:::this is the way the world ends:::

Category: Books (Page 2 of 5)

A Book Not from 2007

I just finished the book Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson. I know, Shotts, you had recommended it to me a while ago, and my mother had suggested it before that even. It seems you both know what I will appreciate, certainly in this case.

It really is difficult for me to describe how much reading that book meant to me. It kind of seared me. It succeeds on so many levels that at times it was difficult for me to think of it as fiction, and yet that sounds as if the fact that it is fiction is somehow a detraction. What a miracle that something imagined can emanate into the minds of others so entirely.

Of course, I’m sure that all of this sounds like blathering, and perhaps others would not have the same experience I had with the novel as they have not had the same experience with life, but I am deeply grateful for having had the opportunity to experience it.

A Book from 2007

Dream Life of Sukhanov I’m wondering why I am posting this, but for some reason feel compelled. Since I have been on the couch or in bed lately, I managed to read a bit.

I just finished The Dream Life of Shukhanov by Olga Grushin. It was a terribly engaging book that takes place in real time over three or four days, but covers in flashbacks much of the life of a Soviet artist/critic. There are several narrative techniques that are interesting, such as the way the book flows from third person narration to first. But I guess the most valuable part of the book to me was what it said about living with the choices we make, the life we live, and the art we do and don’t make. It reminded me a bit of Ishiguro’s novels in that it begins to blur the main character Sukhanov’s past with his present in an effort to reconcile the two lives he has led in a manner that is almost surreal.

A Brief History of Violence

Thanks Ned for posting the Story of Stuff. I think that it is largely preaching to the choir (with emphasis on “preach”) on this blog but still it is good to know that there are people out there fighting the good fight. I’ve been thinking about these issues over the last few days. I hope to post a more robust response later this week.

So since I took twenty minutes of my time I ask you to take twenty minutes of your time to review this TED talk on A Brief History of Violence by Harvard linguist, Steven Pinker. Shotts if you are looking for an “popularized” science book, you can’t go wrong with anything by Pinker though I have only read The Language Instinct.

Anyway, this is sort of an evidenced based “feel good” story about how the chances of human being killed by another human have consistently dropped throughout history. Pinker talks about why we may believe that the opposite is true and what we may have done right in the last 400 years or so to make this possible. Please take time to view this. I think it’s really important.

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Books of 2007

For reasons known to all of you, 2007 was a year in which I read very few books (though I shouldn’t feel too bad as I’m sure I read about 1000% more the national average.) Anyway here’s my rundown.

The View From the Center of the Universe by Joel Primack and Nancy Abrams may be the most influential book I’ve read since The Moral Animal. This book takes the popular understanding of the “scientific worldview” and turns it on its head by rescuing our cosmology from the meaningless void. As with most science and philosophy texts it takes a lot of work to get through but I highly recommend it. You should expect several bog entries in 2008 referring to View from the Center.

Martin Amis’s, Time’s Arrow tells the story of a man’s life backwards. It’s an old device but very effective. If found that after I had been reading it for a while and had to put it down and perform some task I had to “set” my brain back to “forwards.”

I as I think I’ve mentioned before, I highly recommend Susanna Clark’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell — a novel about English magic during and after the Napoleonic Wars. It’s a fantasy novel that reads like Jane Austen.

Oh yeah, I think I read something about Harry Potter and some stolen horses or something or other.

Holidays and End of Year 2007

Happy holidays to all! Be safe, merry, and joyous, and accept good intentions for the New Year and for seeing you all in 2008. 

Jen and I will be at her parents’ home for a couple of days over Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, then will be enjoying some restful days here in Minneapolis. We have a good few inches of snow on the ground, and it’s expected to snow tomorrow an inch or two. So no need for dreaming of a white Christmas in these parts. 

OUT STEALING HORSES by Per Petterson is #33 on this week’s New York Times Bestsellers list. Amazing for such an introspective, literary work of translation. Funnily enough the book is just ahead of WAR AND PEACE. So take that, Tolstoy!

