Darwin8u's bookshelf: 2023

Darwin8u's bookshelf: 2023 en-US Wed, 01 Jan 2025 19:21:41 -0800 60 Darwin8u's bookshelf: 2023 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg Skin Elegies 58523691
In a dystiopian future, an American couple flee their increasingly authoritarian country by transferring to a quantum computer housed in North Africa. The novel’s structure mimics a constellation of firing neurons—a sparking collage of many tiny narraticules flickering through the brain of one of the refugees as it is digitized. Those narraticules comprise nine larger stories intersecting with memorable moments in human time: the Fukushima disaster; the day the Internet was turned on; the final hours of the Battle of Berlin; John Lennon’s murder; an assisted suicide in Switzerland; the Columbine massacre; a woman killed by a domestic abuser; a Syrian boy making his way to Berlin; and the Challenger disaster.

With his characteristic brilliance and unrivaled uniqueness, Lance Olsen delivers an innovative, speculative, literary novel in the key of Margaret Atwood, Stanislaw Lem, and J.G. Ballard.]]> 248 Lance Olsen 1950539350 Darwin8u 5 "This is how the present worked:
we are features of tales
we will never be features of."
- 11 :::: march :::: 2011

"What was hardest to accept was next morning the clocks kept collecting the minutes inside them just like usual."
- 10 :::: june :::: 2015

"When you are inside a tale like that, it never feels like you are in a tale like that."
- 29 :::: october :::: 1969

"Who ever imagined tourniquets could feel like tenderness?"
- 20::::april :::: 1999

"Memory is the mother of grief."
- 2 :::: may :::: 1945

"...it hitting you what a curious condition thinking was, exactly like waking up one day with a French accent."
- 8 :::: december :::: 1980

"The Me of Us can sense The Was has entered the God Swirl."
- 8 :::: august :::: 1974

'It is just the no no-light strewn with diamond-dust stars suspended in the middle of his reeling mind like an always."
- 28 :::: january :::: 1986

"wading farther and farther into
the warm dark sea."
- 11 :::: september :::: 2001

+++++++

"Living forever is tantamount to being trapped inside one's freedom."
- 29 :::: october :::: 2072 :::: 10:30 a.m.

+++++++

description

author: Lance Olsen
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 4.13
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2023/08/23
date added: 2025/01/01
shelves: american, 2023, aere-perennius, fiction, scifi, experimental
review:
"This is how the present worked:
we are features of tales
we will never be features of."
- 11 :::: march :::: 2011

"What was hardest to accept was next morning the clocks kept collecting the minutes inside them just like usual."
- 10 :::: june :::: 2015

"When you are inside a tale like that, it never feels like you are in a tale like that."
- 29 :::: october :::: 1969

"Who ever imagined tourniquets could feel like tenderness?"
- 20::::april :::: 1999

"Memory is the mother of grief."
- 2 :::: may :::: 1945

"...it hitting you what a curious condition thinking was, exactly like waking up one day with a French accent."
- 8 :::: december :::: 1980

"The Me of Us can sense The Was has entered the God Swirl."
- 8 :::: august :::: 1974

'It is just the no no-light strewn with diamond-dust stars suspended in the middle of his reeling mind like an always."
- 28 :::: january :::: 1986

"wading farther and farther into
the warm dark sea."
- 11 :::: september :::: 2001

+++++++

"Living forever is tantamount to being trapped inside one's freedom."
- 29 :::: october :::: 2072 :::: 10:30 a.m.

+++++++

description

+++++++

I read this book twice over two years. Bits and pieces never dissolved. Bits and pieces will never be solved. Goddam I loved this book. I'm not usually a BIG fan of experimental fiction or art. I get the need for it, but often something gets lost; the humanity, emotions. But those writers and artists who can push the envelope without losing the thread of humanity are just amazing. This novel is a thread of 9, well, 10 different narratives. Broken. Fractured. Dislocating. Blending. I can't explain fully, but Olsen (who is an absolute mensch btw) manages to maintain the tension and the stories and land them in unexpected ways. I'm sad. But sad in a way something only beautiful, risky, and human can be sad. I don't want to say more. Saying more might give the game away, but if you've never read Olsen give this book a chance, or two.

Also.

Try another of his more recent novels: My Red Heaven. It is also amazing. Similar and different than this one. Equally built like a Kaleidoscope. Working with small packets, threads, strings wrapped un in various streams of consciousness to produce a picture of a place (My Red Heaven) or a mirror on life, death, and time (Skin Elegies).

Good luck.
]]> <![CDATA[So Much Longing in So Little Space: The Art of Edvard Munch]]> 41431983 A brilliant and personal examination by sensational and bestselling author Karl Ove Knausgaard of his Norwegian compatriot Edvard Munch, the famed artist best known for his iconic painting The Scream

In So Much Longing in So Little Space, Karl Ove Knausgaard sets out to understand the enduring and awesome power of Edvard Munch’s work by training his gaze on the landscapes that inspired Munch and speaking firsthand with other contemporary artists, including Anselm Kiefer, for whom Munch’s legacy looms large. Bringing together art history, biography, and memoir, Knausgaard tells a passionate, freewheeling, and pensive story about not just one of history’s most significant painters, but the very meaning of choosing the artist’s life, as he himself has done. Including reproductions of some of Munch’s most emotionally and psychologically intense works, chosen by Knausgaard, this utterly original and ardent work of criticism will delight and educate both experts and novices of literature and the visual arts alike.]]> 252 Karl Ove Knausgård 0525504907 Darwin8u 3 3.98 2017 So Much Longing in So Little Space: The Art of Edvard Munch

So Much Longing in So Little Space: The Art of Edvard Munch

author: Karl Ove Knausgård
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2017
rating: 3
read at: 2023/09/13
date added: 2024/02/22
shelves: 2023, art, biography, european, history, nonfiction
review:
Gathering my thoughts first. Giving them time to fade. I’ll soon write a review of Knausgaard’s take on Munch based on my memory of my thought and the emotions they evoked. That seems an appropriate approach.
]]> Dare I Weep, Dare I Mourn? 31172039 13 John Le Carré Darwin8u 3 "No one is free", his wife replied, "when duty is involved."
- John Le Carré

This is a short story that appeared in the Saturday Evening Post, 28 January 1967. Essentially, it tells the tale of a family split between East Germany and West Germany. The father dies and wishes to be buried in the West.

I once had a friend whose father died in Arizona and wanted to be buried 630 miles away in Pleasant Grove, UT. Flying the casket with his father was too prohibitive, and there was a lot of red tape involved with driving. So, my friend bypassed the red tape, loaded the casket with his 90-year-old father in the back of his short-bed truck and headed to Utah. He drove his father through National Forests, National Parks, and had one last, slightly irregular road trip with his father. This story felt like that, just darker. The cold war was a cold mother, er, father.]]> 3.70 1967 Dare I Weep, Dare I Mourn?

author: John Le Carré
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 3.70
book published: 1967
rating: 3
read at: 2023/09/19
date added: 2024/01/31
shelves: 2023, british, fiction, short-stories
review:
"No one is free", his wife replied, "when duty is involved."
- John Le Carré

This is a short story that appeared in the Saturday Evening Post, 28 January 1967. Essentially, it tells the tale of a family split between East Germany and West Germany. The father dies and wishes to be buried in the West.

I once had a friend whose father died in Arizona and wanted to be buried 630 miles away in Pleasant Grove, UT. Flying the casket with his father was too prohibitive, and there was a lot of red tape involved with driving. So, my friend bypassed the red tape, loaded the casket with his 90-year-old father in the back of his short-bed truck and headed to Utah. He drove his father through National Forests, National Parks, and had one last, slightly irregular road trip with his father. This story felt like that, just darker. The cold war was a cold mother, er, father.
]]> The Mysteries 100698795 A New York Times, USA Today, Publishers Weekly, and Indie Bestseller.

From Bill Watterson, bestselling creator of the beloved comic strip Calvin and Hobbes, and John Kascht, one of America’s most renowned caricaturists, comes a mysterious and beautifully illustrated fable about what lies beyond human understanding.

In a fable for grown-ups by cartoonist Bill Watterson, a long-ago kingdom is afflicted with unexplainable calamities. Hoping to end the torment, the king dispatches his knights to discover the source of the mysterious events. Years later, a single battered knight returns.

For the book's illustrations, Watterson and caricaturist John Kascht worked together for several years in unusually close collaboration. Both artists abandoned their past ways of working, inventing images together that neither could anticipate—a mysterious process in its own right.

With The Mysteries, Watterson and Kascht share the fascinating genesis of their extraordinary collaboration in a video that can be viewed on Andrews McMeel Publishing's YouTube page.]]> 72 Bill Watterson 1524884944 Darwin8u 4 3.76 2023 The Mysteries

author: Bill Watterson
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2023/10/12
date added: 2023/10/12
shelves: 2023, absurdist, american, art, dystopia, fantasy, fiction, fable
review:
Great to finally see Watterson back on the horse after Calvin and Hobbes. A fantastic little fable. Loved the art and the story. Hopefully it won't take him another 30 years to follow this up with a Jazz record, a contemporary art exhibition, or a performance piece at the MoMA.
]]> <![CDATA[A Tree or a Person or a Wall: Stories]]> 28251061
A Tree or a Person or a Wall brings together Bell's previously published shorter fiction--the story collection How They Were Found and the acclaimed novella Cataclysm Baby--along with seven dark and disturbing new stories, to create a collection of singular power.]]> 383 Matt Bell 1616955236 Darwin8u 4 3.68 2016 A Tree or a Person or a Wall: Stories

author: Matt Bell
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2016
rating: 4
read at: 2023/10/11
date added: 2023/10/12
shelves: 2023, american, fiction, short-stories
review:
God I loved some of these stories so much. The more I read of Bell, the more I'm blown away by his voice and creativity. I'll add more later, but ye Gods. I'm going to be haunted by some of these stories for a long time.
]]> <![CDATA[What Ritual Is Being Observed Tonight?]]> 199043869
A month after le Carré’s fifth novel was released in bookstores, “What Ritual Is Being Observed Tonight?” appeared in a November 1968 issue.

It is a good example of the author’s skill with language, his unerring ear for dialogue, and his sharp eye for the telling detail. However, the story does not involve le Carré’s usual world of international politics and espionage. Instead, it gives us a glimpse into the world he knew during a seven-year hiatus from active intelligence work, when he earned a degree at Oxford and taught at Eton College.

Saturday Evening Post 10/2012]]> 5 John Le Carré Darwin8u 3 2023, short-stories, british "We are making a bridge," he explained..."A bridge between the naïve and the sentimental. Between the intellect and the body."
- John Le Carré, What Ritual Is Being Observed Tonight?

description

author: John Le Carré
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 3.00
book published: 1968
rating: 3
read at: 2023/09/19
date added: 2023/09/20
shelves: 2023, short-stories, british
review:
"We are making a bridge," he explained..."A bridge between the naïve and the sentimental. Between the intellect and the body."
- John Le Carré, What Ritual Is Being Observed Tonight?

description

In 1968, Le Carré, after taking a break from the British Secret Service, and after publishing his fifth novel, A Small Town in Germany went to Oxford and later taught at Eton. There he wrote, and published a story of love missed, and found again. Oh, and French wine. It is a bit over-the-top, but should, as the above quote hints, be associated with his 6th book, The Naïve and Sentimental Lover: A Novel.

