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August 20
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Michael
gave
 
to:
Lost on Planet China: The Strange and True Story of One Man's Attempt to Understand the World's Most Mystifying Nation, or How He Became Comfortable Eating Live Squid (Hardcover)
by J. Maarten Troost
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my rating:
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read in August, 2008
Michael said:
"I picked up this book because a friend of mine from Barnes and Noble had mentioned how funny the author's previous two books, Sex Lives of Cannibals and Getting Stoned with Savages are. And since Lost on Planet China was in hardc...more
I picked up this book because a friend of mine from Barnes and Noble had mentioned how funny the author's previous two books, Sex Lives of Cannibals and Getting Stoned with Savages are. And since Lost on Planet China was in hardcover on the Barnes and Noble shelves--and since booksellers can borrow any hardcover book in the store (but, alas, no paperbacks)--I checked it out.
To be sure, I also had a tinge of interest of China somewhere in the back of my mind, seeing as how I know next to absolutely nothing about the country. I mean, really: I knew there is a big wall, they eat rice, its overcrowded, some people where those pointy hats--but that's about it. Moreover, the author, J. Maarten Troost, is something like myself, a liberal-minded family man, so I had a feeling I could trust and gain insight from his observations. And if he was as funny as my friend claimed, all the better.
First of all, he's definitely funny. No, that's an understatement. He's frickin' funny. I was laughing out loud from the first page, where he explains how his trip to China originated out of the blue when he absentmindedly began telling people that his next book was about the overpopulous country, only later to realize that he had not even begun planning any type of trip, or even thought about it. Also, he describes hilarious moments when he does things like this:
As funny as he is, however, Troost also does a fantastic job of pointing out how...unfortunate...many aspects of modern China are, such as the inescapable smog (which we've all seen on NBC's coverage of the Summer Olympics), and the billboards that line once holy Buddhist cities such as Lhasa. This paints a painfully real image of the impact of globalization on remarkable traditions and cultures, and leaves us wondering things like, "Do Tibetans actually need Big Macs in their lives?"
Another intriguing aspect of Planet China is Troost's observation of the country's totalitarian state. It seems to be Orwell's 1984 with live squid. There is no free press, there is propaganda EVERYWHERE (including countless oversized portraits of Mao hung up in every square, despite the fact he ranks up there with other downright evil dictators like Hitler and Stalin), and a large percentage of the country is living like drones: go to work in the factory, come home, eat, sleep, repeat. There are, of course, many Western touches, like the aforementioned ubiquitous McDonald's, and even Japanese touches like Karaoke bars all over the place (despite the fact that the majority of Chinese still hold a nasty grudge against the Japanese for the Nanjing Massacre, and rightly so, especially since the Japanese haven't so much as offered an apology). But these examples of "outside-ness" seem to be petty allowances made by Hu Jintao's police state, which otherwise keeps the people simultaneously afraid of the government and cocksure that China is the next big thing.
After finishing Planet China, I am quite sure that China is going to be making a huge impact globally in the next few decades--much more so than it already has, what with controlling such an immense percentage of the factory-labor industry (despite the fact they make toys with lead, those factories in China still continue to ship products all over the world, including to the U.S., to a major extent). The Chinese economy is improving hand-over-fist (exemplified by the countless Ferrari and Lamborghini dealerships all over the country), and an increasingly humongous amount of all world trade is conducted in the major cities (Beijing, Hong Kong, Shanghai, etc.). Troost's book did not inspire me to travel to China in the slightest (except for Tibet, which I'd love to go and see, if only to weep over the lost culture in person), but it most certainly did open my eyes to how and why China will be the next big thing.
Goose step by goose step.
...less
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August 16
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Michael
gave
to:
A Monk Swimming: A Memoir (Paperback)
by Malachy McCourt
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my rating:
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Michael said:
"Dear Malachy,
You are not Frank. So stop it.
All the best,
Mike Kneeland
PS "Your" book was good enough to elicit a 3-star rating, but only because as I was reading it, I could not get your brother's voice out of my head. Even in the par...more
Dear Malachy,
You are not Frank. So stop it.
