Debut

Hi!

I'd like to say thanks to Erica for the warm welcome, albeit two months ago, and make the proverbial leap from my comfort zone of random blogging to something a bit more intellectual and constructive.

While I mull the topic of good books I've read around in my head for a bit, I'd like to throw out to the masses the series written by Joel C. Rosenberg. For those of you who haven't read his work, this five book series begins with The Last Jihad and ends with Dead Heat. While I am a bit of a Christian fiction nut, this series appealed to me because of the political and world applications to today's society, and the religious aspect of the books were more subtle than most Christian fiction books I've read lately.

Just as an introduction to my reading styles, allow me to short-list my all time favorites, for no other reason than because I liked 'em, and mostly favorites from my younger days:

1. Where the Red Fern Grows by Wilson Rawls
2. Left Behind series by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins
3. Sounder by William H. Armstrong
4. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
5. The Cay by Theodore Taylor

I shall scour my bookshelves and try to recall the best or most influential books that I have read over my short 20-something years. And as an aside, I can tell you my least favorite book of all time--Lord of the Flies by William Golding. My 10th grade Honors English teacher tried to make some sort of parallel between sex and pigs and the boys on the island....it was horribly creepy and as such created a deep animosity between said book and myself. More to come, when I have both time and insight.

Happy Reading,
Independent Slave

A Few Good Reads

All right, so the conversation that spawned my renewed vigor for the idea of this blog revolved around one of the gals at work who's going to Italy soon and needed to know some good books. I told her that "The Birth of Venus" by Sarah Dunant was essential as it is set in 15th century Florence - I read it a couple of years ago when I was enroute to Italy myself and found it fascinating, historically based, and entertaining. I do like to read Sarah Dunant ("Mapping the Edge" is good too) but I digress.

Some of my recommendations:
"Up High in the Trees" by Kiara Brinkman
"Prodigal Summer" and "Animal Dreams" by Barbara Kingsolver
"The Life of Pi" by Pi Patel
"Peace Like a River" by Leif Enger (one of my all-time faves)
"Nineteen Minutes" and "Perfect Match" by Jodi Picoult

Dr. Mac suggested:
"The Glass Palace"
"The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime"

More as I recall them... Feel free to pitch in, anybody.

Welcome, Dear...

Okay, everybody who used to pay attention to this blog. We've all slacked, and slacked horribly.

I was chatting with a couple of the girls at work the other night, and we were talking about some good books, and I thought to myself, jeez, there needs to be a web page where we can all keep track of these books for each other. And then it hit me, there is just such a place.

So...first things first, allow me to welcome Independent Slave to the melee. This is a wonderfully intelligent woman who's not afraid to speak her mind, and who has become one of my dearest friends and confidantes. I'm hoping that two more new authors will join, but at any rate, I'm excited to start putting a little bit of good reading info out there again.

RIP Kurt Vonnegut

1922-2007

Reading suggestions?

I will soon be presented with approximately 20+hours of prime reading time; does the class have any suggestions at to reading material?

SciFi / Fantasy List

Note: I cross-posted this on my own site here.

The following list of the 50 most significant SF and Fantasy books comes from here.

Books in bold are ones that I have read.

The Most Significant SF & Fantasy Books of the Last 50 Years, 1953-2002

1. The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien
2. The Foundation Trilogy, Isaac Asimov
3. Dune, Frank Herbert
4. Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein
5. A Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula K. Le Guin
6. Neuromancer, William Gibson
7. Childhood's End, Arthur C. Clarke
8. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Philip K. Dick
9. The Mists of Avalon, Marion Zimmer Bradley
10. Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
11. The Book of the New Sun, Gene Wolfe
12. A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller, Jr.
13. The Caves of Steel, Isaac Asimov
14. Children of the Atom, Wilmar Shiras
15. Cities in Flight, James Blish
16. The Colour of Magic, Terry Pratchett
17. Dangerous Visions, edited by Harlan Ellison
18. Deathbird Stories, Harlan Ellison
19. The Demolished Man, Alfred Bester
20. Dhalgren, Samuel R. Delany
21. Dragonflight, Anne McCaffrey
22. Ender's Game, Orson Scott Card
23. The First Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, Stephen R. Donaldson
24. The Forever War, Joe Haldeman
25. Gateway, Frederik Pohl
26. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, J.K. Rowling
27. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
28. I Am Legend, Richard Matheson
29. Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice
30. The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin
31. Little, Big, John Crowley
32. Lord of Light, Roger Zelazny
33. The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick
34. Mission of Gravity, Hal Clement
35. More Than Human, Theodore Sturgeon
36. The Rediscovery of Man, Cordwainer Smith
37. On the Beach, Nevil Shute
38. Rendezvous with Rama, Arthur C. Clarke
39. Ringworld, Larry Niven
40. Rogue Moon, Algis Budrys
41. The Silmarillion, J.R.R. Tolkien
42. Slaughterhouse-5, Kurt Vonnegut
43. Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson
44. Stand on Zanzibar, John Brunner
45. The Stars My Destination, Alfred Bester
46. Starship Troopers, Robert A. Heinlein
47. Stormbringer, Michael Moorcock
48. The Sword of Shannara, Terry Brooks
49. Timescape, Gregory Benford
50. To Your Scattered Bodies Go, Philip Jose Farmer

