tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-61864442024-03-08T18:20:14.732-05:00matthew griffin's reading journalmatthew griffin readsMatthewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00522324476568129562noreply@blogger.comBlogger258125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6186444.post-35956768301761596292011-12-21T19:30:00.000-05:002011-12-21T19:30:00.731-05:00G.M. Malliet's Death and the Lit Chick & Death at the Alma Mater<p><a href="http://www.gmmalliet.com/">G.M. Malliet</a>, <br>
<i>Death and the Lit Chick</i>, 2009<br>
<i>Death at the Alma Mater</i>, 2010</p>
<p>I haven't blogged promptly about these two: in fact, I renewed them so they could stare at me and make me blog about them, but they're now overdue. Not a habit to get into! They both continue on from <a href="http://matthewgriffin.blogspot.com/2011/11/g_17.html"><i>Death of a Cozy Writer</i></a>, with the further investigations of Detective Chief Inspector St. Just, a worthy and capable protagonist for the genre.</p>
<p>In <i>Death and the Lit Chick</i>, St. Just finds himself at a castle in Scotland, offering a workshop at a crime-writers' conference about evidentiary procedure and the like. He finds himself with a crush on one of the writers, only to have her (and the rest of the weird lot) become suspects when one of the authors is murdered while the castle's drawbridge is up — the locked-room mystery writ Gothic. Malliet does a terrific job at describing St. Just's fascination with Portia De'Ath: it's a very well written capturing of a first blush of feelings. The mystery itself is decent, but not overly remarkable: odd relationships and details typical of castles and of <i>CSI</i> help an okay plot along to a forgettable conclusion, complete with all the suspects gathered in the Great Room for the great detective's explication of the crime. (The addition of DCI Ian Moor, the detective in charge of the investigation, is a nice touch to St. Just — we actually get someone who is St. Just's equal, and pleasantly funny to boot. </p>
<p><i>Death at the Alma Mater</i> is more tightly plotted but less plausible. Summoned to a Cambridge college, St. Just finds himself investigating an odd gaggle of alumni from whom the college is trying to raise a pretty penny. The murder of one of their number prompts an investigation that leads St. Just off at weird angles before finally seeing through an overly-complicated scheme and nabbing the murderer.</p>
<p>I'm going to keep reading Malliet's mysteries, as her writing is certainly entertaining. It has a piece I need missing, though. I enjoy the way she plays with the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_unities">unities of place and time</a> (a manor house, a castle, a college, a village; a weekend, a conference, a weekend, a fair), but there's a failure in the effort to break through the conventions that I have trouble getting past. In the St. Just series, we watch as she gathers her overly weird suspects to traditional venues for a murder. She bumps off one or more of the cast, and we move through the investigation. Each time, I've waited for the turn, the new take on the convention--and on the times it has come, it has been too slight an innovation or too weak a new look. There's such potential that never quite offers something new. I also struggle with the characters: while some, like St. Just, De'Ath, and Sgt. Fear, are well developed, too many of the others are given a quick sketch and that's all we're given to understand them: Malliet doesn't write Russian novels, but I still needed her character list because I simply wasn't motivated by the writing to tell a couple of characters apart in each of the stories. The newer <i><a href="http://matthewgriffin.blogspot.com/2011/11/g.html">Wicked Autumn</a></i> shows improvement on that score, but with too trite and poorly developed a conclusion to be called a great murder-mystery.</p>
<p>I will gladly read her next book, as I do enjoy her work. I wish I could enjoy it just a bit more.</p>Matthewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00522324476568129562noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6186444.post-33576681774265330072011-12-21T14:04:00.003-05:002011-12-21T14:04:59.947-05:00Tony Hendra's _Father Joe_<b><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Hendra">Tony Hendra</a></b>, <i>Father Joe: The Man Who Saved My Soul</i>, 2004.</p>
<p>Three-quarters memoir, two-tenths paean, one twentieth context, Hendra's book needs to be approached as a reflection on how his own life has been changed by another. It's not a biography, nor an introduction to what life is like in a Benedictine monastery: it's about Hendra's life, and how it's better because of Father Joe's role in it. </p>
<p>The eponymous Father Joe was a Benedictine monk at <a href="www.quarrabbey.co.uk">Quarr Abbey</a>. After an indiscretion as a lad with a married woman, her husband took Hendra to the Abbey. The book is really about how Fr. Joe helped Hendra to grow up: recovering from the relationship, and then in nearly every aspect of his life. Hendra discovers a deep admiration both for Fr. Joe himself and for the Benedictine way of life (though with, I'd argue, an overly fixed view of the latter: later in the book Hendra describes his inability to cope at all well with the liturgy changing from Latin to English). He decides he wants to become a monk, and lives with Quarr as a second home and Fr. Joe as a second father. Thwarted in his desires to enter Quarr by winning a scholarship to Cambridge, Hendra's life turns to the career as a satirist — and all of the accompanying messes that emerge as a life is lived.</p>
<p>The book is an engaging read, and it's easy to identify with many of the stages Hendra identifies in his own life: his awakening to vocation, and his subsequent loss of faith; his discovery of comedy as art, and his flailing attempts to live with another. I found it both moving and endearing to read his portrayal of his father and his own marital challenges. </p>
<p>The two most effective parts of the book were for me the twin morals: be where you are, and love. The first is explored best around Hendra's second marriage: Fr. Joe's advice to Hendra is to do a better job of being a husband (and father), to find his sense of roots in the marriage. It's a translation of the Benedictine vow of stability, the sense that life isn't better anywhere else, but is best lived where one is. The second portion is best expressed when Fr. Joe and Hendra talk about what humour is, and we see the ease with which humour — and satire in particular — can hurt: Fr. Joe's impulse to ask deeper questions about the intent and design of the humour is subtle for the reader, but wise indeed.</p>
<p>One weakness of the book is the dialogue, and I wish I had a better sense of what bothers me about it. Hendra presents conversations he had with Fr. Joe, and there are times when the dialogue is plausible, and times when it's quite difficult to read. I think this is just a stylistic issue, a failure of the author to capture the authentic rhythms of speech because the idea is more important than the style, but I'm not quite sure. I plan to spend some more time thinking about that question.</p>
<p>Ultimately, it's an enjoyable read and rewarding for more than just those interested in living a religious life: Hendra succeeds in capturing something of the struggles of life, and his view of his path manages to offer insights for the reader without ever slipping and becoming prescriptive. </p>Matthewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00522324476568129562noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6186444.post-49633649357460783642011-12-07T23:28:00.001-05:002011-12-07T23:31:47.607-05:00"Richard Castle", Heat Rises“<b>Richard Castle</b>”, <i><a href="http://castle.wikia.com/wiki/Heat_Rises">Heat Rises</a></i>, 2011.
<p>Yes, this book was an odd reading choice after my disappointment in the <a href="http://matthewgriffin.blogspot.com/2010/11/richard-castle-naked-heat-2010.html">second volume of “Castle’s” series</a>. [For those not in the loop, Richard Castle is a character on the TV show <i><a href="http://beta.abc.go.com/shows/castle">Castle</a></i>, played by the delightfully insouciant <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathan_Fillion">Nathan Fillion</a>; Castle is a crime-fiction writer, and this series of books is loosely based on his character’s experiences as the partner of Detective Kate Becket.]</p>
<p>The novel is in the same vein as the first two: quippy, funny, and similar to the show in many ways. I didn’t have the same suspension of disbelief issues as I had with the last outing, but I did find this newest volume overly predictable (You’re going to figure this one out, if you’ve read a mystery of two before). The twist with<i> Heat Rises</i> is that it’s an interesting fictionalisation/projected-wish-fulfilment commentary on the events of the previous season of Castle. It doesn’t add anything viewers would miss, but is interesting to read the book in light of the episodes. What I find fascinating is that the intertextuality is now in this direction rather than the other: we’ve moved from watching Castle and catching Kate reading a copy in the washroom to readers noticing links to the tv show. Fundamentally, this shift seems to be about advertising and attracting the same audience (or a subset) across different platforms. I hope not to see this worrisome trend continue, but won’t count my chickens.</p>Matthewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00522324476568129562noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6186444.post-1483911622033389212011-11-18T13:30:00.000-05:002011-11-18T13:30:01.923-05:00Bill Bryson's At Home<b><a href="http://www.billbryson.co.uk/">Bill Bryson</a></b>, <i><a href="http://www.billbryson.co.uk/books_athome.html">At Home: A Short History of Private Life</a></i>, 2010.
