(Go to my home
page)
Reading
list
I'll keep this for a year, just to see what I read.
Anywhere but my web page, I'd probably misplace it.
Only books here;
newspapers and magazines are too much trouble to track.
See also favorite fiction and adventure stories and current research.
Below, the first line is the title, the second the dates
on which I started and finished the book. The third line
is the author's name.
Since I update this page irregularly, dates are often vague.
A tilde ("~") means an approximate date.
If the end date is not filled in, I didn't finish the book.
Question marks mean I'm not sure of the exact month and/or day.
Note: the list is not complete. Sometimes I forget to log a book.
The Barn at the End of the World.
~4/8/2004
Mary Rose O'Reilley.
Quaker woman becomes a Buddhist shepherd.
In Retrospect.
~4/10/2004
Robert McNamara.
From a man supposedly brilliant, I'd expected more depth,
and at least less wooden writing. It's as if he thinks he's
still at Ford, or DOD, or the World Bank, and has to fit
all his ideas into schemes: outlines, bullet points. The
book reads like a Powerpoint presentation. Also, his style
is repetitious. He's probably a good executive, but he's not a writer.
I wish to hell George W. Fucking Bush would read this, though;
there's good advice for him here, if he were capable of heeding it,
at least in the parts I read: the last chapter, and the appendix;
more would have been too much, and I have no time or interest for the entire book.
An Inquiry into the Accordancy of War with the Principles of Christianity.
~2/15/2003
Jonathan Dymond.
The 1892 edition, but it was an old book even then.
An eloquent and well-researched case against the madness specific to our species.
The book was a year overdue from the Meeting house library when it turned up in
an archeological dig in the books I've been reading. Shame on me, since I'm
the librarian at Meeting.
The Captain is Out to Lunch and the Crew Has Taken Over the Ship.
4/10/2004 - 4/11/2004
Charles Bukowski.
A sort-of journal, by the author of Notes of a Dirty Old Man.
I don't know why I like this guy; he's not my kind of writer.
But I do, I do.
Say When.
4/9/2004 - 4/9/2004.
Elizabeth Berg.
Examination of a marriage that's falling apart, by a catalog
of tiny details; it's these details that are the strength of
this book.
Back Story.
4/5/2004 - 4/5/2004.
Robert P. Parker.
Spenser. I should have known better than to pick this up.
How many of these have I read, now? Feels like more than
Parker's written of them.
The Riddle and the Knight.
3/27/2004 - ~4/2/2004
Giles Milton.
On the trail of Sir John Mandeville, an English knight who spent
more than 30 years travelling distant lands in the 14th century,
and claimed to have gone as far as Tibet and China.
Christopher Columbus read his book, and may well have been
inspired by Mandeville's claim that circumnavigation was possible.
Don Giovanni, in full score.
2/?/2004
Mozart.
Studying the score, so I can read along in it, at the
performance next month... Yes, I know this doesn't come
under "reading", but I have nowhere else to put it.
Mozart is worth any three other composers for me.
I played a lot of his pieces on the flute, and came
to love his music above all others.
Viking Age Iceland.
2/?/2004
J. Byock.
This is the kind of beautifully crafted and deeply researched,
well-thought-out book I wish I had more time to read.
Something about Workmen.
3/20/2004 - 3/21/2004.
Alison Tyler.
Cat Harrington, bored with her fiance, gets involved with a
construction worker she sees on the street. Light masochism,
bondage, cheating, group sex, lesbianism, toys, role playing.
And a marriage at the end.
A Quaker in the Zendo.
3/6/2004 - 3/6/2004.
Steve Smith.
Pendle Hill pamphlet 370. I can identify with this, though in
my case the situation is opposite: a Zennist at Meeting.
Those Autofellatio Blues.
3/5/2004 - 3/5/2004.
Christo.
Unfinished online novel about a teenager who shocks his mother
when she walks in on him blowing himself. She sets him up with
a swinger friend, he gets involved with the most beautiful girl
in his high school and her mother, and then it gets strange.
But funny, well-plotted, and much better written than most
of the crap on the web.
The Number One Ladies' Detective Agency.
~2/27/2004 - 2/29/2004.
Alexander McCall Smith.
Finally got around to reading the first one in the series.
Quaker in Vietnam: Rick Thompson.
2/29/2004 - 2/29/2004.
Beth Taylor.
Story of a Kansas City Quaker boy who had C.O. status,
turned in his draft card anyway, and then went to Vietnam
on his own to help in a rehabilitation center in 1972.
He was killed the next year in a plane crash there.
Pendle Hill pamphlet number 367.
Drop City.
2/25/2004
T. C. Boyle.
Check the photos of the author.
On Boxing.
2/24/2004 - 2/26/2004
Joyce Carol Oates.
Re-read this slender tome for the umpteenth time.
Doubt, a History.
2/22/2004
Jennifer Michael Hecht.
Just what it claims to be: a history of doubt. I didn't trust some of the writing,
especially when I spotted an egregious error of fact: she mixes up D.T. Suzuki and
Shunryu Suzuki, attributing Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind to the former.
Morality for Beautiful Girls.
2/8/2004 - ~2/24/2004
Alexander McCall Smith.
Mma. Ramotswe continues her intrepid journey through the
tangles of other people's (and her own) problems.
Absolutely American.
2/7/2004 - 2/21/2004
David Lipsky.
Rolling Stone journalist spent four years at West Point.
Yes, you read that correctly.
Pauline's.
~1/?/2004 - 3/27/2004
Pauline Tabor.
Memoir of a madam. Ran a cathouse in Kentucky for many years.
Much dull writing peppered with great anecdotes. This woman is
opinionated, a bit addled, and quaint, but she had her feet on
the ground.
Man Walks Into a Room.
1/28/2004 - ~1/31/2004
Nicole Krauss.
Amnesiac literary professor is found wandering in the desert.
Highly literary examination of memory and identity.
Part one is penetrating; after that, author can't sustain
the highly accomplished writing she gave to the man,
his marriage, and his wife.
Concepts of Modern Mathematics.
1/17/2004
Ian Stewart.
A good book for a smattering of algebraic topology
and the other areas I never got around to.
Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen.
~1/9/2004 - 1/17/2004
Larry McMurtry.
The man can write essays as well as fiction --
actually better. Who knew?
Without Fail.
1/10/2004 - 1/11/2004.
Lee Child.
Thriller. Much better writing than the run of the mill,
since thrillers as a genre tend to be badly written.
But with this genre, "better" is still not "good".
Between the Sheets.
~1/8/2004 - 1/10/2004.
Erica Sakurazawa.
Japanese graphic novel. Sex lives of a group of young
people in what seems to be Tokyo. The odd thing about
this book is that one of the two main characters is
drawn as a true blond, though in every respect she
lives as a Japanese. She's the sex magnet in the book --
the object of desire for the other characters,
especially her girlfriend, who's shown as having black
hair. Black hair loves blondie, futilely, because
blondie merely sees blackie as a friend, nothing more.
This pretty much sums up much of what the Japanese
feel about themselves and the way they look. They
admire Occidental hair, eyes, and bodies. In their
comic books, the characters never have epicanthic
folds in their eyelids. They usually seem to have brown
hair, too... Given this admiration the Japanese feel
for what is not-them, the way the book ends is perfect:
blackie has become the girlfriend of blondie's ex-boyfriend,
and the two of them are having sex and thinking and
talking about blondie.
Summer Camp: Susan.
1/2/2003 - 1/2/2004.
Nick Scipio.
Another Internet story -- getting it on with an older woman,
with his mother, etc. Nick Scipio is deeply perverted.
Internet novel.
Gettin' Buck Wild.
1/1/2004 - 1/?/2004
Zane.
Dirty stories, all in black female first-person point of view.
My only question is, if the author isn't ashamed of these
stories, why does she appear to be using a pseudonym?
The Stories of Paul Bowles.
~12/29/2003 - 1/27/2003
Paul Bowles.
A writer who's both a master of storytelling, and of style.
The only writer whose stories seize me from the first sentence,
so that I have to read through to the end. There's an exotic
quality to these stories, set as they are in Mexico, the Amazon,
North Africa, and elsewhere; they exist outside our contemporary
culture and concerns. They could be set in any time. The sensibility
is very concrete, and informed by selfishness, violence, and evil.
The Delicate Prey is a good example: A stranger befriends three
merchants crossing the Sahara. Through trickery he kills the first
two. The third he ties up. He cuts off the man's penis, cuts a
slit in the man's stomach, and shoves the penis inside. In the
morning he slits the man's throat and goes on his way. Some time
later, he's selling the merchants' goods, and friends of the men
he's killed recognize the merchandise. They take him out into the
desert and bury him so that only his head is above ground. They
leave. In the sun, without water, he goes mad and begins to
sing, the dust blowing into his mouth.
A typical Bowles plot is: man goes out for a walk, gets murdered.
Next Door Neighbor.
12/31/2003 - 1/1/2004.
Dorsai.
The Playboy philosophy meets Matt Helm meets cyberguy meets
Sensitive New Age Guy meets dirty filthy perverted child molester.
Also, the sex is highly repetitive... Internet novel.
Silence and Noise.
12/22/2003 - 12/26/2003
Ivan Richmond.
Memoir by a young man who was raised in Green Gulch Zen monastery.
Simple, genuine, clear, and rather repetitive. I read this
in the hope of finding nuggets I can use in my own book --
his alienation from American popular culture, and his reactions,
are similar to Ada's. Was disappointed, because I didn't find
anything: though there were plenty of details, I'd already imagined
the ones I might find useful. I should find this encouraging,
I suppose, but I don't. I feel like I've wasted 13 bucks.
But don't take my word for it. It's worth reading, if you don't
have ulterior motives like mine.
Happy Days.
12/?/2003 - 12/?/2004.
Anonymous.
Internet "memoir". Likely fictional.
Farm: A Year in the Life of an American Farmer.
12/?/2003
Richard Rhodes.
Skimmed this in the library, doing research.
All things wise and wonderful.
12/?/2003
James Herriott.
Skimmed this in the library, doing research.
Star Maker.
12/21/2003 - 12/22/2003.
Olaf Stapledon.
Sci-fi is the wrong term for this book. It's visionary,
mystical, and religious. The search for God, fictionalized
and broadened to a staggering scope. Probably unlike any other
work of fiction ever written. Hadn't read it in years.
The Music of the Primes.
12/20/2003 - 1/9/2004
Marcus du Sautoy.
Yet another book on the Riemann hypothesis. I read them all.
Compared to the other two, this is The Riemann Hypothesis
For Dummies -- there's no math. How can you write a book
about the R.H. and not give the math? Besides being dumbed
down, it's vague. The author talks about things like
"quantum billiards" versus "random quantum drums" without
ever saying what he means. I suspect that he doesn't know
what he means. This is a book of vague generalities and
personalities, devoid of mathematics. It's useless.
I learned nothing more about the Riemann Hypothesis.
The Speckled Monster.
12/14/2003 - 12/16/2003
Jennifer Lee Carrell.
Heavily researched, almost as heavily fictionalized book
on two early figures in the battle against smallpox.
Much of the writing (reading between the lines in the
endnotes) seems to reason that "this is the likeliest
thing to have happened, so it must have happened this way".
But when any of a hundred things could have happened,
even the most likely (least unlikely) is highly improbable.
She took a remarkable story and added fiction on every
page, to make it even more remarkable. It think her
true calling is as a novelist: she can't restrain herself
from telling a better story than the truth.
Stolen.
12/13/2003 - 12/14/2003.
Kelley Armstrong.
By the author of Bitten. The freshness is gone,
the skill remains, but the premise is too farfetched.
Learn Java in 21 Days.
~12/1/2003
.
Being lazy, this will probably take more than 3 weeks.
Uncertain Pilgrims.
12/10/2003 - 12/11/2003.
Lenore Carroll.
Another unpublished novel, which, like Goat Boy, I've
edited for a friend. This one's been accepted by U. of New
Mexico Press and will come out in 2005. Story of a woman
travelling to New Mexico after her daughter and father die.
Ethan Frome.
~12/8/2003 - 12/13/2003
Edith Wharton.
Never expected to like Wharton, but do.
This is as close to flawless as makes no difference.
One for the Money.
12/7/2003 - 12/7/2003.
Janet Evanovich.
Picked this up to look at it, and ended up reading it in
the course of an afternoon. A fun read.
If Loving You is Wrong.
12/?/2003
Gregg Olsen.
The story of Mary Kay Letourneau, the Seattle teacher
who had the notorious affair with one of her sixth-
grade students. There's a lot more weirdness here than
I suspected. Her father was a famous politician;
Mary Kay was supposed to be watching her infant brother
when he drowned; she was molested repeatedly by one of
her older brothers; her father's political career went
down in flames because of a sex scandal, but her mother,
though a devout Catholic, apparently didn't care; Mary
Kay was pregnant out of wedlock and had a miscarriage,
but her mother refused to allow a D&C -- and there was
a twin, which survived to term. Then, of course, there
was the affair with the twelve-year-old. Now she's in
prison, she spends her time answering her fan mail.
I quit halfway through, though: the woman's behavior
was getting too strange for me.
Living to tell the tale.
11/24/2003 - 12/6/2003
Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
This man may tell a story better than anyone alive today.
And this story of his life appears at first to be superb,
but by the middle I was annoyed with its sloppiness.
Nonsensical sentences, adjectives that appear to have
nothing to do with the nouns they modify, and strange
changes of subject in the middle of a paragraph: the
book is rife with these. Too bad Gabito doesn't believe
in polishing. Too bad the translator doesn't believe in
it, either. Here's a particularly egregious example of
unintelligibility: "Perhaps because there survived inside
me the idea of Caribbean mothers that women from Bogota
gave themselves without love to men from the coast only
to fulfill their dream of living by the ocean." Yes,
that's an exact transcription, and if you can parse it,
you're brighter than I am. I wouldn't believe a word this
man says, anyway. Near the beginning of the book he refers
to his false memories. Later, he says he saw a faun on
the streetcar, and met a man with a "satanic" beast
growing in his belly. He claims one village where his
parents lived had a magic land hidden inside it, ruled
by a sorceress who lacked only the ability to bring the
dead back to life, "because that was reserved to God".
