WonderBlog

The idea occurred to me while shopping at the B&N...I saw a shelf of Nicholas Sparks books while trying to find Nabokov..BOTH of them were in the LITERATURE AND FICTION section.

I thought, "how can Sparks and Nabokov be in the same section at the bookstore? Sparks can't touch Nabokov's hem"

[thinking now though, Sparks could probably BUY Nabokov's whole wardrobe. Sparks is a multi-million bestseller...and Nabokov couldn't even aspire to being a full-time professor at university for most of his life]

But thoughts like this take on a life of their own. I have been finishing Glory by Nabokov...since I'd only read Lolita before. This book filled me with hope, because it was good, but not anywhere near as good as Lolita , which means that he did not spring out of God fullly formed as the master author. SO, that means that I will probably have a chance of being a better writer too.

Which led me to think again of how long it takes to write a damn book. And how short of a time it takes to read a book. I am going on vacation for 11 days, and I worry that I will run out of book. And that CAN"T HAPPEN. I MUST have enough book to last me....I am a book addict, like a drug addict. A drug addict, when she runs out of her drug of choice, will take anything...even sniff glue. I don't want to my addiction to drag me down into such degradation, but I have been known to read the phone book when nothing else is available. I can't let that happen.

So I am a monstrous reader, devouring the feast that took so long to prepare. Books that took their crafters years of heart and soul wringing to write, and even more lifebeats to gain the wisdom to be able to start the writing-- these I devour callously and insatiably.

And I do feel sad that I read so fast now. And I approach each new book with eagerness, but still knowing that I am going to have a changed thing after, that the expectation is not going to be the reality.

Posted by Murphy Horner at 10:00 AM | Permalink

I just finished Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Maguire. Remember the Wizard of Oz? And the green Witch with the flying monkeys? Well, this book is supposed to tell her story.

I confess I didn’t really have high expectations for this book when my book club chose it. It was a popular book and had even been made into a Broadway musical—two things that made me dismiss it as intellectually shallow.

I could not have been more wrong. What a page-turner! I couldn’t put it down.

Maguire creates a full and detailed world. At his hands, Oz has climate, people groups, competing religions and mythology. Politics create rifts and alliances.

As for the heroine herself, he begins early with her. He starts with her conception and early life, but she becomes a real person to the reader when she arrives at the university. She is a hotheaded activist and sincerely believes in doing what's right even at personal cost.

She is a powerful woman. The ties and interpersonal tensions that guide her choices are utterly familiar to modern readers. Her loves and insecurities are poignant and universal.

What exactly about her is wicked? What does wicked mean in her world--or ours?

With the title he has chosen, Maguire is not being subtle. He quotes Tolstoy, Defoe and Frank Baum (the originator of Oz) before the book starts. He wants to analyze wickedness in this book.

The story itself, though, doesn’t seem to address wickedness conceptually. What it does address is the person of the Wicked Witch. If she is taken to embody wickedness, then the filling out of her character and personality in this story makes wickedness extremely ordinary and normal.

She herself seems to live leaning over the edge of despair, feeling herself and the mercy of forces outside her control. With this position, Maguire would imply that evil itself is merely a misunderstanding.

And this makes me understand that I definitely underestimated this book.

I’m going to go find all the other books this guy wrote.

Posted by Murphy Horner at 09:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

A while back, a friend with a blazing smart and fast-reading niece complained that she couldn't think of books to recommend for her to read, since young miss read so fast.

I made a list of some of my favorite. Enjoy!

By M.E. Kerr I stay near you

Fell Down

Book of Fell

Fell Back

by Francesca Block.
Weetzie Bat,
Witch Baby,
Cherokee Bat and the Goat Guys,
Missing Angel Juan,
The Hanged Man,
Baby Be-Bop,
Girl Goddess #9,
Echo.

Louise Erdrich ANYTHING by HER


by Robin McKinley.
Beauty,
The Blue Sword, T
he Hero and the Crown,
A Knot in the Grain and Other Stories,
Rose Daughter,
Deerskin

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED by Katherine Paterson.
Jacob Have I Loved,
Lyddie,
The Same Stuff As Stars,
Bridge to Trerabinthia

Graphic novels (aka comic books) Art Spiegelman.
Maus: A Survivor's Tale;
Maus: A Survivor's Tale II.

· Cynthia Voigt.
Dicey's Song,
Izzy Willy-nilly,
Wings of a Falcon,
Orfe,
When She Hollers,
Bad Girls,
Bad, Badder, Baddest.

The Lovely Bones: a Novel Alice Sebold

Achebe, Chinua.
Things Fall Apart

by Austen, Jane.
Pride and Prejudice,
Emma (anything by her, really)

by
Charles Dickens
Bleak House, (if you like him, there are tons more)

by Bronte, Emily.
Wuthering Heights

by Buck, Pearl.
The Good Earth

by Cather, Willa.
My Antonia,
Death Comes for the Archbishop (anything by her)

by Defoe, Daniel.
Robinson Crusoe

By Dreiser, Theodore.
Sister Carrie(not an easy read, but good…sad)

by Eliot, George.
The Mill on the Floss,
Middlemarch (also not easy, but very good)

by Ellison, Ralph.
The Invisible Man

by Flaubert, Gustave.
Madame Bovary( not an easy read)

by Grahame, Kenneth.
Wind in the Willows

by Hammett, Dashiell.
The Maltese Falcon,
The Glass Key (these are mysteries, not hard to read and very good)

by Hurston, Zora Neale.
Their Eyes Were Watching God

by Keys, Daniel.
Flowers for Algernon (this will blow your mind, and it’s good)

by Lee, Harper.
To Kill a Mockingbird

by Marlow, Christopher.
Dr. Faustus (if you like Shakespeare)

by Morrison, Toni.
The Song of Solomon (anything by this author, but they are strong stuff…these can be pretty vivid stories about slavery in America)

by Munro, Alice K.
Selected Stories( these are the only short stories I know that read like a novel)

by Orwell, George.
1984,
Animal Farm(the granddaddy of science fiction…well, except maybe Jules Verne)

by Salinger, J. D.
The Catcher in the Rye (a favorite of serial killers…but why?)

by Shelley, Mary.
Frankenstein (the original is way good, and way less scary than I would have thought)

by Sophocles.
Oedipus the King,
Antigone(ancient greek plays that could kick shakespeare’s Butt)

by Steinbeck, John.
The Grapes of Wrath,
East of Eden,
Cannery Row

by Swift, Jonathan.
Gulliver's Travels

by Thurber, James.
The Thurber Carnival (this guy has the quirkiest sense of humor…AWESOME!)

by Wilde, Oscar.
The Importance of Being Ernest (also, anything by this guy)

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by betty smith

Johnny Tremain by Esther Hoskins Forbes
The Witch of Blackbird Pond by Elizabeth George Speare

Amy Tan (anything by her!) The Joy Luck Club, The Kitchen God’s Wife, A Hundred Secret Senses

by Madeleine L’Engle
A wrinkle in Time, A Swiftly Tilting Planet and a Wind at the Door
And ALSO:
The Arm of the Starfish, House like a Lotus,

Posted by Murphy Horner at 09:22 PM | Permalink

D.H. Lawrence is scandalous. He's most famous for Lady Chatterly's Lover, which announces its scandalousness loudly by having "Lover" in the title. It screams "Sex is happening here!"

This meant that he got banned and censored. Even better! Nothing so titillating as a banned book.

Yeah, except...A lot of the time the books that are banned are not as raunchy as the imagination of the people who banned them. True smut is seldom banned; it's just put in the back room and left for the pervs who want it.

And D.H. Lawrence's smut is sort of weak and intellectual. Yes, Lady Chatterly had a lover. And yes, Lawrence tells all. But when you get down to it, the all is kind of disappointed. He tells it like it is, and wouldn't that be the definition of "prosaic"?

In daily lives, relationships are like that. They're not scandalous—even the scandalous ones.

