Timeline, Michael Chricton
Fellowship of the Ring – JRR Tolkien
The Two Towers – JRR Tolkien
The Return of the King – JRR Tolkien
The Life of Pi – Yann Martel (which has since, on October 20th, won the Booker Prize – whodathunkit? I was shocked, but this was a very original and striking book, I must admit)
Fire Ice – Clive Cussler
Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
Take Me With You – Brad Newsham
King Solomon’s Mines – H Rider Haggard
Drowning Ruth – Christina Schwarz
One For My Baby – Tony Parsons
The Deadhouse – Linda Fairstein
Northern Lights – Philip Pullman
In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz – Michela Wrong
Man and Boy – Tony Parsons
Off Keck Road – Mona Simpson
TimeQuake – Kurt Vonnegut
The Devil and Miss Prym – Paulo Coelho
Future reading: Autobiography of a Yogi (P. Yogananda - a re-read for me), Half a Life (VS Naipaul), Walden and Other Essays (HD Thoreau), Moo (Jane Smalley), Things Fall Apart (Chinua Achebe – a re-read from college)…
Timeline – Michael Chricton (decent story about time travel back to medieval times, coolest part is the Chricton-esque usage of real facts and information on current quantum technology and its possibilities)
The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, and The Return of the King – JRR Tolkien (I’d been chomping to re-read these books for years and this was my chance. Just amazing – the only books I know that make you want to rush to bed each night to read yourself to sleep. Sadly, I realized I last read these books 17 years ago [!!!!!] when I was 13. Ouch. Time flies. Great books, though, and recently voted the best books ever written over in England)
The Life of Pi – Yann Martel (Strange but oddly satisfying read. The fictitious story of Pi Patel, and 16-year-old Indian boy who survives a shipwreck at sea. His family was emigrating to Canada on a container ship loaded with a group of animals bound for a zoo in the US. Pi survives 2 years at sea on a life raft he shares with a 500-pound Bengali tiger. Pretty amazing how he keeps the tiger from eating him – lots of cool animal behavior stuff in this book, and an interesting ending)
Fire Ice – Clive Cussler (Cussler’s books are such crap, but I have to read at least one or two each trip I take. They are cheesy, Indiana Jones-meets-James Bond-type stories, but they always involve action and cool historical shipwrecks, so I eat them up. It’s pretty embarrassing that the main character is ‘Dirk Pitt,’ though. I mean, c’mon Clive, gimme a break! What a cheesy name! Always a fun and good read, though. Action, action, and more action. If they ever become movies, Arnold Schwarzenneger has to play Dirk Pitt.)
Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad (What is all the fuss about? I like Conrad – he is verbose, but writes really well – but did not see the big deal about this book. Everyone warned me off it for its dark, grim moralist tones. I must have missed them entirely. Granted, this book must really have caused a stir from 1900 to 1950, but since then? The world is a violent, morally ambiguous place, and I guess I’m just desensitized at this point. Conrad and his dark Mr. Kurtz didn’t scare or shock me at all, nor did his restless ‘savages.’ Maybe it was my fault, maybe I was expecting too much. A great book, no doubt, but I think movies, video games, and real life events like September 11th make this book read like Disney to me…)
Take Me With You – Brad Newsham (The best read of the trip – READ THIS BOOK IF YOU HAVE EVER TRAVELED OR WANT TO TRAVEL. Newsham is actually a friend of a friend, and although I don’t know him at all, I feel like I do since reading his work. Apparently, he traveled around the world in the 70s [partly with friend of my family, Bird Nietman – thus the connection] and was wowed by people’s gracious hospitality. He vowed to then invite someone from his next trip back to the USA with him – free of charge - in karmic repayment of all the good turns done to him over his travels. This book is his 100-day adventure to find this person, and his ultimate choice of who to invite. A great story for that, but even better for Brad’s simple yet penetrating insight into foreign cultures. He also perfectly captures – in my opinion - the feeling of being a western white traveler in 3rd world countries. And his insight with regards to ‘playing god’ with beggars and local merchants who might make in 10 years what we make in a day, is utterly poignant, and applies to homeless men in NYC as well as it does to Indian beggars. Newsham makes us think about who we are, why we are on the road, and what we expect from that road. Read it. Also really cool that I was reading his chapter on Lamu, Kenya as we were flying into Lamu, Kenya!)
King Solomon’s Mines – HR Haggard (another cheesy old Indiana Jones adventure, but I had to re-read it since it’s set here in Africa. Just a fun story about the search for diamonds and gold in 1880s Africa. It also made me wonder – did I ever look up the words ‘koodoo’ and ‘eland’ when I first read this book at 14? Now I know they are African antelopes…but what did I think then???)
