2005 Reading
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The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis (winter) -- For several
reasons, my wife thought it would be a good idea to buy this book and read it to
our daughters. We started by reading one chapter aloud each night right
before bedtime, but one night it was two chapters, then four the next night, then
the remainder of the book in one afternoon and evening. Our girls loved it and
were left in suspense at the end of every chapter, prodding me with, "One more
chapter? Please?" They loved predicting the events of upcoming chapters and
hypothesizing about the motivations of the characters and describing the
creatures and settings as they envisioned them in their heads (very few
illustrations in this edition of the novel). It was just as I remember reading
fantasy books was for me as a child. Disney's movie version is coming out in
December, and we're all eager to see it now. [P.S. Saw it. Loved it!]
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Ghost Soldiers by Hampton Sides (autumn) -- My friend Curt lent it to me, and
I'm grateful for that. It's the true story of the Bataan Death March in the
Philippines during World War II and the raid, three years later, on a prisoner of
war camp to free the surviving American soldiers held there by the Japanese.
One chapter tells of the earliest events leading to the March; the next tells of
the later events leading to the raid on the Cabanatuan camp. In alternating
chapters, we hear about either the conditions of the prisoners in the camp or
the advances of those soldiers who are sent, three years later, to rescue them.
It's an interesting way to construct the book and maintain suspense about the
success of the rescue mission. It's also written with such descriptive detail and
attention to the individual humans caught up in this event (based on lots of
interviews and research) that it's difficult to put down. The end is particularly
emotional. It's really an engaging work of nonfiction.
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A Series of Unfortunate Events -- Book the Tenth: The Slippery Slope and Book the
Eleventh: The Grim Grotto by Lemony Snicket (autumn) -- I was glad to have the
opportunity to read these two books so soon after having finished the previous
installment in the series; the plot developments from Book the Ninth were still
fresh in my memory! I appreciated from these books that Snicket is no longer
following the same "Orphans Get an Inept Guardian, Count Olaf Disguises
Himself and Captures Orphans, Orphans Escape by Their Own Wits, Repeat"
formula as the early books. The Baudelaires still use their individual talents
(Violet = an inventive mind; Klaus = a well read mind; Sunny = sharp baby teeth
and a just-emerging bent for the culinary arts) to escape the traps they
encounter on their search for answers to myriad mysteries that just keep
building, all the while trying to avoid the clutches of the evil Count Olaf, who
wants to steal their inheritance and rule the world (apparently). In these books,
Violet and Klaus realize that their baby sister Sunny is now a toddler whose
speech is finally starting to become intelligible. Violet gets a first crush in
Slippery Slope, and Klaus meets his first crush in Grim Grotto. And now they're
wrestling with moral questions: Have they become as bad as their adversaries
if they use villainy to counter the villains' own villainy? Can there be a bit of
good in bad people; and what drives a good person to do bad things? How
should one choose when asked to decide between loyalty to family or
dedication to what's right? Grotto ends where Book the First began: at (well,
near) the site of the Baudelaire orphans' parents' tragic death. We see a
familiar character we haven't heard from in a long time and meet a brand new
character we've only just heard about, but who promises to reveal more about
the author's own connection to the children about whom he writes and the
mystery that they're all researching alike. And although Book the Eleventh
introduces two new mysterious terrors (both undersea), it ends on the happiest
note yet for these unfortunate children, "turning the tables of their lives and
breaking their unfortunate cycle for the very first time." I'm eager for the next
installment to come out! (There will be thirteen books in the series, just as there
are thirteen chapters in each book, FYI!)
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Crossworld by Marc Romano (autumn) -- I did not grow up doing crossword
puzzles. I pretty much ignored them when I saw them in newspapers and
magazines, even though I enjoyed reading (a pastime which is often associated
with doing crosswords). When I first met my wife, she would work on them
while eating and ask me occasionally for answers to clues. She and her dad
would share the crossword from the morning newspaper, he doing half of it and
saving the other half for her. Before we had kids, we did crosswords together in
the car, she reading the clues from the passenger seat (and usually filling in the
answer silently before waiting for me to offer my answer). Now we often do the
Sunday crossword puzzle together after we've returned from church and dining
out at noon. Therefore, I found this book interesting. It tells about crossword
puzzle solvers and constructors, the big names in the world of crosswords, the
ins and outs of the national crossword tournament, the international variants of
the crossword puzzle, the origins of word puzzles, how to improve at solving
crosswords (and at doing so quickly), etc. I recommend it to anyone who
enjoys playing word games and theorizing on their meaning and popularity.
