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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in
radreader's LiveJournal:
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| Wednesday, March 25th, 2009 | | 11:31 am |
| | Friday, February 27th, 2009 | | 8:51 am |
| | Monday, December 8th, 2008 | | 7:01 pm |
| | Tuesday, April 15th, 2008 | | 12:48 pm |
two books
Charlotte Perkins Gilman The Yellow Wallpaper1899 Well that was short and inspiring -- a woman, trapped in a room, goes bonkers. Reasons for the psychological decay include poorly designed psychedelic sulfur-yellow wallpaper and passive mistreatment by a well-meaning husband who confines the woman to their bedroom during his daily absences. Fifteen pages. Worth analyzing, but I wish I had gotten it as part of a collection. Richard Grant In the Land of Winter1997 I picked this up assuming that it would be escapist lit ala Harry Potter. Instead it's a tale of a Wiccan woman (who is spiritual, but not exactly Hermione) whose daughter is seized from her as she undergoes and investigation for quasi-ritualistic occultic sexual traumatization. The plot was much more political and the writing much less charming than I anticipated, but I don't regret the time I spent reading this. The most interesting thing about the reading experience in this library book was that someone had read it before me; someone who obviously takes Wicca very seriously. She(?) had penciled in footnotes in several places warning of the dangers of adopting wild wolves or correcting some incantation or another. I became much more interested in this co-reader than I was in any of the characters of the book; those penciled asterisks were serious business! | | Saturday, April 5th, 2008 | | 8:01 pm |
A review of Khalil Ghibran
Khalil Ghibran The Forerunner 1920 While reading the Forerunner I felt an overwhelming sense of wonder. The parables and poems deal with life and death and the deepest aspects of human existence; the purity of the forms used made me want to read each bit of writing over and over, dwelling on the many possible interpretations dealing with spirituality, self-awareness, the relationship between the mentor or muse and the inspired. Amazon has a lovely review of this book written by the editor of Eyes Of The Poet: Love and Passion in Lasting Splendor, Brian Douthit. Douthit claims that Ghibran's book is an assertion "that we are all our own forerunners, meaning that we originate from nothing less than ourselves, our own spirit, and our own karma." Reading Douthit's review of Ghibran's work seems to be opening up a wormhole for me . . . now I want to get to know more about the reviewer than I do about the book he reviewed! Has anyone else had this experience? | | Sunday, March 30th, 2008 | | 10:04 pm |
Ivona, Princess of Burgundia
Witold Gombrowicz
1938
This play
is
totally
rad.
The eponymous* character, Ivona, through no action of her own, drives the royal family so insane through her passivity that they are compelled to murder her. Each member of the royal family (King, Queen and Prince) finds a different reason to hate Ivona (although all reasons relate to her passivity).
Each reason they find seems to relate to a sense of self-loathing that that character has; the Prince hates Ivona because he projects his own predisposition towards lovesick crushes onto her. The King thinks that Ivona's silence is a challenge to his power, thus revealing how tenuous he believes his grip on his situation to be. The queen believes that Ivona's silent and shy demeanor parallels the flaccid stylings of her own poetry habit, which the Queen has been shamefully hiding for years. Ivona is a mirror that shows each member of the household a weakness and they independently decide she must be killed. The three each come up with a different way of killing the poor girl--a passive poison, a knife thrust through the heart, and a choking hazard are all on the table, but in the end her death brings the entire royal family to its knees.
The story is beautiful, puzzling, strange, morbid, and really pretty funny. I related to all of the characters and would love to see "Ivona" staged. The story begs for analysis from a feminist perspective. The passivity of the female lead wreaks havoc with the existing power struggle. The variety of ways the character of Ivona could be played is boundless; there is so much room for interpretation in her silent presence that I feel compelled to read this play again and again, imagining a different Ivona every time.
Top 20, most definitely.
*This isn't quite the word I'm looking for. | | Friday, March 28th, 2008 | | 10:24 pm |
The Book of Shadows
The Book of Shadows
by James Reese
2002
Horror fiction featuring an incubus/ghost/priest, succubus/ghost/girl, hermaphrodite witch and other witches, nuns and psuedonuns, handsome demon, innocent farm boy, and just about any other traditional Halloween costume you can imagine (excepting of course, the slutty cheerleader or Steve and the Stingray). The characters, which could easily have devolved into paper-dolls given the degree to which their strangeness is exaggerated, are surprisingly well-developed. The plot is tightly woven; fantastic, glamorous and suspenseful. A wonderful take on the French Revolution.
