Books you've read in 2009 - Page 3

My daughter has been getting me to read some of her YA books. Just finished Generation Dead by Daniel Waters and working on Kiss of Life: A Generation Dead novel by Daniel Waters. The series revolves around a town where teenagers are coming back to life (zombies) and trying to find a way to fit back into life with the living. Interesting story.

I'm finishing up this book right now: Atomic Awakening: A New Look at the History and Future of Nuclear Power    http://www.amazon.com/Atomic-Awakening-History-Future-Nuclear/dp/1605980404/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1251301312&sr=8-1 Highly recommended!!!!!!

How do they tell them apart from the regular teenagers? 

Dave-

While Empire is a Card book, it was one that was commissioned and had to follow certain guidelines, as it was written as sort of an option toward a video game.  I found the book to be "good" but far from his best work, and once I realized how it had come about, I knew it.  I've got two of my employees reading "Children of the Mind" right now; we finished Xenocide.  Some of Card's stuff is truly brilliant.

I had started Pride and Prejudice and Zombies but just could not get into it.  That may have just been my own mindset at the time and I fully intend to finish the book eventually.  Steven Erikson's 9th Malazan book, Dust of Dreams, came in a week or two ago so I'll also crack that one.  I picked up Suzanne Collins' sequel to The Hunger Games, Catching Fire, last night and that is what I am reading now.  Only two chapters in but I am enjoying it so far.

It's been a while since my last update:

The Hollow by Agatha Christie. An unusual Hercule Poirot novel in two important ways: First, Poirot is surrounded for a change by characters that are on-the-whole as smart as he is. Even the police inspector handling the case is portrayed as being competent, insightful and very good at his job. Poirot speaks to Inspector Grange as a collegue and keeps his usual condescension to a minimum. Second, the story is almost entirely story-driven rather than plot-driven. The lives of these people are complex and more fully fleshed out than Christie's usual suspects and foils. Here she is more preoccupied with how they relate to one another than how they relate to the crime. The result feels more like a typical Miss Marple mystery than a typical Poirot mystery. Unfortunately, this book continues the Poirot series tradition of too-clever endings; Christie can't resist a murderer that couldn't possibly have done it, and that makes pinpointing the perpetrator easier than it should be. That being said, the impressive characterizations still make this one of the more memorable and worthwhile Poirot tales.

The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold. When the author was a freshman at Syracuse University, she was brutally assaulted and raped in a tunnel on campus. In the aftermath, she was told she was lucky: another girl in that same tunnel had been murdered and dismembered. It is the latter, more dire fate that befalls her 14-year-old protagonist Susie Salmon (like the fish) here. What follows is Susie's unrelentingly sentimental and remarkably charitable first-person retelling of the events following her murder as she looks on from heaven.
This is not a happy story, because nothing about the death of a fourteen-year-old -- especially under such horrific circumstances -- can be. Because only her elbow was recovered by police, her family is plagued with the uncertainty of a horrific event not quite proven. Susie, in turn, is plagued with the helplessness of being unable to share what she knows only too well. She also yearns for the future Mr. Garvey stole from her as she watches her family mourn, grow, change and evolve. Some of the most poignant moments come from Susie watching the milestones of her younger sister's life, knowing that she herself will never get to experience them.
Large stretches of the story are mired in debilitating misery of best and most affirming sort. Unlike the cold, isolating suburbia of most post-war literature, Susie left behind a place and time where she was wholly and truly loved. Her father Jack is the most sympathetic character besides Susie herself, his all-consuming grief destroying him even as he keeps it mostly locked in with masculine restraint. Truly a parent in a way hardly any literary fathers are allowed to be, the moments when he grapples with how to love his living children under the weight of his daughter's memory are positively heartbreaking. It doesn't take him long to correctly deduce, partly through instinct and partly through perspectiion, that his next-door neighbor raped, murdered and dismembered his daughter his oldest daughter. His inability to prove anything is even more heartbreaking. Her sister Lindsey was the smarter, taller, more athletic and more graceful sister. Susie would have been stuck in her shadow had she lived, but instead Lindsey is stuck in the shadow of the dead girl she so closely mirrors. Her strategy to break free involves embracing adulthood as prematurely as possible; the goal is to put as many miles as possible between herself and the sister she lost.
Susie's father and sister are the only family members with the strength to confront their grief directly. The youngest sibling, Buckley, is too young to process his loss. Their mother is overwhelmed by sorrow for a daughter she loved but never desired. A feminist archetype long stricken with Betty Friedan's "Problem That Has No Name" her characterization is the most shallow. Her mother is far more interesting, a woman who looks at the loss of a grandchild as the latest in a string of miseries to be comfortably paved over with a steady diet of alcohol. As a veteran of misery, she finds herself in the best shape to make tactical decisions that will keep the family from unraveling.
There is a subgenre of the modern novel that I like to call tragedy porn within which authors like Jodi Picoult are building a career. This story should not be so easily dismissed. While the foundational event is undenibly tragic, the ripples from Susie's life drew those whom she loved together and helped them fit. Sentimental in the best sense of the word.

