Rick has
327 books
—
compare books
|
stats
controls:
shelf settings: main
views:
covers
table
print
| # | cover | title | author | isbn | isbn13 | asin | num pages | avg rating | num ratings | date pub | date pub (ed.) | rating | my rating | review | notes | recommender | comments | votes | read count | date started | date read |
date
 |
date purchased | owned | purchase location | added to swap | condition | format | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0316074233
| 9780316074230
| 4.00
| 1,867
| Apr 15, 2011
| Apr 15, 2011
| 
| None
| Notes are private!
| none
| 0
| Jan 14, 2012
| not set
|
Jan 14, 2012
| Hardcover
| |||||||||||||||
| 0316180661
| 9780316180665
| 3.90
| 1,223
| 1991
| Oct 20, 1992
| 
| Yet another book which magically escaped my attention, though reading it would have promoted my understanding of so much. Better late than never, eh? ...moreYet another book which magically escaped my attention, though reading it would have promoted my understanding of so much. Better late than never, eh?
And as always, there was no program to my finding it. An old re-met friend rather, who must have been remembering me as I once was well over 30 years ago, lent it to me. He thought the book had my name written all over it. Indeed! Nor do I wish to lay claim to that identity I would name for myself, acknowledging readily that most of what I call myself is at best character-based response to happenstance. As to the enactor of my conjectured character, we may forget him as readily as that creature which eats its brains once they've served the purpose of lodging it. I can find nothing with which to disagree here. Astonishingly to me, I also find that consciousness has indeed been explained. I have no further questions, or rather the questions can be left aside and the work turned to more interesting matters. Such as, for a quick instance, how is it that we can rid our minds of those harmful parasitic memes which would harness our apparently hard-wired self-aggrandizement compulsions. What political arrangements might make us act otherwise than to incorporate any and all techniques for manipulation of the symbolic discourse of money toward our maximal individual corporeal advantage at the expense of any cultured ground? For so long as the Big Questions remain unanswered, there will always be some convenient jog to excuse whatever local pleasure or convenience we can buy at some discount from ever-attenuating meanings for value. Profit extensible to infinity on misdirection alone such as would cause P.T. Barnum to blush. Let me sell you self-confidence with that logo. Quite simply, whatever consciousness is, it will not outlast our physical implicated being which is continuous with the Earth together with whom we have evolved to this point. My mind extends - there are no bounds - into all of that stuff which can be understood in principle, but also into that which cannot be comprehended. Chance will forever exceed my grasp, else what's a meta for? It is the stuff of chance we will destroy for so long as answers remain deferred. There will be no end to our manipulations of words, of money, of tools of every sort because, as with a siren pitching ever higher, we will not stop. There is no ending, and so enthusiasm for ever-more is the only forever. Enough! I mean honestly. Just as it sets out to do, this book defines the question and along the way discards those questions which still compel so many among us to defer our very responsibility because it is so pleasurable to imagine more perfect unions. If, in other words, there were to come about some critical mass of readers who have mastered this work, we could finally begin engagement in those discourses which might wrest humanity from the degeneration which is attendant upon inhabitation by those memes in whose thrall our brains now labor. And in that sense, this must be the most important book I, for one, have ever read. By limiting the field for proper questioning it has in fact already answered that which by its end remains, its author claims, conjecture. Will enough of us learn to read it before it's become too late? It makes a nice dream that enough of us shall, which finally will not only explain consciousness but create it. Nice work!! (less) | Notes are private!
| none
| 1
| not set
| Mar 06, 2011
|
Mar 06, 2011
| Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
| 0684804476
| 9780684804477
| 3.91
| 11
| Sep 02, 1994
| Sep 20, 1995
|
| I don't know how I've missed reading this one for so long. Because Schell did such a careful job creating a durable long-view context for his reportin...moreI don't know how I've missed reading this one for so long. Because Schell did such a careful job creating a durable long-view context for his reporting on current events, his take on China during the time leading up to and immediately following the 1989 "Beijing Spring" remains astonishingly relevant.
I'm glad to read it now that China and the rest of the globe are focused on the current wave of democratic uprising, this time in the Middle East and not among the former Soviet states. Fact is I've blocked out China from my radar for a while. There's too much information, almost minute by minute, for even someone versed in Chinese tradition to make sense of. The dimensions of what gets reported are too difficult to grasp. The pace and scale of economic growth for certain, but the exponentially growing disparity in wealth within the nation; the sheer scope of environmental degredation; the depths of misery from which China's dispossessed still cannot extricate themselves - from prison, from sweat shops, from massive relocations. The stark fact of single (Communist??!!) party rule, upheld among military-capitalistic and provincial power centers which pull against a China-center which cannot possibly hold. And yet it does hold. It is the entire people now who hold tight to order in the face of a chaos made palpable by its lurking ever-presence. It's closeness in time and imagination. Rationalizations are as trivial as to compare the earnings in a sweatshop to those down on the paddy, and forget the comparisons out-of-country. "Beijing Spring" is the euphemism for what really was an horrific sequence of events about which many Chinese swore "we will never forget." And yet so much tumult has continued in China that it's hard to believe that retrospection from the current vantage won't create an entirely new assessment compared to one made more near June 4, 1989. But against that eventuality, Schell was utterly solid in his presentation, laying out the facts according to which every side has made its case. He wrote even to the point of documenting certain kinds of revisionism among the most political of the principals. It would be difficult to find any spin here. The spin swirls all around the events now pinned in history by this book. Or at least, as a Western reader, that's my story and I'm sticking to it! When even someone like Wu'er Kaixi, albeit himself not Han Chinese, is willing to consider that he too might like a piece of China's wealth (and not considering his life subsequent to Schell's denouement interview from Calfornia where Wu'er Kaixi was then a successful roadhouse manager, having pulled on guanxi to get there . . . ) it really is hard to quell the virtigo. And I think it remains historically impossible to determine whether the crackdown at Tiananmen has subsequently allowed the government that much more, and subtle, control. Would there now be more "democracy" had the Beijing Spring never happened? Would imaginations have run wild by now? And how hard it does remain for freedom fighters everywhere to accept that verdict. China presents a funhouse mirror to our smug certainty in the West that we, at least, allow free speech and contending political parties. We allow workers rights and independent labor unions. We would never permit basic human rights to be so submerged beneath such corruption. When, one has to wonder, will there be some point of view which doesn't suppose that we in the West still know better? Will it require us to dismantle our government completely? Destroy our workers' rights? Recognize that global warming knows no global bounds, even while we accelerate our export of both knowledge and its effluents. So my sense of what it would mean to bring Schell's assessment up to date is that we will have to consider China's challenge to be our challenge also. We cannot make of her our adversary, our bogey, our other. This is a book which deserves to be read again as a global recounting of events which are in fact still so recent. Indeed, we must never forget. China's center holds also against its narratives of our web of discourse here in the West. There is one written language still. There is a unitary identity not based on some fictional narrative of the future. While we uphold our American Constitution as though it were received whole from God's mouth, the Chinese adjust. Horrors!(less) | Notes are private!
| none
| 1
| not set
| Mar 05, 2011
|
Mar 05, 2011
| Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
| 0060839783
| 9780060839789
| 3.77
| 17,634
| Jan 01, 1998
| Jul 05, 2005
| 
| None
| Notes are private!
