Fundevogel Fights Shelf Creep 2013

I don't have a set number of unread books I want to get through. I just want to reduce the ratio between how much I read and how much I acquire. Hopefully even reduce the total number of books waiting to be read on my shelves. Otherwise I have a feeling I'll get to that point where there will be scores of books unread on my shelves when I die. I don't want that.

I'm setting a couple of posts up right after this one to keep track of what's read, acquired and ultimately whether or not I'm able to keep up with and staunch the growth of my TBR pile.

In 2012 I read 22 off my shelves and acquired 28. Fingers crossed.

Pre-2013 Inventory:
listing as of 12/27/12
Sorta arranged by category. Dates are included when its acquisition date is known. I think this is complete, I'll update it if I find something I've missed.

Various Works of Fiction
Devil on the Cross - Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o
Water Music - T. C. Boyle
The Thurber Carnival - James Thurber 1/7/12
Girl Factory - Jim Krusoe 4/16/12
The Cry of the Sloth - Sam Savage 10/12/12
King City - Brandon Graham 12/25/12 (gift)

Various Works of Non Fiction
The Italian Boy - Sarah Wise
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee - Dee Brown
Freak Show - Robert Bogdan (gift)
Guns, Germs and Steel - Jared Diamond (gift)
The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta - John R. Ridge
Burton on Burton - Mark Salisbury (gift)
The Gulag Archipelago - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
The Prince - Niccolo Machiavelli
Kingdom Under Glass - Jay Kirk 1/31/12 (gift)
A Bright and Guilty Place - Richard Rayner 2/1/12
The Code Book - Simon Singh 4/18/12

Medicine
The Blank Slate - Steven Pinker
Charlatan - Pope Brock
Stuck Up!: 100 Objects Inserted and Ingested in Places They Shouldn't Be - Rich E. Dreben & Co. (gift)
Plagues and Peoples - William H. McNeill 1/14/12
The Ghost Map – Steven Johnson 3/3/12
The Knife Man - Wendy Moore 4/12/12
Vaccinated - Paul A. Offit 4/24/12

Religion, Myth & Folklore
The Golden Bough - James George Frazer
Immodest Acts - Judith C. Brown
In the Devil's Snare - Mary Beth Norton
Religion in Ancient Mesopotamia - Jean Bottero (gift)
Wayward Puritans - Kai T. Erikson (MIA)
The Dead Sea Scrolls - various
The New Annotated Oxford Bible - various
Forests of the Vampire - Charles Phillips

Boxall's Batch
The Moonstone - Wilkie Collins
The Name of the Rose - Umberto Eco
A Handful of Dust - Evelyn Waugh
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time - Mark Haddon
The Monk - M. G. Lewis
The Stranger - Albert Camus
Animal Farm - George Orwell
Blood Meridian - Cormac McCarthy
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban - J. K Rowlings
Love in the Time of Cholera - Gabriel García Márquez
Candide - Voltaire 1/7/12
Fanny Hill - John Cleland 1/7/12
Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency - Douglas Adams 2/28/12
The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks 11/21/12
The Once and Future King - T. H. White 12/18/12

Children's & YA
The White Deer - James Thurber
The Annotated Huck Finn - Mark Twain (gift)

Theater
The Boy Who Would Be Shakespeare - Doug Stewart
Macbeth - William Shakespeare 1/5/12
Othello - William Shakespeare 1/6/12

Poetry
Laxdaela Saga - unknown
Collected Poems 1947 - 1997 - Allen Ginsberg

Biography & Memoir
This Boy's Life - Tobias Wolff
When You are Engulfed in Flames - David Sedaris
Dead Men Do Tell Tales - Byron De Prorok
Life on the Mississippi - Mark Twain

Southern Gothic
All Over but the Shoutin' - Rick Bragg
Selected Short Stories of William Faulkner - William Faulkner
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter - Carson McCullers
Losing Battles - Eudora Welty

DIY Reference
CSS in Easy Steps
Web Publishing with HTML and XHTML
The Animation Book
DVD Authoring with Adobe Encore
Essential ZBrush
The Art of Rigging
Stop Motion - Susannah Shaw
The Prop Builder's Molding & Casting Handbook - Thurston James
Apocalypse Cakes: Recipes for the End - Shannon O'Malley 12/25/12 (gift)

Russian Language
Basic Russian Vocabulary
Аня в странѣ чудесъ - Lewis Carroll (translated by Vladimir Nabokov) 7/12/12
ты только прислушайся - Phillis Gershator 7/31/12

Books acquired in 2013:
Books purchased, won, swapped for or gifted to me.

1. 501 Russian Verbs - Thomas Beyer Jr. Ph.D. 1/28/13
2. Prophet, Vol. 1: Remission - Brandon Graham 2/5/13 (gift)
3. Saga, Vol. 1 - Brian K. Vaughan 2/5/13 (gift)
4. Bloody Foreigners - Robert Winder 2/6/13 (gift)
5. Creation: Our Worldview - Dr. Grady S. McMurtry 2/11/13 (gift)
6. The Sun and the Moon - Matthew Goodman 3/2/13
7. Why Men Fake It - Abraham Morgentaler 3/5/13 (ER)
8. John Dies at the End - David Wong 3/14/13
9. Naked Lunch - William S. Burroughs 3/21/13
10. This Book Is Full of Spiders - David Wong 5/14/13
11. Complete Maya Programming: An Extensive Guide to MEL and C API - David Gould 5/14/13
12. The Society of Timid Souls - Polly Morland 5/20/13 (ER)
13. Master the Basics Russian - Natalia Lusin, Ph.D. 5/29/13
14. After the Fact - James West Davidson & Mark Hamilton Lytle 5/29/13
15. Pissing in the Snow - Vance Randolph 6/1/13
16. Engelsk-nynorsk/Nynorsk-engelsk ordbok - Trude Davidsen Bjerga 6/18/13
17. The Handbook of Good English - Edward Johnson 7/1/13
18. Just the Facts: How "Objectivity" Came to Define American Journalism - David Mindich 7/1/13
19. Punch and Judy in 19th Century America - Ryan Howard 7/8/13 (ER)
20. Norwegian : A Book of Self-Instruction in the Norwegian Riksmål - Alf Sommerfelt 7/18/13
21. Norwegian English Dictionary - Einar Haugen 9/4/13
22. The Tomorrow Girl - Aaron Diaz 9/11/13
23. Breakfast of Champions - Kurt Vonnegut 9/?/13 (gift)
24. The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird Stories - H. P. Lovecraft 9/?/13 (gift)
25. The Holocaust Industry - Norman G. Finkelstein 10/28/13
26. The ABC of Relativity - Bertrand Russell 10/31/13
27. The Autobiography Of Bertrand Russell: The Early Years - Bertrand Russell 11/4/13
28. Bosnia's Million Bones - Christian Jennings 11/20/13 (ER)

Books read in 2013:
This includes all books read, not just the ones from my shelves. Books that don't come from my shelves will be italicized.
I'm counting books acquired and read during the year as off the shelf. They're still off my shelf, even if they haven't been there long.

1. Obedience to Authority - Stanley Milgram 1/11/13
2. King City - Brandon Graham 1/13/13
3. Othello - William Shakespeare 1/26/13
4. Selected Short Stories of William Faulkner - William Faulkner 2/3/13
5. Locke & Key, Vol. 1: Welcome to Lovecraft - Joe Hill 2/7/13
6. Prophet, Vol. 1: Remission - Brandon Graham 2/13/13
7. Horns - Joe Hill 2/15/13
8. Stuck Up!: 100 Objects Inserted and Ingested in Places They Shouldn't Be - Rich E. Dreben & Co. 2/21/13
9. The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta - John R. Ridge 2/26/13
10. John Dies at the End - David Wong 3/4/13
11. The Thurber Carnival - James Thurber 3/17/13
12. The White Deer - James Thurber 3/18/13
13. This Book is Full of Spiders: Seriously, Dude, Don't Touch It - David Wong 3/25/13
14. Why Men Fake It - Abraham Morgentaler 4/7/13
15. Vaccinated - Paul A. Offit 4/12/13
16. The Gulag Archipelago - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn 4/16/13
17. Saga, Vol. 1 - Brian K. Vaughan 4/26/13
18. St. Lucy's Home For Girls Raised By Wolves - Karen Russell 4/26/13
19. The Code Book - Simon Singh 5/2/13
20. Basic Norwegian - Pimsleur 5/17/13
21. The Sword in the Stone - T. H. White 5/22/13
22. House of Leaves - Mark Danielewski 6/2/13
23. The Society of Timid Souls - Polly Morland 6/9/13
24. Immodest Acts - Judith Brown 6/13/13
25. The Prince - Niccolo Machiavelli 6/23/13
26. Stop Motion - Susannah Shaw 6/29/13
27. Pissing in the Snow - Vance Randolph 7/1/13
28. Merde! - Genevieve 7/3/13
29. Plagues and Peoples - William H. McNeill 7/19/13
30. In the Devil's Snare - Mary Beth Norton 8/18/13
31. The Once and Future King - T. H. White 8/20/13
32. Girl Factory - Jim Krusoe 8/24/13
33. Punch and Judy in 19th Century America - Ryan Howard 8/30/13
34. Candide - Voltaire 9/6/13
35. The Tomorrow Girl - Aaron Diaz 9/13/13
36. Breakfast of Champions - Kurt Vonnegut 9/21/13
37. The Ghost Map - Steven Johnson 10/6/13
38. Creation: Our Worldview - Dr. Grady S. McMurtry 11/1/13
39. After the Fact - James West Davidson & Mark Hamilton Lytle 11/2/13
40. The Holocaust Industry - Norman G. Finkelstein 11/4/13
41. Norwegian : A Book of Self-Instruction in the Norwegian Riksmål - Alf Sommerfelt 12/1/13
42. Bosnia's Million Bones - Christian Jennings 12/1/13

Your reading lists are eclectic and intriguing, fundevogel. Following.

Thanks! I'm hoping I make good progress this coming year.

Fundevogel: Fascinating lists. Commendable. Have fun reading!

The Italian Boy is fantastic - start with that one!!

Good luck with your goal.

My downfall is my local library. They have a wonderful cart of books for sale. Ten cents for paperbacks and three for $1.00 for hard covers. I return books and then mosey over to the cart. I never bring home just one.

>Whisper1: That should be illegal.:) I would not stand a fighting chance either.

>fundevogel: Impressed with your Russian reading. My Russian used to be good enough for reading but it's fallen by the wayside in the past couple of decades (damn you, fall of the Berlin wall;). I'm hoping to brush up on it again, however...

You may want to check out the Magic Land books by Alexander Volkov (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Melentyevich_Volkov). He basically started out by translating The Wizard of Oz but then kind of went off on his own. I loved these as a kid.

Great username, btw.

@ littlegreycloud Oh my Russian is very much a work in progress. I had a few semesters several years ago, never got very good and decided to give it another go last year. My Russian books are mostly either children's picture books or language study books.

если вы хотите говорить, понимайте мои слова, они ужасны.

Thank for the heads up about Volkov, sounds interesting. и спасибо. I like it too :)

...они ужасны.

I have no idea why LT won't let me finish that sentence. But there it is. Dangling thought concluded.

1. Obedience to Authority - Stanley Milgram 1/11/13
borrowed from my public library

"Worse crimes have been committed in the name of obedience than in the name of rebellion." - C.P. Snow

This book has been on my TBR list (but not my shelf) for years. About a 100 pages into The Gulag Archipeligo I had to stop and request this one at my library. I just needed something to help me understand how an institution built on human cruelty could possibly find the manpower to perpetuate its cruelty. This definitely helped.

In the 1960's Stanley Milgram conducted a series of experiments that tested what happened when a figure of authority instructed a person to do something that violated common ethics. In the experiment subjects were told that they were taking part in a study into the effects of punishment on learning. There were three roles in the experiment: experimenter, teacher, and learner. The teacher would read a series of word pairs to the learner and the learner was to remember what word was paired with another. However, for every incorrect response given by the learner the teacher was to administer and electric shock. In most versions of the experiment the severity of the shock increased with each wrong answer. The experimenter oversees the experiment, recording results and instructing the teacher.

