The Historian

by Elizabeth Kostova

I tend to avoid most contemporary writers. I have several reasons: publishing houses, whether they admit it or not, are ultimately about profit and this has created an institutionalized push for predictability, copycat prose, and bland reading. But every now and then a writer with a spark of individuality tends to slip through. Elizabeth Kostova has that spark. And if she's lucky, the publishing houses won't put it out anytime soon.

Praise aside, Kostova writes a slow, methodical prose that is quite the opposite of someone like Dan Brown. This can be exasperating at times, particularly given the highly tense situations she creates for her charaters in The Historian. She is precise. Most settings are described in the perfect amount of detail to create a masterful image in the mind of the reader. This can be a challenge for all but the most Dickensian of readers. But it is a tremendous advantage when it comes to creating characters. She gives the goldilocks amount of information - just right - when it comes to giving her characters life. She doesn't tell too much or too little, which is hard yet necessary in a work built on drama and characterization as opposed to action.

The Historian is a tremendous book. It's writing must have been tremendous given its length and attention to detail, and reading all 650+ pages is a bit tremendous too. However, the book admirably takes on the challenge of three separate narratives presented simultaneously. There's a student, his mentor, and the student's daughter later in life. Oh, and a book-obsessed Dracula too. It sounds weird, maybe a bit confusing even, but Kostova pulls it off with so much grace and finesse that this book becomes a page-turning thriller despite the fact that it was written to be a melodrama/travelogue/ode-to-a-parent.

So without saying anything more about this book, except that it has Dracula, which is really quite cool when you think about it because nobody of note has taken the infamous Dracula and given him any depth or significance since good old Bram Stoker (though many have tried), I encourage you to go find a copy and read it right away.

This is one of those books that lets you know if you're a good reader or not. I'm sure that sounds pretentious. Nonetheless it's true. If you make it through The Historian, then it's safe to say that you are a good reader even if you started as a poor, uninterested reader. So ask yourself this: How many books can turn you into a good reader if you're not one already? This is one of them.

Califia's Daughters

by Leigh Richards

It's the future. Bad things have happened. Men are scarce, literally. It's a 12:1 female to male ratio on account of an unexplained genetically mutated virus. Women are in charge and they're trying to rebuild civilization one agro-community at a time. The premise is a bit far-fetched; though after seeing "Children of Men," my willing suspension of disbelief came a bit easier.

This is one of those books that I particularly enjoyed yet am hesitant to recommend. I stayed up late - 4am - one night just so I could finish it. I felt at times uncomfortable with the psychological makeup of the protagonist, especially in the latter half of the book when the heroine undergoes a brutal and sadistic initiation and consequently becomes brutal and sadistic. But it was powerful and necessary and more real than most authors are comfortable writing. The characters, particularly Dian the protagonist, were full and carefully considered and the plot was feasible. And that, when it comes right down to it, is all you need for a good read.

But. The book was painful to get into. It took me 3 separate starts which usually results in complete abandonment. But the author is one of my favorites (writing under a pen name), and she had earned my triple-try. However, my rough start was due to a poorly conceived beginning and a lack of necessary background information to get going. There were several other inexplicable elements that normally would have prompted me to cast this tome aside for the next one of my list.

Faux pas 1: Dian roams about with a pack of loyal, highly trainable dogs. Yes, I realize that Dian is symbolic of the ancient Greek goddess and yes I realize that the dogs are a necessary part of the symbolism. But in this case it just didn't fit. The dog conceit was taken too far and explained particularly poorly as some sort of feminine mystical bond; it was at odds with the relationships built and sustained in the rest of the book. Faux pas 2: Dian engages in a fascinating relationship with an enigmatic male and his young son, yet this relationship is completely abandoned in the second half of the book and never satisfyingly brought to a conclusion at the meager end. Faux pas 3: The second half of the book is built on the need for Dian to go and examine an isolated agro-community that wants to ally with her own small group. The need for her journey is built on a huge secret mystery that turns out to be rather insignificant, especially since the resolution to this huge secret takes a scant 2-3 pages to resolve and barely transitions into the second part of Dian's journey and her dark transition. This whole situation is an example of bad planning that tries to hide under solid writing. In this book, it simply doesn't work. Faux pas 4: The meager end leaves simply too many loose threads to leave the reader happy. I enjoy obscure endings, particularly when the author has prepared me. I have no problem with the notion that Dian's future is uncertain. I do have a problem with the complete ambiguity surrounding nearly every other character in the book.

