Book 19 - The Hunger Games - Suzanne Collins

Just so you know, I do take recommendations, and I actually act on them.  I don't read every book that is recommended to me, but I will almost always give it serious consideration.  Please leave your suggestions in the comments section of the blog, or on my FB page.

Book 19 - The Hunger Games - Suzanne Collins

The Hunger Games is the first book in a very popular teen fiction series set in a futuristic America.  Panem, the central capital, rules over twelve districts with an iron hand.  There used to be thirteen districts, but one of them was destroyed in the process of putting down a rebellion, and now once a year the capital demands that each of the remaining districts send one boy and one girl to participate in a spectacle known as The Hunger Games.  One might think that this is some quaint little sporting event, modeled after the Olympics or the X-Games to promote peace and harmony among the districts.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  It is a bloodsport in which these youngsters, aged 12-18 (not surprisingly the same demographic at which the books are aimed), are forced to fight to the death in an open-air arena.  The environment is under the control of the game masters, and is engineered to present just as much of a deadly challenge to the fighters as any of their fellow gladiators.  The whole affair is broadcast on live television, with nightly recaps of who died that day.

Katniss is a teenage girl from District 12, which was once Appalachia.  She is very poor, and helps feed her mother and younger sister by illegally hunting in the woods outside the District 12 fence.  She usually hunts with her friend Gale, a boy maybe a few years older than her.  They typically bring home enough meat to feed their respective families, with some extra to trade for other goods at the local market.

When Katniss' little sister, just twelve, is selected for the games, Katniss volunteers to take her place, and is sent to the capital with the baker's son Peeta.  After a brief training period, they are thrust into the arena.  The game turns out to be just as much about survival against the elements as it is about battling the others.  Provisions are scarce, and one must generally engage in direct battle with others to obtain them.  Katniss' skills as a huntress allow her avoid these skirmishes by obtaining her food from her environment, but water sources are few as well, and are placed to help force conflict, making it difficult to survive without engaging the others.  Some of the players form alliances, but these are typically short-lived and rife with distrust, because in the end there can only be one winner.

Because this is teen fiction, there has to be teen drama.  Katniss has been too wrapped up in taking care of her family to notice boys, so when she learns that Peeta has had a crush on her forever, she starts to wonder about the so-far platonic relationship she has with Gale.  To further complicate things, her alcoholic coach has devised a plot-line in which she and Peeta are a love interest, so she must keep up appearances by playing kissy-face with him.  This "relationship" becomes incredibly popular with the viewing audience and proves to be even more advantageous than they could possibly imagine.

I can understand why these books are so popular.  It's the classic theme of righteous teens against a world of either evil and/or inept grown-ups.  There's silly teen romance, but it doesn't slow down the action.  I thought it might be a little violent for younger readers, but I guess it's no worse than anything else they see on the movie or the video screen.  All-in-all, it beats the heck out of sparkly vampires.

Book 18 - In Defense of Food - Michael Pollan

No preamble.  Time's a wastin'!

Book 18 - In Defense of Food - Michael Pollan

Michael Pollan is obsessed with food.  But it's not about a particular chef, or a particular style of preparation, or a particular ethnic cuisine.  He's not going to exotic locals trying to convince you to eat bugs or organs or something else the natives there eat all the time.  No, Michael Pollan doesn't care so much about what particular kind of food that you eat.  He just wants you to make sure that it is food.

"That's silly," you might say.  "Of course what I'm eating is food.  The very act of consuming it, by definition, makes it so."   Mr. Pollan might take exception to that.  Especially if what you are eating is the highly processed "edible foodlike substances" that comprise the modern Western diet.

"Shenanigans!" you might say.  "Now Keith is so desperate to try to finish the challenge that he has resorted to diet books!"  But Pollan is not trying to compete with likes of Atkins and Tarnower.  His book is An Eater's Manifesto (the book's subtitle).  It is a set of theses that Pollan has nailed to the kitchen door in order to get us to reclaim real food, and shun the "foodlike substances" that have been foisted upon us by the food industry.  His ideas, in theory, are simple.  In fact the entire gist of his manifesto can be summed up in three very short sentences:  "Eat food.  Not too much.  Mostly plants."

Pollan spends a good bit of time explaining the notion of nutritionism, which is the belief that food can be scientifically broken down into its constituent parts (fat, carbohydrates, protein, vitamins, anti-oxidants, etc), and by increasing or limiting the intake of these component parts, we can eat our way to nutritional health.  This way of thinking has dominated nutritional science for years: one minute we are told we should eschew butter for margarine, the next minute we are told that trans-fat is bad.  Pollan explains the drawbacks of this reductionist approach and how incorrect conclusions based on this approach have negatively affected health.  Pollan also shows us how this nutritional roller coaster plays right into the food science industry, who when faced with a particular nutritional science claim are more than happy to engineer fat-free cookies, or low-carb pasta.

Right now, you might be clutching your McRib Sandwich between stubby little fingers, barbecue sauce dripping down your chins, preparing once again to defend the substance you are shoving into your gaping maw as being food.  Pollan has very simple guidelines for determining whether what you are eating is food:  don't eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food; don't eat anything with unpronounceable ingredients;  don't eat anything that makes health claims on its package, etc;

Pollan is a convincing advocate for the topic.  He stays away from hyperbole, and presents cogent, well-researched arguments.  His message is simple and sensible enough to be intuitive.  Much as The Omnivore's Dilemma made you stop and think about where your meal comes from, this book will stop and make you think about what it is made of.

Book 17 - The Wordy Shipmates - Sarah Vowell

Well I'm winding down from Thanksgiving, and between tryptophan-induced comas I've managed to knock out a couple of books.  In somewhat keeping with the holiday, I decided to read something to do with the early Puritan settlers for whom the holiday is rightly or wrongly associated.

Book 17 - The Wordy Shipmates - Sarah Vowell

The Wordy Shipmates is a witty view of the early Puritan settler's foray into the new world, but it forgoes tales of  the Mayflower voyagers that landed at Plymouth Rock, and instead focuses mainly on those settlers that came across ten years later on the Arbella and founded the Massachusetts Bay Colony on the site where the city of Boston stands today (more or less).  Vowell establishes early on that there is an extremely important difference between the two settlements.  While the Plymouth pilgrims were separatists, wanting nothing to do with the Church of England, those who founded Massachusetts Bay Colony tried to maintain their membership in the Church, thinking that they could reform it from within.  This creates an interesting theological and political tightrope they must walk in order to stay true to their principals and not piss off the King, who you may recall is - thanks to Henry VIII's marital problems - the head of the Church of England.

Managing this balancing act falls greatly on John Winthrop, the founding governor of the colony and the man who inspired the colonists as well as Ronald Reagan's speechwriters with his line: "For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us."  Winthrop has the thankless task of keeping some of the more radical colonists in check, such as the separatist John Endecott, and the always "out there" Roger Williams, whose ideas eventually lead him to be banished.  Winthrop is forced to constantly spin the actions of these and others in order to keep the King at bay.
 
Vowell has a deep love/hate relationship with these Puritans, admiring many of their principles while abhorring many of their deeds.  She admires the free-thinking Roger Williams who puts forward such radical ideas as true freedom of religion (most in the colony felt you were free to worship as they did), separation of church and state, and the notion that the land actually belonged to the Indians.   She also seems to admire the prototypical feminism displayed by Anne Hutchinson, who has the gall to develop her own theological ideas and the unmitigated audacity to preach them to others, which winds up in her banishment.  She seems to admire many of the ideas Winthrop puts forth, but looks down on some of his actions, such as his role in the trial of Hutchinson.  She paints a particularly unflattering picture of The Mystic Massacre, in which John Mason and John Underhill burned the Pequot fort to the ground, resulting in the deaths of 700 men, women and children.

