Summer Reading Project

Moving to a new platform

2007-05-30T21:34:00.000-06:00

I've moved my blog over to WordPress, because I think I like the features they offer better.

Here is the URL for my new blog, Textual Frigate: http://textualfrigate.wordpress.com
And here's the feed, for those of you who are reading this via RSS: http://textualfrigate.wordpress.com/feed/

Rainbows End, part II, and Double Fold, by Nicholson Baker

2007-05-19T23:35:00.000-06:00

It's a very disconcerting experience to be reading a work of science fiction, and then to read a nonfiction book that confirms one of the more outlandish plot points of the novel. In Rainbows End, Vinge writes that the company that digitized the contents of the UCSD Library will have a monopoly on the information for a certain amount of time simply because they changed the format and control the access to the reformated information.

In Double Fold, Nicholson Baker reveals that something similar happened to American newspapers. Libraries often preserve newspaper by having it filmed. But then, if a library wants a copy of an older newspaper, they have to pay a company like Heritage Microfilm to send them a copy. Very few libraries have the wherewithal to preserve their own newspapers in their original format. Plus, a lot of libraries that did have copies got rid of the paper in favor of the film because it's thought that the film will last longer. For a lot of titles, I'm sure that the microfilm companies have a monopoly on the information.

I've had to read Double Fold for a preservation class I'm taking this summer and, I have to say, it's probably the most vehement work I've ever read about libraries. Baker gets really hot under the collar about certain things, and I don't think I've ever seen name calling in a book about libraries either.

Strange Coincidences

2007-05-08T09:53:00.000-06:00

How bizarre is it that a journal about death and bereavement is published by a company based in Amityville, New York?

And people think that scholarly journals are boring. Tcha.

Am I getting Wikified?

2007-05-02T21:03:00.000-06:00

The other night I was taking a look at some of the new reference books that have come into the library. One was the Encyclopedia of Intelligence and Counterintelligence. The other one was the Supernatural fiction writers : contemporary fantasy and horror. As I flipped through the Intelligence book, which was published in 2005, my fingers kind of itched to update some of the information, especially the dates. And for the Supernatural writers, I kept wanting to flip around in the text and read about the authors mentioned in the articles about writers I've already read. When I you spent a lot of time just reading things on Wikipedia, you start to miss your instant cross references. I bounce from topic to topic so much that I have to admire people like A.J. Jacobs, who can resist the temptation to skip around and just read an encyclopedia through in order.

Rainbows End, by Vernor Vinge

2007-05-02T20:46:00.000-06:00

Rainbows End, by Vernor Vinge, is definitely going to join the short list of books that freaked me out when I read them, along with The Stand and 1984. Rainbows End is a novel set in the not-too-distant future and, while I don't buy how all the technology has developed--in this world, the Internet and multimedia technology are ubiquitous and most people spend most of their day plugged in--I don't think Vinge is all that far off.

As I read this, I felt that that plot was less interesting than seeing this alternate future play out. The plot involves an odd assortment of characters trying to thwart the development of mind-control technology. The puppet master characters, who were pulling all the strings, did their job in such a way that it was hard to see how everything was going to come together or even what was going on.

But what really interested me was the plot elements that involved the Geisel Library at the University of California at San Diego. Having been employed at libraries for many years, I've seen the growing demand for digital materials, for journals to go online, for old books to get scanned and posted online, and so on. In Vinge's future, the digitization projects have gone farther. But the way that books are digitized here causes the destruction of the books themselves. That was a disturbing chapter for me, given that I geek out at book exhibits and tear up at the sight of book burnings.

I can envision a world where the libraries are totally online, but I don't know if me and the other book lovers could ever give up our tangible texts.

The Physician's Tale, by Ann Benson

2007-05-02T20:37:00.000-06:00

I've finished the series (as far as it's written), and about all I have to say about the series is, "Huh." Even though I finished all three books, I feel pretty underwhelmed. This last book, The Physician's Tale, finishes up all the loss ends from the previous books. Kate reunites with her son and adopted father. Janie and her family built a new life in a decimated former United States. I get the feeling, though, that Benson is setting the stage for future books.

Unfortunately, the excellent plot mirroring Benson set up in The Plague Tales is almost completely gone now. And that was one of the things I really enjoyed about this series. Plus, it seems to me that Benson is squandering her set ups. As I've said before, Benson sets up a lot of fascinating catastrophes that almost never happen. And, now that I know that, it's hard to get worked up about anything.

I think that if Benson writes another book in this series, I might just let it go without reading it.

Ink and Blood

2007-04-22T17:27:00.000-06:00

The Museum of Idaho is hosting a traveling exhibit called Ink and Blood, which is sort of a combination history of printing and history of the Bible. And I hate to say it, but I totally geeked out at the Museum. I couldn't help myself, I was surrounded by very old books--some of them very famous books. I spent most of my two hours there trying to control myself from boring my mother silly by nattering on about how alphabets evolved, how the English language has evolved, St. Helena's tour of the Holy Land, Chinese printing techniques contrasted with Gutenberg's methods, misprinted Bibles and what happened to the printers, and reading out loud from the various books on display.

I am truly a terrible museum geek.

Some of the artifacts that awed me:

Dead Sea Scroll fragments--these were particularly awing. They're in special darkened cases, and you can see the fragments by pushing a button that'll turn a light on for 10 seconds.
A copy of a Tyndale Bible
A copy of the Wicked Bible and the Breeches Bible: I spent several minutes in front of these cases trying to snicker discretely.
A copy of Foxe's Book of Martyr's
Erasmus' parallel New Testament
Three Books of Hours, beautifully illuminated
Martin Luther's translation of the Bible into German

Check out the Exhibit Artifacts page to see some of the books and text fragments that they have on display.

A lot of exhibit was dedicated to attempts to translate the Bible into the vernacular. Today, Bibles are produced in just about every language that has a written version. But 650 some odd years ago, people like William Tyndale were violently put to death for daring to translate the Bible into their own language.

I also got to see a replica of a Gutenberg press in action. There was a short, fifteen minute talk about the invention of movable type and then a volunteer got to turn the screw and print a couple of pages (lucky guy!).

This exhibit is moving on in May. If you haven't gone and you're in the area, I really recommend it.

Regrunt with a Hat Trick

2007-04-20T12:58:00.000-06:00

In my last two desk shifts I've been asked about:

Icelandic volcanoes. But he only wanted enough information to write a 3-4 page paper. And he couldn't remember the exact name of the volcano he wanted.
Slavery in South Carolina in the 1830s. Some times students come in with really narrow topics and are frustrated that they can't find a book on them. They don't realize that most books in our catalog are often not searchable at the chapter level. Half of the battle in teaching students to do research is getting them to think about how information is organized. (That and how Boolean works. I've been using a linguistics analogy that seems to be working pretty well.)
Bilingual education.
Erasers. A student needed a big eraser. Unfortunately, we only have pencil erasers.

And this morning, I did a reference hat trick. I helped a single student who had three distinct questions--which only gets me a single tick on the reference sheet, natch. This student asked about:

The story of Red Riding Hood as a means of social control
Evolution and speciation
What people are doing in the US to help lower the divorce rate

Plus, the student's instructor sent their students over to look for a single book and both our copies are now checked out. Do our faculty not know about course reserves?

Burning Road, by Ann Benson

2007-04-14T15:16:00.000-06:00

When you read a fantasy series, you can often expect plot arcs that span across books. I wasn't expecting that when I picked up Benson's historical and medical series, but it's starting to look like this series has multi-book plot arcs. When I wrote about The Plague Tales, I wrote that I was disappointed that I didn't get the disaster I was expecting. It looks like that disaster is finally happening in book two, Burning Road.

In Burning Road, the historical plot jumps about ten years and takes place during the Jacquerie Rebellion of 1358. The current plot seems like it's taking place only a few months after the events of The Plague Tales. Instead of the plots mirroring each other, with both doctors trying to fight outbreaks of bubonic plague, these plots don't mesh nearly as well in this book. The historical plot follows Alejandro and his adopted daughter's struggles to survive in the extremely volatile political climate of post-plague France. The modern plot is frankly bizarre, with Janie Crowe trying to uncover a very disturbing cover-up involving some illegal genetics work and then running into a second epidemic of drug resistant Staphylococcus aureus.

It's kind of strange to have gotten two books into a series and still have no real idea where it's all going. I'm wondering if Benson is one of those authors who sits down to write without an outline, in spite of the amount of structure these books have in terms of plot mirroring.

The Plague Tales, by Ann Benson

2007-04-08T12:34:00.000-06:00

Have you ever read a book that you're interested in, and you have the feeling that, any page now, it's going to get really good? I felt that way through most of The Plague Tales, by Ann Benson. I was at one of the public libraries trying to find a copy of Magic Study (see previous post), when I came across The Physician's Tale, by Ann Benson. When I got home, I realized that I'd picked up book three of a series. Fortunately, I happened to have the first two books in my picked-it-up-a-while-ago-haven't-actually-read-it pile.

The Plague Tale follows the lives of two fictional doctors who are dealing with outbreaks of bubonic plague, also known as the Black Death. One of the doctors is a Jew in disguise who has to protect the English royal family from the plague. The second doctor is a modern surgeon who lives in a not-to-distant future where most bacterial diseases have become completely drug resistant.

To me, this sounds like a really good, terrifying read. Unfortunately, the plot that I was imagining never happened. The catastrophes that I was expecting to happen in the modern plot thread never happened. The medieval plot, barring a few mystical weirdnesses, did live up to its promise. I have hopes for the sequels. After reading the book jacket for The Physician's Tale, I think that something big might finally happen in that book.

The modern plot thread brings up a funny plot problem for me. This is going to require a little bit of set up, so bear with me. Othello is one of my favorite plays by Shakespeare, but every time I read or see the play, I feel like yelling at the characters "Don't listen to Iago!" A lot of the tragedy of the play could have been prevented if the characters had trusted each other and figured out that Iago was a twisted little stick who spoke nothing but lies.

By contrast, the main characters of The Plague Tales manage to thwart the bad guy and save the world well before the plague outbreak gets out of control. It's not that I want to see millions of fictional characters die horrible from a mutated version of the plague, but this book could have been absolutely enthralling if that had happened. I just felt let down after all the build up.

I've moved on to the second book, Burning Road. I'm hoping that the modern surgeon plot thread will mature and get better.

Magic Study and Poison Study, by Maria V. Snyder

2007-04-08T11:53:00.000-06:00

Sometimes, when I feel like grabbing a slice of pizza at the local mall, I have to stop in to the local bookstore and pick up something to read while I eat. I picked up Poison Study because it was the most likely looking thing on the shelf that day that I hadn't already read. It ended up just sitting on my shelf for a while until I picked it up again a week or so ago and found a very pleasant surprise.

But first, a short digression. Have you other fantasy readers noticed that most fantasy novels take place in very similar worlds? With the exception of books by Brandon Sanderson, China Miéville, and Jeff Vandermeer, most fantasy worlds look like technology stopped before the Renaissance, all the governments are monarchies (or were until the evil dictator showed up), and so on.

But Poison Study is about the first time I've seen socialism, complete with guaranteed employment and enforced atheism, in a fantasy novel.

In Poison Study, the main character, Yelena, is forced to become the food taster for the "evil dictator"--who overthrew the monarchy and instituted the socialist regime. The plot involves various people trying to kill Yelena, for a variety of unknown reasons. But I really admire Yelena's brains. She has very quick wits and a strong instinct for survival. I think what I liked most about this book was how often Yelena and I agreed with each other. In most books, I end up mentally disagreeing with the main character over courses of action.

Yelena must uncovers a plot to overthrow the new leader and has to diffuse it. While I don't think this book is meant to be a critique on socialism and capitalism in our world, I am very intrigued by the way Snyder has managed to treat socialism here in its own light. (For the record, I think socialism will never work and think that Communism as practiced in the Soviet Union, China, and Cuba are or were terribly repressive and murderous regimes.) In Poison Study, socialism is treated like a new social experiment.