To read this novel -- er, "memoir" -- is to be persuaded
of the flamboyance, corruption, incompetence and (most
of all) violence of the nation of Columbia. This is a
man who made his living as a journalist, but seems to
have lived in a fabric of hallucinations. He appears to
have made his way by personal charm and the ability to
spin stories.
Seductions.
10/?/2003 -
.
Short stories, mostly amateurish.
Tears of the Giraffe.
11/15/2003 - 11/16/2003.
Alexander McCall Smith.
One of the series of novels about a woman detective in Botswana.
The characters are a bit idealized, but the story is sweet and
involving, and a delightful, humane read.
Human Sexual Response.
11/15/2003 - 12/13/2003
Masters and Johnson.
Still the definitive study, I suppose. Polysyllabic as can be.
I learned a lot of new words from it, though not much about sex.
Slow going, and didn't get through it all of it, only about
two thirds. Now if they'd just translate it into English...
King Solomon's Mines.
11/?/2003 - 11/14/2003.
H. Rider Haggard.
Magnificent pulp by the author of She.
Geisha, A Life.
10/27/2003 - 10/31/2003
Mineko Iwasaki.
Autobiography of a top geisha. Very non-Japanese, actually:
assertive and unconventional. No -- very, very Japanese...
The Giver.
10/24/2003 - 10/25/2003.
Lois Lowry.
Hadn't read this since my son was little.
One of the few books we've both read, and a
masterpiece of children's literature.
The Crimson Petal and the White.
10/16/2003 - 10/24/2003
Michael Faber.
The misadventures of a prostitute in Victorian London.
Maybe once a year I read a novel that opens me up.
This is one such. The sheer gorgeousness of the language,
the vividness of what's pictured, the appropriateness
of the turns and twists in the story, kept me reading
when I should have been sleeping, or working on my
own book. Most novels are too long and could be cut
without harm by at least a third. To lose any of the
900 pages of this book would be a shame, especially
given its extraordinary heroine.
Bird by Bird.
~10/12/2003 - 11/7/2003.
Ann Lamott.
A writer, on writing. Though not an especially long book,
I had to force myself to get through it, because Lamott
is the most annoying writer I've encountered in quite
some time. She gives her advice as if everyone reading her
were as neurotic as she, and in the same ways. (I'm not.)
Her writing is full of strange non sequiturs, mixed
metaphors, and the use of "so" as a standalone adverb.
("And it's so beautiful." -- not a direct quote, but
precisely her kind of thing.) Never once does she mention
day jobs, as if everyone were like her and could make
a living from writing alone. She's egocentric. She
indulges in hyperbole, and longwinded discussions about
such things as the "spiritual" value of writing. This is
probably the most overrated book on writing it has ever
been my bad luck to encounter.
Fire in the Mind.
10/11/2003 -
.
A book-length essay on contemporary science, philosophy, and religion.
Database Nation.
10/11/2003 -
Simson Garfinkel.
His name sounds like a 60s singing duo, right?
The subtitle catches it, though: The death of
privacy in the 21st century. Live with it.
Postal Blues.
~10/6/2003 -
Vincent Alexandria.
Local writer, self-published. He needed a proofreader --
every page has errors of punctuation, spelling and grammar.
Daughter of God.
9/23/2003 - 9/25/2003
Lewis Perdue.
Much like The Da Vinci Code, but not as well written:
goddess religion, a thriller, a love story with the man and
woman going through some of the adventures together, etc.
The Icelandic Saga.
?/?/2003 -
Peter Hallberg.
Browsing around in this, once more.
The Lovely Bones.
9/20/2003 - 9/22/2003.
Alice Sebold.
I tried to read this once, and failed, unable to bear
the opening, in which the girl is raped and killed.
This time, I made it to the end, but with a growing
sense of disappointment, and anger at dishonest storytelling.
My Life in Heavy Metal.
~9/19/2003 - 9/20/2003
Steve Almond.
Short stories, about the man/woman confusion, many of them
very well wrought.
Dumped.
9/13/2003 - ~9/18/2003
Edited by B. Delores Max.
Superb short-story collection by various (mostly famous) writers
about just what you'd expect: getting dumped.
My Secret Life.
9/5/2003 -
"Walter".
The famous pornographic Victorian memoir. For a period
thought prudish, they did a lot of fucking, including
widespread, open prostitution in public parks. (In one
park, the writer and a whore step around fucking couples.)
When this man wasn't whoring, he was raping; an unintended
subtext is the power of well-off men over others in
19th-century England. Not what the man intended, but no
intelligent reader can miss it.
On the other hand, it isn't quite that simple.
For instance, not too far into the book he falls madly,
helplessly in love with a whore, who takes him for
all the money she can get -- or, rather, all the money
he willingly throws at her.
On further thought, I've concluded this is heavily
fictionalized. The author's message: that women enjoy
sex, and therefore should be forced to have it. One
encounter after another ends with him pushing the
woman until she gives in, or forcing her, and the
woman finally enjoying it. The repetitive nature of
these revolting encounters is the clue that it's fiction.
East Bay Grease.
9/4/2003 - 9/7/2003
Eric Miles Williamson.
A local writer who grew up in Oakland, CA. Grim.
Curious Wine.
8/29/2003 - 8/29/2003.
Katherine V. Forrest.
Read part of this in a bookstore. Hadn't ever heard of it,
but it turns out to be a famous novel about a lesbian love
affair. Beautifully written.
In the Freud Archives.
8/29/2003 - 8/30/2003.
Janet Malcolm.
The notorious Masson/Eissler stink. A tempest in a teapot.
A gossipy book about something unimportant, because no
one who wasn't brainwashed before 1960 believes
in Freud's integrity or insight. We see through him.
Still, there's a fascinating maliciousness about all
these people. Why is it that psychoanalysts always
resort to personal attacks? Malcolm herself is like this.
Masson appears to be writing other sorts of things now.
See Lost Prince, below.
I also have his book on animal emotions, but have yet
to start reading it.
Henry's War.
~8/27/2003 - 8/29/2003.
Jeremy Brooks.
Read about a third of the book this time,
only my favorite parts. A novel about a man who
finds that he cannot kill, in war. Every time I re-read
this book or Jampot Smith, I wish Brooks had
produced more novels.
Egil's Saga.
~8/26/2003 - 9/4/2003
Unknown.
Re-read this, one of the Icelandic sagas I've already read.
Fearless Jones.
~8/24/2003 - 8/27/2003.
Walter Mosley.
A crime novel both black and noir.
Grimm's Tales for Young and Old.
8/20/2003 -
Translated by Ralph Manheim.
All 200 of them.
Andersen's Fairy Tales.
8/17/2003 - 8/24/2003
Hans Christian Andersen.
A collection. But why did they leave out Thumbelina?
Goat Boy of the Ozarks.
7/?/2003 - 8/10/2003.
John Mort.
Manuscript of a novel by a friend who's a very good writer,
so I hope the book gets published. Story of an orphan
taking care of himself in the Ozarks. John's written
award-winning fiction, and is an insightful critic
and writer of nonfiction as well. It's instructive to
edit an accomplished writer's book.
The Mammoth Book of International Erotica.
~8/21/2003 - 9/18/2003
.
Why is it so difficult to find well-written pornography?
This collection is full of the kind of crap a college
student might write, scarcely better than the stories
on asstr.org.
Secret Lives.
7/18/2003 - 7/22/2003.
Catherine Browder.
Short stories by a friend of mine, fine but unknown.
Help her out: buy the book.
Mathematical Fallacies and Paradoxes.
7/17/2003
Bryan Bunch.
Just what it sounds like.
Learning XML.
7/17/2003
Nutshell Books.
For work.
The Book That Changed My Life.
7/?/2003 - ~12/?/2003.
Diane Osen.
Writers on the books they loved when young.
Islam Revealed.
7/10/2003 - 8/?/2003
Anis A. Shorrosh.
An Anti-Islam polemic. Poorly reasoned and badly written.
The Tishomingo Blues.
7/15/2003 - 7/17/2003
Elmore Leonard.
Another by the master.
The Singapore Wink.
7/4/2003 - 7/5/2003.
Ross Thomas.
I seem to recall reading another of this fellow's books, years ago.
Didn't enjoy that one, either.
This is an ersatz P.I. novel, with a former stuntman turned
used-car salesman in the P.I. role. He should have stuck
with the used cars. So should the author.
Prime Obsession.
6/?/2003 - 7/12/2003
John Derbyshire.
Another book on the prime number theorem -- or, rather, the Riemann Hypothesis.
There's more math here than in Sabbagh's book on the subject.
This book feels hastily written, perhaps because of the constant,
jarring lapses into a sort of aggressive informality.
I had only a vague grasp of the math in the last quarter of the book.
Plain Language.
~6/20/2003 - ~6/25/2003.
Barbara Wright.
Quaker woman becomes ranch wife in dust bowl eastern Colorado,
by a local writer.
The Cat-Nappers.
6/28/2003 - 7/?/2003
P. G. Wodehouse.
Stealing a cat. If you haven't read Wodehouse, do.
That is, if you like to laugh.
Dark Harbor.
6/27/2003 - 6/28/2003.
Ved Mehta.
The author, who is blind, has a house built on an island
off the coast of Maine. He autographed my copy.
Book of Haikus.
~6/2/2003 - ~6/14/2003.
Jack Kerouac.
Wildly uneven.
Numbers in the Dark.
6/16/2003 - 6/22/2003
Italo Calvino.
Hadn't ready anything by him in a while, and after talking
to someone who had, decided to remedy the oversight.
Tuesday, where have you gone? I'd like to talk Calvino
with you again.
The Russian Debutante's Handbook.
6/7/2003 - 6/14/2003.
Gary Shteyngart.
The adventures of a Russian-American Jew in New York
and a fictitious East European country.
Deaf in America.
~6/1/2003 - 6/28/2003
Carol Padden and Tom Humphries.
An explanation of what it's like to be deaf.
This goes far beyond what I expected.
The Riemann Hypothesis.
5/18/2003 - 5/24/2003
Karl Sabbagh.
Math.
Night of the Avenging Blowfish.
5/19/2003 - 5/20/2003.
John Welter.
More wit, some of it amazingly clever, much like his earlier book.
But as in that book, this one's protaganist pines like a
lovesick teenage girl. Two such novels are one too many.
Venus in Furs.
5/18/2003 - 5/18/2003.
Leopold von Sacher-Masoch.
This poor boy was seriously warped, particularly since the
book is not a novel but a factual report of an affair he
actually had, with almost nothing changed in the telling.
Glad I wasn't there to see it. Reading it was bad enough.
Begin to Exit Here.
~5/14/2003 - 5/18/2003.
John Welter.
Humorous novel.
Acid.
5/?/2003 - ~5/14/2003.
Edward Falco.
Short story collection, some of them quite good.
The title story, among others, is worth the
price of admission alone.
The Revenants.
5/9/2003 - 5/9/2003.
Geoffrey Farrington?
A vampire novel. Recent, but feels 19th-century.
A stylish and accomplished re-imagining of the vampire myth.
Seeing Voices.
4/21/2003 - ~6/?/2003
Oliver Sacks.
A book by the prominent neurologist on deafness.
The Virgin of Bennington.
~4/11/2003 - 4/20/2003.
Kathleen Norris.
I started reading this because it was such an interesting personal
memoir. Then it turned into a paen to her mentor, and became considerably
less involving.
Good Night, Nobody.
4/5/2003 - ~4/16/2003
Michael Knight.
Short stories, skillfully written.
Living with Saints.
4/4/2003 - 4/6/2003.
Mary O'Connell.
Mostly stories about Catholic schoolgirls, many of them pregnant.
She's a local writer, whom I've met. Shy, and not cynical,
as the stories might lead you to expect.
The Da Vinci Code.
3/29/2003 - 3/31/2003.
Dan Brown.
Brainy thriller, but too many italicized sentences of internal
monologue. They break the flow of the story.
Dracula.
~4/3/2003 - ~4/5/2003.
Bram Stoker.
I love this book -- at least, the second half,
which is the part I re-read. The first time I read this book
I made the mistake of starting at sunset. Couldn't put it down,
and finished it just at sunrise. Reading in a basement, in the
silence of the night. Creepy.
Collected poems of Pablo Neruda
3/21/2003 -
.
One of my four favorite poets.
Bare.
3/12/2003 - 3/17/2003.
Elisabeth Eaves.
Memoir of dancing naked, and the sex lives of her friends,
who were also nude dancers. Oh, and her own sex life, too.
A brave book, and illuminating. Lives like hers are always
interesting, but I always wonder: how can they be so candid?
She let her father read the damn thing. Sex is too
private for this kind of candor -- but if she wants to write
it, I'll enjoy reading it. I just won't ever discuss mine
between the pages of a book. How can they be so candid?
The Lives of the Muses.
~2/20/2003 - 3(?)/?/2003
Francine Prose.
Nine women who inspired major artists or writers.
But why did Prose leave out Alma Mahler, who inspired not only
Gustav Mahler but Walter Gropius, Gustav Klimt, Franz Werfel,
Oskar Kokoschka, and others, including a priest. Well, maybe
she didn't inspire them all. But she certainly knew how to
torment them. Maybe she was too big a subject -- Prose would
have had to give her a volume all her own... I got the book
to read about Lizzie Siddal, whose story with Rossetti interests
me, but found Suzanne Farrell and Hester Thrale equally
interesting. I never knew that Dr. Jonson was a masochist.
