...and then there was even more tagging
- A book that changed my life:
1984. It sounds a bit cheesy to say it, but this staple of high school English classes, more so than any other work of fiction, informs a lot of my thinking about culture and politics. It's a bit didactic -- I've since come around to my dad's way of thinking on it, about how its characters are fairly weak and it's prone to lengthy sloganeering near the end -- but oh, what Orwell does with language. Only Anthony Burgess or possibly Irvine Welsh could do better things with language and dialect. - A book I've read more than once:
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. It's a weirdly accurate snapshot in time, of the late 60s/early 70s. It's a drug-fueled descent into the subconscious. It's a mirror against the American Dream. It's an immature larger-than-life character. It's a work of fiction. It's factual history. It's flat-out hilarious. It's disturbing as hell. It's had a miserable effect on journalism since -- everyone's gonzo now. It's decadent and depraved. It's bad craziness. (Avoid the bats.)The movie versions never seem to get it completely right: Where the Buffalo Roam gets many of the funny touches right, but the whole movie has more of the flavor of Animal House crossed with a series of sketches about the late 60s. Terry Gilliam's Fear and Loathing certainly gets the general mood and imagery of the book completely right (including the darker, crueler sections), but he's missing a lot of the humor and wit that runs throughout all of the writing. It's a drug trip without the savage humor.
- A book I'd want on a desert island:
Much Ado About Nothing, quite possibly my favorite work of literature. The original romantic comedy, before Hollywood ruined them. I also especially like its hook of communicating love through the most wonderful insults possible. It's a book I find oddly comforting, even though it peripherally involves soldiers coming back from a distant war that nobody cares about, promises of murder, and a cartoony villain. - A book that made me giddy:
One of the ones that comes to mind is The Demonic Comedy, by Paul William Roberts. Again, it's a bit of gonzo journalism, but the hook is irresistible: it's about a reporter's personal observations on Iraqi culture, life and politics before, during, and after the first Gulf War. The Amazon blurb is fairly accurate: he "writes as if he were Outside magazine's British correspondent, filtering extravagant irony through a bottle of Scotch." This might seem like a fairly morbid and horrifying book to make me giddy (especially because, as expected, there are many sections in the book that are unbelievably tragic), but there are particular sections of this book that so perfectly capture the surreal absurdity of life under a Stalinist dictatorship -- for example, how the feared secret police aren't so secret because they all have identical Saddam mustaches, thus inspiring the general male population to grow similar facial hair -- the reason I bring this up is because I read the book on a return flight from M's parents' place. There's one section, near the end, on how the regime puts on an international cultural festival during the height of sanctions, where a popular myth is set to stage, and a ballet dancer (as the hero of the myth) is also meant to look like Saddam -- and some stage pyrotechnics go horribly, horribly wrong. The writing for this passage was so funny that I had the entire cabin of the plane turning around to wonder what the hell was going on in 32B that somebody could be laughing so loud about it. I reread the passage over and over again just to bother myself into laughing hysterically yet again. - A book that you wish had been written:
Like M, this suggests to me something of novelization or scriptwriting (mostly scriptwriting) ideas that I have kicking around in my head. The most prominent one so far is a Silicon Valley noir, where initially the crime seems something mundane such as your average white-collar crime, but ends up being something much more basic in the end: jealousy, passion, rage. - A book that wracked you with sobs:
It's been a while since that happened -- I've been known to cry at movies much more often, since movies are a whole lot more immediate -- but the one that comes to mind is one that I read for my thesis: Unaccustomed Mercy. In it, there's this piece of poetry -- although if you have kids, or even if you don't, I probably think you shouldn't read it -- but you probably will. Suffice it to say it's about an American marine's guilt and humanity as he visits a little Vietnamese girl, burned horribly by the napalm he'd ordered dropped, in the children's hospital.I kept coming back to this one, and it still makes me tear up even now.
And nothing's changed, except that the weapons used today are even worse: white phosphorus and cluster bombs.
- A book you wish had never been written:
In my darker, more confrontational moments, my book would be the same as M's. And then my cynicism takes over and says that human beings would find something else to wage genocides over, hate entire classes of people for no good reason at all, and hold their children's education hostage over a refusal to look reality square in the face. See? I just got all dark and confrontational again! (And then, once you get rid of one book, why stop?) - A book I'm currently reading:
I say, "I'm currently reading", but what I really mean is "I've been way to caught up with work, childcare, laziness, and general exhaustion to continue reading this even when I really want to, and besides, I've looked everywhere in the house and I can't find it." It's The Thirteen-Gun Salute, and my constant refrain is that it's like reading what Jane Austen would've written had she served as an officer in the Royal Navy of the Napoleonic wars. The characterizations are as rich and detailed and quirky as I've found anywhere, and even M was taken with the wit and humor of the few paragraphs I forced her to read one night. Considering how many wives have forced these books on their husbands, I'd definitely say this isn't a "guy" series of books, even though the narratives are very gory in places with swashbuckling battles. - A book I've been meaning to read:
Better, books:
The Origin of Species
The Omnivore's Dilemma
Freakonomics
Bleak House
The Dark Knight Returns series
The Koran
the collected Little Nemo in Slumberland (where there truly is a world of dreams)