In actuality it is the teacher that is the subject of the experiment with the parts of both the learner and the experimenter played by actors. The learners responses are predetermined. In addition, as the learner is in most versions located in an adjacent room, recordings of the learner's increasing protests and pain are played in response to predetermined shocks providing the teacher with feedback for his actions.

There is a fairly decent chance you didn't need that summary of the experiment. It's famous. It's famous because the majority of subjects completed the experiment administering the highest shocks on the board until the experimenter terminated the experiment. Don't misinterpret this. While there was an occasional kook that seemed to enjoy shocking the man in the other room virtually all others showed remarkable amounts of stress, expressed concern for the man they were shocking and or entreated the experimenter to halt the experiment or check on the man. And yet, though they would never do such a thing on their own and knew that their actions violated their own ethics very few were able to defy the experimenter's instructions and halt the experiment.

Milgram recounts the experiment in its variations including transcripts of various trials. It is captivating reading the exchanges between the experimenter and teacher, wondering if this subject will be defiant or if he will conform to the will of the authority. You always hope, this one will defy... The book is utterly captivating and edifying, exposing the fatal flaw in the implementation of personal morality.

Honestly, this ought to be required reading. Fuck Ethan Frome. Assign a chapter of this in high school and have a God's honest discussion about ethics, authority, agency and culpability.

2. King City - Brandon Graham 1/13/13
Off My Shelf - gift

I think my favorite thing about this story is how normal the people are and how bizarre the world is. It's the perfect sort of story to be told as a graphic novel (as it is). There's so much humor and creativity in the in the landscape, but it never overshadows the characters and their doings. And, to be fair, when I say normal I don't mean normal as interpreted by our world. I mean they act like real people living in a bizarre, fucked up world. They deal.

The main character makes his living in shady dealings. He takes pride in his ability to get in and out of damn near anywhere undetected, but he's more preoccupied with once again sharing the same city as his ex-girlfriend. And of course he's a Cat Master. The cat is a weapon and there seems no end to what the cat can do with the right injection. At first this seems to easy. A protagonist that can get out of any fix with the ultimate Swiss Army knife? What problem could possibly be a challenge? It turns out that this isn't really an issue. The flashy problems the young cat master needs his cat for are resolved in the most wonderful, ludicrous ways. Need to stakeout the shady neighbors as they raise a Lovecraftian nether-god? Just give the cat his jabs and peek through the asshole of your cat-periscope.

Of course my favorite turn comes at the end when the young cat master confirms once again that whatever the events of the story he's still just a dude and he's got better things to do than be a hero.

3. Othello - William Shakespeare 1/26/13
Off My Shelf

Lame. Totally and completely lame. I felt like I was reading some sort of petty high school drama, except instead of back-biting and teenage assholery There was spineless rumor-mongering and murder.

Seriously. Eveyone's all, "Oh Iago, you're so great", "you're so honest", "what would I ever do without you?" I wanted the Wife of Bath to take a break from her Canterbury pilgrimage to travel 300 years into the future and punch them all in the nose. Thankfully Emilia at least gave the menfolk a decent smack up side the head, but only after Othello, in a matter of days, went from the dedicated husband to strangling his own wife.

It goes something like this:

Othello: Whore. How could you do this to me?

Wife: ???

Othello: I know Cassio is topping you.

Wife: Um no. We're just friends, I love you.

Othello: I know you gave him that hankerchief I gave you. That proves it.

Wife: Dude, I lost that somewhere, he must have found it.

Othello: Liar-whore!

*strangle*

I guess people usually wonder why Iago causes so much trouble. I don't give a good goddamn. I want to know what sort of wet noodle abandons everything he knows about a loved one because of a stupid rumor.

Great synopsis! All that's lacking is the Peeps treatment, like the one for Romeo and Juliet here:
http://www.theplainjane.com/peep_plays/

Ha! Thanks :)

4. Selected Short Stories of William Faulkner - William Faulkner 2/3/13
Off My Shelf

Good stuff. I wasn't really sure what to expect from this, which wasn't helped by hearing several people whose taste in books I respect announce they found Faulkner's writing incredibly difficult or unreadable. Which is weird because aside from a handful of passages I had to reread I didn't have trouble following the stories. The style reminded me of the sort I encountered in high school reading assignments, you know, there is some sort of fetish for assigning that style of story in secondary school. And while some of the stories would have fit well into that dramatic, edifying sort they like to push on students, not far in you find the edge in Faulkner.

For a lot of people it would probably be A Rose for Emily, and I get now why this is the only story in the collection that I'd heard of before picking up the book. But that one couldn't catch me by surprise as it has been emulated far too many times in pop culture for the big reveal to be a surprise, even when I didn't know what it was about going in. Red Leaves on the other hand...Jesus. This was one that I did re-read more than a few passages, not because they were unclear, but because the events they describe are so bizarre and savage it's hard to believe what you think you read is what's actually on the the page. It is. I suppose disbelief isn't helped by Faulkner's reluctance to narrate a story. You could never accuse the man of telling rather than showing. It's just that his method of showing is a bit like watching an alien strip tease. He's peeling off the layers slowly. Getting you closer and closer to the naked flesh, but having never seen a naked alien you can't even tell what's clothing and what's flesh let alone imagine where this is leading.

It's good stuff and definitely true to that uncompromising yet sympathetic look at the South you expect from southern gothic literature.

5. Locke & Key, Vol. 1: Welcome to Lovecraft - Joe Hill 2/7/13
borrowed from my public library

A friend of mine is gently nudging me into reading more comics/graphic novels. This one I checked out of the biblioteca, mainly because I somehow found out about this guy Joe Hill who is the author and also Stephen King's son. So I was curious. All in all it's not bad and there are definitely some genuinely creepy moments, but it didn't have that je ne sais quoi for me. Part of it was the art which seemed just a bit too candyland for me, though it did the job when it was given real opportunity for creepiness. The other part was this first volume really felt like set up. It delivered a ton of back story, established the rules of the supernatural within the environs and ultimately the arc it presented really just seemed like a delivery mechanism for said set up. They've got more at my library so I might read a bit more, see if it finds it's feet.

6. Prophet, Vol. 1: Remission - Brandon Graham 2/13/13
Off My Shelf - gift

Yay! Birthday books!

Another stunning graphic novel from my friend. It seems after reading this and King City that Brandon Graham has a special knack for inventing and showcasing worlds. Where as King City gloried in the trashy, cancerous sprawl of it's dystopian cityscape Prophet introduces alien worlds through the eyes of an earth man traveling a hostile alien land with patient determinism. The text is limited allowing the art to do a lot of heavy lifting narratively and tonally. It's pretty impressive to tell a story with so few words. Also, for me the more words I see on a comic page the more rushed and chaotic the scenes feel to me. The sparseness of text lent a calm grandeur to the pacing. Honestly it does every thing you'd want a graphic novel to do.

7. Horns - Joe Hill 2/15/13
borrowed from my public library

Another by Joe Hill. This one's a novel-novel and a lot stronger than the graphic novel I read earlier. It starts off with Ig, waking from an epic bender he went on on the anniversary of his girlfriend's murder. He can't remember what happened and there are horns growing out of his head. Ig reacts to this turn of events with disbelief and suspicions of his own sanity. He arrives at the conclusion that clearly, despite what his senses are telling him, the horns must be a delusion and decides to carry on as if they aren't there, but to head to the doctor just in case. It's up in the air if it's the horns or the delusion of horns he needs the doctor for, but either way a doctor seems like the right person to see.

The thing is, while Ig does his best to carry on as usual, everyone he meets can't help behaving strangely with him. They seem untroubled by the horns, if they even notice them at all, but they invariably share their darkest impulses with Ig, even begging him grant them permission to do the unthinkable. And if he does....well they dive in with apparent relish, indulging in their rage, insecurity, vice or whatever. It's a frightening power and immediately isolating for Ig who is unprepared to suddenly have the worst of strangers and loved ones alike thrust upon him. And yet, despite the hurt of seeing humanity's hidden face, Ig also finds a strange pleasure in letting people off their leashes.

The story could probably be a bit tighter, but ultimately finds it's purpose in Ig's decision to use his new condition to find the man that killed his girlfriend and have his revenge on him. Poetically, through an unfortunate turn of events, it is Ig himself that was convicted of the crime in public opinion and, never being granted a trial for lack of evidence, was forever demonized in his community. So there's that nice bit of a man perceived a devil finding solace and hope in becoming a devil. And then there's the always welcome consideration of the nature of the devil himself. It's a nice turn to read a book that acknowledges it's mythological roots, but rather than being bound by them grows and flourishes on it's own terms.

Sounds fascinating, fundevogel. How did you rate it?

I waffled a bit and then gave it 4 stars. The story and characters were captivating, but I really do think it could have been tighter. I am looking forward to checking out the movie adaption whenever that happens.

8. Stuck Up!: 100 Objects Inserted and Ingested in Places They Shouldn't Be - Rich E. Dreben & Co. 2/21/13
Off My Shelf - gift

This just didn't live up to it's potential. It was supposed to be a book of and about x-rays of objects ingested and inserted into the human body. There were plenty of x-rays of objects, mostly the inserted sort, but little about them. The accompanying text was heavy on groan worthy puns and sophomoric jokes, but shamefully low on information, whether it be specific to the x-ray in question or a broader look at the practice of swallowing or inserting objects and the consequences of doing so. I came away with the impression that, regardless of the number of M.D.s on the cover, the book was actually authored by a cadre prudish (but giggly) housewives that simply won't admit they have some inkling as to why people stick things up their butts.

Ok. I get it. It's amusing when someone has to go to the hospital because Buzz Lightyear has lodged where no man has gone before. But at some point, after you've shown 80 or so images of things (sometimes scary things) stuck up people's butts, it becomes a civic duty to actually address why so many people end up in this embarrassing situation (hint they didn't fall on a curiously upright floor-cucumber) and give us the skinny on making better decisions on sticking things up our butts.

Seriously. How can you write a whole book on this and never use the words "butt plug" or "flared base"? Oh I know! Because those things were strangely absent from the epic list of things people needed medical assistance removing from their butts.

Oh my....

egregious right?

9. The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta - John R. Ridge 2/26/13
Off My Shelf

First off I want to say that Joaquin is a seriously kickass folk hero (well anti hero), so long as you're judging him by the legend that grew around him over the last 150 years and don't let you're self be deterred by little things like facts or this book. And lets be clear, though this book does little to stir the heart over Joaquin's exploits it's not a commitment to journalistic integrity that saps the spirit out of the story. It's just bad writing and, to be as fair as possible, while Ridge laid the foundations of the legend of Joaquin, like any other folktale it had to be turned over by many storytellers and audiences to become the stirring ripper it is today.

So what is this? It's the first glimmer of what was to come. As noted in the really good introduction California was utterly devoid of it own folk hero, probably because mucking around in the mud for gold dust lacks even the levels of pizzazz found in logging and laying track. But Ridge saw something in Joaquin that spoke to the people -- a dude sticking it to the man.

In real life Joaquin was a Mexican bandit and a murderer praying on miners and other Californian settlers. He killed them. He took their stuff. He certainly wasn't the only one, in a region crazy on striking gold there were always plenty around to relieve the miners of it when it did turn up. What set Joaquin apart was the back story Ridge provided him. Joaquin wasn't just any Mexican bandit. He used to be a good guy, but he'd turned outlaw after a couple of brutal racial attacks against himself and those he loved. As a bandit he exacts his vengeance against those that wronged him. Banditry becomes a means by which an avatar of a maligned and powerless minority strikes back against their oppressors. It's classic Robin Hood, well except the whole giving to the poor.

But none the less it was the right story at the right time. Let's be real: Mexicans in the area, many of which had lived there their whole lives since California had previous been part of Mexico, faced social, economic and physical abuse from the Americans. Americans that had just turned up when they heard "gold". But we'd just come off the Mexican-American War and as far as the Americans were concerned Mexicans in the area weren't just foreigners (again regardless of how long they'd been around) they were the enemy. Laws imposing fines on Mexican prospectors effectively prevented any Mexican from prospecting and if that weren't enough there were plenty of American assholes to make your life miserable with words, weapons and false accusations.