Laurie R. King is a great writer, and this book has more than just glimpses of her talent. But somewhere along the way, perhaps in the editing shop, something went wrong and it shows. The book is worth picking up, but if you can't get into it in one or even two tries then it's probably time to put it down and move on to something different, or maybe just a different book by the same author.

Not What but How

I believe that reading is an essentially solitary activity. However, this is a fairly new perspective on the act of reading, and I'm sure that reading was not that way in the past. In fact, I know that Charles Dickens owed much of his enormous popularity, especially in his own lifetime when he was a true mega-star, to the social nature of reading in the Victorian era. Reading then was a family affair. Whether it is an overly-romanticized image or not, there is tremendous historical truth in the image of the pater familias reading aloud and directing each family member to take a turn. I suspect that Victorian readers were better readers than today's readers simply because the modus operandi of the reading act led to infinite possibilities.

But times have changed. T.V. has ruined us all. And books have become a private affair. I enjoy the privacy of reading and have no problem with the reality of the solitary reader. But I fear the prospect of solitary thinkers, and I suspect that solitary reading may lead inexorably to solitary thinking. It's not that solitary thinking is inherently bad so much as it is that solitary thinking is finite. And while I may never run out of books to read, I may very easily run out of thoughts to think. And that is a truly frightening prospect.

Wicked

Wicked by Gregory Maguire

I tend to start off most posts by telling people how amazing such-and-such a book is and how they should read it when they get a chance. And in some respects Wicked is no different. It was a pretty amazing book. But I’m not sure that I feel comfortable telling people to go read it. Since my new occupation is a high school English teacher, I have been thinking about books in terms of being interesting to a high school reader. And while the story in Wicked might be interesting to a high school reader, Maguire’s prose would elude most high school students, most college undergraduates, and probably a good portion of the general reading public. Which is not to say that it’s bad. It isn’t. It’s wonderful, but it’s not the type of thing that I would recommend to everybody. Not only do you have to have a stellar vocabulary (or be comfortable reading with a good pocket dictionary close at hand like me), you have to be willing to wade through a tremendous amount of ambiguous narrative to find where Maguire is tying to go with his characters.

Unfortunately I don’t think Maguire knew where he wanted his characters to go as he wrote. This indecision plagues the narrative, which is, since I haven’t mentioned it yet, the narrative of the Wicked Witch of the West. There is one truly great section of the book, which is what prompted me to write about it at all. In the middle of the book, Elphaba (the real name of our green-skinned heroine) decides to drop out of college and become an underground freedom fighter (aka terrorist depending on the spin). The event that drove her to this choice is laid out beautifully. Her life as a fiercely independent underground communist-style conspirator is one of the most inspirational and heart-breaking pieces of writing I’ve read. The whole ‘Wizard of Oz’ gimmick aside, the middle of Wicked is truly amazing writing. It’s hard to recommend one part of a book that is so utterly dependent on everything else, but if it were possible I’d tell folks to read Part III, City of Emeralds. It truly is beautiful.

Part of the ambiguity problem I mentioned above has to deal with the metaphysical direction the book takes in the end. Maguire maps out a complex metaphysics that would have given the book a whole different flavor if he had just elucidated it more in the first 300 pages instead of the last 50 or so. I felt disconcerted at this entirely new direction and frustrated by the meager hint-bones he threw out earlier in the book. I appreciate writers who play around for the first 100 pages or so just to make sure they have the reader’s attention. Umberto Eco is a great example of this type of writer. The first 100 pages of The Name of the Rose are absurdly boring and academic, but he goes on to deliver several big time homeruns in the rest of the book. The big hits in Wicked come, as I mentioned, in the middle of the book, and the ending, to follow the metaphor, is a failed bunt. And I don’t really want to lead readers astray by recommending a failed bunt. Sometimes it’s fun watch a great baseball game with a lousy ending, and Wicked is no different. The middle innings are grand, worth the price of admission to me at least, but you’ll go home disappointed. And there’s a helluva lot of other games out there that’ll keep you riveted the whole way through.