I love "magic words" and enjoyed puzzling with the little French and Latin bits strewn throughout the dialogue, but the way language is used in this book isn't particularly clever.
I wouldn't be surprised to find out that Reese, our author, is some distant cousin of A.N. Roquelaure. If you enjoy her books, you will enjoy this mass market paperback. And you can get it used on Amazon for a penny.
Fair price. | | Wednesday, March 19th, 2008 | | 10:35 pm |
semi-literate rant followed by some whitman
The Eagle
Jack Whyte 2005 I don't know why I keep reading historical fiction writer Jack Whyte's Camelud Chronicles, as I only ever read one that was halfway decent. I guess I just keep reading more hoping that he'll get to the good parts of the Camelot legend, but it doesn't happen. Perhaps this should bias me against the entire genre of Canadian Historical Fiction. http://www.camulod.com/ This series of historical novels presents the tale of King Arthur set against the backdrop of Roman Britain. That means that they speak Latin sometimes, which is fun in the same way that sudoku is fun. I promised myself last time I read a Whyte book that I would never bore myself like that again, but the story of Lancelot seduced me. Surely there will be some bawdy naughty bits . . . right? Hmmn. Well, honestly, there are a few, but GUINEVERE NEVER GETS ANY AFFECTION EVER WTF POOR WOMAN! I mean, the whole point of her character is that everyone wants to get in her pants, right? Not as far as Whyte is concerned. I'm frustrated on her behalf, and I don't care how many Elaines get their bodices shredded. In NINE books the author never got around to the meat of the story, no matter what part of the story he's dealing with. In The Lance Thrower he spent hundreds of pages discussing the threat of Atilla the Hun. The Huns never show up. The Huns never show up, Guinevere never gets laid, Lancelot is a pathetic dork, there's not a speck of magic or mystery in any of the eight books, Merlin has leprosy and goddamn Arthur got stabbed in the leg and never does anything heroic. What a crock. I read the series because the first book showed some potential. Excalibur was forged out of meteor-metal (which I liked to imagine as Kryptonite). I like reading about the way things like weapons are made about as much as I love reading bits and snips of Latin (which is to say, not much, but more than I love Sudoku). I have to admit though, the real reason I started reading these is because I love reading about the Lancelot/Guinivere/Arthur love triangle and will read even the most pathetic grocery-store bodice-rippers to see a new take on those archetypes. I blame The Once and Future King for this clearly unhealthy obsession. Obviously I did not enjoy that last 528 pages of fiction. There is only one cure for this type of frustration: Walt Whitman. 6
A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands;
How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more
than he. I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green
stuff woven. Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord,
A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropt,
Bearing the owner's name someway in the corners, that we may see
and remark, and say Whose? Or I guess the grass is itself a child, the produced babe of the
vegetation. Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic,
And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones,
Growing among black folks as among white,
Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the same, I
receive them the same. And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves. Tenderly will I use you curling grass,
It may be you transpire from the breasts of young men,
It may be if I had known them I would have loved them,
It may be you are from old people, or from offspring taken soon out
of their mothers' laps,
And here you are the mothers' laps. This grass is very dark to be from the white heads of old mothers,
Darker than the colorless beards of old men,
Dark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths. O I perceive after all so many uttering tongues,
And I perceive they do not come from the roofs of mouths for
nothing. I wish I could translate the hints about the dead young men and
women,
And the hints about old men and mothers, and the offspring taken
soon out of their laps. What do you think has become of the young and old men?
And what do you think has become of the women and children? They are alive and well somewhere,
The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,
And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the
end to arrest it,
And ceas'd the moment life appear'd. All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.
| | Wednesday, March 5th, 2008 | | 4:00 pm |
A History of Popular Science
Elephants on Acid and Other Bizarre ExperimentsAlex Boese 2007 This book is designed and written towards an immature audience, but covers explicit and disturbing subject matter. I would not recommend it for anything other than frat-house bathroom reading. The book design is distracting. The text is printed in hot pink and black and the designer uses annoying sans-serif fonts (sans-serif means they don't plan on having you read for an extended period of time). There are b/w illustrations/diagrams/goofy photos on almost every page (often only tangentially related) that are really interesting, but the cover design is horrible. The subject matter includes Frankenstein-type experiments, mind-control, Freudian dream science, horny turkeys and hypersexual cats, pissing experiments and of course, drug-addled elephants. Spoiler alert: the elephant dies. | | Friday, February 29th, 2008 | | 5:36 pm |
no reviews, just a list
I've lost interest in writing real reviews lately, partially because I haven't been reading anything spectacular but mostly because I have other priorities at this time. I'm still trying to reach the 50 book goal though, so I'll keep listing what I've read. If you're interested in hearing what I thought about any of these, then comment.
Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro (2005)* Notes from My Travels, Angelina Jolie (2003) Dawn, Elie Wiesel (1961) Winning with People, John Maxwell (2004) I'm feeling defensive about listing a couple of these. Can you guess which? *I actually enjoyed this book quite a lot. I'm replacing the Murakami on my Top 20 with this. It's creepier and more elegant than anything I've read in a while. ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) raylette, I think you'd REALLY like it. | | Sunday, February 24th, 2008 | | 6:06 pm |
book fair
Holy Moly. This week at the College Art Association I died and went to book fair heaven. Billions of the newest, most interesting books related to art and culture (and free paint and pencils and hundreds of hershey's kisses), with lots of offers for "desk copies" etc. I have specific notes on the conference for specific people. NOTE 1: While I was there, I met some folks from an interesting little publishing company called 33 1/3. DANNY YOU HAVE TO CHECK THEM OUT! YOU SHOULD WRITE FOR THEM AND/OR WORK FOR THEM (or at least buy some of their books for your library). Apparently they have a blog at http://33third.blogspot.comNOTE 2: I got a lot of free and heavily discounted books while I was there. Sara P., I expect to see you at the conference and in the book fair in LA next year, kapeesh? There wasn't an overwhelming amount of printmaking related material, but there was enough to keep you happy for weeks at least. | | Monday, February 4th, 2008 | | 7:04 pm |
| | Sunday, February 3rd, 2008 | | 9:09 pm |
Worst Book Ever
I just finished reading the worst book I've ever read.  Hunk City, by James Wilcox, is set in a fictional Louisiana city inhabited by a bunch of eccentric characters who are supposed to represent the crazy old coots fighting in the culture wars. The characters are very difficult to distinguish from each other because they are all equally outlandish. They're all parts of different religions and sometimes change their religious preferences with no real reason. Their economic structure is equally fluid, due to the lottery, inherited wealth, and a variety of alimony negotiations. Marital infidelity and political corruption are all alluded to but never fully explained or integrated into a cohesive narrative. This makes the plot incomprehensible. The turbulence of the plot makes it impossible to get to know or want to understand any of the characters. It doesn't help the author tries too hard to include charming/tacky southern details and settings for each person he introduces. For example one character lives in a mansion named Graceland II with a pagoda in the backyard next to the gravelly zen-garden landscape architecture, but she also has a big white plastic cross in the front yard, not to mention the catfish ponds filled with sewage (also in the backyard?). If I can't understand what a character's home looks like, how am I possibly going to understand the character? To top it off, the narrator in the story can't tell the difference between a turban and a nun's wimple! I was miserable the entire time I was reading this, but at least it has a bedazzled cover. | | Sunday, January 27th, 2008 | | 4:13 pm |
I've been putting off reviewing Dennis Bakke's Joy at Work because I'm not sure exactly how I feel about it. I don't usually read business or "leadership" books, but after adventuring down an unfamiliar aisle of MPL on behalf of a friend who was looking to improve his time management skills, I noticed this title and thought it might be a useful thing for a struggling young teacher to examine. Joy at Work is about creating a values-based workplace. Although some might be turned off by the religious undertones of Bakke's philosophy, Bakke is very careful to point out that the values around which he structured his business transcend different religious faiths just as they can transcend different business models. Bakke applied his principles to the energy company AES (which he cofounded the year before I was born) where he put employee satisfaction (Joy) ahead of profits as the companies goal. Bakke proposes that Joy comes from empowering employees , requiring them to become educated about and make major decisions regarding the management of his company's resources, even if the employee was originally hired to work as a shift-working plant technician. The philosophy put forth in Joy at Work is pretty interesting and there's a blurb on the back cover by Bill Clinton. I was really taken by many of the ideas and even paraphrased some of Bakke's ideas about profit in the syllabus for a course I teach (relating grades to profits; in which neither is the true measure of a person's joy, education, or life). There are some ways in which the book would appeal to a conservative audience (Christian undertones) and others in which it would appeal to what my Dad calls "liberal whackos" (there's a blurb by Bill Clinton on the back cover). Daniel and Leila would like for me to stop writing this now. The next book I'm reviewing is called "Hunk City." Don't get your hopes up. | | 4:06 pm |
virgil again?