The book is technically a history book, I guess, but it is filled with wit and humor, and is constantly drawing parallels between the actions of the Puritans and more modern historical events and pop culture.  Vowell makes references to The Brady Bunch and a little known show named Thanks, a sitcom based on Puritan life that briefly aired on CBS in 1999.  At one point Vowell tells us that Winthrop is to Williams as Pete Seeger is to Bob Dylan, and compares William's zeal for the pursuit of his religious ideas without care for consequences to Oppenheimer's search for the atomic bomb.  All-in-all, it's an interesting view on what might be viewed as a rather dull subject.

As usual, I probably haven't done justice to the book, so to compensate I dug up some clips in which Vowell previewed some of this material on This American Life.  You can listen here:
Part 1:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTXUSQraEvE
Part 2:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fA59w8yPzJY

Book 16 - Legends of the Fall - Jim Harrison

After a rather prodigious run, I seem to have slowed down a bit, which does not bode well for completion of the challenge.  Yes, I'm still considering that possibility.  It ain't over 'til the fat lady sings, and she doesn't break out her Viking hat until New Year's Eve.  Any suggestions for brisk reads are welcome.  Please leave them in the comments section or on my FB page.  BTW, I always appreciate any comments on the books or the content of the reviews, so don't be shy about that either.

So...I'm somewhat of a fan of Anthony Bourdain.  I read Kitchen Confidential in last year's challenge (click here for the review).  Although he can be a little annoying sometimes, I love the way that he fearlessly approaches the food and culture of the places he visits.  Also, he's never really thought of himself as a great writer, but he admires people who are.  I recently came across an episode of No Reservations, his TV show that appears on the Travel Channel, in which he visited Montana.  One of the people he talked with while he was up there was Jim Harrison, apparently one of Bourdain's literarary heroes.  I'd never read anything by Mr. Harrison, but Tony mentioned that one of his books was Legends of the Fall.  Having heard that the movie had been rather good (I haven't seen it), and curious to see whether Harrison was worthy of the praise Bourdain was heaping upon him, I decided to check out the book.

Book 16 - Legends of the Fall - Jim Harrison

Legends of the Fall is actually three novellas - a fact that I may need to revisit if I find myself two books shy at the end of the year.  The first, "Revenge," deals with Cochran, a man who befriends a very wealthy businessman named Tibey.  This nickname is short for Tiburon, which is Spanish for shark, and which ought to tell you where this is going.  Although he has some legitimate business concerns, for the most part Tibey earned his money the old fashioned way - drugs and prostitution.  As his name implies, Tibey has a reputation for being ruthless, and when he discovers that Cochran and his wife Miryea are having an affair, he arranges to catch them in the act.  He beats Cochran senseless and leaves him to die in the Mexican dessert, and maims his wife and puts her into service as a prostitute.  Cochran is found by some Mexican villagers and nursed back to health, whereupon he sets out to seek his revenge against Tibey, and reclaim his beloved Miryea.  There's a couple of ways you could imagine this playing out, and you'd be wrong about both of them.

In the second Tale, "The Man Who Gave Up His Name," Nordstrom is a man who marries the woman of his dreams, has a beautiful child, and has an extremely successful business career.  Everything is apparently wonderful for 18 years, until one day his teenage daughter notes that he is a bit of a cold fish.  Swept up by a wave of self-doubt, he starts trying to change his life.  He learns to cook.  He embarks on new experiences.  He realizes that his marriage is over, and he and his wife divorce.  As he becomes increasingly detached from his previous life, he is viewed as increasingly eccentric - even crazy.  However, he finds in this change a new freedom that he never new existed, and in that freedom a new-found courage to live life on his own terms.

In the final story, from which the book takes its name, Harrison tells the tale of a father and his three sons living on a ranch in Montana in the early part of the twentieth century.  Alfred is the ambitious one, who will ultimately run for the U.S. Senate.  Samuel, a bit of an intellectual, is his mother's favorite.  Tristan is the black sheep.  He is mercurial, strong-willed, resistant to authority, and wants to carve out his own path in life.  When the war tragically takes Samuel, Tristan reacts by going on a scalping spree of the enemy, an action that lands him in a mental institution.

He returns home and marries Susannah, a woman that was originally chosen for Alfred, but he is restless and sets out again, this time to sea.  He is gone so long that they are sure he is dead (it doesn't help that he sends word back to this effect), and Alfred winds up marrying Susannah.  He ultimately returns and settles down with a different wife and has some kids.  However, there still exists a tension between he and Susannah that fuels her bipolar disorder, and causes friction between the two brothers.  Tragic events and Prohibition lead him to become a smuggler, which puts him at odds with the Irish mob, and ultimately sends him away from the ranch again.

While none of these storylines are connected, all three of these tales share a common thread:  what happens to a man when you take away those things for which he cares the most?  Harrison tells these tales beautifully, deftly weaving interludes of introspection and brutal violence throughout the plot.  Although all three tales are great, I especially enjoyed the second one, perhaps because it comes the closest to having a happy ending.  I highly recommend this book!

Book 15 - Anatomy of a Disappearance - Hisham Matar

This is Hisham Matar's second novel.  His first, In the Country of Men, won a ton of international literary awards and was short-listed for the prestigious Man Booker Prize, so when I saw this on the shelf at the library, I thought it might be worth checking out.

Book 15 - Anatomy of a Disappearance - Hisham Matar

The story centers around Uri, a boy who lives with his father, a dissident exiled from his home country.  Uri's mother passed a few years earlier, and Uri has never really been able to get over the grief.  Now twelve years old, he meets a beautiful young woman and is immediately smitten with her.  The twenty-something woman, Mona, falls for the boy's father however, and after a short courtship, they are married and Mona moves in.  The boy sees himself as his father's rival for Mona's affection, and Mona loves the boy's attention.  The father, seeing what's going on, ships the boy off to boarding school in England.

Shortly after the boy leaves for school, the father disappears under mysterious circumstances.  Most of those close to him are convinced that he has been captured/killed by the current regime of his old country in order to silence him.  The rest of the book is dedicated to how the people around him deal with the empty space his disappearance leaves.  Mona tries to maintain her enchantment on Uri.  Uri grows up and eventually faces the truth about his father's secret life, and a rather unexpected truth about his mother as well.

The book has a powerful trance-like quality that draws you in.  It is a somewhat timely book too, with the recent events in Libya.  The author's father was a Libyan dissident-in-exile who opposed Gaddafi, and like the father in the book, he was kidnapped and returned to Libya when Matar was just a boy.  NPR recently did an interview with the Hisham Matar, and if you listen to the audio version, the author reads an excerpt from the book.  Here's the link:

http://www.npr.org/2011/09/08/140223701/a-libyan-son-mourns-his-fathers-disappearance

Book 14 - Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk - David Sedaris

If you've followed this blog at all - maybe there are a couple of you out there - you'll know that I'm a big fan of David Sedaris' work.  I read three of his books in last year's challenge:  Barrel Fever, Naked, and When You are Engulfed in Flames (you can follow the links to my reviews, if you like).  His stuff is not everybody's cup of tea, however.  He is often raunchy and offensive, and is very open about his sexuality (he's gay).  At the same time his work can be quite poignant, and it often speaks to life's little truths.  One thing for sure - he's almost always hysterically funny

Book 14 - Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk - David Sedaris

In his most recent book, Sedaris departs from his usual essays about people and presents a group of animal fables.  Like Aesop, these tales are meant to spotlight the downside of some of the less than desirable behaviors people sometimes exhibit, but rather than hit you over the head with the moral, Sedaris tends to leave things open-ended, and let the reader fill in the lesson to be learned.  There is the gossiping primate hairdresser in "The Cat and the Baboon,"  who in trying to connect with her feline customer, tries topic after topic until she can find something that they both can hate.  In "The Motherless Bear" a bear suffers a great loss, but becomes addicted to the sympathetic attention and milks it to a tragic end.  In "The Grieving Owl", an owl seeks knowledge for knowledge's sake, which earns him the ridicule of the rest of his family, which are happy in their ignorance.