The Final Solution

Posted by Phat Daddy

the final solution

the final solution by michael chabon
i thought sherlock holmes was dead - first the sly ol dirty bastard takes a nosedive off reichenbach falls - or so we're led to believe - then he pops up again fully healed - then he works for the british in 'his last bow' and retires gracefully to the countryside - but not so fast my sherlockian smerlockians - chabon picks up the archetype years later as a physically ailin but mentally sailin (like on smooth caribbean waters) old geeser chillin in the south of england and solving crimes like only he can - arthritis included

there's tons of authors out there who picked up on sherlock holmes and played with his past and his future - but not many who can do it convincingly - or well - in their own style - too many writers try to imitate conan doyle - and the rest take sherlock too far out of his contextual milieu to make their stuff worth the time of day necessary to sit down and read the tripe - but chabon picks up the character farther down the road than most - leaves just enough essentials to satisfy the notoriously itchy baskervillians - and puts his own inimitable style on one of the central figures of the western canon - (yeah harold bloom i'm talkin to ya)

the writing is typical chabon - murky but rewarding - while this bad boy is short it's not the type of thing you're gonna sail through - sure you might finish it in one sitting but then you'd miss out on the grace and the convoluted eloquence that won chabon the damn pulitzer (in cavalier and klay mentioned somewhere recently but damn near impossible to wade through without smokin a dubee or two first) - this is the best chabon i've ever read - its the only chabon i've ever read - and i would highly recommend it - there's only one or two writers who can do sherlock well - chabon is one of them - so read the book already muthafukas

Watchmen

By Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons
1986-1987

Watchmen is a comic. Or, if you prefer, a graphic novel. Despite these unsophisticated labels, Watchmen has won the Hugo Award and was named one of Time magazine’s top 100 novels of the century. You can find copies in most major bookstores, in addition to every comic shop on earth. Watchmen is the story that forced the “literary” world to start paying attention to comics, hence the origin of the term “graphic novel.” If Watchmen hadn’t paved the way, so the story goes, then the comic-world would never have exploded on society quite the way it has. The most obvious effect of comic’s increased appeal can be found in the movies. Without the precedent set by Watchmen, Batman the movie would never have come into existence, based as it was on Frank Miller’s psychologically dark comic stories of the dark knight. And without Batman there never would have been a market for the numerous comic-related movies such as X-Men, Spiderman, the Fantastic Four, the much-maligned Hulk movie from academy-award winning director Ang Lee, or even Sin City. Comics drive the plot of Kevin Smith’s Chasing Amy, while the mythology of the comic world is central to M. Night Shamyalan’s Unbreakable. Comics, like it or not, are mainstream.

Just how mainstream are we talking about here? If we want to follow this comic resurgence into more tenuous territory, we might argue that Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay would never have been written (or won the Pulitzer Prize), based as it is on comics and super-heroes, because there would not have been enough interest in comics to warrant such an undertaking by a novelist. Of course, such an argument isn’t exactly convincing, but it suggests that comics and graphic novels have clawed their way into the realm of literature and solidified their position in that strange phenomenon called culture.

All because of Watchmen?

I was skeptical. Friends had been recommending Watchmen for years. And while I had been collecting comics since I was a kid, and while I loved Alan Moore’s work in Swamp Thing and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (the comic, not the movie), I just didn’t believe that a comic could hold it’s own against 100 Years of Solitude or The Odyssey. Alan Moore, brilliant as he is, is no Hemingway. After reading Watchmen, I can honestly say that Moore isn’t Hemingway, at all. . . . He’s more like Faulkner, with a touch of Jung, and a little MacGyver thrown in for good effect. Watchmen is amazing.

It’s a critique of the absurdity of superheroes. It’s an insight into the fucked-up psychology of vigilantes. It’s about the connection between power and evil, despite good intentions. It’s about the value of building relationships even when there are more “important” things to be doing. It’s a weird combination of Charlotte Bronte, Albert Camus, Charlie Brown, and Walker Texas Ranger. It’s disturbing: if you’ve ever read Native Son by Richard Wright, then you’ll have an idea of what I’m talking about. It’s not always a comfortable read, but it’s definitely a rewarding read. And it’s worth taking a day or two off and reading it cover-to-cover. But be warned – reading Watchmen takes concentration.