Well, I read Lady Chatterly a long time ago, and that's not the book I'm reviewing now. I picked up Women in Love because I knew D.H. Lawrence was a highly regarded author, and I had only read LCL and one short story by him. I wondered if other his other books were worth reading.

So, this morning, I finished Women in Love. The story starts with two sisters, Ursula and Gudrun. Both of them were extremely modern ladies, but with really old-fashioned names. Gudrun especially has that contrast. I didn't even know Gudrun was a name, it's that archaic, but she herself was an artist. She made her living at it, even. Ursula was a little more tame; she was a teacher.

There were the men, too. Gerald Crich and Rupert Birkin reveal themselves as the love interests for the two women in love.

All these four are strained to the breaking point with their sensitivity. They are constantly in rapturous heights, or seriously believe that they will die of their disappointments. It seemed comical to me, after the first time, how overcome they are by their feelings.

And they are constantly on very high intellectual discussions. What is the meaning of things, really? And they come to conclusions, by paths not apparent to others, which are very definite. All so important.

Love to them is not a soft pillow to fall into and languish upon. It is an argument to resolve, or a cause to take up. They snuggle sometimes, and ask "Do you love me?" of one another. But they had previously torn to shreds any assumptions about love and what the word means, so both the question and the answer are blind groping.

Oh yes, and add to the two cute hetero couples a strong homoerotic tension between Rupert and Gerald. Whew. Even I felt a little steamed up by some of the scenes between those two.

All of these characters seem to want so much. They don't believe in anything they have known, but they want to find something that they don't know to believe in.

...a phrase which sounds utterly nonsensical and as if I could have lifted it directly out of the novel. I don't think I am inadvertently quoting, though...

These people are so modern; they seem unable to exist with any satisfaction in the world they are in. Gudrun, who is the most modern of the group, can find no satisfaction of mind anywhere. She does however, enjoy nice stockings. That particular detail shows that Lawrence is in charge of this book of contrasts.

Bibliomania tells me "Lawrence maintained that it was his finest work." It was finished in 1916, but not published until 1921. I can tell that it fishes deep into the spirit of the time. Many of the ideas and impulses described seem so in keeping with what I know of the period. I could imagine that it would resonate strongly with his contemporaries.

It's not an easily understood book, but I'm glad I read it. Especially now that I know he thought it was his best. I don't feel like rushing out and reading the rest of his stuff though. But if one came to hand, I wouldn't turn it away.

Posted by Murphy Horner at 08:30 AM | Permalink

In this story, Orwell tells how he lives when he finds himself basically destitute. While in Paris, he runs low on money and then gets robbed, leading to a stretch of out-and-out poverty.

Since this misfortune starts in Paris, it is easier to accept. Why otherwise would a well-born Englishman end up dependent on the generosity of pawnbrokers to get food? As the story progressed, I could accept the plausibility of his dire straits only because he was in a foreign place. I’ve been in foreign places, and things are different there. I would accept discomforts and experiences that would have been unacceptable at home, because things are supposed to be strange when one is traveling.

Things got pretty strange for Orwell. He writes of how he has to fake solvency to keep his landlady from kicking him out.

He writes with both feet on the ground. The descriptions are utterly realistic—he gives exactly the sort of detail I would ask for if it were a friend of mine telling me their story over a drink. He gives exact numbers of how much things cost, and tells about the way he had to smuggle food into his room. He mourns that he must waste money on the more expensive bread, because the cheapest variety will not fit into his pocket for smuggling.

He does eventually find work as a dishwasher, which gives him enough sustenance to form the idea to ask for help from a London acquaintance. Alas, things don’t always work out as intended.

The characters that fill the Paris portion of the book are vividly drawn, including people living in the shadow of misfortunes of health and love. The cheap Paris boarding house included a share of impractical dilettantes as well. After he crosses the channel, the London characters enjoy the same brilliance of description.

While the Paris paupers have there own methods of getting by, the British differ substantially. It took the author some time to get the hang of homelessness in the UK. He describes the wandering life, going from homeless shelter to homeless shelter. In the contemporary term, they are formally known as casual houses or informally as spikes.

This is George Orwell, author of Animal Farm and 1984. There were some well-reasoned political thoughts regarding poverty. The book was published in 1933, which means the stories related must have happened during the Great Depression. There was a whole lot of poverty to ponder on at the time. A lot of people were beginning to think ‘whatever we’ve been doing, we should stop and do the opposite.’ There was evidently a lot wrong with the world, in many people’s eyes.

So, Orwell took the opportunity to propose some new activities for homeless people. And he talked about he prejudice held in the hearts of most comfortably situated folks. He would have us realize that tramps are people, too.

This book was set about 70 years ago. When I picked it up, I wasn’t sure I would like it. I was utterly amazed by it. I don’t think I’ll forget it. Of course, I couldn’t help comparing it to Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich. I admit, I’ve only read portions of that book, but I know that it is hugely popular, even spawning a musical of itself.

I feel like Orwell happened upon his down-and-outness a little more honestly than Ehrenreich. She meant it to be an investigative journalistic experience, but Orwell just found himself poor and kept his eyes open to the experience. He was not ashamed of his life experiences. He published them and gave all of us a gift in the form of this book.

As a final word, I’d like to recommend the audio book that I experienced this book through. The reader did excellent reading of the many many accents of the characters in the book and made them vibrant.

Posted by Murphy Horner at 08:19 PM | Permalink

I dont' have time to review them all, but I would like to keep a record of the books I read.

Open Secret by Alice Munro
The man in my basement by Walter Mosely
The Wife by Meg Wolitzer
I want to wear a red dress by Pearl Cleage
The Love Wife by jen Gish

Okay, I'm still in the m iddle of Love Wife. I ran out of book last thursday and Karen loaned it to me.

I have also listened to, recently, a whole lot of audio tapes with lecture series on them. Crazy wonderful, those are. LOVE LOVE LOVE the teaching company:

The history of freedom
The history of Myth
Alexander the Great and the Hellenic Age
The Middle Ages

I tried but got bogged down in:
Great Romans

too many names in that one, and I REALLY wanted to listen to the middle ages series, which was MUCH more absorbing. Middle ages knock me out.

I just checked out:
Churchill

That one should be interesting. More recent, anyway.

Okay, that's enough for now.

Posted by Murphy Horner at 12:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

My home is in Claremont. I picked it carefully, because I wanted a ‘good’ neighborhood. You all know what that means, right?

I wasn’t so sure that I knew what that meant. It is my habit to question everything, and I think that the idea of a ‘good’ neighborhood is potentially prejudiced. So, I wanted hard data to make the determination. What makes a neighborhood good or bad, really? It's a complicated question, but I chose to look at crime.

I went to this site to take a look at crime statistics, and just to keep it simple, I focused on murder. What I found shocked me.

How many murders does it take to be a crime wave? How much does it take to get press?

In 2003, Compton had 43 murders, Inglewood had 32 and Long Beach had 49. That is a lot of murders. But not, apparently, enough to worry about. It did not raise the alarm, not for those cities. These areas are acknowledged black neighborhoods. Known ‘hoods. And murder has come to be accepted there.

But accepted by whom, exactly?

My town, Claremont, had 0 murders. It is part of its appeal, to be quite honest. I prefer to live in a place with a low chance of being murdered.

But we share a border with a known brown town, Pomona, which has a high Latino population. Pomona had 17 murders in 2003. In 2002, there were 18 and 2001 had 19.

Claremont stayed steady at zero.

What’s up with that? A line, a two dimensional line of no thickness at all separates these two places. One side, someone murders someone else every three weeks. The other, people don’t kill each other.

People say, “Just avoid Pomona. It’s not a good neighborhood.”

But people are dying over there. Is that what we are supposed to do for our neighbors? Just avoid them when they are in trouble?

Pomona kills people. But Claremont doesn’t. What does Claremont know that Pomona doesn’t?

I almost feel like there should be an exchange program. Maybe some people from Claremont should go over and have a cultural exchange with Pomona, so the Pomona residents could learn to use alternatives to murder to solve their life situations.