He used to insist that Mrs. Thrale whip him. I'd thought
this sort of thing began with Sade and Sader-Masoch.
A Multitude of Sins.
2?/?/2003 - 2/20/2003.
Richard Ford.
Short stories, some of them astonishingly accomplished.
What Went Wrong?
2/1/2003 - ~5/29/2003
Bernard Lewis.
History of Islam in its relations with the West.
Rights of Man. and Common Sense.
2?/?/2003 -
Thomas Paine.
Didn't finish -- I have trouble with the styles of writing
before the mid-19th century.
Paine is probably the greatest polemicist I've ever read,
though. Wish he weren't such heavy going for me.
My Sense of Silence.
1/19/2003 - 2/1/2003
Lennard J. Davis.
Memoir by the hearing son of deaf parents. As a child
he was sometimes terrified, because his parents couldn't
hear him when he cried. Or the time he was trapped in
the closet.
The Bush Dyslexicon.
12/?/2003 - 1/17/2003.
Mark Crispin Miller.
A savage attack on GWB. As a confirmed Bush-loather,
at first it amused me. But it goes too far. It stoops
to the unrestrained vitriol and hatred that have so far
been the domain only of Republicans like Nixon and Gingrich
and Limbaugh. Still and all, Bush deserves it, though I
had the stomach only to read part of the book. W. is a
complacent creature, one born to privilege who has never
questioned that he deserves it, and that others deserve
the lowly status into which they were born. And he's
done nothing to try to merit his privileges. He's utterly
unable to reason, or to express himself. He's worse than
mediocre. He's stupid. Had he been born into any other
family, he'd be living in a double-wide trailer. But
his daddy's money and connections, and the administration
controlled by his brother in Florida, and the Supreme Court
appointed substantially by daddy and Reagan, gave him the
highest office in the land, and now he's trying to drag us
into a war that will have longer-lasting and more disastrous
consequences than Vietnam did.
Discipline.
?/?/2002 - ~1/2/2003.
Iowa Yearly Meeting.
The "Faith and Practice" of IYM (Conservative).
Figured I should read it, since I'm on the committee to revise it.
Charles Bukowski.
~12/31/2002 - ~1/2/2003
Howard Sounes.
Another bio of the world's ugliest writer. A sample of his poetry:
...the bosses, yellow men
with bad breath and big feet, men
who look like frogs, hyenas, men who walk
as if melody had never been invented, men
who think it is intelligent to hire and fire and
profit, men with expensive wives they possess
like 60 acres of ground to be drilled
or shown off or to be walled away from
the incompetent, men who'd kill you
because they're crazy and justify it because
it's the law, men who stand in front of
windows thirty feet wide and see nothing...
Severe Burns.
12/31/2002 -
Andrew Munster.
Research.
Off to the Side.
12/24/2002 - 12/29/2002.
Jim Harrison.
Memoir by one of my favorite writers.
His forte is novellas. The first half of this is good,
but then it deteriorates into relentless name-dropping.
A Reader's Manifesto.
12/23/2002 - 12/31/2002.
B. R. Myers.
The famous screed, originally self-published, then printed
in the Atlantic in a shorter version. I'm glad someone
is finally pointing out that the emperor (meaning overrated
writers like Proulx, McCarthy, and DeLillo) has no clothes.
Tokyo Story.
12/21/2002 - 12/22/2002.
Akahige Namban.
A Japanese pornographic novel. The first time I've ever heard
of a sex act I never would have believed physically possible,
but which actually is (I looked it up). You want to know
what I'm talking about, don't you? Read it, and guess.
The Buk Book.
12/21/2002 - 12/21/2002.
Jim Christy.
A short biography -- anecdotes, really -- of Charles Bukowski.
A New Kind of Science.
~12/16/2002
Stephen Wolfram.
Irritating, grandiose claims by an egomaniac. He's also a bad writer.
But the book is interesting anyway. Lots of curious cellular
automata and that sort of thing.
When the Women Come Out to Dance.
12/?/2002 - 12/?/2002.
Elmore Leonard.
Stories by the master.
This is America?
11/?/2002 - 11/?/2002.
Rusty Monhollon.
Lawrence, KS in the 60s and early 70s. I was going to school there
at the time, but I had no idea how bad it was until I read this book.
I knew about the cops killing people, and the bombings at the Student
Union and the ROTC building, but I didn't remember people shooting
at the cops (repeatedly), or the governor taking the cops out of
the picture and putting in the Highway Patrol. I didn't know that
there were dozens of arsons one summer.
The Sexual Life of Catherine M.
11/22/2002 - 11/25/2002.
Catherine Millet.
A re-read of the book I sped through a few months ago.
Essays.
11/12/2002 -
George Orwell (Everyman edition).
His honesty, precision, intelligence, and insight are astonishing.
The Writer's Guide to Everyday Life in Renaissance England.
?9/?/2002
Kathy Lynn Emerson.
One more instance: an interesting book, but time ran out before
I got through it. They were a different culture and world back then.
The Infernal World of Branwell Bronte.
10/5/2002 -
Daphne duMaurier.
Much conjecture.
An Italian Affair.
10/5/2002 - 10/20/2002.
Laura Fraser.
Re-read this, because I got her autograph and briefly
talked to her about the book. Sweet even on the second reading.
Atonement.
~9/30/2002 -
Ian McEwen.
Perfect prose; delight in details.
The Corrections.
9/?/2002 - 9/28/2002.
Jonathan Franzen.
Astounding. The most technically accomplished novel I've
read in years.
Some Can Whistle.
9/21/2002 - 9/22/2002.
Larry McMurtry.
A book I'd read a long time ago, and forgotten. Vintage McMurtry.
L.M. loves his characters, and keeps coming back to them.
In this book, he brings back Danny Deck and Godwin, and even
brings us up to date on how Jill Peel (probably my favorite
McMurtry character ever) died. I like his books for the
same reason I like Jim Harrison's novellas: they move
along; they're character based; a lot happens.
The Circus at the Edge of the Earth.
9/7/2002 - 9/8/2002.
Charles Wilkins.
Travels in Canada with tigers and an elephant, and a
lot of colorful people.
Side Show.
~9/6/2002 - ~9/20/2002.
Howard Bone.
His life in the circus.
The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract.
~9/4/2002 - ~9/6/2002
Bill James.
Tomes like this are always hugely impressive - it would take a
month to read, so how much work did it take him to produce?
I'm not even a baseball fan, but browsing around in this
is fun, in the way that reading Robert Byrne's chess column is.
The World's Shortest Stories.
9/2/2002 - 9/2/2002.
Edited by Steve Moss.
55 words or less, some of them good, some of them puzzling.
Hateship, friendship, courtship, loveship, marriage.
~8/24/2002 - 9/2/2002.
Alice Munro.
Read everything but the first (title) story, which for some reason
I didn't want to. Probably sensed an emotional intensity about it
that I wasn't ready for.
Munro is an astonishingly accomplished short-story writer,
almost as good as John Cheever. Their territory is similar;
both deal with marriage and infidelity.
Self-Editing for Fiction Writers.
?/?/2002 - ?/?/2002.
Browne and King.
Read this sometime in the summer. Or maybe spring.
Or was it last year?
The Dhammapada.
?/?/2002 - 8/27/2002.
Translated by Thomas Cleary.
Sayings of the Buddha. Cleary's translation is annoying because
he interjects a lot of nonsense, in bold type. In bold? When
the Buddha's words are not? Are Cleary's words more important?
It's difficult to maintain the flow, while reading.
The Sexual Life of Catherine M.
8/25/2002 - 8/25/2002.
Catherine Millet.
Sexual memoir by a French intellectual. Very self-aware.
Sometimes too theoretical, with that far-fetched, unintelligible
so-called reasoning that the French intelligentsia cultivates.
But when she sticks to straight description, or to explanations
of her feelings and sensibility, or to concrete phenomena,
she's brilliant. She loved anonymous sex, gang bangs, and orgies.
She's lucky she didn't get syphilis or AIDS because
she's certainly been penetrated by thousands of men. Strangely,
though, she was deeply passive; she didn't take the initiative.
And in spite of her world-class memory, her honesty,
and her articulateness, the story remains opaque.
The affect is strangely flat, and her motives are indecipherable.
Choices and Consequences.
8/16/2002 - 8/18/2002.
Dick Schaefer.
How to deal with kids who are using drugs and booze.
Vagabond Hearts.
8/14/2002 - 8/16/2002.
Bobby Hutchinson.
Okay, for the first time in my life I read a romance novel.
Everybody's allowed one mistake. And mistake it was.
I didn't know novels could be this bad, in this way.
The Surgeon.
8/8/2002 - 8/9/2002.
Tess Gerriton.
Crime novel. Author violates a prime canon of the genre by not
introducing the perpetrator until near the end of the book.
Wealth and Democracy.
~7/31/2002 -
Kevin Phillips.
Chock-full of statistics, charts, and every fact Phillips can
can adduce. Some of what he has to say is conjectural, but with
the massive research he's done, it's clear that he has a sound
thesis. Not to mention a very depressing one. Heavy reading,
because so loaded with detail.
Read 290 of the 422 pages; the library fines were mounting.
It was slow going - dense with detail.
The Structure of Evolutionary Theory.
~7/31/2002 -
Stephen Jay Gould.
I should have known better. 1300+ pages, which start with a
long essay on Salisbury cathedral. Gave up right away.
The Plug-in Drug.
~7/31/2002 -
Marie Winn.
Barely got started on this.
Indexing Books.
~7/31/2002 -
Nancy C. Mulvany.
How to.
The Chicago Manual of Style.
~7/31/2002 - ~7/31/2002.
U. of Chicago.
Chapter 18, on indexing.
Democracy in America. (Abridged)
7/20/2002
Alexis de Tocqueville.
Brilliant, but his fatal flaw is that he generalizes
too much, often on insufficient evidence.
Read about a quarter of it; overdue at the library.
This seems to be the problem a lot, lately.
Fast Food Nation.
7/18/2002 - 7/19/2002.
Eric Schlosser.
Thoroughly researched and enormously depressing.
Just an hour after I finished it, there was a story on the radio
about ConAgra recalling 13 million pounds of hamburger.
It was like the past recalls: they stalled and most of the
meat was already eaten. Bastards.
The Princess Bride.
7/16/2002 - 7/17/2002.
William Goldman.
The movie was better.
Purple Cane Road.
7/14/2002 - 7/15/2002.
James Lee Burke.
Burke repeats himself from book to book - there are always
loose ends in his plots, and the protagonist is always
personally involved in a case in some way that isn't quite
plausible and was never adequately set up.
About a Boy.
7/13/2002 - 7/13/2002.
Nick Hornby.
Had just finished reading Hornby's piece in this month's
New Yorker about the World Cup, so picked this up at
the bookstore and couldn't stop reading. Every page surprised
me - Hornby writes mostly dialogue and narrative about the
inner mechanics of his characters, and manages to keep it
interesting all the way through.
An Italian Affair.
?/?/2002 - 7/11/2002.
Laura Fraser.
A sweet story, of an affair between Fraser and a married
French professor. Sorry I missed Fraser when she was in town
to speak. She comes across as charming and sweet and vulnerable.
[Later, she was in town again, and I did get a chance to speak to her;
see above.]
Fatal Voyage.
7/6/2002 - 7/6/2002.
Kathy Reichs.
Murder mystery/procedural, but with a forensic anthropologist
instead of a private investigator in the starring role.
Mediocre at best.
Big Trouble.
6/29/2002 - 6/29/2002.
Dave Barry.
An extended Dave Barry riff; he's managed the novel
length pretty well, but it reads a lot like Carl
Hiassen (whom he credits, along with Elmore Leonard,
in the acknowledgments).
Wittgenstein's Poker.
6/25/2002 - 6/29/2002
David Edmonds & John Eidinow.
Rashomon in Cambridge, England: no one seems to be able to
agree on quite what happened. But most of the book is about
Wittegenstein and Popper. And Russell, and Moore, and Carnap,
and Schlick, and so on. And even Godel and Murdoch. A Who's
Who of big brains.
In Hazard.
6/?/2002 - 6/14/2002.
Richard Hughes.
Functional prose, unadorned and accurate, telling a
gripping story compellingly.
By the man who wrote A High Wind in Jamaica, and
The Fox in the Attic, a book I greatly admired
and still remember decades after I read it.
A Farewell to Arms.
6/3/2002 - 6/5/2002.
Ernest Hemingway.
I've always thought that Hemingway is hugely overrated,
with his thudding rhythms, his wooden, inane dialogue,
and his flat, unconvincing characters. There are
plenty of other flaws, but those will do for starters.
His prose reads like a child's, especially when he
ties together a dozen clauses with "and" after "and".
His writing is mechanical; it has a machine-made feel.
The Alienist.
5/?/2002 - 6/15/2002.
Caleb Carr.
This is an odd novel, combining skill and amateurishness.
52 Pickup.
6/2/2002 - 6/2/2002.
Elmore Leonard.
Early Leonard - 1974. Good, but his chops are better nowadays.
Kiss.
6/2/2002 - 6/2/2002.
Ed McBain.
Another police procedural by the master of the genre.
City Primeval.
5/31/2002 - 6/1/2002.
Elmore Leonard.
I've read this book at least three times now.
Except for knowing what's going to happen, it's as good
on the third read as on the first.
Moses, Man of the Mountain.
~5/27/2002 - 5/30/2002.
Zora Neale Hurston.
I should have known better than to start reading another
novel by Hurston, even one that is completely atypical
for me - a retelling of the story of Moses, no less.
She probably meant to make him an appealing character,
but he murders and lies. Still, it's impossible to
stop reading Hurston.
Their Eyes Were Watching God.
5/?/2002 - 5/?/2002
Zora Neale Hurston.
Hurston is astonishing - her voice is completely authentic.