<p>I bought <i><a href="http://www.billbryson.co.uk/books_shorthistory.html">A Short History of Nearly Everything</a></i> in the airport bookstore in Glasgow just before my flight home a few years ago, and greatly enjoyed Bryson's clear and engaging exploration of what makes our world tick. I enjoy learning from him, and when I already know some of the things he's discussing, I delight in his deftly humorous touch.</p>
<p>I was quite pleased to discover his new book, <i>At Home</i>, which uses his house to explore how we have come to live in the comfort we generally think of when we hear the word home. Bryson moves from room to room, explaining both how they came to exist in their modern forms, and historical and sociological developments associated with them. The chapter on the bedroom contains information both on mites and other wee beasties that share our rooms, fashion and the history of bedding, and both sex and childbirth (and quite the discursive exploration of the development of modern surgical technique) before discussing death and burial and mourning customs. That on the bathroom discusses not just plumbing, but the entirety of the development of the sewage system. The stairs chapter alone has convinced me to hold on to the handrail with every future ascent and descent of my life, after hearing rather sobering statistics on falls!</p>
<p>Though long, the book is eminently readable and fascinating. I discovered both interesting trivia and the histories of discoveries and engineering feats that left me going to bed too late for a couple of nights. Bryson has a fascination with the more interesting of the personalities one can encounter in history, and we re treated to the eccentricities and marvels of both Washington and Jefferson, of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Paxton">Joseph Paxton</a> and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augustus_Pitt_Rivers">Augustus Henry Lane Fox Pitt Rivers</a>, and many more. What's remarkable is how the asides all come back to his topic, and how Bryson is able to use his own home as a lens to explore modern life in all of its variety. Curiosity is rewarded; wondering is a worthy thing to do, and we can come to realize that the shape of our lives has been determined by our connection to the work of many varied people and groups (having read this book, you'll not take either bricks or glass for granted again, without marveling at their complexity).</p>
<p>Throughout the book, Bryson is engaged in a subtle project that only culminates at its very end; a project that was made clear in <i><a href="http://www.billbryson.co.uk/books_shorthistory.html">A Short History of Nearly Everything</a></i> though the and sweep of science here is revealed through the small details of quotidian living. He writes:
<blockquote>Today it takes the average citizen of Tanzania almost a year to produce the same volume of carbon emissions as is effortlessly generated every two and a half days by a European, or every twenty-eight hours by an American. We are, in short, able to live as we do because we use resources at hundreds of times the rate of most of the planet's other citizens. One day--and don't expect it to be a distant day--many of those six billion or so less well-off people are bound to demand what we have, and to get it as effortlessly as we got it, and that will require more resources than this plant can easily, or even conceivably, yield.
The greatest possible irony would be if in our endless quest to fill our lives with comfort and happiness we created a world that had neither. But that of course would be another book. (451-52)</blockquote>
<p>Bryson's sobering thoughts are well worth heeding, and make me turn again to Mike Nickerson's thesis in <i><a href="http://www.sustainwellbeing.net/lmi.html">Life, Money, and Illusion: Living on Earth as If We Want to Stay</a></i> that all uses of resources need to account not just for monetary costs but for their true impact upon the planet. I hope we'll heed both messages; after enjoying such a lovely book as Bryson's, it's a good thing to be brought up short.</p>Matthewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00522324476568129562noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6186444.post-76114866679764190342011-11-17T21:18:00.001-05:002011-11-17T21:33:03.479-05:00G.M. Malliet's Death of a Cozy Writer<b>G.M. Malliet</b>, <i>Death of a Cozy Writer</i>, 2008.
<p>Having finished <a href="http://matthewgriffin.blogspot.com/2011/11/g.html">the most recent of Malliet's murder mysteries</a> after a friend's recommendation, I started reading her earlier work. I have the other two in this series out from the library, and am looking forward to reading them.</p>
<p>I quite enjoyed the novel--more so, in fact, than <i>Wicked Autumn</i>. Set almost entirely in the family manse of Sir Adrian Beauclerk-Fisk (the much loved crime writer), the story revolves around his nastiness and the wackiness of his family members. As he is overly fond of rewriting his will, it's hard to tell just who benefits from his death — and just why has someone killed off his eldest son, first? Old personal histories and eccentric characters are mixed with together, and only <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chief_Inspector">DCI</a> St. Just can unravel the myriad questions that are left unanswered. As in <i>Wicked Autumn</i>, the story unfolds gradually, with different pieces being added to the puzzle as St. Just interviews and explores, and here, too, the solution is both far from obvious and yet entirely sensible given the pieces we readers have acquired as we follow St. Just.</p>
<p>I'm looking forward to reading the next two books in the series.</p>Matthewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00522324476568129562noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6186444.post-15761178408918396112011-11-03T10:30:00.001-04:002011-11-17T21:33:25.878-05:00G.M. Malliet's Wicked Autumn<b><a href="http://www.gmmalliet.com/">G.M. Malliet</a></b>, <i>Wicked Autumn</i>, 2011.
<br><br>
An entertaining murder-mystery set in a small English town, <i>Wicked Autumn</i> has much to recommend it.
The story revolves around Max, a former MI-5 agent turned Church of England vicar, who comes across the dead body of one of his parishioner’s not in hospital but in the village hall—and in circumstances that don’t quite make sense. After striking up a quick friendship with DCI Cotton, Max begins to investigate himself.
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Malliet’s structure meanders through the small town and its characters, bouncing from one to the next as Max makes visits and discoveries. I found myself, professionally, being a bit concerned about his focus on investigation rather than on pastoral care, but the novel is a murder mystery, after all! We learn the quirks of the town’s denizens, and generally find ourselves amazed at just how self-centred the victim truly was.
<br><br>
The solution to the mystery comes as a bit of a surprise, despite the clues that make sense retrospectively—always nice to end a British mystery with the detective laying out the whole story for the reader, I suppose.
<br><br>
The novel was strong enough for me to place a hold at the library on the first book in her earlier mystery series, and I look forward to relaxing with it soon.Matthewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00522324476568129562noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6186444.post-8149128342126869282011-10-08T15:12:00.001-04:002011-11-17T21:33:45.107-05:00Graham Speake's Mount Athos: Renewal in Paradise<b>Graham Speake</b>, <i><a href="http://yalepress.yale.edu/book.asp?isbn=0300103239">Mount Athos: Renewal in Paradise</a></i>, 2003.
<p>Graham Speake’s book is a lovely introduction to the monasteries and sketes of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Athos">Athos</a>, from their origins to today (or rather, to 2002, but what’s 9 years when we’re talking about over a millennium of history?). Part history and part spiritual exploration, Speake’s focus never wavers from trying to offer the reader a sense of why Athos’ existence matters to God, the Orthodox, and the world.</p>
<p>For the unaware, Athos seems like a throwback to a former time and way of being. A peninsula of Greece (that was once an island, thanks to the ambitious canal digging of the emperor <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerxes_I">Xerxes I</a> in his erstwhile conquests), it is home to twenty <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthodox_Church">Eastern Orthodox</a> monasteries and a plethora of smaller communities (sketes) and hermits who live lives paradoxically dedicated to the renunciation of the world and to praying for it. It is consecrated to <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theotokos">Mary</a>, and for over a millennium, no woman has been allowed on the isthmus (punishable even today, by Greek law, by a period of 2-12 months) so as to leave it as her exclusive preserve. The story goes that she was travelling to visit Lazarus, and was forced to take shelter on Athos: so moved by its beauty, she asked her son for it for herself. This legend offers a significant example of a challenge Speake deals with in the book: the monks understanding of Athos revolves not even primarily around what can be historically proven, but around the stories and legends of their collective experience on the Mountain. Speake holds this balance well for the reader.</p>
<p>The oldest monastery on Athos, the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Lavra_(Athos)"><i>Megistis Lavra</i></a> (Great Lavra) was founded in 963, and the others have followed over time. While most are of Greek origin, some were founded by monks from all over the Orthodox world (such as <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iviron_monastery">Iviron's </a>Georgian origins, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilandar">Chillandariou</a>’s Serbian roots, and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agiou_Panteleimonos_monastery">St. Panteleimonos</a>’ and Russia). They have survived Ottoman rule, the Axis powers, the birth of modern Greece, and even its entry into the European Union. An often turbulent history makes for intriguing reading, both about foreign relations and Athos’ own internal arguments and challenges.</p>
<p>Speake’s long association with the <a href="http://www.athosfriends.org/">Friends of Mount Athos</a>, as well as multiple pilgrimages to Athos have resulted in close associations with quite a number of monks on Athos, and his writing shows a deep understanding not just of Athos’ history and geography, but of its ideals. His own understandable biases against nationalism within Athos’ administration and toward hospitality even of non-Orthodox pilgrims become clear as one reads: even without as full an appreciation of Orthodoxy as I might like to have, Speake’s writing is an accessible and inviting introduction. The marvellous collection of photographs that accompany the text are a stunning resource to help the reader comprehend Athos’ remoteness and beauty, and to grasp something of what monastic life is like there.</p>
<p>Some years ago, on retreat at <a href="http://www.saintgregorysthreerivers.org/">St. Gregory’s, Three Rivers</a>, I heard read at meals <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Merrill">Christopher Merrill</a>’s <i><a href="http://www.christophermerrillbooks.com/things_of_the_hidden_god__journey_to_the_holy_mountain__2005__40789.htm">Things of the Hidden God</a></i>. It was my first introduction to Athos, and Speake’s less-personal book has made me intrigued about the prospect of making a pilgrimage to the holy mountain someday—to experience worship at <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vatopedi_monastery">Vatopedi</a> and some of the sketes seems like a very exciting notion.Matthewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00522324476568129562noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6186444.post-2001751846618216182011-09-30T14:30:00.000-04:002011-09-30T14:42:42.924-04:00<b><a href="http://joshritter.com/">Josh Ritter</a></b>, <i>Bright’s Passage</i>, 2011.<br><br>
This blog is meant to be a journal: it’s a place for me to reflect on the book I read. At times that means entries are akin to reviews, with jottings to help me remember the book if I struggle to recall it; other times, I’m trying to work through ideas. With this novel, though, both tasks are made more complicated because of my fan-boy-ish adulation of Josh Ritter as a musican, song-writer, and story-teller. I’ve loved Ritter’s music since I first heard “<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-sny-7_0qgs">Come and Find Me</a>” as the end credits rolled on an episode of “Six Feet Under” many years ago: I rushed out and bought <a href="http://joshritter.com/2010/06/23/golden-age-of-radio/">Golden Age of Radio</a> the next morning.
