Books read recently by J. Zimmerman.
Inspired in part by
Catarina.net's book blog.
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Best book of this quarter:
The History of Classical Music by Richard Fawkes (1997). Wonderful musical history (with 150 recorded musical excerpts) of Western classical music. |
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"poetry is poised between a need for creative freedom within itself
and a pressure to express the sense of social obligation felt by the poet as citizen."
[in Nobel Prize (nobelprize.org)'s Biography of Seamus Heaney]. |
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Skip pages
Reread
Not read
Not finish
Not defend your tastes
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{ September (septiembre (see also books on Spanish)) 2005 }
Favorite poem is Kim Addonizio's "Verities"
The COMMENT section includes an editorial (Christian Wiman) explaining the reviewing procedure of the flood of received books, all of which are logged. They try to review books that:
Further:
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"What we look for in a reviewer is intelligence, courage, unpredictability, and style.
... They can have no personal connection to any of the authors they are writing about. ... They must express a clear opinion about each book reviewed. ... These rules were put in place ... because it seemed to us that the state of reviewing in contemporary poetry was so dire." |
Includes eight reviews by Danielle Chapman, including one of The Wounded Surgeon by Adam Kirsch:
| "Kirsch ... skillfully distinguishes the poems that use life as material for poetry from those that use poetry in order to justify or condemn the poet's real-life behavior. He convinces us that the former are art while the latter are exhibitions of narcissism, self-pity, and sentimentality; ... that a poem fails when the poet abandons the imaginative work of completing it in order to solicit the reader's sympathy or reproach. What Kirsch doesn't convince us of is his cold-blooded bottom line, which is that if art is to be great, it often must take precedence over life, regardless of the costs. This, of course, is exactly what the Confessionals believed ... Kirsch does nothing to persuade us that these poems were good enough to die for, nor that any of them will survive unshadowed by the deaths they hastened." |
Concludes with 13 pages I could mainly do without: letters to the editor.
It took the whole day, carefully spending time on this book which is 'about' time. While reading her poems I focused on (and in fact made note of) her words that are related to time. More information: See more comments on poetry of Jorie Graham.
| Delighted to read a first American edition of
Chocolate: A Bittersweet Saga of Dark and Light
by Mort Rosenblum. Includes the secrets of the food of the gods. Let him advise you what chocolate to try on your chocolate pilgrimages. See also our full review and our chocolate page. |
The book is pretty good but the recording is weak. The voices (even though many of them are the actors from the first fabulous radio broadcast in the 1970s) are undifferentiated and dull. Sadly I recommend you ignore this recording.
As the back of the book says: "Inspired by the example of William Stafford, Bly decided to embark on the project of writing a daily poem: every morning he would stay in bed until he had completed the day's work."
The resulting poems are short (often 3 or 4 quatrains or a few triplets), friendly, and accessible. They lull a reader into thinking not only "I understand that" and "I like that" but also "I could do that."
But beware. If you imitate his form, you will be challenged to include the leaps and juxtapositions that delight Bly. And the way that Bly can completely amaze you with how he ends a poem, leaping (like the Tarot Fool) out into the high blue air.
These are just some of my favorites.
Part 7 of "It's as if Someone Else is with me" ends:
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... A lamppost shines over
The ocean. The waves take what they want of the light. The rest they give back, to the hospitals and the poor. |
This is start and end of "The Neurons who Watch Birds":
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We have to think now what it would be like
To be old. Some funny little neurons, Developed for high-speed runners, and quick Handed bowmen, begin to get tired. ... What can you do? We'll have to round up All those little people wandering about In the body, get them to sit up straight, and study This problem: How do we die? |
This is the end of "One Source of Bad Information":
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He's uninformed, but he does want
to save your life. And he has. Because of this boy
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This is the end of "November":
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Some leaves hang, others fall.
The body says, "It's all right To die. It's not an insult To the world." |
Delight yourself - read Morning Poems.