Any thoughts on the past year? Predictions for the new one? Anyone care to share some of their favorite books, albums, gallery exhibits, songs, movies, etc. of 2007? 

Here’s to what’s ahead… 

Thanks to Graywolf

If you have not read Out Stealing Horses I strongly urge you to pick it up. You have already purchased it right?

I have always enjoyed Scandinavian literature. Many Scandinavian authors share a preoccupation with the formation of the self in the early years of life — a preoccupation we Hollow Men seem to share as well.

Wish I had more intelligent things to say right now but it’s just to late for that. Suffice to say, thank you Graywolf Press for publishing this fine translation and thank you to Shotts for being such insistent champion of it. Though it is too early to tell, I suspect Out Stealing Horses will have a strong presence in my literary consciousness for many years to come.

A Very Beautiful Book

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I received my copy of Shaun Tan’s “The Arrival” in the mail today and “read” it. It’s a graphic novel told totally in pictures about an immigrant’s experience in a strange and fantastic “new world” where he tries to make a living to bring his family with him from their oppressed homeland. Tan’s drawings are exquisite and evocative. It’s one of the best graphic novels I’ve ever seen both because of the art and the beauty of the story. At a time when many people in this country do not want to welcome immigrants, this story seems to have “arrived” at just the right historical moment. I think all of you would really enjoy it, but I especially recommend it to Toby. I’ve been watching Tan’s career for some time now, but this book is sure to cement it. You can view a few images from the graphic novel at his website here: http://www.shauntan.net but in order to really get a sense of the amount of drawing and the consistency of quality you should get a hold of a copy. Anyone interested in illustration and visual storytelling will love it.

The Moral Animal and a Question for Toby… or Free At Last.

I finished the Moral Animal. It is a great book, and I recommed it to any of the Hollow Men that want to tackle a broad survey of evolution, psychology, and philosophy.

I definitely admonish people to do what Shotts apparently had to do with the HP books and persevere through lengthy exposition (except in this case we can’t say Wright could have used a good editor, because apparently he is one). At times Wright will seem to be completely self-indulging in his hypothetical arguments, but keep reading – it all comes around. I feel that early in the book I could have skipped large sections, though I’m glad I didn’t.

I would like to thank J.E. for his recommendation, it has given me new insight into life (somewhat like Peters’ NVC recommendation). And I feel I do understand some of the formative influences on J.E.’s outlook and this makes me happy, as well as Peters’. And I have thoroughly enjoyed the recommendations from Shotts as well.

There is so much in the book that I can’t really respond to everything it covers (it kind of covers everything), but I am in primary agreement with most of Wright’s assertions, though that may be a misleading statement without qualifications. He is a generous mind, an attribute I would also ascribe to Stephen J Gould.

What I find extremely funny is that, in making his argument, Wright often brings up many of the exact issues we covered on the blog discussion, right down to actually comparing the characters of Mother Teresa and Donald Trump which I brought up in the earlier discussion with Peters. Wright also has a section in the back that specifically addresses the example of a soldier falling on a grenade which was also raised.

Both books do support the idea that humans are basically selfish (which is what Liz said, but I couldn’t discern if this was meant in a hopeless sense or a self-awareness sense), as well as self-serving, though not necessarily that everything we do we do to serve our own needs. Both books also encourage individuals to be conscious of this and why we are primarily self-serving, in order to resist this reality.

I would love to discuss the book further, but the blog, sadly, will simply not suffice for the depth of conversation needed. If you want to call me sometime, J.E., I’d love to chat with you about it or anyone else that reads it. I would say that if you were to reread the last eighty pages, from page 313 on to the end, you would see that with the Berger and Weil quotes I posted earlier we were never as far apart as was felt (at least as far apart as was felt by me at the time, if not you). You used the word freewill in a recent blog and this would make for an interesting discussion too.

