Noble.
P.S. I'm going to try this label thing and see if it works. We'll sort by genre I think.
Monday, August 27, 2007
The First Step...
They say that the first step is admitting that you have a problem.
I have a book problem. Really. I spend money that I really shouldn't on books, and I LOVE every single minute of it. Really.
I also love Andrew, but he is a bad influence on me. On Sunday, at the Barnes and Noble in Nashville, I bought SIX books (admittedly, one was free, but the plan had been not to buy ANY books, and instead, I bought SIX).
So now, no more, I have made a solemn oath to myself and my wallet, with Andrew and all my blog readers (all three of you) as my witness, that
I WILL NOT BUY ANOTHER BOOK UNTIL I HAVE READ AND BLOGGED TEN BOOKS.
I have even selected the ten, and they are (in no special order)
The Queen's Fool
By Philippa Gregory
500 pages
The Female Brian
By Louann Birzendine, M.D.
187 pages (excluding notes and references)
Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found
By Suketu Mehta
542 pages
The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death
By John Kelly
303 pages (excluding notes and references)
The Third Chimpanzee
By Jared Diamond
368 pages (excluding notes and references)
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
By Robert A. Heinlein
382 pages
The Princes of Ireland
By Edward Rutherfurd
770 pages
The Rebels of Ireland
By Edward Rutherfurd
863 pages
Saving Fish From Drowning
By Amy Tan
474 pages
Quicksilver
By Neal Stephenson
916 pages
That's ten books. 5,305 pages. Ten complete blog entries before I am allowed to visit Barnes and Noble again. I swear to it. (Although, I do have to admit that I am almost done with The Queen's Fool, but I still have to blog it, and updating the blog is something that I have been rather bad at... so that's a start.)
Right.
I really really really love to read.
I have a book problem. Really. I spend money that I really shouldn't on books, and I LOVE every single minute of it. Really.
I also love Andrew, but he is a bad influence on me. On Sunday, at the Barnes and Noble in Nashville, I bought SIX books (admittedly, one was free, but the plan had been not to buy ANY books, and instead, I bought SIX).
So now, no more, I have made a solemn oath to myself and my wallet, with Andrew and all my blog readers (all three of you) as my witness, that
I WILL NOT BUY ANOTHER BOOK UNTIL I HAVE READ AND BLOGGED TEN BOOKS.
I have even selected the ten, and they are (in no special order)
The Queen's Fool
By Philippa Gregory
500 pages
The Female Brian
By Louann Birzendine, M.D.
187 pages (excluding notes and references)
Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found
By Suketu Mehta
542 pages
The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death
By John Kelly
303 pages (excluding notes and references)
The Third Chimpanzee
By Jared Diamond
368 pages (excluding notes and references)
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
By Robert A. Heinlein
382 pages
The Princes of Ireland
By Edward Rutherfurd
770 pages
The Rebels of Ireland
By Edward Rutherfurd
863 pages
Saving Fish From Drowning
By Amy Tan
474 pages
Quicksilver
By Neal Stephenson
916 pages
That's ten books. 5,305 pages. Ten complete blog entries before I am allowed to visit Barnes and Noble again. I swear to it. (Although, I do have to admit that I am almost done with The Queen's Fool, but I still have to blog it, and updating the blog is something that I have been rather bad at... so that's a start.)
Right.
I really really really love to read.
Tuesday, July 31, 2007
The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul
The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul
By Douglas Adams
Another book whose story starts with something related to the great and wonderful Andrew Gustav Schneider. He gave this to me during our hours of sitting in JFK airport waiting for our flight to London to take off. A reading from my favorite British author for our trip to Britain.
Of course, I didn't get to read it in Britain because I picked up Edward Ruthorfurd's epic novel London at St. Paul's the second day we were there, and spent the rest of the time buried in that 1300 page wonder. (It's amazing, but not for the faint of heart.) So instead I had a book by my favorite British author to recover from my trip to Britain. Just as good really, maybe better.
