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June 22
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Courtney
gave  to:
Light in August (Paperback)
by
William Faulkner
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my rating:
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read in June, 2009
Courtney said:
""Light in August" is filled with grand themes, snatches of brilliant writing, fully realized characters, violent death, perilous birth, love, hate, regret. The ingredients are there, William Faulkner is a master chef, yet somehow he fails t...more
"Light in August" is filled with grand themes, snatches of brilliant writing, fully realized characters, violent death, perilous birth, love, hate, regret. The ingredients are there, William Faulkner is a master chef, yet somehow he fails to pull it all together. For long stretches, this book is boring.
It follows the threads of several lives, among them: Joe Christmas, an orphan, raised white, haunted by the fear that he may have Negro blood; Lena Grove, young, poor, pregnant, unmarried, in search of the father of her child; Gail Hightower, disgraced reverend haunted by his own past and the pasts of his ancestors; Byron Bunch, simple, hard-working, determined in mind to do what's right but drawn by his heart to betray his own ideals.
It's Faulkner, so of course "Light in August" is set in the Deep South, and of course it looks plainly at the naked ugliness of post-Civil War apartheid. If that appeals to you, I recommend his most brilliant indictment of this stain on the soul of the south: "Absalom, Absalom!"
This book also tackles misogyny more explicitly than any other Faulkner book I've read. Men and women don't understand one another. Men fear, hate, dominate and idolize women. Women are defined by men, fear men's brutality, yet view much of the masculine world with detached bemusement. What women think, however, is relatively unimportant - both to the men in this book, and to the overall storyline.
One man early in the story: "You just let one of them ... get into trouble without being married, and right then and there is where she secedes from the woman race and species and spends the balance of her life trying to get joined up with the man race. That's why they dip snuff and smoke and want to vote." Better not to let that happen, the men concur. Instead, another man reveals the appropriate role of the gentler sex: "Passive and Anonymous whom God had created to be not alone the recipient and receptacle of the seed of his body but of his spirit too."
At least Faulkner shows us the foolishness of the men who think these thoughts. In fact, he reveals the foolishness of nearly everyone we meet. And the book's one wise detached female, who in the hands of a lesser author would be a pristine virgin fated for a pitiful death, defies the stereotype. Lena, determined mother of a bastard, breathes air untouched by society's scorn, men's oppression, and even her own poverty.
Across his many books, Faulkner is not afraid of rot and death, he faces incest and takes on the curse of slavery's aftermath. But "Light in August" is the most violent Faulkner I have read. The characters' lives are all upended by the brutal murder of a white woman, possibly at the hands of a black man. Her decapitation unleashes a search across the countryside that ends, eventually, with a gruesome lynching.
Sounds exciting, and at times it is, but "Light in August" is also dull for long stretches. Faulkner's insight into his characters' minds is brilliant, but sometimes that means we have brilliant insight into dull and plodding minds. He also relies too heavily on dialogue to advance the action, and several times introduces new characters whose sole purpose is to tell us what happened from their points of view. Show us what happened, man! Don't invent a whole new character just so some yokel can back us into a crucial plot point by discussing it with his redneck pals. This book could have done with a little restraint. Instead, the author throws in everything he's got and trusts that the good stuff is what will linger. Maybe he's right.