Lost Prince.
4/?/2002 - 5/25/2002.
Jeffrey Masson.
The story of Kaspar Hauser.
Bright Lights, Big City.
5/20/2002 - 5/20/2002.
Jay McInerney.
Few books are this funny, or this touching. A re-read.
Nimisha's Ship.
5/?/2002 - 5/13/2002.
Anne McCaffrey.
Reading this book was like being dragged across acres of
broken glass while huge carnivorous birds ate my intestines
and sadistic dwarves jabbed my ears and eyes with
acid-filled hypodermic needles. It is not an experience I
will have again. Just one example of this woman's egregiously
bad writing: she uses the word "especial" instead of "special".
On the Street Where You Live.
5/6/2002 - 5/13/2002
Mary Higgins Clark.
Reading this book was like having hot coals
pressed against my genitalia. It never fails to
astound me, the non-writers whose books make the
best-seller lists. At the Pikes Peak Writers
Conference, one of the seminar leaders was
reading from Tami Hoag. Jesus spare me.
I keep hoping to pick up some pointers from
these books on how to appeal to readers, but
if this is the crap I have to produce,
include me out.
Platero and I.
4/30/2002 - 5/23/2002
Juan Ramon Jimenez (trans. Eloise Roach)
Had to special-order this; couldn't find it anywhere.
A complete edition, unlike the one I read last
week. I read Jimenez, and his writing has a limpid,
childlike quality, a simplicity that shouldn't work,
but works extraordinarily well. Even the sorrow
is not painful, because it is so beautiful.
This book is an extraordinary accomplishment.
I have never seen anything at all like it.
Platero and I.
4/22/2002 - 4/23/2002.
Juan Ramon Jimenez.
My first girlfriend in college loaned me this book,
and I thought of it the other day, and went to the
library and got it on interlibrary loan. Sadly,
the version I ended up with has been condensed from
138 chapters down to 19. I'll have to find another.
But Jimenez' voice is just as I remember - his
inability to see anything but beauty around him,
and the beauty and simplicity and childlike way
he writes.
On the death of an old canary: "Platero, do you
think there is a paradise for birds? Do you
suppose that above blue sky there might be a green
garden that blossoms with golden rosebushes and
blooms with the souls of the white birds, pink
birds, and birds of blue and yellow?"
It sounds jejeune, a short quote taken out of
context, but his writing is like an incantation:
you fall under its spell, and soon you are
reading it in a dreamlike state. No wonder
he won the Nobel Prize.
The Collected Works of Cesar Pavese.
4/18/2002 - 5/22/2002
R. W. Flint (trans., ed.).
The second novella in this collection feels to me
to be the most accurate description of how war
must affect the people of a country through which
it is raging. This book is, in a different way,
the literary equivalent of Seven Samurai,
but more terrible because more recent.
The third novella is elliptical, and the ending,
though unexpected, is in its own way as sad.
Should only read the second and third novels,
not the first and fourth.
The Bridges of Madison County.
4/18/2002 - 4/18/2002.
Robert James Waller.
The newspaper this morning referred to this as the best-
selling hardcover novel of all time, so I went to the
library and read about 3/4 of it. This sold six
million copies? Some things are cliches before they're
ever said, or published, and this book is one. Amateurish,
maudlin, hackneyed. It would be funny, if it weren't
embarrassing - it's one of those books that makes me
squirm for the writer: didn't he know any better?
Emporium.
4/11/2002 - 7/1/2002
Adam Johnson.
Bought this at his reading at Rockhurst. A genuinely
nice guy, but not my kind of writer. He tries too hard,
and all the stories are contrived.
Buffalo Girls.
?/?/2002 - 4/12/2002.
Larry McMurtry.
Another stellar effort from the ever-reliable McMurtry.
Dogs and Demons.
4/3/2002 - 4/30/2002.
Alex Kerr.
Bought this because I liked his book Lost Japan.
The problems in Japan run much deeper than I realized.
For the foreseeable future, we can write them off as
competition. But I enjoyed the place, the two months
that I lived there, and I always admired much of their
culture. It saddens me, to read what they're doing to
themselves and their land. Japan is vanishing...
He doesn't spare the Japanese. Here's a sample of
the sort of thing he has to say: "[Tokyo University]
graduates make few important contributions to world
scholarship or technology; they go straight into
government ministries, where they proceed to collect
bribes, falsify medical records, and cook up schemes
to destroy rivers and seacoasts..."
The Giant's House.
?/?/2002 - ?/?/2002.
Elizabeth McCracken.
Sometime this spring I read this book while browsing
in a bookstore, but forgot to record it. One of the
most touching books I've read in years. I was filled
with envy for McCracken's accomplishment.
Memoirs of a Beatnik.
2/29/2002 - 2/29/2002.
Diane di Prima.
The poet's fictional sexual memoir. Wear gloves - it's hot.
Sex with men, sex with women, sex with more than one
person at a time. Group sex. Vaginal sex, anal sex,
oral sex. Rape. Sex while menstruating. Peeping through
a keyhole at incestuous anal rape. Modelling for
pornographic photographs. Everything but bestiality;
I guess everyone has to draw the line somewhere. Animals
aren't plentiful in downtown Manhattan; the only candidates
were the cat-sized rats in her apartment. That would be
a bit extreme, even for her.
Hit to Kill.
?/?/2002
Bradley Graham.
Ballistic missile defense. I've read six chapters,
renewed it twice, and now it's time to give it back.
If it weren't for this damn bronchitis, maybe I
would have finished it by now. It's quite good.
The Unicorn Sonata.
2/22/2002 - 2/22/2002.
Peter S. Beagle.
Saccharine fantasy.
52 McGs.
2/8/2002 - ~2/14/2002
Robert McG. Thomas Jr.
Obituaries from the New York Times.
Winter Range.
2/7/2002 - 3/?/2002
Claire Davis.
Weak technique.
The Quaker Family in Colonial America.
2/7/2002 -
J. William Frost.
A lot more interesting than it sounds. But didn't finish.
Mirabilis.
2/2/2002 - 2/7/2002
Susann Cokal.
Novel about a wet nurse in medieval France. Cokal is a
double Ph.D., and more than a little eccentric. My kind
of woman - a brainy one, obsessed with bodily functions.
Ghost World.
2/?/2002 - 2/?/2002
Daniel Clowes and Terry Zwigoff.
When I saw the script in a bookstore, just after I'd
seen the movie, I bought it. A close match.
Lew Hunter's Screenwriting 434.
2/24/2002
Lew Hunter.
He may be able to write screenplays, but his expository
prose is startlingly bad.
The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup.
2/18?/2002 - ~6/17/2002
Susan Orlean.
Profiles by the New Yorker writer. Orlean could write
about a mute paraplegic and make his life interesting,
she's that good.
The Red Room.
2/1/2002 - 2/3/2002.
Nicci French.
Not bad, for brain candy. Not bad at all. The only
problem is that the resolution, though tidy, is not
anything a reader could possibly have deduced. But that's
just a quibble. This isn't a straight mystery. It's
closer to a mainstream novel.
Dead Sleep.
1/29/2002 - 1/29/2002.
Greg Iles.
Jordan Glass's sister is dead - or is she? Her father's
dead, too - or is he? Who knows? Who cares? Cardboard characters,
awkward dialogue transparently meant for no other purpose than
pushing the plot, and a plot with a resolution that's truly
not credible. Lame, lame, lame.
Their Heads Are Green.
1/?/2002 -
Paul Bowles.
Far and few, far and few,
Are the lands where the Jumblies live.
Their heads are green and their hands are blue,
And they went to sea in a sieve.
(Edward Lear)
If anyone writes better than Bowles, I have yet
to read him. A sample:
Abdeslam is not a happy person. He sees his world, which he
knows is a good world, being assailed from all sides, slowly crumbling
before his eyes. He has no means of understanding me, should I
try to explain to him that in this age what he considers to be religion
is called superstition, and that religion today has come to be a
desperate attempt to integrate metaphysics with science. Something
will have to be found to replace the basic wisdom which has been
destroyed, but the discovery will not be soon; neither Abdeslam
nor I will ever know of it.
On Becoming a Novelist.
1/19?/2002 - 1/23/2002.
John Gardner.
Good advice from a shrewd, honest pro.
Plainsong.
?/?/2001 - 1/9/2002.
Kent Haruf.
For some reason, I couldn't get started on this book,
until I started reading in the middle. After, I read the
first half. For such a flatly-written book, it's very
affecting, full of feeling. Beautiful, even.
The Huntsman.
?/?/2001 - 1/5/2002.
Whitney Terrell.
A novel set locally, and a damn fine one, too.
It's good to see someone writing about social issues,
and about people of different classes and races.
It's also good that Terrell has dragged our local
history of racism out in the open, and that he's
exposed the truth as well about the exclusiveness
of Kansas City society (a group so inbred and bigoted
that they wouldn't admit a Jew to the top country
club until Tom Watson quit that club in disgust
over the issue; as far as I've heard, they have yet
to admit a black). It was fun, reading the thinly
fictionalized bits - the "Founders Ball" obviously
being the Jewel Ball, and the "Pemberton Academy"
being Pem-Day (now Pembroke Hill), and so on.
[And in person, Terrell is a delightful guy -
smart, open, helpful, unaffected.]
Even Cowgirls Get the Blues.
1/3/2002 - 1/3/2002
Tom Robbins.
Read 100 pages. He's not my kind of writer, but I'm
glad he's around, anyway, if only because he has the
best titles of any writer working today: Half Asleep
in Frog Pajamas; Another Roadside Attraction; Still
Life with Woodpecker; Jitterbug Perfume; Skinny Legs
and All. I think he's a women's writer. He certainly
doesn't appeal to my sensibility.
Bitten.
1/3/2002 - 1/5/2002.
Kelley Armstrong.
A werewolf novel, with twists. The author shows promise.
Will the Circle be Unbroken?
Studs Terkel.
Haven't started this yet. Looking forward to it.
Terkel is always good.
Belinda.
?/?/?.
Anne Rice.
Don't know when I last re-read this, but am inserting
it here, approximately where I think I did.
My favorite pornographic novel.
Warriors of God.
12/?/2002 -
James Reston, Jr.
The Third Crusade.
Too Close to Call.
?/?/? -
Jeffrey Toobin.
I never got around to reading this before it was
due back at the library, since there was so much other
stuff to read. It's about how the Republicans cheated
in Florida.
Leaves from the Notebook of a Tamed Cynic.
12/?/2001 - 1/13/2002
Reinhold Niebuhr.
Excerpts from the journals of the famous theologian.
Afghanistan's Endless War.
?/?/2001 - 1/30/2002.
Larry P. Goodson.
Scholarly, thorough, well-written.
Lost Japan.
12/28?/2001 - ~1/?/2002.
Alex Kerr.
Consistently interesting personal essays about Japan
by an American who has lived there for decades, and whose
experiences I envy. A modern Lafcadio Hearn, but more
insightful, more objective, and a better writer.
Best American Essays, 2001.
?/?/? - 7/4/2002.
Kathleen Norris.
The same collection I look forward to every year.
In Our Strange Gardens.
12/27?/2001 - 12/28?/2001.
Michel Quint.
A beautiful little book, a Christmas gift from my wife.
A story of a family, and of the Resistance in France, with
some surprising turns. One of the two or three most
perfect stories I've ever read.
When We Were Orphans.
12/29/2001 - 12/31/2001.
Kazuo Ishiguro.
Beautifully written, and utterly unconvincing.
Under a Sickle Moon.
12/?/2001 - 12/?/2001.
Peregrine Hodson.
Re-read parts of this, a book written by a man who
sneaked into Afghanistan with the mujahidin when they
were fighting the Soviets.
Bitteroot.
12/11/2001 - 12/12/2001.
James Lee Burke.
Literary blood and guts. Good writing, but with Burke's
usual loose ends.
Voyages. Scientific Circumnavigations 1679 - 1859.
12/8/2001 - 12/8/2001.
Cynthia J. Rogers.
The catalog for an exhibit of rare books in the Linda Hall
Library - voyages around the world. A score of pages full of
interesting details and reproductions of selected pages
from the books.
A Sport and a Pastime.
12/6/2001 - 12/?/2001.
James Salter.
A perfect, exquisite little novel. A distillation,
like perfume, of unexpected beauties. This may be the classic
Salter novel: one unexpected, flawless sentence after
another going off in your brain like depth charges.
The Adventures of Me and Martha Jane.
12/4/2001 - 12/8/2001.
Santos J. Romeo.
Autobiographical novel (on the Web) about a boy whose babysitter
initiates a ten-year love affair with him when he's six and she's
fourteen. The proof that sex with children is destructive is in
the heart-rending last chapter. This man's life has been ruined -
he's never gotten over this.
The Declaration of Independence. and
The Constitution of the United States.
~12/4/2001 -
Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, et al.
Given the unapologetic totalitarians like Ashcroft
who are in charge at the moment, these are documents all
of us should read and take to heart and fight for.
Good in Bed.
11/30/2001 - 11/30/2001.
Jennifer Weiner.
Speed-read this in the bookstore. Definitely a book
for young women. A success fantasy.
Somebody's Darling.
Larry McMurtry.
11/28/2001 - 11/29/2001
The number of times I've read this book may be in
double digits by now. Among my top five favorite reads,
partly because of the character of Jill Peel.
Dirt.
11/22/2001 - ~12/2/2001.
Jo McDougall.
Poems by the Arkansas poet. My friend Don Maxwell made a
movie of some of her poems, in fact, which is how I came to
know her poetry. An understated, but deeply felt, style.
More subtext than text.
Silicon Snake Oil.
?/?/2001 - 11/19/2001.
Clifford Stoll.
Common-sense objections to the myths of the Internet's
power and utility. But it's always annoying to read someone
you agree with, whose points are well-made, who simply
has no idea how to write. The book is also a little out
of date; things have changed since the mid-90s -
modem speeds, etc. But the core of Stoll's objections stand.
