What Casinos Don’t Want You to Know
What Casinos Don’t Want You to Know by John Gollehon, 2/5
This book is pretty much exactly what you’d expect from anything with a “CONFIDENTIAL INFORMATION INSIDE!” banner on both covers.
The Abolition of Man
The Abolition of Man or Reflections on education with special reference to the teaching of English in the upper forms of schools by C.S. Lewis, 5/5
I mistakenly thought I’d already read everything by C.S. Lewis, so I was both surprised and delighted when Samuel came home for Thanksgiving break with a book by Lewis that I’d never even heard of before. Luckily, it is very short (a series of three college lectures) and I was able to finish reading it before the break ended.
The first chapter is somewhat snarky and rambling, but The Abolition of Man soon settles down to a fascinating analysis of the relationship between science and Tao, the innate, traditional values that give human existence its meaning and humanness. The shortness of the book meant that it was less in-depth (though also, more difficult) than I would have wished. In fact, the very conciseness of some of the points makes it easy to miss their importance and paradigm-changing nature. For example:
“…But you cannot go on ‘explaining away’ for ever: you will find that you have explained explanation itself away. You cannot go on ‘seeing through’ things for ever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. It is good that the window should be transparent, because the street or garden beyond it is opaque. How if you saw through the garden too? It is no use trying to ‘see through’ first principles. If you see through everything, then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To ‘see through’ all things is the same as not to see (81).”
Wind, Sand and Stars
Wind, Sand and Stars by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, trans. by Lewis Galantiére, 4/5
The stories in this book, based on Saint-Exupéry’s experiences as an airmail pilot and member of the French Air Force, are beautifully told – the product of a poetic soul. His bravery, adventures, eloquent love of the desert and romantic point of view remind me of a sort of French version of T.E. Lawrence. While the book is very enjoyable and quotable (occasionally even enlightening), Saint-Exupéry’s patronizing post-modernism results in a lack of intellectual/philosophical depth that makes itself increasingly felt as the book unfolds.
Marathon
Marathon: You Can Do It! by Jeff Galloway, 3/5
This guide, which applies Galloway’s signature run/walk method to marathon training, is clearly the product of much expertise and experience on the part of the author, addressing a wide variety of helpful topics. While it wasn’t entirely convincing (I still really hate the idea of interrupting my runs with walk breaks), the concepts made sense and if I ever become injured or dissatisfied with my training progress, Galloway’s method is likely one of the first I would consider adopting.
Unfortunately, some serious flaws as a book affect the quality and utility of Marathon: You Can Do It! The first half contains multiple appearances of several identical or nearly identical sentences and paragraphs, making the text bloated and frustrating to read. Also, there is a notable lack of helpful diagrams and photos to illustrate key concepts (though the few charts that appear are good). This is a book that deserves to be updated and proofread by an editor who has eyes.
Amphigorey
Amphigorey, Amphigorey Also, and Amphigorey Again by Edward Gorey (try saying that three times fast), 5/5
With a grim gaiety and chilling charm, every dark line in these three anthologies oozes originality and style. Gorey’s authenticity and consistency lend a strange sense of the inevitable to his oeuvre; at our first encounter, I thought, of course, this had to exist. Several of the stories are a little too disturbing for my taste, but I love the overall aesthetic and vocabulary. Any author who can make me run crying to a dictionary, two pages in a row (not to mention introducing me to what is perhaps the greatest sounds-like-a-swear-but-isn’t word of all time: subfuscous), is all right in my blog.
If on a winter’s night a traveler
If on a winter’s night a traveler by Italo Calvino, trans. by William Weaver, 4/5
It is with great mental pain that I write this review before consulting Wikipedia and Amazon ratings to find out what the heck this book is about. It would be easy enough to make up some intellectual-sounding drivel (too easy, in fact – If on a winter’s night begs for multiple interpretations) but I’d rather skip the college book report B.S. and nail down what will actually stick with me after this reading experience.
One of the most memorable aspects of this book is its mind-twistingly self-referential tone; Chapter One opens with “You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel.” Of course, by the time I had read that, I was in the process of reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, not about to begin, which was just a taste of the surreal, logic-challenging, expectation-defying prose to come.