I think for this story and the later, similarly styled novel, we readers should be grateful, because it sent Le Carré back from his brief romance with romance back to espionage. And, thus, it all worked out in the end.
]]> The October Circle 2281800
Connoisseurs of the literary spy thriller rank Robert Littell, the bestselling author of The Company , with John le Carré, Graham Greene, and Alan Furst in the first tier of the genre's pantheon. Set against the backdrop of the Russian invasion of Prague, The October Circle is one of Littell's most riveting early works. Seven of Bulgaria's cultural elite-all disillusioned communists-and one American drifter find themselves staging an extremely dangerous protest that will set off a wave of repression and threatens to repay their heroism with death.]]> 208 Robert Littell 0143112996 Darwin8u 4 "Nothing moves us greatly, that's the heart of the problem. We pay textbook attention to our lives. We treat our bowel-moving and our lovemaking as if they were punctuation. We embrace our children with parenthesis. We package whatever bits and pieces of self-knowledge we come by, as I'm doing now, in corrugated metaphors."
- Robert Littell, The October Circle

Published in 1975, this is one of Littell's earliest novels. October Circle focuses on August 1968 during the period when Russia and other Eastern Block countries invaded Czechoslovakia after Dubček's liberalization reforms. Seven friends, members of the October Circle, are horrified at what has become of Communism in Bulgaria and the degradation of communism over the years and decide they need to take action.

This is a story of friendship, ideals, history, and community. Similar to how John le Carré experimented with non-espionage fiction before and after he found success with The Spy Who Came In from the Cold (but it all mined a similar vein of Cold War and Post Cold War Britian and Europe), Robert Littell's books seemed to largely revolve around the binary stars of espionage and Russia. His first great novel was The Defection of A.J. Lewinter which hold a similar place to The Spy Who Came In from the Cold inside Littell's work.

While this would rarely find its way into any Littell fan's top 5 list, it is still bold and shows an early sign of Littell's literary flair. His stories are compelling. His language is energetic. His narrative has a push that drives the reader into its traps and climaxes. He might not be at the same level as Le Carre, but he is definitely playing on the same stage and holds his own.]]> 3.74 1975 The October Circle

author: Robert Littell
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 3.74
book published: 1975
rating: 4
read at: 2023/09/10
date added: 2023/09/12
shelves: 2023, american, european, espionage, fiction, historical-fiction, russian
review:
"Nothing moves us greatly, that's the heart of the problem. We pay textbook attention to our lives. We treat our bowel-moving and our lovemaking as if they were punctuation. We embrace our children with parenthesis. We package whatever bits and pieces of self-knowledge we come by, as I'm doing now, in corrugated metaphors."
- Robert Littell, The October Circle

Published in 1975, this is one of Littell's earliest novels. October Circle focuses on August 1968 during the period when Russia and other Eastern Block countries invaded Czechoslovakia after Dubček's liberalization reforms. Seven friends, members of the October Circle, are horrified at what has become of Communism in Bulgaria and the degradation of communism over the years and decide they need to take action.

This is a story of friendship, ideals, history, and community. Similar to how John le Carré experimented with non-espionage fiction before and after he found success with The Spy Who Came In from the Cold (but it all mined a similar vein of Cold War and Post Cold War Britian and Europe), Robert Littell's books seemed to largely revolve around the binary stars of espionage and Russia. His first great novel was The Defection of A.J. Lewinter which hold a similar place to The Spy Who Came In from the Cold inside Littell's work.

While this would rarely find its way into any Littell fan's top 5 list, it is still bold and shows an early sign of Littell's literary flair. His stories are compelling. His language is energetic. His narrative has a push that drives the reader into its traps and climaxes. He might not be at the same level as Le Carre, but he is definitely playing on the same stage and holds his own.
]]> Landmarks 23597544 Landmarks is Robert Macfarlane's joyous meditation on words, landscape and the relationship between the two.

Words are grained into our landscapes, and landscapes are grained into our words. Landmarks is about the power of language to shape our sense of place. It is a field guide to the literature of nature, and a glossary containing thousands of remarkable words used in England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales to describe land, nature and weather. Travelling from Cumbria to the Cairngorms, and exploring the landscapes of Roger Deakin, J. A. Baker, Nan Shepherd and others, Robert Macfarlane shows that language, well used, is a keen way of knowing landscape, and a vital means of coming to love it.]]> 387 Robert Macfarlane Darwin8u 5 "And our children's vanishing encounters with nature represent a loss of primary experience."
- Robert MacFarlane, Landmarks

"If children abandon 'the sandlots and creek beds, the alleys and woodlands', if 'children are not permitted...to be adventurers and explorers as children', then 'what will become of the world of adventure, stories, of literature itself?'"
- Michael Chabon, The Wilderness of Childhood

"I was reminded, too, of Emerson's beautiful description of language as 'a city to the building of which every person has brought a stone.'"
- Emerson, quoted by Robert MacFarlane, Landmarks

author: Robert Macfarlane
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 4.24
book published: 2015
rating: 5
read at: 2023/09/10
date added: 2023/09/12
shelves: 2023, british, enviornmentalism, essays, literary-criticism, nonfiction, poetry, writing
review:
"And our children's vanishing encounters with nature represent a loss of primary experience."
- Robert MacFarlane, Landmarks

"If children abandon 'the sandlots and creek beds, the alleys and woodlands', if 'children are not permitted...to be adventurers and explorers as children', then 'what will become of the world of adventure, stories, of literature itself?'"
- Michael Chabon, The Wilderness of Childhood

"I was reminded, too, of Emerson's beautiful description of language as 'a city to the building of which every person has brought a stone.'"
- Emerson, quoted by Robert MacFarlane, Landmarks

Inspired by the removal of several nature words in the Oxford Junior Dictionary: "acorn, adder, ash, beech, bluebell, buttercup..." The list was tragic. The thesis of Robert Macfarlane's book is we love the things we name, and if we lose the name for things in our language, our ability to care for nature and wilderness diminished. This book is a signpost pointing to books where the language of nature is strong. Chapters are essentially essays where Robert Macfarlane is able to sing a love letter to fantastic books like Nan Shepherd's In the Cairngorms, Roger Deakon's Waterlog: A Swimmer's Journey Through Britain, J.A. Baker's The Peregrine, Richard Skelton's Landings, Barry Lopez's Arctic Dreams, Richard Jefferies' Nature Near London, Clarince Ellis's The Pebbles On The Beach, and John Muir's My First Summer in the Sierra.

Macfarlane's love for these books and topics is so rich it is hard to not love them back. I finished this book and purchased three more. It was infective. Just like the glossaries that divide the chapters. In the glossary, Macfarlane include nature words in danger of being lost. The words mostly are focused on Great Britain, but when this book was first published it inspired readers to send in their own local lexicons of nature. It really is beautifully constructed and for a book organic, which structurally is nearly perfect.
]]> <![CDATA[Cleopatra: I Am Fire and Air (2) (Shakespeare's Personalities)]]> 34466916
Cleopatra is one of the most famous women in history—and thanks to Shakespeare, one of the most intriguing personalities in literature. She is lover of Marc Antony, defender of Egypt, and, perhaps most enduringly, a champion of life. Cleopatra is supremely vexing, tragic, and complex. She has fascinated readers and audiences for centuries and has been played by the greatest actresses of their time, from Elizabeth Taylor to Vivien Leigh to Janet Suzman to Judi Dench.

Award-winning writer and beloved professor Harold Bloom writes about Cleopatra with wisdom, joy, exuberance, and compassion. He also explores his own personal relationship to the Just as we encounter one Anna Karenina or Jay Gatsby when we are in high school and college and another when we are adults, Bloom explains his shifting understanding of Cleopatra over the course of his own lifetime. The book becomes an extraordinarily moving argument for literature as a path to and a measure of our own humanity.

Bloom is mesmerizing in the classroom, wrestling with the often tragic choices Shakespeare’s characters make. With Cleopatra , he delivers exhilarating clarity and invites us to look at this character as a flawed human who might be living in our world. The result is an invaluable resource from our greatest literary critic.]]> 160 Harold Bloom 1501164163 Darwin8u 3 "Like the Nile she inundates and then brings forth a harvest of burgeoning vivaciousness. Metamorphic, yet she overcomes the changes through histrionic genius. She acts and is, and who can tell what in her is not theatrical?"
- Harold Bloom, Cleopatra

description

It was hard for me to get excited about Cleopatra or Bloom from this book. Not the worst piece in the series, but not the best (Falstaff). It was weak for the first 2/3 and finished a bit stronger. Like some other of the mediocre titles in this series, it feels like parts of the book were recycled, parts were put together by an RA phoning it in, and occasionally Bloom, his sharp focus dulling, would insert something new. Nothing revelatory here. Lots of diving for some mediocre pearls.

This is the second of the five books Bloom wrote directly about Shakespeare's big personalities. These are the books in his series Shakespeare's Personalities:

Falstaff: Give Me Life (1) ✔
Cleopatra: I Am Fire and Air (2) ✔
Lear: The Great Image of Authority (3)
Iago: The Strategies of Evil (4) ✔
Macbeth: A Dagger of the Mind (5) ✔]]> 3.46 2017

Cleopatra: I Am Fire and Air (2) (Shakespeare's Personalities)

author: Harold Bloom
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 3.46
book published: 2017
rating: 3
read at: 2023/09/11
date added: 2023/09/12
shelves: 2023, drama, literary-criticism, american
review:
"Like the Nile she inundates and then brings forth a harvest of burgeoning vivaciousness. Metamorphic, yet she overcomes the changes through histrionic genius. She acts and is, and who can tell what in her is not theatrical?"
- Harold Bloom, Cleopatra

description

CIA operative Malcolm, codenamed Condor, discovers his colleagues butchered in a blood-spattered office, he realizes that only an oversight by the assassins has saved his life. He contacts CIA headquarters for help but when an attempted rendezvous goes wrong, it quickly becomes clear that no one can be trusted. Malcolm disappears into the streets of Washington, hoping to evade the killers long enough to unravel the conspiracy but will that be enough to save his life?

]]> 374 James Grady Darwin8u 4 “Goodbye, Condor. One last word of advice. Stick to research. You’ve used up all your luck. When it comes right down to it, you’re not very good.”
- James Grady, Six Days of the Condor

description

author: James Grady
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 3.90
book published: 1974
rating: 4
read at: 2023/07/02
date added: 2023/09/11
shelves: 2023, american, espionage, fiction
review:
“Goodbye, Condor. One last word of advice. Stick to research. You’ve used up all your luck. When it comes right down to it, you’re not very good.”
- James Grady, Six Days of the Condor

description

Making my way back through some of the classic espionage novels that I've missed. I've always had 6Days on my radar, but just passed over it like you might a nondescript brownstone in D.C. But I decided to jump into it yesterday. For a first novel, written right out of college (and a Senate internship in D.C.) the books is rather incredible. Grady is able to make leaps and jumps that make an interesting story and a sophisticated thriller.

A great freebie with the current edition is the preface where Grady writes about the book, its influences, and his experiences with both the novel being published and the making of the movie. This is definitely one of those classics of the genre and early CIA-oriented espionage novels that aren't cartoonish. His book is fascinating because he gets bureaucracy, inadequacy, and ineptitude. Not everyone has spider sense and not everyone is a perfect shot. Luck is always an important character in any thriller. I'll probably pick up another Grady in the near future to see if subsequent novels held up.
]]> Scrapper 26310397 A man embarks on a desperate quest for redemption in a devastated Detroit, in this novel that “has the feel of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road . . . Powerful” (Publishers Weekly). Detroit has descended into ruin. Kelly scavenges for scrap metal from the hundred thousand abandoned buildings in a part of the city known as “the zone”—an increasingly wild landscape where one day he finds something far more valuable than the copper he’s come to a kidnapped boy, crying out for rescue. Briefly, Kelly is celebrated as a hero. But even after he has brought the boy to safety, he is driven to secretly avenge this crime and solve the mystery behind the kidnapping—a task that will take him deeper into the zone, and into a confrontation with his own past and long-buried traumas. From the acclaimed author of In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods, Scrapper is a devastating reimagining of one of America’s greatest cities, its beautiful architecture, its lost houses, shuttered factories, boxing gyms, and storefront churches. With precise, powerful prose, it What do we owe for our crimes, even those we’ve committed to protect the people we love? ]]> 321 Matt Bell 1616955228 Darwin8u 5 "You couldn’t escape the past but he hoped you could choose what to restore, what to keep gleaming. This was the progress Kelly had seen, not the replacing of the old city with the new but the building of smarter exits and bypasses."
-- Matt Bell, Scrapper

description

Matt Bell's 2015 novel Scrapper is the second of Matt's novels I've read. When I read him, I get elements of Cormac McCarthy, Brian Evenson, Don DeLillo, Vollmann, and (it took me awhile to put my finger on it) Gertrude Stein?