Even before I finished Poison Study, I was trying to find its sequel. Unfortunately, this book is apparently not to be had outside of one of the public libraries here in town. I've been to three book stores, including two Barnes and Nobles in Salt Lake and still haven't been able to put my hands on a copy. Tcha.

The sequel, Magic Study, follows Yelena after her exile from the north. Instead of lots of people trying to kill her outright, she finds herself constantly accusing of being a northern spy. (And there are still people who want to kill here, just not as many.) This book wasn't as fascinating as Poison Study, but I'm so hooked on the characters--Yelena and Valek in particular--that I am already looking forward to the third book in the series.

I'm not sure why I didn't like this book as much, maybe it's because this book takes place in a more traditional fantasy setting that I am not thinking as much about how the society works. Having written that sentence, I'm starting to wonder if I'm a closeted sociologist.

The Armageddon Rag, by George R. R. Martin

2007-04-08T11:39:00.000-06:00

A lot of George R. R. Martin's (of Song of Ice and Fire Fame) older work has been re-released lately. And, having read The Armageddon Rag, I think I'm going to go back for more.

I was very pleasantly surprised by this contemporary fantasy novel. It was a lot deeper than I had expected. The back of this book advertised a story about a band whose music may have the power to, as their last album title says, wake the dead. And the plot does roughly follow this plot, but this book turned out to be so much more than that.

For me, this book is about hope and disillusionment. This book was originally published in the early 1980s, and the main characters are all survivors (some more than others) of the 1960s movements. Some characters have since gone mainstream, some are still on communes, some have gone crazy. But in the book's present, most of the characters have given up their hopes and dreams from the 1960s. The first half of this book, before the music plot takes over, is a profoundly sad book.

Even though I am pretty young, I can relate to the characters. In my present, there is a hugely unpopular war in Asia going on, most of the people I know are uninvolved or disaffected by the current political system, we're experiencing a time of huge societal and technological changes. The big difference I see, though, is that people my age are too apathetic to try and change the world. Sure, there are people who want to make changes--but there aren't enough people to start a movement. I don't know what happened to make us this way (I have ideas, but nothing definitive), but I felt a kinship with Sandy, who spends a lot of this book wondering what happened to the high ideas.

The music plot, which mostly happens in the last half of the book, almost seems like an action-filled coda to the rest of the book. I loved the first half and, while the second half held my attention, it seemed like a weird counterpoint to the emotion of the first half. The first half of the book revolves around Sandy as he travels across the country to reconnect with his friends from the 60s. The book moves back and forth between the present and the past and sometimes the differences are so poignant, that it's hard not to choke back a sniffle or two.

Regrunt

2007-04-01T08:50:00.000-06:00

From last thursday night on the desk:

I need to find original copies of a book by Huldrych Zwingli. It was written in in 1523. (Fortunately, WorldCat didn't fail me and we managed to find about a half a dozen copies that I am pretty sure are originials.) Plus, she wanted an English translation of this theological, German text.
I need to write a paper about introduced species, you know, like non-native species. Specifically, I want to write about iguanas.
I need information about poaching in Africa.
I want recent history and politics in North Korea. (This one actually turned into a half an hour crash course on how to do research in the library.)

Also, this weekend in my reference class, I was talking to a classmate about how I found the answer to a question about when Cambodia's currency was reinstated. I used an online encyclopedia we have at my University library called Funk and Wagnall's New World Encyclopedia. And my classmate noticed that I made a crucial (and mortifying) typo in the first word of the resource's title. Fortunately, our instructor still had our papers here and I was able to scribble out the offending consonant and spell the word correctly. Tcha.

Goes to show that even proofreading a paper three times may not be enough. I should have handed the paper off to someone else to read. They would have spotted the error. :)

Sad, sad library news

2007-03-07T19:03:00.000-07:00

I seem to be seeing a lot more of these stories in the last year or so. The San Francisco Chronicle just ran this article about big library closures in Oregon. I applaud the community of Medford, Oregon and the surrounding area for their protests and their attempts to keep the library open. Having read the article though, I understand why it happened.

Sad, sad times. According to the article, this is the largest library closure in US history.

Link via Bookslut.

Amusez les cerveaux X

2007-03-07T18:58:00.000-07:00

Quote of the Day:

Me to a patron: If you've found that you've lost your card...wait a minute, that doesn't work...

Also, a new children's title: Do squirrels swarm?

--

I regret that I haven't been able to post much lately. My only excuse is that a lot of my free time lately has been sucked up with doing a lot of work for school. But I did just start reading a promising George R. R. Martin reprint called The Armageddon Rag.

Cryptonomicon, by Neal Stephenson

2007-02-24T20:15:00.000-07:00

For the past few weeks, I've been making my way through Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon. If you've seen a copy, it's a mammoth book. It's also a meandering book. There are three main plot threads, and a fourth creeps in half way through the book.

Essentially, this book--as you can probably guess from the title--is about cryptography. Two of the three threads take place during World War II. One follows a marine who participates in the Double Cross System, which helped keep the Nazis from finding out that their secure code system had been broken. Another thread follows a mathematician who worked for the Ultra program and for Double Cross. The third thread follows the descendents of the World War II characters. (I've since found out that The Baroque Cycle of novels follows the ancestors of the Cryptonomicon characters.)

The first two plot threads involve Shaftoe and Waterhouse's attempts to keep Ultra, and the fact that they've cracked their codes, a secret. What fascinates me about these plot threads is how elaborate Ultra's safeguards were. While the allies would use the intelligence they got from the Ultra transcripts, they did everything they could to make the Nazis think that they got their information from other sources. They'd send up spotter planes, or send thank you notes to non-existent spies, and all sorts of other things.

The last plot thread involves a latter-day Waterhouse's project to create a data haven in the Pacific. I'm not as interested in this thread as I am in the WWII threads, but I will admit that I'm interested to see how it all links together.

All that ties these characters together is their involvement with cryptography, information, and secrets. Well, and their ancestry. But other than that, it seems like two books got shuffled together. Granted, I haven't finished the book yet, and I have to hope that the connections will be revealed.

Amusez le cerveau IX

2007-02-23T08:05:00.000-07:00

This is the name of an actual Web site I ran across this morning while I was looking for sites about physics:

Quantum Physics Made Relatively Simple

I had to laugh at the *possibly* accidental pun in the name.

Also, here's a romance title I came across recently. It's not so much the title that amused me as it was the tagline. The book was called Abducted at the Altar, with the tagline "True love...at gunpoint." How romantic is that?

House of Leaves again

2007-02-16T13:01:00.000-07:00

Even though I never managed to finish House of Leaves, I am still fascinated by this novel. I've never seen a book before that managed to actually exploit its textuality. Any way, the Table of Malcontents post I saw today really sums up what it's like to read HOL:

If you haven't read House of Leaves, the plot is complicated to describe, as it is tiered through multiple narrators of varying degrees of sanity in the form of an endless, nearly stream-of-conscious series of clippings, manuscripts and footnotes.

It's not really the plot that keeps this novel going--though that's pretty interesting, too. It's trying to figure out what's really going on and how sane the characters really are.

The Table of Malcontents post also has a great image of one of the pages, demonstrating how hard this sucker is to get through.

Via Blog of a Bookslut.

Amusez le cerveau VIII

2007-02-15T14:36:00.000-07:00

A Child's Book about Disobeying. (Sorry I couldn't find a link for the edition I saw.)

I know what this book is supposed to be about, but doesn't it look like a How-to title?

A funny thing happened on the way to the stacks...

2007-02-15T14:32:00.000-07:00

When you answer the phone at the library, you're never sure if you're going to get someone who wants to know about library activities, renew books, or scream at you about the late notice they just got in the mail. But the phone call I got today was a first:

When I picked up the phone all I could hear was creepy horror movie/Twilight Zone music.

Me: Local Library.

Nothing, just more music. Then the person on the other end makes a Zombie-like "Uhhhn" noise.

Me: Local Library.

More music and Zombie groaning, then they say they have the wrong number and hang up. How weird is that?

--

This one is from a couple of days ago when I was talking with a co-worker.

Me: Is there a kind of doughnut you hate?

Co-worker: How can you hate a doughnut?

Refgrunt

2007-02-08T22:42:00.000-07:00

Coincidences freak me out, but I keep having them. I even have work related coincidences. Today (today!), I read a post over on one of my favorite library blogs, Happyville Library, about reference triage. Reference triage is a lot like medical triage in that you have a very little time to decide who the most critical "cases" are.

Tonight, during the last hour of my solo shift, I was bouncing between four different people for more than forty minutes. None of the questions were simple. Two of them needed help finding journal articles--one of whom was new to the university and our anthropology databases (which have a very steep learning curve). One of them needed help writing MLA-style citations for Web sites (always complicated). The last person need help with a disk that wouldn't let him access a document he wrote yesterday and then did inexplicably weird things to the file once it did open.

The problem is that they all need a lot of help and they all came up at about the same time and then needed a bit more help after they got started. As a reference librarian, you have to decide who to help first. Do you help the guy who came up a little earlier before everyone else? Do you help the person whose paper is due soonest? Do you help the person you made wait earlier first? What in God's name do you do when the phone rings (like it did to me during my little rush)?

Somehow I managed to muddle through without pissing anyone off too badly, but it was a close run thing.

Story time at the library

2007-02-08T22:33:00.000-07:00

I work in a small public library. Tiny, really. But, man, do we get a lot of people in for story time. So many, I thought I would snap some pictures of the books piled on the table in the kids room to demonstrate, for posterity, how crazy it gets some times.

Most of the time, it's so packed in there that we can't get near the shelves to put away the books that get returned.

And this is actually a slower story time than normal for us.

Possession, Part II

2007-02-04T21:34:00.000-07:00

I am about mid-way through Possession now and am still holding on--though I'll admit that I've started to skip over the excepted pieces of poetry and critical essays. The story part is still very interesting. It's not a very exciting read, I'll admit, but it's a very different kind of love story.

One of the things I'm enjoying the most about this book is that it is also a critique of modern literary scholarship. Last time I mentioned the absurdity of what scholars write about and read into their subjects. This time I want to comment on something that one of the characters said. The character, Fergus Wolff--a scumbucket with a better vocabulary--wondered angrily about the point of what they do. He reads "dead letters by dead people" (my paraphrase). Truth to tell, the vast majority of people couldn't care less about literary scholarship. So why do literary scholars write? Sure some write to stay in academia (for whatever reason), but there has to be a deeper reason to stay in a profession that is poorly paid and highly competitive.

I think it's because literary criticism is, in part, a search for meaning and, maybe, truth. When I was an undergraduate working on a literature degree, I started to think of novels and plays and poems as petri dishes, where the author would throw characters and setting and situations together just to see what would happen. (I always thought this was especially true of Shakespeare.) I saw literature as a safe way to do human behavioral experimentation and the psychology of the text was what interested me the most.

My favorite works to write about were any of the variations of the Faust myth: Marlowe's Dr. Faustus, Shelley's Frankenstein, etc. What drew me to those works was the moral and ethical dilemmas that the characters wrestled with. Maybe it's because I am a dropout from Christianity and have had to find my own moral compass, but watching those characters and thinking deeply about their motivations had profound meaning for me.

I don't know if it's true for every scholar, that they find a story that speaks to them and that they can listen to and think about for years, but I wouldn't be surprised to learn that most literary critics continually return to the same author or the same work over and over again.

Library Signs

2007-01-30T23:05:00.000-07:00

I like funny signs, especially ones in the library. Here's one that I spotted posted in the other local library in town.

Eerily, someone at our library appears to have answered, through a whimsical use of thumb tacks.

Dragons in the library!

2007-01-30T22:59:00.000-07:00

It's almost time for Chinese New Year, and we're celebrating it here Local Library.