People say to me: “Oh, Pomona is suffering under discrimination and poverty.”

But being poor doesn’t make you kill. And discrimination doesn’t either. It’s a separate leap, to murder. What inspires that leap?

This is a sticking point in my relationship with my neighbor, Pomona. How do I relate to this city that allows murders at such a high rate?

To my jaw-dropping amazement, I read a book about this very problem. Not exactly my same viewpoint, but a new angle on the same problem.

Walkin’ the Dog by the incomparable Walter Mosley tells about a murderer. A man out of prison for nearly a decade, walking the free streets of South Central and trying to figure out his life. What does he do with himself and his rage and his unexpectedly returned independence?

He struggles. He thinks, and he works and he talks. He struggles against the gravity-like forces that pull him back to crime and prison. They are the things he knows, after all.

But he wrestles the demons and finds a flicker of epiphany. This book, like many great books, cannot be adequately reduced to plot summary. The story is an amazing journey of bleak honesty and real hope.

I have no doubt that the problems in Pomona and Inglewood and Long Beach are partly the responsibility of the police and the legal system. I also believe that the people in those cities have decided to allow a heightened amount of crime. They share the blame.

And I have a share of the blame too. I participate in the blind eye, in the lack of outrage and grief. I don’t know what I can do. But I know that I have to keep looking for a way to work on making it right. There may be an epiphany waiting for me, and that’s worth looking for.

Posted by Murphy Horner at 09:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

My home is in Claremont. I picked it carefully, because I wanted a ‘good’ neighborhood. You all know what that means, right?

I wasn’t so sure that I knew what that meant. It is my habit to question everything, and I think that the idea of a ‘good’ neighborhood is potentially prejudiced. So, I wanted hard data to make the determination. What makes a neighborhood good or bad, really? It's a complicated question, but I chose to look at crime.

I went to this site to take a look at crime statistics, and just to keep it simple, I focused on murder. What I found shocked me.

How many murders does it take to be a crime wave? How much does it take to get press?

In 2003, Compton had 43 murders, Inglewood had 32 and Long Beach had 49. That is a lot of murders. But not, apparently, enough to worry about. It did not raise the alarm, not for those cities. These areas are acknowledged black neighborhoods. Known ‘hoods. And murder has come to be accepted there.

But accepted by whom, exactly?

My town, Claremont, had 0 murders. It is part of its appeal, to be quite honest. I prefer to live in a place with a low chance of being murdered.

But we share a border with a known brown town, Pomona, which has a high Latino population. Pomona had 17 murders in 2003. In 2002, there were 18 and 2001 had 19.

Claremont stayed steady at zero.

What’s up with that? A line, a two dimensional line of no thickness at all separates these two places. One side, someone murders someone else every three weeks. The other, people don’t kill each other.

People say, “Just avoid Pomona. It’s not a good neighborhood.”

But people are dying over there. Is that what we are supposed to do for our neighbors? Just avoid them when they are in trouble?

Pomona kills people. But Claremont doesn’t. What does Claremont know that Pomona doesn’t?

I almost feel like there should be an exchange program. Maybe some people from Claremont should go over and have a cultural exchange with Pomona, so the Pomona residents could learn to use alternatives to murder to solve their life situations.

People say to me: “Oh, Pomona is suffering under discrimination and poverty.”

But being poor doesn’t make you kill. And discrimination doesn’t either. It’s a separate leap, to murder. What inspires that leap?

This is a sticking point in my relationship with my neighbor, Pomona. How do I relate to this city that allows murders at such a high rate?

To my jaw-dropping amazement, I read a book about this very problem. Not exactly my same viewpoint, but a new angle on the same problem.

Walkin’ the Dog by the incomparable Walter Mosley tells about a murderer. A man out of prison for nearly a decade, walking the free streets of South Central and trying to figure out his life. What does he do with himself and his rage and his unexpectedly returned independence?

He struggles. He thinks, and he works and he talks. He struggles against the gravity-like forces that pull him back to crime and prison. They are the things he knows, after all.

But he wrestles the demons and finds a flicker of epiphany. This book, like many great books, cannot be adequately reduced to plot summary. The story is an amazing journey of bleak honesty and real hope.

I have no doubt that the problems in Pomona and Inglewood and Long Beach are partly the responsibility of the police and the legal system. I also believe that the people in those cities have decided to allow a heightened amount of crime. They share the blame.

And I have a share of the blame too. I participate in the blind eye, in the lack of outrage and grief. I don’t know what I can do. But I know that I have to keep looking for a way to work on making it right. There may be an epiphany waiting for me, and that’s worth looking for.

Posted by Murphy Horner at 09:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Sedaris's writing makes it okay for all of us losers to admit we are. His "SantaLand Diaries" was an expose of humiliation. He was like superhero, with a big 'L' on his chest.

He managed to take all the embarrassing things, the sorts of things we don't want to admit to, and make them so wickedly witty they are badges of honor.

It inspires me; makes me brave to try to write my humiliations.

This latest offering, Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, reaches a little deeper.

The fact is, there are some humiliations that you can be funny about, and some that you just can't. This book takes it there. David opened a vein for us.

There are some side-splitter stories, more of Christmas in "Six to Eight Black Men" that made me laugh till I cried. But Sedaris goes on to talk about his first pubescent sleepover, a terrifying experience fraught with danger for a fledgling homosexual. The tension of his fantasy-come-true triumph during strip poker was genius.

He told a sad story of his estrangement from his youngest sister, of his hopelessness at being the kind of brother she needed. He visits his fears and anguishes over being gay in a very straight world. His obsessive-compulsive disorders take him places he does not want to go.

I like this book. I love Sedaris. I am so glad that he keeps writing. I hope he never stops.

Posted by Murphy Horner at 09:23 PM | Permalink

The narrator of this story is Thersa, a 15-year-old only child. The child of her heart is her cousin, eight-year-old Daisy. It's a summer story, the time when school is on vacation and the long days belong to the children.

As simple as the surface level story is, there are so many complicated and beautiful currents running below the surface. Theresa's love for her little cousin, and the realization that something is wrong puts a tension and sorrow through the story. Theresa is only 15, but in charge of so many young lives. She is a child, but taking on the responsibilities of an adult. The true adults around her have the freedom to abdicate their responsibilities, the care of their children, to this 15 year old. She is expected to do so much.

Her relationship with the aging artist, the father of her only paid babysitting ward, brings in tensions of art and even sexuality. Well, her own budding beauty and sexuality seems to turn any adult male into a drooling imbecile. She has to resond and deflect advances before she quite knows what they mean.

And then the neglected kids next door, so needy and unintentionally destructive, keep her realizing how lonely it is possible for people to be.

It's a beautifully written story, a perfect slow bobbing rhythm, like an inner tube on the surface of the water.

Posted by Murphy Horner at 04:14 PM | Permalink

My new home is having an effect on me. I love it. I like to preen over it, make it pretty.

The garden especially is satisfying. I think about it, and read about different sort of plants I could have. I trim the ones I have and water and have even fertilized them.

One friend was amazed, "This is a side of you I've never seen!" she said.

Hm. Good point. I've not been such a homebody. I'm usually reading or thinking or being away, looking at things.

But this home has been a big change. It makes me happy, and I am always full of projects I want to do. People tell me that happens when you become a homeowner. But the condo, my first owned home, did not have that effect on me.

Probably because it did not have a garden.

That rung a bell for me. I remember a book that talked about leaving adventures behind to take care of your garden.

Candide by Voltaire, it is. A short little story I've never forgotten, mostly because of the pope's daughter who only had one bun because her set was divided by cannibals.

It was this book, meant to be a philosophical treatise, that talks about tending your garden. I read it again, because I am so into my garden right now.

It is more profound than I remembered, having read it the first time as an assigment for my very first college literature class. That was a great class!

But, now that I am a bit older, I can see his point.

Candide roamed the world in search of happiness, basically. And, I, for a long time, have been hitting the streets to check outwhat the world has to offer.