As I said, I'm a fan.  I loved this book, and for the beginner, it actually might be a kinder gentler introduction to Sedaris' work, but that is somewhat relative.  His work, in general, is not for the easily offended.  But if you like that kind of stuff, and I just happen to love that kind of stuff, you'll probably like this book.

Apparently, these stories were not all written recently.  Several of these tales have appeared over the years on This American Life, the public radio program on which Sedaris frequently appears.  There is something about listening to Sedaris read his own work that makes it even funnier.  So for those of you who want to sample a bit before you run out and get the book, or for those just too lazy to read it, I have provided links to the episodes (and the specific acts) in which various stories appear.  I can't speak to whether they are all in the exact form that wound up in the book.  Some of these are from four or five years prior to the publishing of the book, so it's certainly possible that some of them may be from an earlier draft of the story.  I'm sure they will give you the gist of the story, though.  Feel free to give them a listen.

BTW - for some reason I had trouble with some of these in the Chrome browser, but when I switched to Firefox it worked.

The Cow and the Turkey:
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/305/the-this-american-life-holiday-spectacular?act=4

The Squirrel and the Chipmunk:
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/308/star-crossed-love?act=3

Hello Kitty:
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/309/cat-and-mouse?act=2

The Parrot and the Potbellied Pig:
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/315/the-parrot-and-the-potbellied-pig?act=3

The Sick Rat and the Healthy Rat:
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/415/crybabies?act=4

Book 13 - The Road - Cormac McCarthy

No preamble this time.  I've got too many books to finish and write-up!  Let's go straight to the review.

Book 13 - The Road - Cormac McCarthy

Nobody does desperation quite like Cormac McCarthy.  Whether it's Llewellyn Moss fleeing the relentless Anton Chigurgh in No Country for Old Men, or the father and son wandering through the post-apocalyptic landscape in The Road, McCarthy knows how to paint a portrait of people that have run out of options.  It's almost always a quiet, reserved desperation, though.  One that does not get frantic until it needs to.

Did I mention post-apocalypse?  That's the setting for this book, which I thought a little odd for a book that was written so long after the end of the cold war (2006).  This isn't just a case of single bomb destroying a major city either.  This appears to be full-on nuclear war, and the United States (and presumably the rest of the world), is locked in the grip of a nuclear winter.  The sky is a hazy grey which blocks out the sun.  Ash covers everything, and falls with the rain and the snow.  There is virtually no plant life, I assume because of the lack of sun, but there may another reason (radioactive ash?), because there aren't really any animals either, save the occasional dog.  No plants, no birds, no rabbits, no deer = NO FOOD.  

A father and a son, who remain nameless throughout the book, are traveling south, presumably because they think its going to be warmer there.  They push along a shopping cart that contains everything they have: a few pieces of spare clothing and tarps, some tools, a tattered map, and a meager supply canned goods, all of which they have scrounged along the way.  They are trying to avoid pretty much everybody.  Some of the survivors have solved the food problem by eating other people, and there are gangs of cannibals which travel the roads.  Even if the traveler you encounter has not acquired a taste for human flesh, he's likely to try to steal your stuff, and might even kill or maim you in the process.  They have a gun, but they only have two bullets, and the father is trying to save those for a very special last act of desperation.

The problem with The Road is once you've stripped away the desperation, there's not much plot.  They are traveling south.  They are trying to reach the ocean.  They have no food.  Hey, they found some food!  But that's OK.  This book is more about what a father will do to protect his son, even if he risks losing a bit of his humanity in the process.  He is constantly reminding his son that "We're the good guys, we carry the fire."  But as things get increasingly desperate, the line between good and bad starts to blur somewhat.  

One of the things that bothers me about this book is that it adopts the familiar "Mad Max" view of the post-apocalyptic world:  roving gangs, law of the jungle, etc.  Call me a Pollyanna, but I would think there would be more people banding together for good.  Maybe it's the father's complete distrust of everyone that hides them from us, but one would think that there would be more people trying to "carry the fire."  Then again, maybe they were eaten by the cannibals.

Book 12 - The Dolphin in the Mirror - Diana Reiss

I've always been fascinated by dolphins.  I remember watching the show Flipper as a boy, which was basically Lassie with a dolphin instead of a collie.  Flipper not only could perform amazing tricks, but he was incredibly smart, and could seemingly understand what people were saying to him.  He would click and whistle and nod his head in response to conversational speech, as though he understood every word.  He could tell when danger presented itself and had the wherewithal to not only warn his human companions but also to take action to protect them. For years we thought that this idea of dolphin intelligence was purely the romanticized notion of Hollywood writers.  We thought that dolphins were no more than intelligent than any other animal trained to perform for our amusement.  We thought they simply repeated moves they had been trained to execute in response to hand signals or audible commands.  We thought they had no higher intelligence, no true understanding of language, and no true understanding of self.  It seems however that science is starting to prove that dolphins are much smarter than we thought - perhaps even smarter than we have romanticized them to be - and this is placing our past and current treatment of them in an extremely negative light.
 
Book 12 - The Dolphin in the Mirror - Diana Reiss

In The Dolphin in the Mirror, Diana Reiss explores the mind of the dolphin, and makes a case for putting a stop to the poor treatment to which they have been subjected at the hands of fisherman, water park and aquarium owners, and even other scientists.  She starts out by regaling us with her tales of her role in the rescue of Humphrey, the humpback whale who wandered into the San Francisco Bay not once but twice in the mid-eighties/early nineties.  You may be saying to yourself, "I thought this book was about dolphins?"  Dolphins and whales are closely related however, and in addition to sharing sophisticated social structures, they both employ echolocation so advanced,  that it makes the U.S. Navy envious.  This natural sonar plays a big part in how they got Humphrey to return to the ocean, and how Japanese fisherman drive thousands of dolphins to their death each year.

After telling us how she became interested in studying these magnificent creatures, and giving us a bit of history of how man has interacted with dolphins over the ages, Reiss walks us through three decades of research, mostly her own, which sets out to understand if dolphins have intelligence, an understanding of language, and a sense of self.   She engages in various studies of different dolphins, trying to decipher their speech (a difficult task without a dolphin "Rosetta Stone")), seeing if they can make associations between symbols and objects, and testing to see if they are self-aware.  This last effort, which involves studying dolphin interaction with mirrors, yields some intriguing results.  To this end, Reiss subjects dolphins to the mark test: a mark is placed on the dolphin's body and the animal is provided a mirror for self-examination.  The dolphin clearly shows awareness that it is himself in the mirror, an ability that was previously thought to exist only in humans and higher primates such as chimpanzees.  

Free from the rigors of a scientific paper, Reiss can relate some of the more anecdotal aspects of her research.  She is acutely aware of the scientific danger of anthropomorphism, the act of bestowing human traits onto animals that aren't there, but feels that anthropocentrism, the notion that human intelligence is the only "real" intelligence, is equally seductive, and to be avoided as well.  She argues that we may lack sufficient points of reference to fully understand what goes on in the dolphin mind.

Reiss devotes one of the final sections of the book to her pet project: trying to put an end to the slaughter of dolphins that takes place every year in the Japanese village of Taiji.  Each year the fisherman of Taiji form a barrier with their boats and bang on pipes submerged in the water.  The noise creates a wall of sound which causes the acoustically sensitive animals to flee in the other direction.  The fisherman herd them into a cove, where after selecting a few choice specimens for sale to aquariums, they set about brutally slaughtering the rest, killing tens of thousands of dolphins until the cove runs red with blood.   This horrific event is captured in the 2009 documentary film The Cove.

