On the Road by Jack Kerouac
307 pages
Published 1957
Read from January 29 to January 31
Rating: ★★★ out of 5
To understand my impressions of Jack Kerouac, you have to start with my brother.
Randy,
so far as I can remember, never explicitly mentioned Kerouac, or
anything Beat-related, but from the very beginning he romanticized
chump-change criminality. At 11 he entertained bizarre notions of
running a grade-school "co-op," a proto-mafia where tots could pool
their money and somehow accomplish great things under the noses of the
adult community, as if reality were some kind of direct-to-video sequel
to The Sandlot. He shoplifted GI Joes at age 12, giving me (and
possibly believing) the excuse that we two were "owed" more toys than
our father would buy us. He would steal our grandmother's tip money and
buy us boxes of Little Debbies whenever the grownups were gone. By 13 he
was shoplifting cassette tapes, Nirvana and Ugly Kid Joe and Pearl Jam;
he had me transcribe the lyrics with him, because he was certain that
the act of writing them down ourselves somehow made them original
productions, which we would record and thereby become international
superstars. Also by 13, he argued and bullied me (however much I cried,
because I was only 9) into acceding to his plans to kill our father.
Brotherhood
is a strange symbiosis -- we fought viciously, and he pulled a knife on
me more than once; I baited him constantly; yet we never, ever ratted
on each other to our father, and in some corner of my brain I worshiped
him. I imitated his shoplifting predilections with much less success.
(Much later, I shoplifted just to have food in my stomach, but that's
another story, way beyond the scope of this review.) I began writing
because of him, too, putting our GI Joe characters into stock sci-fi
scenarios (aliens, time travel, a violent potty-humor sequel to Jurassic Park).
But there were places I wouldn't follow him. From age 14 on he got
wrapped up in narco-romantic fantasies, fueled by daily clandestine
trips up the street to our maternal family, who kept him supplied with
cigarettes and alcohol. No matter how much he enticed me, no matter how
much he bullied me, I never went up the street with him, never met our
sisters, never met our mother, never met our uncles. And I never got
into his affectations of dissipated Bohemianism.
Randy ran away
once and for all when he was 16 and I was 12. I got stuck in delayed
adolescence, a fugue of years blurring one into the next, living on the
road with my father, sleeping in rest stops and national forests,
escaping my father's paranoid delusions by writing the same derivative
science fiction stories. I didn't see Randy again until I was 16. My
grandmother and I were waiting in a shopfront doorway for a bus, huddled
from the cold, when this short skinny blond dude stalked by, sucking a
cigarette. I was taller than him now and his hairline was prematurely
receding; we barely recognized each other. But we struck up a brief
reacquaintance. During the month or so that we stayed in touch, I typed
up a chapter from one of my novels for him to read, craving his approval
just like old times. I forget exactly what he said; it was something
like "I thought you'd have developed more than this." And then Randy
blew up at our father and that was that.
We made a third and
final attempt to be brothers shortly after I got out of the army. A few
years of harder drugs, absentee fatherhood, periodic homelessness, and
flailing attempts at alternative rock stardom contributed to my
brother's... special... writing style. Even in his personal emails he
affected this painfully artsy try-hard prose, full of hard drink and
hard living, quoting dead philosophers and dangling out off-rhythm
digressions. In style he was closer to the hobo-chic ramblings of
Godspeed You! Black Emperor liner notes, though in content he made
himself out to be some latter-day rust-belt Ginsberg. Our reemergent
relationship, never sturdy, eroded after I refused to let him come to
New York and crash indefinitely on our couch. His subsequent schizotypal
diagnosis confirmed my prejudices.
So when I think of Beat
writers, that's the image in my head: The oh-so-artistic try-hard
indulging in dissipation and narco-romantic cynicism, exactly conforming
in his rush to be nonconformist -- the very art and philosophy of
protracted adolescence. But perhaps that isn't entirely fair. For one
thing, I based that impression on latter-day basement hipsters like my
brother. I have never read anything by Kerouac or Ginsberg or Burroughs.
I've never been drawn to that sort of thing, if you couldn't tell by my
snide talk of "narco-romanticism." Getting wasted and wasting away
isn't my game, pops. Yet I've always felt I should probably give the
Beat dudes a chance, if only so I know what I'm talking about when I
scoff at their modern followers.
(Incidentally, do kids still
read Kerouac? At this point, I feel Beat aesthetics and sensibilities
are so thoroughly integrated into the substance of teenage
intellectualism that there's a good chance today's kids don't feel the
need to imbibe from their philosophical prototypes directly. Kids with a
taste for philosophy and self-importance are just expected to indulge
in drugs and petty anti-establishment manifestos while angsting over
"meaning." Or at least that's my expectation. I haven't interacted with
many young would-be intellectuals since I was that age myself. I'm a
child of the late 20th century, raised in a time of inward-looking
optimism; I have no idea what kids of the early 21st century think or
expect.)
On the Road was well-written and occasionally
appealing -- the parts actually set on the road in the pre-interstate
West were big favorites. The inevitable and oft-repeated excursions
through hard drinking and burned out hedonism and philosophy, though,
were boring. Reading about someone's bender is, to me, exactly as
entertaining (and illuminating) as an account of someone's night on the
sofa watching NBC. I just can't seem to give a damn.