| none
| 1
| not set
| not set
|
Feb 08, 2011
| Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
| 082482833X
| 9780824828332
| 3.25
| 4
| 2004
| Jan 30, 2004
|
| Highly academic and written in a style which should be of interest only to academics, this scholarly tome comes along right in the midst of popular de...moreHighly academic and written in a style which should be of interest only to academics, this scholarly tome comes along right in the midst of popular debate about both the positives and predations of the Internet as a technological phenomenon having transformative power never seen since the time of Gutenberg. Just as the printing press brought down the patriarchal Church, it is supposed that the Internet could undermine the current power structure. What Reed does in this volume is to demonstrate first, how central the mechanization of the production of the production of texts is to the development of industrial capitalism. He's talking about the physical production and the process of production as much as of the dissemination of "ideas." Given that newly ascendant China still counts itself grounded in anti-capitalism, this direction for research is interesting in itself. But the more important thing which this book does is to demonstrate the ways in which there is no inevitability to the adaption by other cultures of what is still often supposed to be the culturally neutral productions of (Western) scientifically engendered technology. Reed shows how industrial printing technology was adapted of a piece in China, rather than incrementally as in the civilization where it was developed. Thus choices could be made that were different than those made in the West. These choices were culturally based and culturally biased and had little to do with what might have been considered the best or most efficient of the developments for the printing press. More recently, and well beyond the scope of this book, the Chinese have been able to bypass traditions of wired communication in favor of a more mature cellular radio network. This might also be seen as a culturally neutral decision based on what offered the most advantage at the time of adaption. But in a similar light, China's particular resistance to what we in the west see as the imperatives of the Internet (Information wants to be free!!) might have to be reassessed in terms of the Chinese choices (Free information is chaotic and as often dangerous as liberating - just look at recent revelations about vaccines and autism, for instance). Because its theme as well as its specific subject matter are relevant to broader popular debates of the day, this book deserves some serious attention. If we are indeed in another age of transformation, rivaling that age when texts could first be massively distributed, perhaps we ought to be more prepared for the range of things that will change. Who knew that the production of words was the most significant of all industrial developments. It was also dirty and dangerous and exploitative. Money and power were the drivers of which texts gained the privilege to overwhelm the others. And the word was thought innocent. But the written word has never been separable from the means of its production. Now more than ever.(less) | Notes are private!
| none
| 1
| not set
| Jan 08, 2011
|
Jan 08, 2011
| Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
| 1591024579
| 9781591024576
| 3.58
| 31
| Mar 20, 2007
| Mar 20, 2007
|
| Anybody from Buffalo, or having friends or family from Buffalo, or spending any time in Buffalo, or even those of you who love just to make fun of Buf...moreAnybody from Buffalo, or having friends or family from Buffalo, or spending any time in Buffalo, or even those of you who love just to make fun of Buffalo, will be interested in this book. It could have benefited from some more serious editing, but that hardly gets in the way of its overall thesis and presentation. Buffalo is a city that has been great, could have been great, might yet be great, but which never did, never has and probably never will make it into the ranks of truly world class cities: cities whose variety extends to a kind of infinity and whose personality makes them unlike any other world-class city. Or maybe it's that last thing which both condemns and redeems Buffalo. Buffalo is unlike any other city in its essence. Mostly, that's taken as a negative. But on the actual negative side of the ledger is the fact that in most ways Buffalo is typical of all the rust belt has-beens. It's hard to find what might make it special. Goldman takes the burden to do that for us. Almost all of Buffalo's citizens have their own personal "best worsts;" their own particular ordering of the collective regrets about what has been done wrong, to us, by us, for us or in spite of us. And we are proud of all the things which we've done right, but don't get credit for. Goldman's regrets seem all on the side of too much pecuniary ambition by an ever diminutive and unrepresentative body of oligarchs which allowed for the destruction of that scruffy fabric of Buffalo which gave it its peculiar vitality. Those with voice almost always drowned out those with a stake in what was working. Almost all of that destruction was done in the name of some form of "urban renewal." This was about neighborhoods blown away in the name of grand civic and architectural and mostly traffic schemes. Buffalo was always gaming automobile futures and always managed to guess poorly. What got nearly destroyed was a unique willingness to experiment in the arts, and to get together across cultural divides for uniquely Buffalonian solutions to problems - like busing to desegregate schools - which would destroy other parts of the nation. In Goldman's fundamentally optimistic assessment, the people never did get drowned completely. Somehow something identifiably Buffalo has managed to survive all the destruction. Almost magically, enough of the architecture, the art production, and even the neighborhood identities, has retained its heritage. At this very moment, almost all public funding for any cultural production in the greater metro area of Erie County is being removed by a local branch of that frightening phenomenon which would have government funding good for nothing other than bombs big business and border fences. Even though cultural production overall may be Buffalo's most productive economic segment - it certainly is if you include education as cultural production. People in power seem afraid of edgy thought. People short on enlightenment seem always susceptible to fear mongering on the part of the powerful. In that sense Buffalo surely is a city on the edge. Goldman is utterly reliable in getting to the heart of all matters Buffalo. In particular, he should be listened to as regards what precisely are the wrong things to do. Which all too often end up being what the powers that be are about to perpetrate. He's good at knowing what we will surely regret if we let it happen. And of course, beyond just local interest, Buffalo is, truly, a microcosm for everywhere and everyman in the United States. It is our collective future, staring us down in the present. We had all better hope that Buffalo finds a way through and doesn't drop off the edge. Otherwise, what's left will look a lot like Disneyland, pretty but dead at night. Too safe to be interesting. Buffalo's also remarkably dead at night, except for a small district brought to life by the author's own forward-looking entrepreneurial investments. But Buffalo sure ain't Disneyland, and that's a good thing. (less) | Notes are private!
| none
| 1
| not set
| Jan 02, 2011
|
Jan 08, 2011
| Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
| 1400063515
| 9781400063512
| 3.70
| 8,712
| Apr 17, 2007
| Apr 17, 2007
|
| Great book! The guy makes important points. But what a jerk. He thinks he has the right to call everyone else a jerk or a stuffed shirt or an empty su...moreGreat book! The guy makes important points. But what a jerk. He thinks he has the right to call everyone else a jerk or a stuffed shirt or an empty suit, but who the hell does he think he is? He's a gamer and a huckster and just plain lucky but he wants you to believe he has that kind of outlier genius which the rest of us are not even supposed to believe in.
He says the world just is the way it is now and get used to it. We live in the state of Extremistan, where the BIG EVENTS which will shape our destiny are fundamentally unpredictable. This is better, he implies, than to live in the state of Mediocristan, led by the high preisthood of the fraudulent Academy which is just too stupid to stop imposing Platonic forms and retrospective narratives on the stuff of raw reality. Well buddy, where the hell would we be if we hadn't started with those forms? Mathematical thinking has done a pretty good job of giving us a handle on the raw reality of nature. And show me a single aspect of reality which can be communicated without some narrative. Show me a truth which isn't metaphor, and I'll show you a fundamentalist dyslexic nutjob. Lots of normal people think that that civilizing influence has been really really good. Lots of us would rather move away from a wolfish pack where only the alpha dog gets to mate or fly high or sell books, and we're not all that terrorized that we might be more like ant-clones, socially organized around survival of the hive. You won't let someone pin you with your own personal narrative, growing up as you did in "Lebanon," that fictional state which only melted down after the Platonic Ideal of the Nation State got imposed on it. But then you want to claim that the state of Extremistan is the true state of nature, and nothing we can do about it but to hang loose, like a huckster, ready to pounce on any opportunity which comes our way. Admit it, Taleb, you stole our money when you were a quant, and you deserve our anger for the supposed Black Swan of our recent meltdown. Funny you don't mention that one in your book, so backward looking are you in imposing your narrative on history that you miss what's staring you down. Were you afraid you'd get pinned with it? Well, I stole your book, so there! I would have borrowed it, but the brave new world of Kindle doesn't allow for that and I hardly wanted to pay for another book which would expand a thought which could be stated in a single page. There are enough civilized people out there who see right through the administrative fiction of intellectual property, thank the gods. There are enough people who understand that there is no choice but to impose narratives on our history. That the only choice is which not whether. There are enough people who understand that our collective choice is to smooth the bumps or die collectively in one last great Black Swan event. Sorry you won't join the party. Jerk! OK, sorry sorry. Got carried away there. Really, read this book. It's great. Just don't get too carried away with it or you'll start believing that there is an actual reality out there that you have nothing to do with. The metaphor of a-causal fractals is so much more real. Trust me on that.(less) | Notes are private!
| none
| 1
| not set
| Sep 27, 2010
|
Sep 30, 2010
| Hardcover
| |||||||||||||||
| B001NLKT60
| 4.14
| 153,935
| Jan 01, 2006
| Jul 20, 2009
|
| None
| Notes are private!
| none
| 1
| not set
| not set
|
Sep 26, 2010
| Kindle Edition
| ||||||||||||||||
| B003R0LBVW
| 3.62
| 37,694
| Aug 31, 2010
| unknown
|
| First of all, why bother? This book made the cover of Time magazine, and if you figure reviews get written by a small fraction of any book's readers, ...moreFirst of all, why bother? This book made the cover of Time magazine, and if you figure reviews get written by a small fraction of any book's readers, and there are that many already, then I'm certainly among the slowest readers on the planet number one and number two, if it wasn't already clear from blogging, nobody's going to read what I have to say anyhow.