In the end, Candide realizes that you make your own happiness. That you cultivate it, you tend it, and it grows or dies based on what you do.

I guess I've come to some similar conclusions. I am happy to be in a place tha tis furthe away from the "streets". My suburban town has lanes, rather than streets.

And, I am ready to take charge of my own happiness. I am fairly confident that I'll be able to grow it myself. There will be troubles, but I will be ale to weather them and keep my happiness well-rooted.

I must cultivate my garden.

Posted by Murphy Horner at 11:24 AM | Permalink

I was disappointed to discover that this is not actually a true memoir of a geisha. I didn't know this when I picked it up, but it's all over the bestseller lists right now. I think it's a decent book, it just wasn't what I expected.

It's basically a kind of 20th century regency romance, set in Japan.

If I had known i was that sort of story, I would have been really impressed. The description of how Sayuri became a giesha, and the historical setting was descriptive and interesting.

But the "Pretty Woman" style happy ending was a little disappointing. I had hoped she would be a strong woman and set out on her own. I concede that was probably personal taste.

Plenty of people love that sort of story, and this is a good one of its kind.

I should say, I heard this book on tape, rather than read it. The audio version was read by a woman with a Japanese accent. Her reading was very engaging, and the accent added a dimension of location that would not have been present on the page.

Posted by Murphy Horner at 10:36 PM | Permalink

Another one by the great Murakami. Every book of his I've read so far (The Windup Bird Chronicals and Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World) has been really great, so when I went to the library I checked out all of his books on the shelf.

But I live in a small town now, so there was only one book by him on the shelf, South of the Border, West of the Sun. It was short, so I finished it this morning.

This one might be the most realistic book I've read. Nothing happened that was outside the range of natural life. His descriptions of emotions were very surreal, though. It was the same Murakami I'd grown to love.

This story is a very human story, and the jacket calls it a love story. There is no doubt that love is involved, but I'm not so sure it's a love story.

It starts off with the hero, Hajime, as a kid. He's 12, and has a girl who is his best friend. When his family moved to a different neighborhood, they lost track of each other. But he never forgot her.

The rest of the story talks about his romantic affairs, high school and growing up. He is finally an adult and has his life on a very successful track, with a business and a wife and family, when the childhood friend reappears.

Everything turns upside down after that.

The story is good and definitely kept my interest. I don't know if Hajime could be called typically male. If he could,this story might be very revealing of the psychology of a cheating husband. But I am not sure he could be called typical. The story is just a little strange.

In the end, it was pretty bleak. As he portrays it, tenuous nature of love and the unreliability of human character leaves little to hope for.

Reading this book makes me rethink the others. Perhaps Murakami is more nihilistic than I realized. Then again, maybe this story is just him exploring his nihilistic side.

One thing for sure, I need to read the rest of this guy's works.

Posted by Murphy Horner at 04:30 PM | Permalink

Los Angeles is a fun place. It's also a pretty silly place--a place that tries to invent the fashions and create the trends. And the world is just an enabler, letting L.A. get away with it.

Which gives L.A.'s silliness a self-importance it probably doesn't deserve.

But the best of that brand of uber-hip ridiculousness is self-aware. The people who know they are ridiculous--who are serious about their art some of the time but almost nothing else the rest of the time--make L.A. a fun place.

Hensley wrote up that side of Hollywood, using the jaded, pop-media-saturated 20-something zietgiest that I'm so familiar with.

The title refers to the area code of the downtown/hollywood area--part of the zip and area code caste system that allows one group to look down on another. The TV star actress, the painfully gay screenwriter and the chubby actress friend start it off and it takes off from there.

A cast of characters go around on unlikely adventures through L.A. I would usually dismiss this kind of book, but I actually enjoyed it. Having lived here for a while, I find it more believable than I otherwise would.

This is a fun read, not a challenging thought in it. But it's engaging enough to read it to the end.

Posted by Murphy Horner at 09:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

If you can't get this on the audio version, at least read it out loud. This epic was meant to be heard.

Gilgamesh is arguably the oldest story in the world, with all the great ancient epic tricks. I love how it repeats the same phrases, such as when Gilgamesh wakes up from his prophetic dreams over and over:

"Did you touch me? Did a god walk by?"

It had me chanting along with the CD. The adventures of Gilgamesh and Enkidu are pretty exciting.

So exciting, in fact, that I would seriously consider recommending it as excellent bedtime reading for the kids.

Except that Gilgamesh and Enkidu get up to enough high-jinks to get not only an 'R' rating, but maybe even an NC-17.

Good stuff, that's all I'm saying.

Posted by Murphy Horner at 04:07 PM | Permalink

Imagine a chill room at a rave. The pounding music with the repetitive but interesting sound samples, the rythmn and the heat are pervasive but still slightly removed. The pillows are beneath your dance-exhausted body and you stare at the weird visual projection provided.

Your mind is open and relaxed, ready to ponder the slow changing light-shapes metamorphasizing across the screens. You are ready to think about the relationship between circles, squares and sine waves--the universe and everything. Themes and dissonances flow, merge and separate in your consciousness. You are relaxed, receptive and passive in that moment.

That's what reading Murakami feels like for me. Except I don't feel passive. His book,The Wind Up Bird Chronicle, has some of the most far out things happen. Toru Okada, the hero of the story, lives the most ordinary life in which occur the most surprising and illogical experiences.

And yet, like a chill room, I feel totally open to the story. I do not feel passive about it though. I could not put the book down. More than 600 pages, and I could not put it down until the end. I am still thinking about it days later.

There is an emotional truth to the story that lodges deep. The love of Toru Okada and his wife for one another is so poignant, while being completely devoid of sentimentality.

And the book's struggle to write around the extra-reality of human spirit or experience leaves me very thoughtful about what it means to be human.

I am going to find more of this guy's books. As an avid reader, this blew my mind away. If you are looking for a good chewy book, this will not disappoint.

Posted by Murphy Horner at 07:11 PM | Permalink

Someone recommended this book to me: The Death Ship. He said, "It's by Traven."

"Oh yeah!" I remembered. "That's the guy who did The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. I had to read that for a film and lit class. It was really good."

Since I had to take a test on it, I knew that Traven was kind of a pinko socialist kind of guy. He wrote TOTSM as a kind of critique on capitalism and greed, etc. The story is about goldminers, after all. How much more greedy can you get?

But TOTSM was a great story, and I actually liked hearing the description of how they did the actual mining. Being from Alaska,I ran into a few gold miners now and again.

As is often the case, the book is better than the movie, but the movie is really great too.

Remembering all this I went to check out The Death Ship. This one was in a similar style and structure as TOTSM, but unless you are really into sailing...I mean, I don't know. It didn't grab me. It went on and on in very grim depressing language about how this life was so awful and the ship was so crappy. In the end, I couldn't finish it.

Which is too bad. The other book was so great I would have loved to read another like it. Maybe I'll try some of his other books.

Posted by Murphy Horner at 08:49 PM | Permalink

Brancaccio is the guy who does "Marketplace" on NPR. Now, I like NPR a lot, but I do think that Marketplace has strayed from the core ideals of public radio--the peace corps, Kennedy mourning, peacenik hippie ideals I think of when I think NPR.

I mean, when the boomers went from hippie to Yuppie, it was hypocritical. And NPR's new concern with the rise and fall of the Dow the NASDAQ seemed part of that trend.

But even so, when I saw the book, I had enough affection for NPR and hippies to check it out.

Brancaccio starts off with an anectodal premise: What do you do with a surplus of money? After graduating from journalism school, he worked for a while and he and his wife managed to accumulate a little surplus--$17,000 to be exact.

They talked it over, and thought the thing to do with the money was for him to fulfill his life dream of being a foreign correspondent. They moved to London to try to make that happen, and just as they were about the run out of money, he hooked up with some radio journalism. It took him on the path to what he does now, hosting "Marketplace."

Now THAT is something I can respect. It's a crisis for the hippie-types to find themselves with more money than they need. And it's the sort of crisis that requires some action to be taken.