Note: Anyone that has not yet read all four books in The Hitchhiker's Trilogy, stop reading this now and rush to your local library, you are missing out on great and wonderful things.
Now, when I first looked at the book, I was fairly sure that I hadn't read it. Then, at some point on the vacation, while Andrew was making fun of the lovely (10 feet of visibility) view that we'd enjoyed from the top of Mt. Snowdon in Wales, he made some joke about the clouds wanting to be close to me. He said that he remembered reading about a character like that, he thought in a Douglas Adams book, and all of a sudden I decided that I in fact HAD read this book and that it was the mystery about the Norse Gods... and that little antidote about the clouds wanting to be close to someone was in this book, something about the rain God...
I was about half right. I did read this at some point in the past, although long enough ago that I had pretty much forgotten it all. It is the mystery about the Norse Gods, but the thing with the guy who the clouds want to be near wasn't in here. Maybe it is somewhere in Hitchhikers. If you know where it is, it would be nice of you to share.
Anyway, this book does live up to the amusement that I expect from Adams on some levels. There is no shortage of one liners or cruel little observations about all the irony in the world to keep you amused. It doesn't have the same glory as Hitchhikers, but really, that would be quite a challenge.
If you are an Adams fan, you've probably already read this, and if not, I suppose you should. If not, I wouldn't start here, instead, read other things first, become an Adams fan, and then read this.
Sad to admit, but one of the coolest things was the fact that things kept happening in places where Andrew and I had been on our vacation (the main character's flat appears to be located on the same street as the car rental place, which was a longer than anticipated walk uphill from King's Cross, leaving me with a feel for the neighborhood.)
Well those places and Asgard, home of the wise and wonderful Gods of Norse mythology.
I do love the idea of Thor walking around frustrated that people don't believe in him anymore... I bet Zeus is pissed too...
Tuesday, May 22, 2007
Lipstick Jungle
Lipstick Jungle
by Candace Bushnell
May 21- 22, 2007
This weekend, when I arrived at Andrew's place, he had a book for me. It was Candace Bushnell's Four Blonds. He had gotten it off one of those ever-present and super addictive bargain tables somewhere for me, mostly because he is wonderful. (At some point he and I had talked about me letting myself read more silly girly books, since I do find them rather relaxing. He always remembers these things and does something about them. It's really rather amazing to me.)
Anyway, I finished the entire thing this weekend, either in the car on our way to and from the Tennessee Renaissance Fair (more fun than you would imagine) or just hanging out around the apartment (more cozy than you would imagine). I liked it, but I couldn't really tell you why. I may or may not get to writing a whole entry about it, we'll see.
Anyway, when I was in the airport trying to kill some time before going through security so that I could finish my juice, I saw this book. It was one of those cheap, small paperbacks, and somehow, I justified the purchase. (Something along the lines of, "It's only eight dollars, and it's pretty late, so I'll be happy to have something mindless to read on the plane. Besides, I am sure that I can paperbackswap it away and get something good once I'm done.")
I swear, I am going to read 10 more books before I buy another one. TEN!
Anyway, from the moment I opened it waiting to board the plane, I couldn't put the damn thing down. It's over 500 pages long and I only started reading it last night at like 7:30... clearly today was not as productive as one might have hoped.
This book is the story of three women in their 40s in New York: a fashion designer, a movie producer, and a publishing exec. They all have tons of money and despite their already fabulous jobs, are headed for even bigger and better things. Sure, there's drama: corporate backstabbing, a failed business deal, a divorce even. But they live in a world where things turn out fabulous. That is what makes this relaxing girly fiction.
Yet I cared about them, in a way that I did not expect to. Perhaps that is why Bushnell has been so successful. I thought that perhaps they were going to piss me off (all four of the blonds certainly did that) but for some reason, I found myself rooting for these girls (women?), in sort of the same way that I liked the women on Sex in the City (and no, I haven't read that yet, but I think that I'll take a break from Bushnell.) Throughout the whole book, I was on their side. I wanted them to kick butt, to show all those silly men that were trying to get in their way who's boss.