In a way, I'd like to see the end of books without genuine protagonists. We like watching beautiful people in film, and we really like reading about people so totally unlike us that we can invest ourselves in their colossal struggles for redemption; for victory over the forces of evil or for perfect enlightenment. We've long since given up hope for these things ourselves, and so the point of investing time in fiction is to project ourselves on an existence that could never be for the humble reader. What would we do if?? What should we be like? As it could also never be for the humble author, except, well, how humble can you be if you're going to be on the cover of Time magazine? If our life were living just fine, thank you very much, why would we want to indulge fiction in the first place?? Well, I guess this book's protagonists are more intelligent, successful, beautiful, enterprising and conduct much more interesting adventures than you or I do or even dream of. (If that doesn't include you, I don't want to hear about it since what business do you have reading fiction anyhow??!!) But you just know they aren't going to achieve anything like enlightenment, these protagonists, and even though they do get the girl in the end, most of them, you know it's not going to mean anything and they might go back to their humbler beginnings. You sort of despair that the tragedy will end up where it belongs and that the author will engineer something seeming awfully like a happy ending, which he does and I hope that won't ruin things for you. I just know that David Wallace (I feel chummy enough now from Franzen's usage that I too can omit the middle and identifying name, as if there could be two of them) really did have enlightenment on offer because he was that smart. I guess the moral of that story is that you can't be quite that smart and be suffered to live. You can't survive among an audience of one, and every time you do get one it's a slice off your soul because you never quite hit the note you get credited with having hit which must leave you that much more alone. But why couldn't he wait? And here also, are we supposed to accept the identification of these lives with the morally vacant backdrop of endless war toward the complete despoiling of our planet? Is that what might make this great literature and not simply yet another perfectly enjoyable and readable entertainment? Compromise is everything if you want to keep on keeping on. Does its happy ending mean that there actually is hope for the planet too, whose fate is actually the front and center concern of each of the good guys - the ones you can identify with - and ignorance about which can only be called willful blindness which quickly leads to the slippery slope of moral bankruptcy among the players you keep your distance from? As does the Author? I don't buy it. I think there is actual hope and not only the default despair of hold me tight and what's for dinner. The secret Grand Narratives of those Titans who most despoil our earth are as convincing to them as the stories they fund to get us on their side are convincing to the rest of us. We are left with conspiracy theories about some Truth that They hold back from us. Forgetting that the First Principle of story telling is the truth that you must hold back from yourself. If, God forbid, the powers that be believe that they must tell fictions to accomplish the greater good, they still cloak their own tale to themselves in flattering terms, by God. I think that Franzen, among anyone who wants actually to get published these days, must present himself as humbler than an author on the model of a designing God. He must place himself that much more self-consciously as reader among the rest of us. Amazed by the stuff of reality and the stories we tell ourselves to enable the mildest forms for atrocity. To be otherwise would trend in a direction away from literary. But then who are we left to read if we want greatness? Or is this why they must kill themselves? There is no God but the cruel One. My God. Must I turn to nonfiction for tales of the supernatural and the fantastic? Yes, well, I suppose I must. This is a good book which will not last but will instead become identified with its time, just before the final fall. Just before the final victory of Nature over Abstracted Man. I mean, there's always hope. Anyhow, the critical nature in all of us draws us only to the books we can live with. The rest we dismiss as so much crap for those little people who don't have any discernment, who wouldn't understand greatness if it were to stare them in the face. Now before I return for my fifth or sixth attempt at Ulysses, piece of self-absorbed crap that it is, I just want to be sure you understand that I have absolutely no critical stance relative to this book. I'm certain that it's a fine book worth reading. In fact I've just started on my second read of it, in case I missed something worthwhile the first time. And anyhow, since I read it on my Kindle, I can't even pass it along, which is an atrocity of the first order, don't you think . . . . ? Humanity destroyed for profit! What else is there to do but cultivate our family plot???(less) | Notes are private!
| none
| 1
| not set
| Sep 22, 2010
|
Sep 26, 2010
| Kindle Edition
| ||||||||||||||||
| 0374158460
| 9780374158460
| 3.62
| 37,694
| Aug 31, 2010
| Aug 31, 2010
|
| None
| Notes are private!
| none
| 1
| not set
| not set
|
Sep 26, 2010
| Hardcover
| |||||||||||||||
| 0099428164
| 9780099428169
| 3.71
| 467
| 1998
| Jan 03, 2002
|
| Finally, a chance to read - a chance read - of this fine author I had a chance to hear here in Buffalo on the Big Stage. There was an astonishing turn...moreFinally, a chance to read - a chance read - of this fine author I had a chance to hear here in Buffalo on the Big Stage. There was an astonishing turnout then, as though this one writers' series is all there is that might, reliably, turn out everyone of a certain intellectual rank. 'What if everyone were to have read the same book?' And "history is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake." Let's all read something different, how about? And compare notes.
Ha Jin's is clearly a superior intellect, and his reasons for writing in his non-native English were, well, brilliant to the point of (my) wanting to cheer out loud. I have a vague memory that some brave souls might have done just that. The perpetual alien these well-credentialed scholars wanted to style themselves, I suppose. But this English-language book is not written in English exactly. It's written in Chinese and then by translation - prior to the page I guess - rendered into English. I love looking up those unfamiliar words for familiar things which must have gotten there onto this page by having themselves been looked up by someone who can't possibly have mastered quite enough of English contexts. Words like "gluteal fold" where you'd have to reach for a nice juicy metaphor in English, and know that there is no particular there there, below the it that is it. Then there's this pivotal passage: "Not until now did he realize that he had been putting on a show. Somehow he had lost himself altogether in the performance and had unconsciously entered into the realm of self-oblivion -- a complete union with a character or an object, which he realized was the ideal state of artistic achievement, dwelled upon by many ancient masters throughout the history of Chinese arts." (pp. 153 in the paperback) Of course, this is pure nonsense. Chinese artists of the true and sanctioned variety could only strive for mastery of true readings of what is, in fact, in front of them. Actors, imitators, as in the West, are lowlier manifestations of the artistic bent. Unschooled, as is our protagonist here, Shao Bin, they strive for what they cannot know. Putting on a show would be rather, well, picaresque for actual Chinese scholars. Fiction is a Western fetish. Artistic creation is meant to better nature. Where? We don't know where our author stands, between two worlds. Is his mimetic art or is it the calligraphic poesis of brushstrokes to open the world to our reading. Is nature bettered in the mind or in reality (ask all the latest films and novels and, um, well, look around you)? Ha Jin may be making fun. He stands, Ha Jin, at an historic crossroads. He writes about ordinary Chinese striving for justice - for a narrative of justice - in a world of petty privilege exercised without constraint beyond what the literate might dare to make in a complaint out loud. There are no legal codes. Ha Jin delineates an illiterate nightmare in the place of a once great civilization. He might as well be describing U.S. I look forward to his further development, happily already accomplished for my belated reading. Anyhow, this is a nice start.(less) | Notes are private!
| none
| 1
| not set
| Aug 18, 2010
|
Aug 18, 2010
| Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
| B0036OSA0O
| unknown
| 3.79
| 155
| unknown
| unknown
|
| I loved this book! Ghosts - spiritual presences - are made to stand in for all those things we all doubt. Even those who profess belief, if they are h...moreI loved this book! Ghosts - spiritual presences - are made to stand in for all those things we all doubt. Even those who profess belief, if they are honest with themselves, don't really believe to the extent that they'd like to.