The book is really enjoyable. It's as if the author is taking a walk around the problem, looking at it from different angles and seeing what it's all about.

He takes a series of road trips to talk with people about what they have chosen to do with their extra money. Some people spend it on shopping, some invest, some go back to school, and some quit their jobs.

His writing is really insightful, not preachy at all, thank god. The book asked a lot of questions I've asked myself and gave a few new perspectives. I'm glad I read it.

Posted by Murphy Horner at 08:24 PM | Permalink

Okay, I'm packing and painting like a maniac. Boy...So I am packing some books right now, and I found my copy of the Iliad.

THIS is the BEST translation. Let me tell you. I bought this copy in the Royal Museum in London. What better place, I thought. What a good souvenir. The british have long been mad about translating greek classics.

So, I had this unread copy. I read a little bit, but I didn't read too far until I had to take the classics class at my univerisity. The teacher had a copy of the Iliad at the bookstore. I thought I would use the one I already.

Then, at a study group where we were getting ready for the quiz, I read a piece from my book. The other students dropped their jaws and said, "Whoa! That's not what my books says at all!"

THIER translations were totally opaque. THey all passed around my book and said I was lucky.

SO, if you want to read the Iliad like it was meant to be read, all exciting and interesting, get this translation. It's really great.

And the Iliad is a good book to read.

Posted by Murphy Horner at 10:39 PM | Permalink

By Hermann Hesse

Heard good things about this guy, but I never read him. A friend gave me this book, and so I had to read it.

Not the most readable. It seemed to wander a lot. Not surprising, since it was about a dude wandering.

The book was one of those philosophical tales, where the author has a serious point to make. He tells a tortured story to make his point.

Camus, Voltaire, Rand, they all did this.

Narcissus was this thinker monk, a man who left the world and lived in the cerebral realm.

Goldmund was a young man who was an artist and lived in world of his senses.

Of course, Hesse had to make them friends so that the worlds could be juxtaposed.

Anyway, it was completely worth it for one part:

"That may be so," said Narcissus. "Niether of us can ever understand the other completely in such things. But there is one realization all men of good will share: In the end our works make us feel ashamed, we have to start out again and each time the sacrifice has to be made anew"

And to understand that part, you have to read the whole book. But that bit is really really profound. I want to always remember it, which is why I am blogging about it.

Posted by Murphy Horner at 06:34 PM | Permalink

Posted by Murphy Horner at 09:25 PM | Permalink

No, that's not the swimmer. It's a pathetic guy who can't get over the Smiths. He takes us back into the teenage world of the 80's when the Smiths could explain everything and save the whole world.

He writes about a poor little rich boy who can't make sense of his life without following the counter-culture movement with religious fervor.

If you ever suddenly threw out your whole wardrobe because of a new album, you will identify.

If you're like me, though, you will feel slightly sick to your stomach at the shallow angst of a Long Island jewish kid who knows so little about what's important in life.

Which is not to say I didn't like the book. It really grabs you. The story starts when the guy is already an adult, working for a rock magazine and trying to retain his hip youthfulness.

Through a series of convoluted yet rapid leaps, he comes to the conclusion that his whole life will start to make sense if he can get the Smiths back together for a reunion performance.

And more important than getting his life to make sense is getting the girl of his obsessions to be his.

If you were a fan of the Smiths, you should read the book. Like I said, despite it's stomach turning quotient, it is very readable.

Continue reading "How soon is never? by Mark Spitz" »

Posted by Murphy Horner at 09:22 AM | Permalink

Hemingway. I read Snows of Kilimanjaro when I was 12. I don't remember much about it, but it freaked me out. It seemed very stark and mean and not nice.

I read it because my big brother had the book from a college class he was taking. He'd given me the Shakespeare plays, which I'd LOVED. Honestly, i think Shakespeare is very good for precocious readers. The tone and concept are fine for a young age.

But Hemingway was a different story. I was horrified by him. Therefore, I have not read anything by him since.

My alma mater, San Jose state university has a guilt list. They say "Any English Major Who Hasn't Read These Has No Right To Joy."

They deny English majors any right to joy; the list is HUGE. Shame on them for making beautiful books into something to feel guilty about! But, the fact is, it a good resource to turn to when I am looking for a suggestion about what to read next.

In this case, I thought I would try Hemingway again. Farewell To Arms. He is sad and horrifying, but I'm an adult now and I can take sad and horrifying in stride.

He's also very MASCULINE. He doesn't talk about how he feels much, just about what he does, what he says, where he's going. He'll say what he's thinking a little bit.

That book was okay. I'm not sorry I read it. It was not as great as I might have hoped. But it made me wonder some more about WW I. The Great War. I'll have to do some reading about it.

THis, of course, pleases Chris tremendously. He will happily talk all about it. Especially the ships.

Posted by Murphy Horner at 09:07 AM | Permalink

This book was wonderful. Top to bottom, all 811 pages of it. I was only disappointed by it being over.

Russian stories don't distance you from the people in them. I heard someone criticize them once for never using two-dimensional characters. Oh, man, no way! I love getting to know all those people in the books. It feels like I got to know a huge set of very interesting people. Anna, Karenin, Levin and Kitty were the main heroes, but everyone had their foibles and their adventures.

I loved the story, and I loved how Tolstoy told it. Basically, Anna Karenina falls in love with Vronsky, one of those fairy tale loves. Only problem is, she is already married. And she has a baby boy.

It was so great. to hear all the perspectives about the situation of women, and how faith comes into play with such a choice.

I just wish I could have really known these people Such smart, earnest interesting people.

Like I said, I only wished it had lasted longer.

Posted by Murphy Horner at 12:59 PM | Permalink

Sometimes I think I should write two book reviews. I should write one when I'm in the middle of reading a book and I don't know how it will end. And then I should write one after I've finished it.

Because a book is an experience. It's not an entire thing. You can feel one way about it in the middle and very different at the end. The middle is often the best part, it's like being on the rollercoaster. The end of the book is what you remember about being on the roller coaster.

The Bell Jar was amazing because of how it pulled me into the emotions without me realizing I was in the middle of them.

I'll tell you, books pull me in. I felt sick and scared and weird when I read Beloved. The Fountainhead makes me cold and fierce and ambitious. I cried for days and days about the state of the world after I read The Poisonwood Bible. My speech pattern change entirely when I read Sense and Sensibility; I require far more clauses to ask for a cup of tea.

And Plath sucked me into the bell jar. I was there with Esther in the middle of all her strange feelings. Plath doesn't go into huge explanations of why Esther feels pointless, so I didn't realize when I started feeling pointless too.

But oh my god, I felt pointless. Everything seemed incredibly overwhelming. While I was reading the book, I had no desire to do anything. I felt like blowing off all my responsibilities and just curling up in a chair and reading.

I feel that way sometimes. It didn't seem unusual that I felt that way while reading this book. But when some challenges showed up at work, they practically undid me. I felt like I totally couldn't handle them, like there was no way out, that I was damned if I did and damned anyway. My stomach tightened up and I felt like crawling under my desk and hiding.

It was intense.

I blame the book. I mean, my job sucks, but wow.

And that's why I think this is a great book. I didn't feel fabulous reading it, absolutely the opposite. But the fact that it could operate on me so powerfully takes my breath away.

Plath is good.

So that stuff I just wrote might have been the stuff I would have written if I hadn't finished the book. Now, after I've finished it I can say all kind of detached things.

Plath wrote a good story about suicidal urges. I have not been that kind of suicidal myself, but my frieds who have describe it in a very similar way. That suicide is a thing out there, a task to be done, something that needs to be done, and it's just a matter of finding the right time.

When Esther recieves the "good" shock treatment, she describes how she kind of forgot that she needed to kill herself. To paraphrase, she says she went to dinner and could not quite remember what she loved the knives for.

I don't know if other people would agree with me, but as I was reading the book, it seemed very easy to follow the logic Esther was using. It was hard to realize she was going crazy until she gave you the clues: she hadn't slept for a week. She hadn't bathed or changed her clothes.