Lines like
"[I wished] I could exchange worlds with the happy, true-hearted,
ecstatic Negroes of America" do Kerouac no favors in my eyes, unless
there's a "Holden Caulfield is the biggest phony of all" angle I didn't
pick up on. What intrigued me the most was the scarcely mentioned
subtext of World War II, the psychological stain of it between the
words, resignation under the terrible light of the Bomb. I know exactly
nothing about Kerouac's views on how his generation got so damn beat in
the first place, or his own wartime experiences (the about the author
page said he was a merchant marine), but it's certainly something my
late 20th century mind picked up on. It added a more sympathetic
dimension to all the drugged-out soul-searching and sentimentalism.
If you're done with young men getting strung out and indulging adolescent melancholia, On the Road
is about half of a good book. I can safely assume that I have never gotten,
and will never get, the appeal of the other half, even if it would've
been obvious to someone like my brother from day one.
Thursday, January 31, 2013
Tuesday, January 29, 2013
2013 read #15: The Summer Tree by Guy Gavriel Kay.
The Summer Tree by Guy Gavriel Kay
309 pages
Published 1984
Read from January 27 to January 29
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
Just the other day I was thinking how much I liked science fiction (and fantasy) from the 1980s. "Much" here is a relative term -- I haven't read a whole lot of it -- but I dig the way the mainstream SF of that decade sorted through and incorporated certain elements of experimental New Wave science fiction, reinventing the genre without going completely daffy with it. Pretty much everything I've read from that decade shares a particular flavor, as comfortable and as comforting in its own way as Pat Benatar or Jefferson Starship, pairing relatively down-to-earth, human-scale stories about "ordinary people" with bonkers backdrops and the apotheosis of pulp art covers to produce the comfort-food reading of a generation. "Post-New Wave" might be a better descriptor than "from the 1980s," as the narrative sensibilities arose during the '70s New Wave and continued well into the '90s, but the Reagan Decade definitely contributed to the style and sensibility of the era's speculative fiction. Robert Silverberg's Lord Valentine's Castle (1980), Julian May's The Many-Colored Land (1981), Harry Harrison's West of Eden (1984), Greg Bear's Eon (1985), A. A. Attanasio's The Last Legends of Earth* (1989), Gordon R. Dickson's Time Storm (1991)... I told you it wasn't a long list, but I stand by the point I'm making here, damn it, which is that 1980s spec-fic was pretty awesome, and I really should just bookmark this list for future reading.
The Summer Tree (yet another one of Jory's recommendations) is consummately '80s, right on down to the DeLorean silver shade of the cover, and the open-chested shirt and straw hat on the author's photo. It fits comfortably within my ordinary-people-in-bonkers-backdrops pigeonhole. In fact, it's a straight-up wardrobe/looking-glass fantasy, where five ordinary white collar kids get snatched up and taken to a realm of wizards and elves and dwarves and shit. In the early going all I could think of was Roger Zelazny's Nine Princes in Amber, which (albeit tolerable) is not my favorite book. I'm not a huge fan of wardrobe fantasy in general. It took a while, possibly half of the way through the book, but eventually Tree surmounted its awkward beginnings and became adequately engrossing. Part of the long delay was the characters: introduced all at once, the five white collar kids didn't resolve into distinct entities until well into their Fionavar adventures. Also part of the problem was Fionavar itself. I'm pretty much over elves and Dark Ones and their ilk, and I'm completely over personified evil and baddies motivated solely by hatred of "the Light." I always love a good fantasy-world crucifixion, though, so without spoiling anything more, I can say that was when the book truly grabbed my interest.
While the Fionavar Tapestry isn't close to my favorite fantasy series (so far), I'm invested enough at this point to continue with the next two books. It's always nice to go into a fantasy series knowing it has a definite ending, and won't take eleven massive volumes to get there.
* I had no inkling of this until I wiki'd it for this entry, but The Last Legends of Earth -- long one of my favorite books -- turns out to be the last volume of a four book series, the Radix Tetrad. I'm feeling cautiously delighted by this discovery. Hopefully the first three volumes will live up to the conclusion. Unfortunately, my library doesn't have any of the preceding three books, so I'll have to see if they can request Radix, In Other Worlds, and Arc of the Dream from elsewhere.
309 pages
Published 1984
Read from January 27 to January 29
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
Just the other day I was thinking how much I liked science fiction (and fantasy) from the 1980s. "Much" here is a relative term -- I haven't read a whole lot of it -- but I dig the way the mainstream SF of that decade sorted through and incorporated certain elements of experimental New Wave science fiction, reinventing the genre without going completely daffy with it. Pretty much everything I've read from that decade shares a particular flavor, as comfortable and as comforting in its own way as Pat Benatar or Jefferson Starship, pairing relatively down-to-earth, human-scale stories about "ordinary people" with bonkers backdrops and the apotheosis of pulp art covers to produce the comfort-food reading of a generation. "Post-New Wave" might be a better descriptor than "from the 1980s," as the narrative sensibilities arose during the '70s New Wave and continued well into the '90s, but the Reagan Decade definitely contributed to the style and sensibility of the era's speculative fiction. Robert Silverberg's Lord Valentine's Castle (1980), Julian May's The Many-Colored Land (1981), Harry Harrison's West of Eden (1984), Greg Bear's Eon (1985), A. A. Attanasio's The Last Legends of Earth* (1989), Gordon R. Dickson's Time Storm (1991)... I told you it wasn't a long list, but I stand by the point I'm making here, damn it, which is that 1980s spec-fic was pretty awesome, and I really should just bookmark this list for future reading.