I probably have not done justice to this fascinating book.  Perhaps I should let the author try to make her case as well.  Diana Reiss appeared on Talk of the Nation: Science Friday this past week (11/4/2011).  There is a link to her segment here: Diana Reiss Interview.

Book 11 - Fool - Christopher Moore

I'm still playing catch-up.  As I mentioned in my last entry, King Lear was just a lead-up so I could enjoy the satire of Christopher Moore's Fool.

Book 11 - Fool - Christopher Moore

In Fool,  Christopher Moore retells Shakespeare's classic King Lear from the perspective of Lear's fool  Sort of.  I mean he sort of retells King Lear.  And it's sort of Lear's Fool.  However, there is a great deal of embellishment on the characters and story line, borrowing heavily from other plays and changing the actions of players, as well as the outcome of those actions.

A case in point is the Fool himself.  Named Pocket, due to his diminutive stature, he moves to the forefront of the story, becoming the narrator and the center of the action.  An orphan who was raised by nuns, he learned his jesting craft as a captive part of a group of travelling performers.  He's a randy fool, shagging all three of the King's daughters as well as various female members of the palace staff.  He's a conniving fool, becoming instrumental in the intrigues that were engineered solely by Regan, Goneril, and Edmund in the original play.  He's a fool to be reckoned with, despite his size, as he is quite accomplished with the throwing knife, and keeps a stash of them in his cowl.  But most importantly, he's the King's fool, a status that protects him from other royals who have been the brunt of his jokes in the past.

Pocket's best friend and apprentice is Drool, a "Natural," fool whose diminished intelligence is made up for by an uncanny ability to mimic voices.  Drool is able to repeat whole conversations verbatim, in the voices of the speakers, despite the fact that he lacks the ability to really understand what is being said.  Drool is also gifted in the manhood department, and Pocket makes effective use of both of these natural talents in his plans.

Pocket is driven to his Machiavellian manipulations by the prophetic poetry of a mysterious female ghost ("there's always a bloody ghost"), and some witches seemingly borrowed from Macbeth.  He is not the sole perpetrator of intrigue, however.  As in the play, Regan, Goneril and Edmund have plots of their own.  However, Pocket is usually able to take their plans and make them work to his advantage.  Like Shakespeare's play, all of this planning and plotting comes to a convergence, resulting in the fatalities of most of the major players, but here Moore diverges drastically from the original play, making adjustments to who dies and how, in order to help wrap up his embellishments on the plot.

This book is quite funny, but also quite bawdy and vulgar.  There aren't too many pages where someone isn't engaging in acts of sexual debauchery, or hurling insults that would make a sailor blush.  However, if this kind of stuff doesn't bother you, and you are a fan of the Bard, you will likely find this book to be hilarious.

Book 10 - King Lear - William Shakespeare

Often, when a book references another book heavily, I feel compelled to read the original book before I can continue.  This was true of Exley, which made numerous references to A Fan's Notes, both of which I read earlier this year.  It should then come as no surprise that when I started looking at Christopher Moore's Fool, a parody of Shakespeare's King Lear, I felt a desire to read the original play.  For some reason, I'd never got around to reading it, nor had I even seen a production of it.  In fact, I'd bet my only exposure to the play was the ubiquitous crossword clue "One of Lear's daughters: Regan."

Book 10 - King Lear - William Shakespeare

Shakespeare's King Lear tells the tragic story of an early king of Britain (Shakespeare plays fast and loose with the history) who is getting on in years and decides to divide his kingdom and the responsibilities thereof between his three daughters, Regan, Goneril, and Cordelia.  Lear is a bit of a dick, so he makes each of the daughter's tell them how much they love him before he formally hands over the land and the power.  Regan and Goneril kiss-ass in royal fashion, telling how they love their father above all else, but Cordelia takes a much more honest approach, telling him that she loves him just like a daughter should love her father - no more, no less.  Lear sees this as a slight and overreacts, splitting Cordelia's portion of the kingdom between the sycophantic daughters and banishing her forever.  Despite her beauty, her potential suitors are disappointed that there is no longer a big fat hunk of Britain as her dowry, so they drop their proposals of marriage.  The King of France however sees her honesty as endearing, and jumps at the chance to marry her, dowry or no.

Lear soon learns that he should have placed honesty above flattery.  His original plan was that he would still be treated like a king, but he would have none of the responsibilities, and his supposedly loving daughters would take care of him in his old age.  Regan and Goneril quickly turn the tables on him, and the indignities Lear suffers at their hands are too much to bear, driving him to madness.

Meanwhile in Castle Gloucester, The Earl is sitting on a tragedy of his own.  His son Edmond, conceived with Gloucester's mistress, is frustrated with his bastard status and wants to deny Edgar, Gloucester's legitimate son, his birthright.  He successfully hatches a plot to make Gloucester believe that Edgar is trying to kill him.

Lear is not without his allies.  There is the loyal Kent, who sticks with Lear despite the fact that the King has banished him too.  Gloucester suffers greatly trying to protect the King.  The King's fool offers brutally honest counsel, seemingly immune to Lear's anger as long as he couches his insults in humor.  Even Cordelia, when she catches wind of what her sisters have done, musters an army to try to rescue Lear.

Of course the various plots eventually converge.  Edgar, assuming the guise of a madman in order to escape his father's men, meets the genuinely mad Lear, who mistakes him for a philosopher.  Edgar also winds up guiding Gloucester after Cornwall and Regan pluck his eyes out.  Edmund gets romantically involved with both Regan and Goneril.  And in the end, in true Shakespearean fashion, almost everyone dies.

Despite the fact that I've only read a handful of the plays, I've always been a big fan of Shakespeare.  I don't buy into this currently fashionable notion that Shakespeare could not have written his plays.  I think it gives short shrift to the power of imagination to say that the only a formally educated, well-traveled person could have penned these works.  However in the end, I really don't think it really matters who wrote them.  They stand the test of time as being some of the greatest works of the English language (although you've never experienced Shakespeare until you've heard it in the original Klingon).  The language can sometimes be a struggle, but there are plenty of annotated versions of the works to help you through that, and the payoff is worth the effort.

Book 09 - Four Fish - Paul Greenberg

Although fish and other things in the water fascinate me, I've never been much of a fisherman. I guess I don't have the patience. In fact the only time I think I've ever really been on a fishing trip was when I was pretty young (10 maybe?). I went out on a boat on the open water off the coast of Florida with my grandfather, his friend (it was the friend's boat), my mom and my brother(s) (I don't remember if my younger brother came along, it seems like he would have been too young).  I remember stopping at the bait store to buy some squid for bait, and setting off for the open water. Despite my inexperience I did manage to catch a fish, as did my older brother, I think. My mom caught a baby shark, which either my grandfather or his friend clubbed to death before throwing it back into the water. When it came time for lunch my grandfather and his buddy reached into the bait cooler, and pulled out some squid, slapped it between two slices of bread and proceeded to chow down on it, offering it to my brother and I to see if we wanted to try it.  Although we didn't try it, I guess you could say that was my first exposure to sushi.

Book 09 - Four Fish - Paul Greenberg

In Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food, Paul Greenberg explores the state of both the wild and farmed populations of four popular fish that grace the world's dinner tables: Salmon, Cod, Bass, and Tuna. He discusses the popularity of the fish, how they have come to be overfished, and whether the wild populations can recover. He educates us on the suitability of each fish to be farmed, how shortcomings of their suitability have been overcome by science, and how other less popular species would be far easier to raise in a domestic environment.