<br><br>
There’s a rush of language in Ritter’s lyrics that delights and entrances. Sometimes the lyrics are almost cryptic (‘I keep you in a flower vase / with your fatalism and your crooked face / with the daisies and the violet brocades’); at other times, the narrative is funny and engaging (‘At this, Sir Galahad got angry, / “Angel,” he said, “don’t you tempt me. / I wish to go to heaven and not to hell. / So when stable boys look lonesome, / when the women call me handsome, I’ll hold me virtue very firmly by myself.”’). There’s an interesting tension between agnosticism and ire at God that’s frequently expressed as in “Thin Blue Flame” (‘If God’s up there he’s in a cold dark room / the heavenly host are just the cold dark moons / He bent down and made the world in seven days / and ever since he’s been a’walking away’) and the ever-stunning “Girl in the War” ('... the keys to the Kingdom got lost inside the Kingdom / and the angels fly around in there but we can’t see them / I got a girl in the war Paul I know that they can hear me yell / if they can’t find a way to help her they can go to Hell'). And yet, the cadence and rhythm of scripture express themselves in deeply positive ways, too, as in the brilliant (and Paul Simon-influenced) “<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FNmqpjkeM_0">Lark</a>”: ‘I am assured, yes I am assured yes / I am assured peace will come to me / A peace that can yes surpass the speed yes / Of my understanding and my need’.
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Why go through those examples? Well, it’s impossible for me to read <i>Bright’s Passage</i> except through the lens of Ritter’s music that I have listened too so often and so carefully for a number of years now. Playful language, careful story-telling, and a deeply ambiguous sense of the numinous are as present in his first novel as they are in his songs.
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<i>Bright’s Passage</i> follows Henry Bright. Just back to his home in West Virginia after serving in the First World War, Bright is coping with the death of his wife, Rachel, and his son’s birth as the story begins. That coping is complicated by an angel inhabiting the body of a horse who keeps giving Bright directions, and then made worse by the pursuit of both a nasty fire and the malicious father and sons of Bright’s dead bride. Interwoven with this story in the present is the story of Bright’s experiences fighting in France.
<br><br>
The writing is vivid and evocative in both time periods, and well-crafted. It’s spare, and uses details that make sense to Bright. The first sentence opens with the true freight of the book: “The baby boy wriggled in his arms, a warm, wet mass, softer than a goat and hairier than a rabbit kit.” (3) This novel is about life and death and possibility, simultaneously attached and disconnected to the world that never does run away. The opening of the second chapter—a switch from West Virginia to France—functions similarly:
<blockquote>Mud and water and the stumps of trees. In every direction that was all there was. Bodies fell, but the trees died standing up. Nightly they were crucified upon themselves by the zip and whine of machine guns, their leaves corroded by gas, their branches and trunks hacked for kindling, some roots cut by entrenching tools, others drowned by the ceaseless, steady dripping of blood and rain. (13)</blockquote>
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There’s an obvious contrast between the crucified trees—and the entire passion that is the war—and the new birth of his son into an uncertain future that is the central tension of the novel: how can Bright enter a new future, leaving behind the cruelty and pain of the past? It’s a question intensified by the dubious quality of his memory, when we read of him seeing Rachel’s brothers cruelly kill fellow soldiers despite our certainty from our perspective as readers that they’d not have been in France. Bright is like a blind man, running unseeing from a terror that’s hunting him to a future that he’s unable to see. All is made worse by this peculiar angel with his own agenda—and angels are never easy or felicitous creatures in Ritter’s work! (I really do love the brilliance and humour of “<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wh-4DtAt3Mc">Galahad</a>” that offers another great example of why angels are to be feared, if they’re Ritter’s creations.)
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It’s an impressive first novel, perhaps precisely because of Ritter’s care and practise of story-telling in so many other genres. It has some infelicities—it’s heavy-handed at times, and the ending is a little over-easy—but they’re easy to overlook whether you’re as fond of him as I or not. I’m looking forward to hearing what others make of it.
Matthewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00522324476568129562noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6186444.post-13149213581922409002011-09-28T10:53:00.001-04:002011-09-28T10:53:20.464-04:00<b><a href="http://terryfallis.com/">Terry Fallis</a></b>,<br />
<i><a href="http://terryfallis.com/the-best-laid-plans/">The Best Laid Plans</a></i>,2007.<br />
<i><a href="http://terryfallis.com/the-high-road/">The High Road</a></i>, 2010.<br />
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Fallis’s two comic novels follow Daniel Addison and erstwhile professor of English who can’t quite escape his life as a former political aide. At the beginning of <i>The Best Laid Plans</i>, we meet Addison: tired of the cynicism of professional politics (and escaping the ruins of a tarnished relationship), Addison leaves the Liberal party’s Leader’s office to work at the University of Ottawa. Determined to make a clean break, his final act for the party will be to find a candidate and run the campaign for the constituency of Cumberland-Prescott: a riding that’s never varied from its deep-blue Conservative tendencies. As Addison finds an apartment to rent in the yard of the hovercraft-building, chess-loving, English-grammar-excessively-pedantic Engineering professor named Angus McLintock, he also makes a deal: Addison will teach English to Engineers, and McLintock will run for the Liberals (with no lawn signs, campaigning, etc.) against the widely loved Conservative finance minister. Hilarity ensues, both within and without the corridors of power, and the second book continues the adventures of Addison and McLintock.<br />
<br />
They’re both funny books. High-minded and idealistic about the capacity of politicians to work for the betterment of the nation, there are clunky moments and widely unbelievable plot points (the set piece with the hovercraft and the drunken First Lady of the United States!). I’m certain that Angus would find much more meaningful censure at the hand of the leader of his party than he experiences, in both books, despite his supposed popularity. There’s an overuse of fart jokes. And yet, for all of my quibbles, the quips and set pieces are funny. One can easily see why <i>The Best Laid Plans</i> won the <a href="http://www.leacock.ca/">Stephen Leacock Award for Humour</a> in 2008. The idealism is reminiscent of <i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_West_Wing">The West Wing</a></i>, and the lasting and exciting myth of politicians who are themselves idealistic is captivating and hopeful.
Matthewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00522324476568129562noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6186444.post-61438097948437410462011-09-20T20:19:00.000-04:002011-09-20T20:19:37.267-04:00<b><a href="http://www.jonronson.com/">Jon Ronson</a></b>, <i><a href="http://www.jonronson.com/psycho.html">The Psychopath Test</a></i>, 2011.
I came into a loan of this book quite fortuitously. I'd heard Ronson interviewed on <b><a href="http://www.maximumfun.org/sound-young-america/jon-ronson-author-filmmaker-and-humorist-interview-sound-young-america">The Sound of Young America</a></b> and on <b><a href="http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/436/the-psychopath-test">This American Life</a></b> within a week or so of one another, and was intrigued. A friend happened to have it on her desk when I was visiting, and since she won't have time to read it for a space, she loaned it to me. It's almost as though I was meant to read it.