The ghost encounters in this book are all with people more like us than not. Never quite as successful as their parents might wish for them, and never quite appreciated, but earnest in their lives. Not quite tempted over to the other side of gloating and what the hell, spend your winnings and live it up because tomorrow you will die. We'll all die. We're all living it up too damned much. Hey, I have an idea! Let's not all die together, OK? There's no Jesus who wants that is there? Sure the religionists are all loonies, and the Christ story is just a story which had been tried out previously (and subsequently) with lots of different actors. That this one particular story stuck is just a strange coincidence, right? I mean, look at those wayward priests if you want to believe in something. Hynd plays - deftly I'd say - with intimations of failed writers, movie scripts which are never as good as they are to the one who wrote them, and stories which are too outlandish to keep anyone's attention. And then he pulls this damnable book right back out of his ass, from where it came in the first place a long time ago. He won't let the thing die!! And he even lets Jesus have a role. The nerve!! I mean you can't be serious, right? Just ask Kanye. It's all just meaningless coincidence filled in my foolish conspiracy theorists. Right? What a perfect read. Really. Are you so certain that it's all just standard issue out there? Really? Does nothing strange or wonderful ever happen in your life? Don't you doubt your own doubt? I've met a few people who don't, but they're all evangelical drones or weird believers in hard Newtonian billiard-ball scientific reality. But Newton was an alchemical loonie looking for God for Chrissakes! There ain't no hard reality out there, and just because we've managed to agree on the basics for the standard issue reality we share doesn't mean that's all folks! Just when you thought it was safe to name your genre. Just when you thought you had cool nailed, and you could summon up the nerve to brand your body for all time. Just when you thought that David Foster Wallace was the hipster replacement for that coprophilic old James Joyce (I know, I know, intentional fallacy, but I still think it's all emperor's new clothes or ghosts or something) and then he goes all earnest on you. Along comes a plain old story to make your skin crawl and you think, gee, maybe I should live my life a little bit more seriously now, and um, not be so darned certain about all that stuff I push beyond the range of my willingness to see. Plus, you know, this book turns the pages. It's fun. I'm glad I read it.(less) | Notes are private!
| none
| 1
| not set
| Aug 12, 2010
|
Aug 12, 2010
| Kindle Edition
| |||||||||||||||
| 0385528779
| 9780385528771
| 3.90
| 13,090
| Jan 01, 2009
| Sep 22, 2009
|
| None
| Notes are private!
| none
| 1
| not set
| not set
|
Aug 12, 2010
| Hardcover
| |||||||||||||||
| 0385721676
| 9780385721677
| 3.92
| 32,789
| May 05, 2003
| Jul 27, 2010
|
| By misrerable happenstance, I have found myself reading end-of-life-as-we-know-it books. Watching movies. I hate these things. Why must everyone show ...moreBy misrerable happenstance, I have found myself reading end-of-life-as-we-know-it books. Watching movies. I hate these things. Why must everyone show us ourselves in the funhouse mirror as if we don't already know these things. As if the oil does not still spew beneath the surfaces we do know. We can read. We can watch movies intelligently. Why does no-one offer something better. Something more like a way out?
I have read The Road now. I watched The Book of Eli. I hear of God and Word all around me as we all, collectively, hallucinate our demises. Gak. I don't need hapless romance. Christ! Authors are smug, as though they see these things ahead of our time. I stole this book, I borrowed it with a click from my local library which offers it in e-form, and I am amazed that there is no line at whose end to wait as there is for The Year of the Flood which I might just have to purchase. It's not like dear Margaret Atwood can live enough longer to appreciate her royalties. I shouldn't feel so bad. Actually, I don't. She makes me mad now. Is a cautionary tale all that is on offer from our best minds? I so want to offer hope, to see hope on offer, about how it is that humans are Earth's mouthpiece and not in voices, not in written words, in fulfillment of what was already always implicit. Still, those who cannot read will never know. Those who worship their own richness, their bodies, their foodist intake of ever more delightful essences. They can never see it coming anyhow. A writer wastes her breath. But I know how to read. I can appreciate Atwood's prose which rehearses her project, to project consciousness of what it might mean to be human if only we could break free of venality, is that the word, or is it, also, extinct? As humans are as are all things natural, as Atwood has internalized, yes she has, masculine mankind and it does not leave her proud. Patriarch be gone! These things will end, as has our entrancement by things perceptual which are all that we can control. It is our minds which conspire, through words, to make a thing conscious which has always been and ever. Relations in the mind alone and humans alone can run this thing - the mind - above the grey matter of their silly brains. Cocksure, I wish she would pay attention to what is going on among Mama Grizzlies! We men are slumbering still, living large and in charge of what is already that far beyond us. In the beginning I really didn't think she was all that brilliant. As a writer. Now I know that she is, and I will read, with relish, the Year of the Flood. I will watch that story enacted all around me, understanding that not only human life, but all life can be snuffed out, to start again, by Mother Earth awakening and dancing careless of her methane farts alighted. I understand, I undertake to understand that it is time we leaned to use our minds which would mean to loosen and not to assert control. To re-enter flood, the flow, the thing which makes its own road, path, Way. Lunatic undertow. Subversion. There is a way forward. Damn!(less) | Notes are private!
| none
| 1
| not set
| Jul 15, 2010
|
Jul 15, 2010
| Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
| 0307390535
| 9780307390530
| 4.00
| 30,390
| Jan 01, 2005
| Nov 29, 2007
|
| Another backwards read for me, I watched No Country for Old Men at about the same time as I watched There Will be Blood and thought that impaling my f...moreAnother backwards read for me, I watched No Country for Old Men at about the same time as I watched There Will be Blood and thought that impaling my frontal lobe with a cow dispatcher might make the world more colorful. Grim.
The book, of course - and I make the same point for The Road is an exploration of what Word can "contain" that nothing else can; certainly not pictures, moving or still. Not gestures. Word endures. Word is alive because it gets used and reused, and in this case, abused by too much fidelity. In this case, keeping ones word does not always make one a better man. Women are represented as free of this particular defect. A kind of worship which turns me right off. Women accept ambiguity and thus let God and thus let Men in to fill up that gap. Gross. An abuse of the Word. Let us all now be essentialized. Let us all praise great men. I blew a little brain power on the mechanisms for tracking the hapless protagonist of this piece, a man in love with his wife who stumbles upon a great deal of cash. I borrowed the book electronically from my local library and had to race to its finish before - Mission Impossible - it would self destruct before my amazed eyes. I had to let it go in the end. I didn't really care what device or devices were used to keep the prey in the sights of the predator. Someone had to win. Someone had to lose; the women had already been declared outside the game. But I think McCarthy is in the game with great writers. To paraphrase him, he thinks he knows but he don't. He thinks these words will expose the paradox of words, that these words will expose the complicity of all of us in something lost when, in the end, it is words themselves which destroy the sense that women make. That the Church will and must deny until the end of time, or so they think, but they don't know. One hell of a good read. As though we were any more or less red in tooth and nail than ever. As though the word could expose more than it hides.(less) | Notes are private!
| none
| 1
| not set
| Jun 21, 2010
|
Jun 22, 2010
| ebook
| |||||||||||||||
| 0060852550
| 9780060852559
| 4.04
| 36,129
| Apr 01, 2007
| May 01, 2007
|
| None
| Notes are private!
| none
| 0
| Jun 19, 2010
| not set
|
Jun 19, 2010
| Hardcover
| |||||||||||||||
| 0060852577
| 9780060852573
| 3.70
| 15,372
| 2009
| Nov 01, 2009
|
| Barbara Kingsolver is a master of voice. Though she must have her own powerful voice, it can be heard here only as an absence; an instance of the book...moreBarbara Kingsolver is a master of voice. Though she must have her own powerful voice, it can be heard here only as an absence; an instance of the book's guiding figure, a lacuna.
I hope to encounter the author herself shortly in her nonfiction, but the voices which come through this fictional work are crafted from other, imagined contexts but one slightest step removed from "actual" history. Each one is informed so fully that it would be hard to believe that Kingsolver herself was not there, actually, in fact, for their creation not as characters in a novel, but as actual lives transcribed without interpretation at all. This is the conceit she uses to create in her readers' minds this novel's protagonist. These words - the ones we read - were salvaged from the burn barrel along with their historical frame, by the novel's purported transcriptionist, VB; which I read as VerBatim, as mnemonic for my porous memory. VB's voice is what we might call hillbilly mountain English, a dialect in fact preserved from the time of Shakespeare, in the time-capsule of out-of-touch. As has the whole of American English by comparison with its roots, this mountain talk has taken on a stark literalness which would have been foreign to its other larger handed-down voice, that of the Bard himself. Our faithful compiler of words shares a marvel with each reader that such figures as faithfulness and nearness to actual fact and amanuensis standing in for author should permeate the book so thoroughly that there is nary a phrase which cannot be heard to resonate with each and every other part of the entire book. It reads like a Chinese poem, I'd say, each word placed in a context which is enriched by each other, to form a hologram, not the sort of which this particular novel is ostensibly built - a set of handwritten notebooks -, but the laser-generated high tech sort, where each smallest bit contains the whole, and the fuller read fills out only the context for what had ever been present in its absence all along. The book itself - the novel about a novelist - is written in a time when otherwise intelligent people speak seriously of such things as information velocity; something thought to overwhelm argument and sense. This is meant to be the overall trajectory of reading, to where context is constucted at a rate to exceed what might fulfill it; enabled by technologies which will themselves fill in the spaces of desire before it can even know itself. Kingsolver overall takes on the hardest of tasks, inventing a character just one step removed from the largest personages of history. This context then creates a man who only might have been, and who in the end, in the novel's actuality, never was; a close observer of those events in our own history which most inform what we might have been but aren't, ourselves. Kingsolver herself must have mastered that much of not just history but voice and time and place to put herself, amanuensis of the author in the book, himself amanuensis to Trotsky, the man himself, life lived in the shadow of death's near certainty, and then the author's amanuensis, and then you and I, mere readers and livers of historical actual fact. This is a book to treasure, as a hidden passage to life still lived.(less) | Notes are private!