I haven't even completed half! However, this list is missing A Song of Fire and Ice series so I'm not sure I agree with the entire list!

Any thoughts about additions or deletions to the list? Which one should be my next completion?

Amy Hempel is wonderful

For those of you who have never read her stuff, I highly recommend it. She writes short stories, some of them only a paragraph in length. But she has that talent, that ability to pack so much meaning into so few well-chosen words, that I only wish I had. She inspires me to try.

I think we need a fresh post here.

So, I'm gonna throw into the ring somebody most of you have already probably read. I'm reading my first Augusten Burroughs right now, Magical Thinking is a collection of his essays and I find it fabulous (complete with z-shaped finger snapping and "you go girl!"). He's quirky, hilarious, but also very good at painting that mental picture. As my brilliant friend Trav says, he "says it so I can see it."

I think I might have to read a bit more of his stuff, though, before I want to run out and see "Running with Scissors."

Recommendations needed

So, I need some book recommendations from the Thinking Persons (and those unfortunate souls who stumble across this post).

My niece begins the latter part of nursing school Real Soon Now. Does anyone (yes, I'm definitely looking at you, Erica) have any ideas of things she simply must read. What I'm really looking for is something along the lines of Scott Turow's "classic"One L, detailing the first year of law school, or the less well-known Snapshots from Hell by Peter Robinson.

Not that she'll have any time to read them. If nothing else, I'd like to get a feel for what she might experience.

An Under-appreciated Classic

I love to find a new novel or author to get lost in. However, I'm also a big fan of revisiting old favorites (I have a few fiction books that have been read at least 10 times). While I love the zany characters and completely illogical plot of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (HGttG) series, I personally prefer the two Dirk Gently novels written by Douglas Adams.

My preference for Dirk (Svlad) Gently and his holistic detective agency may be due to the fact that I read them before picking up HGttG. I spent part of today trying to figure out why Adams' written works are always so entertaining to me and yet the film version was so horrendous. It all boils down to descriptions. The action and dialogue in Adams' works is hilarious but the true genius lies in his descriptions of objects, actions and surroundings. For example, Adams' describes the way in which Vogon ships fly in the following manner:

"The great ships hung motionless in the sky, over every nation on Earth. Motionless they hung, huge, heavy, steady in the sky, a blasphemy against nature. Many people went straight into shock as their minds tried to encompass what they were looking at. The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't."

Now I ask you, how could you visually demonstrate a ship hanging in the sky exactly in the way a brick doesn't? How could you pass that joke on to the audience? Adams' skill at using simile and metaphor to provide descriptions is so pervasive and effective that most of the humor of situation is found within the background and not with the primary action. Film is just an atrocious tool to use in trying to tell such a story. How can you convey:

"Airports are ugly. Some attain a degree of ugliness that can only be the result of a special effort. This ugliness arises because airports are full of people who are tired, cross, and have just discovered that their luggage has landed in Murmansk (Murmansk airport is the only known exception to this otherwise infallible rule), and architects have on the whole tried to reflect this in their designs.
They have sought to highlight the tiredness and crossness motif with brutal shapes and nerve-jangling colors, to make effortless the business of separating the traveler forever from his or her luggage or loved ones, to confuse the traveler with arrows that appear to point at the windows, distant tie racks, or the current position of Ursa Minor in the night sky, and wherever possible to expose the plumbing on the grounds that it is functional, and conceal the location of the departure gates, presumably on the grounds that they are not."

You can instantly picture this airport; but, it is impossible to visually present an actual airport with the same level of impact.

Douglas Adams' death at the age of 49 in 2001 is one of the very few celebrity deaths that I really did feel the loss on a personal level. The realization that there would be no more works coming from his fetid . . . er, fertile mind for me to lose myself in caused a true sense of mourning. If you've never had the pleasure (seriously, how could you read this blog and not have experienced Adams) or are looking to revisit a classic in absurdist humor try The Long Dark Tea-time of the Soul, my personal favorite.

