2006, We Hardly Knew Ye.

Well folks, this is the one blog I utterly and miserably failed at updating this year. I blame this entirely on a large stretch of time at which the only book I read was:

Book 5: Learn Chinese

Which, if you haven't guessed from the title, was a Chinese language book. The grammar part was terrific, it wasn't a good vocabulary book, just had a few vocab pages stuck in for good measure. It came with two CDs that went WAY too fast. I only listened to them once. I found in the long run more success with the Pimsleur CDs, Chinese Pod podcast (until they started charging), and The Rosetta Stone software, which was by far the best.

After I got to China, I started reading again (on the plane over), but hadn't updated this blog in so long that I basically gave up on it. However, I'm feeling the need for closure on it now, so here are the books I've read in that time:

Book 6: Assassination Vacation
By Sarah Vowell

This is a cute little non-fiction book by the friendly kid-voiced NPR contributor, one of my favorite people to listen to on This American Life. I think I would have preferred to have listened to this book than read it because half of the enjoyment in her stories is the way she says things, but there are some really REALLY interesting and strange facts in this book, like the fact that the brother of John Wilkes' Booth actually saved Lincoln's son, Robert Todd Lincoln from a Train accident.

Book 7: Kafka on the Shore
By Haruki Murakami

Great book, very similar in style and theme to The Windup Bird Chronicles. It is quite apparent that Murakami has a thing for alternate worlds, incest, and missing cats.

Book 8: The Dark Tower II: The Drawing of the Three
By Stephen King

So I finally decided to read this series that I started when I was sixteen and still in high school (half of my life ago!). Back then, I got almost to the end of this book, and it had bored me into not finishing it, especially because in the preface, King said that the scope of his story was too large and he'd probably never finish it in his lifetime. Well, he finished it after all (in 2004), so I started reading it again (from the second book, the first one I re-listened to on audiobook download during my commute to Huntington at the beginning of the year).

This book wasn't as boring as I remember it, but it wasn't great either. In this book, Roland, the Gunslinger gets his posse together by stealing them from different worlds.

Book 9: The Dark Tower III: The Waste Lands
By Stephen King

Roland's Posse is almost complete, although he has to spend about 500 pages fixing something that he screwed up in the first book. Then there's some demon sex, and a kid gets kidnapped before the Gunslingin' gang can start on their quest proper. In the end, they get a ticket to ride a train. A bad, bad train.

Book 10: The Dark Tower IV: Wizard and Glass
By Stephen King

This book is basically a prequel to The Gunslinger, and was just a long way of explaining why Roland is the way he is, and give a little more background on the strange world they're traveling through. Meh.

Book 11: The Dark Tower V: Wolves of the Calla
By Stephen King

I didn't have much hope for this book since the blurb on the back made it sound like this was yet another 700 page diversion from the main quest (which is simply to reach the f*ing dark tower). It ended up being much better, and the series really picked up at this point. King starts bringing in this sort of postmodern twisting of reality as characters and things that you don't expect to ever show up in a book like this, suddenly do.

Book 12: The Dark Tower VI: Song of Susannah
By Stephen King

This was a strange book because its much shorter than the others, and basically reads like the transition between the middle of the story and the end. Basically, Susannah has a baby, and the rest of the posse tries to keep the universe from exploding.

Book 13: The Dark Tower VII: The Dark Tower
By Stephen King

Not a very creative name is it? Not a very creative book either. The first half of the book is pretty good actually, very exciting, very tragic, and everything comes together at last. Then he has to get on to writing the ending, because roland had to reach the tower at some point, otherwise it would have been a very poorly named series indeed. I won't write any real spoilers, but this is what happens when he gets there: King basically admits in the end that he didn't really have an ending in mind for the series and the one that he chastises you for reading is pretty lame. I'm not kidding. He actually TELLS you not to read it, and tries to shame you for turning the page to the final chapter. I've read some stinkin' endings in books before, and it doesn't always ruin the book, but I've never had an author make me feel bad for reading it. The fact that he tries to shift the responsibility for the bad ending onto the reader is really the reason that this is the worst ending that was ever written.

Well, i've just started

Book 14: Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
By Haruki Murakami

to get the bad taste of the end of Dark Tower out of my mind. Even though Murakami's endings haven't yet been as interesting as the mysteries that lead there, at least he has enough respect for his readers to own them.

I didn't quite make it to my own dark tower (50 books), but I didn't really expect to. I do feel quite accomplished for steamrollin' through the 4000+ pages of the Dark Tower though. The journey was fun despite the ending.

Kinda like this blog. Thanks for reading.

2006 is over.
Print is Dead.
Long Live Print!

4. Naked Pictures of Famous People

So I overheard someone talking about a new book by Jon Stewart, so the next time I was in the bookstore, I found "Naked Pictures of Famous People" (the quotes change everything in that sentence). Anyway, to make a long story short, the people I overheard must have been talking about "America: A Citizen's Guide", because NPOFP was written in 1999.

Naked Pictures is a collection of short comedic essays, and is pretty hit and miss. One essay is a formula for hosting an awards show, and with the knowledge of his Oscar performance this year, ends up being pretty funny. For example:

HOST:
General greetings and a query as to the audience's well-being. Affirmation of audience's well being. Statement of own well-being. Survey of surroundings. Improvised analogy comparing surroundings to different surroundings. Sarcastic jab at expected length of proceedings.

Pause for laughter.

HOST:
Confusion about actions of government officials. Statement of proposed personal action if given opportunity to govern.

Use. Repeat for Oscars. Repeat for Daily Show. Repeat. Repeat. And yet he makes it seem like new each night. You've got to respect that. Yet in many respects, the book is not nearly as entertaining as his performance on television (I was going to say "or film", but well, it is better than that).