Five more to come when I'm a little less sleep deprived...

 
The "Great War" is a label they came up with for their philosophical co-questioning in the 1920's.  This was prior to C. S. Lewis having converted to Christianity (he was an atheist at the time).

 

I have the third volume of his "Letters" at home, and am working my way through it.  The extant 'Great War letters' are an appendix to this volume.

See: http://www.amazon.com/Lewis-Great-War-Owen-Barfield/dp/0954264304

There is much to be gotten from Lewis outside of "Narnia."

I'm also a fan of Lewis (Screwtape is a particular favorite.)  Barfield was a British poet and philosopher, a friend of Lewis's from Barfield's first year at Oxford and a founding member of the Inklings, the informal literary society that Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkein began there.  (The Inklings were the successor group to the Coal-Biters, which had gathered to read all of the Icelandic sagas in the original language.  Once that project was completed, the group died a natural death, but a core group found that they enjoyed one another's company so much that they continued meeting to discuss other things they had read in common, and eventually to read out and critique each member's own work.  The Inklings were the first audience for The Lord of The Rings and a number of Lewis's works.  According to Lewis's brother Warren, who was also a member, "Properly speaking the Inklings was neither a club nor a literary society, though it partook of the nature of both. There were no rules, officers, agendas, or formal elections."  They generally met in Lewis's rooms at Cambridge each Thursday evening, and often met at a near-by pub - The Eagle & Child, which they nicknamed "The Bird and Baby" -  for lunch on Tuesdays.)

Barfield was a devotee of a religio-philosopical movement called anthroposophy, which Lewis considered rank superstition during his atheist period, the period of "The Great War".  Lewis, of course, ultimately came to religious belief himself, first to a belief in God in 1929, followed two years later by his conversion to Christianity.  That final conversion was helped along mightily, according to Lewis himself, but a long, late-night walk and conversation about the very issues at stake in his debates with Barfield - truth and the imagination.  The conversation wasn't with Barfield, however.  It was with Tolkein and Hugo Dyson, another academic and Inkling, and an expert on Shakespeare.  (Dyson was a fan of Tolkein as a person, but not of his writing.  He preferred Inklings meetings where they just talked and no one read their work.  He was known to shout, "Oh God! No more Elves!" during the months when Tolkein was reading LotR to the group.  Tolkein eventually gave up reading at the meetings, or at least the ones Dyson attended. )  

Joseph Pearce, who has written about Tolkein, Lewis and the Inklings, had this to say about that fateful conversation in an article about Tolkein's work and faith:


Regards,

Joe
Edited by Joseph DeMartino - 10/2/09 at 1:45pm

Joseph,

That's interesting and informative information.  Thanks for posting.

I only found out years after the fact what C. S. Lewis' passions were before he wrote much of the fiction fans of his know and love.  His work in medieval literature is also very good, and very enjoyable to read.  Of course, one has to like that period (which I do in abundance as I am a medievalist) to appreciate fully his talents in this discipline.

I knew that he died the same day that President Kennedy was assassinated.  What I did not know was that Aldous Huxley died on this same day as well.

I just finished Trade-Off: Why Some Things Catch On, and Others Don't by Kevin Maney.  Highly recommended!  Kevin takes an interesting look at business through a lens which evaluates opportunities in terms of "convenience" and "fidelity".  On the "Convenience" side, stuff is easy to access, cheap, not particularly the best quality but good enough.  On the "Fidelity" side, things have "aura" (such as luxury goods) or are perceived to be among the best quality products and experiences available.  Most successful products and services end up either offering high fidelity or high convenience.