After reminiscing about how he came to love fishing as a child, Greenberg introduces us to the salmon. He talks about how the wild populations were decimated by overfishing and the damming of the rivers, which prevented the wild salmon from reaching their spawning grounds. He explains that their comparatively large eggs made them early candidates for commercial farming operations, and how at first selective breeding, and most recently genetic engineering have created "super-salmon" that are much more efficient than their wild cousins in turning feed into flesh. He outlines the environmental impact of industrial salmon farming, and the dangers of these domestic fish escaping into the general population (which they have).

Next he examines the bass, which is actually a name for a group of somewhat unrelated fish. The particular bass that Greenberg is interested in is the European Sea Bass. This fish had become rare through overfishing by early peoples of the Mediterranean. The value of this rarity gave people the incentive to overcome the many difficulties in raising these fish in captivity: Microscopic eggs, hormonal changes, and an extended spawning cycle. The innovations developed unlocked the secrets of fish reproduction in general, not just specifically for the European Sea Bass, and had applications for human fertility research as well.

Greenberg then looks at cod, a fish so plentiful when he was young that in his household (and many others) it was simply called "fish". That is to say, if you were having "fish" for dinner, you were having cod. Fast forward several billion Gorton's Fish Sticks and McDonald's Filet-o-Fish Sandwiches later, and many of the wild populations of this fish have collapsed. Greenberg discusses efforts to conserve the last of these wild populations, attempts to farm the fish, and efforts to find a possible replacement, which have already placed the wild populations of other species of fish in jeopardy.

Finally Greenberg looks at the tuna. He draws analogies between the hunting of this fish to extinction, and the similar fate that whales experienced before they became the darlings of the conservation world. He quashes the myth that Japan's tuna-as-sushi tradition is too well-entrenched to be reversed - actually prior to 1930's, they usually eschewed the heavy, oily fish for much lighter varieties.  He also talks about the economic and logistical problems of raising these fish domestically, and how tuna "ranching," is actually doing great damage to the wild populations.

To wrap things up, Greenberg looks at some of the fish that actually do well in farm situations.  He points to tilapia, tra, and barramundi as fish that are well suited to being raised domestically.  He also lays guidelines not only for preserving wild fish, but for selecting new species to farm.

The length of my blog entries is usually directly proportional to how much I enjoyed the book, and obviously I enjoyed this book a great deal.  Greenberg makes you feel his passion for fishing and the ocean, and makes rational arguments for sane fishing practices and domestic farming that take into account the economic realities of feeding the planet.  If you are concerned about the health of our oceans and the abundance of food that grows in them, read this book.

Book 08 - High Fidelity - Nick Hornby

I'm still playing catch-up.  Here is another book that I read several months ago.  Although I jotted down a few notes, I never really got around to the write-up until now, so I apologize in advance if anything is inaccurate or fuzzy.

Book 08 - High Fidelity - Nick Hornby

High Fidelity is the story of Rob, a rather self-centered 30-something who owns a used record store in England. Rob runs the shop with Dick, a rather mild-mannered chap who is constantly seeking new and more obscure music, and a rather overbearing bloke named Barry, who is constantly badgering his shopmates into naming their top five albums, TV shows, movies, etc. After an introduction in which Rob lists his top five girlfriend breakups, the actual story begins with his live-in girlfriend Laura breaking up with him.  Rob makes a point that she doesn't even make the top five, although his attitude and actions belie that assertion.

It's no wonder Laura left him.  Rob's been going nowhere for quite sometime.  When Laura met him he was a club DJ, but he stopped spinning records years ago.  He owns his own store, but it is not terribly successful.  A hipster in his own mind, he tends to look down on those whose lives don't revolve around music, and views the domestic nature of the lives of those around him - couples with homes, careers, kids - as something to be avoided.  

After Laura's departure, Rob wallows a bit before hooking up briefly with an American singer.  He then starts stalking Laura and her new boyfriend almost to the point of a restraining order, and pays a visit to each of the top five girlfriends before finally realizing that domesticity is maybe not such a bad thing after all.

As I said above, it's been several months since I read this, so my memory may be fading, but I felt like I never got to know any of the characters in the book.  Perhaps, as a reflection of Rob's personality, the book is all about Rob.  The problem is, Rob is so shallow that there's not that much to know about Rob either.  Still, Rob's musings about life and dating are quite funny, and the inane banter between Rob and his employees is entertaining as well.  Also, there are numerous pop culture references, mostly in the form of the top five lists, to keep a culture junkie like me engaged.

Book 07 – The Name of the Rose – Umberto Eco

I'm baaaaccckkk!  One of the things I told myself when I started on the second year of the challenge was that I was going to try to do a better job of keeping up with the one-book/one-week pace. Obviously it hasn't worked out that way. In fact, it looks like it might be almost impossible to get to 52 books at this point.  However, I'm going to see how many I can get done between now and the end of the year.  I've got several books that I've read but haven't written up (I think I read this one in the spring), so I'll be playing catch-up on the blog entries for the next few days.  I can't guarantee the quality of the write-ups, but I will guarantee that for any book I post, I have actually read the whole book during the challenge period.

  

Book 07 – The Name of the Rose – Umberto Eco

The Name of the Rose is a murder mystery set in an Italian monastery in the first half of the 14^th century. It is a time of great turmoil in the Catholic Church. There is a power struggle between the Pope, now residing in Avignon, and the Holy Roman Emperor in Rome. Great schisms have emerged between monastic orders, one of the greatest being the adoption of the idea that Christ had no possessions, which is in stark contrast to the vast materialism of the established church. Adopters of these new ideas run the risk of being accused of heresy.

William of Baskerville has been sent to the monastery to meet with Papal representatives regarding the terms by which Michael of Cesena will agree to obey the Pope’s summons that he appear in Avignon. As a proponent of these new "heretical" ideas, it is likely that Cesena will be imprisoned as soon as he arrives at the Pope's palace, so these talks will prove to be quite delicate, and any trouble could greatly alter the dynamic of the negotiation.  Upon his arrival, William learns of the mysterious death of one of the monks. The death appears initially to be suicide (a sin in the Catholic Church), but it soon becomes clear it is murder. William, a former inquisitor with keen powers of observation and deduction, is asked to investigate. William’s investigation points to the monastery’s library, a vast labyrinth that is off-limits to all but a few.  Despite strict instructions from the Abbot to stay clear of the library, William finds his way inside, and perhaps more important, makes it back out.  

There is a race to solve the mystery before the Papal delegation can arrive, as they will likely attempt to use the crimes as leverage in the talks. Unfortunately, not only is William unsuccessful in solving the crime, but additional bodies turn up.  When the delegation arrives, a rival inquisitor, Bernard Gui, launches his own investigation. Gui is quick to incorrectly attribute the crimes to the work of an heretic, and equally quick to make a spectacle of the accusation.  However, William is unconvinced that they have the right culprit, and he continues to try to learn the truth about who really killed the monks, and to learn the secrets of the library.

Eco's book is told through the eyes of William's young apprentice, Adso. In addition to the mystery at hand, the book deeply explores the competing theologies of various orders within the Church at the time. It also examines the stranglehold the Church had on the dissemination of the written word, and how this hold was gradually slipping away as secular universities began to emerge. The book gets bogged down in arcane theology from time-to-time, but the mystery is a good one, and William's character is quite entertaining. It's worth the read.

Book 06 - Exley - Brock Clarke

As I mentioned in my last review, this book makes extensive references to the book I reviewed last, A Fan’s Notes (click the link for my review). Reading it is not a prerequisite for this book, however I think that for me, reading it enhanced my enjoyment of Clarke’s book.