My question for Toby is… “Got a recommendation?”

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (the movie)

Sara and I had our only date in five months tonight. We ate dinner and saw HP and the Order. It was of course my choice of movie, but she enjoyed it almost as much as I did. We both liked it.

I recently read an article which talked about Rowling’s insistence that the themes and narrative arcs in the story are the product of a deeply felt Christianity. I felt that that was evident with this story more than the other stories that have made it to screen, for sure, but perhaps that is due to the escalting nature of the stories and good and evil. Her books, of course, took a beating from the right in this country, and I am amazed that Rowling managed to keep her Christianity basically a secret for all that time she was lambasted. She is quoted in the article as saying she felt that to state that Christianity undergirded the books was to give away the ending. In some ways I feel guilty for not having read the rest of the series (I thought at the time I finished the third book, years ago, that this series was never going to end and I wasn’t interested in reading the same thing over and over. I also read the first three books of the Series of Unfortunate Events). I do, as Shotts suggested, hope to enjoy them with my children some day, along with the Tolkien books and many others. Eliot has been learning some words with flash cards.

Perhaps the most interesting part of the film (which wouldn’t have been new to any of you readers of the series) was HP’s discovery of his father’s teasing and bullying of Snape. It is jolting and changing, that moment when you realize your parents are not right about everything and perhaps downright wrong about some things. I also read the NY Times article and found it interesting that Hitchens complains about the HP series’ avoidance of Christianity and then encourages readers to “graduate” to the Pullman trilogy.

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There was an advertisement for the Golden Compass at the beginning of the film for which New Line cinema appears to have pulled out all the stops. I would strongly urge that anyone who plans to go see the movie (which I assume is all of the Hollow Men) should first read the entire trilogy, not necessarily as a recommendation from me, but because my guess from the preview is that they have toned down much of the philisophical content. And you certainly won’t get the Milton and biblical literary references from the film. It might make good discussion material; since in the very first scene of the book, Pullman deliberately decided to have a girl coming OUT of a wardrobe.

This may be a funny way to end this post, switching topics, but I’m curious as to how the HM would respond to this quote by Wright from the Moral Animal…

“Friends engage in mutual inflation. Being a person’s true friend means endorsing the untruths he holds dearest…it may be that the hallmark of the strongest, longest friendships is the depth of the shared bias; the best friends are the ones who see each other least clearly.”

“Participate if you want.”

“…when groups of people – especially males – spend much time together, some sort of hierarchy , if implicit and subtle, is pretty sure to appear. Whether we know it or not, we tend naturally to rank one another, and we signify the ranking through patterns of attention, agreement, and deference – whom we pay attention to, whom we agree with, whose jokes we laugh at, whose suggestions we take.”

From the Moral Animal by Robert Wright.

Pretty funny stuff.

Free at Last

I have this afternoon finished the final installment in the Harry Potter series. I have spent the last seven weeks with Harry Potter, from Book 1 to Book 7. Honestly, while I’m glad I read the books and am interested to have conversation about the series, I feel a weight lifted, having closed the cover on the last book. Free at last.

*****I think Ned may be the only one here who has not read the whole series, but I want to at least put up a warning here that I will talk about particular plot details. So, in case you want to discover the books further for yourself, please don’t read further. I get the sense that Ned doesn’t care much, but I thought I should give proper warning.*****