So, based on all my rambling and drivel, you’ve decided to pick up a copy of Watchmen and read it next weekend. Great! A warning though: it might be a little jarring. You might be put off at first; you might be tempted to put it down, call me a raving lunatic, and swear off graphic novels forever. So here’s a few tips for reading. Reading a graphic novel is entirely different from reading a book. Obvious, right? Sure, but it still took me a while to really figure out how to read Watchmen. The characters are as complete as any you’ll find in a work of “literature.” The plot is just as complex and mysterious as an Alfred Hitchcock movie. And to really read a graphic novel in an effective way, you have to combine the habits of reading a novel and the habits of watching a movie. It doesn’t work to read just the dialogue bubbles, and it’s hardly helpful just to look at the pictures. You need to train your eyes to do both simultaneously, and for a lot of readers this means slowing down. So…slow down. One study said that the average museum-goer looks at a painting for an average of three seconds. Three seconds! That’s ridiculous. And it’s just as ridiculous to read the words of a graphic novel and ignore the art. Slow down and pay attention to the pictures. They’re just as crucial to what’s going on as the words. If you train your eyes to read Watchmen effectively, I guarantee you’ll dig it.

DaVinci's Code

by Dan Brown

Okay, so I reread _The DaVinci Code_ right around the time the movie came out. I was trying to recapture the hype and excitement from my first reading when I jammed through the book in a couple of days. The second time around, I noticed that the book was poorly written. Brown has the same style as Michael Crichton - fast-paced, short chapters, explanatory dialogue - but it just comes off as a second-rate. Somehow this style of writing seems to flow when Crichton does it, but it comes off as choppy and forced in Brown's books.

However, the _The DaVinci Code_ still contains an exciting story with awesome suspence. I knew who the Teacher was from the beginning, but I kept reading a few times to get to the point when Langdon and Sophie figure it out. And I had forgotten all the details about the grail that are revealed in the book, and it was cool to read all those mini-history lessons again. After rereading the book I was surprised at some of the renewed world uproar over the presentation of religion in the book. Without citing an exact page # I think Brown makes it very clear that his antagonists are not representative of the Catholic church. They are rogue agents with separate agendas, whose faith waivers in light of worldly temptations - a common narrative device in most parables.

I do see the conflict with the central Christian narrative. If Jesus was married it would challenge the foundation of Western history in which women have been marginalized. But that ignores the fact that women had limited roles in Greco-Roman culture, which was highly influential on the growing Christian movement. We don't tell youngsters the of the wretched status of women in Athens when we teach about the origins of democracy. However, the notion that the sacred feminine has been marginalized by popular monotheism seems to be a pretty valid critique. I think that's the main argument of the protagonists in the text, and it only takes a cursory glance at Western history to corroborate that argument on a religious and historical level. When read like that, it's almost as if all the religious people who feel threatened by the story really feel that masculine authority is being threatened. Of course the recent conflict was never presented in quite that way by the press, but that seems to be what it boils down to on a philosphical level. In the faith level, no one wants to have the central story of their spiritual existence tampered with. Christians have been arguing about that type of thing for years. For example, one way to understand the split between Judaism and Christianity is to think of it as different branches of the same story-tree. And it's very easy to resort to violence based on adherence to different details of the story.

Of Human Bondage

by W. Somerset Maughm

It's crazy how something completely irrational, like an obsession with a wretched human, can become so binding as to completely immobolize human consciousness. As a reader I began to feel bound to the masochistic tendencies of Mildred, the main character's dastardly love-interest. Every 50 pages or so, Mildred would pop up and you just knew that she was going to wreck Philip's life. No matter how smart Philip thought he was and no matter how over Mildred he claimed to be, she would appear and in minutes he would turn into a snivelling shell of humanity completely "bound" to her manipulative whims.

I've often wondered if the author is trying to argue that mature relationships are only possible when a soul has been obliterated and when that same soul comes to expect nothing more than a comfortable normativity. Only then can one love? Only then can one appreciate a relationship? That seems to be how the books ends, even though it is a "happy ending." On the other hand I think that Maugham is dead-on in his analysis. Most people give up their dreams for companionship. They give up the wanderlust for a steady outpouring of affection (and yes nookie too). There just never seems to be that middle path. Of course I could be biased, but I think that Philip should have traveled to Spain. Sally might have waited; after all, she knows him better than anyone. Plus, Spain represented the mystery of existence, and Philip never even got to explore that mystery. He abandoned the search for existential answers for the love of an amazing woman. Crazy!

