David G. Cookson's Blog

The Hobbit

The Hobbit, or There and Back Again by J.R.R. Tolkien

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Down in the valley in the land of Shire
Lived a brave little Hobbit whom we all admire…

I’m certainly familiar with the quest…Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit. I saw at least 2 thirds of the Lord of The Rings trilogy, the Two Towers and the third one. I am aware that it captures the imagination at a young age…people love this book. They Love Tolkien, love it. love it. Love it… I still consider myself an outsider in this fandom. But there is still much to enjoy.
In a hole in the ground there lived a Hobbit…not a nasty, dirty wet hole…it was a hobbit hole and that means comfort…”

Bilbo Baggins. 3 feet tall, about half your size (as we are told) lives in a Hobbit Hole in the land of Shire and values his home, his safety, his comfort; the boring consistency of life in the only space he has ever known.

Then because this is a Hero’s Journey, he must hear the call to adventure—the Wizard, Gandalf enlists him on a quest to recover gold from the dragon Smaug. His house is soon filled with unexpected guests: dwarves (or dwarfs, I forget) Oh dear….hobbits love guests…but they also value their space…

He must refuse the call…and then get dragged along in spite of himself. He must overcome obstacles…He must endure and discover inner strengths that he was not previously aware of.
He is one of a Middle Earth Style Ocean’s 11 gang of dwarves…with his as yet unrealized skills as a burglar. But Gandalf soon leaves the crew to their quest, telling them not to alter from the path they take through the forest…Where they encounter trolls, goblins, flying beasts and ultimately a dragon…with whom Bilbo has a little battle of riddles…he finds a magic ring that makes him invisible…the crew escapes certain death in clever ways…and ultimately it culminates in a battle for the treasure between the 5 armies.

And all that.

This is a year in an otherwise quiet life…and Bilbo shall return from his quest having overcome many obstacles.

Look…I’m not one to argue with the masses. And sometimes the best things come out of hobbit holes.





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Dragon on Centre Street

Dragon on Centre Street: New York vs. Donald J. Trump by Jonah Bromwich

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Waiting for Godot/my God we are in hell/my God nothing really matters.

All those feelings are summed up when you think of this trial and read this account of it.

The 2024 trial of Donald John Trump which resulted in a guilty verdict in 34 counts relating to falsifying business documents in the Stormy Davis affair is one of the bizarre things in this age we live in…that a former president was put on trial, that people actually were called in to serve of a jury…that for 7 weeks a man who could never shut his mouth or go a day without boasting or pontificating on many varied points…would have to sit there and just…be quiet… that he would be found guilty of a crime that would net an ordinary person jail time (tho let’s face it…ordinary people aren’t capable of this level of high level debauchery…people just don’t have the money for it.)

Well…it’s just weird.

And that he was found guilty and spared any real consequences because a few months later he was ELECTED president for a second time???

For what it’s worth, this is a very well-written book. Part of the power of it is the tight focus. And the picture Bromwich paints of New York City and a New York City court is pretty terrific. (I never knew that there were professional line sitters—I thought it was an idea that I had once). The drama of the trial comes through…this is a first-person perspective of a journalist on the front lines. The best part leading up to the conclusion is the Stormy Daniels testimony…only eventually eclipsed by the Michael Cohen testimony…the one-time fixer for Trump, turned witness against him…it is on his word that the jury decides.

You may wonder why this even matters.

In the end, it really doesn’t. It may have even helped push Trump back into the big chair. He is Teflon Don. Nothing really ever hurts him. He is president whether we like it or not… and if he has his way, he will spend the rest of his time getting revenge on the people he feels have wronged him.






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Galapagos

Galápagos by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Every once in a while, I return to an author that is more or less the reason I write novels…
Vonnegut, author of Slaughterhouse Five, Mother Night, Welcome to the Monkey House (and a whole lot of other books) dropped Galapagos on us later in his career, perhaps even at the height of his powers.

The unnamed narrator is looking back from a million years from now…back to 1986. When a tour to the Galapagos islands (on the Bahia De Darwin) paradoxically will lead to the beginning of the new human race…the one with smaller brains and shorter lifespans.

Is humanity worth saving? Discuss.

It is a Gilligan’s Island Minnow trip with the Professor and Mary Ann...
Anyway, there was a part with a song that they were singing and I just naturally sung it in my head to the Gilligan’s Island theme…
It was quote from Charles Carryl (1842-1920)
A capital ship
For an ocean trip
Was the Wallowing Winnow Blind…
No gale that blew dismayed her crew
Or troubled the Captain’s mind.
The man at the helm was taught to feel
Contempt for the wildest blow…
And often it appeared, when the weather had clears
That he’d been in the bunk below.
There is an extinction level event at the time of the tour…and the crew of the Bahia De Darwin is all that is left of humanity… we will re-evolve and lose these big brains that haven’t been doing us such good anyway…

“About that, mystifying enthusiasm a million years ago for turning over as many human activities as possible to machinery… What could that have been but yet another acknowledgment by people that their brains were no damn good.”

