2010 Books Thus Far
If you keep a resolution for a year, you've resolved. If you keep it past that, it's a habit. Let's here it for habits. Here are some highlights from my reading list for the first two months of 2010.
I started the year off with the very heavy, oft quoted, rarely read Democracy in America by Alexis De Tocqueville. There's a lot of very good predictions in here, most notably that around 100 years later (1938) Russia and the United States would be the two biggest powers on the planet. Less dramatically, he accurately predicts the coming US Civil War and its causes. You do have to wade through many chapters about customs that appear irrelevant today. It definitely can be tedious to read, but when he's right he's very very right. See also his sections on the American conformity and the tyranny of the majority.
The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid has the shame of being the first book by Bill Bryson that I found to be boring. His childhood memoir was ok, I guess, except that his childhood was sort of boring, or at least the retelling of it was. Oh well, nobody bats 1.000.
While we're on the topic of memoirs, Jack Kerouac's retelling of his travels through America, On the Road, was far more fascinating than I expected it to be. Quite frankly, I suspect I would loathe most of the characters in this travelogue if I met them in person, seeing as they were mostly irresponsible people who never planned anything. Of course, they seemed to have a much better time than I do most of the time and reading about them was greatly enjoyable, but I'm thinking that being the kind of person who abandons spouse and child on a whim to travel makes for a better read than a lifestyle.
On a lighter note, I knocked off some trashy Simon R. Green novels, notably the 2nd and 3rd books in the "James Bond in a magical world" series "The Secret History." Good stupid fun, with side trips to the Nightside, huzzah!
Every single one of Stephen King's author bios (and I've read almost all of them) mentions his wife, the novelist Tabitha King. I'd never actually read any of her books myself though, until I borrowed her first novel, Small World, from my father-in-law. That's some very creepy stuff; in many ways it's creeper than anything Steve-O wrote after, say, 1982 or so. They must have some fascinating family conversations, eh?
Here's a weird one. A past library bag sale turned up an old circa 1983 biography of George Lucas called Skywalking: The Life and Films of George Lucas, written by Dave Pollock. Released just prior to premiere of Return of the Jedi, it chronicles Lucas's life and films to that point. Among the 'revelations': Lucas hates actors. He hates writing dialogue and doesn't think he's good at it. He doesn't understand women at all and has trouble writing female characters. Once he thinks of an idea he never lets it go, for better or for worse. Hrm... gee, those may have been big news in 1983, but anyone who saw the prequels probably figured that out all on their own. Favorite bit: "Lucas wanted to make C3PO have a Brooklyn accent, or possibly a Jamaican accent. He was talked out of it, but knowing George will undoubtedly save the idea for a future film." Ladies and gentlemen, imagine C3PO as Jar Jar Binks! Yech. Anyway, from a film perspective the book is pretty interesting. There's an updated edition for those who are so inclined.
I figured that after a semester of doing a classical radio show I should figure out what I was doing, so based on a recommendation from Jen (opera singer and spouse of a Cleveland Orchestra cellist) I read
Bach, Beethoven and the Boys: Music History As It Ought To Be Taught, which was vastly entertaining but not particularly edifying. pianodan recommend I check out Classical Music for Dummies which was significantly more useful from an education standpoint and nearly as entertaining. It also came with a CD with several representative works. One chapter handily broke each track on the CD to the second and pointed out how those segments corresponded to various parts of a symphony; that chapter alone was worth the price of admission.
Having seen the movie earlier in the year, I picked up Cormac McCarthy's masterpiece The Road, which I read in one emotionally grueling evening. It's undoubtedly a great book and a rewarding read and I certainly enjoyed it, but I'd be just as happy never to see a copy of it again. Is that a recommendation? It tries to be.
My first attempt to read through William Shakespeare's poem Venus & Adonis got sidetracked at the halfway point by other books. I tried again and read it through in one setting, and about the best thing I have to say for it is that I've read it and I don't have to read it again. Sometimes I wonder if I'm wired for poetry at all; it's so rare that I find anything I like. For the Shakespeare proejct, another poem, the Rape of Lucrece, is next, but after that I've got a nice string of comedies to get back into the groove.
It's not like I haven't read historical fiction about the Warsaw Ghetto Rising before, but for whatever reason I decided to read The Wall. This was by John Hersey, whose book Hiroshima I read last year. In some ways it was an echo of those prior books, especially Mila 18, which makes sense as both books feature fictional versions of real people. This one imagines a single person writing vast records in the nature of the Oyneg Shabbos reports, and excerpts said records after the fact. It's horrifying in much the same way that The Road is, and I mean that as a compliment.
