The best of all possible booklogs
So last night, my roommate discovered mold growing all over the walls of her bedroom, and this morning we noticed that the wall of our kitchen that adjoins the bathroom (as her bedroom does) is bubbling and puckering. Obviously, we have a leak of some kind-gosh, I wonder if that could be connected to the hole in the bathroom ceiling we told the landlord about in December, which he just patched over without investigating the cause? So now we have to wait two days for anyone to fix it, and the job may be so extensive that we won't have anywhere to live while they repair. Oh, and also, this afternoon our neighbors got into a violent altercation and we had to call the cops on them. Happy Valentine's Day, us!
So here's some distraction booklog. SIGH.
1. Candide, Voltaire - One of the oddest works of classic literature I have ever read. If you don’t think too hard about certain aspects-the lovely touches of sexism and racism; the frequent bouts of rape and torture-it’s actually quite fun, and surprisingly funny. As much as I love the repressed staunchness of the Victorian era, one has to imagine that the lewd, bawdy 18th Century would have been a fascinating one to live in.
It also makes one wonder if a backlash to our current level of cultural tawdriness-comparable to the 19th Century’s reaction to the 18th-is coming. As much as I would like to see fewer naked celebrities on various red carpets (and it’s always naked female celebrities-what’s up with that? where’s our era of publicly naked men?), this idea kind of terrifies me. Though it would be nice if cravats came back. Cravats are hot.
2. The Valley of Fear, Arthur Conan Doyle - Dual-purpose Sherlock Holmes reread, as I 1) wanted to try out the e-reader on my new iPhone (it hurts my eyes), and 2) desperately needed some classic Holmes and Watson back-and-forth (*wink wink, nudge nudge*) after being thrown into a tizzy by the fantastically ridiculous new film. I always thought of The Valley of Fear as “the other one with Moriarty in it,” though upon reread I am sad to discover/recall that he really isn’t in it at all, which is a pity. Still, the first half of this is quite fun, with a lot of good classic investigation and interaction, and Holmes and Watson having to share a hotel room. Delightful!
The second half is...largely pointless, giving us backstory that we didn’t need and a lot of stuff about Freemasons. In a way its rather reminiscent of the second half of A Study in Scarlet, which gives one backstory one doesn’t need and a lot of stuff about Mormons. Doyle was a weird writer. With Valley of Fear, you really get the sense that he wished he didn’t have to be writing Sherlock Holmes anymore-which is factually true. (I don’t know what his excuse was for Study in Scarlet, as that was the first Holmes story he wrote!)
Still, for me, Doyle’s Holmes and Watson are like pizza and sex for George Carlin-even when they’re bad, they’re pretty good.
3. The Liars’ Club, Mary Karr - One of the original “My Shitty Childhood Is a Guaranteed Bestseller!” memoirs. Karr is obviously a good writer, is often darkly funny, and I liked how she made her at times imperfect memories of certain events part of the story. However, this is just really, really not my kind of book. For whatever reason, I just can’t do shitty childhood memoirs. One could probably analyze the reasons for this a thousand different ways, but I don’t really feel like doing that, either. Therefore, I’ll say that I think this is good-possibly very good-for what it is, but it’s not something I can examine or read with any pleasure.
4. The Adventure of the Ectoplasmic Man, Daniel Stashower - One of those “Sherlock Holmes meets [Famous Historical Figure]!” books-in this case, “Sherlock Holmes meets Harry Houdini!” This was quite fun, although, as is the case with a lot of mysteries for me, more fun in the setup than in the conclusion. Also, Stashower’s Watson was a bit too much of a bumbler for my tastes. Not Laurie R. King bad or anything, but I think after Jude Law’s impeccable Watson from the new movie, I am feeling a tad spoiled.
5. The Impostor’s Daughter, Laurie Sandell - A graphic memoir, which I am apparently okay with. Unlike The Liar’s Club, this is more about Sandell’s life as an adult (and her childhood was a whole lot less shitty than Mary Karr’s, anyway). I really like Sandell’s art, and the way it seems to become more sophisticated when she’s illustrating the adult portions rather than the childhood ones-a nice Joycean touch. I’m a little bit “eh” about the idea that the rehab clinic recommended to you by Ashley Judd can solve all your problems, but then I’m “eh” on the idea of therapy in general-I know it helps a lot of people, and my grandmother was a therapist, and so on and so forth, but the idea of relinquishing control to an institution and sharing and group and all that stuff makes me vastly uncomfortable. Hello, my own issues! Maybe this is why I don’t/shouldn’t read memoirs so often: I never have to think about this stuff when I’m reading about fighting crime or blowing up spaceships.