—I read this and I think about AI and Elon Musk and all the tech bros who want to make AI books and music and it just seems like Vonnegut was on to something, as he usually was… this was 1986 in real life, too.

As in most of his books, his style is conversational and commentative. He simply describes the action and comments on it. You either like it or you don’t.

We can’t all write Beethoven’s 9th.
That is an inside joke.
*Kurt Vonnegut.







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I Love You So Much It's Killing Us Both

I Love You So Much It's Killing Us Both by Mariah Stovall

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Wow.

So first, I was drawn to the book by the title, which is from a Jawbreaker song (off Dear You, like…1995). The novel jumps around between three different time periods. Khaki Oliver and her best friend Fiona….having a codependent relationship, and going through a platonic love that is all consuming and all enveloping…do you know what it’s like to talk to someone in your head, to have the running conversation in your head…then try to connect with the person you haven’t seen in years and torture yourself over your failure in the relationship…?

On that level, this was so insightful and so confusing and such an intimate sharing of ones thoughts.

Fiona’s eating disorder, her slow dissolution as a person…this goes from LA to New York and back again. Through high school in the 2000’s to being an adult and finding an invitation to celebrate her new adopted daughter in her new straight life as a former punk rocker. Khaki might be the same person and wonder if she has any place in the life of her oldest and best friend. People grow apart all the time. It is as natural as it is heartbreaking.

At times this is a beautiful read. And I love how it is like a mixtape with its own playlist (hey. I found it on Tidal!). I found myself pulling out all my Jawbreaker albums, as well as dusting off Bad Religion: NO Control on the turntable, in all its 26 minute glory.

I loved it so much at times it hurt.
I give 4 stars but it’s more like 4 and a half.




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Requiem For a College

Requiem for a College: The Troubling Trend of College Closures in the United States by Jonathan Nichols

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Jon Nichols gave his heart and soul to St. Joes College, as did his brother, as did his father before him. And over the years, it became his home, his sanctuary. He loved teaching. He loved being a professor and he loved his students…

Until the cracks in the institution began to be exposed…rising debts, years of “deferred maintenance” (a euphemism for ‘not fixing things’), declining enrollment coupled with less cash from greatly discounted tuition…

And suddenly he and his colleagues realized it was too late to save it from itself finally closing down for good in February of 2017….

The closure was devastating to faculty and students alike.
It is also becoming commonplace.
*
What happened at St. Joes is the stuff of Greek tragedy, or at least Death of a Salesman territory. It is seeing the iceberg way too late…or perhaps seeing it while no one believes that you have seen it…and then it suddenly becomes too late for anyone to do anything about it.
Jon searches for answers in the failure of other schools like his…
And finds many reasons why one school or another will fail.
“Each case is different, there are numerous variables at work all the time, and there is no single answer as to why a college might close. I mean apart from the obvious: ‘They run out of money.’”
Many look at education as the way to earn a living and then judge it solely on that.
I believe it is something more.
The mission of education is the betterment of society…the make better decisions in the future…to ensure that we even have a future.
But it is also to make us better humans, capable of a wide range of understanding and empathy.
*
“The love people have for the institution, and their desire to keep the doors open for the sake of the students, blinded so many of us. It silently urged us to continue at all costs and obfuscated our view of the facts in favor of taking on more debt, delaying key maintenance, and increasing tuition discount rates well above the market.”
This is an excellent book that details the journey through a traumatic event of losing one’s home, job, and purpose…and trying to make sense of it all. I feel like I really understand it now.

Very well done.








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The Bee Sting

The Bee Sting by Paul Murray

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


The Bee Sting is 643-page account of a messed-up family, the Barnes’. Mother (Imelda) and father (Dickie) are just holding steady, bored and dissatisfied with their lives and with each other. Father is a long-time closet case whose past will catch up with him, more than once. Daughter Cass is friends with Elaine, and may be in love with her. Son PJ wants to run away…he has an online friend and also has an IRL bully. All the men are weak, except for Frank, because he is dead, and Grandpa, who is carefree and rich. And for whatever reason all the generations of men after Grandpa windup owing money to someone.

Dickie is running a failing auto dealership that has been hit hard by the crash (not sure which one, there seems to always be a crash happening these days) and economic uncertainty is certainly a character in these pages.

And the titular bee sting is an event that happened on the day of Dickie and Imelda’s wedding. It may have been a misunderstanding…it may have been something deeper…but was this the point at which it all went wrong? Or was it sometime sooner?

It all starts with Cass and Elaine meeting in chemistry class and eventually we go back to Dickie and growing up with brother Frank, who was supposed to marry Imelda at one point, until he died.

Hey…it’s a little confusing. And it’s long. And it shifts tone and uses 2nd person perspective at one point (“You are doing this. You feel this way.” You know…like a choose Your Own Adventure Book.) There are huge sections of Imelda’s story where there is no punctuation
And the story just goes on And you don’t really know why this is happening It just does.

(this is what it’s like)
I actually skipped a huge part of this book because I really wasn’t following it. Like, 206 to 330 or something. I may have missed something important.

