Review - Old School

Old School by Tobias Wolff

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Old School is about a kid at a New England boarding school where they have writing contests. Each year, the winner gets to meet a visiting author (in the book, these include Robert Frost, Ayn Rand, and Ernest Hemingway).

This was an enjoyable book for me since I have an interest in writing--one of the main themes being that writers must not be afraid to expose their true selves in their art. I liked Wolff's weaving of real authors into the story, and especially loved the smackdown he gives to Ayn Rand.

I didn't like the way he presented dialogue without quotations--at first I didn't notice it, but at one point it really confused me as to whether a character was talking or it was just part of the narrative. I can see that maybe that was his point, because it does create an atmosphere of being in the story since the quotations are not distractingly set apart, but it also added confusion. The ending worked, but it was a little meandering too. I felt like I didn't really need to know what happened in the next forty years, and that the parallels between the narrator's experience and that of Dean Makepeace could have been handled in a different way (not that I can suggest one).

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BookCrossing

Several months ago after my husband and I moved to the small town of Lynden, WA with its Dutch heritage, and we soon requested a visit from the Welkom basket lady. Clothed in traditional Dutch garb, she came knocking at our door one Saturday morning with a basket full of goodies and coupons for a variety of free stuff and discounts on services.

Today we finally went around town and loaded up on a bunch of the free goods. Afterward, we headed home, then walked about a block to a nearby Greek restaurant. Now, I know this is terrible, but I'm not in the habit of washing my hands before I eat at a restaurant. My husband leads by example, though, so after he had headed off and returned again, I too made my voyage to the restroom thinking it was probably a good habit to pick up.

There, leaning against the mirror, I found a most intriguing and peculiar thing--a book with a "FREE BOOK" sticker on it. It was a horror novel about a dead ex-husband, and coming up on my first anniversary not something I particularly wanted to read. However, the web address on the front and the book ID number inside were enough to get me to pick it up and take it home with me.

Through it I have discovered BookCrossing: a free online community where you can register your books and either "release" them "into the wild" or give them a "controlled release" to someone you know. You can even search for books that have been released nearby and go "hunt" them--a very exciting and nerdy sport, somewhat reminiscent of Geohashing. I've seen through the BookCrossing website that there are also other such sports, like Postcrossing.

In fact, now I understand something from the last book I read, The Eyre Affair. There is a group of people in it called the Earthcrossers, who gather together whenever there is a meteor shower and attempt to catch meteorites in special mitts. At least now I sort of get what the author was parodying.

Anyway, this has the potential to be fun, and it is a neat way to get rid of books that you can't sell. I'm planning on BookCrossing five or six of them some time soon... let me know if you want one and I will mail it to you to spread the awesomeness. They are:

Shadowfires, Dean Koontz
The Woad to Wuin, Peter David
The Eyre Affair, Jasper Fforde
Many Dimensions, Charles Williams
Waters Luminous and Deep, Meredith Ann Pierce
Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi
Random House Japanese-English English-Japanese Dictionary, Seigo Nakao

Book Titles Weird and Monotonous

Another link courtesy of American Libraries Direct: the Weird Books Room on AbeBooks!

Some of my favorites from this selection:
Why Do I Vomit?
Soldier Bear (you have to see the cover)
What to Do When the Russians Come: A Survivor's Guide
Oedipus in Disneyland
Is Your Dog Gay?
Poop-Eaters: Dung Beetles in the Food Chain
Nuclear War: What's in It for You?
How to Survive a Robot Uprising
The Bible Cure for Irritable Bowel Syndrome

Lately I've also noticed an increasingly annoying phenomenon in trendy scholarly book titles. We're an academic library, so of course we buy a lot of academic books, and it's become obvious to me that the format Trendy Title: A Trendy Subtitle That Explains What the Trendy Title is Actually About is very popular. I would vote for an even more original trendy title that can fit in one line and can also adequately represent what the book is about. Here are some examples of what I mean from the recent batch of books that we ordered:

Guesstimation: Solving the World's Problems on the Back of a Cocktail Napkin
World Without End?: Environmental Disaster and the Collapse of Empires
The Sea Woman: Sedna in Inuit Shamanism and Art in the Eastern Arctic
The Borders Within: Encounters Between Mexico and the U.S.
Al'America: Travels Through America's Arab and Islamic Roots

There are SO many of these that whenever I see one I just want to shake the author, or the publisher, or whoever is responsible for it and say "We get it already! The trendy title is very clever! Can you just tell us what the book is about instead?"

I guess I'm stuck with book titles in this line of work, from the amusing to the downright obnoxious.