Berger's books are highly admired. Yet of this book's eight sections, I found the first (in which he claims to meet and re-meet the ghost of his mother in Lisboa) to be slow, unconnected to me, sometimes boring, and easy to disagree with. For example, he claims:
| You can look things up in a dead person like a dictionary. |
Would you could!
The second section is more interesting because it relates to Genèvre and Jorge Luis Borges, who is buried there. This section has some lovely lists of things: "His [Borges'] great poetic oeuvre is a kind of catalogue of the items in such a collection." And this section has the book's first (of few) political stand:
| Last summer while Bush and his army and the petrol corporations and their advisors were ruining Iraq, I had a rendezvous in Genèvre with my daughter, Katya. |
Throughout the writing is slippery, so that of all the writers I have read, I am the least sure that I would recognize Berger's work in another book. He's a little like Virginia Woolf but more natural, without self-consciously cleverness. In part this is because writer hides his telling dramatic tales in an undramatic muting through a variety of cities and other specific things of this world.
The best section (and the one that I wish had started the book) is the de facto final chapter, The Szum and the Ching, with its braid of multiple tales and meditations, interwoven with the slow acquisition of ingredients (fresh-cut sorrel, fresh-dug potatoes, new-laid eggs, etc.) and the preparation and cooking of sorrel soup, zupa szczawiowa:
| Jacob Boehme, ... a little to the west of Wroclaw in the seventeenth century, proposed that the world comes continually into existence by passing through seven phrases. The first is Sourness, the second Sweetness, the third Bitterness, the fourth Warmth, and after Warmth, according to him, comes Love, to be followed by Sound and Language. I would place zupa szczawiowa somewhere between Warmth and Love. |
Rich with Pratchett's hallmark puns, Monstrous Regiment explores gender identity and our reasons for marching to war. The setting may be based on the region of Yugoslavia.
The tiny, belligerent Borogravia has an unending series of war with its neighbor Zlobenia. Guided by Nuggan (one of the world's idiot gods, to whom 89% of all possible behaviors are "an abomination unto Nuggan") Borogravia has used up most of her able-bodied young men. Inn-keeper's daughter Polly Perks, to look for her brother, enlists in the Monstrous Regiment, along with
| A bundle of suppressed instincts held together by spit and coffee. |
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[Maladict said] "The captain looked bad. What did he try to do to poor little you?"
"Patronize me", Polly said, glaring at the vampire. "Ah.". |
The amount of cross-dressing, as well as the sometime-laugh-out-loud humor and the serious undertones show that Pratchett has read his W. Shakespeare.
Sam Vimes, as always, shows what a good chief can be: intelligent, ahead of the politicians, funny, caring, and tough:
| He [Vimes] thought war was simply another crime, like murder. |
There is also a pleasant cameo from DEATH, who walks beside the heroine (as he walks besides all soldiers) for a while - until she asks him to walk more invisibly (he disappears but keeps talking) and more silently (he shuts up).
Other reviewed books by Terry Pratchett include:
Priscilla Masters, who lives in Shropshire (England) is trained as a nurse and married to a physician. This may explains why her descriptions physical damage to a child's body and an autopsy seem so detailed and authentic, and her protagonist (Inspector Joanna Piercy) seems to balance determination and sympathy.
Set in rural Staffordshire during 2001, the book shows how the foot-and-mouth disease closed down the countryside in 2001, hampering explorations. The book is also an interesting exploration of how even the best of us endanger others by our prejudices. The subplot of Inspector Joanna Piercy's unwanted pregnancy opens the debate on abortion in contrast with cruelty to children.
I look forward to reading one of her Medical Mysteries.
A collection of short (a page or three) essays on different pilgrimages to (opening the book at random) bibliophile George Whitman at his Shakespeare and Company Bookstore in Paris, an all-night peyote ceremony in the mountains of northern Mexico, the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., and Troy. Cousineau's many photos of places and people enliven the text.
