Sep 29 2014

The Southern Reach Trilogy by Jeff VanderMeer

It is time for me to get off of my patootie and actually write up some of these books that I’ve been reading. At this point in time I am three trilogies and two novels behind, which doesn’t speak very well of my time management or my self discipline.

Regardless, here we go with trilogy the first, The Southern Reach Trilogy by Jeff VanderMeer. This trilogy consists of three books (shocking, I know) – Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance. I believe throughout the trilogy the author was attempting to achieve a sense of eeriness, what with the patch of land somewhere unspecified in the U.S. being eaten up by something the military calls a tremendously bad ecological disaster but which is really a creepy sentient world that is checking us out.

There are boundaries. There are tunnels through to the heart of “Area X,” as it’s called. There are expeditions, many of them, and there’s the Southern Reach where something only known as Central but presented as something rather CIAish is running things. People disappear. Plants write enigmatic words on a tower that goes down into the earth. A lighthouse contains the left-behind journals of every single failed expedition (so all of them, really), and sometimes people come back from failed expeditions (the kind where everyone is presumed dead), but they aren’t quite themselves, and then they die horrific deaths of cancer. There are weird howling creatures, and of course time works differently there.

It’s supposed to be creepy. It’s supposed to be a horror/maybe-sci-fi thriller. It’s supposed to give you chills.

It didn’t.

I didn’t mind reading them. I didn’t feel particularly forced into finishing the trilogy just for the sake of finishing it, but I wasn’t deeply involved with the books either. The characterization was a bit flat. I didn’t really care much about what was happening, or to whom. There were some good bits that I thought were original and I’m glad I read them, but I wouldn’t recommend this for someone looking for a really engrossing read.

I’ve liked Jeff VanderMeer’s other books. I’m not sure why these fell flat, but they did. Maybe he was trying to be Clive Barker and couldn’t quite pull it off.

Yay, only two trilogies and two books to go!

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2014/09/29/the-southern-reach-trilogy-by-jeff-vandermeer/

Sep 28 2014

Journey Into the Heart by David Monagan

This is an incredible story. The daring, energy, and optimism of the men who pioneered cardiology in the twentieth century are truly extraordinary. This book focuses primarily on Andreas Gruentzig, the East German cardiologist who developed and refined angioplasty. The story becomes a Greek tragedy as success leads to hubris and hubris leads to nemesis. Yet the work of Gruentzig and his precursors lives on and has changed the lives of thousands of people suffering from heart disease. Gruentzig himself is practically a figure from an Ayn Rand novel, larger than life and seemingly superhuman, whose appetite for risk and pushing the limits unfortunately led to his untimely demise. This book is thus both inspiring and cautionary. But it does support the thesis that progress is the work of a few extraordinary individuals who stand head and shoulders above the rest of us.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2014/09/28/journey-into-the-heart-by-david-monagan/

Sep 28 2014

Names for the Sea by Sarah Moss

“It’s time for me to read Names for the Sea,” I told the friend who had sent me a copy. Some books are like that, resting placidly in the to-be-read pile for months before suddenly announcing, somehow, that it is time to read them. And indeed it was; despite a personal schedule that veers from hectic to frantic, I zipped through the book in just a couple of days, impatiently awaiting the next time I could take even a few minutes to read a little bit more.
Continue reading

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2014/09/28/names-for-the-sea-by-sarah-moss/

Sep 27 2014

Cystic Fibrosis by David Orenstein

Excellent book. I started this book expecting to be depressed by accounts of patients not living past childhood, but it turns out that with currently available medical care patients can expect to live into adulthood and even to old age. They will need regular treatments and may have to make many trips to the hospital throughout their lives, particularly for lung infections, but otherwise CF patients can expect to live mostly normal and happy lives if they receive the proper care. I used to be dubious about the benefits of modern medicine, but recent experiences, as well as books like this, have bolstered my faith in its efficacy. In spite of the troubles we face in the modern era, we are still living in an age of wonders.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2014/09/27/cystic-fibrosis-by-david-orenstein/

Sep 27 2014

The War with Hannibal by Livy

Livy is too patriotic to be completely trusted as a historian, but even he cannot help but convey a grudging admiration for the towering figure of Hannibal. He has nothing good to say about Carthage in general, and he works in some malicious gossip about Hannibal that is probably nothing more than just that, but as a historian he is forced to admit that for many years no Roman commander was the equal of Hannibal and every Roman army that took the field against him was defeated. You can audibly hear him thanking the heavens that Scipio finally appeared on the scene to save Rome’s honor. Yet this book shows what kind of people the Romans of this period were, the way they stubbornly held on when all seemed lost and prevailed in the end, and many historians have considered their victory in this war the apex of Roman achievement, after which decline inevitably set in. Hannibal, alas, deserved a better nation to serve than Carthage, but his genius left its mark on military history for ages to come.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2014/09/27/the-war-with-hannibal-by-livy/

Sep 26 2014

The Rise and Fall of Renaissance France by R.J. Knecht

This book was BORING. But it was not entirely without merit. It educated me considerably on the degree to which religious strife has played a role in the history of France. One tends to think of France as a thoroughly Catholic country, but there was once a flourishing Protestant movement. It is tantalizing to speculate how France might have evolved if the Huguenots had not been stamped out root and branch; perhaps she would have thrived and prospered the way other Protestant countries have thrived and prospered. This seemed possible with the accession of Henry IV, but he paid a heavy price for his religious tolerance. My eyes were glazed over throughout most of this volume, but here and there there were some interesting bits of information. Not a book I would recommend to those with weak stomachs or short attention spans.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2014/09/26/the-rise-and-fall-of-renaissance-france-by-r-j-knecht/