Another good essay is on "The New Judaism", in which he suggests ways to get the kids to keep the faith:

Old Judaism Passover Seder

Child: Why on this night do we eat bitter herbs?
Adult: To remind us of the pain our ancestors felt while enslaved in Egypt.

New Judaism Passover Seder

Child: Why on this night do we eat hot fudge Sundays?
Adult: To remind us that being Jewish is like having your birthday everyday!! Plus they're delicious!

There are some duds, in one essay he poses as Vincent Van Gogh on an AOL chatroom, but there's nothing terribly funny, and doesn't really go anywhere.


The praise on the book cover compares Jon Stewart's book to Woody Allen's Without Feathers and Steve Martin's Cruel Shoes. I Haven't read "Cruel Shoes", but it has quite a reputation, and Feathers probably defined the genre of the short-absurd-comic-compilation. While it was a fun read, it didn't quite live up to those standards.

3. A Man Without A Country

By: Kurt Vonnegut

First of all, a passage that I thought the readers of this blog would appreciate:

Here is a lesson in creative writing.
First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college.
And I realize some of you may be having trouble deciding whether I am kidding or not. So from now on I will tell you when I'm kidding.

MWAC is full of all kids of clever thoughts, insight about the state of the world, and other pure morsels of vonnegoodness. While he does an excellent job of exposing the politics of the day through its own absurdity, it feels like there's nothing entirely new here. Perhaps though, this is no fault of Vonnegut's. This administration and GOP rule is such a joke that there is no amount of absurdity that we haven't already seen. They echo the sort of sentiment that is expressed daily on liberal blogs and on Air America radio. To me, Vonnegut was a master of weaving an absurd fantastical story and having it being such an accurate reflection of what the world was really like.

Overall? a great read, but not all that unique and not nearly as interesting as his fiction.

My favorite passage though, was where he explains that all the hurricanes, earthquakes, tsunamis, and what-have-you, are all the earth's immune system trying to heal itself by getting rid of us.

Right on, KV! Write on KV!

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

By: Haruki Murakami

I read this book last year, but enjoyed it and felt like writing about it, even though it doesn't count towards my 2006 fifty.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is a strange postmodern Alice-in-wonderland type journey mixed with sexual angst and generation x passivity in a Japanese Setting. It begins when Okada's cat Noboru Wataya goes missing and his wife asks him to go find it. Okada has time to look since he quit his job at a law firm and has no motivation to find a new one.

This seemingly insignificant incident, is of course, the inciting incident that draws Okada behind the scenes of a story that begins in World War Two and has ramifications in the modern political world. All of this is connected by a supernatural dream-like world and the strange characters that move between these worlds.

Murakami pulls off an incredible feat- an epic with a passive gen-x-er at its center. More than that, he walks that fine line in creating a supernatural world without giving in too deeply to the fantasy. He shows you just enough of this world to intrigue his audience, but not enough to give any answers - much like a dream. There is something very 'twin peaks' about his world; a world in which the real and tangible are touched and influenced by the 'other', but this 'other' is too different to understand. Like 'Twin Peaks', if we understood this world any better, it wouldn't be as interesting.

2. An Artist of the Floating World

By Kazuo Ishiguro

An Artist Of the Floating World paints an interesting portrait of post-war Japan as seen through the eyes of the aging Masuji Ono. It reads much like an early Ozu movie - the pacing is slow and deliberate, and it wanders through Ono's life, interweaving with thoughts and memories. Similarly as well, there is little conflict. Ono has tension with his daughters and he internally questions his past, but there are no crisises to overcome, all the battles have already been fought.

In his youth, Ono is the proto-typical rebel artist, aiming to achieve a new level in his work. The "floating world" refers to night-life Japan, clouded by drink and other pleasures of the night. Ono, like his colleagues, paints images inspired by this life. However, when his attention is turned to the suffering of the poor, his paintings come to support the Nationalist movement in their support of a stronger Japan.

Ono's reflections on his life often come through interactions with his daughters who are embarrassed of his past, and his grandson who has taken to emulating cowboys instead of Samurai. The book never dwells on these little moments, perhaps that is what makes them stand out so clearly. Similarly, the backdrop of a city which lies partially in ruins is only casually referred to by Ono.

There are great discussions on this book on the meaning of art, and its relationship with the world. Its particularly interesting to read, in Ono's rather passive voice, about his attachment to nationalism; its something that you rarely get 'the artist' perspective on, as most 'rebel artists' are portrayed as fighting against a totalitarian government.

1. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

I figured that while Kim and I were in Prague this year, it would be appropriate to read something with a little local color. Seeing as Milan Kundera was of Czech origin (and having read and loved The Unbearable Lightness of Being), I picked up The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. Good choice, because it included a lot of interesting personal reactions to much of the politics of Czechoslovakia during the communist period.

Like Unbearable Lightness, TBOLAF isn't so much a straightforward story, but a philosophy that wanders through different ideas like a path in the woods, meeting different characters and joining diffrerent events as it goes. In fact, where lightness wanders, Laughter and Forgetting even gets lost a few times. Not always in a bad way - it just strays from the path, looks around at another part of the forest, and then stumbles upon the path again.

The story follows a bunch of different characters in different stories. Kundera claims that some of them are real and some are made up. Likewise, it is obvious that the story goes back and fourth in an inconstant pattern between real and fiction as well. The characters and plots in the story have little or nothing to do with each other (with the exception of the author's presence who knew or wrote them into existence).

Many of the themes in lightness are repeated here. In many ways this book feels almost as if its a 'study' for lightness - sort of like sketches of an idea versus the finished painting. In a way, the sketches have their own beauty and capture an immediacy that is lost in the final painting, but it also doesn't reach the level of "complete-ness" (for lack of a better word).