And then there was Joaquin. Or the idea of Joaquin at least, a wronged man, one of them, fighting back when they could not.

The book itself is pretty crap. A 19th century dime novel, plagiarizing salacious bits from other stories, ridiculous caricatures, in desperate need of an editor and chapter breaks. You read it not for what it is (which isn't much) but for what it meant and what it gave birth to. You know Zorro? Joaquin.

10. John Dies at the End - David Wong 3/4/13
Borrowed from my public library...but now I have my own copy. I couldn't help it.

"Our world," he said, "is far more advanced than yours, for reasons you'll understand shortly."

A thin, bony naked woman entered the room carrying two small, white kittens. She sat one of the fluffy cats in my lap and stuffed the other down my shirt. She turned and left.

"There," said the large man, "the kittens will make your sad go away."

John Dies at the End is my first foray into bizarro fiction which, if you're not familiar with it, is exactly what it sounds like. Fiction whose main purpose is to be batshit insane. JDATE (ha!) manages this with grace and more plot turns than 20 feet of intestine in its natural habitat. Also a good bit of viscera.

The story follows two friends, Dave and John, who fall into un-glamorous para-normal investigation after becoming two of the few non-exploded people exposed to a mind-expanding, semi-alive drug called soy sauce. This is a pain in the ass for David who is less than pleased that the side effects of the drug sort of foist the task of fighting off parasitic inter-dimentional invaders on him because, you know, he's one of the only people that can see them. It doesn't help that beyond the usual world-domination plans the malevolent god behind it has developed a taste for fucking with Dave specifically.

The story just sorta winds around as David and John stumble from one catastrophe to another with not quite equal parts of horror and comedy. John's first trip on soy sauce is priceless and there's a bit with a bratwurst early on and a million other things about stupid dogs and non-chronological phonecalls, and the life-saving properties of a verse of Camel Holocaust I want to geek out about. Also, chapter titles that killed me on their own ("Shit Narnia", "Arnie Thinks Dave is Full of Shit"). It's stupid how much I laughed reading this book. There's a blurb on the back by Don Coscarelli (who directed the film version) comparing it to a Douglas Adams/Stephen King mash-up. I suspect a Douglas Adams/William S. Burroughs mash-up would be more accurate. I'll let you know when I finally get to Naked Lunch.

And with that I leave you with the immortal Camel Holocaust, though in my head it sounded more like Big Black or Jesus Lizard.

11. The Thurber Carnival - James Thurber 3/17/13
Off My Shelf

This is a collection of lighthearted stories and essays by James Thurber. I picked it up after getting hooked on the former Keith Olberman segment "Fridays With Thurber". The stories are good, but I enjoyed it less than I hoped for two reasons. The first is that these shine brightest when read aloud and theatrically as Olberman performs them. Sadly, I do most of my reading on my own and am far to lazy to read aloud to myself. The second reason was unexpected. I've read a decent amount of fiction in the last year and a half that was at least 50 years old. For the most part it was fairly predictable which I found unbearably dated (The Turn of the Screw) and surprising how many felt almost contemporary (Tropic of Cancer). This collection had a way of sticking in my craw when I just wanted to be entertained. I mean, this was supposed to be my spoonful of sugar to help Gulag go down.

The thing is Thurber dates his writing. While his primary concern is humor he draws a healthy dollop of his humor from conflict between a changing world and unchanging people. And even when he isn't specifically highlighting things contemporary to his writing he very much sets a scene in the time. Cars are cranked, Freud is cutting edge, grandfather spends half his time thinking the Civil War is still on. All that is fine, it's the casual sexism and racism that got me. I'm talking about the sort of prejudice that doesn't come from malice, but from casually steeping in a world where it's just a fact that women like baubles and can't possibly understand their husbands and "colored" people invariably speak in a manner both quaint and confounding. Without ever meaning to get into racial or gender politics Thurber draws a line between men and women, black and white. And while he probably didn't even know he was doing it he outlines a world where men and women, blacks and whites are classed and divided by the perceived inability of the female and the black to engage the white male.

Certainly Thurber is not setting up the white male as a heroic figure. Thurber is quick to make light of human weakness. And yet, too often there seems to be a beastly woman in the background bringing the worst out of the man. I tried to enjoy it as much as much as possible, but I kept remembering that saying that when you don't notice the bigotry, that's because it coincides with your own bigotry. So here it is in a nutshell. I can handle reading a lot of awful things. But what bothered me about this was the awful things were clearly not a blip in Thurber's mind. They were just things. That ignorance of and indifference to how he wrote an impassable wall between the sexes and races pissed me off.

12. The White Deer - James Thurber 3/18/13
Off My Shelf

Meh. It's not as funny as the Thurber Carnival, and while it's not as distressing either the ultimate result is just unremarkable.

13. This Book is Full of Spiders: Seriously, Dude, Don't Touch It - David Wong 3/25/13
Borrowed from my public library...but now I have my own copy. I couldn't help it.

Ah. The sequel to John Dies at the End. I mean, how can you resist a book with a disclaimer like this:

WARNING: THE FOLLOWING CONTAINS FRANK DESCRIPTIONS OF MONSTERS AND MALE NUDITY.

I'm going to attempt to do this without spoiling this one or JDATE. So, we're back in UNDISCLOSED and it's under attack by horrifying inter-dimensional spider-parasites. As is its wont. The parasites themselves are invisible to all but an (un)lucky few who have been exposed to Soy Sauce (the semi-alive drug introduced in JDATE). Of course the spiders don't really care whether or not you can see them, they still just want to hunker down in your skull and have their parasitic way with you. Things quickly spiral out of control as more and more people are infected. Fear reigns and with an information blackout and a military quarantine it becomes apparent that the parasite may not even be the scariest thing inside the quarantine let alone outside of it.

It's not a zombie story (it totally is), but it nails that social commentary/monster genre George A. Romero loves so much. Except it's a lot funnier. It also takes a well appreciated pause to explain why you should be horrified by the teleportation in Star Trek.

14. Why Men Fake It: The Totally Unexpected Truth About Men and Sex - Abraham Morgentaler 4/7/13
Off My Shelf - ER book

Here's the thing. At some point it occurred to me that knowing my gender really tells you jack shit about who I am. I mean, come on, roughly half the human population share that same gender. As far as enlightening personal identifiers go that's about as piss-poor as it gets.

I'm not the sort of person that says gender is a cultural invention, I just think it's the absolute least important part of who I am and pretty much irrelevant when it comes to getting to know others. We're all humans, all individuals. Rather than piling cultural biases on ourselves and others just let everyone be themselves, whoever they are.

That's where I'm coming from. And from this point of view Morgentaler's book vacillates from weak sauce gender politics to timid tolerance with a side of not-quite-pearl-clutching sex talk. Frankly it's embarrassing. I'm certainly no expert in any of these things but Morgentaler has a tendency to sound like a college freshman that just escaped from his small town conservative Christian upbringing and, coming home for Christmas, is gently and apologetically trying to explain to several elderly maiden aunts that men aren't actually DTF any woman any time and also this one guy in my writing class is gay and he seems really nice. Weak Sauce.

What Morgentaler does know a lot about is penises. You could almost, almost say this book was only about men by virtue of the fact that they're attached to the penises Morgentaler wants to tell us about. You see Morgentaler has made a career of helping men with penis troubles. And that's a noble profession. Sadly, once he dives into his most familiar topic the tone shifts from blushing naivete and the occasional accidentally horrifying gender politics to self-aggrandizing patient-patronizing penis savior. Seriously. Morgentaler's dramatizations of his doctor/patient interactions are absurd:

1. At one point an engineer supposedly asks Morgentaler if he'll be able to father children now that he's allowed his last nut to go necrotic.

2. Morgentaler coins the term "Low T" for low testosterone. He says he did this because apparently everyone, even his most educated patients, has trouble pronouncing "testosterone". He seems very proud of this and eagerly reports some other people have started using the term too!

3. In recounting a story of a married transman and transwoman that want to get pregnant some how neither realizes they would need to go off hormones. I'm pretty sure there isn't a single adult transitioned transperson that doesn't know that.

And then there are the truly horrifying moments. Early in the book Morgentaler recalls a man who couldn't have a sexual relationship with his wife. She just wasn't interested, instead she gave him permission to have other sexual partners. But oh no. Monogamy is the end all beat all so Morgentaler counsels the man to continue pressing sexual intercourse with his disinterested wife. Hey, that's coercive at best and marital rape at worst but goddam it's monogamous so mission accomplished. I mean, everyone knows the thing to do with a woman that doesn't want sex is to put a penis in her, that always fixes everything.

And then there's this gem which so perfectly demeans and diminishes men. It's actually a perfect parallel to the sub-human status women occupied for so long when being a wife was about serving a husband and making babies.

"It is difficult these days for a man to figure out what he brings to the party for the modern woman who appears to have everything: career, money, independence, friends. The one obvious thing he can provide is a hard penis. The good part is that it's true that women cannot supply this on their own. The scary part is that the hard penis can be a unreliable resource. Sometimes it's shy and doesn't want to come out and play. Sometimes it starts out all right and then disappears midact. And eventually with age and/or illness, in nearly all men the ability to 'provide' the hard penis fades away entirely."

Men! Women! Assorted persons with non-binary genders! Do you know want to know what you bring to the table? Yourself. A whole human being. So a woman can stand on her own, so what? You're not her dad. Be adults together. There's nothing wrong with bringing a hard dick to the table, but don't let anyone tell you that's the only thing you've got to offer, or even the most important thing. I don't care how many books they've written.

33: I won't be reading this book (not that I would have anyway), but I admire both the passion and the articulated rationality of your review.

Thanks. Truth be told every once and I while I love to hate a book. I figured out pretty early this would be one of those and just went with it. Not sure if there's a word for that. It's probably related to schadenfreude though :/

I know what you mean. There are a few books listed in my reading journal that I pushed myself to finish so I could really relish writing--and substantiating--a scathing review.

However, I can say that "Why Men Fake It" is justified in its existence by having inspired your hilarious review which I enjoyed thoroughly. Thanks for the Sunday morning laugh.

Thanks, I can see certain people benefiting from it as it's sorta trying to hand-hold more conservative people past some common gender stereotypes. I'm just way too liberal to be impressed by the "Totally Unexpected Truth" Morgentaler proclaims to be selling.

Glad you were entertained :)

15. Vaccinated - Paul A. Offit 4/12/13
Off My Shelf

Good stuff. I'm quite partial to medical history, but it'd been a while since I read any. This is a good one, easily accessible, interesting and super relevant. Although it's organized around the work of Maurice Hilleman it really isn't a biography (thank goodness). Offit simply uses him as a pivot by which he accesses the history and development of vaccines preceding and concurrent with Hilleman's career. It was completely fascinating reading how vaccines grew from the cringe-worthy practice of arm-to-arm vaccination (when the inoculated fluids of one person were introduced directly in the next person to be vaccinated) to the crazy space-age sort of vaccines we've got today where scientists can cleave apart viruses isolating the particles that cause immunity from the dangerous bits with little threat of outside contamination. That's pretty new, they stumbled onto the mechanism to do that in the 80's.

Most of it is about some pretty down and dirty, nose to grindstone type of techniques. Reading about them made vaccines understandable in a way that they never were before. Simply put before I read this book I had only the vaguest idea of how vaccines worked and where they came from. Scientists did it! With magic! Ha. No really, after years and years of hearing about vaccines being made from weakened or dead diseases I get it now. Now I know how they weakened diseases. They forced them to evolve. Stick it in a chicken egg. Force generation upon generation to acclimate to life in a chicken egg until it's not so good at life in a person, but still enough like the original disease that the body can learn to make antibodies from it.

Offit presents how various vaccines were developed and it's fascinating how much the ingredients list sounds like witchcraft. Really. The rabies vaccine was first made in rabbit spines. Offit also does a good job of looking at the political and corporate involvement in vaccine production, both positive and negative. It's all very human. Hilleman was kinda a hardass, but you had to respect how completely committed he was to developing the best vaccine for the people. It's a shame that egos, fear-mongering and bottomlines can do so much damage to such important work.