The Face of Battle.
11/14/2001 - 12?/?/2001.
John Keegan.
Recommended by a friend who was a career Army officer.
Very good, as one would expect, given that Keegan wrote it.
Unholy Wars.
11/7/2001 - 12/6/2001.
John K. Cooley.
How the situation in Afghanistan got so badly out of
control, and what it's likely to cost us. Read all but the
chapter on the Phillipines because the book was overdue.
A real eye-opener, this. We (especially the CIA) created
a monster, and it's come back to haunt us.
The book should have been more carefully fact-checked,
though - there are a number of places Cooley makes obvious
mistakes, such as giving a date as 1979 in one place,
and as 1997 in another.
One Hundred Girls' Mother.
10/15/2001 -
Lenore Carroll.
Lenore is a friend of mine, in fact the founding member
of my writer's group. She writes a lot of Western fiction.
This is one newly reprinted in paperback, and I'm finding
it enjoyable, and an engrossing yarn.
An Uncommon Enemy.
?/?/2001 - ~7/9/2002
Michelle Black.
More Western fiction by another K.C. writer I know.
Great storytelling.
Two-part Invention.
10/21/2001 - 10/21/2001.
Madeleine L'Engle.
Read half of this because the beginning was superb, but it
slowly went downhill. The writing actually became clumsy,
largely because she lacked transitions, which seems like an
odd failing in an experienced writer.
Zen and the Way of the Sword.
10/5/2001 - 10/7/2001.
Winston Lee King.
I read two chapters: "The Samurai Sword", and
"Samurai Swordsmanship" - subjects that have always
interested me, lousy though I was when I actually
studied Katori Shinto Ryu.
Instructions to the Cook.
10/5/2001 - .
Bernard Glassman.
By the famous activist Zen master.
The Qur'an.
10/5/2001 -
Translated by Muhammad Zafrulla Khan.
I've never been able to read this book. I set out to
try once again, but I'm not going to be able to. For one
thing, it begins by claiming to be the absolute truth,
the one holy and indisputable Word Of God, and promises
punishment to anyone who doesn't believe. Then it repeats
this, and repeats it again, and again. I'm simply unable
to read books like this; they strike me as a waste of
my time. It boils down to this: "There is no God but God,
and He is as I tell you he is, and you have no choice
but to agree with me." Why would I believe this? Just
because someone named Mohammed said so? There is no
earthly reason to accept this book, nothing to be gained
by doing so, and much, such as one's rationality, to be
lost. I have yet to hear a Muslim make an actual case
for his religion, and their holy book doesn't, either.
Asserting that what you say is true does not make it so.
You must give me some reason to believe you. In fact,
the more vehemently you assert yourself, the more hollow
I am likely to think your belief is.
The Quaker Reader.
10/5/2001 - .
Edited by Jessamyn West.
Shopgirl.
9/25?/2001 - 9/30?/2001.
Steve Martin.
A near-flawless little masterpiece, like reading a
contemporary minimalist Henry James. Beautifully done.
Lake Woebegon Summer 1956.
9/13?/2001 - 9/30/2001.
Garrison Keillor.
The usual Keillor shtick. This guy has his niche, and he
knows how to milk it for all it's worth. Which is not a
criticism. I enjoy reading him. He could talk about nothing
and make it a compelling story. This is another fun read,
from the man who documents the Midwest like a subversive
anthropologist.
The Ring of Bright Water Trilogy.
8/?/2001 - 11/2/2001.
Gavin Maxwell.
This guy has one of the most polished, beautiful, fluid
styles I have ever encountered. He writes supremely well.
I bought this on the Isle of Skye, perhaps a quarter mile
from where he lived and wrote. I read it years ago, when
in my twenties. I was too young then to appreciate his
mastery, both as a writer and as a human being. It's
unfortunate that he attracted so many disasters, but
in a way, it makes the reading even more compelling.
Under the Volcano.
9/?/2001 - ?/?/2001
Malcolm Lowry.
A very tough read - not in the sense that it's intricate
and difficult, but in the sense that one doesn't want the
Consul to destroy himself, one doesn't want him to die. But
Lowry doesn't flinch; he makes the reader suffer. I've
read the book before. This time, I only read about half.
I don't think I could stand to read the end again. I can
barely stand to read the scenes between Firmin and his wife,
poignant as they are. The extraordinary sadness of it.
Positively 4th Street.
9/7?/2001 - 9/13?/2001.
David Hajdu.
The story of Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, her sister Mimi, and
Mimi's husband Richard Farina. I picked up the book because
I'd started listening to Mimi and Richard's music again
recently, and then Mimi died, so I was vaguely interested.
The story was complicated enough, and involving enough,
that I had to buy the book despite my best intentions.
The Sagas of Icelanders.
8/22/2001 - .
Various translators.
One more great damn thick book calling out to me to read it.
What a fool I am. Is it possible to be a bookaholic? I read
perhaps half of this, but there's simply too much, and too
many other books waiting to be read, and too little time.
Ulysses.
8/15/2001 -
James Joyce.
I get the distinct feeling I'm missing a lot of allusions when
I read this book. Still, I have trouble putting it aside. Read
for 2 hours this morning, intending only to read for a few
minutes. I never expected it to be a page-turner. But I only
got 222 pages read before I had to return it to the library.
Maus.
7/31/2001 - 7/31/2001.
Art Spiegelman.
Venus in India.
7/22/2001 - 7/22/2001.
"Captain Devereux".
A pornographic Victorian novel I read a third of
in Bloomsday books. I've decided that Victorian porn
is my favorite flavor. For one thing, it's usually better
written. For another, the sex isn't mechanical. And it's
different enough from modern sensibilities to be pleasantly
surprising.
Against Joie de Vivre.
7/22/2001 - ?/?/2001.
Philip Lopate.
A collection of essays. This guy's good.
Contributions of the Quakers.
7/22/2001 - ?/?/2001.
Elizabeth Janet Gray.
A Pendle Hill pamphlet. Did you know that Thomas Paine
was a birthright Quaker? Hoy! Elizabeth Gray's booklet is
full of unexpected little facts like this.
Neither Victims nor Executioners.
7/22/2001 - 7/24/2001.
Albert Camus.
The full essay (though still brief): riveting, honest,
prophetic and humane.
Prodigal Summer.
?
Barbara Kingsolver.
Read about half of this sometime during the winter or
early spring. Couldn't tolerate it. Discarded it. I'd
forgotten about it until I saw someone reading it today,
and checked this list - had forgotten to record it here.
Portofino.
7/22/2001 - 7/22/2001.
Frank Schaeffer.
Breezed through this in Bloomsday Books while browsing.
Funny, sweet, well-crafted.
Various Scotland guidebooks:
The Rough Guide.
The Lonely Planet Guide.
The Maverick Guide.
Signpost Guide.
Fodor's.
Interview with the Vampire.
7/17/2001 - 7/25/2001.
Anne Rice.
I've read several of the other books in the series,
so I supposed I should read the first. Rice's prose (and
sensibility) is a bit overheated, but hey, it's like
overeating: you know you indulged yourself, but you
couldn't help it. It even felt sort of - good.
The River King.
7/15/2001 - 7/15/2001.
Alice Hoffman.
Zipped through this because it caught my attention, and
held it, though I've never cared for Hoffman. Still, though
I don't care for her style, I have to admire her skill.
Elvis and Me.
7/1/2001 - 7/1/2001.
Priscilla Presley.
The candid story of her relationship to Elvis Presley.
She was 14 years old when they started their love affair.
Her parents let her move away from her family in Germany
to live with him in Memphis. She attended a Catholic girls'
school during the day and partied with the King at night.
She had sexual relations with him, but was technically a
virgin when they married, years later. A strange
story about a man who makes Michael Jackson seem normal.
Priscilla, on the other hand, comes across as strong
and sane, as a woman who grew into her own person and
out from under the domination of a freak.
Faith and Practice.
6/?/2001 - .
Philadelphia Yearly Meeting.
The Quaker manual. An astonishing book.
The Velvet Bubble.
6/3/2001 - 6/6/2001.
Alice Winter.
My friend Reva Griffith loaned this to me. We're both
friends with the author. I've been intending to read it for
twenty years, but it's been long out of print. The story
is creepy, about a girl for whom the phrase "Electra complex"
is an understatement. Well-done, for a first novel. The
sole flaw is that the same note is hit over and over again,
without enough variation.
Books That Changed the World.
May 2001 - 7/7/2001.
Robert B. Downs.
(The paragraph below was written before I'd read much of
the book. Some of it was misinformed - e.g., it turns out
that Malthus's essay inspired both Darwin's and Wallace's
theories of evolution.)
I now have a craving to read Aristotle, Thucydides, and
Xenophon! The selection is interesting, but with this kind
of thing there's always a lot of room for debate. I would
have omitted some of the choices, such as Admiral Mahan's
The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, and certainly
would have left out Sir Halford J. Mackinder's tiny essay
"The Geographical Pivot of History" - who the hell was he,
and why was this important? I seriously doubt that, as
claimed, he influenced Hitler; it's always seemed to me
that the Austrian megalomaniac cultivated ignorance, not
scholarship. The inclusion of Silent Spring in the
book is interesting - the sort of choice that's surprising
only for a moment, and immediately makes good sense. But
Malthus should probably have been omitted (he's like the
weather: everyone talks about him, but no one does anything).
Pavlov and Einstein should probably have been included.
And I cannot for the life of me understand why Lenin was
omitted, unless it's assumed that only his actions mattered,
and his writing was incidental. The American selections
are apt and interesting: Thomas Paine, Harriet Beecher Stowe,
and Henry Thoreau. But Downs has omitted the Constitution!
I could go on quibbling, but the selection is interesting,
and there's a great deal to be learned here, clumsy though
much of the writing is.
Life Stories.
6/6/2001 - .
David Remnick.
Profiles from the New Yorker. As you'd expect, the writing
is impeccable, and the subjects interesting.
Coffee and Power.
May 2001 - .
Jeffery M. Paige.
So far I've only dipped into this. I started to write a
book on coffee a few years ago, and abandoned the project,
but I've stayed interested in its history. It's a very
political subject, and Paige's treatment of it is political.
A Few Small Candles.
~6/7/2001 - ~6/8/2001.
Larry Gara and Lenna Mae Gara.
I only read a few chapters of this. I borrowed it mainly
to re-read the story of my friend John Griffith, who was
imprisoned in WWII for his refusal to register for the draft.
(There were only 267 non-registrants in the entire nation;
of course, there were far more C.O.'s.) He spent the war in
prison, and some of that time in solitary confinement. He
still gets together occasionally with what he calls his
"graduating class". I greatly admire John. What he did took
tremendous courage and integrity. John is also modest and
unpretentious.
Best American Essays, 2000.
(I don't remember the dates on which I started and finished).
Alan Lightman.
I read this collection every year. It is invariably
superb. I wish they would issue it twice a year. It is
unalloyed pleasure.
J. R. R. Tolkien.
late April 2001 - early May 2001.
Tom Shippey.
Shippey, who followed in Tolkien's footsteps (he held
two of the same University chairs), argues that Tolkien
is the most important fiction writer of the twentieth
century. He failed to persuade me, but the book is
engrossing and insightful, except when he falls into
pedagogical discussions of philology. (I, for one, am
glad that philology, with its fondness for speculation
and unsupported assertion, has lapsed into disuse.) If
you're a Tolkien fan, this book is worth reading.
America's Favorite Poems.
April 2001 - .
Robert Pinsky and Maggie Dietz.
Browsing around in this one.
Best American Science and Nature Writing.
April 2001 - May 2001.
David Qammen.
Superb science writing. I skipped the piece by Oliver Sacks
(he's usually very good; he fails on this one, for some reason).
Everything else was wonderful.
Seduced.
May 2001 - May 2001.
Marcus Van Heller.
Two pornographic novels, reissued by Carroll and Graf.
Van Heller is a master of the pornographic genre; he does it
with greater style than anyone I've seen, with the exception
of the author of Blue Tango. Of the two books collected
here, Roman Orgy, a retelling of the story of the slave
revolt led by Spartacus, is the better. The sex is not the
main part of the story, but there is plenty. Unfortunately,
it mostly consists of rape; I dislike cruelty in porn, but
as someone I know remarked "it goes with the territory" -
why is cruelty such a consistent theme in most sex books?
As for The Devil's Advocate, it's interesting and
sexy and imaginative, but very dated. Some of the book
is laughably antiquated in its sensibility. This is the
story of the corruption of a virgin, and it's over the
top. Van Heller goes off the deep end, repeatedly.
The Razor's Edge.
late April 2001 - early May 2001.
W. Somerset Maugham
I read this many years ago, and re-read it because something
prompted me to - the notion that I could learn some things from
it that I could apply to the book I'm writing now. I didn't. In
fact, this novel is embarrassingly bad in many ways. You'd think
that a writer as experienced as Maugham was, would not let his
technique show through in such obvious ways.
The Day Book of Saints
?/?/2001 - .
Terry Matz.
I bought this strictly because Terry is a friend of mine.
It's an unusually beautiful book, full of frescoes and icons
reproduced in gorgeous color. The publisher solicited Terry
to write the text, and she was absent from Meeting for months
while she was working on it. She did a good job, too. Buy it.
Never Change.
6/7/2001 - 6/8/2001.
Elizabeth Berg.
It's embarrassing to admit that I read this book - it's not
my sort of novel. I think it was chosen for Oprah's book club.
Berg has a very standard narrative technique; there's nothing
formally interesting going on. And the book is saturated with
a woman's sensibility. The story line isn't credible. And yet,
Berg makes it work anyway. The book is full of feeling, and
it's character-driven.
Mim and the Klan.
4/15/2001 - 4/?/2001.