Hey librarians (and other radreaders). What do you think of this list? http://wikiscanner.virgil.gr/btmyd/btmyd StaircaseLarge.png I think it's particularly interesting that "I don't read" fares better on standardized tests than Fahrenheight 451, The Color Purple, The "Holy" Bible (regular Bible readers did much better), and The Purpose Driven Life. | | Sunday, January 6th, 2008 | | 11:05 pm |
Book 2: Ain't Myth-Behaving
The problem with cutting off the cable company is that you start to notice that your most stupid brain cells start to get hungry, and after a few months they start schooling hungrily around in your skull like the sharks in that Jimmy Buffett song "Fins." Who knows what would happen if you didn't throw them some chum every once in a while?  Some parts of Ain't Myth-Behaving by Katie MacAlister like throwing out some fresh sashimi in with the rest of the chum. I'm new to the genre of paranormal romance (although I admit to having had an embarrassing sense of dedication to the WB's Charmed back in undergrad) and I always have low expectations when I buy a book from the grocery store (which doesn't stop me from doing it, especially when I'm staying at my parents house and Dad tells me to get "whatever I need" while I'm picking up a couple gallons of milk and some pasta sauce), but I was charmed by this cutesy take on two ancient myths. In the first novella, MacAlister gives us the story of a normal red-blooded American girl who is swept off her feet by a handsome stud who happens to also be Cernunnos, the Irish fertility god. Spoiler-alert: he has antlers and they're easily stimulated. Also, they have to get married in less than a week or he dies. Good thing everyone falls desperately in love and they are darn sure that they're sexually compatable first. I really enjoyed this half of the book, told from the perspective of the god himself. The second half of Ain't Myth-Behaving tells the story of a contemporary girl who doesn't know she's a Valkyrie who falls in love with a Viking ghost. Only she can free him from a thousand-year-old curse that is keeping him out of Valhalla. This story is pretty complicated, especially since I'm not up on my Norse mythology or Wagner's operas, but somehow MacAlister spins it so that the main characters end up being the offspring of Brynhilde or Sigfried and their steamy union is the only way to end a variety of tangled curses that plague their ancestors. I'm still pretty confused about all of that, which pisses me off because I do not buy pulp to be confused (if I wanted to be confused I'd try to read Barthes on Barthes again). The smut in this story is less rewarding than in the first, relying heavily on ignorance as an excuse for dirty-talk; "Oh, Vikings don't know what foreplay is? Let me explain." An additional minor annoyance was the ironic interior monologue of a newly-minted immortal being who is trying to quit smoking and who thinks Viking sex will help. Both stories are incredibly trashy and mostly fun. MacAlister presents us with characters that are delightfully "down-to-earth." Odin, for instance, watches the world on dozens of flat-screen TVs and Cernunnos' hellhounds are replaced by bow-bedecked toy poodles. The writing is, especially during the frequent sex scenes, quite horrible--but if the sex-talk wasn't so ridiculous then the stories wouldn't be nearly as much fun. The jokes (and puns) are definitely giggle-worthy and the smut is blush-worthy, but if you want my advice, close the book when you finish the first novella and move on to more enjoyable things.
Ain't Myth-Behaving would fit right in between episodes of Charmed and Buffy; young,cute, twenty-something girls; superpowers, paranormal mythology; pop-culture references. Also, the cover is pretty cute. Two down, forty-eight to go. | | Friday, January 4th, 2008 | | 5:33 pm |
new year
2008 will be the first year I set a reading goal for myself and it will (hopefully) also be my last year of college, as I plan to grab my MFA in December. The first book I've read this year is a travelogue. I love travelogues and have been known to get hopelessly lost navigating black belt Alabama while listening to travel-writing on tape. The Sex Lives of Cannibals is one of my top five ten hundred all time favorite travel stories, hands-down. J. Maarten Troost's take on the two years he spent "adrift in the Equatorial Pacific" living on Tarawa, an atole that is part of the Gilbert Islands. Troost's wife works for an agency that is attempting to teach sustainable agriculture and modern sanitation to the people of the Pacific Islands, and he's just along for the ride. Troost "dwells themelike"* on the consequences of Western Imperialism on the contemporary culture of the islanders. Of particular interest to Troost is the way things like disposable diapers and La Macarena have succeeded on the island that can't seem to grasp electricity or plumbing. Rather than writing about actual adventure, Troost is particularly enamored with the topic of sanitation -- poo-filled lagoons bookend the actual story. The book would make good fodder for a classroom debate about Malthusian economics, is not recommended for any animal-rights activists on my flist, and at some points reads like a horrible reality TV show with Unnecessary Capital Letters Used for Comic Effect and Often to Emphasize Something Really Gross (like giant cockroaches or the ten-millionth mention of where poo goes in an island with no toilets). Aside from all that, there is a really great chapter about WWII's impact on the island. When one of the points of Troost's writing is how the disposable aspects of Western culture can't be disposed of when you live on an island, it is particularly disturbing to consider the fact that the detritus left by a battle constantly reminds people that "oh, that's right, 5,500 men were killed here. Other highlights include the impact of nuclear testing on the Pacific Islands (apparently we still do that?)
