Recently in Reading list Category

After much internal debate, I decided to stop reading a book before coming to the end of it. I absolutely hate doing that. I usually consider it a mission to finish a book. But this one I ultimately had to put down.

The book is The Shack by Wm. Paul Young. My sister loaned it to me on our trip to Maine earlier this summer—brought it especially for me, in fact, to see what I’d think.

The Shack starts with an absolutely horrifyingly yet spellbinding story about a very tragic thing that happens to a young girl, and then the rest of the book (so far as I’ve read) details how her father, Mack, deals with that tragedy and an earlier tragedy in his life in the context of his relationship with God.

Truth be told, I’m always skeptical of a God story, especially one that comes across preachy and didactic as The Shack does. I understand that many people have found religious inspiration in this book, so I’d like to make it perfectly clear that my intention is not to discount, or to cast judgment on, their experiences. And, while I respect and honor religious choice, I myself am neither Christian nor a church-goer. I understand, too, that there is an ongoing debate over whether this book is considered to be heretical or revelatory. Due to my relative inexperience with Christian theology (aside from a quasi-Christian upbringing to which I no longer ascribe) I don’t consider myself very qualified to speak on the matter. I did, however, find an interesting examination of theological perspectives put forth in the book at the blog, Doxxa.

I doubt I would have picked up this book on my own, but the college where I recently became an adjunct faculty member handed out Double Take: A Memoir (2009) after a two-day in-service on standardizing the curriculum (don't ask), and so I felt both touched (I am always tickled to be given books) and obligated to read it. It is the second book I've read this spring (after Twilight, that brain candy of a book). My understanding is that at some point the college will hold some sort of discussions of Double Take, so maybe I'll attend if I can get the date right. It would probably be useful to have a conversation with live book-readers from time to time, instead of always sending my thoughts out to the (largely, so far) unresponsive interwebs whilst I sit alone in my borrowed high-mountain abode, out of touch with reality, fixating too much on my purpose in life.

It's not usually a good idea to watch a movie before reading the book, because nine times out of ten the book is better than the movie. But when it comes to Twilight--Stephenie Meyer's first book in her bestselling vampire series--there is really no harm done in reversing the order of things. This is because the movie is better than the book.

If you don't know the story already, it is about a 17-year-old girl, Bella Swan, who moves to her father's house in the small town of Forks, Washington, and then falls in love with her classmate, the pale and dreamy Edward Cullen, who turns out to be a member of a coven of non-human-eating "vegetarian" vampires. Over and over again, Bella drones on about how amazingly beautiful, how hauntingly captivating, and how dangerous Cullen is--dangerous because, even though he has chosen not to eat humans, he still has the desire to do so; and because out of all the humans, Bella's scent is the most irresistible to him. 

To date, my book reviews on the blog have focused primarily on works of fiction. Starting today, however, I've decided to record my notes on the textbooks I have been reviewing--design textbooks, specifically. This shift in focus owes to my recent acceptance of a position teaching digital design at the Breckenridge campus of Colorado Mountain College in Summit County. My goal for reading these textbooks is twofold--to help me select an appropriate text for my students, and also to broaden my own knowledge of the subject.

Exploring the Elements of Design is a thin and colorful textbook by Poppy Evans and Mark A. Thomas (2004). I ordered it about a month ago using interlibrary loan and proceeded to read and take detailed notes on the entire book. I thought it was a good read.

Julia Alvarez, author of ¡Yo!, lives in Vermont and teaches at Middlebury College. I noticed it instantly when I read the back flap of the book, since Middlebury has a renowned writing program and is the one college that rejected my application so many years ago. Not to judge a book by its cover, but I also immediately noticed the design and layout of this charming little yellow book, its diminutive size and handwritten script-style font on the chapter headings. ¡Yo! is another one of those books that just feels right in my hands, that gives me pleasure to simply turn the pages.

My uncle gave me the book, figuring it would appeal to me based on my interest in Latin culture and the Spanish language, and perhaps because I am writing my own novel that tells, among other stories, the tale of the daughter of two undocumented immigrants to the United States from Mexico. In Julia Alvarez' story, in contrast, Yo's family members are wealthy political refugees from the Dominican Republic residing in the United States.

