A Good Book Is a Bad Thing

I've alluded to this before.

Last night I finished One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest.  I've read it before, but when a copy of it landed in my husband's hands (see Book Crossing for how that happened) I decided to read it again, since all I could remember from my high school reading of it was the ending.

But a good book is a bad thing.  Like One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest's main character, Randle McMurphy, a good book cajoles you into abandoning your sensible routine, keeping you awake way past the prudent hour you normally go to sleep, and incites you to shirk your responsibilities until your formerly well oiled machine barely functions.

When I read fiction, I prefer not to know much about the story before I read it, so I'll try not to ruin it for you, except to summarize what you could work out from the back cover: The story, told by a patient in a mental institution, is about the power struggle between the Big Nurse and the new patient on the ward.  The nurse is what I would call a Hook Operator (a term I picked up from the totally unheard of Operators and things: The inner life of a schizophrenic, a book I read 15 years ago, have never seen another copy of, and highly recommend to anyone for it's insights on office life alone, but also to follow the very interesting journey of the schizophrenic author).  The nurse keeps everything under her control, not by using force, but by abusing power.  McMurphy, the new patient, is boastful and cunning, and also trying to work the system in his own way.

This story is about so many different things: the abuse of power, the importance of fun, friendship, sacrifice, and redemption.  I normally try to avoid "the classics" but I highly recommend this book.  As Douglas Eadie says on the cover of my copy, "If you haven't already read this book, do so.  If you have, read it again."

Some people don't care for economic expansion

I just finished reading Arabian Sands, by Wilfred Thesiger, which is the story of the five years he spent exploring the Southern part of the Arabian Peninsula in the late 1940s.  On the surface, this is a book about an explorer traveling through the deserts of the Saudi Peninsula known as "The Empty Quarter" and is classified as a travel book.  But this book is significant because Thesiger was one of the first Westerners to travel the area, where he had the unique opportunity to live amongst Bedu and meet people from many of the tribes in the area.  Though he never learned to identify the tracks of his camel, he was a keen observer of the people he traveled with and among, and has documented the lifestyle and values of a people who are now almost extinct.

All of the people in the area were Muslim.  Many of the tribes he encountered were acutely xenophobic and anti-Christian.  Material possessions were few; his travel companions generally owned camels, guns, the shirt they were wearing, and little else.  Even settled tribes seemed to have very few possessions.  His travel companions were willing to kill for their tribe or traveling companions as a matter of honor.  They were generous to the point of poverty, always offering food to anyone they met while traveling, even if it meant they went without any food for the day or longer, and Thesiger's companions seemed incapable of saying no to a request, even if it threatened the provisions required to cross the desert.  It is also clear that there is great variation in degrees between different areas and tribes, with some not so concerned about Christians and others calling Thesiger's companions infidels because they were accompanied by a Christian.

In the five year period in which Thesiger completed his travels the area was in constant turmoil.  Tribal alliances were complex and the areas of conflict were constantly shifting.  Thesiger follows these tribal conflicts like a local, and recounts tribal conflicts that consolidated power and facilitated exploration for oil in the period between his travels and when he wrote the book.

The rigors of the desert created a society that differs dramatically from our own Anglo-Saxon society.  This book provides insight into where the Muslim religion was formed, and the growth of values that seem utterly foreign to many westerners, which is especially significant in the current climate of Christian-Muslim animosity and the global threat of terrorism. 

Thesiger aspired to define neither Arabs nor Muslims in this work.  However, his keen observations of the Bedu peoples amongst whom he traveled provide insight into the values of both.  Thinking back on my geography education, reading this book would have broadened my understanding of the Middle East far more than the chapters of our text book on the topic managed.  On top of all this, it details the challenge of crossing a desert five hundred miles across by foot, with only the provisions they could carry on their camels, amongst warring tribes.  It's well worth reading.

Writing lessons

I feel a little let down by my high school English curriculum.  For six years I read countless novels, short stories, and plays, I identified themes in spot quotes, and I wrote five to ten page essays purporting to explore the deeper meaning of these stories.  Despite all that reading and writing, I have not been able to shake the feeling that I missed the day when the teacher discussed how to write a good essay (I missed very few days, so it must have only taken one or two classes).

I'm a huge fan of Tim Cahill's writing.  Cahill, who used to be a regular contributor to Outside Magazine, has a style that melds personal experience with history and often has you thinking about the future as well.  For non-fiction, he is one author I'd like to be able to mimic (another is Jon Krakauer, another contributor to Outside Magazine who writes with a very similar style).  Why didn't we read articles by Cahill in high school?  Why didn't we spend any time analyzing the writing techniques used in our endless reading list of the classics?  I suspect it was because my high school English curriculum was more geared towards making sure we could quote from Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man ("Madame, I never eat Muscatel grapes.") than to develop an understanding of different writing styles and how to mimic them.  Not to suggest that mimicry should be the goal of any aspiring writer, but that it can and should be used as a valuable step towards developing one's own style.