As Cousineau says: "Pilgrimage [is] a powerful metaphor for any journey with the purpose of finding something that matters deeply to the traveler. With a deepening focus, keen preparation, attention to the path below our feet, and respect for the destination at hand, it is possible to transform even the most ordinary trip into a sacred journey, a pilgrimage."
Do you ponder why we have global warming, loss of swampland and forest, and the destruction of New Orleans and other communities by Hurricane Katrina? Considerable data for you to ponder are in the images and captions in this report. The first couple of figures show:
The document "using sharpened and enhanced data, shows that humans currently consume 20% more natural resources than the earth can produce, and that populations of terrestrial and marine species dropped by 30%, while freshwater populations plummeted by a spectacular 50%.
"Particularly alarming is our energy footprint -- dominated by our use of fossils fuels such as coal, gas and oil. This is the fastest growing component of the ecological footprint, increasing by nearly 700% between 1961 and 2001."
Elsewhere we have more on the ecological footprint.
A heads-up for "the CEO on his way to a public hearing on an environmental statement", for concerned citizens reading about ecological issues in the newspapers, and for ecology students.
Other books read in Sue Grafton's series include:
B is for Burglar
I is for Innocent
K is for Killer
L is for Lawless
M is for Malice
N is for Noose
O is for Outlaw
R is for Ricochet (my favorite in the series so far)
Q is for Quarry
I especially admire his portrayal of the psychopathic Raymond "Mouse" Alexander, whose wife is having an affair with Easy Rawlins. Rawlings is black, sympathetic to workers and Jews, and possibly a sympathizer with communists. A racist IRS man is after Rawlins for unpaid taxes. Rawlins endures (or enjoys) a series of astonishingly bloody fights as he figures out who is the person committing a series of murders, and how these and many other criminal behaviors relate to solving his tax problem.
As the San Francisco Review of Books has reported: "Mosley is a social critic posing as a mystery writer, much as his character, Easy, is a landlord posing as a maintenance man."
Rawlins is not as funny as the irreverent Kinsey Milhone in Sue Grafton's alphabet series, but even more concerned with the Solomon's Judgments that sometimes each of these detectives makes.
{ August (agosto (see also books on Spanish)) 2005 }
(08.28.2005)
These are the original descriptions of the Norse legends.
See also:
The Dead Bird is a book for kids on coping with death: four little kids find a dead bird in the woods. They touch it as it cools and stiffens. Then they bury it in the woods, sing songs to it, and put flowers on its grave:
| And every day, until they forgot, they went and sang to their little dead bird and put fresh flowers on his grave. |
Which, after people die, is what grownups do with people.
Thanks to Elizabeth Davis, our advisory reviewer, who also brought the much less somber The Gas we Pass and The Queen's Knickers to this reviewer's attention.
| Here we report experiments ... showing that categorizing individuals by race is not inevitable, and supporting an alternative hypothesis: that encoding by race is instead a reversible byproduct of cognitive machinery that evolved to detect coalitional alliances. ... when cues of coalitional affiliation no longer track or correspond to race, subjects markedly reduce the extent to which they categorize others by race, and indeed may cease doing so entirely. Despite a lifetime's experience of race as a predictor of social alliance, less than 4 min of exposure to an alternate social world was enough to deflate the tendency to categorize by race. These results suggest that racism may be a volatile and eradicable construct that persists only so long as it is actively maintained through being linked to parallel systems of social alliance. |
Other books read in Sue Grafton's series include:
B is for Burglar
I is for Innocent
K is for Killer
L is for Lawless
M is for Malice
O is for Outlaw
R is for Ricochet (my favorite in the series so far)
Q is for Quarry
Not quite as funny as Shinta Cho's The Gas we Pass, but almost as informative. For instance, the royal knickers for garden parties are floral, for royal weddings are covered in confetti, and for horse riding have horse shoes, jockey caps, and extra padding. I would like some of the everyday knickers: they have crowns.
Better written than E.G.'s In the Presence of the Enemy (but then, most books are) and more innovative than Ian McEwan's Saturday, this book gets 7 on the British-culture-ometer.