The bathing part I felt was particularly significant, since she had earlier described how much she loved bathing. But then, she didn't want to bathe anymore.

It was definitely not pleasant to read this book, but it was very powerful.

Posted by Murphy Horner at 09:08 AM | Permalink

This book tells the story of Okuni, the woman who started the tradition of Kabuki dancing. I know nothing about Kabuki dancing. I couldn't pick a Kabuki dance out of a line up. I'm sure I would have gotten more out of the book if I had known about Kabuki.

But even so, the story is a really great story about staying true to yourself and to what you know. I mean, a lot of stories are out there about "Doing the right thing." But when it's an asthetic choice, there are not such strong guidelines. The difficulty of staying true to what you FEEL and know in your heart to be beautiful and right, that is worth a lot.

Beauty and dance are very important in life. They are the sorts of things that make life worth living. Okuni's life is inspiring, to stay true to herself and her art.

Posted by Murphy Horner at 02:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I have the written version of this and I also havea recorded performance. It's a play, so it's nice to have both. It's a different thing, reading a play versus seeing it performed. Both have merit, but in different aspects.

Dylan Thomas is a poet, and his play is appropriately abstract. It's basically taking a day in the life of a Welsch town (remember, Thomas is Welsch) and writing about all the characters and dreams in it.

I reminds me of Spoon River Anthology, in it's scope of characters. But the people move in and out of each other's lives throughout the day. It is a very sweet look at what could be describes as the author's hometown, showing the foibles and meannesses as well as the aspirations of the people who inhabit it.

t's a little confusing, but I think if you let go and flow with it the experience is very uplifting. I think it shows a love for the brotherhood of humanity and a great sense of humor.

Posted by Murphy Horner at 01:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

This book seems like the Catch 22 for the 80s. Not everyone in my book club agrees with me about this, but I stand by it.

Catch 22 seemed very rooted in a sense of the ridiculousness of what was happening in the world of the 60s. It centered on a single man in the military, dealing with commercial transactions and the fear that he was going to die, that people were trying to kill him. Of course, people were trying to kill him. This was war after all. But the catch was that he could not be taken out of the army for being crazy because he was sane enough to realize how crazy the war was.

Fine.

White Noise is about a man, a college professor on his 3rd? 4th? wife and the huge mish-mash of half-related children that his family has become. He is also afraid of death, but in a far more abstract way than Yossarian in Catch 22.

He is bombarded, constantly and incomprehensively with messages, the White Noise of the media. He encounters tabloids and TV news and the theories of his professorial colleagues with the same attitude of incomprehending acceptance.

The book is not so much a story as an attempt to capture a snapshot of life. I consider the snapshot to be extremely rooted in the mid-80s. THere are a number of cultural artifacts that come from that time and have passed by.

It was an interesting book. Not so much pleasant, but interesting. Worthwhile.

Posted by Murphy Horner at 09:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

It's a listFrom London. They are naming the 100 greatest novels. Naturally, they miss all kinds of good ones and elevate some ones I don't think deserve it.

But here's my score of which ones I've read:

1. Don Quixote Miguel De Cervantes YES

2. Pilgrim's Progress John Bunyan YES

3. Robinson Crusoe Daniel Defoe YES

4. Gulliver's Travels Jonathan Swift YES

5. Tom Jones Henry Fielding NOPE

6. Clarissa Samuel Richardson NOPE

7. Tristram Shandy Laurence Sterne NOPE

8. Dangerous Liaisons Pierre Choderlos De Laclos NOPE

9. Emma Jane Austen NOPE, but read others byher

10. Frankenstein Mary Shelley YES

11. Nightmare Abbey Thomas Love Peacock NOPE

12. The Black Sheep Honore De Balzac NOPE

13. The Charterhouse of Parma Stendhal NOPE

14. The Count of Monte Cristo Alexandre Dumas NOPE, I could live without Dumas

15. Sybil Benjamin Disraeli NOPE

16. David Copperfield Charles Dickens NOPE, but read others by him

17. Wuthering Heights Emily Bronte NOPE

18. Jane Eyre Charlotte Bronte YES

19. Vanity Fair William Makepeace Thackeray OWN IT, haven't read it yet

20. The Scarlet Letter Nathaniel Hawthorne YES

21. Moby-Dick Herman Melville YES

22. Madame Bovary Gustave Flaubert YES, love it

23. The Woman in White Wilkie Collins NOPE

24. Alice's Adventures In Wonderland Lewis Carroll YES, pure genius

25. Little Women Louisa M. Alcott YES

26. The Way We Live Now Anthony Trollope NOPE

27. Anna Karenina Leo Tolstoy IN PROGRESS

28. Daniel Deronda George Eliot NOPE

29. The Brothers Karamazov Fyodor Dostoevsky NOPE, but read others by him

30. The Portrait of a Lady Henry James YES, I love this novel

31. Huckleberry Finn Mark Twain YES

32. Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde Robert Louis Stevenson NOPE

33. Three Men in a Boat Jerome K. Jerome NOPE

34. The Picture of Dorian Gray Oscar Wilde NOPE

35. The Diary of a Nobody George Grossmith NOPE

36. Jude the Obscure Thomas Hardy NOPE

37. The Riddle of the Sands Erskine Childers NOPE

38. The Call of the Wild Jack London NOPE, but read others by him

39. Nostromo Joseph Conrad NOPE, but read others by him

40. The Wind in the Willows Kenneth Grahame YES

41. In Search of Lost Time Marcel Proust NOPE

42. The Rainbow D. H. Lawrence NOPE, but read others by him

43. The Good Soldier Ford Madox Ford NOPE

44. The Thirty-Nine Steps John Buchan YES

45. Ulysses James Joyce STILL IN PROGRESS

46. Mrs Dalloway Virginia Woolf YES

47. A Passage to India E. M. Forster NOPE

48. The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald YES

49. The Trial Franz Kafka NOPE

50. Men Without Women Ernest Hemingway NOPE

51. Journey to the End of the Night Louis-Ferdinand Celine NOPE

52. As I Lay Dying William Faulkner NOPE, but read others by him

53. Brave New World Aldous Huxley NOPE

54. Scoop Evelyn Waugh NOPE

55. USA John Dos Passos NOPE

56. The Big Sleep Raymond Chandler YES

57. The Pursuit Of Love Nancy Mitford NOPE

58. The Plague Albert Camus NOPE

59. Nineteen Eighty-Four George Orwell YES

60. Malone Dies Samuel Beckett NOPE, but read others by him

61. Catcher in the Rye J.D. Salinger YES

62. Wise Blood Flannery O'Connor NOPE, but read others by him

63. Charlotte's Web E. B. White YES

64. The Lord Of The Rings J. R. R. Tolkien YES

65. Lucky Jim Kingsley Amis NOPE

66. Lord of the Flies William Golding NOPE

67. The Quiet American Graham Greene NOPE

68 On the Road Jack Kerouac YES

69. Lolita Vladimir Nabokov YES

70. The Tin Drum Gunter Grass NOPE

71. Things Fall Apart Chinua Achebe YES

72. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie Muriel Spark NOPE

73. To Kill A Mockingbird Harper Lee YES

74. Catch-22 Joseph Heller YES

75. Herzog Saul Bellow NOPE, but read others by him

76. One Hundred Years of Solitude Gabriel Garcia Marquez YES, LOVE IT

77. Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont Elizabeth Taylor NOPE

78. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy John Le Carre NOPE

79. Song of Solomon Toni Morrison NOPE, but read others by her

80. The Bottle Factory Outing Beryl Bainbridge NOPE

81. The Executioner's Song Norman Mailer NOPE

82. If on a Winter's Night a Traveller Italo Calvino YES, it was very highbrow

83. A Bend in the River V. S. Naipaul NOPE

84. Waiting for the Barbarians J.M. Coetzee NOPE

85. Housekeeping Marilynne Robinson NOPE

86. Lanark Alasdair Gray NOPE

87. The New York Trilogy Paul Auster NOPE

88. The BFG Roald Dahl NOPE, but read other by him

89. The Periodic Table Primo Levi NOPE

90. Money Martin Amis NOPE

91. An Artist of the Floating World Kazuo Ishiguro NOPE

92. Oscar And Lucinda Peter Carey NOPE

93. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting Milan Kundera NOPE, but read others by him

94. Haroun and the Sea af Stories Salman Rushdie READ IT, own it, love it

95. La Confidential James Ellroy NOPE

96. Wise Children Angela Carter NOPE

97. Atonement Ian McEwan NOPE

98. Northern Lights Philip Pullman NOPE

99. American Pastoral Philip Roth NOPE, but read others by him

100. Austerlitz W. G. Sebald NOPE

Posted by Murphy Horner at 10:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Patrick Brogan's book World Conflicts: A Comprehensive Guide to World Strife Since 1945 is really good. It's the kind of thing I should read, but I always feel sad when I do.