Perhaps I've misread the the last 200 pages, but the travesty of bondage seems much broader than the malicious Mildred. The travesty of bondage is being chained to a constricted, if comfy, concept of normal life. Is Mildred really any worse than the life represented by Sally? I don't know, but it's worth considering if you ever get the chance to read _Of Human Bondage_.

Peace.

Nausea

Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo

Nausea

There were times reading this book that I felt physically ill. There was more than one occasion where I had to put the book down and breathe shallowly so as not to vomit. Probably the worst was when Johnny finally figured out how to communicate and tell the doctors what he wanted, only to be told that it was against regulations. After all the struggle and anguish of becoming human again, which was very real to me as a reader, it was mind-blowing how easily Johnny's humanity was stripped away.

And that I think is the point of the book - war strips away humanity. War can make soldiers inhuman, but the more importantly war can affect the humanity of those whose job it is to be humane, i.e. doctors, nurses, etc. And if war can change doctors for the worse, imagine what it can do to everyone else. It's not as if the doctor or Johnny's first nurse, the one who cradled him against her breast without realizing his attempt to communicate, were actively malevolent. No, they thought they were doing good. But that's because war is a tricky thing. It convinces you that you are working for the common good when you are doing the opposite. The US military does this all the time with soldiers. When you join you have to be broken down and the built back up. At least the military is honest about it. But what about the family who lives in the suburbs. How does war affect them? What happens when they are broken down? When they forget about the weapons of mass destruction? When they start to believe that America needs to make the world safe for democracy through war? What happens to the people who think like this? What happens to you and me?

One other thing about the book affected me. Many of Johnny's memories were sad. But for Johnny they stopped being sad and became sacred. His everyday life became sacred. It became sacred in retrospect. Compared to war, a broken heart was something to be cherished. Compared to mutilation, growing apart from your father was a step to manhood. Compared to having your face blown off, arguments with your best friend became the spice of life. Trumbo definitely forces you to think more deliberately and to live more deliberately. For me, that made this book one of the best I've ever read.

Holy Compensatory Religion Batman!!!

The Alchemist by Paulo Coehlo
It's difficult to like a book that tells you so many things contrary to what you believe you know. America is a very practical country, not a very dreamy or mysterious one. After all, the philosophy of pragmatism arose here and nowhere else. As children we're taught that hard work is rewarded, and in many cases we're taught that hard work brings happiness. Even if we don't abandon our dreams or our personal legends, we're often forced to modify them in the name of practicality. And to read a book that calls these so-called truths into question in the name of magic, alchemy, or religion can be quite provocative.

No one feels comfortable when called upon to abandon the security and the surety of daily life for the sake of mystery. Not many will even admit to hearing such a call, and quite often such calls are ignored altogether. On the rare occasions when such calls are not ignored, in the best of our pragmatic heritage we often modify the calls to suit our needs or our wants. We tend to follow our dreams in our own unique and inspirational ways. We rarely follow the dream itself, choosing instead the dream insofar as it can be shaped by our immediate needs and wants. But _The Alchemist_ wants us to follow the dream itself, trusting in providence to guide us safely. It's a difficult thing to do, just as liking this book is difficult for a seasoned skeptic like myself.

The story builds to a crescendo as the boy summons the creative forces of the universe itself. We learn that miracles can only be performed by the hand that wrote all. We learn that if we only have enough faith or try hard enough we will discover that our soul and the soul of God are one. We learn that miracles can be performed by alchemists and the pure-at-heart. We learn that it is possible to communicate with God through prayer and love.

And we learn that we too can be financially rewarded by following our dreams and having faith.

What a letdown!

Aside from being a bit trite, I thought the book was okay until the end when it became the prequel to _The Prayer of Jabez_. It almost sounded like a late-night get-rich-quick commercial. And it had such promise, too. After all the amazing things that happen to the boy I was surprised, and a bit frustrated, when the book ended with a chest of gold. (The promise of love part I rather liked...because I'm a romantic. Plus, isn't it every man's dream to have a woman who will wait for him to fulfill his destiny before coming back to her? Ha! I'm also a realist.) What better way to celebrate mystery than to become one with the forces of nature. What better way to ruin it than with pillaged treasure. Still though, it would be amazing to see the pyramids.