This was, for sure, one of those female empowerment books where women show the men who's in charge. These characters have stay-at-home husbands or no husband at all. They take jobs away from men. They repeatedly say that nobody could understand their careers or talk about money like their girlfriends. It's almost overwhelming, all the empowerment. If they weren't somehow still likable characters, I think I would have put the book down. A girl only needs to be reminded so many times that she can do anything at all, (and without the help of men!). After reading something like this, I feel sure that I am supposed to believe that all a lady needs is some close female friends, some money, and a whole lot of power. We can do it gals!
I suppose that's a good thing... but it gets old.
It did make me think about something again though. The characters in this book start out pretty close to the top, end up pretty much actually at the top, and most of the book is about that striving: climbing the corporate ladder, making it in the fashion or movie industry. All making millions to start, and all ending up with more at the end.
And what does that mean? Is $250,000 a year not successful enough anymore? What about a million? As I plunge into the application process all over again, I have to wonder a little bit what it means that I was concerned that these women would "fail" and end up dead ended as the editor-and-chief or something of the sort. That wouldn't have been enough. I mean sure, that's not bad, but who can settle for not bad when they want to be the best, the top.
And we want that too. "We" being myself and many of my friends. As Charlene said while she was doing all her apps, "I wonder what would it be like to just want to be normal?"
But I don't know the answer to that question, because I, like the women in this book, want very much to be exceptional. There is something in me that has been trained, by a combination of personality, culture and education, to believe that nothing less than extraordinary will do. I want to pull this same sort of thing, to be at the top of my field, to work very hard and see very great rewards. And like these characters, despite all my doubts and fears, I believe that I will be able to do that. (And maybe even be able to have a family too.) Sure, I don't know how, but how much does that really matter at this point? As we learn in books like this one, the hows work themselves out.
And that's interesting to me, because reading this book, at first I felt like these women were extreme, with almost crazy hopes and goals, that people don't need that much money, that much power. And maybe I don't want to be the president of a movie studio or CEO of a magazine division. But really, when I think about it. I want to be successful like that, I want to be outstanding. And usually, I believe that I can be outstanding.
I guess all that empowerment worked after all.
by Candace Bushnell
May 21- 22, 2007
This weekend, when I arrived at Andrew's place, he had a book for me. It was Candace Bushnell's Four Blonds. He had gotten it off one of those ever-present and super addictive bargain tables somewhere for me, mostly because he is wonderful. (At some point he and I had talked about me letting myself read more silly girly books, since I do find them rather relaxing. He always remembers these things and does something about them. It's really rather amazing to me.)
Anyway, I finished the entire thing this weekend, either in the car on our way to and from the Tennessee Renaissance Fair (more fun than you would imagine) or just hanging out around the apartment (more cozy than you would imagine). I liked it, but I couldn't really tell you why. I may or may not get to writing a whole entry about it, we'll see.
Anyway, when I was in the airport trying to kill some time before going through security so that I could finish my juice, I saw this book. It was one of those cheap, small paperbacks, and somehow, I justified the purchase. (Something along the lines of, "It's only eight dollars, and it's pretty late, so I'll be happy to have something mindless to read on the plane. Besides, I am sure that I can paperbackswap it away and get something good once I'm done.")
I swear, I am going to read 10 more books before I buy another one. TEN!
Anyway, from the moment I opened it waiting to board the plane, I couldn't put the damn thing down. It's over 500 pages long and I only started reading it last night at like 7:30... clearly today was not as productive as one might have hoped.
This book is the story of three women in their 40s in New York: a fashion designer, a movie producer, and a publishing exec. They all have tons of money and despite their already fabulous jobs, are headed for even bigger and better things. Sure, there's drama: corporate backstabbing, a failed business deal, a divorce even. But they live in a world where things turn out fabulous. That is what makes this relaxing girly fiction.