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A Series of Unfortunate Events -- Book the Ninth: The Carnivorous Carnival by Lemony
Snicket (autumn) -- I recently watched the movie version of the first three
books in this series, and that inspired me to get to readin' the later books that
we have but that have sat unread on my desk for a year, at least. The
Carnivorous Carnival, like its immediate predecessor, The Hostile Hospital, feels
different from other books in the series in that the Baudelaire orphans do not
get returned at the end to the inept safety of Mr. Poe only to wait for another
unfortunate misadventure in the next book. Hospital leaves them in peril (in the
trunk of a car driven by the evil Count Olaf), and so does Carnival (in a runaway
caravan, careening backward down a mountain, with one sibling abducted in a
car driven the opposite direction by Count Olaf), with Mr. Poe nowhere in sight.
The author has some clever tricks in the book regarding deja vu, and as always,
his narration is funny because of its unashamed judgment of the plot even
while relating it. And there's another plot at work throughout, too--what the
author himself has to do with the Baudelaires and their parents about whom he
writes. I've got two more books in the series waiting for me on my desk!
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The Clockwork Muse by Eviatar Zerubavel (autumn) -- I read this for a graduate
course on writing a dissertation proposal. At only about 100 pages, it's a very
quick read, and it's right up my alley: how to organize your time in order to
break down a large writing project (i.e., your dissertation) into smaller parts
with deadlines for completion. Zerubavel makes the point that very few people
can afford to wait for inspiration to strike before they sit down to write. Finding
your clockwork muse means practicing the discipline required to write regularly
and often enough to complete the project and draw inspiration from the very
regularity of a writing schedule. Like The Craft of Research, this book will be good
to return to when I'm ready for writing my own dissertation.
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The Craft of Research by Gregory Colomb, Joseph Williams, and Wayne Booth
(autumn) -- I read this for a graduate course on writing a dissertation proposal.
There were three books for the course, and this was the thickest, so for no other
reason, I began with it first. It's a very thorough, step-by-step explanation of
how to write good, readable academic research (such as a dissertation) that
meets the high research standards of your academic community. Some of my
classmates found it dull because it tells how to write something that they
haven't yet started; its advice is not yet applicable to them and so seems too
technical (about the writing process) to hold their interest. I, however, liked it
because it is an example of the clear writing that it advocates, and I kept finding
passages that would be appropriate to share with my own high school students
to help them learn the ropes of academic writing. It will be a good reference
when I'm at the stage of drafting my own dissertation.
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Twins by Marcy Dermansky (summer) -- The book's back cover calls it "splendid
and disarmingly funny," but I would argue that it is only splendid and
disarming. I find nothing funny about the lives of the two main characters or
the dysfunctional friends and acquaintances who orbit around the twins. What
is disarming is the severity of Chloe and Sue's situation: neglected by their
parents, allowed by their parents' absence to form a bitter love/hate
relationship with one another, driven by their parents' incompetence to seek
connection in dangerous ways (eating disorders, sexual partners, drugs and
alcohol), etc. What is splendid is how thoroughly enthralled one becomes with
the twins' lives and outcomes throughout reading. I thought I would get
irritated with the conceit of having alternating chapters narrated by each twin,
but I soon grew to appreciate hearing the other sister's perspective on events
in her twin's life. I wanted the girls to "shape up" and get their lives together,
but the plot seemed no closer to a tidy, satisfying conclusion even as I neared
the last few pages. The final sentence took me by surprise; I turned the page,
expecting to find more, but when I found that the novel had ended, I shivered
with the realization that I had, in fact, gotten the happy ending I had wanted
(kinda). Chloe and Sue's lives are disturbing to read about, but their ultimate
triumph over what life has dealt them is all the more satisfying because of it.
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The Electric Michelangelo by Sarah Hall (summer) -- "Back then it had seemed a
ridiculous thing to say. Too much like the great Eliot Riley on a flight of fancy,
getting wordy and profound, trying to make Cy feel like the village idiot again."
This narrative statement about the character Riley could in fact speak for the
novel itself at times (Riley = Hall; Cy = the reader). Hall's storytelling pace
tends toward the ponderous, and her style is to narrate in bountiful
generalizations heavy with metaphor. The reader's patience can wear thin
wading through the narrative observations in search of the plot. Another
obstacle in the reader's path is carelessness of sentence construction and
punctuation. Flouting grammatical conventions is not a mark of individual style;
when the author does not strive for clarity in this regard, the task of
comprehension becomes an unnecessary burden on the reader. That said,
although reading the book was, at times, work, I was pleased to have read it.