Sep 20 2014

A World at Arms by Gerhard Weinberg

The author’s name suggests that he is of German descent, but he is one of the most anti-German WWII historians I have ever read. He does not accept that the Versailles treaty was an injustice to Germany, nor does he buy into the claim that Hitler admired the British and would have rather allied with them than fought them. He heaps ridicule on the Indian nationalist Chandra Bose for supposing that Germans and Japanese would be more benevolent colonial rulers than the British, and he tears to shreds A.J.P. Taylor’s argument that Hitler was not primarily responsible for starting the war. For him there is no question about where the war guilt lies. This was a lengthy work, full of tactical and diplomatic detail, but its thorough documentation serves as a healthy refutation of much of the revisionist accounts of the war that are becoming fashionable in some circles. This is not a book I would recommend as introduction to WWII, but it is a must-read for scholars, professional and amateur.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2014/09/20/a-world-at-arms-by-gerhard-weinberg/

Sep 20 2014

A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole

Walker Percy’s foreword to the book cannot be bettered:

Perhaps the best way to introduce this novel — which on my third reading of it astounds me even more than the first — is to tell of my first encounter with it. While I was teaching at Loyola in 1976 I began to get telephone calls from a lady unknown from me. What she proposed was preposterous. It was not that she had written a couple of chapters of a novel and wanted to get into my class. It was that her son, who was dead, had written an entire novel during the early sixties, a big novel, and she wanted me to read it. Why would I want to do that? I asked her. Because it is a great novel, she said.

Over the years I have become very good at getting out of things I don’t want to do. And if ever there was something I didn’t want to do, this was surely it: to deal with the mother of a dead novelist and, worst of all, to have to read a manuscript that she said was great, and that, as it turned out, was a badly smeared, scarcely readable carbon.

But the lady was persistent, and it somehow came to pass that she stood in my office handing me the hefty manuscript. There was no getting out of it; only one hope remained — that I could read a few pages and that they would be bad enough for me, in good conscience, to read no farther. Usually I can do just that. Indeed the first paragraph often suffices. My only fear was that this one might not be bad enough, or might be just good enough, so that I would have to keep reading.

In this case I read on. And on. First with the sinking feeling that it was not bad enough to quit, then with a prickle of interest, then a growing excitement, and finally an incredulity: surely it was not possible that it was so good. I shall resist the temptation to say what first made me gape, grin, laugh out loud, shake my head in wonderment. Better let the reader make the discovery on his own.

Here at any rate is Ignatius Reilly, without progenitor in any literature I know of — slob extraordinary, a mad Oliver Hardy, a fat Don Quixote, a perverse Thomas Aquinas rolled into one — who is in violent revolt against the entire modern age, lying in his flannel nightshirt, in a back bedroom on Constantinople Street in New Orleans, who between gigantic seizures of flatulence and eructations is filling dozens of Big Chief tablets with invective. …

 

I hesitate to use the word comedy — though comedy it is — because that implies simply a funny book, and this novel is a great deal more than that. A great rumbling farce of Falstaffian dimensions would better describe it; commedia would be closer to it.

It is also sad. One never quite knows where the sadness comes from — from the tragedy at the heart of Ignatius’s great gaseous rages and lunatic adventures or the tragedy attending the book itself.

The tragedy of the book is the tragedy of the author — his suicide in 1969 at the age of thirty-two. Another tragedy is the body of work we have been denied.

It is a great pity that John Kennedy Toole is not alive and well and writing. But he is not, and there is nothing we can do about it but make sure that this gargantuan tumultuous human tragicomedy is at least made available to a world of readers.

 

I was asked whether the book was canonical for Louisiana, and I am not sure that it was when I first read it not too many years after its publication, but surely it is now. It is a note-perfect rendition of aspects of New Orleans, and much more than that.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2014/09/20/a-confederacy-of-dunces-by-john-kennedy-toole/

Sep 17 2014

Gifted Hands: The Ben Carson Story by Ben Carson

No one can say that Ben Carson grew up in privileged circumstances, but from a young age he seems to have had an uncanny knack for making the right choices. I’m not sure the Ben Carson story can be a model for all young people, but it does reinforce my belief that parents rather than teachers are the critical component in a child’s educational success. This is a highly inspiring story, almost an unbroken record of success and achievement in the face of tremendous adversity. Dr. Carson’s writing is not nearly as eloquent as Obama’s, and I’m not sure I’m ready to vote for him for president, but this is definitely the kind of story that makes you examine yourself, both to see where you went wrong and to take heart that you can still change the course of your life. A fine effort by a fine man.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2014/09/17/gifted-hands-the-ben-carson-story-by-ben-carson/

Sep 17 2014

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John Le Carre

This was a fascinating story of a cat and mouse game in which it is never quite clear who is the cat and who is the mouse. It blows to bits the James Bond mythology of what spying is about: it is a dirty, dirty business, and the people who engage in it are hardly the kind of people you would want to have over for tea. I was a bit put off by Le Carre’s introduction of the protagonist, the misanthropic drunk Leamis, crusty, surly, and actually quite stupid, hardly the kind of man to put his life on the line for King and Country. When an East German spy asks him what his philosophy is, what motivates him to carry on the fight that he has dedicated his life to, it is clear that he has never seriously thought about this. It makes the ending all the more tragic and at the same time all the more just. There are layers upon layers of deception and conspiracy that keep peeling away until you’re left dumbfounded at how you, like the main characters, have been taken for a ride. A masterpiece of the genre.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2014/09/17/the-spy-who-came-in-from-the-cold-by-john-le-carre/