Yet I cared about them, in a way that I did not expect to. Perhaps that is why Bushnell has been so successful. I thought that perhaps they were going to piss me off (all four of the blonds certainly did that) but for some reason, I found myself rooting for these girls (women?), in sort of the same way that I liked the women on Sex in the City (and no, I haven't read that yet, but I think that I'll take a break from Bushnell.) Throughout the whole book, I was on their side. I wanted them to kick butt, to show all those silly men that were trying to get in their way who's boss.
This was, for sure, one of those female empowerment books where women show the men who's in charge. These characters have stay-at-home husbands or no husband at all. They take jobs away from men. They repeatedly say that nobody could understand their careers or talk about money like their girlfriends. It's almost overwhelming, all the empowerment. If they weren't somehow still likable characters, I think I would have put the book down. A girl only needs to be reminded so many times that she can do anything at all, (and without the help of men!). After reading something like this, I feel sure that I am supposed to believe that all a lady needs is some close female friends, some money, and a whole lot of power. We can do it gals!
I suppose that's a good thing... but it gets old.
It did make me think about something again though. The characters in this book start out pretty close to the top, end up pretty much actually at the top, and most of the book is about that striving: climbing the corporate ladder, making it in the fashion or movie industry. All making millions to start, and all ending up with more at the end.
And what does that mean? Is $250,000 a year not successful enough anymore? What about a million? As I plunge into the application process all over again, I have to wonder a little bit what it means that I was concerned that these women would "fail" and end up dead ended as the editor-and-chief or something of the sort. That wouldn't have been enough. I mean sure, that's not bad, but who can settle for not bad when they want to be the best, the top.
And we want that too. "We" being myself and many of my friends. As Charlene said while she was doing all her apps, "I wonder what would it be like to just want to be normal?"
But I don't know the answer to that question, because I, like the women in this book, want very much to be exceptional. There is something in me that has been trained, by a combination of personality, culture and education, to believe that nothing less than extraordinary will do. I want to pull this same sort of thing, to be at the top of my field, to work very hard and see very great rewards. And like these characters, despite all my doubts and fears, I believe that I will be able to do that. (And maybe even be able to have a family too.) Sure, I don't know how, but how much does that really matter at this point? As we learn in books like this one, the hows work themselves out.
And that's interesting to me, because reading this book, at first I felt like these women were extreme, with almost crazy hopes and goals, that people don't need that much money, that much power. And maybe I don't want to be the president of a movie studio or CEO of a magazine division. But really, when I think about it. I want to be successful like that, I want to be outstanding. And usually, I believe that I can be outstanding.
I guess all that empowerment worked after all.
Tuesday, March 20, 2007
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
March 10-12, 2007
Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince
by J.K. Rowling
Sometimes you read a book just to escape the real world, and I must say, that for that purpose, the Harry Potter series has always been very effective for me. The stories are fast paced and interesting enough, complete with little doses of childlike wonder and "WOW, I wish I could do that!" moments. Especially when I am a little overwhelmed with other things, they tend to make me feel a little better about the world (and a little better at procrastination.) This book managed to pull me into and through 600 some odd pages in three days over a weekend where I worked Saturday and Sunday.
I put this on my paperbackswap.com wishlist when I first joined, because while I am a Potter fan, I'm not really the obsessive type that has already preordered the last book (although after reading this one, I am thinking about it.) And it turned up, as these things tend to do in my world, at just the right time.
I do think sometimes that the books rely a little bit too much on me having remembered little details from the past books, which I haven't read for years, so the details are fuzzy at best, but I suppose that the rehashing that would be necessary to bring those less-than-true fans like me up to speed might be really tedious for those who can keep track of all the members of the Order of the Phoenix.
SPOILER ALERT!!!!!
I was really convinced that Harry was wrong about Snape, I really just didn't think that he was going to end up as the bad guy. I don't know why, but I thought that in the way of children and teachers, they were wrong about him, and that while unlikeable certainly, he was really on the good side. I'm, not sure why I believed that, or why I wanted to believe that, but I did, and so, while I knew that Dumbledore died at the end thanks to the help of some other spoilers, I was totally shocked that Snape killed him. I am very interested to see how she wraps that one up in the end...