| none
| 1
| not set
| Mar 26, 2010
|
Jun 19, 2010
| Hardcover
| |||||||||||||||
| 0307265439
| 9780307265432
| 3.93
| 146,082
| Sep 26, 2006
| Sep 26, 2006
|
| Rarely do I make the mistake to see a good book first in movie form; degenerated that way as were the corpses desiccated in The Road's ashen landscape...moreRarely do I make the mistake to see a good book first in movie form; degenerated that way as were the corpses desiccated in The Road's ashen landscape. This film was travesty, and made me detest misogynist McCarthy. I could see who he was, putting two and two together with No Country for Old Men. There is no need for this grim landscape of our future.
Sometimes I don't get clued in about who are the good authors. The shortcomings of random. But the Word can only be evacuated by words, and not by images which are as cruel is it would be to awaken in a coffin under ground. The reality of which was rendered by these words. This is not a real world - in that one, we are not so powerful. We cannot wipe all life from the earth leaving only mankind living. Nature is not that particular. Narratives are. This one lays bare what choices are always present in the ever-present which only makes sense if there is its future. These are the choices which we avoid now, inventing a future which looks much like the one portrayed. Words cannot be depicted. They can be hollowed. They can be made lifeless. They can be turned to purest rhetoric; something which is story only and can be rendered in film or audio tapes. Even an aging man like my own father who never was really likable and who smells bad might not be, well isn't yet, actually, without his future. Which must be not alone no matter how disagreeable he can be. But. We must also preserve our laughter.(less) | Notes are private!
| none
| 1
| not set
| Jun 18, 2010
|
Jun 18, 2010
| Hardcover
| |||||||||||||||
| 1607146150
| 9781607146155
| 2.20
| 5
| 2010
| Mar 09, 2010
| 
| Reading insider accounts of the workings of government makes a good corrective to conspiracy theories: if you ever fall victim to the belief that peop...moreReading insider accounts of the workings of government makes a good corrective to conspiracy theories: if you ever fall victim to the belief that people in power are greater than you or me, well, then I suppose you will also believe that terrorists are evil geniuses.
It would empower us to realize they're not. But then we would be responsible to make things better. It's often nicer to be angry with someone who should have done more because it seems they could have. Jail the feckless slob who manages to set off a forest fire with a careless match. For life. And make him a poster model for how responsible we'll be held if our cockamamie schemes should work. We recruit them - terrorists and shooters - by our very horror at their impact. As if it takes much plotting to do damage to a house of cards, an assemblage of fanatics; as if such doomsday machines as financial derivatives and deep sea oil wells don't have more probability for failure than for success. Who are we kidding, if not ourselves? Lloyd Constantine - certainly in his own mind - strives for truthfulness in his account of the early demise of the Spitzer administration in New York State. He doesn't spare himself, but finally, he faults Spitzer for indulging himself, not with prostitutes, but with the seductive temptation of the ordinary life of a wealthy alpha male. He took on the responsibilities of Governor, and he should have seen them through. There is some mild recognition that there is no ultimate requirement that we the people are so uptight about sexual indiscretions. Why, the unspoken question gets asked, should a man as big as Spitzer internalize such small minded obsessions? Why should he be wracked with guilt? Why should he be so indiscreet as to allow his own undoing? The real crime was that he'd led us all in New York state to believe that he really wanted to be governor. If that were so, he would have kept his promise to us. In the end, he's just another rich playboy, nevermind that he pays more than the rest of us would need to even if we wanted to, for the illusion of prowess in love. That much money should have bought discretion, unless he'd wanted or needed to be caught. The hell of it is that he has this perfect wife, this perfect family. He had real prowess in his ability to attract such a powerful group of movers and shakers to the cause of his administration. But he saw himself, one guesses, as the Music Man, and couldn't keep up the act. You know, I had the same feeling when I read Zhao Ziyang's smuggled out memoirs of his downfall from power in the People's Republic of China. From the inside, the moves of the extremely powerful look banal. They look like what we must imagine would be the inside narrative of sports heros, made up mostly of grunts and counting. There is not all that much to say from the inside of any exercise of the familiar moves of the greatly accomplished performing their great accomplishments. Some are more talented than others. But should we adore them quite so much? As it is, how could they not see themselves as greater than they are. When politics is spectator sport? Lloyd Constantine clearly believes that he earns the millions that he earns, defending the likes of Rupert Murdoch from Constantine's self-styled Progressive side. As if he's that much better, more intelligent, harder working than the rest of us. As if the rawest wanting of the alpha-male is that distinguishable from luck. And would the world be worse if Murdoch were crushed by the then still-reigning TV networks? Would New York be better off if the Spitzer administration carried though on its promise? Or would we all be better off if we were to ignore the chest pounding of the alpha males, turn away, and do the hard work of making the right choices, as most of us do every day in our limited realms. Would we all be better off without such complex structures, such dizzying altitude distribution toward the various tops; things which will always seem more likely to topple than to stand. I'd thought surely that one of Spitzer's enemies had entrapped him. The Church perhaps, which he could have brought down in New York State by erasing any statute of limitation for child rape. The stakes were high. Everyone has a weakness. Maybe that is what happened. Maybe the personal cost to do right by the people truly was made too high. Maybe his exposure of what really happened was simply made too personally dangerouus. Or, you know, maybe the responsibilities Spitzer had taken on were in themselves, of necessity, destructive to the family that he loved, and he really did need a way out. Maybe no-one could threaten them more than his job did. Well, that's the lesson I take from this and the Zhao Ziyang book. By the time you want that much power, or need it, your humanity has already been erased. Our democracy is not meant that way. Humility should be the norm in sport and in government. Extreme competence is its own reward. Constantine should go back to government. He's not that great a writer. And the position of Chancellor for the State University belongs to an ac academic, for chrissakes. Who do these operators think they are?(less) | Notes are private!
| none
| 1
| not set
| Jun 04, 2010
|
Jun 04, 2010
| Hardcover
| |||||||||||||||
| 1439149380
| 9781439149386
| 3.38
| 134
| unknown
| May 19, 2009
|
| None
| Notes are private!
| none
| 1
| not set
| not set
|
Jun 04, 2010
| Hardcover
| |||||||||||||||
| 1401309801
| 9781401309800
| 3.48
| 355
| Mar 21, 2009
| Mar 31, 2009
|
| Everybody in Buffalo wants to find a way to be ourselves in the world in a way to be noticed as something not quite dismiss-able, the way that Buffalo...moreEverybody in Buffalo wants to find a way to be ourselves in the world in a way to be noticed as something not quite dismiss-able, the way that Buffalo is. To do that, you have to find a theme - a big theme, that will sustain an entire novel, or a life, without once seeming clunky or contrived or making the whole text one extended metaphor in any way that you've heard it all already.