Thanks to Elizabeth Davis, who also brought The Gas we Pass to the attention of your humble reader.
See his The Three-Arched Bridge (also blog) and Spring Flowers, Spring Frost (also blog).
A classic story of the 19th century morality, hypocrisy, and social convention.
Quote from Guy Tillim (photographer) on BBC Radio (The Ticket)
"I don't think you detach yourself emotionally;
you prepare yourself just by being there."
He said this in the context of his photographing the devastation in West Africa. This also applies to Hospice work. (08.13.2005)
| Delighted to read a first American edition of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2005) by J.K. Rowling. |
It's the best one of the Harry Potter series so far. Well plotted: the reader is surprised and yet can never say that significant events were not foreshadowed.
Hard to quote without giving spoilers, but one of my favorite quotes is (p.46 of the American first edition):
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"I don't mean to be rude - " he [Uncle Vernon] began,
in a tone that threatened rudeness in every syllable.
" - yet, sadly, accidentally rudeness occurs alarmingly often," Dumbledore finished the sentence gravely. "Best to say nothing at all, my dear man." |
One wonders why Hermione does not start at once on the six-month task of brewing a vat of Felix Felicis, but then that might just wind up the saga a book early.
More importantly, one wonders who will be Harry's mentor in Book 7 and whether it will be the mysterious
| "R.A.B." |
See elsewhere for our list of the spells of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (08.08.2005)
Delighted that it includes Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go and I hope this one wins.
Inevitably we also have the latest from Ian McEwan, Saturday, which I find weak though others admire it.
The question of speciation (how species form) is central to Ecology, Evolution, and Biodiversity.
Margulis and Sagan claim (front flap) "random mutation ... (never demonstrated) to be the main source of genetic variation, is of only marginal importance. Much more significant is the acquisition of new genomes by symbiotic merger." They close with: "as Wallin said in 1927, 'It is a rather startling proposal that bacteria, the organisms which are popularly associated with disease, may represent the fundamental causative factor in the origins of genetics.' We agree." Margulis may agree, but her book does not convince me.
Margulis weakens her argument by several non-scientific ad hominum attacks on scientists and non-scientists who don't share her view: e.g. (p.36) "Professional evolutionary theorists tend to by abysysmally ignorant [A PHRASE OF AN OUTSIDER WHO IS DIGGING A BIGGER CANYON BETWEEN HER AND THE OTHERS. PRESUJMABLY THIS EXPRESSION MEANS THAT SHE IS A NON-PROFESSIONAL EVOLUTIONARY THEORIST.] of the three sciences - microbiology, paleontology, and symbiosis - most relevant to their work."
The typos (e.g., p. 201: "attempts to nite [DO THEY MEAN 'UNITE'?] the genetic stability") show a carelessness that adds to the apparent weakness of the work.
A rather unpleasant and creepy story about a child murdered and his abusive mother, about the parents of the child he murdered, and about Detective Sergeant Barbara Havers' solving of the crime.
George (being an American) is a non-native writer attempting to write Scotland Yard stories in England's English. She has a strange fascination with forcing British-specific slang into her story. All rather self-consciously, awkwardly, and poorly written.
Her awkwardness with English increases further my enormous respect for the work of the excellent and brilliant Kazuo Ishiguro, as in his Never Let Me Go. "I'm especially admiring how precisely he has captured the voice of the type of young English woman that is his protagonist. It's the voice of the 14-year-olds I went to school with."
The only redeeming feature (the only reason that I listened through In the Presence of the Enemy) was that it was read by the remarkable actor, Derrick Jacobi. I hope they rewarded him appropriately for his sterling service to this otherwise weak novel.
I found no pull into these earlier books, which seem rather flatly written. But I did love his more recent Dirt Music (2002 Booker Prize nominee) and The Riders (1995 Booker Prize nominee).
