Category: Reviews
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke, 5/5
I knew that I was going to love this intimidatingly large novel as soon as I read the caption for the opening illustration (of a sour old man reading a book): “He hardly ever spoke of magic, and when he did it was like a history lesson and no one could bear to listen to him.” Clarke somehow overcomes a contradiction in terms to tell a plausibly fantastic tale about the revival of “practical” magic in England. The story flows well and is never boring, though it does wear thin near the end, perhaps because the author has a talent for humorous and clever descriptions but her observational style is not conducive to much psychological depth or character development. However, I found it to be a charming read and quite possibly the best debut novel I’ve ever encountered.
[Why I read it: I saw a couple cool GIFs from the BBC miniseries version, but happily decided that I should give the book a chance first.]
Complete Stories and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe
Complete Stories and Poems by Edgar Allan Poe, 4/5
This book organises all of Poe’s writings into just a few convenient categories: Tales of Mystery and Horror, Humor and Satire, Flights and Fantasies, The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym of Nantucket, and The Poems. Of these, I think the first contains the best examples of Poe’s genre-defining style, including one of the first detective stories ever written (predating the strikingly similar Sherlock Holmes stories by 46 years). The scary tales tend to be short on plot but ooze with atmosphere–the effect is almost more pictorial than literary. Overall, I didn’t enjoy this book very much and a lot of the stories felt pointless or tedious to read, but I respect Poe’s groundbreaking literary influence.
[Why I read it: I wanted to be familiar with more of Poe’s works than just The Raven.]
Grand Illusions
Grand Illusions by Richard Lawton, with a text by Hugo Leckey, 5/5
This collection of Hollywood portraits from the 1920s through 40s is full of mesmerisingly beautiful black and white images. Famous actors and actresses, exquisite lighting, glamorous settings–this book is literally a feast for the eyes.
[Why I read it: it caught my eye in the thrift store.]
The Courts of the Morning
The Courts of the Morning by John Buchan, 3/5
This charming novel can, broadly speaking, be included in Buchan’s Richard Hannay series since its prologue is narrated by the eponymous character; however, it mainly features the familiar faces of Archie and Janet Roylance, Sandy Arbuthnot and John Blenkiron. These few find themselves embroiled in a revolution against a megalomaniac mining tycoon who plans to overthrow democracy around the world from his seat of power in the fictional South American country of Olifa. Despite enjoying the book greatly, my initial enthusiasm has worn down somewhat as I consider its many faults in retrospect. Moments of suspense and adventure are countered by sections of very dry, geographical descriptions of war tactics. Psychological and guerrilla warfare are portrayed with a stubbornly naive romanticism that must be taken lightly or it becomes ridiculous. Add to this that the plot isn’t the strongest and you have a book that is fun to read but ultimately not very satisfying.
[Why I read it: I think I saw it advertised in the end pages of the last Buchan book I read. My library didn’t have it, but managed to order in a beautiful first edition from a different library.]
The Pilgrim’s Regress
The Pilgrim’s Regress: An Allegorical Apology for Christianity, Reason and Romanticism by C.S. Lewis, 4/5
Motivated by a mysterious Desire, John leaves behind the lifeless religion of his hometown, Puritania, and explores both the stern, unrelenting wastes of the cerebral North and the swamps of untrammeled self-gratification in the animal South. This journey from “‘popular realism’ to Philosophical Idealism; from Idealism to Pantheism; from Pantheism to Theism; and from Theism to Christianity” will be recognizable to those familiar with C.S. Lewis’s more biographical works (200). Admittedly obscure, this tale is similar to George MacDonald’s Phantastes in that its value may be more in the recognition than the revelation–I suspect that if I reread it every 10 years or so, my appreciation of the truths it tells will grow in proportion with my own life-experience.
[Why I read it: a fortunate thrift store find!]
Verbal Judo
Verbal Judo: The Gentle Art of Persuasion by George J. Thompson, Ph.D., and Jerry B. Jenkins, 4/5
This book contains some helpful, commonsense advice about communicating that I think would be especially useful for parents and other people in leadership roles. Of course, the author is a bit full of it and there are endless acronyms and 5-steps to this and 9-stages of that, but the big emphasis is on the concept of empathy and its related technique–paraphrasing. There is also a helpful list of “Eleven Things Never to Say to Anyone (And How to Respond If Some Idiot Says Them to You),” which includes my personal favourites: “Come here!” (usually shouted threateningly) and “Calm down!” (“BUT I AM CALM!!!”).