The Summer Tree (yet another one of Jory's recommendations) is consummately '80s, right on down to the DeLorean silver shade of the cover, and the open-chested shirt and straw hat on the author's photo. It fits comfortably within my ordinary-people-in-bonkers-backdrops pigeonhole. In fact, it's a straight-up wardrobe/looking-glass fantasy, where five ordinary white collar kids get snatched up and taken to a realm of wizards and elves and dwarves and shit. In the early going all I could think of was Roger Zelazny's Nine Princes in Amber, which (albeit tolerable) is not my favorite book. I'm not a huge fan of wardrobe fantasy in general. It took a while, possibly half of the way through the book, but eventually Tree surmounted its awkward beginnings and became adequately engrossing. Part of the long delay was the characters: introduced all at once, the five white collar kids didn't resolve into distinct entities until well into their Fionavar adventures. Also part of the problem was Fionavar itself. I'm pretty much over elves and Dark Ones and their ilk, and I'm completely over personified evil and baddies motivated solely by hatred of "the Light." I always love a good fantasy-world crucifixion, though, so without spoiling anything more, I can say that was when the book truly grabbed my interest.
While the Fionavar Tapestry isn't close to my favorite fantasy series (so far), I'm invested enough at this point to continue with the next two books. It's always nice to go into a fantasy series knowing it has a definite ending, and won't take eleven massive volumes to get there.
* I had no inkling of this until I wiki'd it for this entry, but The Last Legends of Earth -- long one of my favorite books -- turns out to be the last volume of a four book series, the Radix Tetrad. I'm feeling cautiously delighted by this discovery. Hopefully the first three volumes will live up to the conclusion. Unfortunately, my library doesn't have any of the preceding three books, so I'll have to see if they can request Radix, In Other Worlds, and Arc of the Dream from elsewhere.
Thursday, January 24, 2013
2013 read #14: Pirate Latitudes by Michael Crichton.
Pirate Latitudes by Michael Crichton
309 pages
Published 2009
Read January 24
Rating: ★ out of 5
There was a time, strange as it may seem now, when the general public and the political organism in this country accepted the scientific consensus on anthropogenic climate change. It was a time when Newt Gingrich appeared on television with Nancy Pelosi to warn of the dangers of global warming, when serious discussions were held at the highest levels to control carbon emissions and develop alternative power sources. It may seem like an age of legends and heroes to us now, but it was not so long ago.
The change, of course, was dictated from the top down. Right-leaning politicians discovered how much money automotive and fossil fuel industry lobbyists were willing to part with, and just like that, even the anemic Kyoto Accords were abandoned, and the national press "discourse" was suddenly full of dubious scientists on the petroleum industry's payroll and other would-be debunkers. At the time I figured no one could be stupid enough to believe a "scientist" employed by a massive multi-billion-dollar industry, when the scientific consensus was unambiguous and easy to understand. I mean, the basic ideas behind anthropogenic climate change are literally high school chemistry: CO2 absorbs energy in the infrared range and retains it. If you have more CO2 in the atmosphere, the atmosphere retains more solar radiation in the form of heat. Humans have been dumping prodigious quantities of CO2 (and methane and CFC's) into the atmosphere at unprecedented and accelerating rates. The precise effect that will have on Earth's climate is a matter of complex computer simulations based on a wide array of paleoclimatological data. Such simulations will inevitably shift as we gather more data and models improve, but that's how science operates. You'd have to be some kind of total idiot or ideological infant to ignore the basic science and its implications.
But as I have so many times in life, I overestimated the reasoning abilities of the American public. When the conservative media machine manufactured "doubts" about climate change, lifestyle Republicans -- those who practiced Republicanism as an identity badge and lifestyle choice rather than a coherent ideology, which is to say, most Republicans -- ate it up. And right around the time that public opinion turned from "Let's all believe the scientists" to "Let's all believe the fossil fuel industry lobbyists," all-star airport novelist Michael Crichton published State of Fear.
I'm not saying Crichton was party to the massive industrial misinformation campaign that bamboozled half the American public, but all the same I've never forgiven him. Crichton had been one of my childhood heroes. Jurassic Park was one of the first unabridged, unexpurgated grownup books I ever read. Throughout my 'tween and teen years, I read and reread Jurassic Park, The Lost World, Congo, Sphere, and The Andromeda Strain. For years my stories bore the unfortunate stamp of his prose style. Timeline was the very last birthday-cum-Christmas present I ever asked from my grandmother, the last innocent moment of my childhood. But the existence of State of Fear soured me on him overnight. (Nowadays I just find it kind of funny that in his seminal "Humans aren't affecting global climate" novel, the villains employ a literal weather-changing machine. Which I guess is somehow more plausible than basic atmospheric chemistry, as various HAARP conspiracy theorists suggest. Sardonic amusement is the only comfort left for a 21st century rationalist.)
My attitude toward Crichton hasn't softened since 2004. If anything, after years of reading superior fiction, I dislike him all the more: I realize his books weren't all that good. I still like Jurassic Park, and I haven't bothered to revisit Congo or Sphere, but The Lost World is simply terrible, Eaters of the Dead was stupid, and (sentimentality aside) Timeline was hilariously bad. Every time I scoff about "airport novelists," I have this fucking guy in mind. (Well, Crichton, Koontz, Clancy, Brown, etc.)