Drowning Ruth – Christina Shwartz (in progress - an Oprah book – female heroine – hidden emotions – secrets - angst – I HATE it so far)
One For My Baby was an excellent read. I had heard of Tony Parsons following the success of Man and Boy, but shunned reading his first big hit thinking it was somehow cliché to read something so incredibly popular. After I read One For My Baby, though, I quickly found a copy of Man and Boy and gobbled it up. Tony Parsons seems obsessed with life’s failures and how ordinary people react and sometimes bounce back from them and sometimes not. Both his protagonists in these works – Alfie in One For My Baby and Harry in Man and Boy – undergo profound changes in their so-called “perfect” lives in relatively short periods of time. Parsons reminds us that we are all only seconds, inches, or degrees from a drastic shift in our lives. No one is invincible, or untouchable. Alfie loses his wife and stumbles around London in an apathy-induced fog jumping from shallow relationship to shallow relationship. Does he find love again? How? And, perhaps just as importantly, why? Why risk heartbreak again? Harry, on the other hand, cheats on his wife. He’s not a pathological cheater – he does it once and only once. She finds out and divorces him. Subsequently, he loses his job, and he is forced to become a live-at-home dad and struggle to relate to and find time for his 4-year-old son. Will he get a second chance with his wife? If not, will he find love again? Will he get his job back? Will he become a good dad? Will this experience scar his son for life? Is his vision of a “perfect life” and stable family gone forever? In both books; however, Parsons avoids the cliché sentiment one would expect from ordinary novels dealing with loss and life’s trials. Instead, he tackles real problems and real issues with real dialogue. Very little drama, very little angst – his style is almost subtle. He grounds you, yet without depressing you. In fact, some segments are particularly uplifting. Modern life is not black and white, and Parsons tries to show his reader each and every shade of grey that make up ordinary people. Excellent books, quick reads, and worth checking out.
The Deadhouse was a trash read. I knew it when I picked it up, but was drawn to the cover photo of New York and the dust jacket synapsis. This book – for me – was more about homesickness, I guess, than literary curiosity. I saw it on a shelf in Kenya, and could not control the urge to pick it up. The author is a Manhattan DA who writes about her alter ego (I assume) as a blonde bomshell DA who finds herself in the midst of all the really cool and intruiging NYC murder mysteries. Not intellectually challenging or particularly engaging, but it was nice to read about places in New York that I know so well. It was a touch of home, despite being your typical summer beach book, if even that.
Northern Lights is a really, really cool book. If you like Harry Potter, or The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe (Book One of Nine in CS Lewis’ Chronicles Of Narnia…by the way, does anybody know that JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis were teachers at Oxford at the exact same time? And that they were best friends? Incredible. These guys, individually, produced 2 amazing bodies of work. Have there ever been any other partnerships like that? Seems pretty rare – I mean, it’s the equivalent of Da Vinci and Michelangelo being drinking pals, isn’t it?), then check out Philip Pullman’s trilogy His Dark Materials. I’m on Book Two right now and it’s very, very good. Northern Lights was actually recommended to Cathy and I by Richard Knocker – Cathy was reading a totally different book called Northern Lights (a historical look at the Aurora Borealis and the men that studied it), and Richard asked if it was by Philip Pullman. Funny coincidence. Anyway, when she said no, and he went on to recommend Pullman’s book, particularly in light of the fact that we were talking about Tolkien and fantasy books. I jotted the name down in my notes and planned to buy it in the US, when I stumbled upon a copy in a camp lodge. I traded for it and read it immediately. It’s the story of Lyra, a young girl with some sort of important destiny riding on her shoulders. She’s the daughter of a scientist/explorer bent on making a bridge to another world where he thinks God resides. His plan, as Lyra finds out to her shock and dismay, is to kill God and absolve everyone from Original Sin and guilt. The church is clearly out to stop him, but the church is evil in its own right, and Lyra can’t align with them. She is clearly a special kid and something big must happen with or through her, but I don’t know what yet. So far it’s a story full of myth and legend, great battles, and really interesting characters. There are beautiful witches who are worried about the fate of the world, iron-clad Polar Bears that live to fight, gypsy-type people who’s children are being kidnapped, and individual daemons that attach themselves to each human. In fact, the daemons are merely the outward manifestation of a person’s soul. Kids daemons shift and change with their moods, but adults have set daemons. A scholar might have an owl, an explorer an eagle, and the bad guy a sneering golden monkey. It’s pretty good stuff so far, and I recommend it to anyone interested in fantasy-type books.
In The Footsteps Of Mr Kurtz is a very good book, but I found it extremely hard to read following Tony Parsons and Philip Pullman. Michela Wrong has a newspaper background and her writing is dry and full of run-on sentences that each try to squeeze in the what, when, how, where and who. One week in Father Nauman’s English class at Canisius High School and she’d be in big trouble. The story she documents; however, is simply amazing. The title is a clear reference to Joseph Conrad’s Heart Of Darkness and it’s main character, Mr. Kurtz. Kurtz is the genius ivory trader deep in the Congo that Marlow sets off to meet, and – ultimately – rescue. For those of you who prefer the Apocalypse Now version of the story, Kurtz is Marlon Brando’s character. In the book, we are horrified to read that Mr. Kurtz has gone mad, becoming swallowed up not by the jungle’s darkness, but by the darkest that lies within each and every human mind. Ms. Wrong draws a parallel between the madness-inducing Congo of the past and the 30+ years it spent under the rule of dictator Mobutu Sese Seko. The Congo and the colonialization that so poisoned Kurtz is the same poison that infected it (as Zaire) under Mobutu until his overthrow by Lauren Kabila in 1997, and under Kabila until his murder at the hands of his own son (so it is believed) just recently. It’s a sad, yet incredible, story about a beautiful country being pillaged at the hands of a despotic ruler and the western governments that he manipulates. Anyone interested in African politics, African history, and the phenomenon of dictatorial rule should check this book out. The content clearly makes up for any writing issues, and I must admit to being biased having read it right after some fairly quick and easy books.