Scrapper centers on a man, Kelly, trapped between the things that haunt him in the past and his crumbling, decaying present. This felt very Dystopian to me, but the further I waded into Bell's story, the more I had the feeling that not recognizing a landscape doesn't mean the zone doesn't exist, doesn't mean the disaster isn't inevitable even for the privileged, even for those currently at the top of the heap. The clock ticks for us all and, sooner or later, it stops ticking forever.

There is a physicality to the book, both in setting and characters. The story starts in Detroit and a crumpling Detroit is the centerpiece of the novel. The character is bouncing between redemption and destruction. Interspersed are two separate short-stories that seem in the beginning not related to the narrative structure of the book, but once the veil of the story lifts a bit, you realize these two stories are keys that unlock the theme a bit more. Two twisted, rusted I-beams that give a distinct shape to the broken concrete and the web of rebar that give it all shape and direction. They are two foreign bodies that don't seem to belong, but once we pan back, we see the broken car located in the house is part of a greater entropy from an explosion or wreck.

All damage has a beginning. All narratives begin with a blank slate.

Tracking not exactly directly backwards in Matt's fiction, it appears from the two points I know (Scrapper and Appleseed), there are threads running through Matt's fiction. Environmental disaster, decay, loneliness and redemption are all there.

A warning, and I'll end this with the warning -- This book is not for the faint-hearted. It reminded me a bit of The Road, Immobility, and the prose rang like DeLillo and Stein. It is hard. It is horror, both in landscape and intent. There are no superheroes in this story. No medals. But there is a payoff.]]> 3.30 2015 Scrapper

author: Matt Bell
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 3.30
book published: 2015
rating: 5
read at: 2023/08/04
date added: 2023/09/09
shelves: 2023, american, crime, dystopia, fiction, horror
review:
"You couldn’t escape the past but he hoped you could choose what to restore, what to keep gleaming. This was the progress Kelly had seen, not the replacing of the old city with the new but the building of smarter exits and bypasses."
-- Matt Bell, Scrapper

description

author: John McPhee
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 4.13
book published: 1990
rating: 4
read at: 2023/09/08
date added: 2023/09/08
shelves: 2023, american, nonfiction
review:
Will review tomorrow.
]]> The Passion According to G.H. 13082436 220 Clarice Lispector 0811219682 Darwin8u 5 "I am the vestal priestess of a secret I have forgotten. And I serve the forgotten danger. I found something I could not understand, my lips were sealed, and all I've got are incomprehensible fragments of a ritual."
- Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.

As GH awoke one morning from dry, salty dreams she found her self confronted by an empty room and a barata.

It is hard to review this book without giving away the story. It isn't a story really. It's an experience. Its like trying to summarize a deeply-felt dream, a mushroom trip, licking a Sonoran desert toad. It is religious. It is soulful. It is crisp and fresh. For something that takes place over a day, it feels like a firehose of information has flowed from the author to her readers. Full-stop. Few books have impacted me like this novel did. It felt a bit like Djuna Barnes meeting Franz Kafka, or James Joyce swimming with Gertrude Stein.]]> 4.18 1964 The Passion According to G.H.

author: Clarice Lispector
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 4.18
book published: 1964
rating: 5
read at: 2023/09/07
date added: 2023/09/07
shelves: 2023, fiction, latin-american, south-american
review:
"I am the vestal priestess of a secret I have forgotten. And I serve the forgotten danger. I found something I could not understand, my lips were sealed, and all I've got are incomprehensible fragments of a ritual."
- Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.

As GH awoke one morning from dry, salty dreams she found her self confronted by an empty room and a barata.

It is hard to review this book without giving away the story. It isn't a story really. It's an experience. Its like trying to summarize a deeply-felt dream, a mushroom trip, licking a Sonoran desert toad. It is religious. It is soulful. It is crisp and fresh. For something that takes place over a day, it feels like a firehose of information has flowed from the author to her readers. Full-stop. Few books have impacted me like this novel did. It felt a bit like Djuna Barnes meeting Franz Kafka, or James Joyce swimming with Gertrude Stein.
]]> Leaf Storm and Other Stories 31721 Leaf Storm: 'SUDDENLY, AS IF A WHIRLWIND HAD SET DOWN ROOTS IN THE CENTRE OF THE TOWN, THE BANANA COMPANY ARRIVED, PURSUED BY THE LEAF STORM'

As a blizzard of warehouses and amusement parlours and slums descends on the small town of Macondo, the inhabitants reel at the accompanying stench of rubbish that makes their home unrecognisable. When the banana company leaves town as fast as it arrived, all they are left with is a void of decay.

Living in this devastated and soulless wasteland is one last honourable man, the Colonel, who is determined to fulfil a long standing promise, no matter how unpalatable it may be. With the death of the detested Doctor, he must provide an honourable burial - and incur the wrath of the rest of Macondo, who would rather see the Doctor rot, forgotten and unattended.

Also contains the stories: The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World, A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings, Blacaman the Good, Vendor of Miracles, The Last Voyage of the Ghost Ship, Monologue of Isabel Watching It Rain in Macondo, Nabo]]> 146 Gabriel García Márquez 006075155X Darwin8u 4 Believe me, colonel, I'm not an atheist. I get just as upset thinking God exists as thinking he doesn't. That is why I'd rather not think about it."
- Gabrielle García Márquez, Leaf Storm

This book contains the novella "The Leaf Storm" along with the following stories:

1. - The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World - ★★★★★
2. - A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings - ★★★★★
3. - Blacaman the Good, Vendor of Mircacles - ★★★★
4. - The Last Voyage of the Ghost Ship - ★★★★
5. - Monologue of Isabel Watching it Rain in Macondo - ★★★★★
6. - Nabo - ★★★★

I need to come back and talk a bit more about it, but not now.]]> 3.81 1955 Leaf Storm and Other Stories

author: Gabriel García Márquez
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 3.81
book published: 1955
rating: 4
read at: 2023/09/04
date added: 2023/09/06
shelves: 2023, fantasy, latin-american, novella, short-stories, fiction
review:
"Believe me, colonel, I'm not an atheist. I get just as upset thinking God exists as thinking he doesn't. That is why I'd rather not think about it."
- Gabrielle García Márquez, Leaf Storm

This book contains the novella "The Leaf Storm" along with the following stories:

1. - The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World - ★★★★★
2. - A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings - ★★★★★
3. - Blacaman the Good, Vendor of Mircacles - ★★★★
4. - The Last Voyage of the Ghost Ship - ★★★★
5. - Monologue of Isabel Watching it Rain in Macondo - ★★★★★
6. - Nabo - ★★★★

I need to come back and talk a bit more about it, but not now.
]]> Black Wings Has My Angel 25489208
When Tim Sunblade escapes from prison, his sole possession is an infallible plan for the ultimate heist. Trouble is it’s a two-person job. So when he meets Virginia, a curiously well-spoken “ten-dollar tramp,” and discovers that the only thing she cares for is “drifts of money, lumps of it,” he knows he’s met his partner. What he doesn’t suspect is that this lavender-eyed angel might just prove to be his match.

Black Wings Has My Angel careens through a landscape of desperate passion and wild reversals. It is a journey you will never forget.]]> 209 Elliott Chaze 1590179161 Darwin8u 5 "He'd always said the plan called for two people, one on the waiting end, one on the dying end."
- Elliot Chaze, Black Wings Has My Angel

"The ultimate in horror is, for some unworldly reason, attractive. Hypnotic."
- Elliot Chaze, Black Wings Has My Angel

When I started this novel my wife started to laugh. She reminded me that in Home Alone and Home Alone 2, the hardboiled, mobster movies used throughout the films are: Angels with Filthy Souls and Angels with Even Filthier Souls, respectably. Perfection.

Wow! I came to Chaze loving Jim Thompson, James M. Cain], Raymond Chandler & Dashiell Hammett already, having consumed most all of their books. Black Wings Has My Angel deserves to stand with all of these. The novel hits hard, flows well, and is almost hypnotic in parts. It explores the pull of love, of our past, and of money of course. The ending feels almost like reading a Cormac McCarthy novel.]]> 4.15 1953

author: Elliott Chaze
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 4.15
book published: 1953
rating: 5
read at: 2023/09/03
date added: 2023/09/06
shelves: 2023, american, crime, crime-noir, fiction, nyrb
review:
"He'd always said the plan called for two people, one on the waiting end, one on the dying end."
- Elliot Chaze, Black Wings Has My Angel

"The ultimate in horror is, for some unworldly reason, attractive. Hypnotic."
- Elliot Chaze, Black Wings Has My Angel

When I started this novel my wife started to laugh. She reminded me that in Home Alone and Home Alone 2, the hardboiled, mobster movies used throughout the films are: Angels with Filthy Souls and Angels with Even Filthier Souls, respectably. Perfection.

Wow! I came to Chaze loving Jim Thompson, James M. Cain], Raymond Chandler & Dashiell Hammett already, having consumed most all of their books. Black Wings Has My Angel deserves to stand with all of these. The novel hits hard, flows well, and is almost hypnotic in parts. It explores the pull of love, of our past, and of money of course. The ending feels almost like reading a Cormac McCarthy novel.
]]> The Moon Is Down 763808 Originally published at the zenith of Nazi Germany's power, Steinbeck's masterful fable explores the effects of invasion on conquered and conquerors alike.

Occupied by enemy troops, a small, peaceable town comes to face-to-face with evil imposed from the outside--and betrayal born within the close-knit community. As he delves into the motivations and emotions of the enemy commander and the quisling traitor, Steinbeck uncovers profound, often unsettling truths about war--and about human nature.

Steinbeck's self-described "celebration of the durability of democracy" had an extraordinary impact as Allied propaganda in Nazi-occupied Europe. Despite Axis efforts to suppress it (in Fascist Italy, mere possession of a copy of the book was punishable by death), The Moon Is Down was secretly translated into French, Norwegian, Danish, Dutch, Swedish, German, Italian, and Russian; hundreds of thousands of copies circulated throughout Europe, making it by far the most popular piece of propaganda under occupation. Few literary works of our time have demonstrated so triumphantly the power of ideas in the face of cold steel and brute force.]]> 112 John Steinbeck 0140187464 Darwin8u 4 “There you are mistaken: a man who is good for anything ought not to calculate the chance of living or dying; he ought only to consider whether he is doing right or wrong.”
- John Steinbeck, The Moon is Down

"The moon is down; I have not heard the clock."
Shakespeare, Act II, Scene i of Macbeth

description

author: John Steinbeck
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 4.01
book published: 1942
rating: 4
read at: 2023/07/18
date added: 2023/09/03
shelves: 2023, american, classics, fiction, war
review:
“There you are mistaken: a man who is good for anything ought not to calculate the chance of living or dying; he ought only to consider whether he is doing right or wrong.”
- John Steinbeck, The Moon is Down

"The moon is down; I have not heard the clock."
Shakespeare, Act II, Scene i of Macbeth

description

I've been on a Steinbeck kick the last month. This is my fourth. I read a couple novellas and a nonfiction. This is one I knew very little about. I heard it was popular in Europe and the Soviet Union during the war and I'm still not sure if it was written at the request of any government or individual, but as a piece of literary propaganda it works out really well.