All that was simply a segue into this book: Pirate Latitudes. It's a Michael Crichton novel about pirates. As much as I dislike the man and his prose style, his blow-up doll characters, his "dramatic" sentence fragments, his tell-not-show descriptions, it's a Michael Crichton novel about pirates. Come on. If that doesn't spell "entertaining trainwreck," I don't know what would.
Well, I'll be the first to admit I was wrong: There was scarcely anything entertaining about Pirate Latitudes.
I want to say the prose was particularly graceless and insipid, even for Crichton, but I can't be sure -- years of reading good books, and half a year of reading the dishwater dreck of those who emulate airport fiction, may have left me particularly averse to Crichton's paint-by-numbers storytelling. This is the fast food of fiction, and not even the satisfying kind you might indulge in once in a while. This shit is KFC chicken strips withered into dry stringy shingles at the end of the business day, served up with a hard tasteless biscuit and a watery half-cup of mac and cheese; the kid in the drive-thru didn't give you any dipping sauce, and your soda is bubbly tap water that maybe once held some Pepsi in it before it was retrieved from the trash and rinsed out for your use, and you're eating it alone in your car because no one loves you. Far from a welcome break from more serious reading, this book made me long for something brainy and substantial to relieve the monotony of flat interchangeable characters and "Everyone nodded"-style storycraft. It was bad, man. It was bad. Call this a low blow if you like, but come on -- even Crichton had the sense to hide this manuscript away for all those years.
I'd type up some specific criticisms, but this rant is already three times longer than it should be, so I'll just leave it here.
309 pages
Published 2009
Read January 24
Rating: ★ out of 5
There was a time, strange as it may seem now, when the general public and the political organism in this country accepted the scientific consensus on anthropogenic climate change. It was a time when Newt Gingrich appeared on television with Nancy Pelosi to warn of the dangers of global warming, when serious discussions were held at the highest levels to control carbon emissions and develop alternative power sources. It may seem like an age of legends and heroes to us now, but it was not so long ago.
The change, of course, was dictated from the top down. Right-leaning politicians discovered how much money automotive and fossil fuel industry lobbyists were willing to part with, and just like that, even the anemic Kyoto Accords were abandoned, and the national press "discourse" was suddenly full of dubious scientists on the petroleum industry's payroll and other would-be debunkers. At the time I figured no one could be stupid enough to believe a "scientist" employed by a massive multi-billion-dollar industry, when the scientific consensus was unambiguous and easy to understand. I mean, the basic ideas behind anthropogenic climate change are literally high school chemistry: CO2 absorbs energy in the infrared range and retains it. If you have more CO2 in the atmosphere, the atmosphere retains more solar radiation in the form of heat. Humans have been dumping prodigious quantities of CO2 (and methane and CFC's) into the atmosphere at unprecedented and accelerating rates. The precise effect that will have on Earth's climate is a matter of complex computer simulations based on a wide array of paleoclimatological data. Such simulations will inevitably shift as we gather more data and models improve, but that's how science operates. You'd have to be some kind of total idiot or ideological infant to ignore the basic science and its implications.
But as I have so many times in life, I overestimated the reasoning abilities of the American public. When the conservative media machine manufactured "doubts" about climate change, lifestyle Republicans -- those who practiced Republicanism as an identity badge and lifestyle choice rather than a coherent ideology, which is to say, most Republicans -- ate it up. And right around the time that public opinion turned from "Let's all believe the scientists" to "Let's all believe the fossil fuel industry lobbyists," all-star airport novelist Michael Crichton published State of Fear.
I'm not saying Crichton was party to the massive industrial misinformation campaign that bamboozled half the American public, but all the same I've never forgiven him. Crichton had been one of my childhood heroes. Jurassic Park was one of the first unabridged, unexpurgated grownup books I ever read. Throughout my 'tween and teen years, I read and reread Jurassic Park, The Lost World, Congo, Sphere, and The Andromeda Strain. For years my stories bore the unfortunate stamp of his prose style. Timeline was the very last birthday-cum-Christmas present I ever asked from my grandmother, the last innocent moment of my childhood. But the existence of State of Fear soured me on him overnight. (Nowadays I just find it kind of funny that in his seminal "Humans aren't affecting global climate" novel, the villains employ a literal weather-changing machine. Which I guess is somehow more plausible than basic atmospheric chemistry, as various HAARP conspiracy theorists suggest. Sardonic amusement is the only comfort left for a 21st century rationalist.)
My attitude toward Crichton hasn't softened since 2004. If anything, after years of reading superior fiction, I dislike him all the more: I realize his books weren't all that good. I still like Jurassic Park, and I haven't bothered to revisit Congo or Sphere, but The Lost World is simply terrible, Eaters of the Dead was stupid, and (sentimentality aside) Timeline was hilariously bad. Every time I scoff about "airport novelists," I have this fucking guy in mind. (Well, Crichton, Koontz, Clancy, Brown, etc.)
All that was simply a segue into this book: Pirate Latitudes. It's a Michael Crichton novel about pirates. As much as I dislike the man and his prose style, his blow-up doll characters, his "dramatic" sentence fragments, his tell-not-show descriptions, it's a Michael Crichton novel about pirates. Come on. If that doesn't spell "entertaining trainwreck," I don't know what would.