All the best,
Mike Kneeland
PS "Your" book was good enough to elicit a 3-star rating, but only because as I was reading it, I could not get your brother's voice out of my head. Even in the parts distinctly about you.
Curious....less
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Michael
is currently reading:
The Subtle Knife (His Dark Materials, Book 2)
by Philip Pullman
bookshelves:
currently-reading
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my rating:
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Michael
gave
to:
The Once and Future King (Paperback)
by T.H. White
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my rating:
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read in August, 2008
Michael said:
"For the most part, this novel--well, collection of novels, in truth--is simply a work of genius. Many great lines (too many to quote from memory just now, but suffice to say they were all ravenously devoured by the jaded peacenik that is me), many wo...more
For the most part, this novel--well, collection of novels, in truth--is simply a work of genius. Many great lines (too many to quote from memory just now, but suffice to say they were all ravenously devoured by the jaded peacenik that is me), many wondrous adventures, many touching moments, and many, many pages.
I was disappointed to learn that the Wizard's Duel between Merlyn and "Mad, Mad" Madame Mim was cut out of this version of TOaFK (I heart acronyms, just about as much as I heart anachronisms, which are delightfully peppered throughout the novel, particularly the earlier segments, mostly appearing because of the clever characterization that has Merlyn living "backwards in time," meaning he is growing younger as Arthur grows older). For some reason, someone (T.H. White? Editors? I know not...I'm too tired to Google it right now) decided Mim doesn't fit in the story, so they cut her out. Oh well, at least she lives on in the Disney movie, which is good but in retrospect doesn't really do the novel The Sword in the Stone justice at all, since the book is very much an anti-war treatise and the movie is, well, a Disney movie.
Also, I was disappointed to find that the later segments of TOaFK tend to drag and do not usually retain the pace of the earlier segments and therefore require a much longer attention span, something I don't usually like to pull out for summer reading. But still, as long-winded as the latter sections can be, they are still chock-full of typical T.H. White insights and anti-war sentiment, both of which I heartily cherish. Most moving in particular is Arthur's obligatory death scene (or dying scene actually, as he doesn't actually die "on camera"), which I wasn't expecting to be so emotional. But it makes sense, I guess, that after you've stuck with a character for so many pages, from childhood through late adulthood, through trials and tribulations, through adultery and deceit, that you develop an emotional attachment to him or her.
Perhaps that is what I liked best about the novel, actually: getting to see a colorful illustration of the life and death (or dying) of a character so deeply embedded in Western culture and traditions that practically everyone in Europe and the U.S. knows who he is, a character who I, at least, have known and loved my entire life.
I heard it through the grapevine that they're trying to make a film adaptation--a new and supposedly complete film adaptation, that is--of TOaFK. I only hope that they keep in the anti-war sentiment and hilarious anachronisms and avoid the "bibbiddy-bobbeddy-boo"-ness that can so easily be put into--and consequently water down and belabor--an adaptation like this. The best film adaptations stick to the heart of the original story, and if Hollywood can do that with TOaFK, then oh, what a heart this adaptation will have....less
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July 27
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Michael
gave
to:
Waiting for Godot: A Tragicomedy in Two Acts (Paperback)
by Samuel Beckett
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my rating:
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read in December, 1998
Michael said:
"As a pretentious senior in high school, I thought I would uber-sheik and take a girl a had a crush on to a play, Waiting for Godot, which I had read in the Comedy, Wit, and Satire English elective that I took the previous year with my favorite...more
As a pretentious senior in high school, I thought I would uber-sheik and take a girl a had a crush on to a play, Waiting for Godot, which I had read in the Comedy, Wit, and Satire English elective that I took the previous year with my favorite high school English teacher, Dr. Stone. How I got the tickets is inconsequential (okay, okay: my dad won them from the radio; my uber-sheik persona just took a big hit), but suffice to say, my crush and I were the youngest members in the crowd. Fortunately for me, my crush was also somewhat pretentious (though not nearly as much as myself), so the evening was not an entire bust.