It is essentially the story of a village in an unnamed country (read Norway) that is invaded by another country (read Germany) and begins to initiate resistance to occupation. It was made into a play in 1942 (not great reviews) and later a film in 1943.

Not a perfect novel, but I think the thing that keeps bringing me back to Steinbeck is this generalization, while I think other writers (see Faulkner) are technically better writers, I get fed really well whenever I read Steinbeck. There is just something about his outlook, his moral philosophy, his vibe that I really roll with.
]]> Tabula Rasa: Volume 1 74864398 A literary legend’s engaging review of his career, stressing the work he never completed, and why.

Over seven decades, John McPhee has set a standard for literary nonfiction. Assaying mountain ranges, bark canoes, experimental aircraft, the Swiss Army, geophysical hot spots, ocean shipping, shad fishing, dissident art in the Soviet Union, and an even wider variety of other subjects, he has consistently written narrative pieces of immaculate design.

In Tabula Rasa, Volume 1, McPhee looks back at his career from the vantage point of his desk drawer, reflecting wryly upon projects he once planned to do but never got around to—people to profile, regions he meant to portray. There are so many examples that he plans to go on writing these vignettes, an ideal project for an old man, he says, and a “reminiscent montage” from a writing life. This first volume includes, among other things, glimpses of a frosty encounter with Thornton Wilder, interrogative dinners with Henry Luce, the allure of western Spain, criteria in writing about science, fireworks over the East River as seen from Malcolm Forbes’s yacht, the evolving inclinations of the Tower of Pisa, the islands among the river deltas of central California, teaching in a pandemic, and persuading The New Yorker to publish an entire book on oranges. The result is a fresh survey of McPhee’s singular planet.]]> 180 John McPhee 0374603618 Darwin8u 3 "With the same ulterior motive*, I could undertake to describe in capsule form the many writing projects that I have conceived and seriously planned across the years but have never written."
- John McPhee, "Thorton Wilder at the Century," Tabula Rasa (Volume 1?)

description

author: John McPhee
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 4.33
book published:
rating: 3
read at: 2023/07/26
date added: 2023/09/03
shelves: 2023, american, memoir-autobiography-diary, nonfiction
review:
"With the same ulterior motive*, I could undertake to describe in capsule form the many writing projects that I have conceived and seriously planned across the years but have never written."
- John McPhee, "Thorton Wilder at the Century," Tabula Rasa (Volume 1?)

description

* When McPhee was young he went to a lunch with Thorton Wilder, when asked "Wilder said he was not actually writing a new play or novel but was fully engaged in a related project. He was cataloguing the plays of Lope de Vega. Lope de Vega wrote some eighteen hundred full-length plays. Four hundred and thirty-one survive. How long would it take to read four hundred and thirty-one plays? How long would it take to summarize each in descriptive detail and fulfill the additional requirements of cataloguing?"

***

Now in his early 90s, McPhee better understands: "I know that those four hundred and thirty-one plays were serving to extend Thornton Wilder’s life."

That is the purpose of this book. McPhee is, at the bidding of his wife, his daughter, or the inevitable tug of the eternities, going through his files: organizing, reminiscing, looking for gems, remembering adventures, friends. Bringing to light the hidden, the unpublished, the errata and errant pages and proposals.

He has been periodically adding these to the New Yorker: drip, drip, drip.

Tabula Rasa appeared 3 times from Jan 2020 to Feb 2022.

"Tabula Rasa: Vol 1" appeared in the New Yorker on Jan 12, 2020, and included the vignettes:
1. Trujillo
2. Thorton Wilder at the Century
3. The Moons of Methuselah
4. "Hitler Youth"
5. The Bridges of Christian Menn
6. The Airplane that Crashed in the Woods
7. On the Campus
8. The Guilt of the US Male
9. Extremadura

"Tabula Rasa: Vol 2" appeared in the New Yorker on Apr 19, 2021, and included the vignettes:
1. Sloop to Gibraltar
2. The Valley
3. December 19,1943
4. The Dutch Ship Tyger
5. Ray Brock
6. Writer

"Tabula Rasa: Vol 3" appeared in the New Yorker on Feb 7, 2022, and included the vignettes:
1. Not that One
2. Night Watchman
3. George Recker and Dr. Dick
4. Dinners with Henry Luce
5. Bourbon and Bing Cherries
6. Dropped Antaeus

These 21 small pieces represent a little less than 1/2: 21/50. Clearly, if you like what you read in the New Yorker, you still need to buy the book. Fair. I would hyperlink to the New Yorker articles, but unfortunately, 카지노싸이트 only allows one to link to things from inside africa-eu.com. Booo!

McPhee might be my favorite nonfiction writer, but while these pieces do present an interesting structure and allow the reader to get a bigger sense of a big writer, they are also cast-offs. Some parts are amazing, others are filler, and the structure seems more like a Smörgåsbord of memories, people, reflections, and almost taken paths. I enjoyed it, but these 50 pieces can't compete with McPhee's great books. This is Michael Jordan at 60 not the GOAT at 20-30.
]]> Father of Lies 25330309 Publishers Weekly

Provost Eldon Fochs may be a sexual criminal. His therapist isn't sure, and his church is determined to protect its reputation. Father of Lies is Brian Evenson's fable of power, paranoia, and the dangers of blind obedience, and a terrifying vision of how far institutions will go to protect themselves against the innocents who may be their victims.]]> 172 Brian Evenson 1566894158 Darwin8u 4 Despite all claims the Corporation of the Blood of the Lamb makes to be a divinely inspired Church, it seems oddly as eager as any worldly institution to soil its hands in a little impropriety, to cover a few things over if that means furthering the cause of righteousness."
- Brian Evenson, Father of Lies

Not Evenson's best, but definitely his angriest. This book might be the equivalent to reading just the darkest bits of Blood Meridian. It will seed a forest of nightmares all with hanging children of God.

It needs to come with a warning label, a retch bucket and a lap to cry on. I have to put it down every 10 pages and just pray into the abyss for my soul (not really, but you got to do something to keep from sliding into this nightmare. Imagine being forced into the mind of an evil man, protected by a fundamentalist kafkaucracy, interested only in protecting its "good" name rather than its children. I'm not sure of you -- but I can think of examples in Texas, Ireland, Boston, Arkansas, Utah, Idaho.

This was written right after Brian was kicked out of BYU for the same book of short stories that got him hired there in the first place.* Talk about a literary hat trick. Brian wrote this book post that period. It is a blood-letting. It goes into an angry place and like Clockwork Orange's Aversion Therapy Scene forces you to observe things most people would want to turn away from. But sometimes shades and shadows tell the truth, sometimes lights on a hill are not designed to guide or inform but rather obfuscate.

* Note: I bought a copy of Altmann's Tongue: Stories and a Novella from the BYU Bookstore (back in the day when that bookstore rocked and didn't just sell trinkets and ice cream). I'm solidly team Evenson here.]]> 4.11 1998 Father of Lies

author: Brian Evenson
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 4.11
book published: 1998
rating: 4
read at: 2023/09/01
date added: 2023/09/02
shelves: 2023, american, fiction, horror, religion
review:
"Despite all claims the Corporation of the Blood of the Lamb makes to be a divinely inspired Church, it seems oddly as eager as any worldly institution to soil its hands in a little impropriety, to cover a few things over if that means furthering the cause of righteousness."
- Brian Evenson, Father of Lies

Not Evenson's best, but definitely his angriest. This book might be the equivalent to reading just the darkest bits of Blood Meridian. It will seed a forest of nightmares all with hanging children of God.

It needs to come with a warning label, a retch bucket and a lap to cry on. I have to put it down every 10 pages and just pray into the abyss for my soul (not really, but you got to do something to keep from sliding into this nightmare. Imagine being forced into the mind of an evil man, protected by a fundamentalist kafkaucracy, interested only in protecting its "good" name rather than its children. I'm not sure of you -- but I can think of examples in Texas, Ireland, Boston, Arkansas, Utah, Idaho.

This was written right after Brian was kicked out of BYU for the same book of short stories that got him hired there in the first place.* Talk about a literary hat trick. Brian wrote this book post that period. It is a blood-letting. It goes into an angry place and like Clockwork Orange's Aversion Therapy Scene forces you to observe things most people would want to turn away from. But sometimes shades and shadows tell the truth, sometimes lights on a hill are not designed to guide or inform but rather obfuscate.

* Note: I bought a copy of Altmann's Tongue: Stories and a Novella from the BYU Bookstore (back in the day when that bookstore rocked and didn't just sell trinkets and ice cream). I'm solidly team Evenson here.
]]> The Night Ocean 30901609 From the award-winning author and New Yorker contributor, a riveting novel about secrets and scandals, psychiatry and pulp fiction, inspired by the lives of H.P. Lovecraft and his circle.

Marina Willett, M.D., has a problem. Her husband, Charlie, has become obsessed with H.P. Lovecraft, in particular with one episode in the legendary horror writer's life: In the summer of 1934, the "old gent" lived for two months with a gay teenage fan named Robert Barlow, at Barlow's family home in central Florida. What were the two of them up to? Were they friends--or something more? Just when Charlie thinks he's solved the puzzle, a new scandal erupts, and he disappears. The police say it's suicide. Marina is a psychiatrist, and she doesn't believe them.

A tour-de-force of storytelling, The Night Ocean follows the lives of some extraordinary people: Lovecraft, the most influential American horror writer of the 20th century, whose stories continue to win new acolytes, even as his racist views provoke new critics; Barlow, a seminal scholar of Mexican culture who killed himself after being blackmailed for his homosexuality (and who collaborated with Lovecraft on the beautiful story The Night Ocean); his student, future Beat writer William S. Burroughs; and L.C. Spinks, a kindly Canadian appliance salesman and science-fiction fan -- the only person who knows the origins of The Erotonomicon, purported to be the intimate diary of Lovecraft himself.

As a heartbroken Marina follows her missing husband's trail in an attempt to learn the truth, the novel moves across the decades and along the length of the continent, from a remote Ontario town, through New York and Florida to Mexico City.

The Night Ocean is about love and deception -- about the way that stories earn our trust, and betray it.]]> 389 Paul La Farge 1101981083 Darwin8u 3 “Scratch a professor and you find a paranoiac, Barlow thought. But scratch a dean and you find a con artist.”
― Paul La Farge, The Night Ocean

description

author: Paul La Farge
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 3.31
book published: 2017
rating: 3
read at: 2023/08/31
date added: 2023/09/01
shelves: 2023, american, fiction, scifi
review:
“Scratch a professor and you find a paranoiac, Barlow thought. But scratch a dean and you find a con artist.”
― Paul La Farge, The Night Ocean

description

OK, things I loved: Tales within tales folded inside tales. Lies wrapped in lies buried under lies. Love covering love uncovering lost love. Middle sagged. Ending was great. An interesting premise. The ability to flip the narrative and begin again was great. What can you expect in a book filled with Futurists and ardent fans of SciFi in the 40s and 50s?

But still the book only floats between 3 and 4 stars. No tide. Absolutely no rip tide. There is a plot, it may be shaped like an Ouroboros, but never the less, it is there, it persists like a bad, but not very scary dream. The movement has little energy to it. It slides forward and backward, up and down.

Anyway, I don't want to knock it too hard. I did read it. A lot of the secondary characters (HP Lovecraft, Pohl, etc) stole the show from the prime non-movers.

Oh, but the Amanda Dewey cover and design absolutely kicks ass.
]]> <![CDATA[Curves: Flowers, Foliates & Flourishes in The Formal Decorative Arts]]> 20153580 58 Lisa DeLong 1904263887 Darwin8u 4 Principles do not constrain creativity: rather they inspire diverse and imaginative echoes of seeds, vines, leaves, flowers and fruit. A designer who works with repetition, alternation, undulation, tessellation, spirals, and symmetry soon discovers the rich variety made possible by working with these simple generative processes.
- Lisa DeLong, Curves

description

There is a space where geometry, math, art all meet. Lisa DeLong rules that universe (S( or at least one or two of the major curves of that universe )S).