<p>Ronson is an entertaining and engaging writer, though a tad sporadic: there are times when his stories about his own neuroses are a meaningful help to his argument, and times when I found them off-putting. That statement may be an expression of taste: I didn't mark examples to share. The story begins when he's contacted by a neurologist about a mysterious manuscript that's been sent to a number of different scientists, all of whom are unable to decipher it. Ronson's skills as an investigative journalist help him to find the author, and lead him into musings about sanity and a variety of challenges in mental health. Those musings lead him to an interest in psychopathy, the focal point of the book. He tries to make sense of psychopathy's definition, how it is diagnosed, how it is treated, and how psychopaths live in the world. His exploration includes a look at the history of psychology, and more general issues as well. Much of the book revolves around <a href="http://www.hare.org/welcome/">Bob Hare</a> and his work--the development of the test for psychopathy, and the workshops on how to use it. I was deeply amused as Ronson uses the test with a CEO best-known for firing many, many people, to assess the prevalence of psychopathy in the corporate world. These explorations aren't just funny set pieces, mere side-notes to the argument, but are a marvellous way of exploring Ronson's increasing discomfort with the assessment of psychopathy and the label in general.
<p>It's as he engages Scientologists and their attacks on psychiatry that Ronson's book reveals something just as fascinating as his subject matter: his own struggle as a journalist to maintain objectivity while entering into relationships that will help him engage in his research. The encounters with Tony--an incarcerated diagnosed psychopath--and Brian, a scientologist campaigning against psychiatry, are compelling and very well-written. We see it again in Ronson's depiction of his relationship with Bob Hare: though never studied as self-reflectively as that with Tony, it's even more intriguing, and we're left wondering about a certain level of monomania.
<p>All in all, it's an unsettling book. I enjoyed it, but was left even more concerned than when I began it about how mental health labels are used, particularly in relationship to criminal justice issues. The only resolution I came away with was to decide to add <i>The Men Who Stare at Goats</i> to my to-read list.Matthewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00522324476568129562noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6186444.post-6339356861471771572011-08-27T15:54:00.002-04:002011-08-27T15:54:00.260-04:00<span style="font-weight:bold;"><a href="http://www.jonathanlethem.com/">Jonathan Lethem</a></span>, <span style="font-style:italic;">Gun, with Occasional Music</span>, 1994.
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<br />A marvellous science fiction detective noir,<span style="font-style:italic;"> Gun, with Occasional Music</span> presents a brilliantly realised but completely accessible dystopian world. Set in a future when it’s impolite and impermissible to ask questions, where babies and animals have been raised to sentience and functionality, where the news is all just music, and in which most citizens are heavy users of a drug called make (blended with various different amounts of Forgettol, Acceptol, Regrettol, and the like), our gumshoe protagonist stumbles into a murder mystery he’d rather not know much about. After all, Metcalf’s got problems of his own—not least of which is that, after swapping physical responses with a female friend for a weekend, she left without returning his … responses. Into his life walks Orton Angwine, a man who will soon go down for the murder of the last client of our “private inquisitor,” a man named Maynard Stanhunt. Events tumble into one another, and Metcalf soon finds himself running afoul of the Office of the inquisitors (and two in particular). Office politics, a confusing family intersection of victim and mob boss, babyheads, talking sheep and a certain nasty kangaroo working as mob muscle all combine to create a memorable read, a well-executed sci-fi noir that needs to be more widely read than it is. I wish I remember who recommended this novel to me, but I find myself reaching out excitedly to read more of Lethem’s work.
<br />Matthewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00522324476568129562noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6186444.post-51528594605776104142011-08-26T19:45:00.002-04:002011-08-26T19:45:00.414-04:00<span style="font-weight:bold;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_Fish">Stanley Fish</a></span>, <span style="font-style:italic;">How to Write a Sentence</span>, 2011.
<br />
<br />Fish’s book is a paean to good writing. He believes that all good writing starts with writing good sentences, and that we don’t do a good job of teaching our students how to write such sentences; we get bogged down in confusing grammatical points or offer vague descriptions instead of offering good ways into good writing. Fish proposes that “(1) a sentence is an organization of items in the world; and (2) a sentence is a structure of logical relationships” (16). The essential problem with his book is revealed in this definition: the book will be appreciated and enjoyed by those people who already like sentences, and have a handle on how they work, while those who do not will neither profit much from the book nor enjoy it.
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<br />Throughout, he offers studies of good sentences and describes why they work. Fish is engaging and readable, and even entertaining at time. Where the argument wobbles is in the presentation of exercises to help the prospective writer (his audience) learn to write sentences as good as the superlative examples being studied: Fish’s own sample responses to his prompts aren’t in the same league as the originals, and feel both woefully imitative and wan in comparison. He points this fact out himself, too frequently, and both weaknesses distract from the argument. Yet his examples! And his close-readings that so wonderfully explicate why his examples are as good as they are! Fish produces an unexpected study of excerpts of some of the best writing I have ever encountered, and this book is worth reading for these choices alone.
<br />
<br />When he moves in the final four chapters from form to content, Fish offers a few brilliant and constructive ways to think about writing. Perhaps most significant of these is his way of describing how first sentences should work. Instead of thinking about “topic sentences,” writers should remember that “First sentences know all about the sentences that will follow them” and thus “First sentences have what I call an ‘angle of lean’; the lean forward, inclining in the direction of the elaborations they anticipate" (99). This idea is still one for people who already grasp the concept, but it is as elegant a way of thinking about how to begin a piece of writing than any I have encountered.
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<br />It is a book to read if one loves both reading and writing, and I’d advise the prospective reader to anticipate both felicities and disappointments in their time with <span style="font-style:italic;">How to Write a Sentence</span>.Matthewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00522324476568129562noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6186444.post-71180942202152314112011-08-25T19:34:00.002-04:002011-08-25T19:34:00.166-04:00<span style="font-weight:bold;"><a href="http://www.patriciabriggs.com/">Patricia Briggs</a></span>, <span style="font-style:italic;"><a href="http://www.patriciabriggs.com/books/riverMarked.shtml">River Marked</a></span>, 2011.
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<br />We continue with <a href="http://matthewgriffin.blogspot.com/2010/11/patricia-briggs-silver-borne-2010.html">the saga of Mercedes Thompson</a>. Mercy's a VW mechanic on the days she's allowed to just go to work, but most of her clients don't know that she shifts into the form of a coyote and goes running and getting into trouble with fae, vampires, and the like in a fair bit of the time she's not at her garage. This new novel finds her recovering from her misadventures in the last, and before long, moving up her marriage to the Alpha-werewolf of their environs and going away camping for a honeymoon. Briggs weaves native American traditions and legends fairly deftly into her story, and Mercy finds herself dealing with malicious forces, river otters, and the very sources of myth all while new-husband Adam is mostly incapacitated. It's a fun romp, and eminently entertaining. Matthewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00522324476568129562noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6186444.post-63808164505144680662011-08-08T22:55:00.001-04:002011-08-08T22:57:29.116-04:00<span style="font-weight:bold;"><a href="http://www.neilgaiman.com/">Neil Gaiman</a></span>, <span style="font-style:italic;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Gods">American Gods</a></span>, 2001.
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<br />I’m not sure why it has taken me so long to sit down with a book by Neil Gaiman. I’ve travelled in circles with those who admire him tremendously, and yet have never picked up <span style="font-style:italic;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sandman_(Vertigo)">Sandman</a></span> or anything else until this novel, just as it reaches its tenth anniversary. It’s certainly my loss that I’ve waited so long.
<br />
<br />Gaiman’s achievement in this novel is remarkable: he writes an entertaining and gripping story; he brings a pantheon of half-remembered deities and folktales into the context of America both in who the members were and how they have existed on this continent; and he constructs a gripping battle between the minor deities of yore and those constructs too-worshipped today. What I admire most about the writing is the balance the author strikes between vivid, realised depictions and letting the reader create and imagine as s/he reads. What’s also quite striking is Gaiman’s deftness with myth, his grasp of how stories live and breathe and the power they have.