16. The Gulag Archipelago - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn 4/16/13
Off My Shelf

The Gulag Archipelago (I-II). Over the 4 months I spent reading it I found there were just two reactions in who asked what I was reading: indifferent unfamiliarity and oh, that. This seems appropriate. If you know what the book is "oh, that" is pretty much the simplest, most sincere response.

This isn't anyone's favorite book and what literary qualities there are you don't discuss with your book club. More than anything it is a monument. A monolith of document whose sole purpose is to record the Soviet government's secret holocaust . At least tens of millions were swept up off the streets, from their homes, their jobs and disappeared forever into the grist mill that was the archipelago. Ostensibly these were political arrests, know as 58s. It used to be under the tzars there was pride in being a political prisoner and they commanded a certain amount of respect in prison. Not so under the Soviets. The highest crime was individual thought and if they had even the slightest thought that you may only be 99.99% in step with the regime you were arrested, your dangerous ideas quarantined from the public.

I say ostensibly because this is only part true. It is true that people had only to let off even the barest hint of individual political thought to be swept up. But this was not necessary. The first World War was ending and the distribution of power had changed. Country folk now might be crossing country lines to visit family they had always visited. The Soviet government treated such indifference to the new border as espionage. Russians that returned home from living in Europe were arrested for the crime of being able to notice that The U.S.S.R. was rather shit compared to the west. Russians living abroad that chose to remain rather than return to the new Soviet Union were branded spies, kidnapped and dumped into the archipelago. There were also the Russian POWs, Russian soldiers that had the audacity to live rather than die for their country. They were considered traitors simply by virtue of their continued existence. And in greater numbers were people that were probably just a poor combination of unlucky and naive, people swept up simply because the gulags needed to be fed. You see, as much as the gulags were about political suppression they were even more an economic fact. The country could not support itself on honest labor (if there even was such a thing in the Soviet Union) and thus became dependent on slave labor in the gulags. This is why there were arrest quotas. The gulags required a steady diet of new prisoners as it shat out emaciated corpses that had never had a chance to finish the 5, 10, 15 or 20 year sentences that had been hung on them.

And that's assuming they survived long enough to die in the gulag. The physical book I just completed contained only the first two volumes of Gulag. In all there are seven. In the first two parts Solzhenitsyn doesn't even get to the gulag. Solzhenitsyn you see isn't just writing a memorial, he is documenting a suppressed history as it happens. He knows that no matter how many millions disappear the government is doing it's damnedest to make sure no one finds out what happened to them, to simply make them disappear. And so Gulag attempts to record every facet of the Gulag system including the road to it. He explains the way arrests are carried out, how interrogations are conducted and the role of torture, via both active and passive means. Active torture would be things like beating or staging fake executions (like in Argo) which require action on the part of the torturer, passive torture includes things like starvation, sleep deprivation, prolonged exposure to extreme cold and shoving you in a box full of bedbugs to suck you till you can't stand while they eat lunch (the guards I mean, but I guess the bed bugs are having lunch too). Use of passive techniques by far surpassed active torture as it cost nothing and required no energy on the part of the torturer. There is a limit to just how many prisoners one person can beat. You can only beat one at a time and eventually you have to rest your arm and even the most efficient beater is eventually looking at a repetitive stress injury. On the other hand there is no limit to how many prisoners you can freeze, starve or turn into typhoid fodder all at once. Solzhenitsyn scoffs at reports of people being released unbroken after 4 days of torture by Nazis. Clearly, he says, the Nazis gave up too soon. Everyone breaks under Soviet torture.

On the other hand Solzhenitsyn celebrates every small mercy and the slightest joy that prisoners may enjoy on their way to the gulag. A piss pot, even when it is overflowing, is better than no piss pot. And a bowl is a luxury when you've been eating your gruel out of your coat pockets. And a trip to the latrine, sheer bliss. And then there are the truly unique privileges of the prisoners. In the Butyrki political prisoners awaiting sentencing could request any book from the library. There was no telling when it would turn up but they did turn up and they were books unavailable anywhere else in the U.S.S.R.. They were by in large confiscated from personal collections and the prisoners overwhelmingly indulged in books forbidden in the Soviet Union. Maybe the prison staff didn't know the contents of the books they dutifully delivered to the 58s or maybe they just didn't care about enforcing censorship among a group of people that had already been deemed politically tainted and quarantined. Solzhenitsyn goes so far as to say, "The cell was constricted, but wasn't freedom even more constricted?". You see, outside, where bodies were free minds and mouths were caged by fear of the government, but once in prison you could say whatever you wanted within the intellectual safe zone of the quarantine. And they did. You get the impression that the communal cells housing 58s were full of vibrant and passionate debate on politics and philosophy. Only here were intellectual pariahs free to state their minds, make their cases and change the minds of each other.

There really is no hope of me detailing even a fraction of Solzhenitsyn's work here (and it would only be a fraction of his work if I even attempted it), but I can say with complete conviction that he achieved what he set out to do. He told us what happened to them. How it was done and what it was to live it. And he did it while himself a prisoner. This is what a hero looks like.

Selected Quotes:

"Even the most broad-minded of us can embrace only that part of the truth into which our own snout has blundered."

"The machine stamped out sentences. The prisoner had already been deprived of all rights when they cut off his buttons on the threshold of State Security, and he wouldn't avoid a stretch. The members of the legal profession were so used to this that they fell of their faces in 1958 and caused a big scandal. The text of the projected new 'Fundamental Principles of Criminal Prosecution of the U.S.S.R.' was published in the newspapers, and they'd forgotten to include any reference to possible grounds for acquittal. The government newspaper issued a mild rebuke: 'The impression might be created that our courts only bring in convictions.'"

"If you live in a graveyard, you can't weep for everyone."

"But wasn't everything foredoomed anyway, from the moment of arrest? Yet all the arrested crawled along the path of hope on their knees, as if their legs had been amputated."

"At Novosibirsk Transit Prison in 1945 they greeted the prisoners with a roll call based on cases. 'So and so! Article 58-1a, twenty-five years.' The chief of the convoy was curious: 'What did you get that for?' 'For nothing at all.' 'You are lying. The sentence for nothing at all is ten years.'"

"The OSO enjoyed another important advantage in that its penalty could not be appealed. There was nowhere to appeal to. There was no appeals jurisdiction above it, and no jurisdiction beneath it. It was subordinate only to the Minister of Internal Affairs, to Stalin, and to Satan."

"What the eye doesn't see, the heart doesn't grieve for."

17. Saga, Vol. 1 - Brian K. Vaughan 4/26/13
Off My Shelf - gift

This graphic novel seems primarily concerned with laying the groundwork for the following volumes. We’ve got an introduction to an interesting cast of characters and the strangely personal galactic conflict they’re embroiled in. At this point the strength of the story is with its clever design and interesting characters. I especially like the antagonist Prince Robot. It doesn’t hurt that the book doesn’t shy away from adult content, and for once I mean that in both the sexual and intellectual sense. Though the sexual bits are more developed.

18. St. Lucy's Home For Girls Raised By Wolves - Karen Russell 4/26/13
borrowed from my public library

Russell writes the sort of story where often you can’t tell if the characters are anthropomorphized animals or just people with confusing nicknames. Ultimately it doesn’t matter. In the world of St. Lucy’s Homes For Girls Raised By Wolves children sled in the hollowed out carapaces of giant crabs, there is a manual for the re-education of wolf-children and there are far more ghost fish in the ocean than live ones. The world is magical, but ultimately the stories are far from fantasy.

Honestly, each story is tragic in its own very human way. In Haunting Olivia two brothers spend the night (just the most recent of many) searching coastal waters for the ghost of their dead sister. The narrator of From Children’s Reminiscences of the Western Migration watches as his father the Minotaur hitches himself to their wagon and allows his body to be ground down, blinded by belief in the paradise that awaits them. For me the saddest and most beautiful was the titular story though. There is beauty and abandon and humor, but ultimately this is an unflinching tale of cultural re-education. You can’t help but read it and think of the Native American children that were taken from their families and raised as Europeans saw fit. Here no malice is intended, indeed, the parents themselves send their children away thinking this will help them in ways they cannot. But the ultimate price is a parent and child that cannot recognize the other.

It’s an excellent collection of stories. I came to think of them as adult bedtime stories as the stories themselves are fairly simple while the subtext is rich, nuanced and tuned to those human desires, fears and weaknesses we all know but prefer not to face. Karen Russell makes it easier to do so. Her stories, while rich and vivid, are told without judgment, regardless of the strength or weakness revealed. They simply are. It reminds me a bit of the Faulkner I read earlier. As a reader you can’t help but react to the negative elements, sometimes horrifyingly so, but Russell never tells the reader how to feel and there is a certain ambivalence in that, especially when the characters most vulnerable seem ignorant of just how effed up things are for them.

40: Thank you for your perceptive account of this book, or part of it, at any rate. I'd give it a thumbs-up if it were in the reviews section. This is a book I'll probably never read, although it's been there quietly nagging at my conscience for decades. At least now I feel that I have a better awareness of it.

Gulag is a beast and I'm not sure that I'll ever get around to the rest of it but I'm glad I read what I did. Solzhenitsyn is never easy but he is a really good writer. Even if you're not up for Gulag you might still enjoy Cancer Ward or One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. I haven't gotten to the latter yet but Cancer Ward struck me as a much wryer Russian Catch-22.

19. The Code Book - Simon Singh 5/2/13
Off My Shelf

Ineresting look at the history and craft of cryptography and its eternal nemesis cryptoanalysis. Having had only a rudimentary familiarity with cyphers and other cryptography before I can now say with perfect conviction that I am neither smart enough nor patient enough to even entertain the possibility of further dabblings on my part. My heart got warm fuzzies reading about the epic nerds behind the cyphers and their crackings, but I am not that that kind of nerd (I just think those nerds are hot). I mangaged to do just the first of the challenges in the back, and after sinking several hours fruitlessly into the second I decided I was out of my depth.

Even so it is really interesting reading, and while I have exactly zero interest in cracking a Vigenere or Enigma (ha!) cypher on my own they are pretty cool to read about. Also, Marian Rejewski invalidates all Polish jokes.

20. Basic Norwegian - Pimsleur
Ripped from my Public Library...not sure if that makes it part of my library or not...

Aw, I finished my first Pimsleur course. Og nå jeg snakker litt norsk. Men jeg forstår ikke så mange. To be completely clear I started digging into Norwegian almost exactly a month ago, though I had been taking it in passively over the last eight years by way of Kaizers Orchestra.

I'm not sure how familiar the lot of you are with Pimsleur, for whatever nerdy reason I am forever seeing cheesy google ads for them proclaiming them to the mortal enemies of language tutors. Frankly I call bullshit on anything that claims to have the secret to learning a language quickly and easily, but within the decidedly narrow parameters the Pimsleur courses exist in they are worth looking into. And by this I mean checking them out of your library and giving them a their fair shake. The Pimsleur model is almost exclusively an audio based training system which breaks down pronunciation and introduces dialogue which it then teaches you to recognize and respond to appropriately. Given the intentional use of repetition not a lot of ground is covered in the 5 discs of material, but it is well covered. They definitely err of the side of knowing a few basic things well rather than many things poorly.

The Norwegian course in particular worked well for me, relative to my previous attempts with Pimsleur's introductory Russian course. Admittedly I wasn't studying exclusively with Pimsleur with either language, but I have put in far less time with Norwegian than I have with Russian and I still ended up with a much better grasp of what was going on in the Norwegian course than the Russian course (which I haven't managed to finish yet). Part of this is down to the language itself. Norwegian has far more in common with English than Russian and, if my novice language studies have shown me anything, Russian grammar is a snake pit. Just saying. Of course you can totally learn it despite it's epic grammar, but that grammar makes for a less comprehensible Pimsleur course than Norwegian does.