Book 06 - Exley - Brock Clarke

In his latest book, Exley, Brock Clarke tells of young Miller Le Ray’s quest to find out what happened to his father, who walked out on the boy and his mother some time earlier. Miller’s father’s favorite book is A Fan’s Notes, a “fictional memoir,” written by Frederick Exley in the late sixties. The father’s love of the book seems quite obsessive: he owns multiple copies which he keeps stashed in various places so that he can always have one available and he frequently applies quotes from the book to various situations. The choice of the book as a guidebook for life is an odd one, as the book is filled with vulgar sexual references, misogyny, homophobia, and alcohol abuse. In fact at his mother’s behest, Miller’s father has instructed him not to read the book, but it is immediately apparent that the boy has not obeyed this instruction. He seems just as obsessed with the book as his father, perhaps more so, quoting from it himself, and adopting some of the books idiosyncrasies, such as replacing the names of people with their initial, and blanking out dates.

The story alternates between two equally unreliable narrators. The first is Miller himself. As a young boy of about 9 or 10, Miller’s account of events is limited by his understanding of the world, but it also seems to be affected by the trauma of his father’s departure, as well as by his obsession with Exley’s book. Miller believes that his father has gone to fight in Iraq, something his mother insists is not true. Miller will not give up this belief, leading his mother to seek the help of the second narrator, a psychiatric therapist who Miller has christened Dr. Pahnee. In A Fan’s Notes, Dr. Pahnee is the name of an alter-ego employed by Exley while picking up women in bars, and the name itself is a phonetic spelling of the French word for the male member. The name seems somewhat appropriate, as Dr. Pahnee seems more interested in wooing the boy’s mother than with professional ethics or the boy’s well-being. In fact, his behavior throughout the book is unprofessional and unethical: he breaks confidences: he spies on Miller, he spies on Miller’s mother, he interrogates Miller’s friends, he even breaks into Miller’s house.

Shortly after starting his sessions, Miller comes to believe that his father is back from Iraq. A trip to the Veteran’s Administration Hospital leads him to an encounter with a man he believes is his father. The man has suffered a serious brain injury and is lying in a coma. Miller decides that if he can find Frederick Exley, and bring him to his father's hospital bedside, he will wake up and get better. Miller’s quest is futile, because Exley died in 1992. However, between Miller’s search for Exley, and Dr. Pahnee’s obsession with curing the boy and thus winning the love of the boy’s mother, we gradually learn what really happened with his father.

Like Brock's other book, The Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England (click the link for my review), this book is at the same time both comedic and tragic. Dr. Pahnee's unprofessional behavior is hilariously infuriating, but still manages for the most part to bring about the desired result. Miller's precocious absorption with Exley's book is amusing, but watching the boy struggle with the pain of missing his father is heart-wrenching. Miller's mother seems lost and unwilling to admit to her role in her family's situation, choosing rather to shift responsibility for helping Miller cope to the questionable skills of Dr. Pahnee.

Overall, I thought it was a good book, although I think I liked both Clarke's debut novel and Exley's "memoir" a bit better.

Book 05 - A Fan's Notes - Frederick Exley

I stumbled upon this book while preparing to read the latest book by Brock Clarke, an author I discovered in last year's 52 book challenge with The Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England (click the link for my review). Clarke's latest book is called Exley, and is about a young boy who is looking for his father. The father's favorite book was A Fan's Notes, by Frederick Exley. The boy thinks that by finding Exley, he can find his father. I had never heard of A Fan's Notes, or Frederick Exley for that matter, so I decided that before I read Clarke's book, it might be a good idea to at least familiarize myself with Exley's work. The more I looked into it the more I wanted to read A Fan's Notes. I learned that Jonathan Yardley, the famous book reviewer from the Washington Post was a friend of Exley's and a fan of the book, and had even written a biography of the author. My copy of the book, which was part of the Modern Library collection of great books, sports a glowing blurb from none other than Kurt Vonnegut, one of my favorite authors of all time. I knew that I was not going to be able to read Brock Clarke's book until I tackled Frederick Exley's.

Book 05 - A Fan's Notes - Frederick Exley

In a note to the reader at the beginning of the book, Exley proclaims A Fan's Notes to be a fictional memoir. However, if one digs a little bit into Exley's life story, one learns that this declaration probably springs more from a desire not to be sued than from a lack of authenticity. While it may not accurately name places, dates and people, the reader is left with the impression that the story captures the essence of Exley's life and his struggle with his work, his sexuality, his alcoholism, and his sanity.

Exley grows up in Watertown, NY, in the shadow of his father's hometown celebrity. His father, a high school football phenom who seems destined for greatness in college sports, decides instead to marry his high school sweetheart, but remains a hometown favorite. Exley does not share his father's gift for the game, but possesses a fan's love for the sport many times over. His affection is directed generally at the New York Giants and specifically at Frank Gifford, who was a star running back and wide receiver for the team. Exley obsesses over Gifford, who he met when he was at USC, and throughout the book he contrasts Gifford's successes with his own failures. This obsession is of interest, because it seems to be the only thing that he remotely cares about, except perhaps where he is going to get his next drink. His work, his relationships, and his mental health all seem to take a back seat to Frank Gifford and alcohol.

I would say that Exley struggles with the bottle, but it doesn't seem to be much of a struggle. He drinks frequently and prodigiously, and surrounds himself with enablers who put up with it far longer than anyone might imagine they would. He seems to struggle with his relationships with women and possibly his sexuality. At one minute he is with great bravado and vulgarity discussing his many supposed female conquests. The next minute he is telling us of Bunny Sue, supposedly the love of his life, with whom he is unable to consummate the relationship due to his impotence. Also the level at which he loathes homosexuals makes one think he "doth protest too much." He definitely struggles with his sanity, frequently coming across as delusional. He tells us he was diagnosed as "either a paranoic-schizophrenic, or a schizophrenic-paranoic." This diagnosis was delivered during one of several times he was institutionalized for his drinking and his behavior, and while locked away he received insulin shock and electroshock therapy (this was the 1950s). His state of mind, combined with his deep-seated insecurities and the fog of alcoholism makes him such a quintessentially unreliable narrator, that he has been compared to Nick Carraway, in The Great Gatsby. This presents us with another possible reason for the memoir being "fictional" - Exley just can't keep his facts straight.

I definitely found this book to be quite entertaining. Some people may be taken aback by Exley's homophobia and misogony, but there is also great humor to be found in Exley's disdain for society's expectations of him. I can't speak to the rest of Exley's work, however. His mental problems and alcohol addiction seems to have seriously affected his literary output. He only wrote a few other books, and none of them seem to be very highly regarded. Exley definitely seems to be a literary "one-hit wonder."

Book 04 - Homer & Langley - E. L. Doctorow

Once again I write this many days after finishing the book and many weeks after I should have read and blogged about it. I know I keep saying I'm going to catch up, but other things just keep getting in the way. Anyway, here is book number 4.

Book 04 - Homer & Langley - E. L. Doctorow

Long before there was A&E's "Hoarders," there were Homer & Langley Collyer, the eccentric recluses who in the late 1940s were found dead in their New York City brownstone among vast labyrinths of newspaper and junk, including a Model T Ford that occupied the house's dining room. The house was so bad that they found Homer, but didn't find Langley until more than two weeks later, even though his body was only 10 feet from where they had found his brother. For many years after that, mothers admonished their children to clean their rooms, lest they meet the fate of the Collyers. E. L. Doctorow's book Homer & Langley is a fictional re-telling of the lives of this eccentric duo, and although a factual account of their story might be interesting enough, Doctorow takes great liberties, telling it through the sightless eyes of Homer Collyer, and changing history such that they continue to live on into the 1970s.