Well, I'll be the first to admit I was wrong: There was scarcely anything entertaining about Pirate Latitudes.
I want to say the prose was particularly graceless and insipid, even for Crichton, but I can't be sure -- years of reading good books, and half a year of reading the dishwater dreck of those who emulate airport fiction, may have left me particularly averse to Crichton's paint-by-numbers storytelling. This is the fast food of fiction, and not even the satisfying kind you might indulge in once in a while. This shit is KFC chicken strips withered into dry stringy shingles at the end of the business day, served up with a hard tasteless biscuit and a watery half-cup of mac and cheese; the kid in the drive-thru didn't give you any dipping sauce, and your soda is bubbly tap water that maybe once held some Pepsi in it before it was retrieved from the trash and rinsed out for your use, and you're eating it alone in your car because no one loves you. Far from a welcome break from more serious reading, this book made me long for something brainy and substantial to relieve the monotony of flat interchangeable characters and "Everyone nodded"-style storycraft. It was bad, man. It was bad. Call this a low blow if you like, but come on -- even Crichton had the sense to hide this manuscript away for all those years.
I'd type up some specific criticisms, but this rant is already three times longer than it should be, so I'll just leave it here.
Wednesday, January 23, 2013
2013 read #13: The Tree by Colin Tudge.
The Tree: A Natural History of What Trees Are, How They Live, and Why They Matter by Colin Tudge
413 pages
Published 2006
Read from January 20 to January 23
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
At one point, natural history was my favorite subject. When I was a 'tween and teen I read and reread every book on dinosaurs I could get my hands on (even a college textbook, which I found very impressive indeed at the time). E. O. Wilson's The Diversity of Life, which I first read when I was 13 or so, was long one of my favorite books. As an adult, though, I haven't been motivated to pursue that interest outside of a couple college courses. (And even then I tended to judiciously skim the reading assignments.) Over the last twelve years I've read a handful of pop-science books on geology, a couple more on Cenozoic paleontology, and that's pretty much it.
I'm not sure why I can't seem to marshal the interest. One possible reason: Every pop-science book that treats with biology or paleobiology invariably devotes space to explaining babby's first basics of evolution -- useful if you're trying to educate the general reader, tedious if you've been reading basically that same chapter in dozens of books since you were 11. (The Tree adheres to this rule to the letter.) More to the point: There just aren't that many good natural history books out there to grab my interest. With dinosaurs, my knowledge base exceeds anything I'm likely to find in a pop-science title (and in any case I've already read most of them anyway). With biology, the available books either focus on the mechanics of evolution (kind of boring) or on one tiny particular topic within the field (sea turtles, for example, or dung beetles) -- or worse, on some stupid irrelevant bullshit about Darwin's religious inclinations. With geology or non-dinosaur paleontology, there are vanishingly few pop-science books period.
So it's always a treat to discover a natural history book that covers an interesting, seldom-visited topic -- and even more of a treat when that book is well-written and engaging. The Tree has its flaws, but it's probably one of the better natural history books I've read as an adult. It's not in the same league as John McPhee's terrific (and Pulitzer Prize winning) Annals of the Former World, but what is? The point is, I enjoyed it, and came away from it feeling like some learning took place.
My main complaint about The Tree has to do with the treacly religious sentiment Tudge kneads through the book, particularly in the early chapters. As long as you accept the reality of reality, I don't give a damn what your religious views are. Which means I'd appreciate it if you leave them out of your natural history book altogether. I'm here to read about trees, not for your thoughts on God and Jesus and Moses.
Something that didn't bother me so much, but might bore you if you decide to pick it up, was the book's entire middle section, an occasionally arid list of select families and genera of notable trees. Tudge's winsome prose handily sped me through all 158 pages of this overview, but even I'll admit I bogged down a bit in the chapters on the familiar, conventional groups. I want to learn more about cycads, nipa palms, grasstrees, and araucarias, the weird stuff with funky adaptations, not read page after page of how pear wood and maple wood are employed in home furnishings and woodcuts. The book Tudge decided to write and the book I wanted to read didn't overlap entirely. Like I said, though, he kept it from getting tedious.
As with all popular science books, this one would've benefited enormously from lavish color illustrations of basically every species mentioned in the text. Googling grasstrees was an absorbing pursuit (seriously, Google grasstrees if you don't know what I'm talking about), but the book would've been better if it illustrated its subjects. Maybe bundle it with a companion coffee table book, or do the popular thing these days and re-release it as a special illustrated edition. I know it isn't economical to illustrate every book like a top-of-the-line textbook, but it would be nice. Even a dozen color plates would've helped.
413 pages
Published 2006
Read from January 20 to January 23
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
At one point, natural history was my favorite subject. When I was a 'tween and teen I read and reread every book on dinosaurs I could get my hands on (even a college textbook, which I found very impressive indeed at the time). E. O. Wilson's The Diversity of Life, which I first read when I was 13 or so, was long one of my favorite books. As an adult, though, I haven't been motivated to pursue that interest outside of a couple college courses. (And even then I tended to judiciously skim the reading assignments.) Over the last twelve years I've read a handful of pop-science books on geology, a couple more on Cenozoic paleontology, and that's pretty much it.