I love mosaics, Islamic art, geometry, math, and literature. So I'm glad I discovered Lisa's art a few years back, and equally glad I discovered this little book. It describes, technically, the Curves used in decorative arts, but like the Yin Yang and the Tree of Life, this type of art expands up to the universe and drives down to electrons spinning.

God, I imagine, is constantly drawing ellipses with his finger across the arches and domes of a spiraling Universe. And Lisa is here with us to pull out a brass compass and draw them, and describe the whole process.]]> 4.06 2013 Curves: Flowers, Foliates & Flourishes in The Formal Decorative Arts

Curves: Flowers, Foliates & Flourishes in The Formal Decorative Arts

author: Lisa DeLong
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2013
rating: 4
read at: 2023/08/25
date added: 2023/08/25
shelves: 2023, art, british, nonfiction
review:
Principles do not constrain creativity: rather they inspire diverse and imaginative echoes of seeds, vines, leaves, flowers and fruit. A designer who works with repetition, alternation, undulation, tessellation, spirals, and symmetry soon discovers the rich variety made possible by working with these simple generative processes.
- Lisa DeLong, Curves

description

There is a space where geometry, math, art all meet. Lisa DeLong rules that universe (S( or at least one or two of the major curves of that universe )S).

I love mosaics, Islamic art, geometry, math, and literature. So I'm glad I discovered Lisa's art a few years back, and equally glad I discovered this little book. It describes, technically, the Curves used in decorative arts, but like the Yin Yang and the Tree of Life, this type of art expands up to the universe and drives down to electrons spinning.

God, I imagine, is constantly drawing ellipses with his finger across the arches and domes of a spiraling Universe. And Lisa is here with us to pull out a brass compass and draw them, and describe the whole process.
]]> Of Love And Other Demons 347564 160 Gabriel García Márquez 039428108X Darwin8u 4 "When I stand and contemplate my fate and see the path which you have lead me. I reach my end, for artless I surrendered to one who is by undoing and my end."
- Gabriel García Márquez, Of Love and Other Demons

description

author: Gabriel García Márquez
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 3.74
book published: 1994
rating: 4
read at: 2023/08/18
date added: 2023/08/18
shelves: 2023, fiction, novella, south-american
review:
"When I stand and contemplate my fate and see the path which you have lead me. I reach my end, for artless I surrendered to one who is by undoing and my end."
- Gabriel García Márquez, Of Love and Other Demons

description

I bought 1st Edition Knopf version of this novel shortly after the Edith Grossman edition was translated and published in 1995 to give to my fiancé right before we graduated college. I had read Márquez's two masterpieces Love in the Time of Cholera and One Hundred Years of Solitude a few years earlier, secretly, while my missionary companion slept in the other room. It, along with every other book that wasn't Mormon Scriptures was forbidden. But those rules were a bit loose, and I was looser with them than most. While in that town in Colorado I consumed Marquez, Mailer, DeLillo, and Bertrand Russell. But even with all of that preparation, it still took until today for me to read this book that sat on our communal bookshelf, more a symbol of our love than something we consumed. It sat there silent, virginal and unopened*.

Anyway, I loved it. Not as great as his BIG TWO, but I did waver on whether it should be 5 stars. I gave it 4, but with the option to change it at a later date. Like with love, stars can blink and equivocate. Back to Of Love and Other Demons: I think it should be made into a movie. Hell, I want an animated version that mixes the style of Disney's Sleeping Beauty with Henri Rousseau and the Cusco School.

Somebody with power and money should do it. That is all.

*Technically, it still sits there silent, virginal and unopened because I bought a paperback version to read, but that is just a trivial detail.
]]> The Pearl 5308
A story of classic simplicity, based on a Mexican folk tale, The Pearl explores the secrets of man’s nature, greed, the darkest depths of evil, and the luminous possibilities of love.]]> 96 John Steinbeck 0142000698 Darwin8u 4 The Log from the Sea of Cortez last month reminded me of what a jewel this little novella was and how perfect a book it is for introducing youth to imagery, symbolism, conflict, etc.

It was also amazing to read this at the same time as the Lottery was floating above $1.5B. The parallels of what it must be like to win a large sum in a lottery or find a magnificent pearl in the Sea of Cortez is eerie. I can't imagine all the wolves and vultures that must descend on any sudden fortune. We as humans are often cruel and ruthless.]]> 3.53 1947 The Pearl

author: John Steinbeck
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 3.53
book published: 1947
rating: 4
read at: 2023/08/07
date added: 2023/08/17
shelves: 2023, american, fiction, novella, myth
review:
This is the second time I've read this. The first time as an adult. Reading The Log from the Sea of Cortez last month reminded me of what a jewel this little novella was and how perfect a book it is for introducing youth to imagery, symbolism, conflict, etc.

It was also amazing to read this at the same time as the Lottery was floating above $1.5B. The parallels of what it must be like to win a large sum in a lottery or find a magnificent pearl in the Sea of Cortez is eerie. I can't imagine all the wolves and vultures that must descend on any sudden fortune. We as humans are often cruel and ruthless.
]]> <![CDATA[Argall: The True Story of Pocahontas and Captain John Smith (Seven Dreams, #3)]]> 300738
In Argall , the third novel in his Seven Dreams series, William T. Vollmann alternates between extravagant Elizabethan language and gritty realism in an attempt to dig beneath the legend surrounding Pocahontas, John Smith, and the founding of the Jamestown colony in Virginia-as well as the betrayals, disappointments, and atrocities behind it. With the same panoramic vision, mythic sensibility, and stylistic daring that he brought to the previous novels in the Seven Dreams series--hailed upon its inception as "the most important literary project of the '90s" ( The Washington Post )--Vollmann continues his hugely original fictional history of the clash of Native Americans and Europeans in the New World. In reconstructing America's past as tragedy, nightmare, and bloody spectacle, Vollmann does nothing less than reinvent the American novel.]]> 746 William T. Vollmann 0142001503 Darwin8u 5 "Legend being strangled rather nourished by any abundance of original fact, it is unremarkable how rapidly our .2. best sources, John Smith and William Strachey, pass over Pocahontas."
- William the Blind, Argall: The True Story of Pocahontas and Captain John Smith.

description

Argall is volume three in Vollmann's Seven Dream Cycle. Each book details (or will; 2 have yet to be published) an area of conflict between natives in America and the colonialists. So far I've conquered the three largest ones.

Volume 1: The Ice-Shirt (1990)
Volume 2: Fathers and Crows (1992) ✔ Read
Volume 3: Argall(2001) ✔ Read
Volume 4: The Poison Shirt (unpublished)
Volume 5: The Dying Grass (2015) ✔ Read
Volume 6: The Rifles Landscapes (1994)
Volume 7: The Cloud-Shirt (unpublished)

I'm constantly amazed at Vollmann's ability to just go for it with his Seven Dreams novels. He is experimental, jumps into muddy water head first, throws reams of information at the reader and fiction to fill the gaps. All while he stays within the boundaries he is exploring. The three major characters in this novel are easily illuminated by the title: Argall, John Smith, and Pocahontas. Each character of this New World Myth inhabits a territory of their shared history. They are the holy trinity of Jamestown. The Father (John Smith), the Prodigal Son (Samuel Argall), and the Holy Princess (Pocahontas). Vollmann takes these characters and travels back and forth between James Towne and London Towne. He is able to use the myth and the small history to work on the theme of settlement and to disrupt, if just a bit, the narrative. Argall takes centerplace, because ultimately, Argall: the devil of progress, of capitalism, of settlement, of unadulterated self-interest, moves the plot. He represents all of England, or most of it; the energy and the iniquity; the civilized barbarism; the inevitable motion of conquerer and despoiled.

Like with ALL of Vollmann's massive tomes, I've got lots more I can say. There are so many threads that I don't want to yet abandon. I guess I need to go back and pick up The Ice-Shirt and The Rifles and wait for Vollmann's sights to be set on his big cycle again.]]> 4.21 2001 Argall: The True Story of Pocahontas and Captain John Smith (Seven Dreams, #3)

Argall: The True Story of Pocahontas and Captain John Smith (Seven Dreams, #3)

author: William T. Vollmann
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2001
rating: 5
read at: 2023/08/17
date added: 2023/08/17
shelves: 2023, american, fiction, historical-fiction
review:
"Legend being strangled rather nourished by any abundance of original fact, it is unremarkable how rapidly our .2. best sources, John Smith and William Strachey, pass over Pocahontas."
- William the Blind, Argall: The True Story of Pocahontas and Captain John Smith.

description

Argall is volume three in Vollmann's Seven Dream Cycle. Each book details (or will; 2 have yet to be published) an area of conflict between natives in America and the colonialists. So far I've conquered the three largest ones.

Volume 1: The Ice-Shirt (1990)
Volume 2: Fathers and Crows (1992) ✔ Read
Volume 3: Argall(2001) ✔ Read
Volume 4: The Poison Shirt (unpublished)
Volume 5: The Dying Grass (2015) ✔ Read
Volume 6: The Rifles Landscapes (1994)
Volume 7: The Cloud-Shirt (unpublished)

I'm constantly amazed at Vollmann's ability to just go for it with his Seven Dreams novels. He is experimental, jumps into muddy water head first, throws reams of information at the reader and fiction to fill the gaps. All while he stays within the boundaries he is exploring. The three major characters in this novel are easily illuminated by the title: Argall, John Smith, and Pocahontas. Each character of this New World Myth inhabits a territory of their shared history. They are the holy trinity of Jamestown. The Father (John Smith), the Prodigal Son (Samuel Argall), and the Holy Princess (Pocahontas). Vollmann takes these characters and travels back and forth between James Towne and London Towne. He is able to use the myth and the small history to work on the theme of settlement and to disrupt, if just a bit, the narrative. Argall takes centerplace, because ultimately, Argall: the devil of progress, of capitalism, of settlement, of unadulterated self-interest, moves the plot. He represents all of England, or most of it; the energy and the iniquity; the civilized barbarism; the inevitable motion of conquerer and despoiled.

Like with ALL of Vollmann's massive tomes, I've got lots more I can say. There are so many threads that I don't want to yet abandon. I guess I need to go back and pick up The Ice-Shirt and The Rifles and wait for Vollmann's sights to be set on his big cycle again.
]]> Near to the Wild Heart 13082437
The book was an unprecedented sensation — the discovery of a genius. Narrative epiphanies and interior monologue frame the life of Joana, from her middle-class childhood through her unhappy marriage and its dissolution to transcendence, when she proclaims: “I shall arise as strong and comely as a young colt.”]]> 220 Clarice Lispector 0811220028 Darwin8u 5 "Eternity wasn't just time, but something like the deeply rooted certainty that she couldn't contain it in her body because of death; the impossibility of going beyond eternity was eternity; and a feeling in absolute almost abstract purity was also eternity."
- Clarice Lispector, Near to the Wild Heart

description

It is hard to put your finger on, wrap your brain around, this novel. In someways it reminds me of (and stands with) the stream of conscious writers like Joyce and Woolf. But the novel itself FEELS like Djuna Barnes' classic Nightwood. It is mysterious, lyrical, fragmented, dreamy. At heart, it feels like a brilliant, introspective girl/woman (Lispector was 23 when this book was published) working out what it means to be human, but more specifically, a woman; independent of her parents, relatives, teachers, husband, lovers, other women, motherhood, and even God.

