The launch of this new look coincides with the end of an era. A rather short, relatively insignificant era, but still, it's the end of it. I'm going back to work.
Yes, my retirement was fun while it lasted, but you know what would be even more fun? Being able to pay for all the materials I'm going to need to finish my house. Also, not getting foreclosed on.
So I'm going back to work -- nothing too serious or permanent, but I'm going to be doing some contract work. (And yes, the company that I'm going to be subcontracting for is that rather large, well known, oddly named company that owns a certain blogging platform and, I think, French Polynesia. Hint: It starts with a 'G'.)
Hopefully this won't impact my posting schedule, but my posts may be a little less ambitious for a while. Take, for example, this post.
Back in the heady early days of my retirement, I challenged my readers to suggest books for me to read. Based on these suggestions, I put together a reading list and have been working my way through it. I'm not going to make it through all of them by the deadline (which I believe was the end of November), but I've made some solid progress. I'm going to keep working my way through the list over the coming months.
For your reading pleasure and erudition, here are some highlights from the reviews I've written over the past year. The complete review blog is here, if you want to read more.
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Eragon by Christopher Paolini...The prose is hackneyed and tiresome. Paolini seems unaware that phrases like "for what seemed like hours" are both cliched and unhelpful for communicating anything to the reader. At one point a character speaks "in a language known only to him," which probably sounds ominous to a middle-schooler, but only made me laugh. His parents must be kicking themselves for paying for those lessons.
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So far my favorite line in the book is "I fear that we will all wake up one morning with our throats slashed." Man, do I wish I knew whether the author was joking when he wrote that.
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The main thing holding my interest at this point is the emerging sexual subtext:
"And I have outlived my youth; I'm not as strong as I used to be. Every time I reach for magic, it gets a little harder."...
Eragon dropped his eyes, abashed. "I'm sorry."
"Don't be," said Brom as he shifted his arm. "It happens to everyone."
The good news is that around page 300 the author finally breaks free from George Lucas' Jedi death grip and starts to tell a semi-interesting story. Paolini had the good sense to borrow the elements of his climax equally from Tolkien, Star Wars and the last of the Matrix movies, so that while originality remains beyond him, at least the narrative no longer felt like it was going to collapse from the weight of its own redundancy. Eragon remained utterly predictable throughout, of course. About 5 pages into meeting a particular character I turned to my 12 year old nephew (Everybody's 12 year old nephew has read Eragon) and said, "_____ is Eragon's brother, isn't he?" My nephew, who has read the sequel as well (in which this "secret" is evidently revealed), replied, "Yeah." Shocker!
Fast Food Nation by Eric SchlosserFast Food Nation is a well written, fascinating, and well-researched book.... Schlosser has a very engaging prose style. However, his goal seems to be to shock people into rethinking their affinity for fast food, and in that, he failed, at least in my case.
First of all, I'm a heartless conservative bastard, so his anecdotes about low-paying non-union meatpacking jobs and teenagers slaving away for minimum wage at stultifying, unskilled jobs have no effect on me. Does it bother me that unions can't seem to get any traction at fast food restaurants? Not really. Am I troubled that fast food workers get paid beans for making fries? Again, no. Ditto for the fact that McDonald's is putting traditional restaurants out of business in Germany. Good for them.
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Yeah, yeah, the workers are illiterate and unskilled, don't speak English, and may not even be legally allowed to work in the U.S., so I should feel really bad for them. And yet... they're pouring over the border looking for meatpacking jobs. Sounds more like a problem with the Mexican economy than with the U.S. meatpacking industry.
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To me, the only really troubling revelations in the book were regarding hamburger meat. Basically what I learned from this book is: Don't eat hamburgers from a fast food place. And for the love of all that's holy, don't eat hamburgers from a school cafeteria. And if you buy hamburger from the store, make sure you cook it really well. Because, well, there's a lot of shit in hamburger.