<br />
<br />The plot follows Shadow, just released from prison and quickly in the employ of a dark and mercurial character who seems to be working to bring about a confrontation between the Gods that were and those now more readily worshipped. Shadow’s is a dark quest: he seeks meaning and life in a world where he feels as trapped as he had inside. We learn early in the novel that he has ecountered two key learnings in prison: only do your own time, not anyone else’s; and “Call no man happy until he is dead.” (So nice to meet people, fictional or no, with a fondness for <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herodotus">Herodotus</a>!) As one might expect, these become the twin pillars that Shadow seeks to learn how to live. His adventure, which roams from coast to coast to the very centre of America (in Kansas, if we ignore Alaska and Hawaii), is an exploration of myth and of America itself: centred less in those major centres that we hear about so often, the novel is also a paean to Gaiman’s adopted country, reveling in the glory (and strange peculiarities!) of life in small towns unknown to all not from them and the weirdness of the various roadside attractions that can be stumbled upon.
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<br />It’s a marvellous novel, and well worth reading. Time to add some more Gaiman to my list.
<br />Matthewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00522324476568129562noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6186444.post-6441992434657937002011-07-25T21:48:00.003-04:002011-07-25T22:00:25.459-04:00I came across the <span style="font-style:italic;">Sunday Times</span> <a href="http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article3127837.ece">list </a>of “The 50 Greatest British Writers Since 1945” at <a href="http://ofbooksandbikes.wordpress.com/2011/07/25/a-list/">Of Books and Bicycles</a>.<br /><br /><ol><br /><li>Philip Larkin – I don’t know as well as I should, but quite like what I’ve read.</li><br /><li>George Orwell - the two everyone has read, and some of the essays. On tea and grammar, well worth reading.</li><br /><li>William Golding – had trouble staying awake</li><br /><li>Ted Hughes – Paul Muldoon has rekindled my interest</li><br /><li>Doris Lessing – I’m ashamed to say not</li><br /><li>J. R. R. Tolkien - <span style="font-style:italic;">The Hobbit</span> and <span style="font-style:italic;">The Lord of the Rings</span>, but otherwise just “<a href="http://www.scribd.com/doc/21301124/J-R-R-Tolkien-Beowulf-The-Monsters-and-the-Critics">Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics</a>”</li><br /><li>V. S. Naipaul – ah, Mr. Biswas</li><br /><li>Muriel Spark – not yet</li><br /><li>Kingsley Amis - only <span style="font-style:italic;">Lucky Jim</span>, which I didn’t find as funny as I’d hoped</li><br /><li>Angela Carter - no</li><br /><li>C. S. Lewis - too much. Narnia, Lost Planet, and a heap of his apologetics. While once I had time for him, that phase has passed.</li><br /><li>Iris Murdoch – never been excited</li><br /><li>Salman Rushdie - <span style="font-style:italic;">Midnight’s Children</span> and the<span style="font-style:italic;"> Satanic Verses</span></li><br /><li>Ian Fleming – Mom wouldn’t let me when she still okayed my reading as a lad, so I devoured the lot and found them boring as a teenager</li><br /><li>Jan Morris – unknown to me</li><br /><li>Roald Dahl – Quite a lot, though not for some time. I was quite fond of <span style="font-style:italic;">The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More</span></li><br /><li>Anthony Burgess - no</li><br /><li>Mervyn Peake – mmm… Gormenghast-y goodness</li><br /><li>Martin Amis – never been excited</li><br /><li>Anthony Powell - nope</li><br /><li>Alan Sillitoe – I read <span style="font-style:italic;">The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner</span> because of <a href="http://www.belleandsebastian.com/recordings/jonathan-david-ep">Belle & Sebastian</a>. Haven’t bothered with anything else.</li><br /><li>John Le Carré – decent, clever spy-thriller stuff but never got super excited</li><br /><li>Penelope Fitzgerald - no</li><br /><li>Philippa Pearce - no</li><br /><li>Barbara Pym - no</li><br /><li>Beryl Bainbridge - no</li><br /><li>J. G. Ballard – no— classmates in grad school whose taste I trusted loathed <span style="font-style:italic;">Crash</span>, so I've never bothered</li><br /><li>Alan Garner - no</li><br /><li>Alasdair Gray – don’t even know the name</li><br /><li>John Fowles -<span style="font-style:italic;"> The French Lieutenant’s Woman</span>, <span style="font-style:italic;">The Collector</span>, <span style="font-style:italic;">The Magus</span></li><br /><li>Derek Walcott – some of the poetry, but not much. </li><br /><li>Kazuo Ishiguro – I will always buy and make time for a new Ishiguro. I adore<span style="font-style:italic;"> An Artist of the Floating World</span></li><br /><li>Anita Brookner – I don’t know her stuff</li><br /><li>A. S. Byatt – I quite like some--<i> Possession </i>, especially--and was bored by others</li><br /><li>Ian McEwan – as variable as Byatt, but not quite reaching her heights</li><br /><li>Geoffrey Hill – He may be one of my favourite poets. I have been a different person since reading “Lacrimae Amantis”</li><br /><li>Hanif Kureishi – has been in the to-read pile for too long</li><br /><li>Iain Banks - no</li><br /><li>George Mackay Brown – haven’t even heard the name before</li><br /><li>A. J. P. Taylor - haven’t even heard the name before</li><br /><li>Isaiah Berlin – to-read</li><br /><li>J. K. Rowling – “One of these things is not like the other”. Yes, all 7, but man did she need an editor after the first</li><br /><li>Philip Pullman – I quite enjoy Pullman. His Dark Materials is brilliant, and <span style="font-style:italic;">The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ</span> is fun and thought-provoking</li><br /><li>Julian Barnes – mmm…. I enjoy Barnes. I do want to know to whom I loaned <span style="font-style:italic;">A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters </span>and if s/he will return it.</li><br /><li>Colin Thubron - haven’t even heard the name before</li><br /><li>Bruce Chatwin – I’ve had <span style="font-style:italic;">Patagonia</span> recommended to me more than once, but others have panned it. Inertia is a significant force in my life</li><br /><li>Alice Oswald - haven’t even heard the name before</li><br /><li>Benjamin Zephaniah - haven’t even heard the name before</li><br /><li>Rosemary Sutcliff – I read a lot as a child. <span style="font-style:italic;"> Warrior Scarlet</span> and <span style="font-style:italic;">Knight’s Fee</span> were particular favourites</li><br /><li>Michael Moorcock - haven’t even heard the name before</li><br /></ol><br /><br />I should look up the people I haven’t heard of.<br />And the Times needs to have the heads of its staff checked for omitting David Mitchell. <br />And I'm appalled at how poorly I did with having read the small number of women on this list.Matthewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00522324476568129562noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6186444.post-33528915494762596762011-07-09T16:02:00.003-04:002011-07-09T16:07:06.866-04:00<b><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Foster_Wallace">David Foster Wallace</a></b>, <i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Supposedly_Fun_Thing_I'll_Never_Do_Again">A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again</a></i>, 1997.<br /><br />This collection of essays is my first foray into reading Wallace. I’ve been meaning to spend some time with his work for a while now, and am now both glad that I have and hoping to find more time to spend with <i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consider_the_Lobster">Consider the Lobster</a></i> and <i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_Jest">Infinite Jest</a></i>.<br /><br />The writing is fun: recursive, exuberant, given to marvellous and unexpected comparisons as a way of bringing a scene to life, and richly evocative: “an unshot skeet’s movement against the vast lapis lazuli dome of the open ocean’s sky is sun-like—i.e. orange and parabolic and right-to-left—and that its disappearance into the sea is edge-first and splashless and sad.” What I found most remarkable were the two travel pieces, “Getting Away from Already Being Pretty Much Away from It All” about the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illinois_State_Fair">Illinois State Fair</a>, and the title piece “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” about a Caribbean cruise. They feel at first like deeply personal travelogues, essays that describe the scene and bring you into the author’s experience complete with all his entertaining and identifiable neuroses, and seem to lack coherence other than that given by the passage of time. In reading them, though, I came to see that the seemingly-relaxed structure is a front: Wallace has very deliberate points about what it means to be human and what it means to experience, that are worth discovering in his meandering and footnoted-way. And oh, the footnotes <sup>1</sup> in all their parenthetical and humorous delight, never detracting from the piece but always adding something. One has to read the footnotes!<br /><br />The only piece in the collection I found myself skimming rather than reading was the essay on <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_lynch">David Lynch</a>, and while it examines what makes Lynch a different sort of auteur than many directors, my lack of familiarity with and interest in Lynch himself wasn’t overcome by Wallace’s engaging writing.<br /><br />Captivating but difficult is the essay “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” a piece I wish I had read many years ago. Arguing that television exists as a medium wholly invested in irony, Wallace builds on the brilliant <a href="http://www.lewishyde.com/">Lewis Hyde</a> to argue “… irony’s singularly unuseful when it comes to constructing anything to replace the hypocrisies it debunks” and thus television can never be a truly effective tool for the novelist: authors of fiction have an obligation to use modern references, to be sure, but to transcend irony to create something else. He quotes Hyde’s idea from “<a href="http://www.lewishyde.com/system/resources/BAhbBlsHOgZmSSIxMjAxMS8wMy8xOS8xNl8xNF8zN184NDJfQWxjb2hvbGFuZFBvZXRyeS5wZGYGOgZFVA/AlcoholandPoetry.pdf">Alcohol and Poetry: John Berryman and the Booze Talking</a>” that “Irony has only emergence use. Carried over time, it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy their cage.” I’m excerpting an idea from a complex piece, but it serves to present Foster Wallace as someone who, in this postmodern age, felt that fiction is more than a player in the great game of deconstruction. <br /><br />I look forward to the next bit of time I’ll be able to spend with his writing.