About fifteen minutes into the show, my memory finally overpowered my hormones and I remembered what Waiting for Godot actually is: a philosophical piece, more for discussion afterwards than for immediate enjoyment. I silently berated myself; after all, how could I possibly make a move during Wait for Godot? I mean...it was WAITING FOR GODOT, for crying out loud! There is not one female role in the entire play, and the closest thing to a romantic relationship we get is between the two lead male characters, Vladimir and Estragon, who bicker, joke, hug, and so on as though they are a married couple. Oh well, no romance for me that evening, but at the very least, I retained my decidedly cool, uber-sheik persona.
Well, I guess "cool" is a subjective term.
In any event, in the years since my botched date, I have come to sincerely appreciate Godot. The play is almost literally about nothing (ahead of Seinfeld by more than a few decades) as it depicts the two men mentioned earlier just sitting (or standing, or dancing, etc.) around as they wait for a man named Godot (who, incidentally, never arrives). Other characters arrive from time to time, but that's about it for the main action. So how has this been interpreted so many different ways?
Well, you could say it is the lack of action that speaks to us. Or perhaps it's simply the kooky, wordy dialogue. Or maybe it's the complex, desperate characterization. Or it could also possibly be its minimalist approach to theater. Or, to be sure, it's a combination of all these things. Whatever it is, political, social, cultural, Freudian, Jungian, existentialist, Biblical, and even gay theorists have all written volumes about what Godot means, or if it even means anything at all, or if that even matters one way or the other. I like that about works of literature like this: you can't pin any "meaning" down in one place (as you ostensibly can with, say, The Chronicles of Narnia). Not only does it keep you, the reader (or audience member) thinking long after the work is over, but it ensures the author some amount of immortality. It's like James Joyce once said (and incidentally, Joyce employed Beckett as his personal secretary for a time): “I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it [Ulysses:] will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that's the only way of insuring one's immortality.”
A girl I used to work with tried to convince me that "Godot" is pronounced "God-ott." Despite my rebuttals that Beckett had originally written the play in French--which would mean "Godot" would be pronounced with the French -ot ending as "oh"--she violently proclaimed that it was "God-ott," which she learned from her favorite theater professor, who had supposedly heard this from Beckett himself while they shared a drink in a bar. Whatever. I guess this just goes to prove my point that just about everything in this play is open to interpretation, whether it's the overall meaning, or the simple pronunciation of a word.
But still, it's "God-oh."...less
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Michael
gave
to:
As I Lay Dying (Paperback)
by William Faulkner
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my rating:
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read in June, 1998
Michael said:
"At the beginning of my junior year of high school, I found myself in an elective English class called, "Comedy, Wit, and Satire," which was taught by the venerable Dr. Stone (without a doubt, my inspiration for becoming an English teacher)....more
At the beginning of my junior year of high school, I found myself in an elective English class called, "Comedy, Wit, and Satire," which was taught by the venerable Dr. Stone (without a doubt, my inspiration for becoming an English teacher). At the end of my sophomore year, on "step-up day" (where all students, save seniors, take a quick run-through of their courses for the next year), Dr. Stone gave us a set of books to choose from to read over the summer and write a review of. I looked at the set of books, which comprised everything from The Hobbit to Catch-22. I happened to see a book with the picture of an apparently dead woman lying within a tattered old box, her face disclosed through a grimy, cobweb-encrusted window pane. "Well this looks strange," I thought, and picked it up.
I had no idea what I was in for.