Today I was very excited to discover an analysis of a typical article by Tim Cahill.  If you haven't read anything by Cahill, I suggest you get a copy of his first book, A Wolverine Is Eating My Leg, which is a collection of articles on topics as diverse as the Jonestown Massacre and Bigfoot sightings.  The aforementioned analysis is of a piece from Pass the Butterworms, a collection I haven't read, and is quite understandable even without having first read the article.  I will be reading this analysis several times to glean everything I can from it.  Hopefully it will have an effect on what you see here, but no one should hold their breath for that.

According to Stephen King, in his memoir/writing instruction manual On Writing, good writing comes from lots of reading and lots of writing with a few things like grammar and vocabulary thrown in (in other words, there is no formula).

With the exception of a few pages of Cujo when I was too little to be reading Stephen King novels, I've never read anything by Stephen King.  I was so scared of the shadows in my closet that I have avoided scary books and movies ever since.  And I'm not terribly interested in writing fiction.  I never would have picked up his writing manual except that my mother was so enthusiastic about it that she sent me a copy.  Once I started reading it I couldn't stop.  I was hooked by the second page, which I suppose is why he is a bestselling author.

The book starts with an autobiography that exposes his insatiable appetite for horror, a love of writing, and a determination to publish, all of which started from a very early age.  The second half of the book commences with a discussion of the elements of one's toolbox and relies heavily on Strunk and White's Elements of Style (he recommends that any writer own and study this book).  The better part of the writing manual, however, is about how to manage story, themes, background information, and research in writing.  He illustrates this very effectively with examples from his own writing history and samples of his writing.  The postscript is about getting hit by a car and how writing fit into his recovery.

My only complaint is that he assumes that the reader is an aspiring fiction writer to the extent that he instructs the reader to stop reading if he is not.  I found the book interesting, regardless of my non-existent desire to write fiction, because it demonstrates how one successful author cultivated his skills and develops his stories.  This book would be a welcome addition to any high school English curriculum.

Reading  On Writing made me want to read more of King's books, but I'm still a little afraid of the shadows in my closet.

Books that changed the way I see the world, part 3: The Control of Nature

Four months after it was hit, New Orleans is still cleaning up from Hurricane Katrina.  The population of the city is down and city officials are lobbying the federal government for funds to build new and improved levees, reconstruct housing, and trying to encourage former residents to return. 

Okay, I must admit that I probably didn't change many of my preconceptions about the world from reading The Control of Nature, but I still found it fascinating.  John McPhee is one of those writers who can make any topic interesting, and in this book he provides three stories of man versus nature that seems particularly apropos in the aftermath of Katrina.  For instance, did you know that the Mississippi River has been trying to change course into the Red River and the Atchafalaya swamps for most of the last century.  It has been stopped by an ongoing dam project at Old River driven by the desire for New Orleans to continue to be a port.  While the Mississippi gets increasingly shallower and more likely to flood as it fills with silt, the amount of water flowing from the Mississippi river to the Red river has been frozen to the proportions from the 1950s at great expense because of economic interests!

This book is interesting for several reasons.  First, it illustrates how dependent our homes and property interests are to current geographical conditions.  Second, it demonstrates the exhaustive amount of energy people will use to protect their homes and their property interests from changes in those conditions.

Currently the population of New Orleans is less than one fourth the population prior to Katrina.  Some of these undoubtedly haven't returned because they do not have a place to return to.  Perhaps some of these people have decided that it's easier just to stay where they are now.  Some may have decided that New Orleans is too prone to flooding (if it weren't for all the levees the place would always be under water).  But then there are others who are trying very hard to make New Orleans livable and encourage people to return.

Do we insist on living in places that require continual control of nature because we are too stubborn (or lazy) to move or is it because we are running out of more suitable places?  Are the projects described in this book over the top or are they just extreme examples of the control we exert over nature everyday to make our existence comfortable?  The book answers neither of these questions, but it got me asking them.

Your thoughts?

Finishing fiction

I finished reading Life of Pi last night.  I stayed up way past my bedtime to do so, and after I put the book down I concluded that one should never finish a good book just before it's time to go to sleep.

This is especially true with fiction, which often doubles its pace in the final chapters, turning everything you've absorbed in great detail upside down at the last second.  I can remember reading The Princess Bride
for the first time as a 14 year old, crying with anger at the turn of  events in the epilogue (this part was left out of the movie, by the way).  Of course, that's the sign of a good book, one that leaves you mulling over everything you read in great detail to figure out some piece that is revealed to you in the end that requires revisiting everything you read before before you can know what it means.

Children's Books

My son is about a year old.  Every night, as part of the bed time ritual prescribed by all of the child rearing "experts", we read him two or three books.  At this rate, one can go through a lot of books.

Now the first thing that I have to say about children's books is that they are absurdly expensive: "A dollar a word" as one friend and parent said to us.  Now, it's not really that bad.  They're probably closer to $0.20/word, and some of them may even go less than $0.04/word.  Still, can you imagine paying that rate for your typical novel?  I've mostly gotten over this.  If I find a really good children's book, I will simply ignore the price tag as I take it to the register and pay for it with my credit card so I don't ever have to acknowledge the actual cost.