A strong and sympathetic story of migrant harvesters who strike when the farm bosses cut the wages that they had promised to the harvesters. The setting is in the 1930s apple orchards near the town of Watsonville (near the central coast, Santa Cruz, and Monterey). The protagonists are sympathetic to the low wages and unsanitary working conditions of the harvesters.
As Robert A. Jacoby has commented in his Amazon review of In Dubious Battle: " Steinbeck ... provides us with ... an in-depth character study of several figures worthy of discussion. The characters are intriguing, life-like and hold our attention as they move through their existence. Second, he weaves a picturesque and spellbinding story ... He truly captures the idea of 'suspension of disbelief;' the reader has no doubt he/she is reading about real places and people. Last ... this book ... [is] really a singular question on human nature ... The reader must make up his/her mind at the end on which is the worse crime: [(a)] exploitation of the masses for profit or [(b)] exploitation of the masses for personal power and position, especially at the expense of a friend and ally. "
The point about 'suspension of disbelief' is timely, as my disbelief was just what McEwan fails to achieve with Saturday.
This is one of Steinbeck's core masterpieces, the others being Tortilla Flat (1935), Of Mice and Men (1937), and The Grapes of Wrath (1939).
The more I read Steinbeck, the more I appreciate the content of his stories and the strength of his prose.
{ July (julio (see also books on Spanish)) 2005 }
The problem for me with this book was that the protagonist, Henry Perowne, has such a busy mind, always verbalizing, always trying to get several steps ahead, to be perfect, to win. He is, on the whole, just too good to be true. O.K., so it's Perowne's son, not Perowne, who figures out what to do to defend his family. But apart from that, Perowne is the Man.
McEwan is famous for creepy stories set in domestic life, and seems partial to dismemberment, so it's no big surprise that Saturday has page after page after page of detailed brain surgery. He spent two years watching the neurosurgeon Neil Kitchen at work in the operating theater to get the lingo and the moves.
The details of the surgeries had me cringing and (I admit it) speed-reading. In the end, however, the amount of real-estate that the book gives to Henry Perowne's devotion to surgery does make me a little less skeptical about the ending, where Perowne does the moral equivalent of giving the shirt off his back to a man who might have killed both Perowne and his wife and also raped their daughter.
The lectures on neurosurgery made me nervous that (there being two poets in the family) some lecture on poetic form was coming. As Perowne's friend and colleague Jay says to Perowne in another context:
| No need to give a lecture. |
But in the end, the poetry lecture is a relatively brief and benign, and it's on scansion, given by Perowne's daughter. Meanwhile Perowne:
| can't see how poetry - rather occasional work it appears, like grape picking - can occupy a whole working life, or how such an edifice of reputation and self-regard can rest on so little. |
The most interesting part of the book is Perowne's visit to his mother in a nursing home. She has lost most of her memories, including remembering that he is her son. Her conversation was the less linear than Perowne's, and more intriguing:
| Out here it only looks like a garden, Aunty, but it's the countryside really and you can go for miles. When you walk here you feel lifted up, right high across the counter. I can't manage all them plates without a brush, but God will take care of you and see what you're going to get because it's a swimming race. You'll squeeze through somehow. |
As McEwan is so full of perfect details, I am happy to report he has an error: apparently Perowne and co. should not have been using a single number for Baxter's Glasgow coma score. According to http://www.sfar.org/scores2/glasgow2.html: 'the phrase 'GCS of 11' is essentially meaningless, and it is important to break the figure down into its components, such as E3V3M5 = GCS 11.'
The three components of the score are:
So, what was my own GCS after reading the last page of Saturday? E2V2M4 = GCS 8. If this rating is due entirely to the book, one could say that Saturday causes severe brain injury.