The Kite Runner by Khaled HosseiniYou're probably at least a little familiar with the travails of Afghanistan: First the Russians invaded, which was bad enough. But when the Russians left the Taliban took over. The Taliban makes the Russians look like the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. After reading this book, I am hard pressed to think of a group that embodies evil more purely than the Taliban. Honestly, I don't think even the Nazis measure up. Occasionally I hear people use the term "American Taliban" to refer to the religious right in this country. People who use the term in this way are f***ing retards. Read this book. If you think Pat Robertson measures up to this level of depravity, then you should be in therapy.
Haroun and the Sea of Stories by Salman RushdieMy expectations for Haroun and the Sea of Stories were pretty high -- as they would be for any author who has been both knighted and targeted for assassination for his writing. Maybe unfairly high. It's an easy read and an engaging story. I suppose it's not fair to expect anything more, although it irritates me when a book jacket is covered with hyperbole and superlatives that the book can't possibly live up to:
"In telling his tale, Rushdie borrows from sources as disparate as the conventions of the Bombay cinema; the films of Satyajit Ray; comic books and cartoons; Star Wars; and even the jingles on signboards along the highways of Kashmir... It is a performance that dazzles the eye as it erupts triumphantly out of the dark in a display of fireworks."I mean, seriously? Fireworks? I don't know about all that other stuff, but I've seen Star Wars about a gajillion times and the only reference to it I could find was when one character utters a string of gobbledygook which includes the name "Obi." To me, that review sounds like an exercise in "How can I illustrate my cosmopolitan sensibility and broad liberal arts education?"
The Truth Machine by James HalperinRarely when reading a book do I have the urge to hurl it against a wall.
I'm used to reading sci-fi books that make outlandish and inaccurate predictions about the future, but I think The Truth Machine takes the cake. Supposedly the author interviewed a lot of really smart people about what was going to happen in the coming decades, which just goes to show how much smart people know.
His predictions veer wildly off track almost immediately, to the point of being humorously absurd. To give you an idea: In 2003 Al Gore is President, most people drive electric cars, oil is selling for $4 a barrel, the war in Bosnia is still going on, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are not. Things get more and more absurd as the years go by.
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The central idea of the book is the construction of a glorified lie detector, which comes into being through a series of contrivances reminiscent of the founding of Apple Computers, the creation of the Human Genome Project and the establishment of the X-Prize. Never in human history has any project been undertaken in this way, because none of it makes any freaking sense. The author manages to communicate his ignorance of corporate finance, computer programming, scientific research, and pretty much every other field he touches on.
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The Truth Machine is a mildly interesting murder mystery drowning in giant sickening globs of technology porn.
New Rules by Bill MaherIronically, I don't really like humor books.* Also, I can't stand Bill Maher. I think he's an ugly, mean-spirited, whiny, self-righteous jerk.
So I will fully admit to being prejudiced against New Rules. I read about a third of this book -- enough, I would think, to have encountered something funny if there were anything funny to be found in it. I didn't laugh. Not once. I didn't even smile.
There were some parts where I was tempted to smile, like this:
No more TV gambling. First there was Celebrity Poker. Then there was Celebrity Blackjack. I saw one show that was just Cammryn Mannheim scratching lottery tickets.Or this:
Actually, I can't find another one. I know there was something else that almost made me smile, but I just spent five minutes wading through tired jokes about Paris Hilton, tired jokes about George W. Bush, tired jokes about Pat Robertson, and copious use of the the f-word word in place of a punchline. I feel like I've wasted enough of my life on this crap.
Good job, Bill. You succeeded in publishing a book and getting fired from a TV show. Now go away.
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In case you're wondering, right now I'm reading Love in the Time of Cholera, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (sorry, Pavel, I substituted it for the book you suggested, because I already had a copy of this one). I'll let you know how it goes.
*You should still buy my book, though, because it's way better than most humor books. Seriously. Ask this guy, or this guy, or these ladies, or this chick, this dude, or several other of the fine folks at humor-blogs.com.
Labels: Books
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