Cynthia Stanely Russell.
A young-adult novel about the Klan in 1920s Indiana.
Seeds of Silence, Oread Friends Meeting 1950 - 2000.
4/15/2001 - 4/?/2001.
Jean Grant
A history of the unprogrammed Quaker Meeting in Lawrence.
It's an offshoot of the Meeting I attend (Penn Valley).
Civilizations.
4/17/2001 - .
Felipe Fernandez-Armesto
I didn't manage to get through his Millenium, but
this looks more interesting. He has an ability to make
unexpected sorts of connections, and this always appeals
to me.
Macho Sluts.
4/18/2001 - 11/19/2001.
Pat Califia.
Well-written S-M porn from the notorious California
leatherdyke. I'm still trying to understand S-M. Frankly,
I think people like this are bent, however well they
happen to write, and however cleverly they rationalize
their perversity and cruelty.
As of May, I had abandoned this book because of a
description of fisting so graphic that I just couldn't
go on. (I recall reading a review by John Updike of a
book with a graphic description of fisting, which he
quoted, with the remark, "I can scarcely bear to read
it". The description here is considerably worse than
the quote in Updike's review. I'm with you, John -
there are certain things I just don't want to know.)...
Returned to the book in the fall, and for some reason
it didn't bother me any longer, and I finished it.
Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them
and Quidditch Through the Ages.
?/?/2001 - ?/?/2001.
J. K. Rowling
I managed to get through the Beasts, but not the
Quidditch. Too damn cute.
A Traveller's History of Scotland.
?/?/2001 - 4/?/2001.
Andrew Fisher.
Hastily written and full of typical British solecisms:
comma splices, run-on sentences, and so on. If you remember
those Russian novels where each character had six different
names, so you were never sure who was being spoken to ("But
wasn't 'Misha' actually 'Mikhail'? I'm confused."), you'll
have a good idea of the inaccessability of much of this book.
Fisher makes no attempt to tie things together for the reader,
and when you use the index you find that half the references
to a character or an event aren't listed.
Various Quaker pamphlets.
4/1/2001.
Various authors and committees
An Introduction to Quakers, by D. Elton Trueblood.
Principles of the Quaker Business Meeting, by George Selleck.
Public Witness (by a committee).
The Value System of Friends, by Martin Cobin.
Towards a Quaker View of Sex (by a committee).
Clearness, by Peter Woodrow.
Begin to Exit Here.
3/?/2001 - 3/?/2001 (two days in late March).
John Welter.
Kurt Clausen has problems at work, no matter what job he holds.
For a while, he answers phones and takes orders for a sex-toy
company; he's not even very good at that. Mostly he works as a
journalist, and his problems there spill over into his love life.
The book is very funny, and much of the dialogue is side-splitting,
but this novel starts much stronger than it finishes.
Jackie Brown.
3/19/2001 - 3/20/2001.
Elmore Leonard.
I'd already read this, some years ago, but had forgotten almost
all of it, so reading it again was the usual undiluted pleasure of
reading a new Elmore Leonard. But you'd think I'd know better by
now than to start a book by him on a weeknight. I always end by
staying up much later than I should.
Waiting.
2/2?/2001 - 3/4/2001.
Ha Jin.
I'm of two minds about this book. On the one hand, I like the
characters and the story. On the other, I was endlessly annoyed
at the awkward English usage. Every page is cluttered with weird
turns of phrase I've never seen anywhere else, and never even
imagined were possible. The man's writing often strays as far
from colloquial, idiomatic English as it's possible to get. It
reads like a bad translation from the Chinese. (I suspect that
he still thinks in Chinese, and translates literally before he
puts the words on the page.) Some of his locutions are downright
bizarre, jarring the reader out of the narrative. There are also
non sequiturs and other disruptions to what John Gardner called
"the vivid and continuous dream" that is a good novel. And what
does it mean to smile "damply" at someone?
How such a clumsy novel won the National Book Award is beyond
me. But the author does know how to keep us following the thread
of the narrative. The story line has absolute credibility, and
this, I think, is what redeems the book.
Could Do Better.
2/27/2001 - 3/1/2001.
.
Tips for the parents of underachieving children.
Jackal.
2/21/2001 - 2/24/2001.
John Fallain.
A biography of the famous terrorist Carlos the Jackal.
Something is wrong with our species, that we can produce such brutes.
He seems to have been motivated entirely by ego, even to the point
of murder. He cared nothing. Unfortunately, the book is as clumsily
written as it is thoroughly researched.
Seven Japanese Tales.
? - 2/15/2001.
Junichiro Tanizake.
For a long time, on the occasions when there was no one to eat lunch
with, I would read this little book. Usually I'd manage to get a
page or two read before someone sat down with me and started to talk.
I finally finished the book. The stories show Tanizaki's mastery as a fiction
writer, and the last story in particular, about a blind masseur in
medieval Japan, confirms that Tanizaki is one of the best writers of
this century.
A Quaker Book of Wisdom.
1/28/2001 - 2/19/2001.
Robert Lawrence Smith.
Chapters on silence, worship, truth, simplicity, conscience, nonviolence,
service, business, education, and family. By a ninth-generation Quaker and
former head of the Sidwell Friends School in Washington, D.C.
The Woman Lit by Fireflies.
1/23/2001 - 4/14/2001.
Jim Harrison.
Three novellas. The novella is Harrison's best length. His
novels feel so padded, so muscle-bound, that I can't read them.
But the novellas are lean, and they move right along, like a
champion middle-distance runner. He springs surprises, he invents
something new, on nearly every page. He enjoys the writing of
them, so the reader enjoys the reading. I just wish he'd polish
his sentences a bit.
Cassada.
1/18/2001 - 1/20/2001.
James Salter.
A rewrite of his second novel, The Arm of Flesh. Salter
is the master of economical writing: he can say more in fewer
words than any writer I've ever read. I often have to re-read,
to catch the subtleties of what he's putting on the page. He
remains my favorite stylist as well: a deceptive simplicity,
classical, elegant, patrician.
Essential Pre-Raphaelites.
1/?/2001 - 1/?/2001.
Lucinda Hawksley.
I bought this to look at the models the Pre-Raphaelite
Brotherhood used in their paintings, and especially to look
for pictures of Elizabeth Siddal. Though I haven't read the
entire book, I've looked at the paintings and have come to
a greater appreciation of the PRB's achievements. There's a
glorious texture and richness to what they did. They're too
precious at times, but they celebrated the actuality of
things, the sensuality of things, and though they were
guilty of idealization, it's no small thing to make paintings
so rich you want to reach into them and feel the textures
of the things portrayed.
The Art of the Personal Essay.
12/?/2000 - .
Phillip Lopate.
Someone sent me an e-mail recommending this book
and now I don't remember who it was, since my e-mail
crashed on Halloween, and I can't thank her. This is a
large and eclectic collection, and many of the essays
are minor masterpieces. Listen to the names of some of
the writers collected here: Seneca, Montaigne (of course),
Dr. Johnson, William Hazlitt, Robert Louis Stevenson,
Virginia Woolf, George Orwell, Ivan Turgenev, Junichiro
Tanizaki (his essay In Praise of Shadows - see
the entry below, for 3/23/99), Walter Benjamin,
E. M. Cioran, Carlos Fuentes, Wole Soyinka, Thoreau,
Mencken, Thurber, E. B. White, Mary McCarthy, James
Baldwin, Gore Vidal, Joan Didion, and Annie Dillard.
This is a rich, rich book, with much that merits re-reading.
Blue Tango.
12/29/2000 - 12/30/2000.
Anonymous.
This novel, though ostensibly Edwardian, is probably by
a contemporary writer. The style and sensibility are too modern to
have been written before the Great War. In fact, the writing is very
reminiscent of James Salter's - so much so that I'm half-convinced
that he wrote the book. Whoever wrote it was a pro, at least in the
dialogue, and the sexual descriptions. The interior monologue is
very Edwardian in tone - much talk of "roots" and "nests" and
"rose-holes" and "poking". But some of the sensibility is modern;
there are glimpses of a late-twentieth-century worldview. The plot
is full of wonderful twists, and the multiple points of view
(always a tough trick) are convincing. Regardless of who wrote the
book, though, this is the best pornographic novel I've ever read.
The focus isn't strictly on the mechanics of who did whom and how
and where, but also on the characters. The way the characters
manipulate each other, as if they are all each other's marionettes,
is consistently surprising and fresh. It isn't easy to write
pornography that works as literature. This writer has managed
to do it.
From Paris to the Moon.
12/25/2000 - 01/01/01.
Adam Gopnik.
By the New Yorker correspondent. His ruminations on five
years living in Paris with his wife and son. Some people have
all the luck. See also the journal entry.
The Professor and the Madman.
12/23/2000 - 12/25/2000.
Simon Winchester.
A wonderful book, one of those nonfiction reads that keeps
you involved every minute you can spare for it. Even if it's
not quite up to the standards of, say, Dava Sobel or John
McPhee or Richard Rhodes or David McCullough, it's close. This
is the story of Dr. William Minor, an American madman and murderer,
who helped the scholar James Murray in the production of his lifework,
the Oxford English Dictionary.
The Laughing Sutra.
11/24/2000 - 11/25/2000.
Mark Salzman.
I'd forgotten what a perfect work of fiction this is.
Salzman is a real writer. He can imagine himself into
other people's minds, and then put it on the page. This
book is funny, touching, inventive, and surprising and
convincing on every page.
Godel, A Life of Logic.
11/18/2000 - 11/20/2000.
John L. Casti and Werner DePauli.
I succumbed again, just as with Erdos, and bought a
second book (see below). Strangely, they used Nagel and
Newman's simplification to describe the proof itself,
but dropped it in the middle. The book wanders. The
authors didn't manage to tie anything together. Their
rambles through Artificial Intelligence and the philosophy
of science are either self-indulgent digressions, or their
way of padding the book to a reasonable length.
Godel's Proof.
11/?/2000 - 11/19/2000.
Ernest Nagel and James R. Newman.
100 pages of explanation of the famous proof of the
incompleteness of arithmetic and other mathematical
systems.
I was looking at another book on Godel today,
at Rainy Day Books. I'd wandered in there because Susan
wanted me to sell them some of our used books, and I
naturally started browsing. Books call to me like the
Sirens called to Odysseus' crew. I can't help responding.
So there was this book about Godel and I picked it up
and almost bought it. There was a paragraph that said
that Time magazine had picked Godel as the most
influential mathematician of the century. Frankly, I
find this unbelievable. Except for the incompleteness
theorem, I'm unaware of anything he did of major import.
My choice would have been Paul Erdos. He founded, or
was a seminal influence on, several fields of mathematics,
and inspired and collaborated with more people than any
other mathematician in history. Also, many of his results
gave rise to other important ideas and results, while
the incompleteness theorem has had no important consequences
as far as I can tell, except that it dashed cold water
on some of the more ambitious formal programs of logic
and arithmetic.
As for the theorem itself, well, I have to admit
it was over my head. By the end of the book, I was done in,
so I skipped the Appendix. I remember exactly where they
lost me - page 78. But hey, the book's only 102 pages.
I'll try re-reading the last 24 and see whether it makes
more sense this time. Fat chance.
On Boxing.
11/13/2000 - 11/14/2000.
Joyce Carol Oates.
You'd never expect a frail creature like Joyce Carol Oates,
with her great deer eyes and pale skin and otherworldly look,
to be an expert on boxing. She is, and she writes supremely
well on the subject. I'd read this before. I'll probably
read it again.
A Natural History of Marine Mammals.
11/11/2000 - 12/6/2000.
Victor B. Scheffer.
I'd say this is a fascinating book, but a few excerpts
will say more than I can. My comments are in brackets.
No one has yet seen a newborn Ross seal; no one
knows the color of its coat. The Tasman beaked whale and
the pygmy right whale are known only from stranded specimens;
nothing is known of their lives. [The book was written
a quarter century ago; we may know more by now.]
A sea otter must spend nearly half its waking hours
in cleaning and fluffing its fur.
[T]he largest whales have a problem keeping cool
[they live in cold water!]... Though no one has yet been
able to measure the metabolic rate of a large, healthy whale,
it is thought to be only one-half that of a sloth.
Sea otters...swim faster belly-upward.
A marine mammal found dead on the bottom of its
pool may have suffocated but will not have drowned;
its lungs will not be full of water.
[W]hen a seal or cetacean dives deeply, the lung
collapses and its contained gases move into nonabsorptive
passages within the head and neck.
A fast-moving porpoise will blow and take a new
breath within less than a second's time.
The stomach is divided into four chambers. The first
is a muscular "gizzard"... The stomach of a California sea
lion contained 60 pounds of stones.
The sea otter is the only nonprimate mammal know
regularly to use a tool.
The blind river porpoise of India, surprisingly,
feeds by swimming on its side, rather than on its belly.
[L]ittle is known [about the Steller sea cow].
It was seen alive by one naturalist, Georg Wilhelm Steller...
He described it from field notes made... in 1741-1742.
Steller died on the return trip to Russia, and by 1768
the last sea cow on earth had been killed by hunters.
While marine mammals were gaining powers of hearing,
they were losing powers of smell and taste. [Could this be
because they can't eat carrion, which would sink to the sea
floor? So the marine mammals would not need to detect spoiled
food.]
Marine mammals in general see much better under water
than in air.
Cetaceans may vocalize at rates as low as 20 beats per
second...or as high as 256,000 beats... [P]orpoises of unrelated
species seem to understand a few of one another's words.
A young whale [has] no lips.
Marine mammals tend to reach puberty more slowly than do
land mammals of similar size.
In 24 hours, the [porpoise] closed both eyes for less than
5 minutes and closed each eye separately for 3 or 4 hours. It seemed
to be sleeping - but was it?
[A captured killer whale] fasted for fifty-four days before
he accepted food. Then he ate 100 to 200 pounds of fish daily.