A lively collection of new poetry with an intriguing photo ('Self Portrait in Laguna') by Zebulan Noesser. My favorite poems are:
A good bio from the Nobel Prize folks [http://nobelprize.org/literature/laureates/1995/heaney-bio.html] says that Heaney was:
| born into a society deeply divided along religious and political lines, one which was doomed moreover to suffer a quarter-century of violence, polarization and inner distrust. This had the effect not only of darkening the mood of Heaney's work in the 1970s, but also of giving him a deep preoccupation with the question of poetry's responsibilities and prerogatives in the world, since poetry is poised between a need for creative freedom within itself and a pressure to express the sense of social obligation felt by the poet as citizen. |
Other books read in Sue Grafton's series include:
B is for Burglar
I is for Innocent
K is for Killer
M is for Malice
O is for Outlaw
R is for Ricochet (my favorite in the series so far)
Q is for Quarry
In M is for Malice we lost a potential lover for Kinsey. Here we lose a potential girl pal. But it's the electrocution death of an older man in his pool that unlocks Kinsey's detective route to expose the killer.
Other books read in Sue Grafton's series include:
B is for Burglar
I is for Innocent
M is for Malice
O is for Outlaw
R is for Ricochet (my favorite in the series so far)
Q is for Quarry
Despite that, it's an interesting look back on the life of a now-elderly woman who had endured much physical and emotional suffering, especially as a girl before she escaped to the USA. It's also a cautionary tale on how Alzheimer's patients may benefit the most from talking to some who speaks the language of their childhood.
| temple priest, monk, pilgrim, monastery teacher, scholar or author, therapist or healer, social activist, worldly sage or hermit, and lay teacher. |
In exploring these awakenings, she spoke of a Colombian peace community that she had visited:
| in a corner of Colombia that is extremely fertile and strategically located. There is an enormous amount of desire and green for this area from all quarters, including multinational corporations. People who want the resources and control are doing what they can to forcibly remove those people who live there ... who have been settled on the land for a long, long time. |
She spoke of visiting a Peace Community (La Union) in the area that was holding the land peacefully, and how in that community that might seem impoverished to people from the USA, but how in many ways the people of the community were less grasping than people in the USA. She mentioned the need of her delegation to be especially mindful of their speech, because of the intolerance and imprisonment of so many in Colombia. She also observed:
| I was also struck by the power of speech in the arts. ... We visited a group, a collective that lives and works together, that performs street theater about what is going on in Colombia. ... We saw one of their pieces about the 'disappeared' enacted right in a poor neighborhood. In Colombia there are thousands of people who are taken away without a trace. Usually there is no body every found. The families mourn their loss and never find out the truth of what happened, nor have any closure. ... The theater collective put on a show that was filled with strong images and symbols. ... One of the strongest images was of a mother looking for her college-age son who had been taken. A person, carrying a big basket, comes to her wanting to sell back his bones. The bones of her son. |
A few months after the Abbess visited the Peace Community, there was a massacre in which one of the founders and leaders was killed, as well as members of his family including children as young as 18 months.
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Finished reading
Hand to Earth: Andy Goldsworthy Sculpture (1979-1990) (1997)
by Andy Goldsworthy.
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My favorite in the series so far remains R is for Ricochet, perhaps because of the liveliness of the characters.
Other books read in Sue Grafton's series include:
B is for Burglar
I is for Innocent
O is for Outlaw
R is for Ricochet (my favorite in the series so far)
Q is for Quarry
My favorite in the series so far remains R is for Ricochet, perhaps because of the liveliness of the characters.
Other books read in Sue Grafton's series include:
B is for Burglar
I is for Innocent
O is for Outlaw
R is for Ricochet (my favorite in the series so far)
Lightning flash -- in the bottom of the basin water someone forgot to throw out |
Haiku interleave with senryu (whose misty borderlands the editors thankfully do not strive to distinguish). This is a favorite by Margaret Chula:
fifteen rocks something concrete in the Zen garden [Reprinted by permission of Margaret Chula. © 2005 by Margaret Chula.] |
After the haibun, the book reviews begin with William J. Higginson's review of Cid Corman and Kamaike Susumu's translation, Back Roads to Far Towns: Bashō's Travel Journal. Higginson recommends the book, yet places it in useful comparison with other translations. Then David Burleigh reviews Paul Muldoon's Sixty Instant Messages to Tom Moore. I've attended a poetry reading and discussion by Paul Muldoon and have seen how he revels in the sounds of language, as illustrated in the three-line poems - no one wastes breath on debating whether these are actually haiku.