I'm not sure why I can't seem to marshal the interest. One possible reason: Every pop-science book that treats with biology or paleobiology invariably devotes space to explaining babby's first basics of evolution -- useful if you're trying to educate the general reader, tedious if you've been reading basically that same chapter in dozens of books since you were 11. (The Tree adheres to this rule to the letter.) More to the point: There just aren't that many good natural history books out there to grab my interest. With dinosaurs, my knowledge base exceeds anything I'm likely to find in a pop-science title (and in any case I've already read most of them anyway). With biology, the available books either focus on the mechanics of evolution (kind of boring) or on one tiny particular topic within the field (sea turtles, for example, or dung beetles) -- or worse, on some stupid irrelevant bullshit about Darwin's religious inclinations. With geology or non-dinosaur paleontology, there are vanishingly few pop-science books period.
So it's always a treat to discover a natural history book that covers an interesting, seldom-visited topic -- and even more of a treat when that book is well-written and engaging. The Tree has its flaws, but it's probably one of the better natural history books I've read as an adult. It's not in the same league as John McPhee's terrific (and Pulitzer Prize winning) Annals of the Former World, but what is? The point is, I enjoyed it, and came away from it feeling like some learning took place.
My main complaint about The Tree has to do with the treacly religious sentiment Tudge kneads through the book, particularly in the early chapters. As long as you accept the reality of reality, I don't give a damn what your religious views are. Which means I'd appreciate it if you leave them out of your natural history book altogether. I'm here to read about trees, not for your thoughts on God and Jesus and Moses.
Something that didn't bother me so much, but might bore you if you decide to pick it up, was the book's entire middle section, an occasionally arid list of select families and genera of notable trees. Tudge's winsome prose handily sped me through all 158 pages of this overview, but even I'll admit I bogged down a bit in the chapters on the familiar, conventional groups. I want to learn more about cycads, nipa palms, grasstrees, and araucarias, the weird stuff with funky adaptations, not read page after page of how pear wood and maple wood are employed in home furnishings and woodcuts. The book Tudge decided to write and the book I wanted to read didn't overlap entirely. Like I said, though, he kept it from getting tedious.
As with all popular science books, this one would've benefited enormously from lavish color illustrations of basically every species mentioned in the text. Googling grasstrees was an absorbing pursuit (seriously, Google grasstrees if you don't know what I'm talking about), but the book would've been better if it illustrated its subjects. Maybe bundle it with a companion coffee table book, or do the popular thing these days and re-release it as a special illustrated edition. I know it isn't economical to illustrate every book like a top-of-the-line textbook, but it would be nice. Even a dozen color plates would've helped.
Sunday, January 20, 2013
2013 read #12: Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett.
Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett
182 pages
Published 1929
Read from January 18 to January 20
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
This book wasn't what I expected it to be. When I hear that a novel is going to be about "political corruption and gang violence in a western mining town," I picture labor struggles and company towns and hired guns shooting up strikers, or leftist agitators making trouble for the bosses. I knew Hammett's "Continental Op" books were hardboiled pulp detective fare -- I don't think Hammett wrote anything else -- but I was eager to read a pulp story that dealt with one of my pet topics. I had high hopes when, on page four, a man was introduced wearing a red tie. But then the leftist guy disappeared and the rest of the book was about conventional thugs and bootlegging and such. What with the title being Red Harvest, I figured the red tie guy had to come back and play a central role in the denouement (why else would he be introduced first thing in the book?). In the same way, I figured the dame would turn out to be a bad seed in the end. It's a pulp detective story, damn it. All the broads are ears-deep in the racket. But no. I was wrong on both accounts. I guess the guy was just a... red herring.
My main beef with this book is that it was too twisty. Little more than halfway through I gave up trying to keep up with the twists and red herrings and false accusations and lies and double crossings and who was stabbing whom in the back. I'd need a sheet of graph paper to keep it all straight. Maybe hardboiled detective stories aren't my game.
As with The Maltese Falcon, this was an entertaining slip of a book and I don't have much else to add about it. I want more well-written pulp, but maybe not another hardboiled detective yarn just yet. Any good hardboiled Westerns out there?
182 pages
Published 1929
Read from January 18 to January 20
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
This book wasn't what I expected it to be. When I hear that a novel is going to be about "political corruption and gang violence in a western mining town," I picture labor struggles and company towns and hired guns shooting up strikers, or leftist agitators making trouble for the bosses. I knew Hammett's "Continental Op" books were hardboiled pulp detective fare -- I don't think Hammett wrote anything else -- but I was eager to read a pulp story that dealt with one of my pet topics. I had high hopes when, on page four, a man was introduced wearing a red tie. But then the leftist guy disappeared and the rest of the book was about conventional thugs and bootlegging and such. What with the title being Red Harvest, I figured the red tie guy had to come back and play a central role in the denouement (why else would he be introduced first thing in the book?). In the same way, I figured the dame would turn out to be a bad seed in the end. It's a pulp detective story, damn it. All the broads are ears-deep in the racket. But no. I was wrong on both accounts. I guess the guy was just a... red herring.
My main beef with this book is that it was too twisty. Little more than halfway through I gave up trying to keep up with the twists and red herrings and false accusations and lies and double crossings and who was stabbing whom in the back. I'd need a sheet of graph paper to keep it all straight. Maybe hardboiled detective stories aren't my game.
As with The Maltese Falcon, this was an entertaining slip of a book and I don't have much else to add about it. I want more well-written pulp, but maybe not another hardboiled detective yarn just yet. Any good hardboiled Westerns out there?
