Josh Hanagarne's Blog, page 2

Book Review – The Wolf Road by Beth Lewis

I’m a sucker for two things when it comes to books: cat and mouse games and western frontiers. Well, three things, because I love a good revenge story as well. The Wolf Road is one of the best cat and mouse books I’ve ever read, intense from start to finish, and elegantly colloquial in a way that never feels like stuntsmanship.

It’s a simple set up. In the aftermath of a tragedy, a young girl named Elka is taken by a man who calls himself Kreager Hallett. He raises her in the hills, teaching her to make jerky, hunt, joint animals, track, and more. It’s a harsh world, a wilderness that has drawn comparisons to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, but the style, by design, is not elevated. We are given the story through the eyes of the illiterate Elka. 

Elka learns, through a situation that I will not spoil for you, that Kreager is not exactly what he seems. There is a constable hunting him, one of the most pitiless pursuers I’ve encountered since The Terminator movies.

She escapes, he follows, and what comes between the beginning and the end never failed to surprised and shock me. There’s also an element to the story that I didn’t see coming, which changed the way I thought about it all. I can’t wait to see what Beth Lewis does next.

Highly recommended.

I Accidentally Got A Signed Copy of Blood Meridian

Hi all, if you’ve read the blog for long, you know I have a Cormac McCarthy obsession, particularly with his novel Blood Meridian, which is both my favorite (and least favorite) book. It’s a long story, and beyond the scope of this post, but I’ll be talking about it more in a longer article soon.

However, I wanted to tell you all that when I got back from a family reunion a couple of weeks ago, Cormac had sent me an inscribed copy of Blood Meridian. They’re very tough to come by. Cormac isn’t a recluse, but he does his own thing and that rarely includes promoting or signing or talking about his books. His sister had visited the Mark Twain House in Hartford, Connecticut, and my future mother-in-law just happened to give her a tour and told her what a fanatic I am about her brother’s books.

And that is pretty much the series of accidents that led to the book showing up. I’m not materialistic, but it is absolutely a treasure to me, and my favorite possession.

I hope you’re all having a great day.

One Way To Reconnect With Reading

I’ve never lost the joy that reading gives me, but I realized in the last year or two that I had stopped reading with the same care that I used to. Curiously, I wasn’t sure why. It didn’t seem to matter whether I was reading weighty non-fiction like In The Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Voyage of the USS Jeanette–a book that assumes the reader is going to be invested enough to concentrate on dates, the fallibility of nineteenth century maritime cartography, nautical jargon, and the properties of various alloys used to reinforce ships whose job is to bust through glaciers–or the latest Lee Child thriller. (That link has a big list if you’re not sure where to start with Lee Child and Jack Reacher.)

Perhaps this is because I spend too much time in the click-happy online world which we’re sharing right now. Maybe my brain had in fact rewired itself in the way that Nicholas Carr talks about in The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to our Brains. 

Sounds plausible. I scan instead of analyze. Seeing lots of information can feel like learning, even if nothing is retained. If I can tell you what a book was about, I can pat my back and say I read it, even if I didn’t pore over every sentence.

But I didn’t even really care why. A lot of people I’ve talked to about this–librarians included–say yes, their brains are changing, and so they’re reading fewer books.

That wasn’t me, though, even if my brain had changed in the same way. I never stopped reading books. I never even really slowed down. I don’t know. It has just felt like I don’t make myself concentrate as hard as I used to.

And again, it’s not that the joy of reading went away, but it was the very act of reading carefully, as if I couldn’t stand to miss a word, whether it was The Hardy Boys or Voltaire, that used to give me the most intense joy. It is what made reading an act of oblivion that also managed to serve as an education, or at least a gymnasium for my brain.

Most of this I only see in hindsight, and I only see it because I started reading seriously, with purpose, in other languages.

I study languages because I think it’s fun and because I want to take lots of trips overseas. Not much more to it than that. So, after I would go through a set of Pimsleur or Michele Thomas CDs I would pick a book in Spanish, French, Italian, or German, and start to read. (don’t be impressed, my language skills are fairly primitive. I’ve always had some aptitude for languages, but if I have a secret weapon, it’s just that I study for about 10 minutes a day and never miss a day).

To the point:

When I read in another language, I have to slow down. There’s no point in racing through sentences full of words I don’t know or whose structures I can’t grapple with. I recently read In Other Words, Jumpa Lahiri’s Italian language memoir  (the English is also included) of moving to Italy to master Italian. There were were paragraphs where, before I could even figure out whether I knew the words or not, I had to assure myself that I remembered how sentences even work.

Where is the direct object? Who’s doing what? Are we in the past, present, or future? Did the speaker change when I wasn’t paying attention?

To truly start to grasp prose in another language, you have to read with intent and rigor. For me, that was exactly how I used to read everything. 

Perhaps this is a meager epiphany on the grand scale, but it seems to be true for me.