The characters are ordinary people in extraordinary situations, and I find it
interesting how Hall draws them to be so clearly "normal" when we could easily
be distracted by their occupations (tattoo artist? freak show performer?),
among other strange details of their lives. The second half of the book had my
attention to the end; Cy's relationships with Grace and Nina are intriguing as
well as realistic in that they are not wholly satisfying for him. Furthermore, I
found many more moments of simple brilliance than not in Hall's narrative
observations and figurative language. For all the work that it was to read, her
narration certainly had me seeing things in new and unusual ways. Hall's
seems like an academic mind challenging the standards of fiction; Hall is, as the
back cover claims, "uniquely talented."
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The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd (summer) -- This is one of the most
beautiful books I have ever read. I'm not kidding. The narrator is so appealing:
on the cusp of adulthood, she's still negotiating the joys and pains of leaving
childhood behind, and she does so with such an unassuming, matter-of-fact, yet
always insightful voice that I wish she were real so that I could meet her in
person! And her childhood pains are extraordinary, yet she is no whiner
(another reason she's so appealing). My wife borrowed the book from relatives
and read it last summer. She planned to return it when we went to visit them
again last week but encouraged me to read it first. I'm so glad I did. I even
shed a few tears throughout, both at the painful moments she experiences and
at the hopeful events that buoy her in her stormy life. (And I love the way that
bees serve as metaphors throughout--even in the chapter epigraphs.)
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Living the Revolution (summer) -- Literally hundreds of pages of primary
documents from/by historical figures of our country's founding and early days.
I read it all for a five-day seminar in August on teaching American history and
literature. [Read what one of the seminar's visiting scholars has to say about
this self-same material.] I am surprised at how much I enjoyed it. I normally
wouldn't go into a library and search the shelves for the collected personal
letters of Thomas Jefferson or for Indian treaties of the early 1800s. But I found
just such documents--and many others--to be engaging, "human," and
surprisingly accessible, considering the highly formal language (everyone from
1790-1820 "sounds" so intelligent, judging by the vocabulary in their writing). I
found many works that I'm sure students will find interesting in our American
literature course, too. On the whole, I think learning about history via primary
sources is much more satisfying than through textbook summaries. So much of
my time as a teen-aged student of history was spent memorizing dates and
names of battles for the next test. Harrumph.
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Wild Animus by Rich Shapero (summer) -- That's it; I throw in the towel. I cannot
do it. I tried, though--I really tried. I received an advance reading copy of this
novel while vacationing in Kalispell, Montana the summer of 2004. The jacket
says that it's about a man who heads into the Alaskan wilderness on a life quest
for "transcendental truth" that might just turn out to be "a misguided fantasy."
After spending some days in the beauty of Montana's mountains, I was in the
mood for a story about life in the wilderness. And, hey, it was free! Well, I
didn't get time to start the book until this summer, and as it turns out, that was
about 100 summers too soon. This is one wacky book, fa shizzle! The
protagonist is wacky, and the author's narrative style is wacky. "Wacky" as in
"either on drugs or out of touch with reality." And (what a coincidence!) the
main character himself is a drug user--one who sees a photo of a ram on a
magazine cover and decides that his purpose in life will be fulfilled once he
journeys to Alaska to "become" a ram himself. He takes acid and puts a dried
ram's skull on his head while communing with nature and makes his girlfriend
do shift work at a diner to pay for his drug habit and his hiking equipment. He
also envisions her to be the wolf to his ram, foreshadowing some kind of trouble
ahead for their relationship . . . or just further drug-induced delusion, one or the
other. Readers are supposed to see this as a journey to self-discovery, but I
just wanted the guy to kick the habit, go home, and get a job. Midway through,
the narration starts to alternate between standard (more or less) omniscient
point of view and bold-faced, italicized first-person ramblings that go on for
pages and are meant to take readers inside the psychotropically "enhanced"
mind of the man who thinks he's a ram. It was at that point that I began to
skim. Yes, skim--in a fiction book, mind you, not a newspaper or encyclopedia
article. Just to say I'd finished the book, I continued this method of "reading"
until I reached the last page . . . and I still don't know exactly what happens to
the guy. I think he's dead. I know I feel that way just having endured this
book. But, hey, anyone wanna borrow it from me?! Be my guest!
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The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown (summer) -- A friend who lent me this book just
told me that her brother wants to read it, so I shifted into high gear and read it
all in a single afternoon/evening (454 pages)! I really enjoyed it. It's a well
paced adventure with plenty of surprises and the continual feeling of "A-ha!" as
the main characters solve riddles, figure out clues, and generally put together
the pieces of the centuries-old puzzle that forms the basis for the modern-day
plot--all under the time crunch of racing against the villains and evading
capture/murder along the way! I love the way the author melds truth and
fiction in a very believable way; I can't always tell which details of the past
might be real and which ones are figments of his own imagination. (Others
have done plenty to investigate these distinctions; read more about that here.)