Homer starts to slowly lose his sight in his late teens, and while his brother is off fighting World War I in Europe, both of his parents are taken by the the Spanish Flu epidemic, leaving Homer in the care of the house servants until Langley finally returns home, a man changed physically and emotionally by the ravages of war. Their journey towards eccentric reclusiveness is a gradual one, however. Early in their lives they are quite social, making the rounds of nightclubs, and even throwing open their house for tea dances during the great depression.

Langly's experience with the war has lead him to develop a rather unique world view, and he begins to obsess over the creation of a "universal newspaper." He goes out on daily excursions and brings home a copy of every newspaper he can find. As Langley's hoarding starts to worsen, he returns from his newspaper runs with various junk items: typewriters, pianos, and the aforementioned Model T, to name but a few. Langley is convinced that these are useful things that he needs for various projects and inventions, and Homer's admiration for his brother allows him to ignore his concerns about the mountains of junk that are piling up throughout the house.

Doctorow expands their lifespans considerably, taking them up through the sixties, where their house becomes a crash pad for hippies. Eventually they slip into isolation: Langley does battle with the utility companies, and becomes increasingly paranoid, setting booby traps for would-be burglars he thinks will steal his junk; Homer meets a woman who becomes his muse for writing this "memoir," but gradual hearing loss eventually isolates him even more than his lack of sight ever did.

This is my second book by Doctorow. I read my first, The March, in last year's challenge (see my review here). Doctorow has a wonderful way of making history come to life, even if the life he gives it is not entirely accurate. He takes you into the mind of the hoarder, and allows the reader come to some understanding of how the Collyer's came to live the way that they did.

Book 03 - Green Gone Wrong - Heather Rogers

I am the King of Procastination! I finished this book over two weeks ago, but I'm just now getting around to blogging it. The only reason I forced myself to do it today was that it needs to go back to the library by the end of the day. So much for my resolution to stay on top of my reading and writing!

Book 03 - Green Gone Wrong - Heather Rogers

In Green Gone Wrong, Heather Rogers explores how economic factors taint the current offering of supposedly "green" products and services that are widely available, as well as how these factors prevent goods and services that are truly sustainable from finding a place in the marketplace. She explains how many of the labels such as "Organic," "Green," "Carbon Neutral", and "Fair Trade" are often more about making western consumers feel good about themselves than they are about creating sustainable practices, and how good-intentioned efforts to create sustainability are often perverted by the marketplace to a point where they actually may do more harm than good. She shows how a lack of appropriate standards and regulation allow corruption and fraud to run rampant, and shows that when regulation does exist, it is often ineffective and poorly funded.

Rogers starts off with local organic food, explaining the problems that farmers raising sustainable grass-fed meat have in gaining access to slaughtering services, due to the massive consolidation of the business by conventional industrial farming. Someone going to the trouble and expense of raising cattle that aren't wallowing in their own feces does not want them slaughtered in a facility where most of the cattle fall into that category, however USDA rules, written by and geared toward the owners of large slaughterhouses, make it prohibitively expensive to open a smaller facility dedicated to these hormone-free and generally disease-free animals. She explains how lack of access to supply chains, as well as land price inflation and sky rocketing tax rates from exurban sprawl make sustainable vegetable farming expensive as well, to the point where often the only people who can afford to buy locally grown food farmed with sustainable methods are the very wealthy. Meanwhile the ever-growing desire for "Organic" products is fueling the destruction of rain forests and other diverse biomes in the third-world, replacing them with monocultures that may be pesticide free (or maybe not), but certainly not sustainable.

Rogers exposes the sham of the "Organic" labels as well as those indicating "Fair Trade," especially when it comes to third world food production. Standards and regulations, if they exist, are geared to the advantage of large producers. The certification process for permission to use these labels to describe one's food is too expensive for the local peasant farmers, so large corporations apply for them, and then engage the farmers in a sharecropping arrangement where they are forced to sell their product to the corporation for whatever the corporation agrees to pay, regardless of the market. In the case of "Fair Trade" farmers, they often receive "Fair Trade" prices for only 20 percent of their crop. Certification for these labels is performed not by government entities, but by private companies, who are direct clients of the corporations they certify, creating serious conflicts of interest. The companies that perform certifications are not anxious to alienate the companies they work for, for fear they will be replaced with another certifier. Furthermore, the more the certifiers spend performing their task, the more it cuts into their profits. The combination of these factors make for an environment in which fraud and corruption can and does flourish.

There is a brief section on "green" architecture, showcasing several communities in Europe that have had varying degrees of success and failure, and a lengthy section about transportation, which seems to encompass some general energy concepts as well. She explains how in the mid 20th century car, tire, and oil companies banded together to buy up transit systems and dismantle them, in order to foster the growth of the automobile business. She tells us the simple economics of why American car companies make more SUVs than green automobiles (it's not necessarily because the public wants them). She talks about the fraud that runs rampant in the trade of "carbon credits", as well as the unintended consequences of these "carbon offset" projects. In addition, she explores unintended consequences of biofuels: food shortages, destruction of rain forest, etc.

But the news is not all negative. In addition to the success stories of sustainable architecture, there is a section which outlines things that work, and actions that could put the ineffective strategies on the right track. However, this won't happen without effective policy decisions at the national and global levels, and if the market is left to its own to bring about these changes, they will likely come too late or not at all.

This is a well-written and thought-provoking book. It should be read by anyone who thinks that just because something is labeled "Organic," it means that it is good for you or for the planet, or that thinks that anything labeled "Free Trade" means that a peasant farmer is guaranteed to be receiving anything close to what we would call a fair price for their goods. It should be read by those who think that florescent bulbs and driving a Prius is a substitute for effective sustainable energy policies. And it should be read by those who think that the free-market will solve our planet's environmental problems before it is too late.

Book 02 - Eating the Dinosaur - Chuck Klosterman

I know it doesn't seem that way, but despite my sputtering start, I am committed to the challenge. I thought after my marathon finish last year, I would maintain a similar pace and therefore be ahead rather than behind. Instead, I've been distracted by other things, and have been neglecting my reading. I hope to catch up soon.

Book 02 - Eating the Dinosaur - Chuck Klosterman

I have to admit, the thing that most attracted me to this book was the title. In fact, it was the name of this and an earlier book, Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs, which drew me to Klosterman's work. Despite the fact that he's written for the The NY Times, The Washington Post, Esquire and Spin, I had never knowingly experienced his work. However, I had an eleven hour train ride last week, and I had just picked up the book at the library, so I decided to dive in.

In Eating the Dinosaur, Klosterman writes mostly about popular culture and sports. I had heard from others about the pop culture part, but I was unaware of the sports element. Klosterman is a basketball and football fanatic. He spends almost twenty pages explaining why despite his failed career, Ralph Sampson was the best basketball player that ever lived, but he ties it to the satisfaction we get as a society when a celebrity - sports or otherwise - fails. He spends another twenty pages on the game of football, but he does so by exploring the dichotomy between football's image of conservatism, and the fact that the game is constantly evolving due to out-of-the-box thinking by radical coaches.

But the essays are not all about sports. The enigmatic title of the book comes from what Klosterman feels would be one of the only practical uses for time travel - to eat a dinosaur. In the book's opening essay, he interviews interviewers in order to explore the nature of being interviewed. In another essay, he explores parallels between David Koresh and the Branch Davidians of Waco, and Kurt Cobain and Nirvana. He explains why the critical irrelevance of bands like AC/DC and ABBA is irrelevant itself, and he uses Vertigo, Body Double, The Real World, and personal experience to explore what he feels is the true nature of voyeurism.

It's funny what kind of preconceptions you can form about an author when you've heard of him or her but never read his or her work. Based on the title, I thought this would be a funnier book. While it is quirky in its subject matter, and the writing is not devoid of humor, Klosterman's insights are often more thought-provoking than they are laugh-inducing. The reader might chuckle a bit before realizing he or she had never thought about a particular subject in that particular way.