Using philosophy, geometry, poetry, nature and intuition she examines herself from a period to a line to a triangle to a circle, and then back again. She explores the shape of herself and what it means to be alive.]]> 4.01 1943 Near to the Wild Heart

author: Clarice Lispector
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 4.01
book published: 1943
rating: 5
read at: 2023/08/17
date added: 2023/08/17
shelves: 2023, aere-perennius, classics, fiction, jewish, south-american
review:
"Eternity wasn't just time, but something like the deeply rooted certainty that she couldn't contain it in her body because of death; the impossibility of going beyond eternity was eternity; and a feeling in absolute almost abstract purity was also eternity."
- Clarice Lispector, Near to the Wild Heart

description

author: John McPhee
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 3.95
book published: 1973
rating: 4
read at: 2023/08/13
date added: 2023/08/13
shelves: 2023, american, history, nonfiction, science
review:
"I shall never land short, for you, my Savior, have launched me, and you will surely bring me in."

- last line of W. Miller's Psalm contributed to the "Bulletin of the Officers' Christian Union of the United States of America", quoted in John McPhee's The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed

description

McPhee is a genius at landing the reader at a spot where interesting character(s), location, and an interesting subject (ships, canoes, etc) meet. This book focuses on the development and test of a vehicle that was not quite an airship, yet not an airplane either. "It was a hybrid of the two, trying to combine the benefits of heavier-than-air aerodynamics and lighter-than-air aerostatics," namely an Aereon (the name of the corporation trying to get the orange pumpkin seed to fly).

New Jersey, which at first blush doesn't seem a likely candidate for this type of endeavor/investment, contained history (think Manchester Township's biggest disaster), a surprising number of former Navy blimp pilots and engineers, Princeton-based engineers and model enthusiasts, and a surprising number of Presbyterian ministers with a hard-on for rigid airships, hot air, God, combined with a televangelical aptitude for raising money from fellow PC (USA) members. Bring these elements all together, along with a 30pg micro history of airships, and you've got John McPhee's 1973 book.
]]> Macbeth: A Dagger of the Mind 40538617
From the ambitious and mad titular character to his devilish wife Lady Macbeth to the moral and noble Banquo to the mysterious Three Witches, Macbeth is one of William Shakespeare’s more brilliantly populated plays and remains among the most widely read, performed in innovative productions set in a vast array of times and locations, from Nazi Germany to Revolutionary Cuba. Macbeth is a distinguished warrior hero, who over the course of the play, transforms into a brutal, murderous villain and pays an extraordinary price for committing an evil act. A man consumed with ambition and self-doubt, Macbeth is one of Shakespeare’s most vital meditations on the dangerous corners of the human imagination.

Award-winning writer and beloved professor Harold Bloom investigates Macbeth’s interiority and unthinkable actions with razor-sharp insight, agility, and compassion. He also explores his own personal relationship to the Just as we encounter one Anna Karenina or Jay Gatsby when we are seventeen and another when we are forty, Bloom writes about his shifting understanding—over the course of his own lifetime—of this endlessly compelling figure, so that the book also becomes an extraordinarily moving argument for literature as a path to and a measure of our humanity.

Bloom is mesmerizing in the classroom, wrestling with the often tragic choices Shakespeare’s characters make. He delivers that kind of exhilarating intimacy and clarity in Macbeth, the final book in an essential series.]]> 160 Harold Bloom 1501164252 Darwin8u 3 "Something in us dies with MacBeth: call it ambition or the iniquity of an imagination that does not know how to stop."
- Harold Bloom, MacBeth: A Dagger of the Mind

description

This is the last of the five books Bloom wrote directly about Shakespeare's big personalities. He wrote five books in his series Shakespeare's Personalities:

Falstaff: Give Me Life (1) ✔
Cleopatra: I Am Fire and Air (2)
Lear: The Great Image of Authority (3) ✔
Iago: The Strategies of Evil (4)
Macbeth: A Dagger of the Mind (5) ✔

I've now read 3/5 and should finish the last two in a few months. In many ways this seems like something Bloom may have intended to write more of. I can't see these as being the only worthy personalities in Shakespeare, but time is fickle, the grave beckons, and Bloom was definitely a man of letters and varied interests.

Jumping back into this series, they also seems a bit weak on Bloom's analysis. There are some charming turns of phrases and some unique insight, but a large section of this small book is basically just defining terms or phrases, giving some background, and quoting the Bard a lot. Which is basically the framework of any good commentary, just not a GREAT commentaries. I'll finish the last two because they don't cost much in time, they are interesting (I didn't feel my time was wasted), and I'm a sucker for completing something I start.]]> 3.63 2019 Macbeth: A Dagger of the Mind

author: Harold Bloom
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 3.63
book published: 2019
rating: 3
read at: 2023/08/11
date added: 2023/08/12
shelves: 2023, american, british, poetry, drama, shakespeare
review:
"Something in us dies with MacBeth: call it ambition or the iniquity of an imagination that does not know how to stop."
- Harold Bloom, MacBeth: A Dagger of the Mind

description

One part Karl Marx, one part Groucho Marx, with a bit of Kafka ground in good for good measure.

I'm getting closer to being a completist with Robert Littell. It looks like he's got another book in the wings, so I'm now working into some of the less read areas of Littell's large espionage & Russia collection. I guess I'm through the Littell with a Hegelian systematic logic:: thesis, antithesis and no onto processing the synthesis. Or said differently, if I was exploring a famous Bosch triptych, I'd be squarely in the Garden of Earthly Delights.

Mother Russia starts absurdly. The protagonist, Robespierre Pravdin, pale as death, is typical (and at the same time atypical) of the hustlers you found inside the Soviet Union during the 70s and 80s. He is constantly on the move trying to make a buck ("the buck never stops") in the blat and decay of Moscow. He operates with a disability. He can't shrug (which is almost a necessity in the Soviet State).

He finds himself one day, living in the attic of the last wooden house in central Moscow. He shares this house (it almost gives me Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Delicatessen vibes with just a hint of Eisenstein), with Mother Russia and her three parrots "waak waak, rev-lutions are verbose", his love interest Nadezhda, an old general, and several others. Let's just cover the plot by saying between trying to pitch the commercial idea of Q-tips in Russia, Pravdin, is trying to both hide and expose evidence of a crime against the people of the Soviet Union, so that he can help both Mother Russia and lovely Nadezhda, while keeping both the State and the Druse at bay. He still finds time to crash official parties "What are we here? Literary? What we are is theoretical physics."

But the novel doesn't end with absurdity. The last 10 percent (a tithe to the actual whatthefuckerydarknessthatisabsurd) feels a lot closer to Kafka's The Castle or Koestler's Darkness at Noon. It is dark, depressing, and gets a little lift at the very end thanks to a sewing machine.]]> 2.95 1978 Mother Russia

author: Robert Littell
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 2.95
book published: 1978
rating: 4
read at: 2023/08/10
date added: 2023/08/11
shelves: 2023, absurdist, american, espionage, fiction, russian, satire
review:
"He suffers from the cult of personality without the benefits of having a personality."
- Robert Littell, Mother Russia

description

Burton: A Biography of Sir Richard Francis Burton

author: Byron Farwell
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 4.44
book published: 1963
rating: 4
read at: 2023/08/10
date added: 2023/08/10
shelves: 2023, biography, history, islam, nonfiction, travel
review:
"He dared to think and believe what other brave men would have shrunk from contemplating. He He was an adventurer in the intellectual and the spiritual as well as the physical world and it was this combination of interests, actively followed, which made him unique, one of the rarest personalities ever seen on earth."
- Byron Farwell, Burton: A Biography of Sir Richard Francis Burton

description

This biography of Burton sits at an intersection. I have at least three biographies OF Burton written by Edward Rice, Byron Farwell, and Fawn M. Brodie. I have multiple histories/biographies BY Byron Farwell: This one, Mr. Kipling's Army: All the Queen's Men, Queen Victoria's Little Wars, The Great War in Africa: 1914-1918, Eminent Victorian Soldiers: Seekers of Glory, and Stonewall: A Biography of General Thomas J. Jackson.

While not an academic, it is hard not to think of him as a professional historian. Over a 40 year period he published 14 books, mostly focused on the Victorian period of exploration and war, mostly published by Norton and Viking.

The book isn't a hagiography. Burton had many faults, many short-comings, many quirks and Farwell highlights those as well as his brilliance and bravery. I can't give it my highest ratings for biographies simply because while I adore both Burton and Farwell, this isn't up to the level of Robert A Caro, Edmund Morris, or say David W. Blight. It was really good, just not great. The narrative drive of the book is sidetracked by Burton himself who jumps from place to place, ship to ship, idea to idea.

That said, it is a fantastic start to exploring Burton's character and to gain insight into England during its Victorian period in Africa, South America, and the Middle East. Points should also be given to not ignoring Burton's wife and her role in Burton's life.
]]> <![CDATA[When We Cease to Understand the World]]> 62069739
Shortlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize and the 2021 National Book Award for Translated Literature

A fictional examination of the lives of real-life scientists and thinkers whose discoveries resulted in moral consequences beyond their imagining.

When We Cease to Understand the World is a book about the complicated links between scientific and mathematical discovery, madness, and destruction.

Fritz Haber, Alexander Grothendieck, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger—these are some of luminaries into whose troubled lives Benjamín Labatut thrusts the reader, showing us how they grappled with the most profound questions of existence. They have strokes of unparalleled genius, alienate friends and lovers, descend into isolation and insanity. Some of their discoveries reshape human life for the better; others pave the way to chaos and unimaginable suffering. The lines are never clear.

At a breakneck pace and with a wealth of disturbing detail, Labatut uses the imaginative resources of fiction to tell the stories of the scientists and mathematicians who expanded our notions of the possible.]]> 193 Benjamín Labatut Darwin8u 5
The 20th century, with its world wars and the emergence of quantum mechanics and the atomic age, created a huge disruption. The gods that came out of the 20th century were mathematicians and physicists (at least for a while) and we developed myths about them. Certainly, they were real men, with real passions; real flesh and blood, but they were our rock stars, our saviors, a ultimately, perhaps, our destroyers.

The use of fiction mingled with nonfiction isn't new. We have seen it several times with Norman Mailer, Hilary Mantel, Truman Capote, etc. We see it all the time with movies (Based on a true story). But often, when we mix fiction and nonfiction, it causes some heartburn in those who crave certainty. The problem is we live in an age of uncertainty. We have deconstructed the atom and history. Even those histories that seem rigorous and scholarly, can also be perceived as works of fiction. Just like an electron can take an infinite number of paths between two points, so too can a historian when writing about a grand figure of history. Gaps are filled. Assumptions are made. Things are included and excluded. The record is only so available. The reader either fills in what she wants or the author, in sketching a line between points ,makes an assumption about a path.

What Labatut has done here is explicitly been creative in those gaps. He's ventured into an almost mythic and surreal darkness and come out with a story that seems born as much as written. These stories weave a fabric together with fact and fiction and the pattern is dark, but also illuminates.]]> 4.09 2020 When We Cease to Understand the World

author: Benjamín Labatut
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2020
rating: 5
read at: 2023/08/06
date added: 2023/08/09
shelves: 2023, european, history, nonfiction, physics, science
review:
Whenever there is a disaster of epic proportions, something so grand it adjusts the way we look at the world (think Greeks and volcanos, other civilizations with fires, floods, famines) a myth often gets created to explain it. Gods were made. Stories were told. We need to make sense of the world and grand myths give us structure.

The 20th century, with its world wars and the emergence of quantum mechanics and the atomic age, created a huge disruption. The gods that came out of the 20th century were mathematicians and physicists (at least for a while) and we developed myths about them. Certainly, they were real men, with real passions; real flesh and blood, but they were our rock stars, our saviors, a ultimately, perhaps, our destroyers.