The characters find many connections among seemingly unrelated words and
symbols and people and events from different eras, and I was thoroughly
caught up in their discoveries. I can see now why people have been talking
about this book for so long! I, too, couldn't put it down. (Look who will be in the
movie version!)
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Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince by J. K. Rowling (summer) -- Wow. How
does Rowling do it? The world of Harry Potter that she has created is so
thoroughly engaging that I plowed through the 652-page book in two days. The
familiar characters (from Books 1 through 5) are back or mentioned, as are
previous events that all seem to tie in, one way or another, to the events of this
one, Book 6 in the series. I can't tell if she carefully plotted all the events from
the start and was thus able to sprinkle things in the early books that she already
knew she planned to bring up in later ones; or if she, writing another book in the
sequence, looks back at the previous ones for details to bring up again and
make significant in retrospect. Either way, she's excellent, and so is this book.
But it's undeniable that, by the conclusion of Book 6, things have changed
irreversibly in Harry's life. The evidence is in his behavior as a maturing
adolescent and a growing wizard, as well as in the shocking events of the book
itself. Three particularly significant pages (for those still reading): 596, on which
something so stunning and momentous occurs that life in Harry's world, on the
grounds of Hogwarts and off, can never again be the same; 604, on which the
meaning of this book's title is revealed (and it's a shocker); and 650, on which
Harry makes a decision that makes me wonder if the next (and final) book in the
series could possibly follow the standard follow-a-school-year-at-Hogwarts
formula of its predecessors. Harry, Ron, Hermione, and their friends are a joy
to follow from book to book (i.e., school year to school year at Hogwarts), and
their happiness or sorrow literally brings me to laughter or tears as I'm
reading. Regardless of (or partly because of?) the book's shocking ending, it
was a truly wonderful reading experience.
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The Murder Book by Jonathan Kellerman (summer) -- It was a gift from a very
brief "book club" chain mail scheme. It wasn't an altogether satisfying reading
experience. There's a mystery to be solved, and there are two main characters
working to solve it: a cop and a psychologist. There are some personal issues
for each that get mentioned in between their investigatory trips and interviews
as they work to solve a decades-old crime. Okay. But the point of view keeps
shifting from one chapter to another--sometimes first-person, sometimes
third-person limited, other times omniscient. And for no apparent reason that I
could discern (although I would read a chapter, then set down the book for
weeks at a time, so I wasn't expending a lot of mental energy concentrating on
making sense of it). The ending seems anti-climactic; they figure out well in
advance who is responsible for the crime, and, yes, indeed, they turn out to be
correct. And the cohorts in crime all die before justice can be served. Hmm.
I've heard good things about the author and his mysteries, so maybe I was too
lazy a reader, not pulling my own weight in the give-and-take relationship
between author and audience. Hey, I'll give ya my copy of the book if you want
to read it for yourself.
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Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer (summer) -- I was lent this book by a friend who
rereads it annually! It is the true and terrifying story of the author's ascent of
Mt. Everest--a trek that claimed the lives of five of his teammates on the climb
and could easily have claimed his, too. One has an awful sense of dramatic
irony reading the first two-thirds of the book, reading about their journey up the
mountain and knowing that some of them will not survive. Krakauer's
harrowing trip back down is suspenseful to read, too. Also interesting was the
postscript in which Krakauer counters accusations made against him by
another survivor of the journey in his own book, The Climb. It's a good read (but
I personally wouldn't read it annually.)
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The Amber Spyglass and The Subtle Knife and The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman
(summer) -- These books make up the trilogy called His Dark Materials. A
recently graduated student recommended (and lent) them to me, and I must
say I enjoyed them a lot. The Golden Compass was first, and it took me a while to
figure out the "rules" of the world that is the setting; the characters seem to
occupy modern-day Earth, but it is apparent that their daily life is quite different
from ours (anbaric energy, symbiotic daemons for every human, talking polar
bears, alternate universes beyond the aurora borealis, etc.). However, I was
intrigued by the smooth integration of reality and fantasy. The book ends with
a clear segue into its sequel, and I thought The Subtle Knife was even better! It
juxtaposes the world of the first book with our own world and, in so doing,
clarified a lot for me. It also brings up many more questions by juggling
several mysteries in various storylines at once. And the "cliffhanger" at the
end of that one is even more compelling (and frustrating!) than that of The
Golden Compass! I couldn't wait to read The Amber Spyglass, and I was not
disappointed by it. The first two books build up to a literal "war of the worlds,"
the two main characters' progress toward which creates the suspense of this
installment's plot. As I read, I kept imagining how this story would look as a
Hollywood blockbluster movie (there would be intense special effects
demands). The ending is bittersweet, as well as philosophical and
thought-provoking (especially regarding established religion). I highly
recommend this series.
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