You see, the beautiful thing about the Norwegian course is without defining any rules it prompts you to find the patterns that define word order and grammar and then execute completely new sentences based on what you've already learned. And that is pretty awesome in a beginning language course. This isn't even attempted in what I completed of the Russian course as the inflections fly far to fast and furious to be intuited and executed by a new student. Because of this and Pimsleur's apparent commitment to remaining mum on the subject of grammar a grammatically intense language like Russian is reduced to repetition without interpretation. I was able to sort out a lot of it based on outside sources, but was eventually stymied by the subjunctives. With the Norwegian course all my questions were easily answered with the other sources I was using (one Norwegian-English pocket dictionary, a 1950's Teach Your Self Norwegian book with Riksmål of all things and my beloved Kaizers). Honestly most of the time I was getting the grammar before it came up in Pimsleur so I got to sit back and think "well of course it's got that ending, it's the definite article" or "oh yes, here you use the infinitive, but over here the verb declines for the present tense". It's all very nerdy and delightful.

And most importantly I'm totally learning a lot. Considering I've been at this just a month it's sort of ridiculous how much I can pick up out of written text and I'm getting much better at recognizing familiar vocabulary in my Kaizers' songs. Of course they sing in a different dialect that's transcribed in Nynorsk rather than the Boksmål of Pimsleur or the (good lord) Riksmål in my primer but I don't think it really matters that much at this point. I mean, I'm getting a leg up in Swedish for free here and that's supposedly a different language entirely so I don't think it's worth fretting over the varied spelling and pronunciation conventions observed in Norway just yet.

46: Very interesting comments about language learning and grammar. Any special reason you're working on Norwegian?

I'm determined to be a polyglot and after struggling with Russian for ages I noticed after spending a bit of time with my Kaizers Orchestra liner notes (they often come in Norwegian and English) they suddenly made a good bit more sense...so naturally spent about an hour attempting to sort out the behavior of pronouns (particularly the possessive ones) and I didn't do half bad. I figured I might as well give Norwegian a go since I was getting nowhere with Russian and at the very least I'd be happy if all I succeeded in was figuring out what my music was about and learning to actually sing along. It is pretty cool to read through the lyrics and find something particularly striking.

And it really is crazy similar to English. If I can't learn this one I'll probably just have to give up on ever learning any other language ever.

I've read that Danish is the language most like English, for which we can thank the Viking raiders from the north. Have you given Danish a try?

Nope, but it's actually really close to Norwegian. Norway was under Danish rule for hundreds of years during which they spoke Norwegian but wrote Danish. When they became their own country and established their own written language (well languages) it was based on Danish writing. Apparently there's a friendly jibe used by all three nations against eachother, that the (Danish/Norwegian/Swedish) language sounds like the speakers language if it was spoken with a hot potato in the mouth. I saw it said somewhere else that "Norwegian is Danish spoken in Swedish."

>40 fundevogel:: I have had that book on my shelf for about fourteen years now... I want to read it but there is always a reluctance to let so much grimness into my life. Are you planning on reading the other parts?

(Never mind, just saw message 44.)

>46 fundevogel:: Sounds like you're having fun, although I think your "mange" (many) should be a "mye" (much). And the potato thing only really applies to Danish.:)

Littlegreycloud,

Hmm, I think you're right. I blame my poor Russian for making me think "much" and "many" are interchangeable. But yes I am having fun :). So you know Swedish and Norwegian? Very cool.

I haven't decided if I'll read the rest of Gulag or not. If I do it won't be any time soon, even though I got a lot out of it, especially pairing it with Obedience to Authority. I'm a lot more conscious about the consequences of my actions and the social structures that coerce people into actions they otherwise wouldn't take part in. It was good for me to really get a look at how cruelty could be executed as a matter of bureucracy and how that effected everyone involved. It's just horrifying. I don't know if it's a book you need or want to read, but I don't think you can hope to get through much at all until you're ready for it.

Well, I have only really studied Swedish but I get by with the other two, at least as far as reading is concerned.

I will be reading "Gulag" eventually -- I grew up behind the Iron Curtain so it has special resonance. I'm currently reading Wir wollten ein anderes Land (We wanted a different country) and was reminded of how crestfallen people were when details of Khrushchev's secret speech started leaking out. A good thing to keep in mind when looking at pictures of North Korea, too.

21. The Sword in the Stone - T. H. White 5/22/13
Off My Shelf, except for the fact that it's still there because it's just the first book in The Once and Future King.

I have mixed feelings about this one. I liked the tone, the matter of fact silliness and the love White obviously has for a good student teacher relationship. I was also tickled that his use of magic wasn't so much about magic as it was a means of introducing a child to natural science and ethics. I loved Merlin and while I'm not sure how much of his character was an invention of White's and how much was already there with Mallory this is all I need to know why Merlin is such an enduring character. It's no surprise that Rowlings found inspiration for Dumbledore in him.

On the other hand White runs out of ideas quickly here. Each chapter is essentially its own story and after the first few they start to lose zest and begin repeating themselves. It's charming the first time Merlin turns Wart into an animal to let him learn about the world from a different perspective. But once you realize there is seemingly no end to the transformation lessons it becomes less charming and smacks of laziness. A teacher happily passing of his teaching duties in a ludicrous series of "take your kid to work" days and an author happily recycling the same gimmick over and over to deliver shamefully obvious moral lessons (though the value of hard work and invention is oddly absent). There is just enough God-talk to be weird. I can't tell if this is meant to reflect the period or simply reflects White's own relationship with Christianity. If it is meant to be period it doesn't really feel right as White's vision of Midieval England is clearly an amalgamation of fact, fancy and a largish helping of contemporary humor and anachronism. I could have done without every mention of Robin Hood and Maid Marian. In a book entirely composed of not quite real characters, introducing them as mythic figures in an already fanciful setting left them painfully unreal, flat and twee.

Ultimately I enjoyed White's style, but found the book severely lacking in substance. This probably sounds harsh applied to children's literature, but my expectations came from the very strong opening chapters which the rest of the book just couldn't live up to.

22. House of Leaves - Mark Danielewski 6/2/13
borrowed from my pulic library

In the introduction to Ficciones Borges explains that there is no need to write the books he imagines when he can effectively describe their purpose in a more concise format. Since reading Borges' collection of non-existant books I've been in agreement with the Argentine. Borges was brilliantly effective at packing dense philosophy, metaphor and humor into a compact if challenging short story. It almost seemed a mercy that he never wrote a novel as I suspected it might lead me to wonderful terrible labrinyths from which I could never emerge.

After reading the introduction to House of Leaves I thought, "my god, he's going to do it." This would be Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius brought to screaming life as, paradoxically, one of its own hronir. An artifact of a history that never was. A world that lives in the mind manifested in my hands, a series of other worlds impossibly nested within, simutaneously containing, contained and interpentetrating eachother. Holy fuck.

I'm not going to review this book. For one it seems redundant. What could I possibly add to a book that is endlessly self analytical? There is temptation to fall into step and emulate the obtuse and alternatingly sublime and idiotic criticism defining the Navidson report, but such an attempt would be merely cute and shallow on my part.

Instead I just want to record my experience and impressions reading the book, to help me remember when I look back on it.

Boundaries, impossible ones that defy space and reason. Do these geometries reflect another sort of space? Could this be a reflection of an internal space? Are there limits to the space in a human mind? Could the distances Navidson walks in the house reflect the distance he must travel to reconnect with his wife?

I woke up two nights in a row in the middle of the night. Grinding my teeth. I haven't done that since I was a kid. The only way to get back to sleep was to read more.

I figured out pretty early that I personally couldn't read the book in sequence. I stopped thinking of it as a novel. I used five bookmarks and sticky note and read what I wanted when I wanted. Like the house there is no beginning, middle and end here, just more explorations. They grant insight, but never the full story. If someone asks what the book is about I say "to me it is about boundaries," and then founder trying to explain the swirling eddies, how it is impossible to follow each to its conclusion and that what I find is only the product of the current I happened to be swept up by.

This would be an amazing book for a book club as I expect each member would find something different. It's not like reading a book, its like getting to know someone. It isn't linear or purposeful. You get pieces, out of order that in an imperfect manner define the boundaries of the person. And whats more, like the house people change. What you have learned in the past may no longer hold true.

And lastly a salute to my old art theory teacher. I know for a fact I wouldn't have lasted a day in the House of Leaves without him. Its strange to think that of all of the styles of text here it's the the formal report that most captivated me. It was a little nostalgic to revisit the blend of absurd and insightful all rolled together in that dry and hopelessly obscurant voice that set loves so much. All the same I'm still not planning to revisit any of that Derrida and Baudrillard you dropped on me Carmine.

56: I'm interested in your comments on House of Leaves. That book does seem to do something extraordinary to people. I read it a few months ago, and it took me six or seven weeks to get my review written. I'd write a few lines or just a few words and then have to run away. I wonder what it could have been like writing the book.

Now I'm struggling with my review of The Tragedy of Arthur for similar reasons, even though the book itself is less challenging by what seems like an order of magnitude.

I'm also waiting delivery of Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Maybe it will help me talk about books like these.

Jealous, ER didn't see fit to send me Tragedy of Arthur. Where do you track/review your reading? I'd love to hear your thoughts on the ergodic book when you get to it. As it is House of Leaves has left me sort of indignent at all these other books, mandating that I ought to read them in sequence. Pfft. I think there's a pretty good chance I'll be attempted a nonlinear reading of the next book in The Once and Future King.

My journal thread is here:
http://www.librarything.com/topic/147168

I got Arthur from the library. It's nowhere near as complex as HoL; you can in fact read it linearly. What it has in common is the inclusion of a constructed text by an alleged other author and the POV narrator's commentary on it. In this case the other author is (or is not) Shakespeare, and even pulling off a counterfeit work of a counterfeit Shakespeare is no small feat.

23. The Society of Timid Souls - Polly Morland 6/9/13
Off My Shelf - ER

The book takes its name from a long forgotten group of shy pianists. Rallied together by a man that promised to squelch their paralyzing stage fright they met and took turns preforming to an audience of their peers. Fellow timid souls hooting hollering and generally doing everything possible to be the worst audience imaginable. Apparently the program was pretty successful at steeling the nerves and confidence of the previously nervous pianists.

But this book is not about them. Instead Morland, a self-described timid soul, inspired by the pianists sets out to discover what courage is and if it is something that can be learned. Sadly as an interview based book the bulk of the material is indistinguishable from the millions of human interest stories you've already encountered about soldiers, firefighters, extreme sports, cops, the terminally ill or disabled and those people that in a split second put themselves between a baby and a mad dog. These people act bravely, though their own opinions on their courage (or lack of it) and why they acted as the did are rarely anything you haven't already heard a million times before. And here in lies the problem. Morland set out to write a book of courage but most of the people she interviews, regardless of their personal courage, don't seem to have any more insight into the virtue than the rest of us.

Fortunately there are bright spots. The first was not about courage but fear. In a section on performance anxiety Morland uncovers a vast swath of professional musicians suffer from crippling performance anxiety. And though this fear lacks the drama of the battlefield or a sheer cliff wall it is no less real or difficult to overcome. It turns out though, that because this fear is felt with shame and often seen as a threat to a musician's livelihood it is dealt with clandestinely. It turns out something like 30% of professional musicians take beta blockers to calm their nerves when they anticipate a performance will test their nerves. It does make the, better musicians they explains, it just allows them to perform their best.

The other bright spot comes much later in a section dedicated to what Morland calls "moral courage". Here there are people that stick to their guns and do what they think to be right in the face of social opposition. Morland clearly sees this as the height of bravery as often it requires a person to act alone and in defience of his peers. Those interviewed in the section were universally more interesting and thoughtful. No doubt a consequence of courage born of personal ideology and conviction rather than split second action. There are tantalizing sections with a non violent civil rights activist and the man that literally wrote the handbook on non violent resistence. It would have been a much better book if more of the interviewees were of this caliber.

Gave Trisam Shandy a go and decided to release it into the wild unfinished. I like the premise and form it materializes in, I just have a hell of a time deciphering Sterne's 18th century prose. Speech has just changed too much in the intervening years for me to be able to enjoy this the way it was intended.

24. Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy - Judith Brown 6/13/13
Off My Shelf

Completely bizarre. And consequently one of the easiest bits of academia I have ever read. First off let it be know that the lesbian elements are a relatively small part of the book. There.