My real issue with children's books is that on the whole, they are so bad.  They insult the intelligence of the readers (both the children and their parents) by sloppily throwing together pictures and a few uninspiring notes with little semblance of a story.  At the risk of committing a bit of copyright infringement I'll give you an example, the complete text of one of the board books we own:

Baby bunnies enjoy an early morning wash.
Heads down, tails up! Bunnies drink their breakfast milk.
One, two, three... Hide and seek is fun to play.
One young rabbit learns how to hop.
Cuddle up, it's time for bed.  Goodnight!

Now, with the exception of an old college mate of mine who would have liked the cute pictures of bunnies, I can't see how anyone could enjoy reading this book once, let alone the hundreds of times a parent can expect to read each book they own.  That's why when my son decided he liked to use this book as a teething ring I didn't discourage him until the pages started to fuse together and I started to worry about what kinds of glue he might be ingesting.

Fortunately, there are a few stars that shine through the dark, books with nice stories, clever rhymes, intelligent words, and good illustrations.  They include words like "cavort" and "rapscallion".  A few I've discovered so far include "Slinky Malinky", "Harry Maclary and Zachary Quack", "Edward the Emu", "Edwina the Emu", "Olga the Brolga", "The Very Hungry Caterpillar", "Barnyard Dance", and "But Not the Hippopotamus" (who can resist a story about a hippopotamus?  It's just a fun word to say - try it).

Have you read these books?  Do you have other suggestions or remember favorites from your own early childhood?

By the way, if you're ever giving a children's book as a present to a young child, make sure it is a board book, otherwise it will either be torn and crinkled or stored away to save it from that fate.  I'm not sure at what age this no longer applies, but certainly beyond 1 year.

Couldn't put it down

I've just finished reading Or I'll Dress You In Mourning, the biography of Manuel Benítez, El Cordobés, the bullfighter I mentioned in a previous post.  It didn't take me long to read it (it has actually taken me longer to get around to writing the review).  Plainly said: this was one of the most compelling books I have ever read.  I could hardly put it down (only a year of sleepless nights with an infant was enough to get me to turn the light out each night).

This book tells the story of Manuel Benítez, a peasant born on the eve of the Spanish revolution.  He grew up in a region with only three landholders who paid next to nothing to the local field hands, and the promise of a socialist republic was a popular concept.  His father was quick to join the socialist militia when the fighting started and was imprisoned until his death when the war finally ended.  His mother died quickly after a brief illness and he and his siblings were left to be raised by his oldest sister.  Determined to become a bullfighter like most other peasant boys, he demonstrated a dedication to his cause that few people have, until he finally broke into the big time at an age when many bullfighters are considered washed up.

Despite knowing the fate of El Cordobés, which you can quickly gather from the captions on the collection of pictures, I found it difficult to put the book down for want of knowing what would happen next.  The only disappointment is that the book ends in 1964, at the start of his illustrious career that still continues, 40 years later!

Books that changed the way I see the world, part 2: Under the Banner of Heaven

There are books that provide more detail to something you already knew or broaden your knowledge with something you knew nothing about.  Other books cause you to fundamentally shift your view of the world.  Under the Banner of Heaven is one of the latter.

I bought this book purely because I like the author, even though the topic was outside his usual area.

The book illustrates that religious fanaticism is the exclusive domain of neither Muslims nor foreigners and exists among homebred Americans.  It also demonstrates that the publicized behavior of "religious extremists" does not necessarily represent the values of the greater population following that religion.  "Under the Banner of Heaven" chronicals the events surrounding the gruesome murder of a young mother and her infant by two of her Morman brothers-in-law.  It provides a detailed history of the Morman church and explores how extremist factions have formed and continue to exist.

Krakauer writes with a very unbiased tone and lets the reader come to his own conclusions.  That said, reading this book completely changed my views on organized religion.

Books that changed how I see the world, part 1: Tales of a Shaman's Apprentice

I'm sure most people go through this when they start their blog, but when I was brainstorming what to write about, I couldn't help but think of my favorite books, not necessarily books that I would read over and over, but ones that really impacted me.  I'm always eager to share a good book with someone who's interested, so here's the first installment in my list of books that changed the way I view the world.  Needless to say, I highly recommend every one of the books that make it onto this list.

Tales of a Shaman's Apprentice, by Mark Plotkin

I dragged this book around for five years before I finally had time to read it.  When I did, I couldn't put it down.

I always knew the world's rain forests hold plants that can be used as medicines, and this book provides living details of this, but the book also helped me see the many ways in which the developed world is impacting the native cultures, and the conflict that exists between protecting those cultures versus transitioning them to interacting with the developed world.

There are many sides to this interaction: the missionaries who try to convert "primitives" to Christianity, the aid workers who try to improve living standards and health, the anthropologists who study their culture as an oddity, the tourists who appear to have so much wealth.  Western medicine plays a particularly complex role in this tango between cultures.  All of these things are illustrated as the author recounts his experiences living with several tribes in the Amazon over a number of years.  Reading this book gave me a much greater understanding of the issues surrounding previously isolated cultures and the struggle that exists between retaining their identity versus integrating into the wider world.

The story is a race against time and, even though the author is an ethno-botanist, the story is compelling.