<--This dragon is hanging right near our main entrance.

And this dragon is hanging in the Young Adult area.-->

A little winter art

2007-01-30T22:54:00.000-07:00

Here's a quick camera phone shot of some unexpected art by tires made when I turned around in a driveway recently.

Amusez le cerveau VII

2007-01-30T07:46:00.000-07:00

Some dog-themed titles:

Bark M for Murder
The Finer Points of Sausage Dogs

Possession: A Romance, by A.S. Byatt, Part I

2007-01-29T07:37:00.000-07:00

I'm sure you've all heard the saying, "Don't judge a book by its cover," right? Well, I'll be the first to admit that I do judge books by their covers. Bright colors, interesting fonts and pictures in a bookstore will catch my eye. That being said, when you're reading a book called Possession: A Romance, people will get the wrong idea. Since I picked up Possession, I've been answering a lot of questions with, "Yes, it is a love story, but with English literature scholars."

So far, I'm having a good time. It took me a couple of chapters to adjust to Byatt's wandering prose, but I'm definitely hooked now.

Because I was a literature major in school, I am really enjoying the descriptions of the study of literature in this novel. Because this novel takes place in the 1980s, the literary scholarship going on is highly Postmodernist. I don't know if Byatt meant to write it this way, but a lot of the article titles and conference topics discussed are starting to sound satirical. When a list of deconstructive/Postmodernist articles titles is listed, it's hard not to see them as slightly absurd. Do you remember the Calvin and Hobbes cartoon where Calvin writes a paper on Dick and Jane? A lot of these titles are like that.

Plus, the way that scholarship is conducted in this novel brings up a question that really started to bother me in my last years as an undergrad. Often, when writing a paper, I would wonder how much of what I was saying about an author's intentions was really accurate and how much was just my reading of the text. A great example of what I mean comes from Possession itself. A lot of the feminist scholars in this novel are concerned with, to paraphrase, exposing the hidden rage in Victorian women's writing. As one of the characters comments, they would try to find it in even the dullest and most domestic diaries.

Why don't they read anymore?

2007-01-26T07:52:00.000-07:00

This article from The Washington Post has been making the rounds on some of the book news blogs I read, and when I read it, it annoyed me enough that I had to comment on it. In it, a high school librarian bemoans the fact that reading rates are in serious decline at his school. I disagree with a few things that he writes about library and science and information literacy, but what really bothers me is his approach to trying to get students to read.

Nowhere in this article did I get the sense that he was trying to show his students that reading was fun. I did note that he was trying to show kids that reading would improve their minds, improve their concentrate, etc. But, honesty, my primary motivation for reading is--as you can probably tell by the kinds of things I read--is to have fun. I want to read a good story that I can escape into for a while.

Yes, I'll agree that reading can improve your concentration, your imagination, and so on. But I really think that what will hook new readers and keep them reading is their finding out that reading is another form of entertainment.

Link found via Bookninja.

Mistral's Kiss, by Laurel K. Hamilton

2007-01-25T21:05:00.000-07:00

What can I say? I'm a Laurel Hamilton addict. Though I might not buy a copy of every new book she puts out, I do read every new book. I got a copy of Mistral's Kiss from my local public library.

Overall, it is a bit of an improvement over her last Merry Gentry novel in that I felt like things were actually moving forward, plot-wise, rather than being a complete shagfest with little development of characters and/or plot. Contrary to what Hamilton might think about why former readers dislike her books, it's not because we're unsophisticated and can't handle all the sex. It's that the books don't seem to be going anywhere. Have you read Book-A-Minute's summary of Robert Jordan's New Spring? Well, it's really starting to seem like that, though on a smaller scale. To be perfectly honest, I read the book in about three hours--which seemed about the total period of time covered by the novel's plot.

I am curious about the characters in these novels. And I am genuinely interested in what happens next. But what I really want is something new to happen, something that moves the plot forward in more than one night increments.

I think there are two things that are bogging down the plot. The first is that a lot of time is devoted to the characters negotiating things. In the first books of the Merry Gentry and Anita Blake series, the lead characters seemed like take-charge characters who would cut through all the bullshit and get things done. Not so much anymore. The second thing that I think is the problem is the characters. First, there are a lot of them, many of whom are getting bigger and bigger parts in each book. It's causing the books to lose their focus I think. While I know that Hamilton is probably interested in broadening her books and exploring the complete lives of her characters, it just means that the plot gets extremely diffuse. It's not to say that it's hard to follow, it's just that it gets harder and harder to see what the story is supposed to be. I've felt like most of Hamilton's most recent books could be summarized with the same short sentence: "Small mystery, shag, magic, discuss magic and shagging, shag again, more magic, glimmer of plot, tune in for next installment." Frankly it's getting frustrating.

I will read the next Gentry and Blake novels because I am completely fascinated by the worlds Hamilton's created. But I just wish that she could learn to condense the negotiating and, to a certain extent, the sex. The Blake novels in particular started out as great plot-driven books. And I knew that the Gentry books were going to be character driven, but I think that without a good, meaty in-book plot (as opposed to a multiple book arc), the book is rudderless.

Refgrunt--An Alarming Question

2007-01-25T17:22:00.000-07:00

This happened not five minutes ago:

Student: Oh, when the time comes, do you have, you know, stuff for blowing things up?

Me: Uh...

Student: You know, for making things bigger?

Me: Oh!

And then I told him where the copiers where. Whew. I have rarely heard a simple question phrased in such an alarming way.

Who do you write for?

2007-01-20T11:15:00.000-07:00

Recently, contemporary fantasy writer Laurell K. Hamilton lost her temper with some of her readers on her message board when these readers wrote that they didn't like/hated her latest books. My question was, if they didn't like the books, why did they buy them in the first place? If you don't like a book, but you're still curious about what happens in it, check it out from the library. Then, if you hate it, you're not out $25 and you can get rid of the book.

John Scalzi, a science fiction writer who blogs, commented a little more on the Hamilton situation.

All of this brings up a question I've thought about for a long time. I've read a lot of books by authors that I like and have been disappointed with the direction they've gone. Because of this, I no longer read Patricia Cornwell or James Patterson. But the question is, who do writers ultimately write for? Do they write for the fans? Or do they write for themselves? Personally, I'm in the later camp. I think that if a writer just becomes concerned with churning out books to be sold (Patterson), rather than write the books they want to write or the ones that they think need to be written, they'll eventually lose their charm, their spark, whatever it is that makes the book a good book. That may be a flimsy argument, but it makes sense to me.

Still, I think that authors need to be aware of their audience and keep us in mind when they write. But I would rather read a book by someone who enjoyed the writing of it, who really cares about the book.

You Suck, by Christopher Moore

2007-01-20T10:44:00.000-07:00

This week, Christopher Moore's sequel to Bloodsucking Fiends: A Love Story came out. Finally! I've enjoyed Christopher Moore for a long, because he has a knack for inventing totally absurd and hilarious characters and situations. He's one of the few authors that can make me laugh out loud as I read. (The others are Jasper Fforde and Terry Pratchett.)

And the good news is that he's getting successful enough that not only did The New York Times review his book, but they liked it! (This link will expire in a few days, so read it soon.)

Even though Bloodsucking Fiends came out in the mid-1990s, You Suck picks up right where the first book started. In a way, it was kind of like reading an extended epilogue. It's got almost all of the original characters--with the addition of a blue-dyed prostitute. And the plot almost defies description.

Like the Times review points out, Moore's humor always has a sweetness to it. Lamb, for example, is one of the rare books that manages to be absolutely hilarious and heartbreaking at the same time. You Suck, though, is missing some of that sweetness. Okay, it's missing a lot of that sweetness. In some places, it's downright mean and, as I read the book, I know there are several places that were supposed to be funny that I just didn't find amusing. So, while I enjoyed the book, it's not one of my favorites.

A New Library Program?

2006-12-22T10:08:00.000-07:00

Oh, how I wish we had something like this here. It's a really interesting idea, bring a book you love or hate and use that as a conversation starter at a mixer. I would never have thought of a library hosting something like this, but I really like it. Maybe I should bring it up the next time I'm at my public library...

Via Bookninja

I used to joke about this sort of thing...

2006-12-19T22:25:00.000-07:00

When I shelved periodicals at my university library a while back, I used to tease my supervisor about abandoning the LC call number system and just shelve everything by color. Plus, there's the long running joke among reference librarians about the patrons who come in looking for the books they read last week and they don't remember what they were about, but they remember that it was red.

Apparently, there's a bookstore in San Francisco that actually shelves it's books by color. And it's really quite pretty. Take a look.

Via Neil Gaiman's blog.

Another shelving tidbit for you librarians who read this. According to Matthew Battles' Library: An Unquiet History, Jonathan Swift's library was shelved by size.

Amusez le cerveau VI

2006-12-17T10:46:00.000-07:00

Another great book title:

Racquetball: The Cult, by Eugene Scott

Eragon, by Christopher Paolini

2006-12-15T07:57:00.000-07:00

I finally got around to reading this one, and I mostly read it because I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. This book and its sequel have been almost constantly on hold at my local public library since they were published.

As I read Paolini's Eragon, I was surprised at how well he wrote. His dialogue is very Tolkienesque and often stilted, but his plotting is very impressive. His worldbuilding is outstanding. The world of Eragon is incredibly detailed and learning more about Eragon's world was part of what pulled me in.

That said, this book is very, very derivative. I can see a lot of Tolkien. I can even see some of the old epic literature that I read in my English Literature and Classical Literature classes. Some of the passages in Eragon sounded almost identical to passages that I read of Beowulf and The Iliad. (Check out that Wikipedia link to Beowulf to see a reproduction of the first page of a very old version of the poem. Cool!) Plus, it has a ton of fantasy tropes in it. There's the journeying about from place to place, the wise elder who won't tell you more than is absolutely necessary, the Evil Empire, the untrained boy how is destined to bring down said empire, elves, dwarves, dragons, orcs (basically), etc., etc.

In spite of all that, though, I got hooked and read the book in two days. Tcha.

If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, by Italo Calvino, Part I

2006-12-12T15:11:00.000-07:00

I've been reading this book for about a week now. (I kept getting interrupted by other books like Hannibal Rising and Eragon.) But I am enjoying If on a Winter's Night a Traveler; it's one of the more unusually constructed books I've read. I've never before read a book that employs so much of the second person perspective. It's a little disorienting at first, but it's a very enjoyable way of getting sucked into a book.

The plot, such as it is, is very complex. But if I had to say what this book is about, it would say that it's about reading. It's about the experience of reading and it's about why people read. What is very interesting to me is the way that Calvino shows the differences between reading for fun and reading as an academic exercise. Having done both, I found it interesting to see it from this books perspective. The person who reads for fun, in IOAWNAT, just wants to be sucked into a story. They want to be entertained. They want to be transported. Academics, as shown in this novel, tear the story apart. They want to see how it works. Calvino also pokes fun at how some academics try to put things into the novel that the author probably didn't intend. (This is kind of what I liked about studying literature as a major. You could get away with a lot as long as you could create a sufficiently strong argument to support it.)

More about IOAWNAT later. Just for fun, here is the Book-a-Minute condensed version of IOAWNAT.

Hannibal Rising, by Thomas Harris

2006-12-12T14:57:00.000-07:00

Man, was I looking forward to Hannibal Rising. I really enjoyed both Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal. I'm not sure what it is about this monster, but he fascinates me.

After I finished this book, I find myself agreeing more and more with what Janet Maslin wrote about the book in her December 8th review. Hannibal Lecter, I think, is a better character when he is an enigma. I think part of what draws people to him is the fact that he that he just doesn't fit the mold of any baddie we've ever seen in a book. He is an absolutely ruthless killer--and yet, Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal were written in such a way that you could see why he did what he did. Plus, because we didn't know about his past, we couldn't reduce him to a pathology. (Maslin mentions this idea, and I think Hannibal himself brought it up in one of the earlier books. I need to go reread them.) We couldn't see him as an abused child. He was just an extremely erudite monster.