This is the story of a 16th century nun that rose to power in a fledgling convent by passing herself off as personally chosen by God. You know, visions, stigmata, trances, holy suffering, pretending to be possessed by Jesus or angels. The Usual Things. These, apparently miraculous things, had a well established history at the time. Enough so that when the veracity of Benedetta's...experiences were investigated no one ever asked if she was faking. Nope, inconceivable. Instead they went on and on with the minutea of her experiences, comparing them with other supposed mystics' experiences and evaluated if her visions were in step with church canon. No, it was not chichanery they worried about but devilry. Because obviously if these weren't heavenly visions they were deceptions sent by the devil. That or she was just an overly enthusiastic nun working herself up into thinking she was communing with god in miraculous ways. That wasn't so uncommon either. But with the extent of Benedetta's experiences simple flights of fancy just couldn't cover it. This is after all a woman that mobilized her convent to throw herself a lavish wedding ceremony for herself and Jesus and spent a good part of it talking about how awesome she was as she pretended to be possessed by her divine bridegroom. She was nothing if not extravagant and assertive in her saintly claims.

The fact that she used the power she attained to coerce another nun into a secret lesbian affair would hardly compare if not for the fact that no one had a frickin clue what to think about two women getting it on. Angelic possession and invisible divine bridegrooms sure, but two ladies getting it on. It literally broke their brains. They knew what they thought of two men getting it on (they burned them to death) but two ladies? How could they possibly lust for anything other than dick? Oh Renaissance, how perfectly unenlightened of you. You definitely get the sense that the straight male heirarchy was petrified at the prospect that maybe their dicks weren't the best thing ever. But whatever, the heteronormitsm was so extreme back then even Benedetta appearred to have trouble placing her same sex attraction into the cultural framework available. Ultimately she created a narrative that imposed a heterosexual frame on her lesbian affair. You see she enacted her sexual aggression in the character of one of the male angels that "posessed" her. This also served to make it easier to coerce her partner's participation.

Because of the sort of sources the story is drawn from it is impossible to know the character of the affair. There was certainly a massive disparity between Benedetta's power (she had become an abbess and in effect a living saint) and her partner's. It could have been entirely coercive and rape-y. Or perhaps it was consenual. I expect it was not fully one or the other. Because of the extreme repercussions for being caught in such a relationship both parties reported the relationship when questioned in the manner which best served to cover their own ass. And who can blame them? Regardless of their actions it's hard to believe they would justify what the church would do to them for the truth.

The conclusion? Everyone decided the devil was behind the whole thing. Bendetta was imprisoned for the rest of her life for the weakness she showed in allowing herself to be fooled by the devil and her former sex partner went back to being a nun barely worth a footnote in history.

Verdict: shit was crazy.

25. The Prince - Niccolo Machiavelli 6/23/13
Off My Shelf

It's not quite the scheming snakepit implied by what the author's name has come to mean. Rather it is a systematic look at the ways rulers succeed and fail to gain and hold political power. The analysis is wholely free of moral judgement so the criteria by which actions are judged comes down entirely to how effective an action is at accumulating or maintaining one's power. The assumption is that the ruler is under constant threat by outside parties (and some inside ones) that want nothing more than to increase their own power by forcefully taking land from the ruler. Considering Machiavelli recommends getting some conquest under your belt early as a way get your subjects to see you as powerful and your kingdom as great I guess the border paranoia was justified.

Mostly it's depressing to think there are still places in the world this sort of politics flies. And of course there's just something wrong with business people reading this book for tips and inspiration.

26. Stop Motion - Susannah Shaw 6/29/13
Off My Shelf

Nice introductory overview of how to make stop motion animation. Some sections are far more detailed than others, but it seemed to work out that subjects most exclusive to stop motion were covered in most detail while those skills employed in other sorts of animation and filmmaking got lighter treatment. Seems fair since they tend to be things which you can already find plenty of material on in sources specifically focusing on them.

27. Pissing in the Snow - Vance Randolph 7/1/13
Off My Shelf

Oh look! Another book of folklore!

This is actually a collection of folktales from the Ozarks, curated exclusively by sanctimonious publishers refusing to include them in Randolph's original collection of folktales of the region. This is literally a collection of tales brought together by that favorite badge of "unprintable". Honestly it's mostly a collection of crude sexual story-jokes of varying degrees of success. The sort of thing you might expect a dirty old man to bust out, also with varying degrees of success. Some are hilarious and creative, and there are certainly plenty poking fun at the incestuous reputation of hillbillies. I was tickled by the bridegroom who, indignant at finding his bride a virgin on their wedding night, declared, "if she ain't good enough for her family she ain't good enough for me." Some other stories did rub me the wrong way, but honestly this book is about preserving the local oral literature and that's a noble thing regardless of the variable quality of individual stories.

28. Merde! The Real French You Were Never Taught at School - Genevieve 7/3/13
borrowed from my public library

This one was shamelessly picked up for my Dewey challenge because I actually take all the sections seriously. Even the ones in 400. In other words this got me a section in the French division without much fuss.

In some ways this does feel more authentic than the usual sort of phrase books. There's something that just feels forced about phrases like, "Tell me please, where is the train station?" or "when do you want to eat?". This probably reflects some defect in me as clearly these are perfectly normal sentences, however there's something that just feels more real when a phrase book commits to telling me how to remark, "You bastard, I'll smash your face in," (Espece de salaud, je vais te casser la gueule) or "I walked in some dogshit," (J'ai marche dans de la merde).

Though I don't really see any new French vulgarities sticking in my brain from the book.

Will have to keep an eye out for Merde! Sounds fun.

Once, on a school trip to Quebec City, our tour guide asked if we wanted to learn about Quebec history or how to swear like the locals. We definitely chose the history part... :)

I've heard about the French Canadian swears! I love that when the church deemed certain religious terms too sacred to be spoken what they actually did was render the sacred profane in speach. I swear if I knew the proper pronunciation I'd add tabarnac and sacrament to my cussing vocabulary in a second.

29. Plagues and Peoples - William H. McNeill 7/19/13
Off My Shelf

Well it's been nearly a month since I finished this so it's probably time. This book, written in the 70's, is a pretty academic look at the historical relationship between humans and disease, specifically how great an impact each has in shaping the other's history. This ought to be at least superficially familiar as it's become widely accepted that the European conquest of the America's was pretty much ensured by the catestrophic death toll of European diseases on native populations. Such loss of life often left survivors too few too maintain their civilizations and appeared to be a sign of the divine abandoning them to side with the Europeans.

McNeill's focus is the so called civilized diseases. Things like smallpox, cholera, mumps and such. These diseases, he explains, cannot exist without civilization as all those infected either die or gain immunity. Without a large enough pool of unexposed people regularly coming in contact with infected persons the diseases burn themselves out for lack of hosts. So you see, none of these diseases could exist without humans first supplying a nice nest. Further, humans and civilized diseases evolve together. A human community's first exposure to a civilized disease is invariably extreme. The community his no immunity whether it be imposed by former survivors or social controls and the book references many such catastrophic events on all continents. But from there the disease and it's hosts start to find an equalibrium. The most virulent strains of the disease are burned out by their self-defeating deathtoll allowing the human population to adapt socially and biologically to milder strains. Of course it still sucks, but that's basically how it went until vaccines came around.

Honestly the book is a bit macro for my tastes. My eyes sort of glaze over at troop movement-type history and as you're reading about the trade routes and armies that transported diseases around the world it feels pretty troop movement-y. There is very little discussion of the character of diseases discussed, but McNeill does do an excellent job of illustrating just how much more disease there was in everyday life prior to modern medicine and what that meant to a scientifically naive populous. Basically everyone lived their lives having seen plenty of sudden and unpredictable death from disease. You could literally be totally fine one day and dead the next (seriously, cholera will fuck you) and you get the inpression it left people pretty fatalistic. All in all it's solidly in the category of "read this to get a better picture of the shit people had to deal with before you were alive and thank your fucking stars you don't have to."

30. In the Devil's Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692 - Mary Beth Norton 8/18/13
Off My Shelf

I picked this up a while back based on a glowing review from one of my peers in the Dewey group. I can see why she (or was it he?) had such high praise of it though I found it a bit too academic to be an easy read. Well, that and too tragic and infuriating. I hadn't really counted on my atheist rage being an issue, but it turns out executing people for bullshit from some archaic Christian bullshit does get my gander up. Who knew?

Anywho. Apparently what sets this book apart from other books about Salem is the broad study it is based on (according to its author). Rather than focus closely on Salem's witch problems on a witch-by-witch basis the author progresss through the events chronologically paying attention not just to the witchery, but also to political, economical and social events in which the crisis was nested. While it is impossible to neatly attribute the crisis to any one factor Norton does an excellent job of pointing out the terrifying conditions many of the colonials in the area lived under with no good means of mitigating their situation.

You see the Second Indian War was on and a long history of violence and betrayal on both sides made the hope reconcillation impossible. The local English government had done a particularly poor job of protecting endangered communities and the number of colonials that had seen their neighbors and families tortured and killed was grotesque (though the local tribes had seen equally brutal shit at the hands of the English, like, I don't know, randomly selling hundreds of them into slavery after a supposed truce). Salem was simply a town full of raw nerves with no means of improving their situation.

One can speculate (sometimes pretty confidently) about why this person was accused or why that person accused them. And honestly, occassionally you wondered if there was a sort of justice in them. Certainly there were no real witches, but at least a few times it looked like the usually powerless victims of abuse were able to overcome their abusers. Of course that could only be justice in a poetic sense. The actual trials were a farce. How could they not be we they turned on a very serious debate about how one could recognize a witch. Certainly this is a problem inherent any time the law gets messed up in something as stupid a witchcraft. However plenty of other places around that time and place had tried cases of witchcraft without going batshit insane. There was a good bit more acquittal usually. But not in Salem.

And that's the ugly religious superstition meeting a population living on the razors edge. Naturally the stress put on them by the Indian War was out of their power to resolve, but here rears the ugly head of religion. In true Westboro Baptist style those ignorant 17th century Puritans couldn't just see their lamentable situation as it was. Instead they had to bring God into it. Things were bad for them beause God was punishing them. God was giving Satan power to persecute them with his fiendish French, the heathen natives and all those goddamn witches. This was nice for the government officials as it allowed them to write their shameful failings off as divine providence. It was nice for the colonials as while they could do jackshit about the French and the Indians there's nothing for blowing off steam like scapegoating and human sacrifice.

For what it's worth afterwords most of the prviate documents of the crisis were destroyed out of shame. They leave incriminating holes in otherwise steady journals and correspondence.

31. The Once and Future King - T. H. White 8/20/13
Off My Shelf

As tumblr says, all the feels.

So. I first attempted to read this book many, many years ago when I was just a wee middle schooler. Maybe even younger. And this is probably the first book I can remember giving up on. I was much more of a completionist back then so it meant something that I couldn't finish it. Now that I've finished it I'm glad I couldn't finish it then. It's an odd book, far too concerned with the dearest hopes and tragedies of life for someone that's barely lived at all. And if I had finished it then I wouldn't have had reason to experience it as an adult.

Ostensibly The Once and Future King is T. H. White's take on the Arthurian legend. I have never read Le Morte d'Arthur so I can't say how faithful White is to tradition, but it seems to me he probably wrote the plot of the legends, but animated the old bones with his own passions, sorrow, flaws and hopeful ideas. It's just so beautifully, painfully human. There is no distance, no cool diffidence. I don't think I've ever read a novel before where I felt most connected, not to the characters but to the author. There were so many times I just wished I could hug White as hard as I could and tell him I knew what he meant.

You see, The Once and Future King isn't like other fantasy. It isn't particularly magical, it isn't at all adventurous either. Hell, a good bit of the action is narrated second hand to an audience in the book. It sure as fuck isn't escapist. It's literally the first book I've read where each part felt like an entirely different novel. I suppose they were, but I like them jammed together so their differences become obvious. You see, it isn't a story so much as a life. Stories begin and end over the course of the book, but Arthur's life goes on until it doesn't. You can bracket off sections of his life to make stories complete with arcs, themes, and peril overcome, but the life they are cut from goes on. The wide-eyed enthusiasm of youth grows into the determined idealism of a new monarth. The hard misteps and cruelties of life bring doubt and sadness to the King and while he still believes in his dream it seems like time takes him further and further from it no matter what he does. It is a painful thing to come to the end of one's days and wonder if your life's work was always dead on the vine. Maybe, he worries, people are simply too ugly and hateful to stop beating the snot out of eachother and just be excellent to eachother.