One of Maney's examples is music delivery.  The highest convenience solution is MP3s and Itunes and MP3 players.  The music you want is a few clicks of a mouse away and you can easily have it anywhere you want.  The quality may not be the best, but the cheap price and ease of use make the model successful.  At the other end of the "fidelity" spectrum is the act of attending a live concert.  The actual quality of the music you hear may not be good in many venues.  However, the experience of watching your favorite musicians actually play in front of you (and be able to tell people that you were there), for many people, is worth the extreme inconvenience involved.  You have to buy an expensive ticket, travel to a venue, park, go to your seats.  It's about the least convenient way to hear a song possible, but is hugely successful because of the quality of the experience.

Maney brings through many interesting case studies in the course of the book, and offers many other observations.  A very interesting concept he brings up is the "fidelity mirage", the idea of offering a product or service which is both high fidelity and high convenience.  Over and over again, people try to reach the fidelity mirage, and every time they fail.  Maney brings up some compelling examples of failures in attempts to reach the "Fidelity mirage" in his book, including the Starbucks coffee chain.

 Personally, when reading the book and Maney's example of the "Fidelity mirage" and how it is such an enticing business proposition, I thought of the whole concept of Satellite Radio as a very good case study in the concept.

Highly recommended!!

www.amazon.com/Trade-Off-Some-Things-Catch-Others/dp/038552594X/ref=sr_1_1

for Lovecraft!

Also for CSL.  If you've never read the Screwtape letters, now is the perfect time to start.

I'm surprised nobody has mentioned The Road, by the author of No Country for Old Men, Cormac McCarthy.  Despite having SIX novels here at my desk I'm in the middle of, The Road and No Country are the only books I've actually finished this year.  The Road is coming to theaters soon, starring Ewan McGregor.  No Country as a book outdoes the Coen's Movie, which says a LOT.
http://www.amazon.com/Road-Cormac-McCarthy/dp/0307265439

Still unfinished:
Watership Down.
Closing time (sequel to Catch 22)
Liseys Story
The Last Templar
Einstein
1776 (cannot get into this one)
The Dark House

After those and a couple more Kings I never got around to I wanna read Choke and Pygmy since I liked Fight Club so much, just havent picked em up yet...

Quote:
Just this past weekend there was a PBS documentary on this story.  The filmmaker followed in McCandless' footsteps and interviewed a number of people who knew him.  One guy, it turns out, had found his backpack in the bus (which the police foolishly and completely missed).  It was believed to be empty but he found a hidden compartment which contained numerous forms of ID for Chris, plus $300 in cash.  This implies that maybe he intended to return if his adventure failed.

DaveF:  Enjoy.  while I enjoy Ender's Game, I've always found "Speaker for the Dead" the real stunning work of SciFi in that series.

And now that you mention it, I may finish my last book of 2009, OSC's "Hidden Empire"  it's been very dark, actually, in storytelling and somewhat pulp.

 

I've found that more recent Card works.. let's say, everything after Children of the Mind ;) have largely been pulp/paperback fiction quality works.  Doesn't mean they are bad, they are enjoyable reads.. just not quite the early stuff.  

I keep thinking I'll go back to read some John Twelve Hawks, since I enjoyed the first book.. but just can't get "up" for it.

I'm going to try catch up before the end of the year tomorrow. From where I left off:

Star Wars: Fate of the Jedi: Omen by Christie Golden. The excerpt in the back of Outcast was so terrifically awful that I refused to even buy this book when it came out. When I finally checked it out of the library, and I was pleasantly surprised. Golden adjusts her style and tone for each story line. The excerpt highlighted a scene featuring the teenage characters, far and away the most grating story thread in the book. If Outcast hadn't been such a perfectly executed redirection for Star Wars fiction, this would have felt like a successful minor effort. But as a follow-up that rings in at a scant 235 pages, it's a disappointment. Golden sucks the tension and fury out of the premise, so that the rift between the Jedi and the government this time feels more like a polite disagreement. Characterizations tend toward the shallow and melodramatic, and the younger Jedi Golden introduces are completely uninteresting. She does handle one story line extremely well, and it's the most important one: Luke and Ben's pilgrimage through the galaxy. The father-son dynamic feels more authentic than previous characterizations, and Luke himself is much closer to the character we know from the movies. He's both funnier and less omnipotent than we've seen recently, and both changes make him much more engaging as a protagonist. I love that we get to see Luke actually raising Ben in a serious way, since the Skywalkers and the Solos have largely left their children to be raised by other people as they dash off on page-turning adventures. This time their journey take them to the Aing-Tii, a species I've wanted to know more about since they were intriguingly alluded to in Timothy Zahn's Vision of the Future. The overall work is towards the bottom of the Star Wars pantheon, but I enjoyed it enough to purchase her next book in the series without hesitation.