If you're interested in a plot synopsis, here's an excellent one from the Guardian's Digested Read. Funny and informative. :)

The Prestige, by Christopher Priest

2006-12-12T14:30:00.000-07:00

I think that the reason I didn't like this book as much as I liked the movie was because the movie was pretty different than the original book. The film of The Prestige really emphasizes the action and the suspense of The Prestige the book. I actually really liked the movie--it was dark, it was imaginative, original, and a lot of fun to watch. But the action in the book just didn't pop as much, even though the magic tricks described there were more spectacular. It's not that I went into this book expecting to find a more in-depth version of the movie, but I wished the book had at least lived up to what's written on the back cover.

What I did like about the book, though, was the way that Priest chose to tell the story. It's told from, by my last count, five different people (two of whom are pretending to be the same person). Since this book is really about perception, it was a masterful touch.

I find that perception is a fascinating concept--probably because I got my literature degree a couple of decades into the Postmodernist era. But it's interesting to realize that reality, which seems so concrete, is really a product of our perception of events. In The Prestige, a character named Alfred Bordon returns again and again to the idea that most of the magic he does is really just a matter of altering the audience's perception of what he's doing. And the rivalry between Borden and the illusionist Angier is a product of how they each percieve the other's actions. If the characters had taken more time to try and see things from the other's viewpoint, the rivalry wouldn't have been as disastrous. But then, there probably wouldn't have been a plot either.

In the end though, I think I actually prefer the movie. It was a much leaner telling of the story. The book, I felt, got bogged down because it was trying to do too many things at once.

Refgrunt, again

2006-12-06T20:20:00.000-07:00

I am approaching the four hour mark tonight and so far, I been asked about:

Articles on course reserves
Articles about the effects of orange juice, Sprite, and soil pH on plant growth.
Books about medieval dance.
Books about Hawaiian dance.
Books on local history that weren't locked up in Special Collections.
Where the bathroom is.
Government documents and articles about Sacco and Vanzetti.
Articles about quitting smoking, and "How do I get full text?"
Interlibrary loan
More Sacco and Vanzetti.

For my friends in Reference...

2006-12-02T22:22:00.000-07:00

The Zen Librarian said, "Reference service is like a man hanging from a rope by his teeth over a cliff, with his hands bound to his sides and feet resting on no ledge, and another person asks him for books about Enrico Fermi for a child's school assignment."

More Koans of the Zen Librarian.

Amusez le cerveau V

2006-12-01T18:33:00.000-07:00

Bookninja, one of my favorite book news sites, posted a link to this article on Wired about improvements to electronic translation services. Their intro pointed out the weird translations you can get by running poetry through a couple of languages and then back into English. So, to amuse by cerveau, I took the first stanza of "Jerusalem" by William Blake and plugged it into Babelfish.

Here's the original:

And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon England's mountains green?
And was the holy Lamb of God
On England's pleasant pastures seen?

And, into French, then German, and back to English:

And did these feet go in that antique time
on the green of the mountains of England?
And was the lamb God-holy
on the obliging/pleasing pastures of England seen?

I like how the translator waffled on what pleasant means.

Yeah, pretty much true

2006-11-29T23:51:00.000-07:00

What Kind of Reader Are You? Your Result: Dedicated Reader You are always trying to find the time to get back to your book. You are convinced that the world would be a much better place if only everyone read more.
Literate Good Citizen
Obsessive-Compulsive Bookworm
Book Snob
Fad Reader
Non-Reader
What Kind of Reader Are You? Create Your Own Quiz

Dead Souls, Part III

2006-11-29T23:24:00.000-07:00

Earlier this afternoon, I finished reading my first Russian novel. Hurrah! I made it! Granted, it was hardly more than a novella, but I still feel proud of my accomplishment. It was a near thing. I started reading The Prestige Monday night and I've had a hard time putting that one down. (More on The Prestige later.)

So, now that I've read Dead Souls, I presumable know what it's about, right? Well, I have to say that there really wasn't much plot. Protagonist enters town, charms inhabitants, buys or is gifted with the ownership rights to deceased serfs, things go pear-shaped, and the protagonist leaves town while the narrator waxes rhapsodical about Russia. And according to the Wikipedia article on this book, it's an unfinished novel--so who knows how long this sucker was going to go on.

I really think that this book is more a study of characters and a gentle satire. Gogol seems have a lot more fun creating odd characters for the purpose of poling fun at the Russian aristocracy than he does telling a story. What I learned from Gogol's perspective of that group was that many of them were extremely social creatures who were inordinately fond of gossip, not especially intelligent or possessed of much common sense, and were really quite fickle. Like I said before, no one comes off well in this book, not even the protagonist.

The Wikipedia article cited above, and the notes in the edition of Dead Souls that I had, also mention that this isn't a traditional novel. It's really more of a poem that's written in prose. And I could really see this by the end of the book when the narrator appears to totally lose control and starts describing the Russian country side as Chichikov, the "hero," flees town. The narrator goes on, at length, about his strange relationship with Russia. It's full of poor people, there's not much to recommend it (according to the narrator), and yet he loves the country. It's got its hooks into him and is not letting go. Maybe that's what this whole story is about. The world is full of imperfect, often mean, poor, or silly people, and yet, we enjoy being in it. (Though, it was a bit of a struggle, that last chapter and a half.)

What I really enjoyed about the book was the funny little comments that peppered the story, the little lines that made me smirk or chuckle as I read them. It was almost like reading Wilde, though the funnies didn't come as often, and Gogol has a sharper and weirder sense of humor.

Dead Souls, Part II

2006-11-24T22:22:00.000-07:00

Wierdly, the longer I continue my work towards my MLS, the more I realize that most concepts they we think are new to this century are actually not so new. The Ptolemies, understanding that knowledge is power, held a monopoly on scholarship at the Library of Alexandria. Alexander Pope felt the frustrations of being a successful author by being hounded by his fans and budding writers who wanted his opinions. Laurence Sterne wrote a postmodernist novel that was published in parts between 1759 and 1769.

And, apparently, Nikolai Gogol was doing stunning work breaking the "fourth wall." Other writers of the period did this, by directly addressing the reader, but in every chapter of Dead Souls, Gogol directly addresses the reader and/or draws the reader's attention to the fact that he, the narrator, is actively composing the novel. Here's an example from page 154 of 1996 Yale edition:

The ladies of the town of N--- were...no, I simply can't do it, I really do feel a certain timidity. The most remarkable thing about the ladies of the town of N--- was...Why, it's actually odd, my quill absolutely refuses to rise, just as if it were loaded with lead or something.

It almost feels like you're in the room with him as he writes this novel. And this book was published in 1842, long before postmodernism got going or plays got experimental. And you certainly don't see this kind of writing, the "Dear reader" writing, much anymore. (It's kind of strange that I like this kind of playing around with literature, and I don't much care for Mark Danielewski's experiments. (See previous post.))

I've encountered a lot of narrators, and only a few of them stand out in my mind as attempting to draw the reader into the story as much. The other that sticks out is the narrator of Gulliver's Travels, a snarky narrator who like to point out Gulliver's cluelessness or his Eurocentrism.

Dubious New Books

2006-11-24T22:15:00.000-07:00

Mark Z. Danielewski and Thomas Pynchon have new books out. I don't know how I feel about these authors. I've never read Pynchon, but I understand that his books are spectacularly dense. I read the review in Time magazine, and it looks like this new book is no exception. I did attempt to read Danielewski's House of Leaves, and only made it about halfway through before I gave up.

While I appreciate that Danielewski took the suggestions and ideas of his readers into account, books like these make me wonder if it matters that you're a brilliant writer if most people can't understand your work and the ones that do understand it only understand it after long study.

It's kind of a classic, unsolvable struggle, the way I see it. On the one hand, writers should write the books they want to write. But on the other hand, you have to please the readers.

Amusez le cerveau IV

2006-11-19T00:37:00.000-07:00

(I've decided I like Roman numerals better.)

I found a funny cookbook today. It wasn't so funny because of the title, but because of the author's surname. Honestly, could you trust a cookbook written by someone named Burn?

Also, a quote of the day. I heard this as I was shelving in the children's room, where we also keep our puppets. How often do you get to hear something like this?

"I am an armadillo! Hear me roar!"

Dead Souls, by Nikolai Gogol, Part I

2006-11-17T15:15:00.000-07:00

I'm starting to think that Dead Souls is the first Russian novel that I've read all the way through. I am approaching the half way point, and I'm still enjoying myself. I picked up Dead Souls for a couple of reasons. First, since I bailed out on Nanowrimo, I felt like I ought to do something literary this month. Second, I've heard parts of the story, and I want to know the rest of it.

I have to say, though, I really like the way Gogol writes. He's sort of a cross between Jonathan Swift and Henry Fielding, I think. On the one hand, he's pretty misanthropic. None of the characters comes off very well, and they all seem to have serious flaws. You wouldn't want to deal with any of them. But on the other hand, the descriptions and situations in this book are pretty funny. In that way, Gogol's a bit like Fielding--but the comedy isn't as broad. Gogol has a lot of really funny turns of phrase, especially in the character descriptions. I didn't expect to laugh so much at something that was written more than 150 years ago by a Russian. Not that I have anything agaisnt Russians, it's just that they tend to depress the hell out of me.

My only concern about the book is the translation. The translators, don't get me wrong, have done a really good job. I understand what's going on, but I can see some use of slang that I think is modern. I don't know any Russian, and I don't know enough about Russian culture to know what the slang would have sounded like at the time. What I'm worried about is if the translator's voice is drowning out Gogol. Which is unfortunate, because I do like how the man writes. I have read other translated works were I don't pick up on the fact that it's translated, like The Shadow of the Wind. I didn't "hear" any narrators I shouldn't have. That might be kind of difficult to understand. With the translation of Dead Souls that I'm reading, there are times when I don't think it's Gogol that's writing. But with Shadow, it sounded like Ruiz-Zafón all the way through. And, given that this book was published 1842, some of the translation makes the characters sound anachronistic--there are modern turns of phrase that stick out in a bad way.

I am trying to finish a chapter a day. So I should be done with this book by mid-week next week. More Dead Souls later, then.

I don't feel so bad about reading Terry Pratchett anymore

2006-11-17T15:14:00.000-07:00

...thanks to this post.

Snake Agent, by Liz Williams

2006-11-09T12:27:00.000-07:00

Over the last week, I've been reading (very slowly) Snake Agent by Liz Williams. (And the slowness is really only due to my business this month, otherwise, I think I would have zipped through this book already and be at the point of regretting that its over and that I now have to go and track down the rest of the series). So far, my thought is "Why haven't I heard of this author before now?" She's wonderful. This is one of the most imaginative books I've read in a long time.

Like John Burdett's books, Liz Williams book basically takes a genre that developed in the West and put it in Asia. In this book, the genre is contemporary fantasy--with some horror, science fiction, and mystery thrown in. And, like Burdett's Jitpleecheep, I get a totally different perspective on these kinds of stories because of the narrator.

In Snake Agent, Inspector Chan is a detective who handles supernatural cases. So far so good, but then we learn that he has a demon for a wife, he's on the outs with his patron goddess, Kuan Yin, and Hell is up to something more sinister than usual. And, he's got a demon hunter from Beijing after his wife. I am totally hooked. I'm not done with this yet, but there are so many loose plot threads that I am very interested to see how this all turns out.

What I think I like best about this book is how much detail Williams put into the worlds the characters inhabit. I don't know what kind of research the author put into this, and if it accurately shows an Asian idea of Hell and the afterlife. But I am fascinated by how this version of Hell differs from the Western version of it. I know that other authors have probably played with the idea that Hell is a bureaucracy, but Williams really runs with it.