You may ask why I didn’t just toss the book at this point…and the thing is, there are some really enjoyable bits in this that remind me of why I like Paul Murray’s work in the first place. A young Irish writer (who is the same age as me, in fact.) who wrote the delightful Skippy Dies and An Evening of Long Goodbyes. I hesitate to even pan this. I just feel like I didn’t enjoy it and maybe the experimental nature of it worked against it…the last section ties it up as best as possible with a ping ponging of voices of all the characters as Dickie lies waiting to end his enemy in the shack in the woods that has taken many roles…the latest being a bunker in which to wait out the apocalypse. I learned a little bit about wells and groundwater.

I didn’t hate it. But we are going to settle on three stars.






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Back After This

Back After This by Linda Holmes

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Cecily Foster makes podcasts, working for a place called Palmetto Media. Years earlier, she started a podcast with her ex, Justin, who took the idea they developed together and made it his own without much mention of her…

No matter…she continued on, single, happily maybe…

And then her boss ropes her into a new idea for a podcast about her personal life…where she will solicit the help of a life coach named Eliza Cassidy…who believes that she can help Cecily by flooding the market…by throwing her into the deep end of the dating pool.

She will go on 20 dates with 20 different men…
And make a 12-episode podcast called 20 Dates.
With second dates with the person she likes…
With the finale being with the one that she picks…

It is a terrible idea, she thinks…but she is single…she is a team player…and the company needs this…
But then she meets guy, (Will) who is chasing an adorable dog…who brings them together for the meet-cute. Will works as a waiter, but he is also a photographer. He is probably so bad for her. Eliza would never pick a guy like that for her 20 dates program, no matter how many sparks there are between them.

And…. well…it’s a cheeky rom-com. I mostly breezed through this. There are some good points about the self-help culture and online fame, but overall it’s not a deep dive into anything, just a smart kind of funny book that I mostly enjoyed.





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Hate Monger

Hatemonger by Jean Guerrero

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This is an origin story of a villain.
This is Episode 1 of a terrible trilogy.
I’m not sorry that I can’t be objective.
I'm putting my full review on Substack so I don't get kicked off here.




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Funny Because It's True

Funny Because It's True: How The Onion Created Modern American News Satire by Christine Wenc

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Funny Because it’s True
How the Onion Created Modern American News Satire.
By Christine Weng.

Original Staff member Christine Weng takes a broad history of the original fake newspaper…

You Are Dumb.

The Onion is a comedy institution, straight out of Madison Wisconsin.

“Naked Man Only One Uncomfortable with His Body.”

It’s comprehensive, with interviews of many, many contributors, going all the way back before the beginning in 1988…

And ultimately the journey is fraught with the issues that all artists face once the product is taken and commodified and run by people who don’t make things but only commodify them.

“Study Finds Getting Smacked Right in the Mouth with a Goddamn Tree Branch Really Sucks.”

And how it moved from a small print operation in Madison to New York just in time for 9-11 and comedy landmines (explored in a wonderful YouTube documentary called “Too Soon: Comedy after 9-11). The way The Onion navigated that is nothing short of exceptional.

“Hijackers Surprised to Find Selves in Hell.”

“Us Vows to Defeat Whoever it is We Are at War With.”

This is comprehensive without being exhausting. And in the end, we wonder what the role of fun fake news is in an era where reality doesn’t seem to matter anymore.
Great read.





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Realm of Ice and Sky

Realm of Ice and Sky: Triumph, Tragedy, and History's Greatest Arctic Rescue by Buddy Levy

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


It’s fascinating that there was a time when we had yet to set foot on certain parts of the planet, like…the North Pole.

Robert Peary and Dr. Frederick Cook both had their claims. But we may never know who go there first. One just has a better claim than the other (Peary lost 8 toes…that’s got to count for something).

I read awhile back that Cook had entrusted his documentation of his feat to someone else and that Peary had somehow sabotaged that. Peary was proprietary about the North Pole and had been attempting it for years. The proof depended on journals and measurements and stuff and it was concluded that Cook probably falsified his notes and that he couldn’t have made the distances that he did in single days, or at least not the way that he described it.

Interestingly, both men had backing from rival newspapers. The New York Times backed Peary and some other paper backed Cook. So it was to their own best interests for them to support their own man’s claim.

Ultimately Peary’s claim emerged as the strongest and I find the most telling proof that Cook was an unreliable narrator of his own adventure was his behavior after being discredited…he lost his status as an explorer and his place with the National Geographic society was stripped… he ultimately founded a Ponzi scheme investment scam and he went to jail.

And then the Age of Polar Exploration gives way to the Age of Aviation Exploration.

Realm of Ice and Sky tells the roughly 30-year history of man’s attempt to reach the Pole by airship. And the man who conquered the South Pole came back to try to balloon over the North Pole. With Men like Amundsen, Nobile (backed by the fascist Mussolini) and the little remembered Walter Wellman pushing the issue…who will succeed?

That book I read about Peary/Cook ended with the grim reminder that in 100 years the North Pole will likely be underwater, and that one day this argument over who got there first will be unfathomable.




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