<br /><br /><br /><sup>1</sup> and the footnotes to the footnotes <sup>2</sup><br /> <sup>2</sup> and so onMatthewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00522324476568129562noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6186444.post-5573531428415167852011-07-08T10:53:00.003-04:002011-07-08T11:01:53.091-04:00<span style="font-weight:bold;"><a href="http://www.stephenfry.com/">Stephen Fry</a></span>, <i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fry_Chronicles:_An_Autobiography">The Fry Chronicles</a></i>, 2010.<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">The Fry Chronicles</span> picks up where <i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moab_Is_My_Washpot">Moab Is My Washpot</a></i> left off, offering a vertiginous stream of wordplay and eloquence to describe a portion of Fry’s life—in this case, his years at university and just thereafter as he establishes his career. It ends just before Fry and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugh_Laurie">Hugh Laurie</a> are to begin a tour of England to prepare for <i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Bit_of_Fry_%26_Laurie">A Bit of Fry and Laurie</a></i>, and with the start of a new problem that we readers are to assume will challenge Fry’s life for some time to come.<br /><br />Fry writes his story lightly, interspersed with understandable but too frequent heavy-handed apologies for the what- some-might-consider-trivial woes that mark his life story. Except for these asides, his writing is deeply engaging. We are immersed first in the world of Cambridge, and learn how he finds his way into the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Footlights">Footlights</a>, and then brought into the world of television in London (and radio, and magazines, and musicals). Characteristic throughout is his sense of discomfort in his environs, always suspecting that he’ll be found out to have less talent than he has been credited with by others, and it’s this feeling that gives plot to what is otherwise a fairly linear string of events in Fry’s life. Told otherwise, his biography would seem nearly golden: despite a few expulsions and an arrest for credit card fraud, he attends <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queens%27_College,_Cambridge">Queens’ College, Cambridge</a>, and then soars to a magnificent career as an entertainer, earning and receiving opportunity after chance and indulging tastes for cars and computers along the way. Yet this insecurity never distanced me from Fry as I read: it’s the signature element of who he is, rather than an affectation, and I found it both endearing and easy to identify with.<br /><br />I’ll look forward to the next volume.Matthewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00522324476568129562noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6186444.post-40253262177821213522010-12-30T13:29:00.001-05:002010-12-30T13:32:52.833-05:00<span style="font-weight:bold;">Craig Ferguson</span>, <span style="font-style:italic;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_on_Purpose">American On Purpose: The Improbable Adventures of an Unlikely Patriot</a></span>, 2009.<br /><br />I’m not sure what attracted me to Ferguson’s autobiography: I’m a fan neither of celebrity autobiographies nor of addiction memoirs, but something made me want to read this one. I’m glad I did. Ferguson’s self-deprecating humour and wry observations combine with a level of candour and openness that make for an engaging personal history. We meet his parents and his family, and learn of his yearning to be American (with a very sweet NASA story along the way), before following him into a descent into alcoholism and drumming. Fans of <span style="font-style:italic;">The Late Late Show</span> won’t be surprised that he learns that he loves to make people laugh, leading to a career in both stand-up and film before getting sober with the help of some friends, with a first American sojourn along the way. (It is astonishing to read of both the depths of his alcoholism and his ability to remain employed.) Finally, he finds his way to LA and projects in both film and television, before landing his current gig. There’s a sweetness to the book and its stories, even when Ferguson is sharing his fear of ducks brought on by a bad acid trip (a story that’s changed and reworked in his novel, <span style="font-style:italic;">Between the Bridge and the River</span>, <a href="http://matthewgriffin.blogspot.com/2010/12/craig-ferguson-between-bridge-and-river.html">blogged about here</a>). There’s also no shortage of can-do American Dream-fulfilled optimism that shapes the telling. What you’ll read is entirely congruent with the voice you may have experienced when the sandman’s at your door and you’re watching his show anyway, and it will entertain you even as it speaks revealingly about addiction and how Ferguson has addressed it in his life.Matthewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00522324476568129562noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6186444.post-36988947617169736722010-12-27T22:36:00.003-05:002010-12-27T22:41:59.883-05:00<span style="font-weight:bold;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craig_Ferguson">Craig Ferguson</a></span>, <span style="font-style:italic;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Between_the_Bridge_and_the_River">Between the Bridge and the River</a></span>, 2006.<br /><br />Ferguson’s first novel is a road-trip good-time, a weird and wacky series of pastiches that is strongly reminiscent of the work of both <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Adams">Douglas Adams</a> and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Robbins">Tom Robbins</a>. Ostensibly the stories of two Glaswegians who were once friends, the story careens off into strange asides and amusing characters that one might well meet in Ferguson’s comedy (and bits and pieces from Ferguson’s own life, as you’ll discover in my next blog post on his <span style="font-style:italic;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_on_Purpose">American on Purpose</a></span>). We follow George, a defence lawyer dying of cancer who falls in love, and Fraser, a disgraced televangelist seeking escape at a conference of his brother televangelists in the deep South. Along the way we meet the morbidly obese and extensively depraved Saul and his brother Leon, the singer cum actor. We meet crack-heads, anorexics, and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snake_handling">snake handlers</a>, and are reminded that bumblebees shouldn’t be able to fly... and yet they do. Oh, and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_jung">Carl Jung</a> and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgil">Virgil</a> are key figures, too. It’s a wise-cracking tour de force that touches on sex, suicide, addiction, sex, the stories that trap us, sex, and a deeply humane view of what it should mean to us to lead our lives. From chase-like sequences in RVs to the retelling of the story of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_of_Assisi">St. Francis of Assisi</a>, Ferguson’s writing is deeply entertaining and moving, never stepping away from a sharp comedic outlook while sharing interesting asides on <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myoclonus">myoclonic twitches</a> and the etymology of “cutting to the chase”. The book is at its best in the set pieces, and three morality tales are particularly strong. It’s well worth a read: you’ll not regret it, in your own time between the bridge and the river.Matthewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00522324476568129562noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6186444.post-58944694065198073132010-11-22T07:16:00.002-05:002010-11-22T07:16:00.100-05:00<b><a href="http://www.lewishyde.com/">Lewis Hyde</a></b>, <i><a href="http://us.macmillan.com/commonasair">Common as Air: Revolution, Art, and Ownership</a></i>, 2010.<br /><br />The lights lower in the house, and the screen brightens. Two or three commercials play across the screen as you lean over to your fellow cinema-goer to bet on how many trailers you’ll see, and before the first trailer seeks to tempt you into watching a movie that you have no interest in seeing, one final commercial plays: a young person in a convenience store shoves a couple of candy bars and a pop into his knapsack as the storekeeper sells a lottery ticket to an elderly woman, and then the boy takes off, high-tailing it from the store as the narrator’s deep voice says “We know that’s theft—so is stealing movies” as we cut to a young couple staring at a computer whilst slyly grinning at one another. My stomach tightens at the commercial, though I’ve never illegally downloaded a movie. While I could argue against the false equivalence being established in the efforts of this commercial and its brethren, nothing I could essay would be as erudite, as engaging, or as convincing as Lewis Hyde’s recent <i>Common as Air</i>.