"Light in August" may well be a good way to get to know William Faulkner. The narrative is cohesive, thoughts and dialogue bounded by punctuation, you always know whose story you're reading. If you're turned off by the "My mother is a fish" of "As I Lay Dying" or the every-shifting perspective of "The Sound and the Fury," this may be the Faulkner novel that you can wrap your head around. If you love the confusion of his tightly-written-rejections-of-the-standard-novel, however, "Light in August" will likely be a disappointment.(less)
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May 25
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Courtney
is currently reading:
Burning Man Live!: The Living Spirit of Burning Man as Captured by Piss Clear Magazine (Paperback)
by
Adrian Roberts
bookshelves:
currently-reading
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my rating:
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Courtney
gave  to:
No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith (Paperback)
by
Fawn McKay Brodie
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my rating:
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read in May, 2009
Courtney said:
"Joseph Smith was born to a poor farm family in Vermont in 1805. Despite his lack of education, hard-scrabble upbringing, and early run-ins with the law, by the time he was lynched by a mob at the age of 38 he had founded what may be the only truly Am...more
Joseph Smith was born to a poor farm family in Vermont in 1805. Despite his lack of education, hard-scrabble upbringing, and early run-ins with the law, by the time he was lynched by a mob at the age of 38 he had founded what may be the only truly American religion. "No Man Knows my History" is the definitive tale of Smith's life.
Fawn McKay Brodie is no Mormon herself, she does not believe in what Joseph Smith preached, and she does not dwell deeply on the spiritual development of Latter-day Saints. Instead, she digs deep into newspaper archives, personal letters, first-hand accounts, property documents, diaries and court filings. From these, she extracts a life history that has often been distorted by Mormonism's advocates and opponents.
Joseph Smith was no mere self-promoting fraud, as his detractors have claimed. Nor does Brodie believe that his was the life of a prophet. He was a deeply imaginative and charismatic man whose dreams fueled frauds in his youth. When he dreamed up the Book of Mormon, and then contrived to write it down and distribute it, everything began to change.
From a modern outsider's perspective, the book may seem absurd. But in the first half of the 19th century, it seemed to answer many mysteries within a broader Christian context through which its readers already viewed the world. As the book brought followers and inspired missionaries, Joseph Smith's literary work became the cornerstone of faith for tens of thousands of people.
As his following grew, however, so did his hubris. This hubris, as well as many political missteps, led Smith and his anointed inner circle down paths that outraged the non-Mormons around them. They controlled the use of property of church members - and repeatedly made bad investments or were swindled. They suppressed dissenting views, excommunicating apostates and destroying a printing press. They used religious influence to tell members how to vote. They opposed slavery when they settled in a southern state - a dangerous mistake in the decades before Civil War. And as these men grew powerful they began, in secret, to marry many, many women, and develop religious underpinnings for these practices.
Time and time again, Smith and his followers alienated themselves from the normal people around them to such a degree that they had to move to avoid violence - or in response to it. As his following grew late in his life, Smith's confidence grew, too, and he did not leave his final settlement fast enough.
When Smith died, Mormonism was still a young movement. It could have dissipated like other religious convulsions of the era. That it did not is a testament to Brigham Young, who wrested control of the church after its founder was martyred. Unlike Smith, Young could manage money, think logistically, and balance the political demands of church leadership with its spiritual requirements. But that's another story, one which Brodie hints at but does not tell.(less)
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Courtney
gave  to:
In the Beginning...was the Command Line (Paperback)
by
Neal Stephenson
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my rating:
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read in March, 2009
Courtney said:
"This ridiculous collection of interrelated essays by Neal Stephenson manages to be both dated and contemporary, depending on whether you're still ranting about the advance of computer operating systems, or you've accepted the inevitable but are frust...more
This ridiculous collection of interrelated essays by Neal Stephenson manages to be both dated and contemporary, depending on whether you're still ranting about the advance of computer operating systems, or you've accepted the inevitable but are frustrated with its intractable failings.
Stephenson wrote this book in 1998 and '99, and in it he rails against Windows and the Mac OS for taking away the power of the DOS prompt and making us all view computers visually. A professional writer, he believes that written commands are inherently superior to visual control of the computer - and fails to realize that unless you're using 1s and 0s to tell the computer what to do, you're pretty much communicating in metaphors anyways.
Instead of these frustrating and flawed graphical user interfaces, the author argues, we should all get turned on to Linux, the free and powerful operating system designed by masses of volunteers. Great idea, except that - as Stephenson himself acknowledges - Linux is HARD to figure out, especially for the novice. The average novice wants to check e-mail, write in a word processor, surf the Web, and delegate the intense stuff to someone else.