I'm not sure I'm going to run out and grab another of Klosterman's books right away. For one thing, his bibliography seems a bit jumbled, running the gamut between novels, essays, and memoirs. Also, the other book of pop culture essays (Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs) might be a little dated (2003). However, I think I'll keep my eyes open for his magazine pieces, and hope they share the same level of insight as the essays of this book.

Book 01 - The Big Short - Michael Lewis

I'm baaaack. I know I'm off to a slow start, but I am committed to doing the challenge again, and seeing as I read more than 20 books in 3 months last year, I hardly think being 3 books behind is that bad.

I don't think I've been paying enough attention to non-fiction, so I think I'm going to start off with a few books of that genre, before I get back into some more literature. So without further ado, lets kick this off.

Book 01 - The Big Short - Michael Lewis

When I reviewed The Ascent of Money last year, I think I mentioned that in a previous life I worked developing software applications to model financial transactions called securitizations. These transactions take loans such as mortgages and turn them into securities, which can be sold to investors. This type of financial instrument initially created unprecedented liquidity in the mortgage market, allowing easier access to mortgage credit and making it possible for many hard-working Americans to realize the dream of home ownership. It was of course ultimately twisted by greed: greed of potential homeowners wanting houses they could not afford; greed of mortgage originators that took no responsibility for the creditworthiness of the people they loaned money to; greed of the investment banks, who packaged loans of decreasing quality, and sold them to investors; greed of the so-called rating agencies, who in a massive conflict of interest were paid by the banks issuing the securities, and therefore granted investment grade status to these securities to keep the gravy train rolling; and the greed of the investors, whose insatiable appetite for these supposedly safe securities and their high yields fed this financial mess. It was this cycle of greed, combined with some other factors that ultimately brought about a financial crisis of such magnitude as to rival The Great Depression, and which left waves of economic turmoil that are still being felt many years later.

Michael Lewis' book, The Big Short is not really about any of these players - at least not directly. Instead, Lewis turns his attention to those who saw the impending crash, and positioned themselves to capitalize on it. These people saw that these instruments were growing so complex that not even the banks and the rating agencies could understand them, much less the investors, and that the Triple-A ratings the agencies were handing out like candy to Trick-or-Treaters were basically meaningless. They saw that the financial engineers who designed these transactions used this complexity to obfuscate the true risks involved in the quality of the underlying loans, and that the continued health of these transactions hung on two suppositions: housing prices will always go up, and defaults will be manageable and localized. What the banks and investors seemingly didn't realize, was that it wasn't necessary for housing prices to go down, or even to completely flatten out. A simple slow down in the rise of prices was enough to bring this money machine to its knees.

Lewis profiles several of these supposed visionaries who saw this impending crisis when the rest of Wall Street did not. He chooses for the most part to romanticize them for their foresight and for the trials they faced by going against the common wisdom, rather than demonize them for being bottom feeders preying off the economic collapse of the United States for their own financial gain. In some ways he may be right to do so. Some of them were indeed trying to shine sunlight on this dark Ponzi scheme, but others were just quietly gaming the system, and all of them walked away rich. They used Credit Default Swaps, "insurance" policies that trade relatively small premiums for large payouts in the event of default, in order to "short" or bet against securities backed by sub-prime mortgages. Many of these contrarian investors also shorted the stocks of banks that were heavily engaged in these transactions, and made money when the bank stocks collapsed as well.

While my background makes this book particularly interesting to me, I think it can be enjoyed by anyone who wishes to better understand one of the principal causes of the current economic crisis. Lewis does an excellent job of explaining these transactions and the underlying motives for engaging in them, and therefore makes an extremely complex subject very accessible to the casual reader. Lewis is also a former Wall Street bond salesman, who chronicled that time of his life in the book Liar's Poker, so he has a personal insight which lends to his telling of the story. FYI - he also wrote The Blind Side, from which one of the story threads was used for the recent Sandra Bullock movie of the same name.

2010 Wrap-up and 2011 Look-ahead

I know this is late, but I needed to take a break for a few days.

I did it! 52 books in 52 weeks! Well, 52 books, anyway. I didn't do very well at staying on the one book a week schedule, so coming into October I still had yet to read at least half of the books! I buckled down though, and started reading two and three books a week, and finally finished my last book December 30th.

I performed even worse at staying current with my blog, sometimes waiting a week or more before I wrote up the books I read. For example, I wrote my last three blog entries the morning of the 31st (I posted four that morning, but one of them had already been written and just needed editing). I wrote an entry for every book, though some entries were more substantial than others. I averaged almost 600 words per entry though, so I think that's pretty respectable.

For the most part, the books I read were pretty substantial too. Yes, there were some short books - eleven books I read were less than 200 pages. However, twelve of the books were more than 400 pages, with half of those being more than 500 pages. I did not do any audio books, although I don't have anything against them. I didn't read any e-books either, but that was simply because nobody has bought me a Kindle or an IPad yet (hint, hint).

I read every word of every book. That includes prefaces, epilogues, glossaries, appendices, and informational notes, though I drew the line at indices, reference citations, and acknowledgments. I read from a wide variety of genres: popular fiction, classic literature, science fiction, biography and non-fiction. I did not work from a predetermined list. For the most part, I chose the books, although several of the books I had to read for a literature class I was taking. I also accepted recommendations from friends and/or people following my blog. I got most of the books I read from the public library, although several of the books had been on my shelf prior to the challenge, and I had to buy the ones for my literature class.

Fifteen of the books could arguably be considered classic literature. The exact count depends where you draw the line. Four of those were books I had to read for my American Literature class. They were: Nature and Selected Essays - Ralph Waldo Emerson, Moby Dick - Herman Melville, The Blithedale Romance - Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Walden - Henry David Thoreau.

Four authors had the distinction of appearing twice on the list: John Steinbeck, William Faulkner, Albert Camus, and Carl Hiaasen.

Two authors made the "three-peat," appearing three times on the list: David Sedaris and Stieg Larsson.

Inexplicably, two books featured a character named Zenobia: The Blithesdale Romance and Ethan Frome. I'm guessing the name was a little more common in the 19th century.

I encountered many authors that I had never read before: Albert Camus, William Faulkner, Edith Wharton, Voltaire, Stieg Larsson, David Sedaris, and Bill Bryson, to name but a few. In fact only about a dozen of the books were by authors whose work I had read prior to the challenge.

I liked almost everything I read. The only notable disappointment was Snow Falling on Cedars. I felt it was a bit too much like a Harlequin romance. I also struggled with Emerson's essays, finding him to be overly wordy and preachy, but at the end, I still felt like I got something out of his work, so I can't say I hated it.

So that's it! Or is it? I have accepted the 2011 challenge! I'm planning on doing it again, and keeping the blog going. I'm going to try to do a better job of keeping on track, but it's already the second week of January, and I haven't finished my first book yet, so I guess I need to try harder. I'm also going to try to follow some of the other blogs of people doing the challenge, and see if I can't scare up some more readers for my blog. I know there are a few of you out there, but for the most part I feel like a voice in the wilderness.

I will continue to read from a variety of genres, both fiction and non fiction, and to read from both modern and classic authors. I'll try to get to some of the books that have been languishing on my "to-read" list. One thing I've noticed is that I haven't read a lot of English Literature, so I might try to get to a little more of that this year. Maybe I'll try and fit in some Hardy or some Dickens, or something by one of the Bronte sisters. If you have any classic English Literature titles that you think I would be interested in, please let me know. In fact, feel free to offer any suggestions for future reads, or comment on my entries. You can leave your suggestions or comments here, on Facebook, or even on Twitter. I will be keeping the previous year's blog entries online, so don't be afraid to go back and check out some of my old entries and comment on those as well.

Thanks to everyone who cheered me on!