96 Tears.
11/22/2000 - 11/23/2000.
Doug J. Swanson.
More trash. A very standard private-eye story.
Choice of Evil.
10/22/2000 - 10/23/2000.
Vachss.
Every once in a while I have to read some trash, and
this certainly qualifies. The plot, the characters, the
narrative ground, the dialogue, the events, the resolution -
I could go on, but why bother? None of them are credible.
It makes me wonder whether Vachss revises, or just publishes
his first drafts as they stand.
The Mathematical Universe.
9/30/2000 - 10/2/2000.
William Dunham.
A collection of mathematical proofs, biographies, history,
and jokes. True nerd that I am, I enjoyed even the jokes. Math
humor can scarcely be dignified with the word "humor", though;
it's a very specialized taste.
(Here's a collection of bad math jokes.
Unfortunately, the only good collection I ever found has disappeared from the Web.)
The Novice's Tale.
?/?/2000 - .
Margaret Frazer.
A medieval murder mystery. Not as good as the Cadfael series.
Collected Poems.
8/12/2000 - .
Philip Larkin.
Amazing poetry. Amazing.
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.
8/6/2000 - 8/9/2000.
J. K. Rowling.
Frankly, I can't believe I actually read this damn thing,
since it didn't interest me. I kept wondering as I read, why
I was reading it. But I have to admit that the woman has a
remarkable way of keeping the reader turning the pages,
and ain't that what's it's all about, in the end? Luckily,
the book revealed most of what had happened in the three
volumes that preceded it, so I'm spared the time required
to read them. And I certainly don't intend to waste
my time on the next three.
I'm a Stranger Here Myself.
8/2/2000 - 8/13/2000.
Bill Bryson.
More Matter.
?/?/2000 - .
John Updike.
Essays and criticism.
The Soloist.
7/29/2000 - 7/30/2000.
Mark Salzman.
Not up to his usual standards.
Thomas Wolfe, a Biography.
7/1/2000 - .
Elizabeth Nowell.
A biography of the writer by his agent.
She.
7/3/2000 - 7/3/2000.
H. Rider Haggard.
One of the great yarns of the last century. Like
Dracula, one of those books with a Victorian
sensibility that continues to please. In more than
a hundred years since the date it first rolled off
the press, it's never gone out of print. Read it.
It's great brain candy.
Takedown.
6/28/2000 - 6/29/2000.
Tsutomu Shimomura.
I read this book in one sitting, staying up until
the middle of the night. Haven't done that in a long
time. This is the story of the capture of Kevin Mitnick,
the hacker, by the guy who caught him.
Blue Angel.
6/?/2000 - 6/26/2000.
Francine Prose.
Only read this because a friend loaned it to me.
Not my kind of book - a novel about a novelist, and
I never enjoy these, with the sole exception of Garp.
Neither is Prose's writing style what I seek out. But
I have to admire her skill. She's a pro.
The Odyssey.
5/26/2000 - .
Homer. Translated by Stanley Lombardo.
The new translation by my Zen master. The style is
a bit spare for my taste. Also, I read a different
translation just a couple of years ago; I doubt I'll
get through this one.
The Mind of Clover.
5/26/2000 - 12/21/2000.
Robert Aitken.
Essays in Zen Buddhist ethics. I finally read the last chapter.
Like much Zen, it seems a mixture of the profound, the inane,
and much that is far beyond my ken.
Time to be in Earnest.
4/30/2000 - ?/?/2000.
P. D. James.
Oracle 7.3.
4/27/2000 - .
Various authors.
Brushing up my SQL, which has gotten rusty.
Ever Since Darwin.
4/1?/2000 - .
Stephen Jay Gould.
Another book I forgot to record here. I love this guy.
I've still never been able to find out whether he married
my first girlfriend in college, though. It's quite possible.
I'd really like to know one way or the other for certain.
The Way of the World.
4/2?/2000 - .
.
I bought this because I happened to flip it open in
the bookstore and see mention of the relation between
the benign climate of the last 10,000 years and its
relationship to the development of agriculture. See the
entry in the old journal for 5/28/98.
The Raven in the Foregate.
? - ?.
Ellis Peters.
An Excellent Mystery.
4/25/2000 - 4/27/2000.
Ellis Peters.
I'm losing my cunning: this one had me fooled
right up to the end.
Money Doesn't Grow on Trees.
4/?/2000 - .
Neale S. Godfrey.
A practical guide to teaching children money management.
Full of useful tips.
Death of a Prankster.
M. C. Beaton.
4/24/2000 - 4/25/2000.
One of a series, but not a series worth getting
involved in.
Fundamentals of Mainstream Buddhism.
Eric Cheetham.
?/?/1999 - .
This has been sitting around for a long time, and I'm
finally reading it. It's very technical - much discussion
of dhatus, dharmas, skandhas, and so on. Not recommended
for non-Buddhists.
Worst Fears Realized.
Stuart Woods.
4/17/2000 - 4/17/2000.
A truly amazing piece of literary trash. It was obviously
written by a machine, working from a formula, not by a human
being. There is not a spark of intelligence or originality
to be found on any page.
Dead Man's Ransom.
Ellis Peters.
4/14/2000 - 4/16/2000.
The Devil's Novice.
Ellis Peters.
4/5/2000 - 4/7/2000.
Sick Puppy.
Carl Hiassen.
3/21/2000 - 3/22/2000.
The Sparrow in the Sanctuary.
Ellis Peters.
3/21/2000 - 3/24/2000.
A Tuscan Childhood.
Kinta Beevor.
3/19/2000 - 4/1/2000.
This is a truly fortunate human being, to have had
such an enchanting childhood.
Hunting Badger.
Tony Hillerman.
3/13/2000 - 3/13/2000.
I'm tired of Hillerman. He's just repeating himself.
He grows old, he grows old, he should do something bold.
Current research.
Various writers.
March 2000 - ?.
Reading various things for background information
for the novel I'm working on.
Beowulf.
translated by Seamus Heaney.
3/7/2000 - 3/8/2000.
An utterly magnificent translation, deserving of the
critical praise it has been receiving. Very readable, too.
Strangely, it reminds me of the Iliad: similar rhetorical
tropes; similar obsessions with war, plunder, gore and the
warrior's reputation; similar roundabout ways of describing
such things as ships setting sail. A similar sensibility, in
short. Better structured than Homer, though, who does tend
to ramble. Most ancient lyric poems, however beautifully
written, are unsophisticated when considered purely as
narratives. Beowulf is the exception. Its directness works
for it in this respect - no sophisticated strategy is
necessary, and the straightforwardness of the narration
keeps the story together. Beowulf himself is something of
a stick figure, a man meant to represent all the ancient
Norse virtues, but it doesn't matter. One doesn't read
these ancient tales for psychological subtlety. That's a
modern invention.
Flying Colours.
C. S. Forrester.
3/5/2000 - 3/6/2000.
The first time I've read one of the Hornblower series.
It may be simply a matter of having read the Aubrey/Maturin
novels first, but I far prefer them to this, which seems
a weak literary effort in comparison.
Opera.
Herbert Kupferberg.
2/20/2000 - 3/15/2000.
The Virgin in the Ice.
Ellis Peters.
2/19/2000 - 2/20/2000.
Be Cool.
Elmore Leonard.
Delacorte Press.
2/14/99 - 2/14/99.
Leonard has written yet another minor masterpiece of the crime genre.
The Leper of St. Giles.
Ellis Peters.
2/9/2000 - 2/10/2000.
Saint Peter's Fair.
Ellis Peters.
2/3/2000 - 2/4/2000.
I'm already reading too damn many books at once, and here I've gone
and added one more. I finished it, natch, faster than the nonfiction
books I'm readying (uh, make that "reading"; a little Freudian slip there).
Modern Philosophy.
Roger Scruton.
1/26/2000 - .
Picked this up again, after a month of not looking at it. Heavy going,
but well-written and thorough.
Journey to the End of the Night.
Celine.
1/25/2000 - 2/12/2000.
Celine and his hectic energy, his pell-mell haste, hilarious cynicism
and constant generalizing, much of it incoherent. It's as fresh now as the
day he wrote it. But beneath the humor is a despair that comes from his
suffering, a suffering which comes from not being reconciled to life.
Reading Rilke.
William Gass.
1/23/2000 - 2/7/2000.
An unusual combination of criticism, biography, and the equivalent
of a translator's working journal... I read everything, including the
translations of the Elegies in the last chapter. This is the
first time I've managed to read all of them. Though I prefer Poulin's
translation, it's so hair-raising that I've never managed to get all
the way through it. Gass's was easier, which is not to say that it's
better or worse.
One Corpse Too Many. and Monk's Hood.
Ellis Peters.
1/20/2000 - 1/22/2000 and 1/22/2000 - 1/23/2000.
I read these mysteries because I like the re-creation of the medieval
period, and because I like Brother Cadfael. I like his love of the world
and the people in it, and I like his hardworking nature, and his knowledge
of medicines and gardening. I like his decency and doggedness (qualities
found in the protoganists of many another English mystery series). And I
like his willingness to bend the rules in pursuit of justice and truth.
Longitude.
Dava Sobel.
12/29/99 - 12/30/99.
I stayed up much later than I should have, reading this book. It is the
story of John Harrison and his struggle first to build a chronometer that
kept time well enough to be used for the calculation of longitude, and then
to claim the prize he deserved for his success. The book is written with a
precision and skill worthy of Harrison himself, has been translated into 21
languages, and has received universal praise from the critics.
Note: the reference to "precision and skill worthy of Harrison
himself" equate Sobel's writing technique with Harrison's horological genius.
As a writer, Harrison was remarkably incoherent.
A Morbid Taste for Bones.
Ellis Peters.
12/27/99 - 12/29/99.
Another wonderful read in the Shrewsbury series. Brother Cadfael is as
appealing on my second meeting with him as on the first, with his tough, pragmatic
compassion. It helps that the book is beautifully crafted, the pages flow by like
a happy spring stream, and the plot, which grows naturally out of the characters
and places, is wrapped up with a neat, ironic twist. The author gives us
a modern wink, while treating these medieval people and their beliefs with
respect and courtesy, and this dual sensibility never grates or jars the
reader.
Life.
Richard Fortey.
12/21/99 - .
Subtitled "A Natural History of the First Four Billion Years of Life
on Earth", but that's only part of it. The kind of good, personal science
writing that's all too rare.
Blue at the Mizzen.
Patick O'Brian.
12/22/99 - 12/25/99.
Number 20 or 21 in the Aubrey/Maturin novels. Not bad, but either I'm losing
interest (perhaps I've hit the literary equivalent of the marathon runner's
"wall", at mile 21), or O'Brian's skills are weakening. Maybe it's time to
end the series. Or, in my case, simply to stop reading them. But I'm glad
for Jack, that he finally became an admiral of the blue, and not the yellow.
Personal Memoirs.
Ulysses S. Grant.
12/8/99 - 12/15/99.
The celebrated memoirs of U.S. Grant. I spent most of the weekend reading
them. But stay away if you don't enjoy military history, because that's
almost all this book is. But in addition to the portrait of a war, a portrait
of the writer emerges as well, and by the end I felt that I had a fair
idea of who Grant was, candid, plain, simple, committed, economical,
generous, determined, practical, hardworking, modest. He was a disaster
as President, of course, for many of these reasons; he simply could not
believe that some of the people he dealt with were out-and-out crooks,
and even when driven to poverty by their swindles, held no bitterness
toward them. There seems to have been no bitterness in the man at all.
As for the descriptions of military maneuvers, battles, and preparations,
which occupy most of the book and are not always easy to follow, he writes
so well that these are engrossing.
The Path Between the Seas.
David McCullough.
11/25/99 - 12/3/99.
The construction of the Panama Canal. A good story by a superb writer.
The only criticism I have so far is that there should be more maps. Books
dealing with geography should always have plenty of maps. How else can
we picture things in their proper place? Also, a short chronology and a
cast of the main characters would have helped. Unless you read this book
straight through, it's hard to keep track of the events, and the hundreds
of people who played important parts. But there's nothing wrong with the
actual writing. It's not easy making a book about an engineering project
a compelling read, but McCullough has done it.
Strega.
Andrew Vachss.
11/24/99 - 11/25/99.
Noir, noir, noir. Burke makes Mike Hammer look like a wuss. But the
author's obsession with child abuse, and his occasional wacko theories
about such things as the genesis of AIDS, spoil the book. It was also
crystal-clear before I was halfway through the book what Strega's secret
was, and with whom. Still, it was worth reading one book by this guy.
He makes other mystery writers look like Pollyannas.
Popol Vuh.
Translated by Dennis Tedlock.
10/8/99 - .
As a creation myth, this is my favorite so far. The making of the world,
according to the Quiche Maya. A group of gods makes the earth, the animals,
man. So far, nothing seems to turn out quite right. They tell the animals
to sing their praises, but the animals can only cackle and squeal, they
cannot speak. They make a man, but their first attempt goes awry and he
cracks and melts, so they say, "It seems to be dwindling away, so let it
just dwindle. It can't walk and it can't multiply, so let it be merely
a thought". I like this. If Christianity had this attitude, I might have
stuck with it. (I remember seeing Saint Peter's, in Rome, and laughing
at the megelomania, the self-importance of it. It's things like this that
alienated me. Christianity is alien to me now, as dead to me as if I'd
never belonged to it.)
Best American Essays, 1999.
Edited by Edward Hoagland.
10/1/99 - ?.
Finished this, but forgot to note the date (mid-October?).
The Charterhouse of Parma.
Stendhal.
10/1/99 - 11/20/99.
This book knocked me out. It's a masterpiece, among the best novels
I've ever read. The book has everything: derring-do, romance, a great
plot, narrative drive, appealing characters, and the indefinable
something that makes it enduring literature.