Here's the layout: he gives short synopses on what's been happening in all kinds of countries since WW2. No, he doesn't cover every country. No, he isn't without bias. But this book is a great catch-up on stuff that's been going on.

And stuff has been going on everywhere. When I read his chapter on Argentina, I finally understood the Falkans. I'm sure I didn't have all of it, but I feel like I have some basic facts.

What's the deal with Africa? What's the deal with the Middle east? What is going on in the Phillipines? These kinds of questions pop up in my mind every day. THis book gives me some answers.

It's really great, and it makes me sad. I wish the world were not so full of trouble.

Posted by Murphy Horner at 04:12 PM | Permalink

Madonna is writing children's books.

You've probably heard this already, but it is still kind of amazing.

The Material Girl, the Pointy-bra Diva, the perennial object of lust is writing children's books.

Well, she is a mom now. I am not a mother, but if I ever become one, I could see a certain shift in my life happening.

Madonna seems to LIKE being a sex symbol. And apparently she likes being a mom.

I guess there is room in her life for both.

But it was very very sweet, a nice lesson about not judging people, and being happy with your life. A lesson mothers would like their children to learn.

And all I can say is, "good for you, Madonna!"

Posted by Murphy Horner at 03:37 PM | Permalink

I saw this on naturallycurly.com

Curly hair is a whole different ball game.

It does not do what you expect. It does not look like what anyone expects.

This book lets us curly girls in on some tips and tricks. Understand the curly hair. LOVE the curly hair.

And whatever you do, don't shampoo too often!

Posted by Murphy Horner at 04:18 PM | Permalink

Don Delillo wrote this book about a murderous cult in the middle east. I read it on accident, because I thought it was the one my book club was reading.

Turns out we are reading White Noise. I'll tell you about that one when I'm done with it.

But The Names was depressing. Man! a story where a man living in the middle east, where he thinks all the time about their political situation, who finds other things to be MORE depressed about.

I guess murder is pretty depressing.

Mainly, I was depressed because he seemed to have such a tough time showing love to his wife. Sad Sad. I like to see love enjoyed. But the main guy didn't know how to enjoy his love at all. He seemed stuck.

Delillo had a lot a lot of internal thoughts about words and meaning. It was interesting, but still had a hopeless theme.

I think it was worth reading. It made me want to finish, for sure. But I was sad the whole time I read it. It made me sigh a lot.

Posted by Murphy Horner at 08:08 PM | Permalink

I normally don't like mysteries. They don't grab me.

For a period of time, I was thinking this was a sign of my superiority, but then I realized it's more a sign that i'm bad at finding the clues. You know? I just never catch on to whodunit.

I read books for the pleasure of the journey, and I don't want to know where it is going to end up. That is why I don't like formulaic books at all.

UNLESS! they are done with style. Which brings me to my point:

Raymond Chandler. Wow and wow again.

I was reading White Oleander a while back, and it starts out by talking about the Santa Ana winds. I was telling Chris about it, and he immediately said, "that's from Raymond Chandler."

He'd mentioned Raymond Chandler to me, telling me I should read it. So now, he dug up a paperback of short stories and I read it, once I got through White Oleander.

I loved it for so many reasons. I don't like formulaic stories, but some formulas are so true to life. Like, some people, especially people who are bent on doing the wrong thing, are so predictable.

Like the dispirited blonde lady cop who falls in love with a con and keeps on wanting to reform him. She may be more complicated than that, but while she's on the reform path, that's pretty much all she is.

During moments, people can be just the one thing, not full complex people. Chandler captures that so well. People makes types of themselves, narrow themselves down. I get the idea that the stories emerge from the character's choices, not the manipulations of the author.

And he boiled it down to such lovely sentences.

Plus, now that I live in LA and work across the block from where he lived, I find glimpses of my city in his books. He practicaly gives driving directions to crime scenes. It's a vieled realism that's really exciting.

Posted by Murphy Horner at 09:12 AM | Permalink

Carpe Diem and Rock and Roll!

Eric Olsen had reason to metion John Donne while talking about the Rolling Stones, the Spirit of Rock'n'Roll and Living Life fully to the end.

I am a fan of John Donne, so I thought I would take up the thread and say a little more on the subject.

Remember the Movie, Dead Poets Society? I can't remember exactly, but the super-cool English teacher teaches the boys the meaning of Carpe Diem-Sieze the Day! He says it was the poets anthem.

It was the anthem of a certain SCHOOL of poets, not all poets. They were the Cavalier poets, or the Metaphysical poets. And that other thing that Robin Williams said, that the real reason for poetry was to woo women, was really true of these guys.

That was almost all they did. They came right AFTER SHakespeare, and were constantly writing poems to get the ladies to give it up. But it was part of their Credo, Live now! Live large!

Sounds a lot like Rock'n'Roll to me.

Check out this bit by Donne:
Go and catch a falling star,
Get with child a mandrake root,
Tell me where all past years are,
Or who cleft the devil's foot,
Teach me to hear mermaids singing,
Or to keep off envy's stinging,
And find
What wind
Serves to advance an honest mind

Remind you of anyone? Dylan? Hendrix?

When John Donne is young, he pretty much devotes himself to pursuit of chasing tail. His poems are almost entirely seduction poems.

But he gets older. He passes 30. And he gets religious.

But he doesn't leave it behind. "It" being the passionate intensity. If you ask me, and maybe it's because I'm a jaded female who is not impressed with seduction attempts, the religious poems are much more powerful than his earlier carnal works.

Here is my favorite:

Batter my heart, three-person'd God; for you
As yet but knock; breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise, and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend
Your force, to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurp'd town, to another due,
Labour to admit you, but O, to no end.
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captived, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain,
But am betroth'd unto your enemy;
Divorce me, untie, or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

The driving energy of that is just as much as a head-banging drum line or a squealing guitar riff. Rock on, John Donne!

Posted by Murphy Horner at 09:29 AM | Permalink

You know how when you were young, you came up with all kinds of "in" words for things.

I remember we came up with all kinds of strange meaning for the colors of M&Ms. Green was supposed to have aphrodisiac powers. If you offered a green M&M to the young man of your dreams, and he accepted, it was a potent love spell.

I think the guys were completely unaware of this.

I knew one guy who referred to overly available women as puppies. Have no idea where that came from. It took him a long time to tell me that what he meant when he called a girl a puppy.

Weetzie Bat, by Fransceca Lia Block, takes that to an extreme. This very L.A. book is for young adults, a sort of fantasy coming-of-age story where there are special words to mean everything, and of COURSE everything works out in the end.

It was cute. I started reading it in the bookstore, and could have finished it there. But I was honest and bought the darn thing. It made the world feel very exciting and possible.

Posted by Murphy Horner at 04:26 PM | Permalink

This collection of short stories, by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, blows me away. The author is an Indian female living in my old neighborhood, the San Francisco Bay area. The stories talk about husbands, children, work, school, love and ambition. They are the most modern feminine stories I have ever read.