When I read Neil Gaimon's American Gods last year, I was always expecting a brief cameo by Toe Rag, Miss Schechter, or the incomparable . . . er, incorrigible Dirk himself. Definitely a must read.

The Bibliophile Goes Online!

Yeah, like writer Anne Fadiman, I am a confessed bibliophile. But I'm also a word-nerd, a bookshop loiterer, and a page prowler. And I'm a peeping-tom of others' libraries. At cocktail parties I can be found near the bookshelves half-listening to a conversation that apparently involves me while I nod occasionally and scan the titles before me.

So leave it to the internet to create something just up my alley. Library Thing is just that thing. An online book catalogue for my books. I list all my books and compare libraries with other users and find, weirdly enough, libraries that match my own in spooky detail. But there is a lot of other cool stuff (read: distractions from real work) on this site you should check out.

Because all my books are boxed up and waiting for our move in 48 hours, I could only catalogue a teeny percentage of my library (from memory), but what I have is there: 200 books (which are free to catalogue, and after that, ten bucks for a lifetime membership).

Added bonus: because I have never arranged my books alphabetically (I, know, not very bibliphilic of me), but thematically or by genre (e.g. environmental literature/memoir/literary fiction/history/western american literature/anthologies, etc), this will enable to unbox my library, and arrange them in an intelligible manner once and for all.

I'm excited.

Because I'm that much of a geek.

The Summer of Magical Reading

Who can remember what books they read during the nineties? Well, apparently, Chazz and Bill can, and it's worth the jump to glimpse their lists. . .

Meanwhile, I am struggling just to remember what I read this summer. My god. So here's a short-list with some admittedly scattered commentary.

1.) Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. First a confession. I am in love with Annie Dillard. Another confession--I haven't finished the damn book. I'm stranded somewhere toward the end without wind. Dead in the water, as they say. I mean the book won the Pulitzer in nonfiction when it appeared in 1974, for christ's sake. You'd think I could just umph it out to the end. And it's not that I have not enjoyed what I have read. Brilliant stuff. I guess I wanted more Dillard than she gives. But there I am asking for a book that Pilgrim isn't. What it is, though, is a lyrical meditation on place and her focus pans wide, cosmic wide, and returns to the micro/molecular level. Nothing gets by her. The way she connects topics thematically is intoxicating, really. Allow me to gush on that point. Indulge me. Now I have to indulge Dillard for the remaining pages. Surely I will write more when the end arrives.

2.) David Foster Wallace's A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again floored me. Speaking of indulgent, by the way. My god. Wallace demands that you indulge him in this collection of essays what with the footnotes stacked ten deep per page--but they are worth the effort. As Matt pointed out a while back, Wallace's footnotes are like scenic byways through the narrative. Sometimes I had to ask whether or not the footnotes were more compelling than the "surface" narrative, or if one could survive without the other. I am here to tell you they are co-dependent. Reading his essays without reading the footnotes would be like watching a movie on mute.

Be warned, however, you must be a patient reader. Wallace isn't for everyone. Clearly the highlight in the collection is the title essay of some 120+ pages. The supposedly fun thing Wallace will never do again is go on a Seven Night Cruise (7NC) on a megaship. Following Wallace around on the cruise ship for so many pages is a delight, I think, and reminds one that much can be gleaned from the seeming banalities of life.

3.) The Best American Essays 2005. Ed. Susan Orlean. A solid collection of essays this past year. One of the best is "Consider the Lobster" written by our friend from # 2 (above). Others are quieter if less-quirky, but no less compelling. Edward Hoagland's "Small Silences" is a meditative piece on the nature of place and what a childhood haunt can mean years later when it is gone, say, and replaced with a highrise or gas-station. I think we all have places like this. For me, it was a certain bend in Soda Creek in Soda Springs, Idaho, just off the backside of Mineral Heights. Hoagland revisits his own places (which occur in time and space and memory), and in doing so, asks that we revisit our own, and that ultimately, we have much to learn in the natural world. And this latter point, our learning potential, Hoagland seems to argue, is threatened by disappearing "natural spaces."

Other essays come to mind. Jon Franzen is always good for a knock-out essay. His piece, "The Comfort Zone" is an amazing rumination on his childhood obsession with The Peanuts comics. Franzen came to love Charlie Brown & Co. as our country was being torn apart by the Vietnam war. Brilliant piece. Other highlights include works by Ted Kooser (current poet laureate), Brian Doyle, Oliver Sacks, et al.

4.) I just finished Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, her literary memoir recounting the year her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, died of a heart attack at their dining room table, and her daughter's illness through the book. And I'm not giving away anything by saying this, but the fact that her daughter in the weeks after the book was printed adds a haunting layer to the book. Aside from the emotional factors, the book won the National Book Award for nonfiction for its language, for Didion's measured, spare prose. Truthfully, I dislike writers like Didion who make writing appear easy, as if the words just appeared on the page, pulled from the thin air without fuss or second-thoughts. Like she wrote the damn thing one night and turned it in to her editor.