The only problem I have with this book is that, for the longest time I couldn't figure out if it was the first book in the series. I hate picking up a book in the middle of a series, for various reasons. As far as I could tell, this was the first book, but the characters kept referring to events that might have happened in a previous book. Rrr. It took me about half of the book to decide that this really is the first volume. But apart from that, I am really enjoying this. It's fast-paced; the plot is complicated and wonderfully involving.

So now, it looks like I'm going to have to find the rest of the series.

Strange Signs

2006-11-09T12:18:00.000-07:00

Last week, I visited another library. On the tour portion, I really regreated not having my camera with me, because I saw some thought-provoking signs and I ended up taking pictures with my camera phone. I should probably preface these pictures by saying that this library was at a private, religious institution, so they have the ability to make stricter rules about how the library is used.

First sign, regarding cell phone coverage:

I do like this sign, actually. It made me smile.

Second sign, regarding the use of headsets:

It never would have occurred to me to put this on a sign. When I had to use the TVs and headsets in the language lab at my university, my biggest temptation was not falling asleep.

Third sign, regarding the rules of the quiet study areas:

We could never get away with making a sign like this at our library.

I belong in a library

2006-11-01T23:48:00.000-07:00

...because I am constantly amused by classification systems. Seriously. How can you not enjoy something that can put something written by Robert Boyle on the same shelf as a biography of John Dee? (Library of Congress Classification does this at one of my libraries.) I've also seen books about death shelved right above books about fast food (Dewey Decimal Classification) and, in one very small library, Danielle Steel right next to John Steinbeck (alphabetical).

If someday you're in a library and you hear someone chuckling in the stacks, it might be me laughing at the weird juxtapositions of books on the shelves.

Amusez le cerveau 3

2006-11-01T23:41:00.000-07:00

This really is an unfortunate choice of titles: Success with Joints. It's really about carpentry, but honestly, what do you think of first when someone says "joint"?

The Thirteenth Tale, by Diane Setterfield

2006-10-27T15:52:00.000-06:00

I didn't think that I would like this book all that much when I first picked it up. Literary fiction and I haven't always gotten along in the past. But then, I kind of thought that about The Shadow of the Wind when I first read that one, but I loved that book and I keep recommending it to people.

Diane Setterfield's The Thirteenth Tale, though, was so engaging that I ended up reading it in two days. The Thirteenth Tale is, I think, unique in fiction today because you don't really get out-and-out Gothic fiction any more. And by Gothic fiction, I mean those depraved stories that you got around the same time that Romanticism was taking off. (I always kind of wondered about why those two literary movements coincided when I was a young lit major. How could a country produce someone like William Wordsworth at roughly the same time that it produces people like Matthew Lewis? Weird) Anyway, this book is about as bizzare as those first Gothic novels and the plots are about as disturbing, too.

One of the reasons I first picked this book up was because the New York Times book reviews said it was similar to The Shadow of the Wind, and about books with a mystery on top. But it's not really about books so much as it is about storytelling, truth and lies. I hate to say much more about this book because when I try to think of a way to describe the plot I can only come up with sentences that involve truth being stranger than fiction and the ability of some people to reinvent themselves. And that sound a little dull, but I have to let you know that this book is damned interesting. It's not an especially moving book, and it may not even be particularly believable when you pick apart the plot, but this book is fascinating.

Quote of the Day

2006-10-25T12:37:00.000-06:00

While helping a man renew a book over the phone:

Him: I just wanted to make sure of when it was due. I didn't want the Gestapo to come after me.

Me: We're a small library, sir. We don't have a Gestapo.

First Snow of the Season

2006-10-25T12:30:00.000-06:00

The snow started to come down at about 10:00 this morning and hasn't stopped yet. And, unlike most first snows, this one looks like it's going to stick around for a while.

Another view of the snow. It caught use before we could bring in all the lawn stuff from the summer.

In the Merde for Love, by Stephen Clarke

2006-10-23T22:09:00.000-06:00

In the Merde for Love, the sequel to A Year in the Merde by Stephen Clarke, I hate to say, is not as much fun as its predecessor. And I was really looking forward to it.

Both books center on the experiences of Paul West, a Brit who moves to France for a job. The best parts of both books involve Paul's trying to learn how to function in France and it's alien culture. The absolute best parts involve his trying to deal with the French bureaucracy, which often sounds like something out of Brazil.

In the Merde for Love, though, has moved away from all this somewhat, to focus on Paul's love life and his new English-style tea room in Paris. While there are some great moments in this book, it still felt like kind of a slog and not nearly as much fun as it could have been.

Fun with declensions

2006-10-23T22:01:00.000-06:00

Seriously.

While working during a kind of busy period at the public library when we couldn't get much done, a co-worker and I amused ourselves by making grammar jokes. By way of background, Co-worker was looking at the Wikipedia article on declension (she's trying to learn Croatian, of all languages), and we found a ton of cases we had never heard of. So we started making up definitions for them. Here's some of the best ones:

Ergative: case in which the noun is most comfortable
Absolutive: used by dictators, tyrants, and autocrats
Pergative: used by mythical horses
Temporal: only works for the time being
Elative: used when you're really happy
Excessive: ...actually, this is funny on its own

I have to stop looking at that page, because I could go on forever making declension jokes. Sick, isn't it? :)

Refgrunt, again.

2006-10-13T22:31:00.000-06:00

Over the last three days, in three different reference desk shifts, I have been asked about:

A conference about Robin Hood
A dissertation on courtship in Jane Austen's novels
A possibly apocryphal experiment in which Arctic foxes were frozen
Fetal alcohol syndrome
Bans on soda machines in public schools
Scorpion vemon
Deseret news from the mid-eighties
Chicago Manual of Style
About a series of three articles that might have just been one big article
And the inevitable, where's the bathroom (though this instance was remarkable because I had two different people ask this question within seconds of each other)

Also, I had my very own oranges and peaches moment, when I thought a patron was asking for a book about gerrymandering, when in fact she was asking for a book by Jerry Mander.

Amusez le cerveau 2

2006-10-13T22:28:00.000-06:00

The cowboy: six-shooters, songs and sex.

Sounds like a good time.

Russell and Holmes Novels, part II

2006-10-08T18:32:00.000-06:00

Just an update on my progress through Laurie R. King's Holmes and Russell series. So far, I have made up through books four and five, The Moor, and O Jerusalem. One of the things that really struck me during this read through was how integral the setting seemed to the story. I know that the setting is rarely just a background, a place for the characters to act out the plot, but honestly, for many books, the setting is just that. However, in these two books, I was constantly made aware of the setting.

The Moor takes place primarily in Dartmoor, in Devon. And O Jerusalem takes place in Palestine. As I was reading these books, it struck me how hard it must be for a writer to describe a setting without bogging down the story. Writing about place (good writing about a place) must be a little like drawing, you have to use minimal lines that suggest the setting; you have to rely, somewhat, on your readers to do the rest of the work. When I read, it often seems like I have a little movie running in my head. A few well-chosen sentences can cause my mind's eye to see whole streets and shops and forests and so on.

Since what really draws me into a book is the plot and the characters, I don't usually notice the setting unless it's really important or it's described very poorly or very well. In these two books I have to say, King did a great job and I felt like I was right there with the characters, freezing my ass off on Dartmoor and sweating in the underground tunnels in Jerusalem.

Amusez le cerveau

2006-10-03T22:11:00.000-06:00

Heard of amuse bouche? Well, this is amusez le cerveau, "amuse the brain," a new feature I've thought up. Since I regularly see funny or odd book titles in my jobs, I thought I would share them with you all, between book reviews. These are all actual titles.

This week's amusez:

Glory days of logging: action in the big woods--British Columbia to California

Misheard Book Titles

2006-10-02T18:23:00.000-06:00

A patron came in to pick up an interlibrary loan. When I asked her what the book was, so that I could find it on the shelf, I could have sworn she said the book was called "The Squirrels of the Ancients."

Holmes and Russell Series, by Laurie R. King

2006-10-02T08:23:00.000-06:00

I can't imagine the guts it would take for an author to use another writer's character, especially a character as iconic as, say, Sherlock Holmes, for several reasons. First, you have to worry about pissing off fans of the original character. Second, you might have to negotiate copyright issues. And third, you have to do something with the character to make it your own, and make it new. Yowza. If you want to see where this idea goes right, I recommend that you pick up this series. (If you want to see where, in my opinion, this idea goes dreadfully wrong, try picking up the "sequels" to Pride and Prejudice. Some of them, I understand from the plot synopses, look down right pornographic.)

Over the weekend, I've zipped through the first three books in Laurie R. King's Holmes and Russell series: The Beekeeper's Apprentice, A Monstrous Regiment of Women, and A Letter of Mary. I just started a sentence that descriped the plot, and I found that I couldn't right one without it sounding silly or uninteresting. Okay, let's try that again. In the first book, The Beekeeper's Apprentice, a young orphan, Mary Russell, stumbles across Sherlock Holmes in his retirement. Over the course of that book, Russell becomes Holmes' apprentice and then partner.

I think what I like about these books is that, through King, I get to see Holmes through the eyes of an intellectual equal. I have never liked books, such as the original Holmes stories or the Hercule Poirot novels, in which the main character has someone thick to act as their foil. Plus, I never liked that those stories usually involved a sentence to the effect of, "Ah, but Hastings/Watson/etc., if you had known this bit of information that I have known about for fifty of more pages, you would already know who committed the crime." Mysteries, for me, are a chance to flex my brain muscles. Some people do crosswords, I try to beat the detective to the punch.

Three Days to Never. Addenda.

2006-09-28T12:21:00.000-06:00

This morning I remembered the other thing I was going to say about Three Days to Never. One of the things about this book that really rocked my socks off was the way that Powers played with history. In this book, history is not exactly fluid, but it's not static other. There's really an aspect of the multiverse here, in that multiple time lines can exist concurrently and can be manipulated even after they've officially "happened." In a way, how Powers had his characters use time travel to change their own pasts really reminded me of the movie The Butterfly Effect, but in a much less melodramatic way.

Three Days to Never, by Tim Powers

2006-09-27T13:38:00.000-06:00

I think karma and/or poetic justice has just slapped me upside the head. I don't think I've blogged about Tim Powers before, although there may be a review somewhere on my old Web site about one or two of his books, but the thing that strikes me every time is how little he actually explains what's going on in his books. And this, after I write about Mistborn and complain about too much explanation. Tcha.

This book isn't nearly as over my head as some of his other books (Declare, Last Call, The Anubis Gate, etc.), but there's still an awful lot going on in this book. There's time travel, Einstein, quantum mechanics, psychics, astral projection, Charlie Chaplin...In this book, I think Powers has unbent a little and used his story to explain what's really going on, especially towards the end. Or, it could be that reading Dante's Equation and some of the other works of fiction that borrow from the world of physics has prepared me a little bit for this.

But I think what I really like about Powers comes down to two things. One, he is absolutely fabulous about blending fact and fiction. It makes it hard to tell what really happened and what didn't--especially when your book involved time travel and alternate histories--but it makes for a very involving story and a smooth read. The other thing that I like about Powers books, and this one in particular, is the way that he pulled in other works of fiction. The Tempest plays a really big role in this one. The only other author I've read who's managed to do this (though he took it to a whole other level) is Dan Simmons who blended The Iliad, The Odyssey, and The Tempest with science fiction and created Ilium and Olympos.

Tim Powers is an acquired taste, I'll admit, but he is well worth it. I've never found anyone who writes quite like he does. I never know what to expect when I hear he has a new book out.

Small Announcement

2006-09-27T13:32:00.000-06:00

I have been recently invited to post at Library Vixens, which was created by a friend and co-worker of mine. In order to have something worthwhile to post over there, I'm thinking that most of my library-related posts are now going to appear on that blog.

But I think I'll keep the funny ones here, like my Louisa May Alcott story.