This entry is the long overdue "part II" of my notes from reading The Audacity of Hope by Barack Obama. As mentioned previously, I write these comments more or less from the perspective of a layperson trying to make sense of the book despite an acknowledged deficiency in political knowledge.  

Chapter 3: The Constitution

Obama talks about the Constitution in Chapter 3, and he is a good person to speak on it, having taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago. He presents the contrasting views of strict constructionists--who believe in a word-for-word interpretation--with those of relativists, who believe that the tenets of the document must be interpreted in the context of current realities. After first acknowledging the validity of both sides of the issue (something Obama seems to be very good at), he sides with relativism, preferring a relativist view in particular as it relates to the institution of slavery.

I finished reading The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream by Barack Obama last week--out of order, as I have not yet read Dreams from my Father--but I debated for a while about whether or not to put comments to page, lacking as I do an adequate framework of knowledge about both the structure and workings of our political system and the historical context of politics in this country to come up with what I consider to be a decent commentary.

However, I did take some notes in the course of the reading, primarily in the beginning, and those I will transcribe here, if only because I am sorely lacking a blog entry for this week.

I found Chapter 1, Republicans and Democrats, most difficult for the reason cited above. Obama describes a widening gap between the two parties--that much I did grasp--and with that an increasing polarization of the issues. As a result, he explains, a supporter of one party these days is expected to toe the party line on every issue--so much so that very little can get done in politics, and that the two parties have lost track of the civil conversations that politicians who were nonetheless in disagreement once had, and in which everyday Americans continue to engage. He traces the origin of this increased divide to the civil rights movement, where one side fought for recognition of civil rights and the other sought return to a clear cut, organized, and seamlessly operating country. Obama argues that although the civil rights movement was a necessary step in our country's evolution--one that won important rights for the disenfranchised--it is now similarly important that we overcome that widened political gulf and return to a place where we can have civil conversations about our common needs once more.

I'm posting this entry as "Part II" because I wrote an earlier piece on the first half of the book after it rode away from me, along with a backpack full of our belongings, in a New York City cab last month. When I returned to Colorado, however, Gregg gifted me a paperback copy of the book, which he acquired second-hand at the newly-opened Printed Page bookshop in Denver.

By way of review, Michael Pollan uses the first part of In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto, to critique what he calls "nutritionism," the tendency of food science and national policy over the last several decades to look at food and healthy eating in terms of individual nutrients, an approach that has allowed the producers of "food-like substances" to make outrageous nutritional claims and in effect wrested the expertise of eating from both mom and the American populace and handed it over to the "experts." As a result, Pollan argues, we have actually become more confused about what we should eat and less healthy as a people.

Despite the fact that Water for Elephants was a #1 New York Times bestseller--among other bestsellers lists--I found it difficult to get into this book at first.

Admittedly, it may have more to do with a personal aversion I seem to have for circus stories, however, and less with the book itself. (Nightmarish recollections of a long ago reading of Geek Love by Katherine Dunn come to mind...) Of course there is also the "what's going on in my life at the time" hypothesis--that how much I enjoy a book depends on inane and inapplicable factors such as how well I slept, how I am feeling, and how busy I am--and that I myself do not know how large a role these factors actually play in my assessment. (This blog book review effort is based around that, by the way; this is my mission to figure out what it is, exactly, that I like and dislike in a novel in an effort to finally churn out all the fiction pieces in my own head one day.)

What a strong impression this book has made on me! I've read many good books recently, but not for a while has a novel engaged my fascination and in turn inspired me to work on my own fiction so much as The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery.

The Elegance of the Hedgehog is a collection of philosophical essays and musings on life, literature, and art, told through the erudite words of two characters--a low-born concierge named Renée who hides her intellectual pursuits from the wealthy tenants of number 7, rue de Grenelle, where she has lived and worked for her entire adult life; and Paloma, the extremely intelligent 12-year-old daughter of one of those wealthy families, who, seeing the pointlessness in life, has vowed to commit suicide on her 13th birthday.