While I was probably too young to appreciate the finer points of Faulkner's novel, As I Lay Dying did introduce me to the dumbfounding world of experimental (or, at least, non-traditional) writing. The novel is told from no fewer than fifteen points of view--including that of the dead Addie Bundren--and makes frequent use of the stream-of-consciousness writing technique, something that only baffled me at the time (it wasn't until college, upon reading James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, that I truly understood the technique). Still, I was able to discern the basics: the Bundren's honor dead matriarch Addie's wish to be buried on the other side of Yoknapatawpha County, so they load her (and her casket, of course) into a cart and haul her there. But like all stories with journeys, the importance is not the destination, but the trip itself. Along the way, we learn all the personalities and problems inherent in the Bundren family. I suppose this did teach the 16-year-old Michael Kneeland that novels didn't have to be about adventures or romance or tragedy, but could simply be about characters. Of course, since then I have come to realize that the "character novel" gives us perhaps the most clear depiction of life as we know it; thanks to Dr. Stone, I was introduced to this idea earlier than most.
Faulkner still seems daunting to most people--despite Oprah's endorsement--but As I Lay Dying, despite its experimental writing style, is probably among Faulkner's most accessible novels. It was certainly accessible enough for a pretentious 16-year-old, anyway, and has remained my favorite Faulkner piece....less
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July 26
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Michael
gave
to:
Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim (Paperback)
by David Sedaris
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my rating:
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read in November, 2005
Michael said:
"Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim delves further into the fascinating, hilarious, and otherwise utterly bizarre life of David Sedaris and his family. This collection of his essays is quite good--among my favorites of his--because through...more
Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim delves further into the fascinating, hilarious, and otherwise utterly bizarre life of David Sedaris and his family. This collection of his essays is quite good--among my favorites of his--because throughout most of it, he manages to find a moving balance between the tragic and the comic.
Take, for instance, "The Ship Shape," about how his family almost bought a summer home, but ultimately lost out on the chance because of his father's fickleness with money. The essay starts off humorously enough, with plenty of zany details, like the absurd names his family comes up with for the summer home in question. But by the end, we have a rather melancholic picture painted of the family, headed by a father who would like to give his family something nice like a summer home on the beach, but is just too fickle to actually go through with it.
Then there is "Hejira," about how Sedaris' father kicked him out of the house seemingly because he was an unemployed college dropout whose number of bong hits surpassed his number of trips out of the house, but really, we learn, because he was gay. We have plenty of funny anecdotes throughout, giving us hilarious images of Sedaris sitting stoned in his room listening to the same Joni Mitchell record over and over again, but by the end, we see ultimately see a father who finds his son so unacceptable that he removes him from the situation. From reading his other works, we know that Sedaris and his father eventually mended ways, but as "Hejira" closes, we only see a depressed young man wanting to be acknowledged for being, as he puts it, "special."
Of course, there is also plenty of outright absurdity, such as "Six to Eight Black Men," which I have my students read each year during the holiday season; and "Rooster at the Hitchin' Post," which is on the outset about his obnoxious, foul-mouthed younger brother's wedding, but we eventually see is about the relationship between Sedaris and his brother. These are wholly hilarious, and do well to offset much of the depressing downheartedness emoted from the essays mentioned above.
Fans of Sedaris will certainly appreciate this collection of essays. Newbies may find his life and family a bit too bizarre to digest at first, but after pushing through will realize the palette of emotions mentioned earlier. After all, while Sedaris' life is strange and usually utterly absurd, it is still life nonetheless....less
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Michael
gave
to:
Naked (Paperback)
by David Sedaris
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my rating:
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read in December, 2004
Michael said:
"Naked was my first encounter with...well, whatever it is David Sedaris writes (not quite memoir, not really fiction)...and I think it was a good starting point.
The book offers the bare essentials for one first entering the weird, wild worl...more
Naked was my first encounter with...well, whatever it is David Sedaris writes (not quite memoir, not really fiction)...and I think it was a good starting point.
The book offers the bare essentials for one first entering the weird, wild world of David Sedaris: stories about his kooky and altogether bizarre family, his homosexuality, his unabashed neurosis, his penchant for the flamboyant ("The Drama Bug" should read by all students starting to read Shakespeare), and of course, Dinah the Christmas Whore.
Sedaris does manage to offer some biting realism admist the otherwise surreal depictions of his life in an essay entitled, "Ashes," which is about his mother's death of lung cancer. Very sad, but still peppered in places with Sedaris' trademark wit and humor.