[Why I read it: Came across it while sorting through some of my Dad’s books.]
Fermat’s Last Theorem
Fermat’s Last Theorem: Unlocking the Secret of an Ancient Mathematical Problem by Amir D. Aczel, 2/5
In around 1637, Fermat hinted that he had “discovered a truly marvelous proof” that an + bn = cn cannot be true for n>2. Proving this deceptively simple theory required the contributions of dozens of mathematicians over a span of some 350 years. Unfortunately, while biographical aspects of the story are competently told, the author is unable or unwilling to explain important mathematical concepts in layman’s terms. If the following paragraph makes sense to you, then you probably fit the target audience of this little book:
Here, a periodic function could be conceived as having a periodicity both along the real axis and along the imaginary axis. Poincaré went even further and posited the existence of functions with a wider array of symmetries. These were functions that remained unchanged when the complex variable z was changed according to f(z)——>f(az+b/cz+d). Here the elements a, b, c, d, arranged as a matrix, formed an algebraic group. This means that there are infinitely many possible variations. They all commute with each other and the function f is invariant under this group of transformations. Poincaré called such weird functions automorphic forms (82).
If, like me, you were completely nonplussed by that description, then the only thing of value you will likely get from this book is a deeper understanding of the fact that concise ≠ comprehensible.
[Why I read it: I came across it while sorting through some of my Dad’s books.]
American Shaolin
American Shaolin: Flying Kicks, Buddhist Monks, and the Legend of Iron Crotch: An Odyssey in the New China by Matthew Polly, 3/5
This memoir of an American college dropout who transforms from bullied to badass by studying kung fu with Shaolin monks in China is a fun read, if a little bit less interesting, less believable and dirtier than the author’s later book Tapped Out.
[Why I read it: I enjoyed the author’s other book a lot.]
Better Than Before
Better Than Before: Mastering the Habits of Our Everyday Lives by Gretchen Rubin, 3/5
They say that opposites attract, in which case I suspect that I may be very similar to the author, who I found to be thoroughly grating. Perhaps it’s her approach to the topic, which is somehow both overly analytical and overly anecdotal, or perhaps it’s because studying how to make habits seems pointless to me (surely the hard part is deciding what habits to have, not how to keep them up?). I knew I was in trouble when Rubin’s first attempt (of many) to organize her readers into overly-tidy categories failed to resonate with me–am I an Upholder, Questioner, Obliger, or Rebel? Does it even matter? At any rate, I felt so little interest in this book that I had a difficult time finishing it and remember practically nothing about it now. It has joined the growing ranks of faceless self-help books that have made the New York Times Best Seller list but not an impression on me.
[Why I read it: my friend Joy recommended it to me.]
Man’s Search for Meaning
Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl, 5/5
When a psychiatrist who endured the German concentration camps of WWII has something to say about happiness and the meaning of life, you can bet it’s something worth paying attention to. Frankl’s thoughts on the bigger questions in life are woven into the first part of this short book–an account of the author’s experiences and observations in Auschwitz and other concentration camps. An introduction to the foundations of logotherapy (the author’s approach to psychotherapy) comprise the second part of the book, in which Frankl’s ideas really come into focus.
Frankl’s refreshing premise is that “man’s search for meaning is the primary motivation in his life” (121) and that “A man’s concern, even his despair, over the worthwhileness of life is an existential distress but by no means a mental disease” (125). The author’s theory of the meaning of life encompasses the complexities of human existence with startling simplicity:
As each situation in life represents a challenge to man and presents a problem for him to solve, the question of the meaning of life may actually be reversed. Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather he must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible (131).
I have seldom been moved as this book moved me, right from the preface, which contains this bit of wisdom that alone would make the book worth reading:
Don’t aim at success–the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one’s personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long run–in the long run, I say!–success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think of it (17).
[Why I read it: it was mentioned in Your Money or Your Life and the title sounded interesting.]
OmniRambles 