Saturday, January 19, 2013
2013 read #11: Rome: A Cultural, Visual, and Personal History by Robert Hughes.
Rome: A Cultural, Visual, and Personal History by Robert Hughes
463 pages
Published 2011
Read from January 10 to January 19
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
I became infatuated with Robert Hughes' writing last year when I read his biography of Goya. That book presented a richly detailed tapestry of Spain and its court figures in the waning decades of the Inquisition, and of their resistance to "francesas" Enlightenment ideas; Goya's life and work were merely the compositional lines of that depiction. Goya was Hughes' magnum opus, the book he had always wanted to write but shirked until a near-fatal car accident and years of grueling physical therapy made him determined to undertake it once and for all. That passion made for compelling reading. The fact that the book had color reproductions of Goya's works on practically every other page was pretty cool too. That one book was enough to make me gravitate toward any other Hughes titles I come across -- enough to make me a fan of his, as it were.
Rome is the first Hughes book I've tackled since my Goya infatuation. (I owned The Fatal Shore at one point, years ago, but I never read it, and now I can't find it.) It's a bit of a disappointment, I have to confess. Dabbling through three millennia of art and history, without a central figure like Goya to focus on, Rome is often rambly and disconnected, retreading the same subject in separate chapters. Hughes' heart doesn't seem to be in this book, especially in the early going -- his enthusiasm clearly perks up in the Renaissance and peaks during the Settecento, but by then it's too late. Worse, his editor didn't seem to be invested in it so much, either; a paragraph from Tacitus regarding Nero's persecution of the Christians is quoted at length on page 108, and then the same paragraph (albeit worded differently, so possibly a different translation of the same paragraph?) is quoted at length on page 140. This isn't done to highlight a different aspect of the subject or to emphasize a point. It reads as if Hughes simply forgot he'd already talked about the persecution in his section on Nero, so he went into it again in his chapter on early Christians in Rome, and his editor didn't bother to fix it.
Without anything comparable to the narrative urgency of Goya's biography, Rome is often a rather dry recital of names and works. (Again, I can't emphasize how much of a difference it makes to have full-color reproductions of pretty much every work named in the Goya book; Hughes will rhapsodize in detail about a Caravaggio or a Velázquez, which hardly seems fair when you're left to imagine it. I suppose I could look up the works individually on the internet, but I'm reading mostly for pleasure, not for homework.) At one point I literally fell asleep reading Rome, something I don't recall doing with any previous book. As I slept, my brain kept on nattering away in imitation of Hughes' blunt and summary style. No wonder it took me ten days to read the damn thing.
Lest you wonder why I gave this four stars when all I've done is criticize it, I should mention that Hughes' prose is always a treat. One reviewer calls it "muscular yet elegant," which is pithy enough, ignoring its masculist implications. Despite the rambling, despite the lack of passion for anything before Brunellischi and obvious contempt for everything after Canova, Hughes' way with words made this a worthwhile read. Just not the classic I found Goya to be.
463 pages
Published 2011
Read from January 10 to January 19
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
I became infatuated with Robert Hughes' writing last year when I read his biography of Goya. That book presented a richly detailed tapestry of Spain and its court figures in the waning decades of the Inquisition, and of their resistance to "francesas" Enlightenment ideas; Goya's life and work were merely the compositional lines of that depiction. Goya was Hughes' magnum opus, the book he had always wanted to write but shirked until a near-fatal car accident and years of grueling physical therapy made him determined to undertake it once and for all. That passion made for compelling reading. The fact that the book had color reproductions of Goya's works on practically every other page was pretty cool too. That one book was enough to make me gravitate toward any other Hughes titles I come across -- enough to make me a fan of his, as it were.
Rome is the first Hughes book I've tackled since my Goya infatuation. (I owned The Fatal Shore at one point, years ago, but I never read it, and now I can't find it.) It's a bit of a disappointment, I have to confess. Dabbling through three millennia of art and history, without a central figure like Goya to focus on, Rome is often rambly and disconnected, retreading the same subject in separate chapters. Hughes' heart doesn't seem to be in this book, especially in the early going -- his enthusiasm clearly perks up in the Renaissance and peaks during the Settecento, but by then it's too late. Worse, his editor didn't seem to be invested in it so much, either; a paragraph from Tacitus regarding Nero's persecution of the Christians is quoted at length on page 108, and then the same paragraph (albeit worded differently, so possibly a different translation of the same paragraph?) is quoted at length on page 140. This isn't done to highlight a different aspect of the subject or to emphasize a point. It reads as if Hughes simply forgot he'd already talked about the persecution in his section on Nero, so he went into it again in his chapter on early Christians in Rome, and his editor didn't bother to fix it.
Without anything comparable to the narrative urgency of Goya's biography, Rome is often a rather dry recital of names and works. (Again, I can't emphasize how much of a difference it makes to have full-color reproductions of pretty much every work named in the Goya book; Hughes will rhapsodize in detail about a Caravaggio or a Velázquez, which hardly seems fair when you're left to imagine it. I suppose I could look up the works individually on the internet, but I'm reading mostly for pleasure, not for homework.) At one point I literally fell asleep reading Rome, something I don't recall doing with any previous book. As I slept, my brain kept on nattering away in imitation of Hughes' blunt and summary style. No wonder it took me ten days to read the damn thing.