I was disappointed in Book 7, actually. Nothing, in the end, felt that surprising about it, and it feels more like an inevitable conclusion rather than a riveting, surprise-laden finale. Sure, I was surprised that certain more minor characters died–Hedwig, Mad-Eye, Dobby, Fred, Lupin, and Tonks–but they felt sort of inconsequential, compared to how much fretting is done over Cedric Diggory, for instance. Sure, I thought maybe Hagrid would die, and he didn’t. But I felt the larger plot pieces–Harry having a piece of Voldemort within him as a Horcrux, Snape turning out to be doing Dumbledore’s bidding all the while, Snape being in love with Harry’s mother, Ron and Hermione finally getting together, etc.–were all in the realm of the predictable, and were all things I had entertained at some point in the series previously (certainly by Book 6). And I agree with Toby, in a different posting, that there is a serious lull in the book, while Harry, Hermione, and Ron go camping around various woods and locations pretty aimlessly–which confirms again for me that at least 200 pages could have been trimmed from the book. I would say that is true for Books 4 through 7, with the possible exception of Book 6, which could probably be trimmed 100 pages.

I did like the opening of The Deathly Hallows and did like the last 150 pages or so, when things moved forward at the pace the finale deserves. The Epilogue was perhaps the most predictable part of the book, and frankly, the Epilogue really took away the sense that evil, as part of the world, endures, which I think is a disappointing move, though I understand the pull toward having a shiny, happy ending: “All was well.” But that does feel like it pulls the seriousness out from under the whole series, in some ways.

Christopher Hitchens has an interesting review of Book 7 in today’s New York Times Book Review, and I believe you can read it online, if you haven’t already.

Looking over the whole series, there are some terrific things about the books–particularly Books 3 and 6. There are some imaginative, ingenious devices, and some thematic territories that I think are valuable for young people to explore. But I’m glad the series is over, and I hope Rowling will let it stay finished. The cleverness wore out over seven books, and for all the build up over making Voldemort into a villain with a complicated, disturbing, and interesting past, he came out in the end as another comic book villain with a lot of bluster but with the classic cardboard faulty arrogance that makes him lose control of his power. I lost it and it lost all credibility when 1) Mrs Weasley yells out to Beatrix LeStrange in all capitals: “NOT MY DAUGHTER, YOU BITCH!” and that is followed on the next page by 2) Voldemort, alone with no other Death Eaters or allies, preparing to duel Harry, just back from the dead and surrounded by several Hogwarts professors and members of the Order of the Phoenix, and Harry then literally says “I don’t want anyone else to try to help. It’s got to be like this. It’s got to be me.” And then that is followed by six pages of goading talk between the two of them, while we assume everyone else is just watching this happen. I mean, that is just as schmaltzy and uninspired as it gets, for any reader of any age. In other words, the build up to everything seems far more interesting than the actual final installment.

But, J.E. had mentioned in an earlier post that Book 7 “doesn’t disappoint,” or something to that effect, and Toby put Book 7 right up there with Books 3 and 6 as his favorites. So I’d love to hear other reactions, and would love to be convinced.

Done

I finished the fourteen spreads and the four decorative pages for my book on Girgian in Ramadan. J.E. when you are back to a normal swing, let me know and I can send a few along for a post or two. I’m obviously not as connected to these as some of my personal pieces, but it still might be fun to see this other side of what I do. Now I need to finish a small personal commision before meetings begin (you’re lucky Shotts to avoid the bureaucracy of that side of academia).

John Estes has a book of poetry out.

We got a post card from Finishing Line Press (www.finishinglinepress.com) that announced the publication of John Estes’ (Jennifer’s husband) first book of poetry. You can find it in the new releases section on the website. I’d be interested to hear what you know about the press, Shotts. I’m going to order a copy. I’d also appreciate it if anyone has the Estes’ new email address to send it to me, or post it here, protected I suppose. Sara had tried to contact them recently but failed to get ahold of them because of their address change. John teaches at Columbia in MO so I suppose we could find him there. His book is called “Breakfast with Blake at the Laocoon. Perhaps the rest of you got the card as well.

Participate if you want…

We are all 1st years at Hogwarts School of Wichcraft and Wizardry. Taking turns sitting on the stool, wearing the Sorting Hat, we are all Sorted into our halls. I suspect I would be in Ravenclaw. For those willing to share, where do you think you might end up?

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