6. Sum, David Eagleman - Forty-for the most part fascinating-ideas of the afterlife. Fascinating, yes: but they are also all, without exception, relentlessly depressing. I’m not saying I want angels with harps and fluffy clouds, but jeeze louise. These are all worse than the afterlife I generally believe in, i.e., nothing. I guess happiness, or even hopefulness, aren’t intellectually stimulating enough.
7. Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded, John Scalzi - I really like John Scalzi as a blogger-his recent post on the big Amazon Fail had me in stitches-but I don’t think his blog posts work as a book, or at least they don’t as they’re arranged here. The decision to put the posts in a random order means that there’s never any sense of progression to his thoughts; too many posts on the same topics are included; and his frequent, mildly condescending posts on How to Be a Successful Writer and Lead a Successful Life made me feel shitty. Obviously, it’s not Scalzi’s job to make me feel good or even to not make me feel shitty, but “writing” advice like “marry someone more successful than you” is really not helpful to me right now, and not something I want to read in a book of humorous essays. Also, I get that writing is a job and should be treated as such, but man does Scalzi make it sound like such a drag.
I think Scalzi’s scathing sense of humor-which I enjoy-may be better taken in small doses than absorbed all at once like this.
8. The Unwritten: Tommy Taylor and the Bogus Identity, Mike Carey - Gloriously smart meta-comic that explores the relationship between reality and fiction. Carey fondly skewers everything from Harry Potter to thrillers to Rudyard Kipling in this twisty and exciting first volume. If the line between the real world and the printed page has ever seemed blurry to you, you'll love playing hopscotch with the boundary in one of the most electrifying graphic novels I've read in a long time.
9. The Unnamed, Joshua Ferris - I really liked Ferris’ debut novel, Then We Came to the End, which makes how confused and just plain bad this follow-up effort is even more disappointing. Gone is the sense of humor and the light, humanist touch that made Ferris’ first book so readable. The Unnamed is bleak and its characters thin, and with so little sense of who they were, it was hard for me to feel connected to them throughout this series of implausibly awful circumstances. You gotta hope that this is a sophomore slump, but it’s tough for novelists: the last line of my review for Then We Came to the End was “I really look forward to seeing what Ferris does next.” Now it’s more like, “I will be wary of what Ferris does next.”
10. The Checklist Manifesto, Atul Gawande - Here are some adjectives that describe Atul Gawande's writing: compassionate, thoughtful, honest, funny. In The Checklist Manifesto, he observes a problem in his field, medicine, and then looks to other disciplines for a solution: what can doctors (and you, the reader) learn from people who fly planes or build skyscrapers? This is not my usual kind of book, but I love how Gawande makes you think about systems, communication, and simple ways in which the world can be made better.
Total Reviews: 10/35
So here's some distraction booklog. SIGH.
1. Candide, Voltaire - One of the oddest works of classic literature I have ever read. If you don’t think too hard about certain aspects-the lovely touches of sexism and racism; the frequent bouts of rape and torture-it’s actually quite fun, and surprisingly funny. As much as I love the repressed staunchness of the Victorian era, one has to imagine that the lewd, bawdy 18th Century would have been a fascinating one to live in.
It also makes one wonder if a backlash to our current level of cultural tawdriness-comparable to the 19th Century’s reaction to the 18th-is coming. As much as I would like to see fewer naked celebrities on various red carpets (and it’s always naked female celebrities-what’s up with that? where’s our era of publicly naked men?), this idea kind of terrifies me. Though it would be nice if cravats came back. Cravats are hot.
2. The Valley of Fear, Arthur Conan Doyle - Dual-purpose Sherlock Holmes reread, as I 1) wanted to try out the e-reader on my new iPhone (it hurts my eyes), and 2) desperately needed some classic Holmes and Watson back-and-forth (*wink wink, nudge nudge*) after being thrown into a tizzy by the fantastically ridiculous new film. I always thought of The Valley of Fear as “the other one with Moriarty in it,” though upon reread I am sad to discover/recall that he really isn’t in it at all, which is a pity. Still, the first half of this is quite fun, with a lot of good classic investigation and interaction, and Holmes and Watson having to share a hotel room. Delightful!
The second half is...largely pointless, giving us backstory that we didn’t need and a lot of stuff about Freemasons. In a way its rather reminiscent of the second half of A Study in Scarlet, which gives one backstory one doesn’t need and a lot of stuff about Mormons. Doyle was a weird writer. With Valley of Fear, you really get the sense that he wished he didn’t have to be writing Sherlock Holmes anymore-which is factually true. (I don’t know what his excuse was for Study in Scarlet, as that was the first Holmes story he wrote!)
Still, for me, Doyle’s Holmes and Watson are like pizza and sex for George Carlin-even when they’re bad, they’re pretty good.