Quote of the Day

2006-09-17T16:07:00.000-06:00

Me: Love means never having to say, "Sorry I almost shoved an Anzac biscuit up your nose."

During a family visit to Idaho Falls, we had lunch at a restaurant called Aussie Eats. Good food, and the desserts--which I haven't gotten to yet--look amazing. As we paid for our meal, our waitress gave us some free Anzac biscuits. Yum!

Mistborn, by Brandon Sanderson

2006-09-14T11:16:00.000-06:00

I'd been looking forward to another book from Brandon Sanderson since I read Elantris, and this summer, Mistborn: The Final Empire came out. Sanderson is one of the few genuinely fantasy authors I read any more. If you read a lot of fantasy, you'll probably agree that a lot of it is all the same--a set of easily recognizable archetypes for characters journey to and fro in a world that looks an awful lot like medieval Europe, with magic and/or creatures from a beastiary thrown in, with a plot that seems to come from a standard play book. Because of the conventions that govern what fantasy is, it's hard to find original fantasy.

The originality factor is what made me love both Elantris and Mistborn. Sanderson obviously puts a lot of thought into the construction of his novels and his writing style delivers ripping stories. (I have one minor criticism about writing style, though, which I'll get to later.) In this book, Sanderson delivered an intriguing and new style of magic, a very formidable set of villains and henchmen, a fully realized society, history, and culture, a very charismatic duo of heroes, and a plot that--though I knew roughly were it would end up--that kept me wondering how the protagonists were going to pull it all off.

One thing about this book that I really liked was the way that Sanderson handled gender in this book. In fantasy novels, there are a limited set of female characters--the damsel in distress, Amazons, evil sorceresses, etc. But in Mistborn, Sanderson gives us Vin, a character who visible grows during the novel from a frightened abuse-victim to a powerful Allomancer (the name for someone who practices the magic system in this book) who helps to finish the work that her mentor started. Vin's story was amazingly fresh and believable, and I look forward to seeing more of her in the next books.

Oh, and a short word about Kelsier, the other protagonist. I really wish there were more characters like him in fantasy. He was a lot of fun to watch.

The only criticism I have about Sanderson's writing style is that often, when he was describing how the magic system worked, there was too much telling and not enough showing. In a few sections, it felt like I was getting a mini-seminar on Allomancy, the magic system. I know there was a lot to cover, given that this system is unique in fantasy, and you can't bring prior knowledge to bear, and that telling is really the most efficient way to cover the necessary background. But it did slow things down. Hopefully, the future books will have more showing, given that we readers have the basics down now.

That said, I am really glad there are going to be two more books in this series--there is a lot more I want to know about this world. (And, in the mean time, I have Warbreaker to keep me busy.)

World War Z, by Max Brooks

2006-09-14T11:00:00.000-06:00

I finished this book last night, around 1:40 in the morning. This one was a very fast read, given that I worked yesterday and was in class for a couple of hours and I only started reading it Tuesday afternoon when it came out.

World War Z, by Max Brooks, is a follow up to his fantastic book, The Zombie Survival Guide, which was all it's title promised. Really, if there were zombies, the Guide would be perfect.

Essentially, this book is a collection of interviews with the survivors of a global zombie attack that wipes out most of humanity. This book follows that outbreak from it's origins (as far as they can figure), through to the end of the Zombie War--though people are still finding zombies on the ocean floor and frozen in the extreme northern and southern parts of the world.

This book was a lot of fun. I had my nose in this book every chance I got, just to find out how people survived. I even found myself thinking some of the same thoughts I had when I read the guide, about zombie-proofing my house: how can I board up the doors and windows, how long would it take to get rid of the stairs, should we run for it instead of staying, &etc.

In retrospect, I am amazed at how much thought Brooks put into this book. On top of all the zombie action, this book has a lot of social and political commentary about our society and it seems like Brooks knew exactly were we would fracture. I daresay that some of this commentary--which gets pretty anti-Bush, anti-corporate, anti-celebrity and material culture, and so on--may be hard to take for people who on the other end of the political spectrum from me. And even for me, some of the comments made by the survivors stung.

The Lost Cosmonaut, by Daniel Kalder

2006-09-14T10:39:00.000-06:00

I have mixed feelings about reading The Lost Cosmonaut: Observations of an Anti-Tourist, by Daniel Kalder. There were a lot of things I liked. I really enjoyed that I got to tag along on Kalder's trips to places that, according to a New York Times review I read when the book first came out, even Russians haven't heard of. This is why I read travel books in the first place. This book also had the added benefit of some philosophy about places we have never heard of. For example, there's this bit on page 24 of the trade paperback version, where Kalder talks about discovering the cultural figures of these places:

The existence of these invisible geniuses disturbs me. We take no notice of their music, their books, their causes, or their history, altough they are and it is European. But it's unknown, a whole other Europe, a shadow Europe, that does not exist for us...I know people are reguarly tortured and murdered for causes I've never heard of. So the existence of ghost canons and traditions shouldn't really disturb me at all. But it does. I shiver when I think about them. They are a mystery, an existential riddle I cannot solve.

It's a little trite to say that this book really made me think. But it did. There are so few books that I read that I really think expand my consciousness and make me think about all the other billions of people on the planet and what their lives are like.

Kalder also has a really odd sense of humor that appeals to me. One of my favorite bits is this one, where Kalder's friends have gone off to visit a Kalmykian Buddhist temple: "I preferred to sit on a bench and observe the emptiness. That, and not Buddhism, was what I had come for" (111). I am sure this little funny was entirely deliberate, but I like those moments in a book when the reader and the person who wrote the book--as opposed to the narrator persona--get to share a laugh.

But I get mixed feelings about this book around the beginning of the second half. After a while, the author really struck me as kind of a putz. And you know how hard it is to enjoy a trip with someone you don't like? Who doesn't enjoy the same things you do? It felt like this after a while. I stuck with it, hoping that Kalder (or the version of him in the book) would stop being so snide and world-weary. That didn't happen, unfortunately.

The first two parts of the book are good. They're odd and funny, and I learned a lot about parts of the world that I would never have heard of otherwise. But the last two parts of the book, well, I still learned things, but I didn't enjoy it near as much.

Souls in the Great Machine, by Sean McMullen, Part I

2006-09-03T20:53:00.000-06:00

I don't know why, perhaps it's the impending release of World War Z by Max Brooks, but I find myself interested in post-Apocalyptic literature and zombie movies lately. Something about the idea of surviving a catastrophe that wipes out most of humanity and then rebuilding society fascinates me. And I don't mean fascinate in a good or bad way. Rather, I'm fascinated by human ingenuity and the endless ways in which human society can defend and organize itself. So, the next time you're feeling guilty about watching 28 Days Later or Dawn of the Dead (like I did this weekend) or about reading most of S.M. Stirling's works, remind yourself that you're being a kind of sociologist. :)

One of the books I'm in the middle of right now is Sean McMullen's Souls in the Great Machine, a book set in Australia about one thousand years after the present. Humanity has survived some ill-fated attempts to combat global warming and managed to create new cultures. What interested me about this book is the prominence of librarians in this book. Being a librarian-in-training myself, I get a kick out of the idea of librarians who fight duels with flint- and matchlock pistols and earn ranks with the word "dragon" in them. (Maybe if they taught dueling in library school, we would have more students. But then again, maybe not. :) ).

On a more serious note, another fascinating aspect of this novel is the way that humanity has recreated technology. Rather than using coal, steam or electrical power, technology is powered by human beings. The train system functions in a Flintstones/paddle boat way and the massive mainframe computer in the central library is made up of human components rather than circuitry or even vacuum tubes.

Aside from these points though, I've found it easy to be distracted from this book by other things. Namely, I've been distracted by The Lost Cosmonaut, a book I recommended to my public library and that has finally arrived and been checked out to my hot little hands. The characters in Souls are interesting, but there are rather too many of them for me to really bond with them, and there's so much going on and so much not explained that, again, I'm having a hard time sticking with it. I will stick with it though, as I've gotten half way through the book and I would be annoyed with myself for getting that far and then giving up.

For the benefit of several readers

2006-09-01T16:52:00.000-06:00

Just for you Jenny, As complete a list of books I've read in the past year (I've probably forgotten some):

Something Rotten, by Jasper Fforde (Blogged)
Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Bronte (Blogged)
Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens (Blogged)
The Winter Queen, by Boris Akunin (Blogged)
Murder on the Leviathan, by Boris Akunin
The Turkish Gambit, by Boris Akunin
The Zombie Suvival Guide, by Max Brooks (Blogged)
A Breath of Snow and Ashes, by Diana Gabaldon (Blogged)
Olympos, by Dan Simmons
Ilium, by Dan Simmons
The Joy Luck Club, by Amy Tan (Blogged)
The Outlandish Companion, by Diana Gabaldon
Elantris, by Brandon Sanderson (Blogged)
Mistborn, by Brandon Sanderson
Thud!, by Terry Pratchett
The Truth, by Terry Pratchett (Blogged)
Year of Wonders, by Geraldine Brooks (Blogged)
The Big Over Easy, by Jasper Fforde (Blogged)
Dies the Fire, by S.M. Stirling (Blogged)
The Protector's War, by S.M. Stirling (Blogged)
The Difference Engine, by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling (Blogged)
Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, by Mary Roach (Blogged)
To Say Nothing of the Dog, by Connie Willis (Blogged)
A Dirty Job, by Christopher Moore
The Birth of Venus, by Sarah Dunant (Blogged)
A Writer at War, by Vasily Grossman (Blogged)
House of Leaves, by Mark Danielewski (Blogged, but not completed)
The Hanged Man's Song, by John Sanford
One for the Money, by Janet Evanovich
Two for the Dough, by Janet Evanovich
Three to Get Deadly, by Janet Evanovich
Four to Score, by Janet Evanovich
High Five, by Janet Evanovich
Hot Six, by Janet Evanovich
Seven Up, by Janet Evanovich
Hard Eight, by Janet Evanovich
To the Nines, by Janet Evanovich
Ten Big Ones, by Janet Evanovich
Eleven on Top, by Janet Evanovich
Twelve Sharp, by Janet Evanovich
The Egyptologist, by Arthur Philips
The Thrall's Tale, by Judith Lindbergh
Dante's Equation, by Jane Jensen
The Black Angel, by John Connolly
Definately Dead, by Charlaine Harris
Break No Bones, by Kathy Reichs
Bad Men, by John Connolly
Dead Witch Walking, by Kim Harrison
Fistful of Charms, by Kim Harrison
Any Which Way But Dead, by Kim Harrison
The Good, the Bad, and the Undead, by Kim Harrison
Distraction, by Bruce Sterling (Blogged)
The Last Cato, by Mathilde Asensi (Blogged)
The Misanthrope, by Moliere (Blogged)
V for Vendetta, by Alan Moore
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, vol. 1, by Alan Moore, et al.
Y: The Last Man, by Brian K. Vaughan, et al.
First two volumes of the Sandman series, by Neil Gaiman, et al.
Lamb: The Gospel of Christ According to His Childhood Friend, Biff, by Christopher Moore (Blogged)
A Canticle for Liebovitz, by Walter Miller (Blogged)
In Your Dreams, by Tom Holt (Blogged)
Earth, Air, Fire, and Custard, by Tom Holt (Blogged)
Faust Among Equals, by Tom Holt (Blogged)
Flying Dutch, by Tom Holt (Blogged)
Fledgling, by Octavia Butler (Blogged)
Shelters of Stone, by Jean Auel (Blogged)
The Hard Way, by Lee Child
The Cold Moon, by Jeffrey Deaver
Garlic and Sapphires, by Ruth Reichl
Kushiel's Dart, by Jacqueline Carey
Kushiel's Chosen, by Jacqueline Carey
Kushiel's Avatar, by Jacqueline Carey
Kushiel's Scion, by Jacqueline Carey
Danse Macabre, by Laurell K. Hamilton
The Messenger, by Daniel Silva (Blogged)
The Handmaid's Tale, by Margaret Atwood (Blogged)

This list is in no particular order. Textbooks have been omitted, because I didn't read them for fun.