The use of fiction mingled with nonfiction isn't new. We have seen it several times with Norman Mailer, Hilary Mantel, Truman Capote, etc. We see it all the time with movies (Based on a true story). But often, when we mix fiction and nonfiction, it causes some heartburn in those who crave certainty. The problem is we live in an age of uncertainty. We have deconstructed the atom and history. Even those histories that seem rigorous and scholarly, can also be perceived as works of fiction. Just like an electron can take an infinite number of paths between two points, so too can a historian when writing about a grand figure of history. Gaps are filled. Assumptions are made. Things are included and excluded. The record is only so available. The reader either fills in what she wants or the author, in sketching a line between points ,makes an assumption about a path.

What Labatut has done here is explicitly been creative in those gaps. He's ventured into an almost mythic and surreal darkness and come out with a story that seems born as much as written. These stories weave a fabric together with fact and fiction and the pattern is dark, but also illuminates.
]]> <![CDATA[All the Sonnets of Shakespeare]]> 52587340 306 William Shakespeare 1108490395 Darwin8u 4
I really haven't read Shakespeare's sonnets in any consistent way since high school (where I read less than twenty and memorized two). It was fascinating to read all 154 from first to last as a whole connected work. One really gets a sense that English is a tool which almost all of us use, many often play with, but only Shakespeare fully owned. The Bard could bend a word, fit infinity in a couplet, and drop the whole universe on a period.

Review from 2023 (Cambridge edition)

This Stanley Wells, Cambridge edition is different than most collected Sonnets of Shakespeare because it 1) includes all the sonnets (including the ones from the plays, whether foreshortened or extended), 2) places them in chronological order (as best as they could figure), and 3) then does a short analysis of each one. It felt a bit like reading The Book of Psalms: A Translation with Commentary with Commentary with its commentary and academic heft that still lands well with interested amateurs.]]> 4.34 1609 All the Sonnets of Shakespeare

author: William Shakespeare
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 4.34
book published: 1609
rating: 4
read at: 2023/07/28
date added: 2023/08/01
shelves: 2017, shakespeare, poetry, 2013, 2023
review:
Review from 2013 & 2017 (Pelican Shakespeare)

I really haven't read Shakespeare's sonnets in any consistent way since high school (where I read less than twenty and memorized two). It was fascinating to read all 154 from first to last as a whole connected work. One really gets a sense that English is a tool which almost all of us use, many often play with, but only Shakespeare fully owned. The Bard could bend a word, fit infinity in a couplet, and drop the whole universe on a period.

Review from 2023 (Cambridge edition)

This Stanley Wells, Cambridge edition is different than most collected Sonnets of Shakespeare because it 1) includes all the sonnets (including the ones from the plays, whether foreshortened or extended), 2) places them in chronological order (as best as they could figure), and 3) then does a short analysis of each one. It felt a bit like reading The Book of Psalms: A Translation with Commentary with Commentary with its commentary and academic heft that still lands well with interested amateurs.
]]> Tortilla Flat 19095421 East of Eden, Cannery Row, In Dubious Battle, The Long Valley, The Moon Is Down, The Pastures of Heaven, and Tortilla Flat. Penguin Classics is proud to present these seminal works to a new generation of readers?and to the many who revisit them again and again."

]]> 207 John Steinbeck 1101659831 Darwin8u 4 "The story was gradually taking shape. Pilon liked it this way. It ruined a story to have it all come out quickly. The good story lay in half-told things which must be filled in out of the hearer’s own experience."
-- John Steinbeck, Tortilla Flat

description

author: John Steinbeck
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 4.02
book published: 1935
rating: 4
read at: 2023/07/31
date added: 2023/07/31
shelves: 2023, american, classics, fiction, novella
review:
"The story was gradually taking shape. Pilon liked it this way. It ruined a story to have it all come out quickly. The good story lay in half-told things which must be filled in out of the hearer’s own experience."
-- John Steinbeck, Tortilla Flat

description

Up the street from Cannery Row and California's coastal town of Monterey is Tortilla Flat, where Danny and his Paisano Knights, veterans from WWI, swing and swig from adventure to adventure. Each chapter is a quest and each lady of the local flophouse is a maiden waiting to be rescued, if only for a night. The book jumps from story to story exploring characters and celebrating the life of those who are often overlooked and exist on the edge of every town.

This was a popular book when it came out in 1935. It rolls with the same vibe as his later novel Cannery Row (published in 1945 minus the Mexican Paisanos).
]]> <![CDATA[La Place de la Concorde Suisse]]> 80 La Place de la Concorde Suisse, a rich journalistic study of the Swiss Army's role in Swiss society, "there is scarcely a scene in Switzerland that is not ready to erupt in fire to repel an invasive war." With a population smaller than New Jersey's, Switzerland has a standing army of 650,000 ready to be mobilized in less than 48 hours. The Swiss Army, known in this country chiefly for its little red pocketknives, is so quietly efficient at the arts of war that the Israelis carefully patterned their own military on the Swiss model. You'll understand why after reading this outstanding book.]]> 160 John McPhee 0374519323 Darwin8u 4 "In the Swiss Romande, we say, 'Why do we go to the army, anyway? There are always enough Swiss Germans to defend us.'"
- John McPhee, La Place de la Concorde Suisse

Painting by Joseph Clemens Kaufmann

author: John McPhee
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 3.92
book published: 1983
rating: 4
read at: 2023/07/29
date added: 2023/07/29
shelves: american, 2023, history, nonfiction, war, swiss
review:
"In the Swiss Romande, we say, 'Why do we go to the army, anyway? There are always enough Swiss Germans to defend us.'"
- John McPhee, La Place de la Concorde Suisse

Painting by Joseph Clemens Kaufmann

An enjoyable read. John McPhee delivers a tour of the Swiss Army, full of its contradictions. At once fierce and ever vigilant, it also has (or had, I'm not sure what the current status of the Swiss Army is) its own share of malingering "volunteers." The army is huge, at the writing of this book it was supposed to be 450,000 Swiss nationals serving in the Army. Don't confuse neutral with peaceful. The Swiss spend a lot of capital keeping their country out of the hands of the stray Italian or German fascist.

The book made me think a bit about the different approaches of the Swiss and the Americans to military preparedness. Americans spend an ungodly amount of money on our military for equipment, bases, and personnel (and money taking care of veterans of our many, many military adventures overseas). The Swiss spend money, certainly, but they are a bit like the Marines. They will gladly fly and older plane that gets the job done, keep it going, and spend the money on bullets. Where the Swiss are unique is the amount of time many of the people spend. Most of the civilian army spends at LEAST 1 month a year doing Army stuff. Those of higher rank, might spend a lot more time. That is a cost that can't be under appreciated.

That bleeds into the other dynamic that separates the Swiss form of defense from the American: class and influence. The Swiss Army is Switzerland. Rank in the military influences jobs in the civilian world and vice versa. As much as they might want to paint it a bit milder, the Swiss Army is VERY class conscious. The American military, since it is largely a full-time, volunteer army, depends a lot of the lower class to fill its enlisted ranks. At the top, you also start to see a big cross-over between higher ranks and the corporate world. 3 and 4 star generals retire into jobs at Military Defense companies, and often sit on corporate boards. The difference with the Swiss is this happening at the same time.

The first part of this book (first 90 pages) appeared in the October 31, 1983 edition (Under Reporter at Large) of the New Yorker. The final part of this book (last 60 pages) appeared in the November 7, 1983 edition of the New Yorker.
]]> <![CDATA[The Log from the Sea of Cortez]]> 60392967 374 John Steinbeck Darwin8u 4 "It is advisable to look from the tide pool to the stars and then back to the tide pool again."
- John Steinbeck, The Log from the Sea of Cortez

This book was originally the idea of Steinbeck and his marine biologist/muse Ed Ricketts. They traveled from Monterey, CA down to Baja and collected flora and fauna throughout the Sea of Cortez (see Gulf of California). This is right before WWII started for the US and about 1.5 years before Japan pulled us into it, but the impending war is like a giant submerged whale that follows the Western Flyer down to Mexico and back.

It is told mostly in a first person, plural, supposedly the joint thoughts of Steinbeck and Ricketts, but mostly a narrative constructed by Steinbeck after reviewing his log/diary from the trip. The original book, Sea of Cortez: A Leisurely Journal of Travel and Research included the research and accounting of Ed Ricketts of all the items they collected. After Ed Ricketts died, his name was dropped as was the species catalogue. Steinbeck added a Eulogy for his dead friend, but the estate keep Rickett's name from the authorship.

I read this book as I drank Pain Killers and Margaritas in Puerto Penasco (Rocky Point), Mexico while recovering for a week after breaking a femur in May. It seemed an appropriate time to carefully place a toe back in the warm pool of Steinbeck's writing.

]]> 4.07 1951 The Log from the Sea of Cortez

author: John Steinbeck
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 4.07
book published: 1951
rating: 4
read at: 2023/07/11
date added: 2023/07/19
shelves: 2023, american, memoir-autobiography-diary, nonfiction, science
review:
"It is advisable to look from the tide pool to the stars and then back to the tide pool again."
- John Steinbeck, The Log from the Sea of Cortez

This book was originally the idea of Steinbeck and his marine biologist/muse Ed Ricketts. They traveled from Monterey, CA down to Baja and collected flora and fauna throughout the Sea of Cortez (see Gulf of California). This is right before WWII started for the US and about 1.5 years before Japan pulled us into it, but the impending war is like a giant submerged whale that follows the Western Flyer down to Mexico and back.

It is told mostly in a first person, plural, supposedly the joint thoughts of Steinbeck and Ricketts, but mostly a narrative constructed by Steinbeck after reviewing his log/diary from the trip. The original book, Sea of Cortez: A Leisurely Journal of Travel and Research included the research and accounting of Ed Ricketts of all the items they collected. After Ed Ricketts died, his name was dropped as was the species catalogue. Steinbeck added a Eulogy for his dead friend, but the estate keep Rickett's name from the authorship.

I read this book as I drank Pain Killers and Margaritas in Puerto Penasco (Rocky Point), Mexico while recovering for a week after breaking a femur in May. It seemed an appropriate time to carefully place a toe back in the warm pool of Steinbeck's writing.

]]> The Red Pony 8732 95 John Steinbeck Darwin8u 4 “It would be a dreadful thing to tell anyone about it, for it would destroy some fragile structure of truth. It was truth that might be shattered by division.”
― John Steinbeck, The Red Pony

description

author: John Steinbeck
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 3.49
book published: 1933
rating: 4
read at: 2023/07/17
date added: 2023/07/17
shelves: 2023, american, classics, fiction, short-stories
review:
“It would be a dreadful thing to tell anyone about it, for it would destroy some fragile structure of truth. It was truth that might be shattered by division.”
― John Steinbeck, The Red Pony

description

A episodic novella that collects four (or sometimes five) short stories written in the 30s. Each of the stories' protagonist is a young boy named Jody, centered on his family's ranch near Salina, California. The novel is pastoral and full of the dreams and emotions of a young boy learning about life, death, fragility and disappointment. Loved the stories. Steinbeck is a master of the simple story that lovingly explores one or more characters.

"The Gift" was first published in the November 1933 issue of North American Review.

"The Great Mountains" was first published in the December 1933 issue of North American Review.

"The Promise" was first published in the October 1937 issue of Harper's Monthly.

"The Leader of the People" was first published in the August 1936 issue of Argosy.

The edition I read (Penguin) didn't have the story "Junius Maltby" that was part of an earlier book of Steinbeck entitled The Pastures of Heaven.
]]> Gorky Park (Arkady Renko #1) 58010955 B074ZK3C5W

The Arkady Renko book that started it all: the #1 bestseller Gorky Park, an espionage classic that begins the series, by Martin Cruz Smith, “the master of the international thriller” (The New York Times).

It begins with a triple murder in a Moscow amusement center: three corpses found frozen in the snow, faces and fingers missing. Chief homicide investigator Arkady Renko is brilliant, sensitive, honest, and cynical about everything except his profession. To identify the victims and uncover the truth, he must battle the KGB, FBI, and the New York City police as he pursues a rich, ruthless, and well-connected American fur dealer. Meanwhile, Renko is falling in love with a beautiful, headstrong dissident for whom he may risk everything.