AND SHARKS! 20 FOOT SHARKS! THE AUTHOR ACCIDENTALLY KICKING SHARKS IN THE FACE! OMG BIG WAVES FILLED WITH SHARKS!*his word not mine | | Wednesday, December 5th, 2007 | | 11:45 am |
I've been lazy updating lately AND I've been reading trashy grocery store novels:) Let's see . . . along with Constance O'Banyon's historical trash The Sword of Rome and Mary Janice Davidon's mermaid chick lit Swimming Without a Net, I swear I have been reading "real books." For example, Elie Wiesel's Night, Hunter S. Thompson The Rum Diary, and Vonnegut's Galapagos. All were fun, none were top 20, and I apologize, but I don't have time to review any of them with any depth. Someday soon I'll write a review of Night for crackthespine and then I guess we're reading Swann's Way? | | Sunday, October 28th, 2007 | | 1:16 am |
October Books
I recently read The Devil's Cup: Coffee, the Driving Force in History(1999) by Stewart Lee Allen. Rather than being much about history or even about coffee, it was more of a travelogue written by a gastronomic pirate ala Anthony Bourdain. Allen makes a number of different trips in Africa, India, and the Middle East to better understand the origins of caffeinated culture and is often engaged in illicit or illegal pursuits at the same time. Art smuggling, for instance, or carrying a vial of pure caffeine that looks suspiciously like coke on a trans-America roadtrip. They invented the word "gonzo" for books like this one. The story would make a great adventure film! My one major criticism is that the book's design seems grossly over-stylized, from jacket design, to font, the page numbers, to page size, to the chapter numbers illustrated with quotes and cups of coffee. It's ridiculous and distracting and makes it seem dated already. The book was published in '99 and it looks like the editors truly expected the world to end shortly thereafter, as their drippy gross fonts are too offensive to allow the book to have any staying power. No one in 2010 wants to looks at something best described as hyper-grunge. What else have I been reading . . . hmmn . . . Daniel and I listened to the first dozen CDs of Bill Clinton's autobiography last weekend when we were driving to a conference in W.Va. I also started Acts of Faith by Philip Caputo because I'm interested in reading more about Darfur, but so far it's awful, so it might be a while before I pick it back up. I checked out a tacky-looking book I thought that I expected to be a trashy historical romance novel and was perturbed when I discovered I was reading "inspirational fiction" by Kathleen Morgan. It was called Consuming Fire and it was too silly for me to renew it at the library. I also started and quickly abandonded Alon Paton's Too Late the Phalarope. I've got a bookmark in Nabakov's Pnin too. I guess my attention span is shrinking lately, because it seems like that's an excessive amount of unfinished reading. One thing I did finally finish is John Steinbeck's The Red Pony (1937) and I posted my comments about it to ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif) crackthespine, a new book group I was recently invited to join. | | Saturday, October 6th, 2007 | | 10:49 pm |
banned books week
Last week was banned books week and to celebrate, I read Lolita. Sadly, this is not the filthiest book I've ever read. Happily, I noticed that there are many more Nabokov books on the shelves of the Central Library, and I definitely prefer this writing to some of the other smut I've been paging through. Lolita was pretty awesome and not at all what I expected. I read the annotated edition with notes by Alfred Appel Jr., which I recommend unless you speak French and know the works of Edgar Allen Poe, Proust, Freud, and Joyce by heart. It also helps to understanding the intricacies of lepidoptery. The endnotes also helped me unpack with some of the wordplay that I would have missed otherwise; for instance Nabakov includes many anagrams of his name when he speaks of minor characters. I feel like every single word of the novel was a puzzle piece; dual meanings and literary references made the writing rich, the language multivalent, and the style of Lolita exquisite. I thought I knew much more about this book before I picked it up than I actually did. For instance, I didn't know that Humbert Humbert was a murderer. I also didn't know how Lolita's mother died. I didn't know that so much of the meaning of the book centers on the relationship of "old world" Europe with pop-culture teen Americana. I didn't know Nabokov loved bugs. I love that he loved bugs. . . . now to netflix queue the movie. Speaking of Netflix, I recently watched a "family-friendly french film" called Le Papillon (2002).I think this book and that movie make interesting bedfellows. |
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