Also, I'm currently reading Souls in the Great Machine, by Sean McMullen--but mostly for the dueling librarians. But I will post more about that on Sunday, probably.

Happy Birthday, Summer Reading Project!

2006-08-31T17:59:00.000-06:00

...Actually, this blog's birthday was yesterday, but I forgot. (Sorry, SRP.) This blog is now one year old! I should probably do a retrospective of some kind, like a tally of all the books I've read, but I know that there were a lot of books (mostly brain-candy) that didn't get mentioned on this blog.

At any rate, I have managed to keep this blog going for one year, in spite of having two jobs and attending graduate school at three-quarter time and living with my sister's small children.

Happy Birthday, blog!

A refgrunt post, and quote of the day.

2006-08-30T21:19:00.000-06:00

In my two hours on the reference desk today I answered questions, in no particular order, about:

1. Power of attorney. What is it? With example cases.
2. I need ethnologies, about the Paiute.
3. I need a video about Stanley Milgram's experiment. (I then got to explain the experiment to a co-worker. Fun.)
4. Fiction and non-fiction in easy-to-understand English for two Persian-speaking patrons.
5. Do you have The Adventures of Good Soldier Švejk?

I love Random Question Day.

Also, the quote of the day:

Me to my mom, following a joke about "redistributing the pepperoni" on a frozen pizza: You're the only one who gets my Communist jokes.

The Handmaid's Handout

2006-08-23T09:57:00.000-06:00

I've put together a handout for The Handmaid's Tale that I intend to pass out when people come to pick up their copies of the book. It's designed to get people thinking about the novel, and we may or may not discuss these things in the course of the evening. Thoughts? Comments?

The Handmaid's Tale, Part III

2006-08-20T19:32:00.000-06:00

I finally got some answers to my big question: How did all this happen? About a third of the way from the end of the book, Offred described the series of events that lead to the founding of the Republic of Gilead. After a catastrophe in Washington--which was most likely planned and executed by some future members of the Republic--the Constitution gets suspended and over the period of several months, civil rights are taken away. Women have even more rights taken away. Offred describes losing her job, then finding out that she can no longer access her own bank account. And I found myself having some of the same thoughts I have when I read books about Jewish people in Europe in the 1930s. I kept mentally yelling at the women to "Get out! Get out now while you still have the chance!"

I also figured out what was happening with the pollution situation. The Republic has turned the hot spots into gulags, where undesirables work until they die of poisoning and/or radiation sickness.

You might be a fantasy novelist if...

2006-08-20T15:32:00.000-06:00

I may have blogged this before, but it's so funny that it deserves a second mention. Created, I think, by the same people who do the Book-A-Minute reviews, this an exam for anyone writing a fantasy novel. If you've read a lot of fantasy, you'll probably alternate between laughing and saying, "That is so true!"

The Handmaid's Tale, Part II

2006-08-16T00:06:00.000-06:00

A couple of sentences I read today from this book disturbed me--more than usual anyway. On page 164 of my trade paperback edition, Offred (the narrator) talks about being able to shop at the fishmonger's for a change. She says:

Loaves and Fishes is hardly every open. Why bother openning when there's nothing to sell? The sea fisheries were defunct several years ago; the few fish they have now are from fish farms, and taste muddy. The news says the coastal areas are being "rested." Sole, I remember, and haddock, swordfish, scallops, tun; lobsters, stuffed and baked, salmon, pink and fat, grilled in steaks. Could they be extinct, like the whales?

In this book there are frequent mentions of what had happened to the world right before the revolution, if that's what you can call it. In particular, this books is peppered with references to severe pollution. And it doesn't seem like the Republic of Gilead is really doing anything to help heal the environment apart from leaving the worst places alone. Kind of strange, given that this society has regulated just about everything else about people's lives and behaviors.

The Handmaid's Tale, by Margaret Atwood, Part I

2006-08-14T22:46:00.000-06:00

It's been a long time since I've read The Handmaid's Tale, and I had forgotten what a fascinating and disturbing read it was. I've been reading it for only three days now, and I am already past the halfway point.

What's really striking me about this book on this read through is the idea of complicity, especially as it pertains to political systems. Systems like the one that exists in The Handmaid's Tale (Wikipedia article) couldn't exist, I don't think, if so many of the participants didn't just go along with things. They way Atwood described this system, it sounds to me like a huge reaction against the politics and culture of "the time before"--the narrator's words for the way life was before whatever catastrophe it was that spawned the Republic of Gilead.

Frankly, I find it all horrifying, the way that this society has swung so far in the opposite direction of "the time before." And probably the really scary thing is that I can see this sort of thing happening in our own American society and politcal system. Think about it, almost every time the Democrats and the Left get ahead, they are followed by a Conservative and Right period. Kennedy and Johnson, then Nixon to Bush the First, then Clinton, and now Bush the Younger. And every time, it seems like the reactionary swing goes further Right or Left.

End of rant. Sorry.

Another thing that's really striking me about this book on this read through is how Atwood has personified the struggle over a woman's right to choose and control over her on body in the Handmaids. As a reaction to years of abortions and declining birth rates, reproduction and sexuality have become frighteningly regulated. The Handmaids, as the narrator frequently describes them, are "walking wombs" and so on.

The reason I am re-reading this book is because I am planning on leading a discussion about it at the end of September for Banned Books Week at my local public library. As you can no doubt see, I am going to have a lot to talk about.

Technology Used to Recover Lost Text

2006-08-06T18:08:00.000-06:00

A cool story that ran in the online version of Wired the other day. The story describes the use of X-ray technology to recover a couple of treatises by Archimedes that had been lost since the Middle Ages.

The Messenger, part II

2006-08-06T18:00:00.000-06:00

Pacing. When a writer does it well, you may not even notice. But when something it wrong with the pacing, you can tell. Either the story drags by or it sprints by so fast you might have to re-read passages to figure out what the hell just happened.

In the case of The Messenger, I felt a little of both. The novel started out at a good pace, with the plot just humming along. But around the middle, I felt like I was starting to get bogged down as the characters set up and executed their operation. As I got further and further into the book, I kept waiting for things to start to pick up like they usually do in thrillers. And, as usually happens with a book that takes too long to set up, the ending felt like Silva rushed it to make all the loose ends come together. Good book, but I couldn't help but wonder why Silva would take such care to set up the main plot and then have the ending feel like an "Oh-shit-I-have-to-get-this-to-my-editor-tomorrow-where-did-all-that-time-go" ending.

Overall, this was a really good book that could have been better if the pace had been more even and the ending drawn out a little more.

The Messenger, by Daniel Silva, part I

2006-08-03T19:09:00.000-06:00

The Messenger is the latest installment of Daniel Silva's Gabriel Allon series, now six books long, about an art restorer who is also a counterterrorism agent and assassin for the State of Israel. I love this series, because its always about more than just danger and thrills like many espionage novels. Above all things, I think, these books are about the history of Jews and Israel. Books one, five and now six have been about the increasingly violent and seemingly eternal fighting between Israel, the Palestinians, and the Middle East. Books two through four were about, as Silva describes in the author's note of A Death in Vienna, the "unfinished business of the Holocaust" (p. 397 in the hardback version).

So far, I am really enjoying The Messenger and am on tenterhooks about what's going to happen next. However, I am also hearing a lot of the recent political discussion about Iraq and Israel coming out of the various characters' mouths. This makes it hard to enjoy the book just for the sake of its plot and characters, but I also think this book does a great job of showing all this sides of these debates. No doubt some critics, professional and otherwise, will take issue with this, and say that Silva sacrificed a great book to get these agendas across.

I think he did, too, at least a little bit. But I think that these issues are so important for the world we live in now that we need to stay informed anyway we can. And fiction has always been a great vehicle for political commentary. (Jonathan Swift, anyone?)

I am also impressed at Swift's ability to write about things that are so relevant now, when surely he must have had to finish this book many, many months ago. His last book, Prince of Fire, suffered a little when the world changed just after Silva wrote it. (I have a short review I wrote last year that talks about this in more detail.) It's an unavoidable problem for books, that they often become out of date as soon as they're published.

A short conversation at work

2006-08-03T16:52:00.000-06:00

The boss comes out of her office and, because we screen her calls, says: I am expecting a call from a guy with a New York accent named Lenny.

Me: Lenny?

Boss: Yeah.

Me: What, are you looking to by some books that fell off the back of a truck?

True story. I love these little moments, when someone gives you a great set up and you're quick enough to think of something funny to say.

More DOPA comments

2006-07-31T07:55:00.000-06:00

Librarian.net has some great comments about the new DOPA bill that's making its way through Congress--more explanatory than my initial outburst.

Bible Blog

2006-07-29T13:45:00.000-06:00

I haven't read this, but it looks like they're blogging the Bible over at Slate.com. This reminds me that I'm really going to have to get back to my War and Peace project. Maybe now that the semester is winding down, I'll have some time to get back to this.

Congress is full of DOPAs

2006-07-29T13:27:00.000-06:00

Ars Technica published this short article about a new bill that is working its way through Congress. It appears to be similar to other legislation, like COPA and CIPA, that seeks to limit what children can access on library computers. This law seeks to automatically ban social networking sites in response to some of the things that have been happening on MySpace (see links in Ars article). But according to Ars, the criteria that can get a site banned are so broad that it looks to me like you could use the law to ban half the Internet, especially the networks and blogs that are used to socialize online. (These criteria are listed in the Ars article.)

But my question is, why are we legislating this stuff? One of the things that has always bothered me about censorship is that it give the few the right to affect what the many can read, see, or have access to.

In this case of the MySpace criminal proceedings, I think what we really need are for parents and educators to start teaching kids about online safety. The MySpace things probably wouldn't if two things had happened: 1) if the kids had been taught not to reveal personal information on the Internet and about the kind of people that are lurking out there and 2) if the parents had been more aware of what their kids were up to. Remember people, the word "parent" is not just a noun--it's a verb as well.

First Folio Update

2006-07-14T17:11:00.000-06:00

The copy of the First Folio that was autioned at Sotheby's yesterday fetched 2.8 million pounds (approximately $5.2 American). More here.

Updates and News

2006-07-13T22:14:00.000-06:00

Cripes, it's been almost a month since I've updated this blog. (Well, apart from the new icon that I put in the profile the other day.) My only excuse is that most of my free time has been given over to working on a presentation, a paper, and a research project that involves another paper and presentation. On the plus side, I will get my projects done--and done well--with time to spare. The bad news is that I don't have time for much else.

In the time I have stolen from my projects, I have managed to read the following books (not in order):

1. Twelve Sharp, by Janet Evanovich
2. The Hard Way, by Lee Child
3. The Cold Moon, by Jeffrey Deaver
4. Kushiel's Dart, by Jacqueline Carey
5. Kushiel's Chosen, by Jacqueline Carey
6. Danse Macabre, by Laurell K. Hamilton
7. Kushiel's Scion, by Jacqueline Carey

And, a paltry 25 more pages in War and Peace. Tcha.

Oh, and I have some interesting tidbits of book news. Read them before they move the pages.

--The First Folio went up for auction today. John Mullan at the Guardian wrote this piece about rare book auctions. He's got a knack for those funny turns of phrase that some British writers seem to have. When writing about Tyndale's translation of the Bible into English, he wrote "The agents of Henry VIII were diligent in destroying copies of this heretical publication, ensuring its future market value."

--They held the annual Bulwer-Lytton contest this week. Here's a bit from the Guardian's Culture Vulture about the winner.

To be honest, the sentence submitted by the runner up, Stuart Vaseperu of Scotland, made me laugh more:

"I know what you're thinking, punk," hissed Wordy Harry to his new editor, "you're thinking, 'Did he use six superfluous adjectives or only five?' - and to tell the truth, I forgot myself in all this excitement; but being as this is English, the most powerful language in the world, whose subtle nuances will blow your head clean off, you've got to ask yourself one question: 'Do I feel loquacious?' - well do you, punk?"