Lest you wonder why I gave this four stars when all I've done is criticize it, I should mention that Hughes' prose is always a treat. One reviewer calls it "muscular yet elegant," which is pithy enough, ignoring its masculist implications. Despite the rambling, despite the lack of passion for anything before Brunellischi and obvious contempt for everything after Canova, Hughes' way with words made this a worthwhile read. Just not the classic I found Goya to be.
Friday, January 18, 2013
2013 read #10: The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin.
The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin
387 pages
Published 1974
Read from January 14 to January 18
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
The Left Hand of Darkness -- commonly included in lists of science fiction's best novels, often cited as proof that genre fiction can be serious literature -- was my first exposure to Le Guin, and still numbers among my personal favorite books. In fact, when I'm pressed to name favorite authors (as I've had to do in the two interviews I've given as Scareship's editor), Le Guin usually finds her way onto the list. This despite the fact that the only other Le Guin title I've read was Rocannon's World, a thoroughly forgettable Silver Age sci-fi book, so thoroughly forgettable that I haven't been able to remember a single thing about it aside from its awesomely trashy pulp cover. I've had this copy of The Dispossessed since '06 or so, but it's languished on shelves, in boxes, or in the book graveyard downstairs until now.
The first thing I took from The Dispossessed is an impression that Shevek is a familiar New Wave science fiction protagonist, an outsider accustomed to living in his own head, long of hair, functionally bisexual, a one-man embassy between cultures and reluctant revolutionary and messiah figure. Valentine Michael Smith comes to mind, though thankfully without any of Heinlein's free love and cannibalism baggage. I shouldn't complain about the protagonist's familiarity, though; writing this review, I got sidetracked into researching New Wave science fiction, which made me realize how very little of it I've read. Thanks to the library, I have two volumes of Dick at hand (eight novels all told, of which I'll probably read two or three, depending on what else grabs my interest in the meantime), but I haven't even begun to look into Ballard, Russ, Farmer, Ellison, Delany, Aldiss, or early Silverberg, and I've barely scratched the surface with Le Guin. I'm in no position to declare what's a stock New Wave character or element and what isn't. So enough about that.
I liked this book a lot, but didn't find it as satisfying as Left Hand. I suppose it's because abstractions of gender and sexuality interest me, whereas abstractions of politics and ethics -- utopian fictions -- are innately dull. I enjoyed the culture encounters, and portions of The Dispossessed were moving (anything to do with a parent having to be separated from his child touches a tender spot in my brain), but the frequent discussions of abstract philosophy and make-believe physics made my eyes slide off the page. I was somewhat mollified when the (spoilers) slow internal collapse of the anarchist utopia became a central plot point -- it was a relief to learn Le Guin was being honest and simply using the culture to tell a story, and not advocating it as an ideal option. Frankly, living the Anarres lifestyle would be a total bore, preferable though it may be to the misogynistic and exploitative capitalism of Urras.
387 pages
Published 1974
Read from January 14 to January 18
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
The Left Hand of Darkness -- commonly included in lists of science fiction's best novels, often cited as proof that genre fiction can be serious literature -- was my first exposure to Le Guin, and still numbers among my personal favorite books. In fact, when I'm pressed to name favorite authors (as I've had to do in the two interviews I've given as Scareship's editor), Le Guin usually finds her way onto the list. This despite the fact that the only other Le Guin title I've read was Rocannon's World, a thoroughly forgettable Silver Age sci-fi book, so thoroughly forgettable that I haven't been able to remember a single thing about it aside from its awesomely trashy pulp cover. I've had this copy of The Dispossessed since '06 or so, but it's languished on shelves, in boxes, or in the book graveyard downstairs until now.
The first thing I took from The Dispossessed is an impression that Shevek is a familiar New Wave science fiction protagonist, an outsider accustomed to living in his own head, long of hair, functionally bisexual, a one-man embassy between cultures and reluctant revolutionary and messiah figure. Valentine Michael Smith comes to mind, though thankfully without any of Heinlein's free love and cannibalism baggage. I shouldn't complain about the protagonist's familiarity, though; writing this review, I got sidetracked into researching New Wave science fiction, which made me realize how very little of it I've read. Thanks to the library, I have two volumes of Dick at hand (eight novels all told, of which I'll probably read two or three, depending on what else grabs my interest in the meantime), but I haven't even begun to look into Ballard, Russ, Farmer, Ellison, Delany, Aldiss, or early Silverberg, and I've barely scratched the surface with Le Guin. I'm in no position to declare what's a stock New Wave character or element and what isn't. So enough about that.
I liked this book a lot, but didn't find it as satisfying as Left Hand. I suppose it's because abstractions of gender and sexuality interest me, whereas abstractions of politics and ethics -- utopian fictions -- are innately dull. I enjoyed the culture encounters, and portions of The Dispossessed were moving (anything to do with a parent having to be separated from his child touches a tender spot in my brain), but the frequent discussions of abstract philosophy and make-believe physics made my eyes slide off the page. I was somewhat mollified when the (spoilers) slow internal collapse of the anarchist utopia became a central plot point -- it was a relief to learn Le Guin was being honest and simply using the culture to tell a story, and not advocating it as an ideal option. Frankly, living the Anarres lifestyle would be a total bore, preferable though it may be to the misogynistic and exploitative capitalism of Urras.
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