Now, when I read in English–which is still the majority of the time–I tend to treat the text as if it were in another language. Something I have to parse, to discover to anew, to digest, and to absorb it to the point where I carry it with me when I close the book…and that was always the point.

I’d just forgotten somehow.

 

 

 

How To Have Tourette’s – Signals, Pain, and The Only Questions Worth Asking

If you’re new to the site or haven’t heard me talk about Tourette’s, the How To Have Tourette’s series is a good place to start. thanks!

Hey gang,

Since it’s been so long since I’ve written regularly here, and since so many of you have asked about my health, I wanted to give you an update. I’m doing fine–great in many ways–but Tourette’s is one of the pieces of my life that continues to deteriorate.

In a nutshell, everything hurts, all the time. I’m almost 39 and all of the little (and big) things are taking an accumulative toll that I thought I’d be able to stay ahead of. But physical pain is much easier to deal with than emotional garbage and I’m doing fine on the inside.

I’m a little worn out and pretty low energy, but the things that have always sustained me continue to do so. Reading, writing, thinking, friends, family, and love. I’m getting married in October and couldn’t be happier about it. I have book projects coming that I hope to be able to tell you about soon. I have a wonderful son and a family I love dearly. 

But one of the most obnoxious things about pain is that you can know all this stuff, know how good so many things are, and the great things still doesn’t feel like they matter as much as you know it does. Pain collapses the world. It’s a type of living in the moment that is not at all Zen.

Now, if you have Tourette’s, before you start nodding and thinking Oh yes, we have it so hard, and no one will ever understand us, boo hoo, I’d just say that I don’t feel sorry for myself.  I’ve been there, though. I spent way too much of the first half of my life crying about Tourette’s. It never helped or made me feel better or changed anything.

I’d rather have Tourette’s than cancer. I’d rather have Tourette’s than be in a wheelchair. I wouldn’t trade my hearing or sight for fewer tics. And it’s possible that many of those folks wouldn’t trade with me. There’s never any reason not to be humble when you realize there’s always someone suffering worse and handling it better.

You can’t show me someone who doesn’t deal with something awful, inside or out, seen or not. We all have something unfair in our lives but no one promised any of us fairness. Letting go of the idea that it was supposed to be another way is a big part of acceptance. It wasn’t another way. It’s however it is and now you and I and everyone else still have to live.

So here’s a clear-eyed update about what’s annoying me the most, just sticking to the facts:

As far as the symptoms, I am currently:

Smashing my teeth together to an insane degree. We were eating nachos the other night and I spit out a piece of one of my front teeth. Did it again last week at work. My incandescent smile grows more like Stonehenge every day
Very strange stomping tic where I’m slamming my heels into the ground. This has made it hard to stand for long periods, or even to walk around at work. Feels like needles are in my heels.
Lots of spitting, to the point where my damn chin is all chapped from wiping it off
Elbows hurt from weird arm cranking tics. I haven’t been able to find an exercise that doesn’t hurt in over five weeks, which is a drag
The fatigue at this point is hard to describe. It’s really surprised me. No amount of calories or sleep seems to cut into it much right now.

There’s more, but there always is.

That’s one of the biggest challenges with Tourette’s. Pain is a signal that says “stop doing whatever it is that hurts.” With Tourette’s, it’s not really an option. It’s like spraining your ankle and then, instead of bandaging it, icing it, and elevating it, you’re forced onto a pogo stick for 30 minutes of each hour.

But, like everyone else, when it hurts, there are only a couple of questions worth asking. (And they’re not “Why is this happening to me?” or “How come everyone but me gets to have a perfect, pain-free life?”)

Instead, when it hurts, I try, whenever possible, to look at myself and say:

“So what?”

and

“Now what?”

That’s it. Any adjustments we can make to our jobs, lives, attitudes, medical care, goals, etc, are just answers to those questions. There’s nothing else besides dwelling and moping and venting while the clock tics, the sun sets, and we now have one fewer day left to live.

So I have to look at the many, many days left in my life, and the millions of tics that will fill them, and to figure out what the best way to keep moving forward is.

It’s always the same: Learn, laugh, love, help more people than I hurt, and try to create a life filled with things that are meaningful to me.

I hope you’re doing the same. Thanks to all of you who have checked in on me. I’m tired and grouchier than I’ve ever been, but I’m still making progress in all the areas that matter most to me. Sometimes that’s going to be the best we can do.

 

Book Review – Sleeping Giants

Hi all, I’m happy to announce that the blog problems are all fixed and I’m jumping back into the swing of it for good. Since it’s been about a decade since I told you what I’d been reading, I wanted to start the routine with a book review:

Sleeping Giants by Sylvain Neuvel. This is one of the nicest surprises I’ve had in a while. Jeff O’neal from Bookriot tweeted about it and I picked it up for a couple of bucks.

The setup is pretty irresistible. If you read World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War, or books like Louder Than Hell, The Definitive Oral History Of Metal, you’re familiar with the oral history format. Basically it just means you get lots of first person accounts from people Who Were There to witness whatever the calamity was. 