Maybe it's because the idea of an arranged marriage strips away the necessary "happily-ever-after" fairy tale we have in the west, maybe because the Indian women feel the pull of family and children so strongly..I don't know. Maybe we have heard the feminist views here in america so long that our sincere concern for children and mothers and brothers as equally important to our personal ambition feels like a guilty secret.

The emphasis on societal pressures reminds me a lot of Jane Austen. That, and the very pragmatic view of marriage. Let's be real, kids. Marriage is very much a practical affair. Love waxes and wanes, but the solidity of married life has to remain.

I find this book affirms the real details of female life. The scariness of having children, or not having them. The struggle to evolve as a person without disrupting the lives of your loved ones. Others' expectations of you, and your expectations for yourself.

The stories are beautiful, utterly practical, and haunting.

Posted by Murphy Horner at 01:28 PM | Permalink

The story begins with the Santa Ana winds. The girl's mother tells her that women who kill their lovers on a night like this will blame it on the wind. Naturally, her mother is about to kill her lover.

You'd think that would be enough of a story. But not for Janet Fitch. That's only the setup for the main story. The main story is about the daughter, Astrid. Astrid is left to fend for herself in a series of horrific foster homes. And in those places, she goes through a very dramatic coming of age transformation. Yes, we know all about coming of age stories. But the usual problems of that time are thrown on their head. How different is it to become your own person, separate from your parent (s), when your mother is a murderer?

This story was really good. It has all the terrible sensational things in it (occult references, murder, forbidden sex), but somehow for me, it worked.

One of the redeeming features was the constant references to beauty. The murderer mother was a poet. Astrid cut her teeth on fine art. It was bordering unbelievable to me, how much this girl knew about authors and artists. But perhaps there are such people, such 14 year olds, that can know about Kandinsky and have well-formed opinions about him.

The other thing that made this story really great for me was how much it was rooted HERE. HERE, as in Los Angeles. She described exactly exactly how things are here. She talks about the wind, which anyone who is not or has not been here does not know about. The wind is crazy.

And she talks about the apartments in Hollywood, and the wildness just not very far North. She talks about how different people shop and dress differently. The author knows this area, this strange area that is Los Angeles.

The story is a good one, I recommend it.

Posted by Murphy Horner at 12:23 PM | Permalink

Anybody remember Enron? Any body remember all those OTHER companies that were caught with their accounting pants down? Man, what was going on? What made them think they could get away with it?

There is no way not to think about Enron when listening to The Voysey Inheritance. Here's the story: Daddy Voysey gives his son, the one who is going to take over his investment firm for him, some papers that show how the business really works. That is, the business has not protected the capital other have invested in it. They continue to pay the dividends to the investors, but the capital supposedly producing the income no longer exists. And Daddy Voysey tells the horrified son that his father started the business that way, and handed it on to him. So, he hands it on to his son the same way.

Okay, this is Victorian England, but does it matter? How different is now? Hmm...Voysey jr. has to think about what to do. What's the true justice? To go to jail? or stay and try to amass the capital again, keep on paying off the interest to the people who are relying on it? Going to jail won't restore the money to the investors.

This story also explores what makes people trust others. Why did so many people keep giving Daddy Voysey the money? THis is a great story.

Posted by Murphy Horner at 10:09 AM | Permalink

I am still pondering this book.

It occurs to me that I am a gluttonous reader. I read these amazing, complicated books. I LOVE their texture and the feelings and the beautiful words I am reading.

But then...I don't stop and savor them enough. I read one, and I like it...But If I finish one early in the day, I'm on to the next one by night.

Perhaps I am too greedy for these books. I don't stop and linger.

When I am eating a truly delicious dish, I like to savor it.

But my reading does not work like that.

I miss my university classes.

I would take a class again, just for the joy of discussing the books. But the fact of the matter is, I cannot go back to literature classes at the jr. college level. They are not enough. I have more questions and ideas than would fit there anymore.

Well...So I miss those literary cud-chewing sessions. And I don't know what to do with my observations and thoughts.

Journal them?

ta da! Here i am!

I had been making a concerted effort to write short reviews of the books I read.

But then, my brother Mark mentioned that he preferred a more personal approach on my blog.

Hmm...Yes. So do I. You know what though? It's harder to be personal. I end up rambly and not particularly proud of what I write.

It requires a lot of discipline to be personal. and practice. So maybe this is practice.

Stream of consciousness shift here...My co-worker practices his keyboard (piano) 4 HOURS A DAY!

holy crap!

I told him I was ashamed, because I try to make an effort to just play one song a week. I have this whole big beautiful piano, and I squander it.

He said, He is in a band, Jazz fusion, and the sax player is so good, he is ashamed to do a solo after him. He is VERY inspired to practice.

Hey, this does wrap around. See, he is inspired to do his best because he is in an evnironment that challenges him.

Me, I was more challenged in my school environment. Because somebody there notices, cared, and I paid more attention to what I was reading.

It is important, I think, to foster environments that drive us to excellence.

Oh man. That's the tough part. Good friends are hard to find.

So.

i have finished White Oleander. I feel like there is so much I would want to think about and talk about in it.

And I have already begun A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. I'm 95 pages into it, having started it yesterday.

i was reading it, and in between reading it, I was watching Zorba the greek.

I wonder if there is a mental equivalent of a vomitorium?

No, my appetite is endless.

But there are SOME books that are too steep a climb to go swiftly.

Ulysses.

I'm working very slowly on that one.
I'm on pg 122. 700 more to go. I read it in between the other books I'm reading.

Which is probably the wrong way to do it. I should sit down and savor and ponder and try to GET all the little references and stuff.

But life doesnt' let me separate and savor. It zips by, the hour gets late and then the alarm clock goes off.

More work and more meniality, and bills and catboxes and plans for the catboxes of the future.

I will tell myself that it is better to read 10 books too fast than read one slow and miss out completely on the other nine.

I can't help it anyway. I love to read.

I also have this feeling, like, I have to study, I have to get the basics down before I can get to the important question. Start working, with the right tools and theorums and laws, on the important, significant questions.

I obviously don't have the tool now, because I don't even know the question.

Posted by Murphy Horner at 11:32 AM | Permalink

A book review should include certain facts. You should include a mention of the author, the tittle, and a brief overview of the story. Probably it is bad form to give away the entire story, but it can be acceptable, or even necessary in certain contexts.

There is also another idea. An idea from the late victorian era, championed by Walter Pater and others, said that a review, or a critique, was an art form in itself.

I've talked about this before, because the idea resonates with me. Let me explain the idea in my own words.

Say, there is a work of art. A poem, a book, a painting. It is art, it is beautiful. Someone experiences it, and wants to tell other people about it.

There are two ways to do this. Let's call the first way the movie review way.

People read a movie review to find out whether the movie they are considering seeing is something they really want to see. It is really funny or thrilling or whatever it's supposed to be?

But there are some problems with movie reviews: they are subjective. Maybe that person who did the review didn't have the same sense of humor as you do. Maybe you would love a movie they hated.

Here's another idea: Have you ever been to a really good movie with smart great people, and then gone out for coffee or drinks afterwards and discussed it? That's happened to me, and we talked about the movie, and talked about the ideas of the movie...After a while, if it was a really good conversation, we would have left the movie behind altogether and started talking about the ideas.

This is the beginning. Basically, a piece of art can be a launching pad. Yes, you need it to get started but once you are launched, you may never need to refer to it again.

I feel like music does this exceptionally better than most forms. It is so abstract, you are forced upon your own soul. Pieces that are labeled "Symphony No. 5". Just what the music means to you. Not a name, not a suggestion.

What happens to me in a classical music concert is that I pay close attention to the music until I start to drift on ideas, images, colors or movement. It is an amazing source of inspiration. I feel like i could paint, or choreograph or do things I've never done before.

Now THAT is what I'm talking about!
What if I could write a review about how a book makes me feel and the ideas it makes me think without ever referring to the specific story of the book?

That would be a really great book! And I would have to be a really great writer. Or maybe i would become a great writer in the proce