Empire is the first and probably the last zombie novel I'll ever read. Horror is just not up my alley. The book was loaned to me by a friend because it is a postapocalyptic zombie novel, and I have (long) been working on a piece of postapocalyptic fiction--albeit of a very different variety.  

The book takes place in Jefferson Harbor, Louisiana, where there is a swamp containing a "Source" of dark energy that can bring the dead to life. The undead have caused a viral outbreak--anyone who is bitten becomes a zombie too, and the zombies feed on human flesh. The story takes place many decades after the initial outbreak and is accompanied by older journal entries describing life during the early stages of the plague, although most of the characters have lived their entire lives in the dark times following the outbreak.

We lost our backpack in a New York City cab last week, and with it went our newly acquired book, In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto, by Michael Pollan. The book was gifted to Gregg recently by Bill, and I consider it to be the biggest loss of our whole backpack debacle. I had read almost all of the first section, "The Age of Nutritionism," on the train ride in, and of course that was as far as I got. I liked In Defense of Food enough, however, that I am going to break my own rule and write about a book I haven't finished until a new copy lands in my lap.

The central idea, as proposed in the first line of the introduction, is that we should "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." Pollan goes on to describe the historical process by which our food has been (ideologically, hence the "ism" in "nutritionism") broken down into nutrients in the public's consciousness, so that people came to believe they had to shop nutrient by nutrient, knowing which nutrients were "good" and which were "bad," as opposed to trusting their senses as humans had always done before and eating whole foods. One of the many effects of this changed way of thinking about food is that it relegated the expertise of eating to scientists and took it away from the individual eaters, complicating and thereby removing pleasure from the eating process, which, he argues, is a crucial component for human health and happiness.

The Known World by Edward P. Jones is the fictional account of many interwoven lives centering around the life and death of Henry Townsend, a black farmer and former slave who becomes a slave owner himself. The story takes place in the antebellum days of Manchester, Virginia, a town and county replete with well-illustrated historical records--all of which are products of Jones' imagination. That black ownership of slaves did occur historically is a known fact, although Jones himself admits to uncertainty about how widely spread the practice actually was.

The background of the story is that Henry Townsend's father, an accomplished craftsman, is eventually able to buy his own freedom from his master, Henry Robbins. Over the years--and it takes several years each time--his father saves up enough money to buy his wife's and then his son Henry's freedom. With Henry, however, the slave owner comes to have a larger influence on the boy's thinking than does his own father. Taking a liking to Henry while the boy is still a slave on his plantation, Robbins treats him "well" and eventually, after Henry is a young free man, helps him to buy his own first slave. Over the years Henry acquires many slaves, much to his father's dismay. When Henry dies, his wife Caldonia is left to run the plantation, which falls increasingly into chaos.

In my last couple of entries about wild edible plants, I repeatedly cite Cattail Bob Seebeck, author of Best Tasting Wild Plants of Colorado and the Rockies (1998). Today I figured I'd take a moment to officially review his guide. 

Over the years I've used many wild edible plant guides, so I feel comfortable saying I know a great one when I see it. In fact, until further notice, Cattail Bob's guide is my absolute favorite. Some of the salient features of Best-Tasting Wild Plants of Colorado and the Rockies include the following:

• It has four (4) full-color pictures of each plant at different seasons of the year.
• It separates plants into high and low altitude.
• Each entry has a chart describing the growth phases of the plants by month and altitude. 
• Look-alikes for edible plants are listed along with their toxicity.
• There is a separate section on toxic plants including pictures to help distinguish toxic plants from edible ones.
• Each entry has suggestions for how to prepare and eat the plants.

The Little White Trip - A Night in the Pines by Peter Joseph Gallagher is definitely "a trip," as the author wrote on the first page of the copy he sold to me in person back in 2007 at Venice Beach, California. "One of the first to take this trip," is what he wrote, followed by a thank you.

I didn't buy the book because of the back cover description, which starts, "They say that killing with a knife is the sex of murder." I can't even sit through an entire horror movie, so serial killer stories don't usually make my reading list, especially ones that mix murder and sex, which is what I thought about when I judged the book--at first--by its cover.