Star Wars: Fate of the Jedi: Abyss by Troy Denning. This book was the reason I decided to finally read Omen. It's an perfectly adequate book, with the Luke and Ben story line continuing to be the most interesting story thread. This series definitely feels more cohesive than the previous multi-author projects, and the introduction of some really surreal, Lovecraft-esque ideas is a welcome change. Denning's shortcomings arise with the Coruscant-based story lines. He's written so many books with the same characters in the same time period that after a while it begins to feel like the same old routine. The Han & Leia storyline barely held my attention, and the Jag & Jaina storyline was only a little more interesting. If Golden's writing was too dramatic, Denning has the opposite problem.

Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins. Not the worst book I've read this year, but easily the most frustrating. Judged seperately, it's a decent enough book with the same relentless pacing and sharp writing that shaped its predecessor. However instead of expanding on the story of the brilliant Hunger Games, Collins retreats to familiar territory with a story that parallels its preceding chapter a little too closely. Katniss is again our protagonist and narrator. After winning the Hunger Games in a most defiant fashion, she is arguably the most important person in all of Panem. You wouldn't know it, when the story picks up with her back in the woods hunting for game. Since her victory ensured her a lifetime of plenty, this comes across as more than a little artificial. Otherwise, the recap heavy early chapters promise to take us in a new and exciting direction. Having shaken the Capitol's grip on power, she rightly assumes that her days are numbered. surprise visit from the odious President Snow culminates in a conversation that is quietly terrifying in its implications. A couple of escapees from District 8 she meets in the forest share a theory that would blow everything we've known about this world wide open. Instead of following through, though, Collins flinches: Katniss is headed back to the Hunger Games, and all the familiar elements are trotted out again in an almost perfunctory manner. The larger political and social questions are dealt with only tangentially when they are dealt with at all. Only at the end does Collins refocus on the macro plot, leaving us waiting again with bated breath. Until then, the book's main pleasures come from the way she twists the same plot beats to explore how Katniss's victory has changed things. The sometimes vast differences in how things play out speaks volumes about how far the characters have come. Those subtle pleasures weren't quite enough for this reader, who was expecting an Empire Strikes Back rather than a Rocky II. Next time around, I want to see the revolution instead of hearing about it second hand.

The "Ender's Shadow" series, which I found really inferior to the Ender series.. but not bad, follow those themes.  The next book really in line for Ender is "Speaker for the Dead"  (or Exiles in Flight, I suppose, but that's kind of a side-bit).  And "Speaker for the Dead" is a major continuity break.. but a very smart one.  That's the book I envy people reading.  The first time I read that book, until you get about 1/2 way through it's somewhat puzzling.  But once it starts to click together, it is one of the best rides in SciFi lit.

Remainder of 2009 continued:

Dumb Witness by Agatha Christie. This mystery is not one of Christie's especially showy or clever efforts, and I think it's all the better for it. The format is familiar to any follower of the early Poirot novels and short stories. Poirot's friend easily befuddled friend Hastings again narrates and the story is neatly divided into chapters named after the character(s) who give evidence, knowingly or otherwise, within. The case attracts Poirot's attention when he receives a letter from a dead woman, which she dated several months prior. Every surviving family member had a motive to kill her, and all are perfectly happy to tell the detective that they wanted her dead. There is reason to believe that the victim was driven to write Poirot following a previous attempt on her life that had been written off as an accident. Even with the tired format and lack of shocking twist, this was one of the only Poirot novels where I failed to fully guess the perpetrator's actions and intent. The least likely of the included suspects is almost always the perpetrator in Christie's mysteries, but that wasn't quite the case this time. And when Poirot lays his cards out on the table at the inquest, the pieces fit together more soundly than most mysteries. There isn't a whiff of cheating about this one.

Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon. I came into this novel with a vague memory of the film adaptation, which meant that I had Michael Douglas -- strangely mutated into the larger, Brendan Gleeson-esque build Chabon described within -- in my head as the protagonist the whole time I was reading it. While Pittsburgh professor and author Grady Tripp is one of the only genuine gentiles in the entire book, he sure does seem a heck of a lot like the very Jewish Douglas. Robert Downey Jr, homosexual editor Terry Crabtree in the film, was pushed aside in my head to make room for a cross between Richard Roxburgh and Bradley Cooper. If I've spent too much of this book review discussing actors, I use the book's own fascination with Hollywood as an excuse. What I remember of 2000 film adaptation, which I quite liked, tracks closely to the first half of the book: a circus of hilarious, drug-fueled disasters that compound on each other like a Dave Barry column. In the second half, Chabon's literary voice is more evident; as the compounding madness starts to unravel again, the story becomes both more Jewish and more introspective. The pretenses upon which Grady Tripp has built his life crumble and he is faced with the prospect of genuine change for the first time in a long time. The movie's ending is more affirming than the ending Chabon provides us, and yet his ending fits better because it only seems plausible that the happiness Tripp attains could only come at the expense of the things he once valued most.

Juliet, Naked by Nick Hornby. Hornby's return to the adult coming of age genre that used to be his bread and butter is a bit of a mixed bag. The novel rotates between a reclusive, semi-famous eighties rocker, his most fervent fan, and the woman who dates both of them. Tucker Crowe, whose listed musical influences run the gamut from Dylan and Springsteen all the way to Dolly Parton broke into the mainstream with the critically acclaimed album 'Juliet' after a series of commercial failures. Midway through the tour to promote the album, he went into the men's room of a dive bar in Minneapolis and came out a changed man. All future tour dates were canceled and he disappeared off the face of the earth for a couple decades. No further albums were forthcoming. Duncan maintains a website for the dwindling number of Crowe devotees. He lives with Annie in a forgotten seaside town in the northwest of England. Aside from Duncan's obsession, Annie finds life with Duncan exceptionally untroublesome. That all changes when a parcel arrives containing the first unheard music by Tucker Crowe in decades: a compilation of demos entitled 'Juliet, Naked'. When Annie commits the treasonous act of listening to it without him, a fight results that ultimately leaves Annie wondering how she could have wasted the preceding 15 years of her life with him. When Duncan posts a boastful, over-the-top-positive review of the "naked" album on his website, Annie posts an assessment of her own that is blunt and critical. It isn't long before a email drops into her Inbox from Tucker Crowe himself.

Of the three perspectives Hornby rotates between, Duncan's is the least interesting. Hornby focuses on how Duncan's love affair with Tucker's discography has formed a critical part of his identity, and the impact meeting the actual Tucker has on the certainties he's built his life around. It's an intellectual, judgmental exploration that comes across as both shallow and sterile. The heart of the story lies with Annie and Tucker, two aging adults left wondering what the hell happened to their lives. Childless and passionless at 39, Annie is haunted by how little living she's done.

Tucker has the opposite problem: he's done too much living, creating a scattered family of five children by four ex-wives. Only two of his children really mean anything to him, and only his youngest son Jackson, a likable but fatalistic kindergartner, knows it. Annie's attempts to break out of her holding pattern end up reinforcing her loneliness and regret, and Tucker has long since surrendered to the depressing course he's charted for himself. First through email and later in person, Tucker and Annie expose parts of themselves to each other that they'd previously kept hidden as a matter of course. In due course we learn the secret behind Tucker's bathroom revelation, and it is both simple and emotionally wrenching. The ending is ambiguous but optimistic.

^^^

Agatha Christie is one of my wife's favorite authors.  Twice she has tried to join a book club that is offering all of Christie's works, and both times the club has not completed the set.

I'm currently reading Canon and Canonicity: the Formation and Use of Scripture, ed. by Einar Thomassen (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum, 2010).

Precisely which books (and why) constitute the canonical books in the Hebrew bible and the various Christian (Roman Catholic, Protestant, and Eastern Orthodox) bibles has fascinated me for many years, as has the exclusion of various pseudepigraphal works.

I'm also reading Music and Medieval Manuscripts: Paleography and Performance: Essays Dedicated to Andrew Hughes, ed. by John Haines and Randall Rosenfeld (Adershot, Hants, England; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, c2004).