Naked is a well-chosen title for this book since the essays within essentially lay bare Sedaris and his family. When you finish reading it, you will know quite a bit about his life and relations, but moreover will feel as though you have a new--if altogether strange--branch of your family....less
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Michael
gave
to:
The Alchemist
by Paulo Coelho (Goodreads author!)
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my rating:
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read in December, 2005
Michael said:
"I have always loved a good journey story.
The pattern is quite simple: a hero discovers some motive to leave the comforts of his home, embarks on a journey to satisfy the motive, and then returns home, possibly finding whatever it is he is looking...more
I have always loved a good journey story.
The pattern is quite simple: a hero discovers some motive to leave the comforts of his home, embarks on a journey to satisfy the motive, and then returns home, possibly finding whatever it is he is looking for, though not necessarily. The real reason for the journey is, of course, not the proverbial pot at the end of the rainbow, but instead the journey itself. These stories are all about what the hero learns along the way.
Paulo Coelho's short novel, The Alchemist, is a fine example of the journey pattern. Santiago, a young shepherd boy in Andalusia, has a dream one night about a treasure located somewhere near the Pyramids. He consults a gypsy to explain the dream, and is told to follow his dream and go to Egypt. So, he sells his flock and heads south across the Mediterranean to northern Africa. When he arrives, however, a thief steals all his money, and he is forced to work at a crystal shop for about a year, during which time he learns some vital lessons about life from the shopkeeper and the locals. Finally he is able to continue on his journey across the Sahara, where he encounters a series of fantastic adventures and eventually meets the love of his life, Fatima. He finally arrives at the Pyramids, but by the time he gets there, we realize that's not really the point and ultimately, so does Santiago.
The Alchemist is simple, straightforward, and heartwarming. It does not sink to the level of melodrama, nor does it get lost in the marvelous realm of the fantastic. Instead, Coelho keeps his short little fable right on track, offering endearing insights about life and love along the way. ...less
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July 25
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Michael
gave
to:
Naked Lunch: The Restored Text (Paperback)
by William S. Burroughs
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my rating:
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read in December, 2003
Michael said:
"I'm not an uber beat generation guru, but I'm fairly certain that Naked Lunch is the final destination to the journey started by Jack Kerouac in On the Road. It is very rhythmic (try reading it out loud) but also incredibly stream-of-co...more
I'm not an uber beat generation guru, but I'm fairly certain that Naked Lunch is the final destination to the journey started by Jack Kerouac in On the Road. It is very rhythmic (try reading it out loud) but also incredibly stream-of-conscious, much more so than Kerouac's novel (and he can get pretty damn stream-of-conscious).
This novel depicts the life (if you want to call it that) of a junkie in the '60s who travels from America to Mexico and finally lands [halfway across the globe:] in Tangier. He is helplessly (and carelessly) addicted to several drugs, notably heroin and morphine. He will rip off just about anyone just to score. And he's reckless. Shamelessly reckless.
So why did I give this novel four stars? Because, through all the craziness and chaos of the novel's narration, there is a lucidly clear depiction of alienation and loneliness in the modern world. The novel's main character, William Lee (though we might as well call him William S. Burroughs), is chased by the police, drug dealers, and even a "notorious liquifactionist" from the Interzone (you know where that is, right?) named Hassan. He is not safe or sound anywhere, not even alone with himself. He is literally apart from society.
And what is the root of his painful alienation? Well he is, of course.
Who else was the cause of their own alienation? Oh, that's right: Holden Caulfield, Jay Gatsby, Stephen Dedalus, Odysseus, Aeneas, Ralph (if you've read the novel he's in, you'll know him), Briony Tallis, Randall Patrick McMurphy...hell, let's even throw Grendel on this list. Like "William Lee," each of these characters shows us just how human it is to paradoxically crave acceptance into society while we simultaneously push ourselves away.
Being a human can sometimes suck big time, and Naked Lunch depicts this unabashedly.
And nakedly....less
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