It's pretty clear that the book was put together on the heels of two World Wars. You can bet any reference to the canon could just as easily be swapped out for the bomb. There's a good bit of ink laid down on the matter of force, justice and pacificism. On why people go to war and the cost of it. Pages and pages trying to untangle how we might build a future truely without war. But neither Merlyn nor White have the answers we need and they know it. It is an imperfect and violent world and it kills them they can't see a way out of it. How can you ever break the cycle of violence if the only weapon in your arsenal against force is more force?

Just to be clear as much as I am gushing here (and there's a bit more in my earlier review of The Sword in the Stone) my appreciation was not always appreciative. I flat out hated The Ill-Made Knight. Much idiocy and gnashing of teeth over said idiocy (I'm certain my intial attempt was broken off shortly after starting that part). As I said earlier, it gave me all the feels, love, hate and a million things in between. And in the end I appreciate that because all those negative feelings were reflective of the stupid as bullshit that really does mess up the world. It pisses me off in real life and White was never going to spare us the sight of our own fatal flaws.

I wish White had the answers, but what he does is still a good bit braver than most attempt. Holding up the mirror.

32. Girl Factory - Jim Krusoe 8/24/13
Off My Shelf

Doesn't merit a review.

You have had a really interesting crop recently (>32 fundevogel: excepted, clearly!) - I'm pottering down the recent additions just wanting to add everything to my To Be Read list for future reference :)

Indeed! I think the fact that so many of them have been really good is what has upped the number of books I've read this year.

33. Punch and Judy in 19th Century America - Ryan Howard 8/30/2013
Off My Shelf - ER

There's something that happens often enough in schools that, even if it never happened to you, you've probably run across it more than once in your education. Namely students are given a project that they can, to a varying degree, define themselves. But upon proposing their project their instructor strongly advises they choose another subject. There can be many reasons for doing so, but the one that always seemed most common and defensible to me was when the student had selected a topic for which they would almost certainly have trouble finding research materials on. Sometimes the student is committed (or bullheaded) and barrels on inspite of advice and if the instructor was correct the result would invaribly be a thin, desperate attempt at literary stone soup.

That's what I was thinking as I worked my way through Punch and Judy. The orginal text makes up a scant 116 pages, but feels like a morbidly obese pamplet given the very limited depth of it's content. The author, with his apparently tragic lack of source material, tries to make do listing such dry and statistical facts as the names of performers, dates of shows, their venues and lists names of guests that would have been noteworthy in 19th century America (few of them remain so today). He pads his page count with quotes that rarely provide new information and entire chapters seem to have naught to do with Punch and Judy at all despite hopeful titles like "Punch and Judy in the Museum and the Circus". There is far more talk of freak shows in this chapter than puppetry, but it is justified with a hand wave as the author reminds us that often Punch shows existed along side freak shows. But then in the face of such obvious reaching he finds even more astounding levels of tenuousness in name-dropping such apparently irrelevent university darlings as colonialism, capitalism, queer theory and the uncanny. This is not to say that a relationship could not be made here, at least metaphorically, but it is clear that Howard does not have the historical resources to make any compelling argument regarding these possible connections.

Tragically, at some point the author says, "my thesis is X", and even though the book had barely started I knew this was I problem. Not because there's something wrong with explicitly stating your thesis, but because I already knew that by the end of the book I would not know his thesis anymore because aside from that one sentence there really wasn't any thesis established within the writing. Not unless his thesis was "a collection of anything I can scrape together with some sort of connection to Punch", but even given the accuracy of that possible thesis I'm about 99% sure the thesis in that one sentence sounded a good bit less desperate and a good bit more beyond the abilities (or at the very least the resources) of the author.

It does seem like Punch and Judy would have been a fun and culturally significant show, and I wish I could know more about it. Sadly reading this book leaves me thinking that in addition to not being able to enjoy live Punch and Judy a denizen of the 21th century I won't really be able to find any information of much worth on it either.

To steal Meredy's six word review conceit : precious little punch, academic distraction aplenty

>72 fundevogel:: I bought this only recently. Will move it up on the list.

34. Candide - Voltaire 9/6/13
Off My Shelf

It started out strong, but it seems to run out of steam midway through. I blame it on the fairy tale simplicity of the tone. It works well with the short punchy bits, but loses kick as the story became less episodic and more of a moron's quest.

But Voltaire does seem like he would have been a pretty awesome dude. Beats the pants off of Rousseau in sheer hangability.

78: That summation jibes with my impression of many years ago. The same, I thought, was true of its English contemporary Gulliver's Travels, which starts off interestingly enough with the familiar tales of Lilliput and Brobdingnag but drags on as the voyages become ever more preposterous and the satires more strained and obvious (even, somewhat paradoxically, when they are obscure--i.e., relating to political and social matters of Swift's time).

You don't have to know everything about what's being satirized to know that parallels are being forced and situations exaggerated to the point that internal logic falls apart and it's no longer a story but just feels like a lesson in comic-book form.

I wondered I about Gulliver's Travels as I read it. The introduction mentioned it and said Voltaire and Swift were admirers of each other. I read it long ago when I was a kid and found it pretty wanting. Of course I didn't even know it was meant to be a satire then. Somewhere along the line it must have really missed it's mark to be so often mistaken for a children's book.

35. The Tomorrow Girl - Aaron Diaz 9/13/13
Off My Shelf

Woo! The first volume of my favorite transhumanist webcomic immortalized in the medium of reconstituted tree corpses!

36. Breakfast of Champions - Kurt Vonnegut 9/21/13
borrowed from a friend turns out it was a gift

Very good, and sorta surreally realistic. I think at some point Kurt decided breaking the fourth wall was a bit passé and decided to break the other three. I can't really bring myself to write a proper review though as I've already been spending too much time angsting about the subject of the book and while my angst is no where near tapped out the thought of talking about it anymore right now exhausts me.

I' ditching The Moonstone because I'm 80 pages in and I still think all the characters are useless and stupid and the diamond is useless and stupid and I couldn't name a single time I gave less of a shit about if a mystery was solved. Because at the end I'm pretty sure no matter who stole it they'll all still be pointless wastes of carbon.

83: I'm sorry to hear that. It was a very early entry in the detective genre (Wikipedia says "generally considered the first detective novel in the English language") and doesn't flow like later novels that followed well-established conventions, but I still enjoyed the story as a period piece.

I get that it is organized in an unusual manner and I've read enough 19th century fiction to appreciate that it is technically better written than wide swathes of its contemporaneous brethern...but it just wasn't enough. Every time I started to appreciate the writing it turned on me as it displayed a smug self-satisfaction that seemed to say, "see what I did right there? Yeah, I'm pretty awesome" and completely spoiled what had been done right. Couple that with the intolerable characters and a complete lack of credible drama and I was done.

I really don't see how I'm supposed to get invested in whether or not a 15 year old gets back her massive birthday diamond and which of her wealthy cousins she ends up marrying. The character of story felt like celebrity tabloid mania transposed into a 19th century manor. Oh and I was pretty irritated by all the racism, sexism and classism.

I glad you got something out of it...I just couldn't.

> character of story felt like celebrity tabloid mania

This may be one of the most accurate descriptions I've read for certain sections of 19th century literature :)

I'm glad I'm not alone on that :)

37. The Ghost Map - Steven Johnson 10/6/13
Off My Shelf

"It's true enough that the Victorians were grappling with heady issues like utilitarianism and class conciousness. But the finest minds of the era were also devoted to an equally pressing question: What are we going to do with all this shit?"

Somewhere around chapter two I realized this is a book about shit. And that's ok. It turns out it's something that needs addressing once you start packing enormous qualtities of people (who are very good at making shit) into a comparatively small area (like Victorian London).

Victorian London saw an insane population explosion (brought on by industrialization I believe) for which it had neither the square footage nor the infrastructure to support. With gross class disparity this meant millions of poor were packed into squalid neighborhoods basically living on top of each other. Technology had come far enough to make water closets a thing, but even if you had one they just drained to your cesspool or your basement, yard or whatever public space it encroached on if you were too cheap to have the nightsoil-men empty said cesspool. A lot of people were too cheap, or just couldn't afford it. Hell, plenty of people just emptied their filth out the window.

As you might expect this created an enviroment less romantic than you probably imagined the last time you saw or read a story placed in Victorian London. It was just really shitty. Really Shitty. And then they started dumping the waste in the Thames to try and get rid of the fetid stink...you see where this is going?

Cholera is normally a little bacterium that knocks out a humdrum existence living on plankton or something. But you introduce it to the human digestive system and it loses its mind (so to speak). Once it hits your small intestine it produces a chemical that tricks the human body into endlessly dispelling its water into the intestines while the bacterium replicates itself in the trillions. People can lose as much as 30% of their body's water in a single day. A person can go from perfectly healthy to cadverous in a day. Or dead. I'm not sure I ever heard of a disease that can tear down a human body as quickly as cholera. Thankfully because cholera has to be introduced to the digestive track one infection is unlikely to result in transmission...unless the cholera bacterium's wildest dreams comes true and it stumbles into a communtiy of humans that regularly ingest each other's fecal matter.

So non existent waste disposal + ground water = ground water you don't want to ingest

This seems obvious today, but Victorian Londoners didn't have a lot of options at their disposal and no one had a goddamn idea what caused disease anyway. Ok, they had ideas...but they were wrong. In fact the primary theory of the time, that they were caused by miasma (bad smells/air), was actually the basis for the decision to turn the Thames into a sewer (they thought it would help the smell).

So this was the situation that paved the way for London's brutal cholera epidemic. Johnson's book primarily follows two men, a scientist and a clergy man, who, initially on the ground independently with disparate theories regarding the epidemic eventually came together to uncover the source of the disease and it's means of transmision. Honestly it reads like a mystery. Without any knowedge of the existence bacteria or means of actually seeing it the two were none the less able to track it and deduct it's means if transmission with their exhaustive boot leather investigation of the neighborhood, it's inhabitants and their habits.

I've never appreciated sewers so much.

37: As it happens, it was only yesterday that I read the chapter entitled "The Bathroom" in Bill Bryson's fascinating At Home. In one of his many compelling digressions, he details the history of sewage in London and how it led to the devastating Victorian epidemic of cholera. At the moment my appetite for more of the same is a little low, so I'm duly warned. I agree, though, that those impressions will certainly color any future reading with the same setting of period and place.

What a weird coincidence. I don't blame you. I was emotionally drained after In the Devil's Snare.

The unexpected side of this was how much of it ended up being about city planning and government health measures. It makes sense, I just hadn't put that much thought into large communities and just how extensive public health measures must be to keep them livable.

I just might cite this next time a meet a liberatarian that wants a row.

The Ghost Map is on my TBR-eventually list (although perhaps I will avoid reading it at the dinner table...). Great review! And agreed, sewers are a fantastic invention. That and indoor plumbing.

37 sounds fascinating. I've visited one of the Victorian sewage pumping stations in London - typically Victorian, in that it's as practical as anything (hello , sewage pumping!) and as ornate as a cathedral. These days it's being lovingly restored by unpaid volunteers, mostly retired engineers and mechanics, and occasionally pops up on tv and film. As anything but a sewage pumping station :)

38. Creation : Our World View - Dr. Grady S. McMurtry (not a real doctor) 11/1/13
Off My Shelf

Hey there everybody. I am an atheist. And as such every couple of years I seem to be the receiver of some nonsense book trying to make me stop being an atheist and be something more Christian. Having gone through this four times now I don't really need to read these books to know what my reaction will be. Frustration at the author's misprepresentation of science in both fact and method. Anger at the logical leaps in which a simple statement of the author's position is considered evidence without any reference to data or honest look at counter arguments. Revulsion at twee exclamations telling me how obviously wonderful god is and whatever irrelevant tid bit the author has decided shows how wonderful and amazing his god is. The inevitable result is the stoking of my atheistic passions and a renewed depression that there are probably a scary number of people lacking the rudimentary science education and critical thinking skills it takes to see what's wrong with books like this one.