In this case, it starts with a young girl reminiscing about a walk in the woods. Suddenly, the ground fell away from under her feet. When she came to, she was looking up at her father, far above.

He saw something very different: his daughter, at the bottom of a hole whose existence made no sense, cradled in the palm of a metal hand.

Then we switch to the statements of other people, all of whom are involved in the effort to discover and assemble the remaining body parts. First, a forearm is found. When put in proximity to the hand, the two pieces snap themselves together.

This question is at the forefront for most of the book: What’s going to happen when they snap the whole body together? 

Everything that follows is far more inventive and frantic than anything I could have expected. When I realized what was happening, I thought that the oral history format was an odd choice for the story, but it totally works. Especially since most of the subjects are interviewed by one person whose identity is unknown.

There is some fantastic alien mythology, an unorthodox surgery that you won’t soon forget, and a pace that made this a book I finished in one sitting. It’s a fun read, but there are some heavy themes at play as well. How many lives are worth sacrificing on behalf of progress? Whose version of progress should be pursued? Is there a point where the potential risks outweigh the scientist’s experiments?

It’s an arms race the likes of which I’d never seen, and Sleeping Giants is the first in a series, so I can’t wait to see where it goes next.

If you’re looking for anything else to read, I just finished The Animators by Kayla Rae Whitaker, which I highly recommend, The Wolf Road by Beth Lewis, which is incredibly intense and you should not read before a camping trip, and 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea by Jules Verne, which is always the right choice.

Glad to be back. What are you all reading these days?

 

Are Any of You WordPress Experts?

Howdy friends, I’ve got a bunch of news coming, and I’d love to blog about it, but I’m having a hell of a time fixing some weird broken code with WordPress. Would any of you be interested in making a little money to help me fix it?

Let me know in the comments if you think you could help me get things back on track.

 

Thanks!

An Unfortunate Typo

All, I have recently entered the world of freelance writing and editing, and have been loving it.

However, because nearly 100% of my communication with clients occurs online, mistakes can happen. Some are irrelevant, some are…like this.

It was a day just like today–actually, it was today–that I tried to type the very benign words “You got it!” to a freelance client. This was supposed to convey boyish enthusiasm and a passion for the work.

Instead, I hit enter and was suddenly looking at this phrase:

“You go tit.”

And now everything hangs in the balance.

I am recommitted to slowing down and breathing.

What I Looked Like With Hair While Grabbing A Basketball With Great Ferocity

The picture kind of says it all. I don’t remember what town the Colts were from. I really like how unprepared the other guy looks. He apparently was not expecting this level of intensity. I’m not sure what was going on. This picture might have captured the one intense moment of my life, and certainly one of the only moments when I wasn’t reading.

Also, I was 6’7″ in this picture and weighed 150 pounds. A delicate, snarling flower, covered in hair, with two twiggy legs.

One Big Wish for 2016

If I could actually have one wish, it would be something grand like, “There’s no more unnecessary suffering and no one is cruel ever again or even a little bit mean.”

Since we’re never going to get world peace, and because the certainty of death is always going to force a certain amount of suffering into our lives, I’ve been thinking about what another big wish for 2016 might look like. Something that might actually be within reach.

I think I have it.

I think the world would improve immeasurably if everyone had something they were truly passionate about. That’s what I wish I could see.

And that is my fondest wish for you next year. I hope you’ll feel loved and have something that is an absolute, consuming passion for you, whether it’s your family, art, spouse, writing, music, job, activism, friends, pets, children, religion, fitness, chess prowess, travel, love of languages, etc and so on and amen.

I have so many passions, many of them bordering on obsessions. I don’t know who I would be without them, and I’m glad I don’t have to.

Here’s to a great year.

PS: I know a lot of people who confuse having a favorite show with living a passionate life. There’s a big difference.

 

A New Book For You – Merry Christmas!

Hi all, it’s been a great year. I’ve been so in love in 2015 that I spent the year writing a super-secret romance novel for Angela, featuring her as a main character, and me (or is it?) in a cameo role. I just gave it to her in Paris. There’s only one hard copy, which you can see over there on the right.

Yes, it is actually called Hippo Surrender and was written by someone named Josh Hippogarne. Over 300 pages of…well, you’ll have to be the judge.

Many, many authors enthusiastically contributed blurbs to the book, but they shall remain nameless and appear only in the one print copy that Angela has in her hands right now.

However, she has agreed to let me share it with everyone online. Therefore, if you are up to reading a romance featuring a hippo and a huge Amazonian adventure, now you can. (Yes, I know that hippos shouldn’t be in the Amazon).

For those of you who’ve been asking for a new book from me, Merry Christmas. I hope it doesn’t feel like a lump of coal.

PS: there is also a Bond-esque theme song for the book that I wrote and performed. It will be uploaded soon for your questionable listening pleasure.