<br /><br />Just as in <i>Trickster Makes This World</i><b>*</b>, Hyde uses analogies and discursive examples to outline an argument that is very difficult to argue against convincingly. In <i>Common as Air</i>, he argues that copyright is broken: that what once existed to help the development of art and discovery now limits and prevents meaningful building on the “<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standing_on_the_shoulders_of_giants">shoulders of giants</a>” that have gone before. He proposes reform, asking us to move away from the notion of property to a commons with stints. Hyde develops this proposal with heavy reference both to the ancient structures and strictures of the commons and to the founding fathers or the United States. At times heavily historical, the reader would be forgiven for thinking in the early pages that she was reading more of an history of ideas than a book dealing with what may be the defining issue of our time. The fifth chapter makes heavy use of Benjamin Franklin to show how his work on a number of scientific fronts could not have occurred without heavy debts both to earlier investigations whose results had been freely shared and to his oft-forgotten co-experimenters. Its argument is that the “founders believed that created works belong largely in the commons so as to support and enliven creative communities” (112); the preceding chapters develop our understanding of the commons, and the successive chapters expand this idea and show how it has continuing relevance to our society and culture, with reference to Bob Dylan, the human genome, and the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr., among others. Hyde captivates the reader both in the argument itself and in his myriad and surprising examples. Dealing carefully with both issues of law and culture, the arguments he makes are persuasive and intriguing. The sceptic—who is willing to agree that theft is theft, and copyright works just fine, thank you—will find himself challenged, and the already converted will need to nuance her arguments in the light of Hyde’s work.<br /><br />What I find most compelling in Hyde’s new book is an essential underpinning of his argument. A serious problem that our contemporary culture faces is that we tend to conceive of freedom as negative: too often we are concerned about being free from infringements by others. Hyde shows that this way of thinking is backwards when compared with the bulk of thinking about freedom through time.<br /><blockquote>Social well-being in this view cannot arise simply by aggregating individual choices; private interest and public good are too often at odds. Citizens acquire virtue in the civic republic, therefore, not by productivity but by willingly allowing self-interest to bow to the public good (or by recognizing that the two are one). (93) </blockquote><br />True liberty is not freedom from, but rather freedom <i><b>for</i></b>, a liberty that is entirely congruent with what is extolled in the <i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnificat">Magnificat</a></i>, for example. I need to spend more time thinking about how Hyde’s arguments are working on my own understanding of what it is to live in the communities in which I make my home.<br /><br />My sole serious quibble with the book is composed of two lines on the frontispiece: “Copyright © 2010 by Lewis Hyde / All rights reserved.” After he so extolled the virtues of <a href="http://creativecommons.ca/index.php?p=explained">Creative Commons licenses</a>, was there an effort to persuade Farrar, Strauss and Giroux to publish <i>Common as Air</i> under such a license? <br /><br /><br />* I first fell in love with Hyde’s writing when reading his magnificent <i><a href="http://www.lewishyde.com/publications.html">Trickster Makes This World</a></i>. If you haven’t read it, I remind you that old time is still a-flying.)Matthewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00522324476568129562noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6186444.post-88303977507528370842010-11-21T16:49:00.001-05:002010-11-21T16:51:17.275-05:00<span style="font-weight:bold;"><a href="http://www.gilesblunt.com/">Giles Blunt</a></span>, <span style="font-style:italic;"><a href="http://www.gilesblunt.com/reviews.html#crime">Crime Machine</a></span>, 2010.<br /><br />The newest entry in Blunt’s Detective Cardinal mystery series does not disappoint: it’s a taught, well-plotted murder mystery. Despite some predictable plot twists (who’d have thought that the ignored cold case, the butt of so many jokes, would shed light on the main case—other than every intelligent reader?), the milieu of Algonquin Bay and the always enjoyable and, this time, following his wife’s murder, the especially vulnerable Detective Cardinal. The mysterious crime scene with the beheaded Russian furriers, possibly with a Mafia connection, combined with the clear signs of presence of another mysterious person at the crime scene ties in with local politics and marital discord, all lead to the reader’s enjoyment at Blunt’s deft handling of the multiple strands he weaves together. The challenging aspect of the book is the same issue as I had with <span style="font-style:italic;">Blackfly Season</span> (two books back in the series): because Blunt gives us much of the criminal’s perspective, we see deep and peculiar brutalities and odd character studies that detract from the mystery but fail to add a significant thriller component. Despite this weakness in writing, I continue to enjoy Blunt’s books, and look forward to the next Cardinal outing.Matthewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00522324476568129562noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6186444.post-85884828026723208102010-11-10T21:39:00.003-05:002010-11-10T21:49:29.891-05:00<span style="font-weight:bold;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermann_Hesse">Hermann Hesse</a></span>, <span style="font-style:italic;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Glass_Bead_Game">The Glass Bead Game (Magister Ludi)</a></span>, 1943. Trans. Richard and Clara Winston, 1969.<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">The Glass Bead Game</span> was a revelation to me in high school: it was a tome that made sense of life, that drew me toward academia and study in what I now know was a dramatically over-idealised way. Given its importance to the earlier me, I’m surprised that, until this fall, my copy has been sitting on shelves, un-reread, the story only half-remembered. <br /><br />Hesse’s novel follows Joseph Knecht, a young man who is so dedicated to his music that he is plucked from his virtually un-described normal life and sent to the elite schools in Castalia—the region where the real scholars are made. Hesse follows Knecht’s career through two sets of schools, and then into the “order” of scholars and his leadership position in the order. You now know almost everything that “happens”: this story is about ideas, and the reader experiences debates between characters and musings on knowledge, politics, social responsibility, the proper role of study to the state, and more. <br /><br />There are some peculiar features to this book. I read it as a sort of gedankenexperiment, an attempt to dream as near-to-possible a utopia as might exist, complete with the challenges it would face in relating to the “real” world. The form of the book is also unusual: it’s almost an anthology. It begins with an introduction to the glass bead game (the central conceit of the book and Castalia, the game is an elaborate formal way of representing the inter-relationship of various aspects—well, of all aspects—of knowledge*), and continues with a dry, academic biography of Knecht with a tone that Hesse deliberately writes in a way that skirts close to hagiography. Then we have the poems Knecht wrote as a student, followed by three of his <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought_experiment">gedankenexperiments</a>: imagined lives he might have lived in other times and places in the world. We learn much about Castalia, and it seems awfully close to the monastic scholarship ideal (so the scholars can have affairs in their youths, sure, but otherwise they’re celibate, and there’s a disturbing absence of women that is hard not to read as misogynistic in this era—strange that teenage me wasn’t disturbed or upset by that absence/misogyny). In fact, it veers so close that it’s really only possible to distinguish it because of an extended section of Knecht’s career when he’s sent to be a game tutor to a leading Benedictine monastery, to advance Castalia’s hopes of permanent relations with the Vatican. <br /><br />It’s not a book one would pick up to be riveted by story, but in the extended character study, Hesse reveals in Knecht both an idealist and an ideal. We’re asked both to empathize with the kenosis of true scholarship and civic identity (reinforced by an opposing pair of friend and mentors: Tegularius, whom Hesse based on <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nietzsche">Nietzsche</a>, who sees little of such responsibilities; and Father Jacobus, based on <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Burckhardt">Jakob Burckhardt</a>, who is the ideal monk and scholar. The universality of the individual’s struggle between these poles is revealed not just in Knecht, but also through Knecht’s ‘secular’ non-Castalian friend, Plinio Designori). We’re forced to engage with just how much an individual has an obligation to be true to himself, and at what cost, when part of society. It’s a theme we see in much of Hesse’s work, but in <span style="font-style:italic;">The Glass Bead Game</span> it plays at a nearly constant <span style="font-style:italic;">fortissimo</span>, unmuted by a need for story. <br /><br />Just what did teenage me see in this book? I think it likely that I saw in it, in a way that I could articulate nor fully comprehend at the time, a paradox I couldn’t then resolve between creativity and scholarship, and found myself drawn to a place and milieu where I imagined I would be free to live in a way that could explore that paradox. Now, that’s a misreading of the book—Castalia and Knecht show little freedom from the world I remember in high school—but it’s what I half-remembered, before I reread <span style="font-style:italic;">The Glass Bead Game</span>. It also explains why I was so fascinated by the <span style="font-style:italic;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_ching">I Ching</a></span> after reading the book for the first time, given its allusive and elusive way of making sense of what is to come that functions in a book as a symbol of that paradox.<br /><br />I’m less sure, outside of what’s certainly a more nuanced reading, what I got out of my reengagement with the text. There remains something seductive about the utopia of Castalia, and a slim desire to emulate Knecht (and a wishing that I lived his self-discipline!); at the same time, I find myself more intrigued by the gulf Hesse depicts between scholarship and the world: Castalia can exist after a long, nightmare-like period of war and desolation, but it’s an ill-understood beacon to the rest of the world: a place to be vaguely proud of in a nebulous way, without having any sense of what it’s actually for or about. Despite being on the other side of the “Age of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feuilleton">Feuilleton</a>”, a time when people were more interested in crosswords and diversions than real learning, Castalia is more what lets the rest of the world claim they’ve moved past that age than the epitome of a shift of culture. Hesse’s prophetic (not forecasting, but prophecy <span style="font-style:italic;">à la</span> the Hebrew Scriptures, warning of a loss of purpose, understanding, and right-living) depiction of the world is no less true of our time than it was of a world in the throes of the Second World War—and will likely continue to go unheard.