Cannae 216 BC.
Mark Healy.
9/15/99 - 9/23/99.
An account of the famous battle and the events leading up to it. Hannibal's
slaughter of the Romans set a record for the number of soldiers killed in a
single battle that was not broken for more than two thousand years (i.e.,
until World War I). Hannibal the man has fascinated me since I read a biography
of him a few years ago. With troops who didn't understand each other's
languages, on the territory of his enemies, he won battle after battle. He
was both a great general and a great man, and I can't help it, I wish he
had ultimately defeated the Romans. He was noble, and they were brutes,
and he deserved to win.
The Pilgrim of Hate.
Ellis Peters.
9/9/99 - 9/11/99.
Charming and well-crafted. I would say that its portrayal of its medieval setting
is authentic, but how would I know? Say "convincing", rather. And Brother Cadfael is
one of the most appealing characters I've encountered in years. It's just unfortunate
that the author is dead, and I'll have to make do with the score or so of books in
the series. This is my first, and I'm looking forward to the rest.
Interbeing.
Thich Nhat Hanh.
8/27/99 - 11/4/99.
14 mindfulness trainings, and the charter of his order, by the famous Vietnamese
Zen monk. I read the first two parts, but not the ceremonies or the Charter.
The Blue Cliff Record.
8/28/99 - .
After the Mumonkan, the most famous koan collection.
The Catcher in the Rye.
J. D. Salinger.
8/27/99 - 9/4/99.
I had the same reaction this time as when I first read this book in high school:
it's overrated. It's boring, and full of stuffy, affected, unconvincing upper-crust
speech mannerisms. Worst of all, Holden Caulfield is a thoroughly unappealing
character, with his universal disdain for everyone and everything, sometimes
verging on downright hatred. Small wonder he gets beaten up twice in as many days.
Old Souls.
Tom Shroder.
8/27/99 - 8/28/99.
An investigation into the evidence for reincarnation. The author travels with
a researcher in the field. Much of the book reads like a travelogue, and much of
the rest is anecdotal, which wouldn't be a criticism except that the treatment
lacks depth. Shroder even gets briefly into the standard New Age riff on quantum
physics, although the rest of the book scrupulously avoids this kind of nonsense.
He's a good writer, and the book is readable, but it's a tough topic and he's
not quite up to it. Maybe John McPhee could have managed it, but his interests are
a lot more concrete than this. It's a slippery subject, and this book doesn't do
much to resolve the issues. The jury is still out.
Afterzen.
Janwillem van de Wetering.
8/20/99 - 8/23/99.
Having already read The Empty Mirror and A Glimpse of Nothingness
and liked them enough to re-read them, as well as reading some of the adventures
of Grijpstra and De Gier (spelling? it's been a while...) I'm now obliged to read
the latest of his Zen efforts, too... This book suffers from all the flaws of the
first two, only more so. Don't bother buying it; if you insist on getting it, you
can have my copy. The man is too damn theoretical, and too repetitive. His Zen
is certainly not mine. Furthermore, the book reads like fiction, which is what
pissed me off about the second book. He makes things up instead of just reporting
them, and only confesses to it in the last chapter, although it's obvious long
before then that it's fictionalized.
Sunset Limited.
James Lee Burke.
8/15/99 - 8/17/99.
I seem to be reading a lot of brain candy lately, although as brain
candy goes, this is very high quality stuff indeed. I've been hearing about
Burke for years, and he deserves his reputation. The book develops slowly
because it's literary - the focus is on character, narrative, and it's a
bit atmospheric - and the plot becomes a bit diffuse. Loose ends aren't
properly tied up, or at least, the plot's a bit creaky and contrived. But
it doesn't matter. The man can write, and that's all I care about.
Last Stand at Saber River.
Elmore Leonard.
8/8/99 - 8/9/99.
The first Western by Leonard I've read. He's one of the few writers
to master more than one genre, apparently. I don't care for Westerns, but
this one was readable, at least.
Survival of the Fittest.
Jonathan Kellerman.
8/1/99 - 8/2/99.
First time I've read this guy. I'll have to avoid him in the future,
because I just couldn't stop reading. Helluva page turner. Psychological
thriller and murder mystery.
The Nature and Logic of Capitalism.
Robert Heilbroner.
7/29/99 - 10/6/99.
Not one of his best efforts. Fussy writing, and too general. Also too
Freudian and perhaps too Marxian (and I mean Marxian, not Marxist).
But worth reading anyway for the insights into capitalism, this sadly
inhuman economic system we live under.
Heilbroner's insights into capitalism, government, and even science
and technology are startling and fresh. I often wished I was reading the
book with highlighter in hand, for sentences like this: "...we are all
hostages of a combination of premature technological virtuosity and
persisting sociopolitical primitivism".
Burning the Days.
James Salter.
7/23/99 - 7/24/99.
Salter has been my favorite writer for more than 15 years. He holds this
record because he writes so unbelievably well, closer to perfect than I would
have believed was humanly possible. Light Years was hypnotically
beautiful. And the man sees things, he can sum up in a single sentence what
other writers fail to get in an entire book: "Climbing is an ordeal, and like
all ordeals, it has the power to bind one closely to it". He's a Mandarin,
the possessor of a flawless style. If what you want is gorgeous writing,
he's your man. He's a writer's writer, widely admired by the best writers
working today.
Having said all this, I dislike Salter's values - his obsessions with fame,
money, beauty, and class, and his incessant judging and ranking of people.
But, yes, I'm re-reading this book anyway, for the pure pleasure of reading
such writing.
What is Life?
Erwin Schrodinger.
7/20/99 - 7/27/99.
A meditation on biology by the famous physicist, he of the wave equations.
I've intended to read this book for years, and it turned out to be quite
different from what I'd expected. After the dull, and I thought rather contrived
reasoning (but I always find the reasoning of physicists contrived, as opposed
to mathematicians, who are always much clearer, even when I don't understand
them - clearer in the sense that they have a clearer idea of what they think,
and what they want to say), after the contrived and weak reasoning of the
earlier chapters, the last chapter was worth reading. The epilogue, though,
was truly startling, even downright bizarre. Considering that it was written
by a physicist in the 1930s, it's surprising how the epilogue comes off sounding
like some kind of big-think New Age pop philosophy. The odd thing is, I've had
similar ideas myself, but they sounded fuzzy and poorly thought out when I read
them in this book.
The Thirteen Clocks.
James Thurber.
7/16/99 - 7/18/99.
Another re-read. This seems to be my year for re-reading. This one is always
worth it. It's the best fairy tale I've ever read. Some quotes:
The brambles and the thorns grew thick and thicker in a ticking thicket of
bickering crickets. Farther along and stronger bonged the gongs of a throng of frogs,
green and vivid on their lily pads. From the sky came the crying of flies, and the
pilgrims leaped over a bleating sheep creeping knee-deep in a sleepy stream, in
which swift and slippery snakes slid and slithered silkily, whispering sinful
secrets.
A dehoy who was terribly hobble
Cast only stones that were cobble
And bats that were ding
From a shot that was sling,
But never hit inks that were bobble.
Something very much like nothing anyone had ever seen before came trotting
down the stairs and crossed the room. "What is it?" the Duke asked palely. "I
don't know what it is," said Hark, "but it's the only one there ever was."
Any Rough Times are Now Behind You.
Dave Alvin.
7/16/99 - 7/16/99.
I never read a book of poetry cover to cover in a sitting, but this was
easy - fast-food poetry. One great poem (the title poem) and one great title
("Spiderman versus the Kachinas"). A lot of repetition, and a certain sameness
from one piece to the next. Less poetry than prose set ragged-right. It's
like Chinese food - an hour later and you're hungry for Rilke.
N is for Noose.
Sue Grafton.
7/11/99 - 7/13/99.
What a piece of crap. Amazingly bad writing, mercilessly padded with
irrelevancies. Ghastly.
The First Eagle.
Tony Hillerman.
7/5/99 - 7/5/99.
Leaphorn and Chee solve another murder, and Chee's on-again off-again
romance with Janet Pete continues to misfire.
Somebody's Darling.
Larry McMurtry.
5/30/99 - 5/31/99.
McMurtry catches up with Jill Peel, whom he first introduced to
the world in All My Friends Are Going To Be Strangers, if I
remember correctly. This is at least the third time I've read this.
The Best American Essays. 1998.
Edited by Cynthia Ozick.
? - 5/27/99.
Finally finished this - just in time to read the 1999 edition?
Living on the Wind.
Scott Weidensaul.
5/7/99 - 6/29/99.
Bird migration in the western hemisphere. This book took me much
longer to finish than it should have, because it continually depressed
me. On every page, some threat to birds is discussed, and I love birds.
Weidensaul thinks migratory birds are doomed, and after reading this
book, I'm afraid he may be right.
The Man Who Loved Only Numbers.
Paul Hoffman.
5/2/99 - 5/7/99.
Having already read one biography of Paul Erdos (My Brain
Is Open) this year, it's senseless to read another. But there
are certain people I'm helpless not to read about. Usually they're brilliant
eccentrics. Feynman is one. Erdos is another, in spades; he was the epitome
of the unconventional genius. This book is well-written and full
of the great funny stories of Uncle Paul. But then, so was
My Brain Is Open; it's hard to fail when the subject
matter is a natural.
Thinking in C++.
Bruce Eckel.
4/27/99 - .
Recommended by my friend Charles Sharp. A long book, and rather
too long-winded in places (chapter 0 should have been omitted, and
much of the code is so obvious that is should have been combined with
other bits of code). But "well-motivated", as they say in the math
world - everything is clear, everything is defined when a new term
is introduced, and the progression of topics is
beautifully thought-out. For someone like me, who learns by knowing
what the goal is, then by being given an example, and only then
learning the syntax and other nitty-gritty, this book works well.
You Got to Dance with the One What Brung You.
Molly Ivins.
4/23/99 - 4/25/99
A collection of editorials by my favorite editorial writer.
Long may you live and prosper, Molly, so we may continue to read your
wit, your research, your logic, and above all your moral outrage at
some of the political idiocy in this country. Molly cares about
people, not money. She lets the venal, the corrupt, the stupid
and heartless (i.e., people like Gingrich) have it right between
the eyes.
The Gateless Barrier.
Translated by Robert Aitken.
?/?/99 -
The famous book of koans, translated by the dean of American Zen.
It will take years to get through this. It will take many more years
before I've actually solved them all; certainly it will take more
than just this current lifetime.
StripTease.
Carl Hiassen.
4/16/99 - 4/16/99
Reread this. Another baroque effort from Hiassen, filled with South Florida
color and offbeat sleazos. A page turner, even when you've read it before.
C++, an Introduction for Experienced C Programmers.
Ray Jaeschke.
4/14/99 -
The reason I'm reading this is obvious, given what I do for a living.
In Praise of Shadows.
Junichiro Tanizaki.
3/23/99 - 3/23/99.
Reread this for the umpteenth time. A slender book that can easily be read
in an evening, and the best essay I've ever read.
The Buddhist Handbook.
John Snelling.
Barnes and Noble Books.
2/26/99 - 5/6/99.
Full of information that ties together and extends other things I've
read, but some of it seems inaccurate. And the index is so useless it
should have been omitted.
Patriotic Gore. Studies in the literature of the American Civil War.
Edmund Wilson.
3/10/99 - 3/23/99.
Much of the writing that Wilson reviews has nothing to do with the Civil
War at all, simply having been written by people who lived through or fought
in that war. (Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes is one of these. In fact, most of
the chapter on him has nothing to do with his writing.)
But not for nothing is Wilson thought our greatest
critic. He has something interesting to say on nearly every page, and he can
find the simple deep truths that very few writers can. Still, the book would
have been better at half the 800 pages it ran - or even less. And he should
have devoted a lot more space to Lincoln's style.
Keiretsu; Inside the Hidden Japanese Conglomerates.
Kenichi Myashita and David Russell.
McGraw - Hill.
2/21/99 - 2/27/99.
An impartial examination of the Keiretsu. Though it didn't mean to be
disturbing, I found it so. It would seem that the Japanese are much more
callous to one another than I thought. The way the giant conglomerates treat
the small companies from which they buy parts is brutal, and a national
disgrace. We're almost talking about slavery here.
How to Tell When You're Tired; a Brief Examination of Work.
Reg Theriault.
W. W. Norton.
2/26/99 - 2/27/99.
A perceptive and useful meditation on the nature of work, especially of
physical labor, and how it has permeated Theriault's life.
There are also a number of humane observations that can only be called political.
Coming from a working-class background which never produces books like this,
a class which is therefore below the literary radar, Theriault reminds me of no
one else except Eric Hoffer, with whom he has much in common.
Stuff I forgot to list and remembered later.
Naked. David Sedaris.
'Tis. By one of the McCourts. Speed-read it. Strikes me as
fictionalized.
Small Changes. Marge Piercy. If she wanted to write an
essay, she shouldn't have tried to disguise it as a novel.
Got halfway through and abandoned it.
Other recent reading (but not as recent as the above).
Twenty-two Foreigners in Funny Shorts. Peter Davies.
The rules and history of soccer.
Chasing Cezanne. Peter Mayle.
Undaunted Courage. Stephen Ambrose.
The Odyssey. Translated by Robert Fagles.
Autobiography of a Face. Lucy Grealy.
A personal story of great suffering, told without self-pity.
Lost in Place. Mark Salzman.
Salzman, like Peter Mayle or Elmore Leonard, is one of those
writers whose every book I read.
The Minds of Birds. Alexander Skutch.
The Costa Rican bird authority.
Freddy the Detective. Walter E. Brooks.
Freddy the pig solves another case.
My Brain is Open. I forget who wrote this.
Another biography of the great mathematician (and even
greater eccentric) Paul Erdos.
Slaves in the Family. Edward Ball.
This is a rewarding read by a very decent man.