Cause the end is coming... and I'm not sure that I buy into Sean's prediction "He's going to die you know..." I suppose that it's possible, but at the same time, that idea seems a little too dark for the world of Hogwarts. I hope that he doesn't. I really like the idea of Harry Potter surviving. Of course, there is always the question: What does one do for a living after defeating the worst kind of evil at age 17? It kind of makes insurance sales seem a little anticlimactic ;-)
I suppose that I had forgotten how much I enjoyed these books in the time since I read the last one. When I think back, they have been very useful procrastination tools for me in the past. I do think that I will preorder the final book, (Barnes and Noble will sell it to me, a member with the credit card, for not so much at all). At this point, what I'm debating is reading the others again before the new one comes out, so that my memory is fresh, so that the whole story can come together as one complete tale, which I think is fitting. Probably not the most effective use of my time, but fitting the compulsive side of me, and I know that I will be able to get Jannine to do it with me, which might be fun. Plus, the book is coming out over the summer, so no classes, just work, disc, and God willing, some looming medical school secondaries. Sounds like a wonderful time for some quality escapism.
Want to know what else I've been reading lately? Check out The 2007 Booklist
Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince
by J.K. Rowling
Sometimes you read a book just to escape the real world, and I must say, that for that purpose, the Harry Potter series has always been very effective for me. The stories are fast paced and interesting enough, complete with little doses of childlike wonder and "WOW, I wish I could do that!" moments. Especially when I am a little overwhelmed with other things, they tend to make me feel a little better about the world (and a little better at procrastination.) This book managed to pull me into and through 600 some odd pages in three days over a weekend where I worked Saturday and Sunday.
I put this on my paperbackswap.com wishlist when I first joined, because while I am a Potter fan, I'm not really the obsessive type that has already preordered the last book (although after reading this one, I am thinking about it.) And it turned up, as these things tend to do in my world, at just the right time.
I do think sometimes that the books rely a little bit too much on me having remembered little details from the past books, which I haven't read for years, so the details are fuzzy at best, but I suppose that the rehashing that would be necessary to bring those less-than-true fans like me up to speed might be really tedious for those who can keep track of all the members of the Order of the Phoenix.
SPOILER ALERT!!!!!
I was really convinced that Harry was wrong about Snape, I really just didn't think that he was going to end up as the bad guy. I don't know why, but I thought that in the way of children and teachers, they were wrong about him, and that while unlikeable certainly, he was really on the good side. I'm, not sure why I believed that, or why I wanted to believe that, but I did, and so, while I knew that Dumbledore died at the end thanks to the help of some other spoilers, I was totally shocked that Snape killed him. I am very interested to see how she wraps that one up in the end...
Cause the end is coming... and I'm not sure that I buy into Sean's prediction "He's going to die you know..." I suppose that it's possible, but at the same time, that idea seems a little too dark for the world of Hogwarts. I hope that he doesn't. I really like the idea of Harry Potter surviving. Of course, there is always the question: What does one do for a living after defeating the worst kind of evil at age 17? It kind of makes insurance sales seem a little anticlimactic ;-)
I suppose that I had forgotten how much I enjoyed these books in the time since I read the last one. When I think back, they have been very useful procrastination tools for me in the past. I do think that I will preorder the final book, (Barnes and Noble will sell it to me, a member with the credit card, for not so much at all). At this point, what I'm debating is reading the others again before the new one comes out, so that my memory is fresh, so that the whole story can come together as one complete tale, which I think is fitting. Probably not the most effective use of my time, but fitting the compulsive side of me, and I know that I will be able to get Jannine to do it with me, which might be fun. Plus, the book is coming out over the summer, so no classes, just work, disc, and God willing, some looming medical school secondaries. Sounds like a wonderful time for some quality escapism.