<br /><br />* Perhaps it was my fascination with the game that led me to become as fond as I am of the work of Northrop Frye: the game imagines that all aspects of human knowledge may be studied as a system, and that the interrelations may be displayed: this is strikingly close to Frye's concept of a verbal universe with a structure that it is the critic's job to study, describe, and comment upon.Matthewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00522324476568129562noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6186444.post-8554555358261671272010-11-09T23:12:00.000-05:002010-11-09T23:13:28.304-05:00<b>“<a href="http://twitter.com/#!/writercastle">Richard Castle</a>”</b>, <i><a href="http://abc.go.com/shows/castle/naked-heat">Naked Heat</a></i>, 2010.<br /><br />The newest entry in the on-going saga of Richard Castle--sorry, of "Jameson Rook"--this novel is weaker than the last year's entry, <i>Heat Wave</i>. What worries me is why I think that's true. After all, this mystery is well-paced, and has some surprising twists and turns. It stands squarely in line with the TV series, with a similar sense of humour. <i>Naked Heat</i> and <i>Heat Wave</i> have clear similarities with episodes of Castle, with the same unfolding of the case, and characters who are in many ways much like Rick Castle and Detective Kate Beckett. So what's not to like? Well—that's the part that embarasses me. I don't think that the TV character Rick Castle would write like this. I think he'd be a better writer. I grant that's a pretty subjective judgement. Let me offer an example or two. On the first page, describing Nikki Heat, "Castle" writes: "She used the interlude to peel back the lid of her coffee to see if it was drinking temp yet." Castle's portrayed as a language geek on the show, someone who cares about how the English language is used: I simply can't imagine the character allowing "temp" to stay in a published copy of a book, rather than "temperature." Pedantic, on my part? Absolutely. More telling are the lines like this one:<br /><blockquote>The previous May, just days after he had returned to New York from Cannes, where he received a special jury prize for his role as the bastard son of France's first American ambassador, Reed Wakefield pulled a Heath Ledger and died of an accidental drug overdose. (129)</blockquote><br />The overly long nature of the sentence is a stylistic issue; the tastelessness of the simile is egregious. If the simile was being used on the show — and it got past <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standards_and_Practices">Standards and Practices</a> to make it on the air, an idea I find hard to credit —I could imagine Nathan Fillion pulling it off with his insouciant charm. On the page, it doesn't work.<br /><br />I've taken several days to wonder why I'm so disturbed by faults like these. (I've also taken several days to ponder instead of to blog, because my beloved has been reading it, and I haven't gotten my hands back on the copy to type out the examples I've used.) How much of my reaction is a fan-boy-esque disappointment in something that didn't live up to my expectations, and how much is something else? Does a television network publishing a book to help advertise a show have a responsibility to make the novel sound as though it was written by the character to whom it's ascribed? How much of my problem is that the mystery itself wasn't as good as <i>Heat Wave</i>? I'm finding these questions interesting, and I don't have clear answers. Despite the flaws in writing (and in not sounding enough like the Rick Castle I watch each Monday night), it's a decent little diversion. I can't imagine that anyone who picks it up is looking for anything remarkable--maybe its real purpose, other than advertising, is to let over-interested viewers leer voyeuristically at Castle's fantasies of a Beckett/Castle relationship, in the not-overly-disguised roman à clef fashion that these books offer.<br /><br />I'm left disappointed, but more intrigued by my own reaction. The book itself reminds us of the importance of libraries; after all, it's certainly not worth the $24.99 US sticker price.Matthewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00522324476568129562noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6186444.post-19233061187389706082010-11-08T23:26:00.002-05:002010-11-08T23:32:39.564-05:00<span style="font-weight:bold;"><a href="http://www.maureenjohnsonbooks.com/index1.html">Maureen Johnson</a></span>, <br /> <span style="font-style:italic;"><a href="http://www.maureenjohnsonbooks.com/books/suite-scarlett/">Suite Scarlett</a></span>, 2008<br /> <span style="font-style:italic;"><a href="http://www.maureenjohnsonbooks.com/books/scarlett-fever/">Scarlett Fever</a></span>, 2010.<br /><br />Why do teenagers and tweens read Twilight crap and other such things when they could read well-written, clever, and entertaining YA novels like Johnson’s? Who needs to worry about vampires and werewolves when one can wonder who will capture Scarlett’s heart? (Note no actual Twilight comparisons should be considered: the books referred to in this blog entry are good, and worth reading. And lack vampires. <span style="font-style:italic;">Deo gratias</span> on both counts!)<br /><br />Set in a New York that’s neither tourist-y (for the most part) nor exploited for fear or kitsch, Johnson’s stories of Scarlett Martin and her family are rollicking, funny, and engaging. Scarlett’s family runs the no-longer top-notch Hopewell hotel in Manhattan. As the first novel starts, Scarlett is, in the family tradition, given one of the Hopewell’s suites to care for; while it should have been more a formality than real work, the arrival of the mysterious and peculiar Mrs. Amberson changes Scarlett’s plans for how she was to spend that summer. Meanwhile, her brother Spencer is trying to make it as an actor, and the production of <span style="font-style:italic;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamlet">Hamlet</a></span> in which he lands the role of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosencrantz_and_Guildenstern">Rosencrantz </a>(or Guildenstern—I can't actually remember if it's specified, and the two roles are treated fairly interchangeably when the play takes the fore) is lacking a production space. Add the challenge of the younger sister, Marlene, who only likes the older sister Lola (who is herself in a confusing romantic space with her rich boyfriend). Toss together with the complications of Eric, the Guildenstern (or Rosencrantz), who may or may not have a thing for Scarlett, and you’ve got a recipe for mayhem, silliness, comedic timing, pratfalls, Shakespearean revenge subplots, and general fun that’s eminently enjoyable. The second novel follows in the series: new romantic interests, new familial complications, new wackiness-es with Mrs. Amberson (whose borrowed dog and put-upon doorman exist to provide set-pieces that Johnson handles deftly), plus school all combine to leave the reader wondering how Scarlett continues to stumble from one thing to the next.<br /><br />Read. Enjoy. And for pity’s sake, if you see a young woman (or man) reading misogynistic Twilight crap, give her these instead: it’s more worth her time to have a plausible young woman who’s simultaneously strong and confused by life as a role model than simpering simpletons she’ll find in other books.Matthewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00522324476568129562noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6186444.post-53191396183727742522010-11-07T14:30:00.002-05:002010-11-07T14:30:00.821-05:00<span style="font-weight:bold;"><a href="http://www.hurog.com/">Patricia Briggs</a></span>, <span style="font-style:italic;"><a href="http://www.hurog.com/books/silverBorne.shtml">Silver Borne</a></span>, 2010.<br /><br />I blame <a href="http://feliciaday.com/">Felicia Day</a> and <a href="http://twitter.com/#!/feliciaday">her twitter feed</a> for my first reading Briggs and her series about a mechanic, Mercedes Thompson, who shifts into being a coyote and whose personal life is a little too intertwined with werewolves. In many ways, it’s very traditional fantasy: a great deal of thought has been put into the nature of werewolves and their pack dynamics (and their revelation of their existence to the wider world), into the fae, into witches and magic and vampires. Underlying each novel to date in the series (and I don’t seem to have blogged about them, but have read each one—embarrassment?) is an acknowledged debt to existing mythology and a clever attempt to update it and bring it into our own world. Its weaknesses, as a series, stem from another convention of too much of contemporary fantasy: the novels verge too often on slipping into the harlequin-esque romance style, and the depth of reliance on mythology and the sheer creativity of the milieu Mercedes inhabits is the saving grace.<br /><br />This novel is the fifth in the series (after <span style="font-style:italic;">Moon Crossed</span>, <span style="font-style:italic;">Blood Bound</span>, <span style="font-style:italic;">Iron Kissed</span>, and <span style="font-style:italic;">Bone Crossed</span>), and is not my favourite of the lot. Its plot revolves around an attempt on Mercy’s life, fae who want an object in her possession, werewolves trying to upset the pack dynamics, and a werewolf on the verge of ending his life. The elements of the plot fail to cohere sufficiently well: ideas are introduced but not sustained, and emerge later, half-forgotten. The entire suplot of the werewolf unhappy with his existence is weak and implausible given what we know of him from the other books in the series. Finally, the denouement is so scattered and diffuse that it feels like Ms. Briggs simply didn’t know how to bring the story to a successful conclusion. I do hope that the next volume returns to the quality of the earlier books in this series.Matthewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00522324476568129562noreply@blogger.com0