3. The Liars’ Club, Mary Karr - One of the original “My Shitty Childhood Is a Guaranteed Bestseller!” memoirs. Karr is obviously a good writer, is often darkly funny, and I liked how she made her at times imperfect memories of certain events part of the story. However, this is just really, really not my kind of book. For whatever reason, I just can’t do shitty childhood memoirs. One could probably analyze the reasons for this a thousand different ways, but I don’t really feel like doing that, either. Therefore, I’ll say that I think this is good-possibly very good-for what it is, but it’s not something I can examine or read with any pleasure.
4. The Adventure of the Ectoplasmic Man, Daniel Stashower - One of those “Sherlock Holmes meets [Famous Historical Figure]!” books-in this case, “Sherlock Holmes meets Harry Houdini!” This was quite fun, although, as is the case with a lot of mysteries for me, more fun in the setup than in the conclusion. Also, Stashower’s Watson was a bit too much of a bumbler for my tastes. Not Laurie R. King bad or anything, but I think after Jude Law’s impeccable Watson from the new movie, I am feeling a tad spoiled.
5. The Impostor’s Daughter, Laurie Sandell - A graphic memoir, which I am apparently okay with. Unlike The Liar’s Club, this is more about Sandell’s life as an adult (and her childhood was a whole lot less shitty than Mary Karr’s, anyway). I really like Sandell’s art, and the way it seems to become more sophisticated when she’s illustrating the adult portions rather than the childhood ones-a nice Joycean touch. I’m a little bit “eh” about the idea that the rehab clinic recommended to you by Ashley Judd can solve all your problems, but then I’m “eh” on the idea of therapy in general-I know it helps a lot of people, and my grandmother was a therapist, and so on and so forth, but the idea of relinquishing control to an institution and sharing and group and all that stuff makes me vastly uncomfortable. Hello, my own issues! Maybe this is why I don’t/shouldn’t read memoirs so often: I never have to think about this stuff when I’m reading about fighting crime or blowing up spaceships.
6. Sum, David Eagleman - Forty-for the most part fascinating-ideas of the afterlife. Fascinating, yes: but they are also all, without exception, relentlessly depressing. I’m not saying I want angels with harps and fluffy clouds, but jeeze louise. These are all worse than the afterlife I generally believe in, i.e., nothing. I guess happiness, or even hopefulness, aren’t intellectually stimulating enough.
7. Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded, John Scalzi - I really like John Scalzi as a blogger-his recent post on the big Amazon Fail had me in stitches-but I don’t think his blog posts work as a book, or at least they don’t as they’re arranged here. The decision to put the posts in a random order means that there’s never any sense of progression to his thoughts; too many posts on the same topics are included; and his frequent, mildly condescending posts on How to Be a Successful Writer and Lead a Successful Life made me feel shitty. Obviously, it’s not Scalzi’s job to make me feel good or even to not make me feel shitty, but “writing” advice like “marry someone more successful than you” is really not helpful to me right now, and not something I want to read in a book of humorous essays. Also, I get that writing is a job and should be treated as such, but man does Scalzi make it sound like such a drag.
I think Scalzi’s scathing sense of humor-which I enjoy-may be better taken in small doses than absorbed all at once like this.
8. The Unwritten: Tommy Taylor and the Bogus Identity, Mike Carey - Gloriously smart meta-comic that explores the relationship between reality and fiction. Carey fondly skewers everything from Harry Potter to thrillers to Rudyard Kipling in this twisty and exciting first volume. If the line between the real world and the printed page has ever seemed blurry to you, you'll love playing hopscotch with the boundary in one of the most electrifying graphic novels I've read in a long time.
9. The Unnamed, Joshua Ferris - I really liked Ferris’ debut novel, Then We Came to the End, which makes how confused and just plain bad this follow-up effort is even more disappointing. Gone is the sense of humor and the light, humanist touch that made Ferris’ first book so readable. The Unnamed is bleak and its characters thin, and with so little sense of who they were, it was hard for me to feel connected to them throughout this series of implausibly awful circumstances. You gotta hope that this is a sophomore slump, but it’s tough for novelists: the last line of my review for Then We Came to the End was “I really look forward to seeing what Ferris does next.” Now it’s more like, “I will be wary of what Ferris does next.”
10. The Checklist Manifesto, Atul Gawande - Here are some adjectives that describe Atul Gawande's writing: compassionate, thoughtful, honest, funny. In The Checklist Manifesto, he observes a problem in his field, medicine, and then looks to other disciplines for a solution: what can doctors (and you, the reader) learn from people who fly planes or build skyscrapers? This is not my usual kind of book, but I love how Gawande makes you think about systems, communication, and simple ways in which the world can be made better.
Total Reviews: 10/35