Yeah, who would want to go there? What is it we all avoid? Could that be where the humanity is? Could it? Can we look hard at the City of No Illusions and retain any illusions for ourselves? People give up, you know, fall back, from dreams and accept life in its fullest mediocrity, take pride in that to the point of delusional boosterism, so? But why would you want to go there if given the chance to go somewhere else? Lots of creative types get born here, but they call it their beloved home. They don't stay. Visiting celebrities, filming, say, love it here. Why would they stay? Maybe aging football stars find a place where they can remain a celebrity for the rest of their lives. From the inside, Buffalo seems a place of might-have-beens, if-onlies. Petty politics, advantaging local bigshots, trump vision every time and so we build our perpetual wanna-be flagship university out of town, wipe out our waterfront with highways and dead industrial tracts, and conspire to route traffic around our natural transportation hub. Hell, we even sell our hydro-power down the river, downstate. So, it's in the person of a once-vital Mom, a noted expert in the care of elderly demented patients, who herself becomes a living shell of who she once was, that Buffalo can come alive, in words at least, as something larger than its life. Something about each of our lives, no matter how accomplished, no matter how smug or self-satisfied must remain in the world's capitals of mediocrity. You will find yourself less than you could be and at the same time find the lock-jawed striving in the face of white-out blizzards determination to find in yourself and in your life something still better. Something to make light of. Something to brood about, and mostly long long lists of friends who care for you as you are. This is not the fictional Buffalo. This is the real thing, real places named and authenticated. Real characters. I live here. I know them. I am them. If you want to be judged by your proximity to beauty, to power, to accomplishment, then this is not your place. But you are not those things, and if you are, you won't be for long. If you realize, as did de Kooning in an essay which was for me, the central figure in this novel, "Content is a Glimpse;" if you realize that perfect beauty is always only glimpsed, perfect accomplishment, no matter that the glimpse may last an entire performance. I haven't read that essay, but it's title gives a glimpse, right? into its content. In the end, that's all we are to each other, unless we make more of it than that. Unless we commit to stark beginnings and endings. Unless we understand that regret perpetuates the dissected stare, the bloodied guts-revealed loss of what might have been which is the city of Buffalo. Where only a glimpse is required for a father and son to bond, to conspire, to complete life. Our natural disasters merit guffaws. No hurricanes, no oil to spew, just perpetual and powerful Falls. No Superbowl wins, ever, before they will inevitably move to another town more celebrated. More besieged by worse disasters. Ours are merely relentless. And of our very own making, if you'd like to have some excuse to pass us by. But this novel makes of Buffalo what it truly is. A life. Worth living in and by and through. Stark. But not Carol-Oates stark. These are lives moving up, the way you feel when facing the Falls.(less) | Notes are private!
| none
| 1
| not set
| Jun 04, 2010
|
Jun 04, 2010
| Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
| 0571224385
| 9780571224388
| 3.98
| 66,284
| 1984
| May 01, 1999
|
| None
| Notes are private!
| none
| 1
| not set
| not set
|
May 12, 2010
| Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
| 0156011603
| 9780156011600
| 3.59
| 1,616
| 2000
| Jul 16, 2001
|
| None
| Notes are private!
| none
| 1
| not set
| not set
|
May 12, 2010
| Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
| 0061626813
| 9780061626814
| 3.83
| 398
| Mar 01, 2009
| Mar 01, 2009
|
| OK, so I find this really funny: Just yesterday, I was visiting my extremely well-read friend who is just exactly 20 years older than me, and facing n...moreOK, so I find this really funny: Just yesterday, I was visiting my extremely well-read friend who is just exactly 20 years older than me, and facing not just his mortality, but the fact that he can no longer master things. A cellphone, for instance. Or walking to the library to return a book which friends had so helpfully transported him to borrow. There was some sense of resentment that the return trip, whether by him walking or by the helpmates returning, was never anticipated. Getting old can really make a person cranky, don't I know.
Well, of course, I offered to return the book along my way, since I would be walking right by the library. But, well, you know, I glanced at the book, and decided I might like to read it. Despite the lines of people no doubt more justified in their desire than I am in mine, queued up in orderly fashion as the computer can now arrange. I wasted no time, and am only now an hour and a half beyond the library's opening, so I don't feel too bad. Nor, for that matter do I regard it as a terrible sin that my friend had once pilfered some hundreds of dollars in library fines proffered him in a part-time job he once held as a college student, when he realized that there was quite literally no accounting for the fines. I guess it weighed enough on him to tell me. I guess my own sin of stealing a read from this book weighs on me that much. So I'm confessing it publicly, dear reader, to you. Yes, I secretly read books about religion. Off the record. Privately. Anyhow, I was just dying to see how this story would unfold. I was glad to find the author not overly intellectual. He is honest in his telling, and skilled as the celebrated journalist he actually is. I could easily get away with this without any worry about any accounting. Ordinarily a somewhat painfully slow reader, I do find that I can be extraordinarily quick if the read is of merely professional interest. I guess that's the case with this one. I mean, I've differed from Richard Dawkin's take on religion, suggesting that he throws the baby out with the bathwater, to make an utterly atrocious pun on Jesus. This one disappoints me for mildly different reasons. And those, if you are a careful reader, have already been embodied in what I've written to this point here and now. It seems that baby Jesus has now been placed in some sort of limbo. And it's hard for me to get past the pure coincidence of the book landing in my hands. Well, it would be if there were any program to my reading at all. The book ends with a kind of celebration of Howard Stern. I must say that just as the movie "8 Mile" did for me on behalf of the rapper M&M, I may have to take another listen to Howard Stern. I'd rather thought him to be a celebrant of gross and crude, which of course, he is, and, you know, I'm in favor of better taste than that. But there seems to be something about honesty and openness that I'm missing. Well, until you see what's generally hidden by attempts to distinguish, by rules of civility, the ranks of us radically equal humans, I guess you don't really know what gross is. Which it is the burden of this book to expose. Not just the evil of the Church or churches of whatever denomination, but the evil more generally of the fictions we pose for ourselves. The fictional postures we make of ourselves. The fictional narrative we try to fit ourselves to. Etc. But, you know, ultimately if playing out a role in public makes me somehow less than good, I'd like to see the gutsy person I'm meant to be. Or rather, yuch, no I wouldn't! A bit of taste is a good thing. I've never cared very much for Howard Stern, but then again I never really considered him very different from lots of priests I've known. They just cloak it better. Sorry. So yeah, no personal God for certain. But not quite random either. Now, I've gotta go see a Man about a Book. It's the decent thing to do. Plus, I wouldn't want to be accountable for my friend's fines. Oh. I meant I've gotta go see an institution about a book, silly. There's just no accounting for Capitals in English. Confused? Me too. But I can say this about religion. Get lost! You're in the way of my life, which has always been partly truth and partly fiction. I think the author agrees with me. Maybe.(less) | Notes are private!
| none
| 1
| not set
| May 04, 2010
|
May 04, 2010
| Hardcover
| |||||||||||||||
| 0310278732
| 9780310278733
| 3.64
| 87
| Dec 04, 2009
| Dec 15, 2009
|
| I have just now finished this third in Noel Hynd's Russian Trilogy. It must be said that I have never read a trilogy so well conceived as such. Each b...moreI have just now finished this third in Noel Hynd's Russian Trilogy. It must be said that I have never read a trilogy so well conceived as such. Each book stands on its own, and yet reading all three lends depth and satisfaction to the whole.