I started the year off with the very heavy, oft quoted, rarely read Democracy in America by Alexis De Tocqueville. There's a lot of very good predictions in here, most notably that around 100 years later (1938) Russia and the United States would be the two biggest powers on the planet. Less dramatically, he accurately predicts the coming US Civil War and its causes. You do have to wade through many chapters about customs that appear irrelevant today. It definitely can be tedious to read, but when he's right he's very very right. See also his sections on the American conformity and the tyranny of the majority.
The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid has the shame of being the first book by Bill Bryson that I found to be boring. His childhood memoir was ok, I guess, except that his childhood was sort of boring, or at least the retelling of it was. Oh well, nobody bats 1.000.
While we're on the topic of memoirs, Jack Kerouac's retelling of his travels through America, On the Road, was far more fascinating than I expected it to be. Quite frankly, I suspect I would loathe most of the characters in this travelogue if I met them in person, seeing as they were mostly irresponsible people who never planned anything. Of course, they seemed to have a much better time than I do most of the time and reading about them was greatly enjoyable, but I'm thinking that being the kind of person who abandons spouse and child on a whim to travel makes for a better read than a lifestyle.
On a lighter note, I knocked off some trashy Simon R. Green novels, notably the 2nd and 3rd books in the "James Bond in a magical world" series "The Secret History." Good stupid fun, with side trips to the Nightside, huzzah!
Every single one of Stephen King's author bios (and I've read almost all of them) mentions his wife, the novelist Tabitha King. I'd never actually read any of her books myself though, until I borrowed her first novel, Small World, from my father-in-law. That's some very creepy stuff; in many ways it's creeper than anything Steve-O wrote after, say, 1982 or so. They must have some fascinating family conversations, eh?
Here's a weird one. A past library bag sale turned up an old circa 1983 biography of George Lucas called Skywalking: The Life and Films of George Lucas, written by Dave Pollock. Released just prior to premiere of Return of the Jedi, it chronicles Lucas's life and films to that point. Among the 'revelations': Lucas hates actors. He hates writing dialogue and doesn't think he's good at it. He doesn't understand women at all and has trouble writing female characters. Once he thinks of an idea he never lets it go, for better or for worse. Hrm... gee, those may have been big news in 1983, but anyone who saw the prequels probably figured that out all on their own. Favorite bit: "Lucas wanted to make C3PO have a Brooklyn accent, or possibly a Jamaican accent. He was talked out of it, but knowing George will undoubtedly save the idea for a future film." Ladies and gentlemen, imagine C3PO as Jar Jar Binks! Yech. Anyway, from a film perspective the book is pretty interesting. There's an updated edition for those who are so inclined.
I figured that after a semester of doing a classical radio show I should figure out what I was doing, so based on a recommendation from Jen (opera singer and spouse of a Cleveland Orchestra cellist) I read
Bach, Beethoven and the Boys: Music History As It Ought To Be Taught, which was vastly entertaining but not particularly edifying. pianodan recommend I check out Classical Music for Dummies which was significantly more useful from an education standpoint and nearly as entertaining. It also came with a CD with several representative works. One chapter handily broke each track on the CD to the second and pointed out how those segments corresponded to various parts of a symphony; that chapter alone was worth the price of admission.
Having seen the movie earlier in the year, I picked up Cormac McCarthy's masterpiece The Road, which I read in one emotionally grueling evening. It's undoubtedly a great book and a rewarding read and I certainly enjoyed it, but I'd be just as happy never to see a copy of it again. Is that a recommendation? It tries to be.
My first attempt to read through William Shakespeare's poem Venus & Adonis got sidetracked at the halfway point by other books. I tried again and read it through in one setting, and about the best thing I have to say for it is that I've read it and I don't have to read it again. Sometimes I wonder if I'm wired for poetry at all; it's so rare that I find anything I like. For the Shakespeare proejct, another poem, the Rape of Lucrece, is next, but after that I've got a nice string of comedies to get back into the groove.
It's not like I haven't read historical fiction about the Warsaw Ghetto Rising before, but for whatever reason I decided to read The Wall. This was by John Hersey, whose book Hiroshima I read last year. In some ways it was an echo of those prior books, especially Mila 18, which makes sense as both books feature fictional versions of real people. This one imagines a single person writing vast records in the nature of the Oyneg Shabbos reports, and excerpts said records after the fact. It's horrifying in much the same way that The Road is, and I mean that as a compliment.