This book, when compared to others of it's ilk, is only notable in it's astonishing shittiness. The illogical arguments, strawmen and habitual substitution of the author's claims for evidence of those claims is completely unremarkable. However, this is the first I've come across that doesn't seem to have been edited, like, at all. McMurty's disregard for science may actually be rivalled by his disregard for the English language and bookcraft if this book is any indication. There is no real organization and often no central thought. He instead makes list after list of items often recycling the same bullet point for no apparent reason apart from his own rambling disorganization. There's some formatting issues as well including one page where the text is printed right at the edge of the page without it's margin.

It's hard to say if there are any real facts in this book. I am well versed enough in evolutionary science to point out every lie and lie by omission he printed...but my geology and climate science is a good bit rougher. Of course McMurtry's method is to spit out some unsourced, unexplained data point and tell you it supports his view before topping it off with a Bible verse to let you know it's beyond debate. He does this with the content of the Bible as well, though probably just with his glib summary of whatever book/chapter/verse he drops. I was not even remotely motivated to pull out my Bible and check if the Bible verses he referenced but didn't print (he did this a lot) said what claimed so I decided to regard them as the I did his science. Unreliable. After all, why paraphrase the if the original verse demonstrated your point for you? It's not like there's a copyright issue there.

As a bonus this particular edition was revised to let reader know what, as Christians, we should think about all of this climate change/environmental stuff. So, though it wasn't easy to pick something to share here's a little taste.

"What is the environmental terrorist's agenda? The Green Movement is the new home of global socialism/communism. What the communists could not do through their military and political machinery they are now accomplishing through economic means. What they could not accomplish through brute force, they are now trying to accomplish by locking up the natural resources needed for biblically based capitalism to survive. As an example, they are against both pesticides and the use of biotechnology to increase crop yields, yet these things have tripled crop production since WW II."

McMurtry dismisses the prospect of climate change with many unsourced, redundant, contradictory and unexplained bullet points before putting his foot down on the matter:

"Man is not in charge of the weather. God is in charge of the weather! (Matt. 5:45)" ...emphasis most emphatically his.

Weep for me for I have just read a 160 page crackpot chain email.

>Hey there everybody. I am an atheist. And as such every couple of years I seem to be the >receiver of some nonsense book trying to make me stop being an atheist and be something more >Christian

Lol. Only in the US, I guess. In the city where I live, less than 50% of the population believes in anything (Christians, Jews, Muslims etc. all added together). The only person who ever thought this remarkable was a US ambassador.:)

Hey littlegreycloud, that's a fair representation of the sort of reaction that would get in America. They like to tell eachother that non-believers are secretly empty, broken people that can't possibly be complete, happy and healthy without god. Not everyone one of course, but it's treated as common knowledge in every church I've set foot in.

93: Just wondering: why do you read them?

>96 Meredy: It probably doesn't make sense, but there are a few reasons that have kept me doing it so far at least.

One, the books have all come from my family and I love them. They genuinely hope that the content of these books will change my mind (and thus save me from a eternity in hell, or something). It seems respectful to take the time to read the books given that they seem sincere, but also the best way let them know that actually these things they think will convince me don't meet my standard of evidence.

Two, I feel bad about getting rid of a book without giving it some kind if attention. It seems wasteful and there's probably some residual completionist in me.

And lastly, sometimes I read masochistically. This was a poor example of it since I've tired of sharpening my teeth on these same bad arguments, but clearly "Why Men Fake It" demonstrates the zest with which I can respond to content I disagree with.

I probably should stop though. Leave my masochism to more novel topics.

"Leave my masochism to more novel topics."

Or to more topical novels.

>98 rocketjk: Zing!

39. After the Fact - James West Davidson & Mark Hamilton Lytle 11/2/13
Off My Shelf

I am reasonably sure this is a college textbook, but it's shameful something which ought to be the foundation of an education of history seems to be tucked away and forgotten by our education system until you become a history major. Or possibly minor.

The basic goal of the text is to illuminate how history is decyphered, it's limitations and ultimately that it is an epic mistake to treat history and the past interchangeably. Each chapter approaches a particular way of studying the past through a specific historical event highlighting how the type of data available inherently limits and focuses the history that can be constructed. The characteristics of the resources historians have availible may have been consciously curated to tell a certain story at the time of it's creation as in a photograph, public political speech, or literary activism, or their character may be shaped without intent by virtue of documentation being limited to certain classes, the fact than any human documentation is limited by the experience of those documenting it or simply that time passes swiftly and is unconcerned with leaving proper documentation.

The authors intentionally choose to look beyond the common-knowledge assessment of the history they discuss to show how history can be misleading or how it is impossible to strip the past down to a single point of view or rigid chain of cause and effect. This is not to say that there is no such thing as an authentic past, but that history is incabable of reproducing it. It is simply too big, complicated and messy. It explodes outward exponentially from a single event in the actions and beliefs of people colliding into still more events each hopelessly and unconsciously interconnected in their immediacy. The ultimate message seems to be, we should all study the past, but understand that no single person owns it. Which is probably why you're unlikely to face such an approach in the usual education. It fundamentally undermines the idea that there is such a thing orthodox history, and instead points out that the past is only seen from where it's witnesses are standing.

40. The Holocaust Industry - Norman G. Finkelstein 11/4/13
Off My Shelf

Sacred. Profane.

These are words that are never used in The Holocaust Industry, but they are the ones I think get to the heart of matter. The Holocaust is the superlative crime against humanity, and it's victims (all Jewish) perfect martyrs. Do not confuse this with the Nazi holocaust which, while completely horrible, is still just one more awful chapter in the continuing history of man's inhumanity to man. But not The Holocaust. The Holocaust is the standard by which all other cruelty is measured, it's author perfect evil. Sacred evil. This is why invoking The Holocaust is powerful, the idea of it has been made so epic and pure that it is socially beyond doubt and beyond question in all ways.

And that can be taken advantage of. Fake memoirs, fake survivors, extortion of well over a billion in the name of holocaust victims (exclusively Jewish ones by the way) that by in large doesn't actually get to holocaust victims. It's a nice trick really. Shake governments and banks down with accusations of Nazi collaboration, war profiteering and double down with how these poor victims are running out of time and amends must be made now, no don't check our numbers, a billion dollars will be fine. And then pass the vast majority of the so called restitutions to Jewish organizations and lawyers because, fancy that, we can't actually find all those victims we told you we need the money for in the first place but we think they'd like us to have it. They literally demanded the return of Jewish property in Poland that were active schools and hospitals. Because, you know, it doesn't matter that the Jews who own them are dead, they'd want us to have them.

It's pretty disgusting to read about the few actual surviving victims picketing outside, lobbying for retributions to go to healthcare for victims, while their supposed lobbists are throwing a gala and arguing the medical idea isn't really feasible.

This is why nothing should be sacred. The war is over, Hitler is dead, but there are still people wringing blood out of it in the name of charity.

Not everyone is sanguine about Finkelstein's beliefs. From wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust_Industry):

Andrew Ross reviewing the book for Salon magazine wrote:

On the issue of reparations, he barely acknowledges the wrongs committed by the Swiss and German institutions — the burying of Jewish bank accounts, the use of slave labor — that gave rise to the recent reparations drive. The fear that the reparations will not wind up in the hands of those who need and deserve them most is a legitimate concern. But the idea that survivors have been routinely swindled by Jewish institutions is a gross distortion. The chief reason why survivors have so far seen nothing of the $1.25 billion Swiss settlement, reached in 1998, is that U.S. courts have yet to rule on a method of distribution. On other reparations and compensation settlements, the Claims Conference, a particular bete noire of Finkelstein, says that it distributed approximately $220 million to individual survivors in 1999 alone."

There's more on that wikipedia page, both pro and con.

The Swiss spent $500 million dollars auditing their banks in response to accusations of blocking victims from their assets. Those pressing them for reparations refused to wait for the results and squeezed 1 billion non-reurnable dollars from, because according to them, time was not a luxury the victims had. When the audit was complete (the most expensive audit of a banking system at the time of the book's writing) the bank's initial estimate that they held less than a million (if I remember correctly) was sound. Examples of victims facing difficulty getting their assets were few and a result of less than optimal banking process rather than active opposition.

As for legal delays....the war ended seventy years ago. If you believe reparations are owed and collect reparations and you can't get them to old holocaust victims YOU AREN'T TRYING. How hard is it to give money you've already raised from other people's funds to old holocaust victims? That's 70 years plus their age at release! Time was of the essensence when they were pressing the banks, but suddenly it's not so big a deal? I don't buy it.

I mean it's not as if it's reparations for the American slave industry...

All I'm saying is that there seem to be serious, extremely reputable people who have substantial concerns with Finkelstein's theories, to put it mildly. If you're deriving your opinions on the matter solely by reading Finkelstein and believing his assertions, you might owe it to yourself to see what the objections to his claims are before accepting the conspiracy theory.

Fair enough, though with or without the fraud Finkelstein rails against he is completely correct about the mythic proportions The Holocaust has gained culturally and why this is a very bad thing, not just because of those that would take adantage if it, but for every tragedy lost in it's shadows. The Nazi holocaust wasn't special, but pretending that it was lets people overlook systematic and institutional evil the world over. Sometimes people find the silver lining in that war saying that having been there we won't let it happen again, but it had already happened many times before and it still happens.

I do need to read more on the subject, though I'll probably be hitting some other genocide first as ER took one look at me and said, "oh hells yes this girl will be reading Bosnia's Million Bones: Solving the World's Greatest Forensic Puzzle."

"The Nazi holocaust wasn't special"

I couldn't disagree more strongly, but let's just leave it at that.

As you wish.

41. Norwegian : A Book of Self-Instruction in the Norwegian Riksmål - Alf Sommerfelt 12/1/13
Off My Shelf

I found this little book a wonderful little leg up with Norwegian grammar. It's an old one (from the sixties), but it's well organized and provides good examples and exercises. I appreciate the lack of childish dialogues and images that seem to clutter modern language textbooks. And since it is most certainly not a phrase book it was entertaining to see what sort of random sentences were given as usage examples.

I like that Alf took the time to demonstrate when common niceties might be used to sass someone:

Jeg skal melde Dem til politiet. (I'm going to report you to the police)

Ja, vær så god. (Yes, by all means.)

But my favorite was one of the examples of the use of past participles:

Naboen vår er blitt beskyldt for å ha stjålet en sekk poteter. (Our neighbor has been accused of having stolen a sack of potatoes.)

Yay! Grammar!

42. Bosnia's Million Bones - Christian Jennings 12/1/13
Off My Shelf - ER

To say this book is in need of a good polish would be an understatement. To be fair, ER supplied me and uncorrected ARC, but my issues go beyond typos and awkward phrasing. The real problem is the author doesn't seem to know what the book should be about.

It started out totally and completely about the genocide at Srebrenica. It's riveting, but as it turns to the forensic work of excavating and identitfying bodies it seems to suddenly become a broader and sadly superficial look at the identification of all unknown victims of the Bosnian War. And then, out of no where there are long awkward digressions regarding the ICMP's (International Commission on Missing Persons) involvement investigating missing persons from the Iraq War, Chile, that tsunami, and Norwegian Nazis. At this point I'm thinking maybe this isn't about Bosnia at all, maybe it's really about the establishment and work of the ICMP. But no, then we're back to Bosnia (and The Netherlands) talking about the arrest and indictment of Ratko Mladic (primary mover/shaker and war criminal of the Bosnian War), but now there's hardly any mention of the ICMP. The final chapter is another scattershot look at ICMP involvement with various countries ready to face their troubled history with missing persons.

So we've got three different subjects, and although they are all related, not a single one really forms a foundation for the book. It's distracting, disorienting, disorganized and a damn shame since any one of those subjects would have made a good book. There is a lot of good content here (occassionally disrupted with overaught narration), but it feels like it was cobbled together from several completely different books. I kinda suspect the author started with a nice narrow and purposeful foundation and then scrambled when he realized there wouldn't be enough length as he wanted. Or maybe he was just too in love with the various angles to lay them aside and pick one thesis. Either way this is the sort of issue I expect out of freshmen essays, not published journalists.

Maybe it was saved in the final version, but it would've taken some very substantial revisions.