At the beginning of Part II of this volume, Alex, the accidental master spy of the series, remembers how she got her start. A young student alone in Europe, she faced and mastered that most extreme form of self-reliance - away from home in alien surroundings but without even rudimentary experience. She'd had to trust and to judge and to master alien tongues and ways. She might have turned around, but random bits of luck enabled her not to. Others might have ignored them, or mistrusted potentially dangerous offers of help. She's a good reader of the people and signs around her. What is a spy but someone who must, on pain of instant death, master all the subtle signals the rest of us can safely ignore as random happenings? Nothing is random when you are plotting against powerful people able to deploy armies against you. Everything can become a sign. Everything can have meaning. Nothing is as it seems - it's meant not to be. And what is a spymaster - a writer of spy novels - if not someone who can convince the reader that his descriptions are trued to the actual goings on among those with decision making power over our own lives? As a Buffalo boy, Hynd almost lost me with his ham handed description of a terrorist border crossing near Buffalo, the impossibility for which would be obvious to anyone who bothered to consult a map. But nothing is as it seems, and I must forgive. But of course, that minor lapse served mostly to highlight this good author's truest artistry; to get the reader to keep turning the pages, which happened for me all too quickly. The particulars gain your confidence for the larger scheme, and it, in turn, makes you want to know this protagonist's innermost workings. What will she do, how will she feel, why does she do it. Of course, she doesn't really know. Neither does the author, who also writes to find out. Why would any of us put ourselves in harms way? Alex doesn't exactly buy even her own handlers' motives for deploying her the way that they do. They are automatically included among those she can't entirely trust. She is hardly a blind patriot. She is not a rote order taker. But all of us are, in fact, in harms way all the time. The real question Alex sets out to answer is the one all of us really would rather not bother with, or have its answer handed to us somehow, stripped of doubt, stripped of ambiguity. Why wouldn't you put yourself in harm's way, when the alternative is to play victim to life's meaningless impingements. Take the meaningless accidents of fate as they come, and leave meaning to some greater power. Why wouldn't you make something of your life? The same ending will come in any case. I continue to marvel at how well Noel Hynd foregrounds that most fundamental matter; faith. Faith in oneself, in meaning; for him and for his protagonist apparently, faith in God. Alex finds in herself a capacity for love and for forgiveness, which must be strange to the reader, since she has been wronged and betrayed and has found man all too capable of betrayal of any confidence. Except that she has read the signs well, and was never disappointed in her certainty that there was in fact meaning to it all. Not meaning as in conclusion, story lines tied up(although Hynd does that masterfully for each book, and especially for the trilogy) some answer revealed. But meaning as in living her own life to its fullest potential, exercising every one of her God-given talents and bits of good fortune in a way, if not to make the world a better place, certainly not to serve only herself; her aggrandizement here on earth. She is not patient with those who would do otherwise. But she'd rather help them to wake up than to kill them. I'd rather read another of these books than to pick nits about what falls short. Well, I do have interesting thoughts about border crossings near Buffalo. Anyhow, if each of us were to make courageous decisions without mistrusting what we already know to be our morally correct instincts, the world really would be a better place. The pages would keep turning. Imagine that! Me a fan of spy novels! (less) | Notes are private!
| none
| 1
| not set
| May 2010
|
May 01, 2010
| Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
| 0310278716
| 9780310278719
| 3.26
| 334
| Oct 01, 2008
| Sep 16, 2008
|
| (from my Amazon.com review "Spymaster Masters me Again")
I was a little nervous reading this book. I'd really enjoyed Midnight in...more(from my Amazon.com review "Spymaster Masters me Again") I was a little nervous reading this book. I'd really enjoyed Midnight in Madrid (another in this trilogy), but that was my first Kindle read, and I didn't know then that these books are published by a Christian publishing house. Starting this one, I was afraid my positive impression might have been contaminated by first-timeism (I liked reading on the Kindle) and I have to assume that Christian publishing would prove to be, you know, programmatic and rule-based and therefore shallow. This book has two parts, and part one had me completely. A good spy novel, for me, has to lead the reader to the same spot as the protagonist, wondering whom to trust, what's real, and if she's actually working for the good guys. Hynd's writing does that for me in (sorry) Spades. He is utterly convincing with his takes on the world's actual ambiguity, which he backs up with utterly reliable and detailed rich descriptions of the situations where our hero, Alex, finds herself. Including all the historical and political background you might need to leave what you thought you knew - for the purposes of the story - well and far behind. Hynd's world is a complex place, full of spy v. spy, cynicism on the part of the 'good' guys, themselves doing illegal and nasty thing; and good hearts at the core of 'bad' guys, who have nothing good at all in their brutish resumes. You give him a pass for making Alex impossibly attractive and talented and dedicated. It makes it conceivable that she could actually be that clear-eyed about what she's up against. She's been hit on, competed against, cheated, and uses what she's got in a world where she's utterly alone and without family. She looks good because she has to, and makes a triumph of it. I almost gave it up in the second half though, where the complexity of a world where America is not very certainly good, starts to break down. You sense flags waving, missionary certainty regaining an upper hand, and you remember that this is just a page turner where the ugly people are bad, and the pretty people good. As though all it might take is prayer and determination and style to move from one side to the other. The second half presents a billionaire in flat relief, who's doing good by virtue of spending money on spreading God's word to indigenous people, sure along with stuff they wouldn't need without having had their world upset by that same impulse in the first place. The protagonist shrinks, in this reader's estimation, by her apparently unthinking willingness to abide by her judgments of people's hearts, regardless of the harm they wreak by their actions and by their omissions, or how they throw around their money and power. And then, in the most blatant of possible heavy handed, programmatic and didactic moves (surely worthy of a Christian author writing Christian books), the prayerful Alex gets saved by a medallion of the cross, given her by a pure hearted and surprisingly talented child. Oh please! I thought this was a reader's book, written by a writer. Most spy novels don't afford the reader tears, remaining focused instead on the adrenaline and mind games. This one does, again in part one, which is both surprising and a good clue to what sets the work apart. So, I'm cutting the author some slack, and here's why: the reader actually gets a chance to rise a bit above the book's protagonist. We can't be anywhere near so beautiful, so multi-lingual and muli-talented, and only James Bond himself could be so good a shot. Never mind that we would do something other than make lots of money doing missionary work to console ourselves for our pain and loss. Our choices are not so, well, lavish. But we do understand, by the author's own recounting, just exactly where she was lead astray by her own gullibility in service to a flag and to a missionary cause whose principals were never, in any way, willing to take the risks that she did on their behalf. Unless for vanity. The author shows how the carnage directly results, in reality, from these disingenuous self-serving moves, and reminds the reader of the Church's missionary atrocities in the name of evangelism across the centuries. You don't know where the author stands (I'm giving him back his writer's stripes), but you're pretty sure, as reader, that you're not going to be so gullible as Alex was. You're pretty sure that you're real and she's not. Which is a nice thing to be reminded of, by a book that draws you in so completely. Then theres the matter of prayer. The stimulus-response of God's hand in apparent "answer" to prayer was so heavy handed that you have to assume it to be an announcement on the part of the author that he's not God, even in relation to the book. It's a reminder to the reader that it is just a book, and that in real life the miracles are never quite so obvious. What choice did the author have? (less) | Notes are private!
| none
| 1
| not set
| Feb 02, 2010
|
Feb 16, 2010
| Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
| 0759514925
| 9780759514928
| 4.17
| 7,815
| Dec 01, 2005
| Dec 01, 2005
|
| As with other collections of this wondrous writer's essays, here we get a chance to watch as a supremely gifted writer and thinker works out the colos...moreAs with other collections of this wondrous writer's essays, here we get a chance to watch as a supremely gifted writer and thinker works out the colossal conundrums of our time; and indeed of all time. These conundrums are colossal because, by definition therefore, they require some colossus to work them out. What right does David Foster Wallace have even to attempt it!? And what right did he have to take his own life? I'm asking the question seriously.
He self-consciously attempts things which are the province of more accomplished professionals in their fields. Literary criticism, political journalism, gourmet-level food evaluation, and most prominently for me, athletic accomplishment. Even while he may claim better credentials than you or me, he doesn't claim them as any basis for his writing. His essay on athletic accomplishment inquires about the vacancy - one might call it vapidity, and I think he calls it something like that - of athletes writing about themselves. In this case, child tennis starlet Tracy Austin. He at once dismisses the notion that athletes might not have strong minds, as well as the notion that some ability to comment on their own experience of their accomplishment is any indication of its value. DFW was himself an accomplished tennis player, but he confesses here that he never could achieve that emptiness of mind which allows his performance to be solid in the presence of an inhibiting crowd. It is precisely this ability to perform in the face of an adoring and thus defining crowd which is what is meant by a great athlete. So, I said, advisedly, that we get to "watch" DFW work these conundrums out, which is, of course precisely what we're not allowed to do. We must, in fact, move right along with him as he leads us to the very spot which poses him the most trouble, and then we must do it right along with him, whatever it is he's doing. That right there is the performance art of writing. He forces you to stumble among quirky footnotes, clumsy abbreviations, and idiosyncratic seeming-colloquialisms, which might just as well be DFW-isms at least half the time. And it is his genius to allow you to achieve such heights as you would be scared away from were you to even try to follow the more professional language of those authors whose fields he trespasses. He seems to have mastered their language for you, and then he does precisely what Tracy Austin could never do; he translates the experience not into language which you can relate to. No, he actually takes you there yourself, as some sort of guide, and you feel that you never did have to read Tracy Austin's ghost-written memoir for instance, because you got to read it as she would have written it were she able to write. Which means, of course, that you also got to read the literary critic if he knew how to write, which is a pretty funny thing to say, but still true. Or the gourmand, or the activist PETA crusader. I also did read DFW's recitation of the life of abstraction, in the guise of a short history of infinity, just in case you don't think he really can take you right to the heights, in that case, of mathematical thinking. Which he also, DFW, was pretty darned accomplished with, or at, or in, or by, himself. I suppose that what he couldn't do, then, was to do for himself - in the same way that Tracy Austin couldn't do it for herself - that thing which gives us a glimpse of what it must be like to be David Foster Wallace. And, he didn't have the fulsome sense of self as did, say John Malkovich, being him. But it still pisses me off that he didn't ask my - the readers' - permission before, well, you know. I think he thinks - thought - he could have used a little bit more of what Tracy Austin did have. Which is being OK with vapidity. Which, well, in the end, I guess he actually was. Let's be clear. It's our loss. And I think we should have read him better. Though there may have been nothing we could have done. As he himself tells us about the lobster. Whose pain we cannot know, explain it away though we will.(less) | Notes are private!