“The novel begins in a railway station, a locomotive huffs, steam from a piston covers the opening of the chapter, a cloud of smoke hides part of the first paragraph. In the odor of the station there is a passing whiff of station café odor. There is someone looking through the befogged glass, he opens the glass door of the bar, everything is misty, inside, too, as if seen by nearsighted eyes, or eyes irritated by coal dust. The pages of the book are clouded like the windows of an old train, the cloud of smoke rests on the sentences (10).”
Easy, you think, this is obviously a novel about novels. Yes, but no. It is also a novel about inspiration and the experience of reading. Or maybe, its incorporation of ten different, abortive sub-stories makes If on a winter’s night more of an un-novel about the relationships between reader and book, reader and writer, reader and reader, writer and book. Whether these are “correct” interpretations or not, this book resonated deeply with me, though perhaps more in the re-thinking of it than in the reading. In contrast to novels, which follow strict rules (whether acknowledged or not), life is a labyrinth of disjointed narratives, started without beginning and ending without resolution, a tantalizing journey at the end of which we will “arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.” At least, I hope that’s the case. It is more likely that the end will find me rubbing my eyes hazily and reaching for the Wikipedia article.
Books: A Memoir
Books: A Memoir by Larry McMurtry, 1/5
Disjointed. Random. And kinda boring (much like this review).
The Polysyllabic Spree
The Polysyllabic Spree: A Hilarious and True Account of One Man’s Struggle with the Monthly Tide of the Books He’s Bought and the Books He’s Been Meaning to Read by Nick Hornby, 3/5
Hornby’s modern taste in literature meant that I did not recognize most of the authors/books he mentioned, which limited my enjoyment of this collection of essays. Luckily, though, Hornby is reasonably witty and comfortingly honest about his shortcomings as a reader (one of which is forgetting almost everything he’s read), so the book was still reasonably entertaining.
Leviathan
Leviathan, or The Matter, Forme and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil by Thomas Hobbes, 2/5
It took a couple years of Hobbes’ name consistently cropping up in books and conversation for me to get around to reading his sizeable, though by no means monstrous, Leviathan. Tommy is quoted often and respectfully, so I approached the book with a bias towards him, expecting to have my mind expanded, possibly to the point of explosion (Spinoza-style). The first chapter, which was all of two pages, took me a couple days to comprehend in any way, which seemed like an auspicious start, but sadly, once I became acclimated to the 17th century vocabulary and sentence structure, with its superabundance of semicolons, it didn’t take long for me to realize that Hobbes and I were not going to play well together. In fact, we clashed on an almost molecular level (if souls were made of molecules).
Where I had expected to encounter the radical and incisive mind of a bold hero of philosophy, I found instead a shattered old man, traumatized by civil war and clinging to futile modes of thinking. I realize that my limited life experience of uninterrupted privilege and safety does not put me in a position to make compelling criticisms, but it seems reasonable to think that maybe a man whose sole ambition in life is to avoid being slaughtered by his neighbors is not the best man to be speaking for his fellows and creating vast schemes of government and civilization. While Hobbes makes an admirably dogmatic case for the merits of abject slavery to absolute power, surely the evidence of history and testimony of every human being who has preferred death to subjugation, winning freedom at great personal risk, powerfully attests to the prevalence of an opposing set of values and beliefs. Hobbes may have worked out the perfect form of government and religion for people with the souls of slaves, but he leaves no room for people who desire more than physical safety.
NB. Reading Leviathan mostly consisted of manly slogging along, stifling groans of disagreement, so I feel only a little petty for pointing out the hilarity of the final chapters, where Hobbes starts to unravel, giving up even the pretence of logicality. It is a guilty pleasure to witness the man who denounces the usage of metaphor as one of four “abuses of speech” on page 21 then comparing the papacy to the “kingdom of fairies” and the Pope to “King Oberon” on page 543. Oh anti-Catholicism, you have never been so charming.
Ex Libris
Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader by Anne Fadiman, 5/5
This is a charming collection of book-themed essays, written with delightful wit and insight. The essay on proofreading, which opened with Fadiman’s family gleefully pointing out typos in a fancy restaurant’s menu, was my favourite. Overall, the collection provided a welcome check to my exuberant ego since, smothered in the society of undiscerning devourers of cheap romances and bad fantasy, I tend to forget that there exist many readers who are better than I am (by which I mean, who read and retain more than I could ever hope to).
OmniRambles 