But Didion is a scion in the literary scene and has been since she established herself in the 1960s. I have friends who tire of such heavy-weights in the Old Guard (e.g. John Updike, Oates, Franzen, Doctorow, and Didion). Some of these friends argue--and often convincingly--that the Old Guard is inclusive, nepotistic, incestuous, and finally self-serving. The awards to be given are given to each other. I don't have a response to this, other than to say there will always be an Old Guard, but when I see maddeningly young writers like David Foster Wallace, Anthony Doerr, Steve Almond, and Lan Samantha Chang rise up, I take heart. Guards change. And the tradition moves forward. In the meantime I read work like The Year of Magical Thinking because, at the very least, there might be something to learn there. And because it is the human experience on paper. Why else does one read?

5.) Have just picked up David Sedaris's Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim. So far so good. I won't say much here until I have finished it.

6.) Also reading William Kittredge's Who Owns the West? This is classic Kittredge. Smart, gruff, polemical. And his western land-ethics are doled out in clean hard-knuckled prose. This reading is good for the soul. It's like fiber for the diet. More when I finish it. If you haven't read Kittredge, I suggest beginning with Hole in the Sky, his memoir. It's stunning for its clarity of voice if nothing else. A great book. I hope this one holds up just as well.

If I could just get my act together

Yeah, if I had time to breathe I could get this damned book started. I have been on page three or so of The Nasty Bits (Anthony Bourdain) for 2 weeks now. First came hand foot and mouth virus, then of course the basement was completed and I spent hours cleaning off all the crap in the storage room. I hit the tip of the iceberg with that job and I really am just fried.

So my goal for the rest of this week is to finally re-crack that book and get it going. Wish me luck...

Summer Reading Funtimes

Well, the past few years I've always found the time to tear through about five or so novels and two pop-science books while in the field. Each summer has begun with a ritualistically trip to either "Half-Price Books" in DFW or "The Walrus and the Carpenter" in Pocatello {a very cool place, by the way. One can drink coffee, look at local art, listen to impromptu poetry or guitar and discuss books with proprietor Will Petersen ~ who inevitably has read every book in his store}.

But this summer has been different mainly due to an over ambitious PI who bit off more than we could chew. With candles burning at both ends, who has time to read for fun? So this summer I am stuck on about page 100 of A Prayer for Owen Meany, by John Irving. A reread which I will complete, perhaps on the plane back to Texas. Last summer I was pleased to read The World According to Garp, by the same author. Both are really fun reads, and thought provoking I might add.

By the way, someone decreased the octane level of the coffee in the dining trailer. It's really irritating. Thus I need about five more cups of 'decaf' before I can think about such things as the proper placement of apostrophes or commas. So my apologies if this post makes Mr. Bordelon's ex-students cringe.

That damned apostrophe...

Okay, so Bookman raises the very valid point that my choice of apostrophe placement in the title of this blog is a little clumsy and annoying. (My words, not his - he was very gentle.) By way of explanation, I had intended said placement as a sort of a play on Dave's way of using 'persons' where most of us use 'people.' Thus, multiple thinking persons contributing to a blog rather than just one thinking person...you see where I was headed with this.

But aghast at the fact that anybody out there might just think I'm an ignorant fool - I feel compelled to solicit opinions. Should we move the apostrophe or ditch it altogether in favor of a different choice of words, or what?? This is a democracy - or is it a republic - That dilemma always requires way more thought for me than I have caffeine on board to support right now. Anyway. Be heard, people. (Persons?)

Cyber-punk Entertainment

Inspired by Chazbot's comment to Bookman's request for suggestions to reach a teenager, I re-read an old favorite, Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash. While Stephenson's depiction of the Metaverse is not quite like the modern web, some aspects are eerily accurate (the Librarian:Google and Earth:Google Earth). Pop-up ads, virtual dates, and software support are all described in a book written five years before Mosaic and the World Wide Web were even invented.

As prescient as the metaverse segments are, the best part of Stephenson's vision is the continuous description of urban sprawl in the form of burbclaves, franchises, and the ever present loglo. Every time I drive down a major road here in the Treasure Valley, the neon haze of fast food joints, gas stations, big box stores, and home-improvement warehouses cause me to mentally flash into the world of Hiro Protagonist. I want to grab a 'Poon and surf the 'crete behind a bimbo box.

Besides, any popular fiction book that is capable of teaching you the basics of Sumerian mythology/religion while including katana duels deserves at least a glance.

Chad