It's a delight, especially in SM's deadpan delivery. Along the lines of 'it takes one to know one', Steve Martin shows us how people with idiosyncrasies get through life in remarkably good ways despite themselves. His hero, the definitely non-average Daniel Pecan Cambridge, is brilliant (possibly IQ of 190) in terms of calculating (for their calming effect) huge magic squares in his head, and setting himself audacious tasks like not using any word with the letter E during a 1-week road trip with a young woman and a baby.
The cause of his idiosyncrasies ties back in barely glimpsed memories, to his physical abuse by his father. The most important gift of this book is that Daniel does not pass along the grief to some other child. He internalizes it, deals with it through his coping strategies, and does no harm.
In addition to being clever and modest (an unusual combination, I think), he is really observant, Really generous, and REALLY good with the pre-verbal kid. His obsession with have the same number of watts of light burning in his house at all times is finally laid to rest by his ultimate girlfriend by the expedient of giggling while she turns lights on and off.
(07.14.2005)
Gilbert is a little off-kilter at a reading, but this book of poems, his first in the decade since The Great Fires, writes of the joys and pleasure to him of his Romantic life.
The poems (even those by Wendy Cope and Billy Collins) are weak, but the Comments section is good, especially Kay Ryan's "I go to AWP" (her report on the recent AWP Annual Conference in Vancouver), and Michael Lewis' "How to make a killing from poetry" which includes advice and examples on six topics such as 'Think About Your Core Message.'
The letter are also funny (and presumably invented), including one that insults Poetry in a Franz Wright way and in the next paragraph asks them to consider a batch of poems for publication.
Vernon God Little (2003)
Pretty good. 7/10 on the Blog-ometer.
Not as laugh-out-loud funny nor as creative as Tom Robbins' "Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas," which was my #4 hit in my 2002 best books list. But, like "Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas," Vernon God Little has flashes of self-induced surrealism interwoven with gleeful social commentary. Along the way, he has one of his characters (an abusive psychiatrist) give a definition of personality disorder that fits most of the story's participants (and possibly politicians such as George W. Bush):
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"These personalities thrive on instant gratification - they're unable to tolerate the least frustration of their desires. They are facile manipulators, and they have a unique self-regard which makes them oblivious to the rights and needs of others." "Am I correct in thinking these aren't mental illnesses as such, they don't involve any diminution of responsibility on the sufferer's part?" "Quite correct. Personality disorders are maladjustments of character, deviations in the mechanisms of reward attainment."
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Why Vernon's middle name? In the grand finale, Vernon grants everyone what they think is their wish, as they think. In the process, you discover just who he had been protecting and why. As I am a fan of justice, this book satisfies me.
I thought 'DBC' meant 'dumb but cute' though a poet friend tells me that "Australian DBC (stands for Dirty But Clean - I swear I did not make this up!) Pierre [is] a pseudonym for Peter Warren Finlay".
So much better than the unpleasant 2004 Booker Prize winner, The Line of Beauty. by Alan Hollinghurst.
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Finished listening to unabridged CD of
The History of Classical Music (1997)
by Richard Fawkes.
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Gladwell writes about the characteristics of social epidemics: their contagion, the big effects of little causes, and that changes can happen in a dramatic moment - the point when the change tips over.
And he claims that the place where an epidemic tips is a function of:
See also blink!.
Good beach reading; short chapters (one per movie); journalist breezy style. The personalities of Wilder and so many of his actors and actresses come through, some of them self-revealed by words and actions in ways that show them as good, and others as incredibly egocentric narrow people.
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Related pages:
Books on Buddhism.
Books on Learning Spanish.
Poetry - Learn How to Write Your Own.
Forests of California and Trees of the World.
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