I also did not purchase The Little White Trip because I was intrigued by Matthew Thomas' forward, which explains that Peter Gallagher was, in fact, the ghostwriter commissioned to tell Thomas' true story, but who Thomas realized should get credit for it as the writer in the end. (Good for you, Matthew Thomas!)

I've always wanted to keep a list of the books that I've read, so now I'm going to do it here on the blog. These are in chronological order to the best of my ability. This is a work in progress as I am certain to have missed more than a couple in recent history, nevermind the long-term work it's going to take to excavate the books I knew from my more distant past.

After some consideration I've decided to do this twofold.

• First is the list of books, posted in this entry. I am only including books that I finished.
• Next I am going to track down my comments for however-many of these books I have in my journal, and post them as separate blog entries according to the approximate date in which I finished reading them. Future book commentaries, then, will be future blog posts.

Part of me is hoping that if I start to keep a bibliography of my life it will help to inform and direct my future writing.

Lies My Teacher Told Me is a nonfiction history book consisting of the author's attempt to debunk various myths, untruths, and omissions in American history as taught to high school students through US history textbooks. The author analyzes 12 textbooks, mostly traditional texts but also including two "discourse" style books, around specific events in US History.

Throughout Lies, Loewen illustrates how Anglo centric the textbooks are in their selection and presentation of material, how they tend to present one-sided stories in order to preserve the "heroification" of certain historical figures (like George Washington, Christopher Columbus, Woodrow Wilson, and Helen Keller). For example, most of the textbooks paint a glowing picture of Columbus and how he "found" the "New World" (despite the land's previous occupation by indigenous people, the facts that many other explorers may have been in North America previously, and that Columbus enslaved and murdered thousands of indigenous people).

I picked up The Bean Trees at a rummage sale (one of my favorite places to go book shopping). I almost didn't take it, but in the end I'm very glad I did.

The story is about a young girl who gets away from her go-nowhere town just as soon as she's saved up enough money to buy a car. She's not sure where she's going so she just drives. Then at one of the stops on her trip, a Native-American woman puts a baby girl on the passenger seat of her car and tells her to take it. She continues onward, now caring for a small child she nicknames "Turtle" who, it turns out, has been sexually abused. Eventually she stops out of necessity because her car dies, so she calls that city her temporary new home. There she meets a handful of characters who become her new family.

Uncle Ken gave me West with the Night to read on one of my many book-foraging visits to his home library. Originally published in 1942, one of the things that continues to capture my imagination about West with the Night is what Ernest Hemingway wrote about it in a letter to Maxwell Perkins:

"Did you read Beryl Markham's book, West with the Night? I knew her fairly well in Africa and never would have suspected that she could and would put pen to paper except to write in her flyer's log book. As it is, she has written so well, and marvelously well, that I was completely ashamed of myself as a writer. I felt that I was simply a carpenter with words, picking up whatever was furnished on the job and nailing them together and sometimes making an okay pig pen. But [she] can write rings around all of us who consider ourselves writers. The only parts of it that I know about personally, on account of having been there at the time and heard the other people's stories, are absolutely true....I wish you would get it and read it because it is really a bloody wonderful book."

Aside from that, the story is Markham's account of being a bush pilot in Africa in the 1930's. She is a remarkable and brave woman in a time that women were not piloting planes around Africa; in fact, very few people were doing it at all. I like the writing style very much, aside from the sometimes not-so-enlightened race references that date the work and offend me somewhat. But it was good, too, to read the descriptions and the stories of Africa--both its landscape and its people--from her unique vantage points in the air as well as on the ground.

The Book Doctor is a first person account by a narrator who makes her living helping a motley crew of people to finish and/or doctor their books. The characters, to me, are hard to read, vapid people who are cognizant of the lie they are living but persist nonetheless. I found it hard to like these characters.

The book resonated with me, however, because of a crazy project I have embarked upon assisting a client to complete his self help book for girls, which is both amazingly sexist and nonetheless honestly intended to help people. So that makes me a "book doctor" too. The book was recommended to me by my friend Heather for this reason, and gifted to me by my friend Cathy.  

At the very least, The Book Doctor made me feel like I could write my own book. I read it right before starting my NaNoWriMo novel project, so it was good timing.