Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube: Chasing Fear and Finding Home in the Great White North - Blair Braverman Coming-of-age memoir of a California teen who wants to be a polar explorer, so she goes to far north Norway to learn to be a dog-sled driver. Very well-written.
Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning a page turning vacation read by the great Timothy Snyder. The most interesting thesis is that, for the holocaust to have happened, the state and its institutions needed be destroyed so that chaos could be the order of the day. Makes sense that someone like Putin or axis would be delighted to have someone like Trump in charge of the executive branch.
Voices From the Grave: Two Men’s War in Ireland - Ed Moloney Book is mostly excerpts from oral history interviews with an IRA volunteer and a UVF volunteer who had extensive involvement in paramilitary activities during the Troubles. Author, who was Northern Ireland editor of the Irish Times, also does lots of historical narrative.
I put in a request for an e copy of Infinite Jest. It just became available. Now I’m gonna see what all the fuss is about. The timing is serendipitous…a week ago I finished A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. My sense is both books come from the same place. Wish me luck.
Good luck. Make sure you at least skim the footnotes. There’s some great stuff there. Reading the chapter then skimming the footnotes, occasionally skimming ahead, worked best for me. if you really get into fiction with footnotes, you need to read Nabokov’s Pale Fire.
Not very often these days unless I’m teaching it. Which is why I read Pale Fire recently. If it gets humid enough this summer, I’ll break out the Faulkner.
Against the Wall - Simon Yates New route in 1992 on Torre Central de Paine in Chile. In southern Patagonia so there is plenty of wind, rain, and snow . . . in the summer!
Speaking of Mountains... Road to Heaven: Encounters with Chinese Hermits by the great American poet and translator of Chinese classics (under his pen name Red Pine), Bill Porter. Somehow, a handful of Chinese Taoist and Buddhist hermits survived the Cultural Revolution to continue the tradition into the century. How did they do it? I don't know, because it wouldn't have been a good idea to give away any secrets so long as the CCP still exists.
The Secret Pilgrim - John le Carré Veteran British spy “Ned” recalls his various Cold War exploits. Not really a novel, more like a series of short stories, some of which are very good.
I’m really enjoying it, because I’ve decided not to try to figure out the plot. I’m just absorbing the vibe. And I like it. I hope ignoring plot won’t bite me in the ass later. Some elements of it are astonishingly prescient. Hard to believe it’s 30 years old.
Misfit: Growing Up Awkward in the 80s a memoir that is funny in spots and pretty, well, awkward in others by stand up comedian Gary Gulman. The book alternates between a story of growing up semi-blue and jewish in Boston's Northern Suburbs in the 20th centuryt with bits of harrowing narratives of a crippling depression in the last decades that comprised his worst period of depression when he "retired from life," as he posted on social media. Pretty decent recovery from a terrible depression to a steady but productive state of melancholy that he can work with for his comedy.
Well, if someone could manage to avoid childhood and teenage awkwardness, congrats to them, but they’ll never be stand up comics.
Except Jay Leno, if he still counts as a stand up (or ever did). He is doing his stand up routine tour this Fall at the theater where my better half works. I am not going.
Piers Plowman - William Langland 14th century allegorical religious poem (translated into prose). Some of it is interesting, but much of it is as boring as “The Parson’s Tale” (Chaucer).
I’ve decided that I don’t need to read the whole thing. I get your point, DFW. Modern life (ca. 1995) was increasingly absurd, and increasingly reliant on people not even seeing the wizard’s curtain, let alone seeing what’s behind it. And also DFW, yeah, you have an enormous vocabulary. Good for you. I prefer less elitist writers, writers who are more interested in communicating than showing off. I mean, I almost NEVER have to look up words unless I’m reading science or Econ or some similar academic field. At first it was exhilarating but soon enough it became tedious. @Dr. Wankler , do I get an A?
IIRC, my Penguin Classics copy of the Canterbury Tales leaves the Parson's Tale out. Mercifully, apparently.
Hidden Mountains - Michael Wejchert Two couples attempt a climb in a very remote part of the Alaska Range. One is seriously hurt in a fall. Alaska Air National Guard is called and pararescue jumpers perform difficult helicopter rescue and take him to hospital in Anchorage. Back stories of the climbers, and the climbing, are rather dull, but the rescue part is very interesting.
Japan: A History by Kenneth Henshall. It's a history book about Japan, from the Stone Age to the 21st Century. It's more academic than I thought. Seems like an interesting read.
I've started Ross Douthat’s Believe. I’m stretching a point he makes because it’s interesting. Try to go back to the world of say 1600. The writer is arguing for belief, not Christianity, remember. He’s arguing that there is some kind of organizing intelligence behind the universe. Which worldview is more evidence of such an intelligence: what they thought then about Earth being the center and how planets’ motions could be explained by epicycles, or, planets’ motions explained by ellipses? I think it’s the latter. The latter is more “rational.” It’s better evidence of, ahem, an intelligent design. I didn’t like it. I stopped about 10% of the way through. 1. I wanted it to be about MLK as a person, but it was about his era, his place. So it was boring because there was little new in it. 2. I don’t like history that tries to be moralistic, because that inevitably raises too many questions. It makes a book about the writer’s moral universe and not history. In this specific book, Eig rarely passes up a chance to condemn white supremacy as bad. Ok, fair enough. They were bad people. But he excuses sexism by various black leaders as a sign of the times. They aren’t bad, they’re victims of their time. When your acceptance or condemnation of prejudice is situational, you lose me, as a reader. If you feel it’s necessary to say white supremacy is bad and its practitioners were bad, but sexist men, well, you just have to understand them, I’m out. The writer has lost my trust, and in a work of history that’s largely interpretation, that’s a fatal flaw.
The Shakespeare Requirement - Julie Schumacher Misadventures of a college professor who is appointed chair of the English department. Good for a few chuckles, but not as funny as its predecessor, Dear Committee Members.