Enjoy.

War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy, part I

2006-06-11T10:24:00.001-06:00

Yes, really.

I am reading the Mt. Everest of books. No air packs, no sherpas, no Cliff's notes. Why? The only answer I have is that I am reading this book just to see if I can get all the way through this sucker.

Week one progress: 220 pages of 1455 pages. 1235 pages to go.

I finished part one a day or so ago, and am now in part two. Part one seemed like a clip from a Jane Austen novel. Lots of people, lots of parties, and a lot of social maneuvering. Many of the people I've talked to who mentioned having attempted this book said that one of the biggest problems they had was keeping track of the cast. Fortunately, my edition has a dramatis personae of the main families in this book and, so far, I am managing to remember most of the people in this book.

Part two is a lot more interesting. I'm currently following Prince Andrei Bolkonsky and Nickolai Rostov as they fight the French. I am not quite sure where we are in the timeline of Napoleon's Russian campaign. Somewhere after Ulm, but before Austerlitz I think. All I know is that we're somewhere at the end of 1805 and have seven more years of war before Napoleon retreats.

This book isn't that bad so far. It's just that there's a lot of it left to go.

Shelters of Stone, by Jean Auel

2006-06-03T17:05:00.000-06:00

And now for something completely different...

I'm reading The Shelters of Stone just to find out what happens next. I've read the reviews and, having read about 8/10ths of the book, there really isn't anything that I can recommend about this book apart from the fact that you get the next segment of the Ayla and Jondalar saga. The characters are good, but no one gets to do much. I've read more than 400 pages but we haven't progressed more than a week or so, book time.

Most annoyingly, there seems to be an inordinate amount of recap in the book. Not only do the characters and the narrator recap what happened in the previous novels, but it seems like every time a character does something, they have to explain what they just did to other characters when they meet up again. It completely bogs down the narrative, and there's no point to it. This book would probably been half the size it is if it weren't for characters taking as long to tell each other what they were doing as they did doing it in the first place. And if I have to read another description of what happens when you knock iron pyrite and flint together, I may have to add this book to the short list of books I have hurled across a room in anger.

Jean, you have written great books, what happened while you were writing this one?

In Your Dreams and Earth, Air, Fire, and Custard, by Tom Holt

2006-05-19T09:22:00.000-06:00

I have a knack for finding the middle books of a series, but I very rarely manage to find the first book in the series. And I have again managed to start a series with the second book. I thought I found the first book--but no. I picked up the second and third books of the series. Tcha.

Both In Your Dreams and Earth, Air, Fire, and Custard take place in a company that employs wizards, fairies, goblins, and dragon-slaying heroes. And the stories are centered around a character who, while he has magical abilities, is generally clueless and annoyed by all the wierdness around him.

The plots are unbelievable and you can't describe them unless you take the length of a book to do it. But I will say that, especially in Earth, Air, Fire, and Custard, that it sometimes seemed like the plot went totally off the rails and into the deep blue absurd. I could follow it, but it really seemed that the book would have made a lot more sense if I had been imbibing a controlled substance. So, if you're looking for a totally off the wall book, these books are perfect for you. I have rarely seen a more imaginative flight of fancy that didn't collapse under the weight of its own weirdness.

Dead Funny, by Tom Holt

2006-05-16T15:38:00.000-06:00

I find it hard to locate books that can make me laugh out loud, or books that have the demented, absurd plots that I enjoy and that actually work. Because I have this problem, I figure that other people have it to. So, while you're waiting for the next Christopher Moore,Terry Pratchett, or Janet Evanovich book to come out, give Tom Holt a try. I've read four of his books so far and there hasn't been a one that hasn't made me almost snort a beverage out of my nose yet. :)

Dead Funny contains two full novels, Flying Dutch and Faust Among Equals. Flying Dutch takes the story of the Flying Dutchman, adds nuclear power, alchemy, insurance, and accounting and creates a delightfully weird book. Faust Among Equals is, if you can believe it, even weirder. Basically, Faust escapes from Hell, hooks back up with Helen of Troy, wreckes hilariously warped revenge on his captors. And it all comes to a close in a themepark in Hell designed by Hieronymous Bosch.

As an added bonus for me, Holt has a very English way of writing that is a joy to read, with wacky metaphors, inventive turns of phrase, and uproariously funny understatements. Fun, fun, fun. Plus, he has a huge list of titles already written, so I don't think I'm going to run out of reading material any time soon.

Here's Holt's web site. Enjoy.

The Last Cato, Part II

2006-05-16T14:52:00.000-06:00

I saw one of my co-workers a week or so ago check out these three books and, since I was reading The Last Cato myself and plugging it to the people I thought would like it, I wondered why, since The Da Vinci Code came out a couple of years ago, there were so many of these religious thrillers coming out now? And what's with all the Knights Templar and Freemason stuff anyway? With very few exceptions (Cato), these books are pretty bad--cliched, with rickety plots and flat characters. And, since DVC, they almost always come off as knock-offs of Brown's book.

A thought just occured to me, and I wonder if I'm far off base here, but looking back at American history in particular, it seems like periodically, we all get in a religiously curious mood. There were the Great Awakenings, which occured about every other generation for 150 years. Then, in the 1960s and 70s, there were a series of New Religious Movements (if you click this link, please explore the see alsos). Are these religious conspiracy novels this generations expression of its dissatisfaction with the standard denominations?

While a lot of these books are churned out just to make a buck or two, they all involve a kind of quest for knowledge, for truth. They examine the origins of the church and try to locate where things went wrong. Interesting idea. It looks to me like a lot of people have questions about Christianity or religious needs that just aren't getting fulfilled in regular church.

It's kind of a weird way to express religious curiousity, but it's probably a lot healthier and cheaper than trying to get into Scientology or something.

Fledgling, by Octavia Butler

2006-05-07T18:40:00.000-06:00

This week I also finished reading my first Octavia Butler book. Now that I've read her, I kind of wonder that it took me so long to read her. I picked up her books after I read her obituary in the New York Times, and the descriptions of the topics she discusses in her books made me want to go out right then and pick up one of her books.

Unfortunately, my local public library didn't carry any of her books. Fledgling was the first title I recommended to the library that came in.

Fledgling, I think, is Ms. Butler's last book. It's a vampire novel, but it does some really interesting things to the myth. First, it disregards most of the vampire myth and starts out fresh. Butler uses the idea of vampires genetically engineering themselves so that they can go out during the day as a platform to talk about racism and what it means to be a part of two different species and races at the same time.

This book doesn't have a lot of the action that most people have come to expect from their contemporary fantasies, but it was wonderful to explore deep themes through the usually frivolous vampire story.

The Last Cato, by Mathilde Asensi, Part I

2006-04-24T22:51:00.000-06:00

I don't ordinarily pick up religious thriller novels because they tend to be, with few exceptions, crap. Either they're poory written, or poorly plotted and/or just plain stupid and I can't make myself read them.

The Last Cato, however, was actually rather good. Barring a few translation problems (Alexy, a Russian Orthodox patriarch, becomes Alejo after a couple of pages) and some typos, this book has fewer typographical oddities and typos than some of the books I've read lately. (I have no idea why, but there seem to be a lot more of these in the last five years than there used to be. Editors and proofreaders, please pay attention and read carefully. We all learned in school that, if you make those kind of errors after a while, it makes you look like a moron.)

I really enjoyed the plot. It delves into religious history without trying to tear down one side or another. Both sides have points for and against them and this book does not bill itself as an expose, which is a nice change from most of the religious thrillers out there. This book was written before The Da Vinci Code came out--so it can't be read as a knock-off of that book.

This book is really original. I've seen Dante used before in fiction, but those always use the Inferno rather than either of the other two thirds of The Divine Comedy. I also really enjoyed the fact that the Knights Templar only made a brief appearance and that there were no Masons, either.

I think that the only thing that I didn't like was the short detour into science fiction that occurred near the end. The way the Staurofilakes (the "bad guys") were portrayed at the end was just a little too far out there into yeah right land. Other than that, this was a really good read.

Geoffrey Chaucer hath a blog

2006-04-23T22:37:00.000-06:00

This may be the wittiest and most original parody I've seen on the internet since the Angry Alien web site. A co-worker told me about this one last Thursday, and I've been reading Geoffrey Chaucer's blog since then trying to get caught up. I am so impressed by the modern Geoffrey's ability to sound just like the first one and still be readable to someone who hasn't looked at Middle English in about two years.

When I checked out Chaucer's Rotulus bloggorum, I was surprised to discover that there is apparently a whole community of people who are blogging away in resurrected Middle English.

(Sorry about my vocabulary. I've been having a Pride & Prejudice weekend. I've watched the newest one three times now, and watched the first half of the A&E miniseries last night after it cae from Netflix. If you've watched the newest one at all, doesn't it seem like one of the writers screwed up and channeled a Brontë while writing the script? Honestly, with all that brooding and walking around in the rain all the time, I was surprised that no one caught pneumonia and that Heathcliff didn't show up.)

The Misanthrope, by Moliere

2006-04-23T11:57:00.000-06:00

Considering what I've been reading lately, I don't think you would have espected to see Molière here. But I decided to read him for two reasons. 1) I've heard that he's a witty social commentator, and 2) I wanted to see if I still had the brain cells to understand four hundred year old literature.

Turns out, I do. :)

I really enjoyed reading The Misanthrope. Even though I don't know much about seventeenth century court life in France, I think that I understood the social behaviors that Molière was skewering here. The play begins with the main character, Alcestes, explaining to a friend his reasons for giving up the social game of flattery, double-dealing, and outright lying. (These very behaviors get played out later in the play to great effect). Even though this play was about the sort of social actions that make me feel misanthropic, I didn't have any trouble staying interested. Bonus.

I was impressed by some of the modern touches in Molière's dialogue. He has characters interrupting (to great comic effect) and running over one another's words. I can only imagine how funny this would be on stage. Some portions of the script, however, drag. After a while, I don't care how important or amusing or illustrative what one character is saying after they've run on for four or more paragraphs. For me, it's a bit like a musical--very unnatural. I only know one person how speaks in paragraphs and that's because he's been in academia since, I think, infancy.

But I think what I really liked was the ending. I think the standard happy ending--with multiple weddings and a moral or two--would have ruined what Molière was up to throughout the play.

I think I'm going to go on and read Tartuffe as long as I have this collection of Molière I checked out from my library. But I am also reading The Last Cato and, even though I am only a few chapters in, I find that I have a lot to say about it already.

Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal, by Christopher Moore

2006-04-16T12:46:00.000-06:00

I always seem to end up rereading this book around Easter. This is about the third time I've read the book, and the magic of it never seems to go away. Personally, I think it's the best thing that Moore has ever written.

I've mentioned Moore before. He's one of the few authors I read who can always make me laugh out loud at the madcap weirdness of their books, and who I can reread forever without ever getting bored.

In Lamb, Moore takes on the missing years of Christ's life. Our narrator is Biff, a smartass who takes care of Jesus, or Joshua as he is known here, because Joshua is much to trusting and naive to take care of himself. This book is histerial from beginning to almost the end. The end, I think, is what makes this book really special. At the end of this book, Moore writes such a moving account of the Passion and death of Joshua that I felt deeply touched by this book for weeks after I finished reading it the first time. Even now, after I've read it three times, the ending still moves me.

There's a lot to think about in this book, and the more you read it, the more you realize this. The jokes are still funny, but you really start to see how philosophical this book is. So you get jokes about trying to circumsize Greek statues, but you also get some meditations on the role of sacrifice in Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism, and Hinduism.

I adore this book, and it's one of the few books I evangelize for ('scuze the pun). Pick it up if you're ready for an off-the-wall account of Christ's life.