Want to know what else I've been reading lately? Check out The 2007 Booklist
Thursday, March 15, 2007
A Perfect Mess
March 12-14, 2007
A Perfect Mess
by Eric Abrahamson and David H. Freedman
My mother gave me this book for Christmas. I think in hope of communicating to me that she loves me in spite of my messy messy ways. I know she does, but it was still a nice gesture.
The premise of this book is that we, as a culture, have gone too far in our quest for organization, and that we now seek to be more organized simply for the sake of organization, rather than because we have a good idea of what the actual benefit of this organization might be. Basically, being organized has a cost in time and resources and such, but frequently people don't consider that, and instead just quest to keep everything NEAT without thinking if that time could have been used more productively for other things. (Anyone that has seen my bedroom or the back seat of my car knows that I suffer from no such illusion, and think that my time can be better used for just about anything rather than just making things neat.)
The authors are not advocating anarchy or complete and total sloppiness, but they argue that in each situation there is an optimal level of messiness that will result in a maximization of productivity/creativity etc. and that we should quest for that. They split the existence of messiness up into many levels and different types of messiness, and talk about how a slight mess can be an advantage in everything from our desks to our thinking.
The argument is a pretty common sense one once you think about it, but I did still find parts of the book enlightening, especially as I am one of those people constantly in a quest to go from chaos to totally perfect organization. I have, since reading this book tried to introduce a little of the productive kind of messiness into some areas of my life. (For example, my MCAT studying now includes more passages unrelated to the things that I have recently reviewed.) I'm pretty sure that I haven't yet found the optimal level of messiness (Read: agenda still compulsively color coded, floor of my bedroom, less easy to find.) But I hope that this thinking might help me get there.
It is a little redundant, and if you can accept the idea that neater is not ALWAYS better, than you can probably get by with only the first couple chapters, or reading the reviews, but if mess and organization is something that you struggle with (like me) than this might be a good one to get you to calm yourself down.
Maybe I should have bought it for my mother...
Want to know what else I've been reading lately? Check out The 2007 Booklist
A Perfect Mess
by Eric Abrahamson and David H. Freedman
My mother gave me this book for Christmas. I think in hope of communicating to me that she loves me in spite of my messy messy ways. I know she does, but it was still a nice gesture.
The premise of this book is that we, as a culture, have gone too far in our quest for organization, and that we now seek to be more organized simply for the sake of organization, rather than because we have a good idea of what the actual benefit of this organization might be. Basically, being organized has a cost in time and resources and such, but frequently people don't consider that, and instead just quest to keep everything NEAT without thinking if that time could have been used more productively for other things. (Anyone that has seen my bedroom or the back seat of my car knows that I suffer from no such illusion, and think that my time can be better used for just about anything rather than just making things neat.)
The authors are not advocating anarchy or complete and total sloppiness, but they argue that in each situation there is an optimal level of messiness that will result in a maximization of productivity/creativity etc. and that we should quest for that. They split the existence of messiness up into many levels and different types of messiness, and talk about how a slight mess can be an advantage in everything from our desks to our thinking.
The argument is a pretty common sense one once you think about it, but I did still find parts of the book enlightening, especially as I am one of those people constantly in a quest to go from chaos to totally perfect organization. I have, since reading this book tried to introduce a little of the productive kind of messiness into some areas of my life. (For example, my MCAT studying now includes more passages unrelated to the things that I have recently reviewed.) I'm pretty sure that I haven't yet found the optimal level of messiness (Read: agenda still compulsively color coded, floor of my bedroom, less easy to find.) But I hope that this thinking might help me get there.
It is a little redundant, and if you can accept the idea that neater is not ALWAYS better, than you can probably get by with only the first couple chapters, or reading the reviews, but if mess and organization is something that you struggle with (like me) than this might be a good one to get you to calm yourself down.
Maybe I should have bought it for my mother...
Want to know what else I've been reading lately? Check out The 2007 Booklist
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