Even Stephenson admits that Linux is a bit of a bear to use if you're, say, a writer and not a coder. So after gradually building the case for this operating system, he changes allegiances to BeOS. Ironically, Be had already largely been abandoned by its developers by the time this book came out. It was completely dropped in 2001.
When I call this book anachronistic or dated, it's because of Stephenson's advocacy for computer systems that were already waning as he wrote, and because of his naive - though still, in some circles, widely held - belief that Linux has any chance of taking hold in the real world.
Yet many of his complaints about the failings of Windows and Macs are the same complaints that I have with the operating systems today. And they're underpinned by a clever assessment of the business models that drive Microsoft and Apple down similar yet different paths. You could take much of the content of the first third of this book today, and transpose it into the competing "I'm a Mac"/"I'm a PC" commercials. Ten years later, the same arguments fly back and forth and still neither dominant competitor really has a computer system that meets all of our needs.(less)
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March 28
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Courtney
added a quote:
"No one asks how or what I am doing. They could not care less. We’re all looking glasses, we girls, existing only to reflect their images back to them as they’d like to be seen. Hollow vessels of girls to be rinsed of our own ambitions, wants, and opinions, just waiting to be filled with the cool, tepid water of gracious compliance.
A fissure forms in the vessel. I’m cracking open.
--Libba Bray"
— Libba Bray
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March 14
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March 12
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Courtney
read and liked
John's
review of 1421: The Year China Discovered America:
"Ok, so this was really interesting and he had a pretty good basic thesis. In fact, I could totally buy the most important 10% of his theory. Basically, no one disputes that the Chinese had this enormous fleet that set sail in 1421 and went across the...more
Ok, so this was really interesting and he had a pretty good basic thesis. In fact, I could totally buy the most important 10% of his theory. Basically, no one disputes that the Chinese had this enormous fleet that set sail in 1421 and went across the Indian Ocean to the east coast of Africa. They were sent on a mission to trade with different countries and basically tell everyone how great China was.
The part of his theory I can buy is that the Chinese didn't stop at East Africa. They sailed around the southern tip, up the west coast, and across to Brazil. Then they bumped around the coasts of what is now Brazil and Argentina and then sailed back to the Indian Ocean. Makes sense. They were told to sail as far as they could and explore, and they had the ships to do it. Plus they were mapping the southern stars and learning about navigation.
But the author doesn't stop there. He says, basically, that the fleet split up and then sailed, literally, everywhere else in the world. One group went up the east coast and explored everything from Puerto Rico to Greenland, one group explored Mexico and California, one group explored Antarctica(!) and Australia. Basically, the Chinese went EVERYWHERE.....except Europe. For some reason, they didn't stop anywhere in Europe. At all. Even though they knew there were countries there they could trade with.
Plus whenever this guy sees a map that doesn't help his story, he comes up with some excuse, including gems such as "they must have seen an iceberg and thought it was an island" or "they must have traveled by these islands at night and accidentally thought they were a continent". Right.
I can't say it's not an interesting read though. I'd say read it and decide for yourself how much of this guy's elaborate story you are willing to buy into. (less)
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Courtney
read and liked
Andrew's
review of 1421: The Year China Discovered America:
"There are books that break new ground with bombshell research and there are books that spellbind us with the skill of their deception. This book is the latter.
Menzies takes a tremendous dump on the sensibilities of his readers, bombarding us...more
There are books that break new ground with bombshell research and there are books that spellbind us with the skill of their deception. This book is the latter.
