Archive for the ‘books’ Category
Howard Zinn Dies at 87
January 28th, 2010
Historian, author, and activist Howard Zinn died yesterday on vacation in Santa Monica. Aside from publishing the seminal A People’s History of the United States, Zinn was among the first to call for immediate, unconditional withdraw from Vietnam, helped hide the Pentagon papers, and consistently spoke out for the causes of pacifism and social progress. Good thinker, good speaker, good guy.
2009’s Reading List
January 4th, 2010
Apparently I read 45 books in 2009, plus a bunch of other minor stuff (short stories, graphic novels, etc.) Here’s the list, more or less chronologically:
- God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater – Kurt Vonnegut
- Eyeless in Gaza – Aldous Huxley
- If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler – Italo Calvino
- The Beautiful and Damned – F. Scott Fitzgerald
- Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
- Violence – Slavoj Zizek
- Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead – Tom Stoppard
- Collected Fictions – Jorge Luis Borges
- Gentlemen of the Road – Michael Chabon
- Cosmicomics – Italo Calvino
- The Tao Is Silent – Raymond Smullyan
- The Old Man and the Sea – Ernest Hemingway
- Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! – Feynman and Leighton
- Cradle to Cradle – McDonough and Braungart
- The Two Cultures – C.P. Snow
- American Gods – Neil Gaiman
- Illuminations – Walter Benjamin
- The Medea – Euripides
- The Unbearable Lightness of Being – Milan Kundera
- Walden Two – B.F. Skinner
- The Worldly Philosophers – Robert Heilbroner
- The Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
- The Fall – Albert Camus
- White Noise – Don DeLillo
- From Bauhaus to Our House – Tom Wolfe
- Common Sense and Nuclear Warfare – Bertrand Russell
- A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
- The Quest for Mind – Howard Gardner
- Slowness – Milan Kundera
- The Prophet – Kahlil Gibran
- Letters to a Young Poet – Rainer Maria Rilke
- Darkness at Noon – Arthur Koestler
- One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich – Alexander Solzhenitsyn
- The American – Henry James
- The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
- Invisible Cities – Italo Calvino
- In Defense of Food – Michael Pollan
- The Upanishads (Easwaran translation)
- Consider the Lobster – David Foster Wallace
- King Solomon’s Ring – Konrad Lorenz
- The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao – Junot Diaz
- No Logo – Naomi Klein
- Black Hole – Charles Burns
- Foucault’s Pendulum – Umberto Eco
- Seven Nights – Jorge Luis Borges
The Good:
OK, Julia, I’ll admit – it didn’t immediately grab me, but overall Eyeless in Gaza was pretty excellent. No Point Counterpoint, mind you, which I still think is fundamentally the best book ever written by a human… but very good.
Borges was an incredibly imaginative storyteller; his Collected Fictions is a great compendium, especially the stuff in Labyrinths and Ficciones. Seven Nights is a collection of lectures. Borges talks about whatever delightful thing happen to enter his mind: The Divine Comedy, Kabbalah, the Thousand and One Nights, and so on.
Cloud Atlas and the various works of Italo Calvino both featured lovely writing and good explorations of narrative structure.
The Count of Monte Cristo was a nice documentary about Batman.
A Confederacy of Dunces and Foucault’s Pendulum are both classics that completely lived up to my expectations of them.
The Bad:
The Bell Jar. The Bell Jar, The Bell Jar, The Bell Jar. Much like The Old Man and the Sea, it’s one of those books that I wanted not to read, but to have read. Wasn’t worth it. The cover of my edition pictures a wilted rose, and the back-cover summary contains the words “…the despair of a sensitive, questioning young artist whose search for identity…” In hindsight these were serious warning signs.
The “Eh:”
Oscar Wao was fine, but for me it didn’t quite live up to the hype. I’m not sure what I expected, but it wasn’t what I got.
I’d probably have liked The Unbearable Lightness of Being better if I’d read it as an impressionable youth. Now it just exemplifies The Deep.
2010’s List
I’ve got some good stuff in the queue for this year. I just started Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch, which is terrific so far. I want to pick up Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives again; I don’t know how I ever stopped reading it, frankly. I got some Dan Dennett for Christmas. I’ve also got my eye on Nabokov’s Pale Fire, which I’m told is incredible. Plus about a million other things.
Behemoth
December 14th, 2009
While reading through Borges’ Seven Nights, I came across a reference in his discussion of the Kabbalah in which he mentions that Behemoth is actually plural, meaning “the animals.” Looking this up in the ever-reliable Wiktionary, I learned that
It may be an example of pluralis excellentiae, a Hebrew method of expressing greatness by pluralizing a noun; it thus indicates that Behemoth is the largest and most powerful animal.
Behemoth is so big that it has to be plural. Language is great.
Interview with Umberto Eco
November 16th, 2009
Der Spiegel has an interesting interview with scholar and author Umberto Eco, in which he discusses the merits of lists:
SPIEGEL: But why does Homer list all of those warriors and their ships if he knows that he can never name them all?
Eco: Homer’s work hits again and again on the topos of the inexpressible. People will always do that. We have always been fascinated by infinite space, by the endless stars and by galaxies upon galaxies. How does a person feel when looking at the sky? He thinks that he doesn’t have enough tongues to describe what he sees. Nevertheless, people have never stopping describing the sky, simply listing what they see. Lovers are in the same position. They experience a deficiency of language, a lack of words to express their feelings. But do lovers ever stop trying to do so? They create lists: Your eyes are so beautiful, and so is your mouth, and your collarbone … One could go into great detail.
Another good one:
Eco: … Culture isn’t knowing when Napoleon died. Culture means knowing how I can find out in two minutes.
Also, hearing the author of Foucault’s Pendulum say, “I felt like a character in a Dan Brown novel,” is a little bizarre.
Way better than Warhol
October 6th, 2009
A brilliant cover for a brilliant essay. The art on the Great Ideas series is fantastic.
The Nobel Prize in Gambling
September 29th, 2009
Here are the latest betting odds for the Nobel Prize in Literature. There’s also one for the Economics prize.
The Encyclopédie
September 3rd, 2009
French writer/philosopher Denis Diderot is probably best known for editing the Encyclopédie, a series of collaboratively-written books meant to compile all the knowledge of late-1700’s Europe. I just learned that the University of Michigan hosts a hypertext-ed translation of the whole thing. You can read a blurb about the project here. Some highlights:
Aside from some offensively dated ideas about race, I’m really impressed with how modern most of the thinking is. Compare that with, say, the Pseudodoxia, written just a century earlier. Way to go, Enlightenment.
The Sokal Affair
August 18th, 2009
The Sokal Affair was an incident in which a physicist, Alan Sokal, wrote a parody article using deconstructionist terminology and managed to have it published in a reputable journal of cultural studies. There was a big fuss. He discusses his reasons for doing such a thing here; an excerpt:
“But why did I do it? I confess that I’m an unabashed Old Leftist who never quite understood how deconstruction was supposed to help the working class. And I’m a stodgy old scientist who believes, naively, that there exists an external world, that there exist objective truths about that world, and that my job is to discover some of them. (If science were merely a negotiation of social conventions about what is agreed to be “true”, why would I bother devoting a large fraction of my all-too-short life to it? I don’t aspire to be the Emily Post of quantum field theory.”
The ongoing struggle between the two cultures is awesome and hilarious but mostly just sad.