Off Keck Road is another of those Oprah books that I regret picking up at all. Ok, fine – I admit that it’s amazing writing to actually make a book out of the non-events-occuring-over-50-years in a small Wisconsin town. In fact, it’s incredible. Nothing ever happens – it’s just daily life and people’s perceptions of each other. Feelings, feelings, and more feelings. A clear Oprah pick, and probably just the kind of book they’d make you read in a really bad sophomore English class one day. Right up there with Ordinary People or A Separate Peace – books that are supposed to have some subtle, yet profound message, that – frankly – I never got. I actually raised my hand in class when I was 15 years old and asked why we were made to read nothing but stories of messed up teens (Romeo and Juliet, Ordinary People, A Separate Peace, Catcher in the Rye). Was there some point the Jesuits were trying to impress upon us? I mean, c’mon – does anyone out there actually remember what the point of A Separate Peace was? Gene and Phineas? What was their deal? Just like Bert and Ernie from Sesame Street, I bet you could read a lot into the ambiguously gay relationship between Gene and Phineas if examined through modern, sexually-liberal, and politically-correct glasses. Anyway, back to Off Keck Road: even books with no action can have great value, so long as they have a point! This book was well crafted and beautifully written at times, yet just took me nowhere and meant nothing to me at all. Zero. By the way, Oprah, I am hereby waiving the white flag. You win. Next book, please.
TimeQuake, at the time it was released, was to be Kurt Vonnegut’s last book, an opus of sorts. It appears there may be another Vonnegut book on the horizon but that does not detract from TimeQuake at all. In his satirical style, he tackles issues pertaining to life and death, and is perhaps more personal and autobiographical than he is in any other work. Vonnegut’s alter ego (and a fixture in many of his novels) Kilgore Trout features prominently in a world recently released from autopilot: In Feburary 2001 the universe undegoes a moment of hesitation and insecurity and stops expanding. What, the universe wonders, is the point of it all? As a result it begins to contract, taking everyone and everything back 10 years to February 1991. At this point, however, it changes its mind again and resumes expansion. Everyone is thus doomed to repeat the past 10 years of their lives, for better or for worse. And at the moment the 10 years are up, people are jolted back into a world in which what they think and do actually matters, and they are returned to a state of free will. Many applaud the return of their faculties, and many others preferred being on autopilot. Depending on your perspective, it’s a very poignant and satirical look at the way we modern human beings live our every day lives. Vonnegut weaves small vignets of personal history and insight into the fabric of his story, and the result is a barrage of ironies, joys, horrors, deaths, lives, and legacies that make us take a good look at who we are and how we behave. Vonnegut’s work, I have always thought, provides a thought-provoking mirror into which all of us need to stare into from time to time. I find him menaingful and insightful, and highly recommend reading ANY of his work. My favorites, though, are TimeQuake, Slaughterhouse Five, and Cat’s Cradle.
The Devil and Miss Prym is by Paulo Coelho, the author of The Alchemist, a more modern version of Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha. Coelho is a “feel good” writer that tackles themes of good and evil, destiny and chance. I loved The Alchemist, but didn’t enjoy The Devil and Miss Prym nearly as much. It’s a short book – more like a fable – and its moralistic themes might have been better weaved or disguised within the story. I felt like I was reading The Celestine Prophecy again – a pure socialogical fable that was thinly disguised with a pretty poorly written story. Coelho tackles big issues, and the point of his tale is to remind us that the constant struggle of right and wrong is not cosmic in scope – rather, it takes place one person at a time, within each and every one of us. A stranger appears in a tiny town in the mountains and the Devil (unseen to everyone) is by his side. The man has undergone the worst the world has to offer – his wife and kids were murdered – and he responds by setting out, much like Job in The Bible’s Book Of Job, to test God and fate to see if the world is a true and just place. He challenges the town, which is desperate for investment, with a simple task: commit a murder, and win 10 gold bars, capable of saving the town from its impending decay and ruin. The man, and the Devil that has won him over, seeks confirmation that the world is purely evil. Miss Prym becomes a key player in the fable, and good and evil vie for her heart, and in turner the winner seeks to sway the stranger and the townspeople themselves. Does good or evil win? Does neither win? It’s an interesting book, but if you are going to check out Paulo Coelho, read The Alchemist first.
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