Menzies takes a tremendous dump on the sensibilities of his readers, bombarding us with outrageous claims backed up with erroneous facts and arrogant speculation. A typical "fact" presented by Menzies is introduced with "By this point I was sure..." or "I realized that Zhou must have...." or even "From my days as a navigator, I knew that ...." Then Menzies will absurdly postulate about what the Treasure Fleet MUST have been doing in uncharted territory, with no trace of written or oral record, halfway across the globe nearly 600 years ago. He claims he knows the exact date that the the Fleet passed certain islands in the Caribbean due to their haphazard presence and occurrence on later European charts (the absence of the moon excuses when these oddly shaped islands are misrepresented or missed on the charts). Then he will wax appreciatively about how precise Chinese navigators and cartographers were, attributing stone structures (Menzies' alleged observation decks) all around the globe to Chinese astronomical prowess and their desire to properly construct latitude and longitude by measuring eclipses all across the globe. Of course, the Chinese never bothered to go back to these places to collect the results. Nor did they return to the dozens of colonies they set up everywhere from South America to Massachusetts to Gympie, Australia. Nor did they return to collect the fruits of the mines they set up all over the world. Menzies will say that this is because of the isolationist policy China soon after adopted. But if you really think about, and if you read later editions' postscripts and visit his website - you will soon realize that he is trying to collect all of the unaccountables and unexplainables of history and wrap them up in a flimsy and manipulative description of a massive journey and colonization campaign that most likely never even happened. This book is the nadir of pop history, and, sadly, it shows how dedicated propagandists have been stretching history to their own means for centuries - mix your audience's curiosity and ignorance with a fantastical proposition and then support it with smart and thorough sounding explanations based on baseless facts, and then sit back and let their imagination take hold.
It may be added that the HMS Rorqual, the submarine that Menzies briefly commanded, experienced its only collision under his steerage. So much for his great navigational deductions.(less)
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Courtney
gave  to:
Gilead: A Novel (Paperback)
by
Marilynne Robinson
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my rating:
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read in March, 2009
Courtney said:
"John Ames is a Congregationalist minister. He is also an old man with a weak heart, a young wife and a young son. "Gilead" is his meandering first-person letter to the 7-year-old boy, who will grow old without a father.
Initially...more
John Ames is a Congregationalist minister. He is also an old man with a weak heart, a young wife and a young son. "Gilead" is his meandering first-person letter to the 7-year-old boy, who will grow old without a father.
Initially, Ames sets out to tell his son about his own life and the family history. His grandpa was an abolitionist minister driven by his visions to serve the underground railroad and enter the Civil War. His dad, deeply troubled by the violence of the war, became a minister as well, but a pacifist who stood in opposition to the violence of abolition. From small town mid-'50s Iowa, Ames struggles to find his place in the history of these great men, and to reconcile a late-life betrayal by his father.
But Gilead is more than a generational history. We learn of Ames' difficult life, his deeply considered and often challenged faith, and his all-too-human struggle to live by the standards that guide his understanding of the world.
And gradually a conflict emerges, as we learn about the sullied past of Ames' godson. Our hero struggles to forgive a transgression that goes against much of what he holds most sacred, as he recognizes that forgiveness is itself sacred.
Author Marilynne Gilead gives the most sympathetic and realistic portrayal of a deeply religious life that I have ever encountered. This is a beautiful and profound book. Even though I don't share in many of the protagonist's beliefs, I found myself won over by some of his philosophies, and moved to a new sympathy and empathy with the profoundly religious people in my life.
Here's one excerpt that surprised me in its echos of the Buddhist concept of mindfulness:
"When you encounter another person, when you have dealings with anyone at all, it is as if a question is being put to you. So you must think, What is the Lord asking of me in this moment, in this situation? If you confront insult or antagonism, your first impulse will be to respond in kind. But if you think, as it were, This is an emissary sent from the Lord, and some benefit is intended for me, first of all the occasion to demonstrate my faithfulness, the chance to show that I do in some small degree participate in the grace that saved me, you are free to act otherwise than as circumstances would seem to dictate. You are free to act by your own lights. You are freed at the same time of the impulse to hate or resent that person." (less)
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Courtney is on page 50 of 528 of Light in August
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