| none
| 1
| not set
| Feb 02, 2010
|
Feb 02, 2010
| ebook
| |||||||||||||||
| 0307272400
| 9780307272409
| 3.18
| 3,736
| 2009
| Jan 05, 2010
|
| I just came back from walking to my local bookstore, in penance for reading Noah's Compass on my Kindle. It was so cold it burned my lungs, but my blo...moreI just came back from walking to my local bookstore, in penance for reading Noah's Compass on my Kindle. It was so cold it burned my lungs, but my blood was pooling and the sun wasn't about to stay out the whole day. I paid for paper virtue.
Anne Tyler messes with an American reader's expectations, and she messes with mine. There is never a nice ending, if by nice you want to mean some resolution of life's fallings short. But there is somehow a getting at what it means to be alive and limited. Even when her protagonist is, marginally, smarter, simpler, more honest, and more successful than you are but in ways you'd never aspire to. I guess these reads are about as satisfying to a guy as would be the Soviet follies, if there ever were any. If there were, your wife would be in them, and your place in the audience would be compromised by everybody knowing it was your wife up there and either what do you see in her, or how can you not be cheering. It would mess with your freedom to read, you know? Because you don't really want your wife up on any stage. Not that way, unless that was her business, and you might want to stay out of the audience then, and trust that she'll come home to you. And you don't really want to read about yourself, just as you are. Why not just stay home, then. Why ever go out at all? Or you might just remain alone, discretion the better part of valor, even though there is love on offer from a younger woman. Even though you feel that longing, it would mess up someone else's life, which is very much like inviting trouble home to roost. Curl up and read a good book, it's cold outside. The walk will do you good. Huh? But gradually, that void which you had been obsessed to fill, the one you share with Liam, the protagonist here, whose placid life was disrupted by a new and violent voiding, disappears; and also for the reader, full and satisfied although nothing very much has happened. It was the search for what might have been, in that nothing spot, which filled up all the rest of nothing. This must be cliche about Anne Tyler's novels, or at least it's how I've felt after each and every one I've read. Which must raise some question about why four stars and not my customary five, which I "reserve" for every book which changes my life, which is, well, just about every book I read. Could be I'm just not willing to give Liam the upper hand over. You know, unlike Noah, I'm not willing to say I'm going nowhere with nothing important to do. Oh. Well, some people think that the Kindle will save the planet by saving paper, and some people think that Amazon is just too Walmart big, and some people want to give free speech away to corporations, and I just simply can't afford to read that much on paper. So cut me some slack, and I'll trade you a star. (less) | Notes are private!
| none
| 1
| not set
| Jan 28, 2010
|
Jan 29, 2010
| Hardcover
| |||||||||||||||
| 0310278724
| 9780310278726
| 3.24
| 273
| Feb 20, 2009
| Mar 03, 2009
|
| Posted this on Amazon, and got an A+ from the author! Well, I was pretty complimentary, but my read was and remains sincere. I love writing which disa...morePosted this on Amazon, and got an A+ from the author! Well, I was pretty complimentary, but my read was and remains sincere. I love writing which disappears, sometimes, as vehicle for a well-wrought tale. The vectors messing with our poise in 2009, er 2010, are all here. A very nice spy novel, if you ask me. It pulled me in as me, and not simply as some romantic projection.
***** (Amazon review below) I read all over the map, and travel a bit as well. I love books, and have generally negative instincts toward new technologies which would interfere with their look and feel. But I just finished downsizing from a house to an apartment and nearly killed myself lugging all those books. So I was thrilled when I unwrapped my new Kindle in the hospital this Christmas! I took a wing shot at the first book which showed up on the Amazon bestseller list. I pretty much expected a bestseller, which for me would be a lowered expectation. Don't get me wrong, I wanted a quick, exciting and pleasant read, and I wasn't disappointed. The Kindle worked transparently, as I found myself reaching up to turn the page from its corner, forgetting the button. And the read itself was absolutely terrific. As it happens, I've recently traveled in Spain, and have lots of experience in China, which were the two most prominent cultural excursions (for an American) along the way in this spy adventure called Midnight in Madrid (about 8 PM anywhere else on the planet). Spain was real life, as was the larger context of a world and an age in the grip of anxieties about faith. We fret the destructiveness of faith's uncivilized certainties, just as we struggle with the inevitably ironic remove among those of us who know how to read. The very earth is screaming out for earnest, as even David Foster Wallace was noting before he checked himself out for good. We the literate - just like the spies among us - know that compromises must be made if one is to stay sane and decent. We give a postmodern 'yeah yeah' double-positive to anything claimed as abstract Truth; a stupid word if ever there was one. Especially when it gets reified. We are as likely to be terrified of the ungodly reach of the world's superpowers in our careless arrogant responses to the inevitable blowback from our own manipulations. Spain becomes the perfect setting for a subtle clash of titans; the United States and China. The narrative has them working together, while underneath, there are massive cultural rifts. These get explored via the lense of both the characters' romantic inclinations, and - far more importantly - those of the reader. Hynd plays deftly with our practiced expectations. In this case, the Chinese side gets its start from an impulse of forbidden Christian faith, in a man who had been abused for it. The urge is therefore necessarily distorted. The American side is barely contained by a super-structure of jaded non-chalance, casually throwing its weight around. We get re-presented in a fashion to make almost perfect use of the British foil implicit in any good spy novel. British aplomb in the face of death, and the limey coldly cheerful certainty of cultural superiority is ever present by its absence among Americans who still strut - however ironically - and thereby advertise self doubt. We very nearly overlook the bomb under our own feet by having routinized even our aspirational quirks. As readers of novels, I mean, and as presumptive carriers of the once and always banner of freedom. We look that stupid dressed in multicultural mufti, while the Chinaman looks sharp. But this is not Bush strutting. This is those who've worked under cover, surviving the idiot winds of politics. They curse openly, drink whiskey and likely chomp cigars in ways that politicians can no longer get away with. Hynd presents not one agency, but the reality of competing and overlapping jurisdictions both within and among national divides. Alex, the female protagonist, is presented with an impossible challenge to decide who can be trusted, based on what information will reasonably be withheld. She herself must withhold information from her own superiors, and from those she trusts with her life. Inevitably, she will wonder what she must withhold from herself, bringing the reader right to that very spot which such a master as John leCarre will nearly always do. Ableit with the frankly charming difference that the world does not end bleakly. Along the way toward plumbing the depths of what compromises might be required to remain both human and among the living; and how deeply these might reach toward the very soul of a human who would be both decent and implicated in keeping the world on track, the actual core of Christian faith is exposed without a trace of mawkery or neat simplicity. I understand that the imprint for this book is a Christian publishing house. I wouldn't have known except that I was clued-in by the knee-jerk assumption among folks like me that nothing good can come from those who might publish "Left Behind." But speaking as one who is too stupid to tell the difference between Saturday Night Live and televangelists - along the vector from ironic to earnest - if they're teaching me about God, they're doing so in a manner hardly offensive to an atheist smart enough neither to name Him nor be certain that truings will always be scientific.(less) | Notes are private!
| none
| 1
| not set
| Jan 07, 2010
|
Jan 10, 2010
| Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
| 0394755111
| 9780394755113
| 3.87
| 1,106
| 1986
| Dec 21, 2011
|
| None
| Notes are private!
| none
| 1
| not set
| not set
|
Nov 27, 2009
| Paperback
|
Loading...