A wonderfully textured, vivid look behind the Iron Curtain, Gorky Park is a tense, atmospheric, and memorable crime story. “Once one gets going, one doesn’t want to stop…The action is gritty, the plot complicated, and the overriding quality is intelligence” (The Washington Post). The first in a classic series, Gorky Park “reminds you just how satisfying a smoothly turned thriller can be” (The New York Times Book Review).]]> 385 Martin Cruz Smith Darwin8u 4 "It’s not a mystery; it’s just the past.”
- Martin Cruz Smith, Gorky Park

description

author: Martin Cruz Smith
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 4.32
book published: 1981
rating: 4
read at: 2023/07/16
date added: 2023/07/16
shelves: 2023, american, crime, crime-noir, espionage, hard-boiled, fiction
review:
"It’s not a mystery; it’s just the past.”
- Martin Cruz Smith, Gorky Park

description

I remember watching the William Hurt film adapted from this book in the early 80s. Great movie. Great book. The 80s had some absolute bangers for Cold War espionage/crime novels. I love this genre. It isn't an espionage thriller. It is basically a police procedural, but set on a different axis than New York (although this does have a NYC angle), Chicago, or Los Angeles. Some of the great that exist in this space, for my money are:

Olen Steinhauer's early crime novels (the Yalta Blvd Sequence) set a Soviet Era state that is basically a combination of Hungary and Romania:

‧ The Bridge of Sighs
‧ The Confession
‧ 36 Yalta Boulevard
‧ Liberation Movements
‧ Victory Square

Or James Church's Inspector O series. I think there are six, but I've only read the first four:

‧ A Corpse in the Koryo
‧ Hidden Moon
‧ Bamboo and Blood
‧ The Man with the Baltic Stare

Some of LeCarre's novels float a bit in this direction, but not absolutely. None of these authors reach LeCarre's best, but all three manage to hit close to his average with their best, if that makes sense.

Anyway, the idea is the same with these three authors. You are dealing with hard-boiled, crime fiction set in an alien/totalitarian landscape with sympathetic characters. The main detective is always sympathetic and manages to get the job done despite the restraints imposed by his system. One of the refreshing things about this is it allows a reader to reframe American Crime fiction and ask, how does our system also create an atmosphere that prevents crime from being resolved. One of the best authors who tackles this type of situation, for my money is Don Winslow.

This Cruz novel is the first of 10 Arkady Renko novels. So, Renko must be a cat+1.
]]> <![CDATA[Stella Maris (The Passenger #2)]]> 60581095 The best-selling, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Road returns with the second of a two-volume masterpiece: Stella Maris is an intimate portrait of grief and longing, as a young woman in a psychiatric facility seeks to understand her own existence.

1972, BLACK RIVER FALLS, WISCONSIN: Alicia Western, twenty years old, with forty thousand dollars in a plastic bag, admits herself to the hospital. A doctoral candidate in mathematics at the University of Chicago, Alicia has been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, and she does not want to talk about her brother, Bobby. Instead, she contemplates the nature of madness, the human insistence on one common experience of the world; she recalls a childhood where, by the age of seven, her own grandmother feared for her; she surveys the intersection of physics and philosophy; and she introduces her cohorts, her chimeras, the hallucinations that only she can see. All the while, she grieves for Bobby, not quite dead, not quite hers. Told entirely through the transcripts of Alicia’s psychiatric sessions, Stella Maris is a searching, rigorous, intellectually challenging coda to The Passenger, a philosophical inquiry that questions our notions of God, truth, and existence.]]> 190 Cormac McCarthy 0593535235 Darwin8u 5 2023, american, fiction 3.98 2022 Stella Maris (The Passenger #2)

author: Cormac McCarthy
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2023/03/24
date added: 2023/07/14
shelves: 2023, american, fiction
review:

]]> Titanium Noir 58894500
But Titans are Cal’s specialty. In fact, his ex-girlfriend, Athena, is a Titan. And not just any Titan—she’s Stefan’s daughter, heir to the Tonfamecasca empire. As Cal digs deeper into the murder investigation, he begins to unweave the complicated threads of what should have been a straightforward case, and it soon becomes clear he’s on the trail of a crime whose roots run deep into the dark heart of the world.

A virtuosic mash-up of Philip K. Dick and Raymond Chandler by way of Marvel—the story of a detective investigating the murder of a Titan, one of society’s most powerful, medically-enhanced elites, Titanium Noir is a tightly woven, intricate tale of murder, betrayal, and vengeance.]]> 272 Nick Harkaway 0593535375 Darwin8u 4 later. 4.23 2023

author: Nick Harkaway
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 4.23
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2023/06/08
date added: 2023/07/14
shelves: 2023, british, crime-noir, dystopia, fiction, scifi
review:
later.
]]> <![CDATA[The Survival of the Bark Canoe]]> 54974 114 John McPhee 0374516936 Darwin8u 5 4.18 1975

author: John McPhee
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 4.18
book published: 1975
rating: 5
read at: 2023/07/06
date added: 2023/07/14
shelves: 2023, travel, nonfiction, memoir-autobiography-diary, enviornmentalism, biography, art, american
review:
I’ll review it when I get back home from Mexico.
]]> The Pine Barrens 821355
The term refers to the predominant trees in the vast forests that cover the area and to the quality of the soils below, which are too sandy and acid to be good for farming. On all sides, however, developments of one kind or another have gradually moved in, so that now the central and integral forest is reduced to about a thousand square miles. Although New Jersey has the heaviest population density of any state, huge segments of the Pine Barrens remain uninhabited. The few people who dwell in the region, the "Pineys," are little known and often misunderstood. Here McPhee uses his uncanny skills as a journalist to explore the history of the region and describe the people "and their distinctive folklore" who call it home.]]> 157 John McPhee 0374514429 Darwin8u 4 4.20 1967 The Pine Barrens

author: John McPhee
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 4.20
book published: 1967
rating: 4
read at: 2023/07/08
date added: 2023/07/14
shelves: 2023, american, enviornmentalism, memoir-autobiography-diary, nonfiction
review:

]]> The Headmaster 821356 160 John McPhee 0374514968 Darwin8u 4 3.99 1966

author: John McPhee
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 3.99
book published: 1966
rating: 4
read at: 2023/07/09
date added: 2023/07/14
shelves: 2023, biography, american, nonfiction
review:

]]> Rogue Male 1343861
Geoffrey Household’s Rogue Male is a classic thriller and a triumph of suspense. Described by Household as a “bastard offspring of Stevenson and Conrad,” the book is no less remarkable as an exploration of the lure of violence, the psychology of survivalism, and the call of the wild.]]> 197 Geoffrey Household 1590172434 Darwin8u 4 "He who has learned to not to intrude his emotions upon his fellows has also learned not to intrude them upon himself."
- Rogue Male, Geoffrey Household

description

I've never read Household before. I picked this one up because it was an early thriller (published in 1939) and was made into a movie (Man Hunt) directed by Frtiz Lang. I was scrolling through NYRB's offerings and I guess the moment was just right. The novel is short, interesting and well-paced (meat and potatoes for any book considered a thriller). It gave me similar vibes to The 39 Steps which was published in 1915,* and which I can't imagine wasn't an influence to Household. The 39 Steps is set in a pre-WWI Europe, while Rogue Male was set in a pre-WWII Europe. RM also seemed to possess similar qualities to the short story The Most Dangerous Game which was published in 1924.

When I think back to my childhood I also felt it echoed in My Side of the Mountain and Deathwatch. (p 1973). Looking backwards, you can see how My Side of the Mountain possesses some influence from Rogue Male (replace a cave with a tree and a cat with a hawk). But the stronger relationship is definitely between 'The Most Dangerous Game' and 'Deathwatch'.

Anyway, enough nostalgia. The book is a must for those interested in early thrillers and cat & mouse novels. It isn't heavy and is a nice palate cleanser between other novels.

* I also apologize of being a bit OCD on publication dates here. I was just curious about how all of thesse books aligned in time and space.]]> 3.84 1939 Rogue Male

author: Geoffrey Household
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 3.84
book published: 1939
rating: 4
read at: 2023/07/01
date added: 2023/07/01
shelves: 2023, british, espionage, fiction, own, nyrb
review:
"He who has learned to not to intrude his emotions upon his fellows has also learned not to intrude them upon himself."
- Rogue Male, Geoffrey Household

description

This picture/essay/table book on Wimbledon consists basically of three parts. Photos by Alfred Eisendstaedt of Wimbledon in 1971 and two essays written by John McPhee about Wimbledon 1970. The essays are: 1. "Hoad on Court 5" and 2. "Twynam of Wimbledon."

The photos are ok. Not Eisenstaedt's best. There weren't many that came close to top shelf Eisenstaedt (his Oppenheimer, Sophia Loren, & Kennedy portraits; Mt Rushmore; the Drum Major; Ice Skating Waiter, St. Moritz; or his iconic V-J day in Times Square). This man is a genius, but whoever turned his photos of Wimbledon into a book enlarged many of the photos beyond their resolution. Also, at the time Eisenstaedt was 73, he might have aged out of sports photography. I'm not saying you can't be a good sports photographer when you are your sunset years, but I'm not sure the camera, the man, and the sport were rightly connected here.

As far as the McPhee writing goes the first "Essay Hoad on Court 5" gives a nice overview of the game and a really good survey of Wimbledon in the early 70s as the game, and Wimbledon really started to take off. This was still largely age of wooden rackets and there were still some amateurs in the game, and yes money, there was always money attached to tennis, but it hadn't quite hit the level it would later take in 10 years. The snapshot of 1970/1971 is nice because that really was a time of dynamic shifts in the game. The essay itself is ok. It was good McPhee, but not something I would send someone to to introduce them to John McPhee. It isn't top shelf or 2nd shelf McPhee. He never mails it in, but if he did, it might look a bit like this.

His second essay "Twynam of Wimbledon" centers on Robert Twynam. The book is dedicated to the man and this essay is more classic McPhee. He looks at the man who looks at the grass. The man tells McPhee about the grass and McPhee tells us about the grass. In the course of hanging out with these two gentle souls (Twynam and a nearly invisible McPhee) we get another perspective on the game, on Wimbledon, and a peek at all the other things floating over the net. I liked this essay. This is more what you expect, with no surprises but it is McPhee in his element. He likes people. Likes the deep dive.]]> 4.26 1972 Wimbledon: A Celebration

author: John McPhee
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 4.26
book published: 1972
rating: 3
read at: 2023/06/18
date added: 2023/06/19
shelves: 2023, essays, nonfiction, sports
review:
"The exhausted athletes dive in, like on their backs, stare at the ceiling, and float with victory, or marinate in defeat."
- John McPhee, Wimbledon

description

A fantastic piece of sports writing about the encounter at the 1968 US Open between Arthur Ashe and Clark Grabner. Some of McPhee's best writing is his sports writing. His book on Bill Bradley, A Sense of Where You Are: Bill Bradley at Princeton, might be one of my favorite sports books ever. Like with his Bill Bradley book, here McPhee is profiling an athlete (two technically) before they've reached their peak. McPhee can see greatness like Ashe can see a ball and Bradley can see a court. Anyway, it is a short read and worth the couple hours and few dollars it requires the reader to invest. I spent a few years in my early twenties living in Richmond and the ghost of Ashe still quietly covers the corners of the town. He was a man of immense talent, class, and intelligence.]]> 4.24 1969 Levels of the Game

author: John McPhee
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 4.24
book published: 1969
rating: 5
read at: 2023/06/11
date added: 2023/06/11
shelves: 2023, history, nonfiction, sports
review:
"Tennis is a game of levels, and it is practically impossible for a player who is on one level to play successfully with a player on any other."
- John McPhee, Levels of the Game

description