Terrible Book Title

I just ordered a book called Harpoon: Into the Heart of Whaling.

Let the bad puns roll.

Review - The Eyre Affair

The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This was a very fun, genre-defying book... a little bit of science fiction, alternate history, fantasy, horror, time travel, historical fiction, romance, literary parody... it's pretty much got it all, and it blends them well.

Thursday Next is a LiteraTec in an alternate 1985 UK, except that it's not the UK since Wales is an independent and somewhat hostile state. Everyone is nuts about classic literature, so LiteraTecs exist to combat literary crime. There are over two dozen other special operations units with various functions, and with whom Next comes into contact frequently throughout the book. Her father is a renegade member of SpecOps-12, the ChronoGuard. Next finds herself pitted against a heinous villain, fumbling around a long-lost love, traveling through time, shooting people and getting shot, among other things. I won't spoil the other things like the back of the book does (OMG DON'T READ THE BACK OF THE BOOK WHATEVER YOU DO IT RUINS THE FIRST 200 PAGES).

Despite that annoyance and some obnoxious writing pet peeves (occasional dialogue in which you can't tell who's talking, etc.), it's a very entertaining read. I think there are something like five more in the series now, and I would consider picking up more of them at a later date.

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Review - The Reason for God

The Reason for God by Timothy Keller

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is the first book I've read in a long time, possibly even the first book ever, that is a well-reasoned, intellectually satisfying argument for the existence of God and his divinity in Jesus Christ.

One of the things I like most about Keller's writing is that he comes across as a down-to-earth person who obviously has great respect and patience for people's questions. Not having grown up a Christian, I have often had great difficulty relating to people who speak "Christianese" and justify faith using only the Bible, but Keller's arguments put God and Jesus in a rational, scientific, and historical context. He frames the book in two sections: confronting doubts about Christianity (scientific, cultural, Biblical, historical, etc.) and analyzing the foundations of its claims (particularly about Jesus).

The book comes down to a conclusion that I've heard in many other places--Jesus wasn't just an enlightened teacher. If you read everything he says in the Bible, you will quickly conclude that either he was the son of God . . . or he was a stark raving nutcase. But it's one or the other.

I want to summarize parts of the book here, but I would have to water it down too much for a small post, and I don't think I could do it justice. If I had to recommend one book, though, that sums up all of the reasons why I am a Christian, why my doubts six years ago were not enough to keep me from becoming one, and why, though I continue to struggle with faith, I keep coming back to Christ, it would be this one.

You won't find any irrefutable proof of God in this book (or in life, for that matter), but Keller makes an excellent, gently stated argument.

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Library Pet Peeves

Okay, I'm trying to think of some other material to post here other than my Goodreads reviews (although I know some of you don't look at my Goodreads account, so the cross-posting is still useful).

Library pet peeves. Well, really only one is a "library" pet peeve, I suppose.

Newspapers. I can't stand it when people don't put the newspapers back neatly. It is not hard to put the other sections back into the "A" section. I don't care if they're in order, as long as it looks like a whole paper and the front page is the first thing I see. I suppose there could be four people every day who have to rush off to the hospital to tend their ailing great-uncles and can't be bothered to take the five seconds to put the paper back correctly... and if so, I can forgive that. But come on. Otherwise it's just laziness.

I also can't take it when people take their stuff out of the microwave before the time is up, then they don't clear the display. I look at the microwave all the time in order to find out what time it is, and 05 is not a time. It drives me nuts.

But you know... at least I still have two legs and two hands and two eyes, so I can walk around and grab books and read them. That is always a good thing.

Review - Many Dimensions

Many Dimensions by Charles Walter Stansby Williams

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Charles Williams was a contemporary of Lewis and Tolkien, and a member of the Inklings. His stories also deal with the fantastic, but they tend to take place in our world and have spiritual or ethical themes.

Many Dimensions is about a mysterious stone that has been wrongfully taken from the Persian Empire and is said to have belonged to King Suleiman (Solomon) in ancient times.

Lord Arglay, the Chief Justice of Britain, and his secretary Chloe Burnett try to understand the powers of the stone as they act to prevent its use for the wrong reasons.

The stone seems to be a metaphor for God in the story, but also for power in general--how different people seek to use and misuse it. Ultimately, only those who are willing not to use it for themselves at all, but to submit to its own unknown purposes are able to fully experience it.

I can't say I really "got" or liked the ending as much, but the writing was rich and interesting and the philosophical themes challenging. As much as I liked the theme, though, I felt like the story served too much as a vehicle for it and would have liked it to be more integrated.

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