Nothing For Now (Books Archives)

Home, where my mind's escaping...

I'm baaaack! *watches as America cringes in horror* After thinking I'd missed my plane, being delayed for 2 hours due to "mechanical problems" (that wasn't scary...), completing about 30 Sudoku puzzles, watching the heartwarming endings of A Beautiful Mind, Seabiscuit, and Cinderella Man all in a row, and being extorted for a $3 luggage cart (shame on you, JFK), I managed to drag my exhausted butt past Customs and get home. Woohoo!

I've received a few Chanukah presents already, including way too much chocolate, which I'm trying not to munch all at once. I also went to my precious library and took out Watchmen for a school essay, a book on identity and the Internet for another paper, the first book of Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle because what I need is another 900-page techno-historical fiction head trip, The Red and the Black because it's referenced in A Little Night Music and I'm pathetic enough to think of that as a Sondheim product endorsement, and Preludes and Nocturnes because I've delayed my reading of Sandman for far too long. *pant* *pant*

You know what else I want? SHOWS. Namely, Sweeney Todd. Like, now. *twitch* Also, I have many movies to see. Brokeback Mountain, The Producers, Memoirs of a Geisha, Munich, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, Syriana, Transamerica, Capote, The Dying Gaul, Match Point, Paradise Now, stuff I missed like Jarhead and Shopgirl if I can...uh, yeah. I'm not sure I even have that much money. BUT I WILL FIND A WAY. Because I'm back, baby!

I Need a Bookstore

So pretty.

*wants*

*le sigh*

My Totally Awesome Day

Okay, so the day didn't start off very promisingly.

Cryptonomicon

Finishing Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon feels like an accomplishment in a way to which the completion of mere mortal books cannot hope to compare. At over 900 pages of dense, often technical prose, it isn't a novel so much as a tome, or some other heavyweight-sounding word. Needless to say, I loved it.

The story ties the cryptographic geeks of World War II and the present (well, the late 90s), along with various soldiers, businessmen and sundry others, into a vast knot involving Axis gold, submarines, and lots and lots of codes. Stephenson is a geek of the highest order, but unlike so many technology and engineering types he has a great grounding and interest in history and literature, so he can actually pull off writing a book like this. The narration can, at any time, veer off the story and into involved explanations of cryptography, mining, computer surveillance, or pipe organs, but Stephenson is obviously having so much fun sharing the knowledge it's no burden to go through it, even for this hardly math-oriented reader.

It helps, of course, that the book is genuinely funny, and when it isn't graphing out a function of, say, male horniness to mental function, the story moves along at a more than respectable clip. The interest level of various storylines waxes and wanes, so sometimes you might look forward to a chapter about the morphine-addicted Marine Bobby Shaftoe, and at other times you might be eager to get back to World War II codebreaker (and all-around geek avatar) Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse. Eventually, of course, everything ties together in an insanely complicated way, and if all that cryptography wasn't enough, you'll have some interesting ideas on history and politics to chew on. So if you're looking for a book to occupy you for the next two weeks at a minimum, look no farther than here.

Now I have to see about getting tickets to The Great American Trailer Park Musical. Hmm.

Simple Things

In an act of intellectual masochism, I was about to sit down and translate Honor� de Balzac's P�re Goriot from French to English myself when I came to an interesting realization: The French copy of the book I'd requested on interlibrary loan was, in fact, in English.

*kicks things*

How hard can it be to give me a copy of this book in French so I can make myself suffer for hours on end?

***

Anyway, the countdown to the Great Computer Switch has begun. My new laptop should be coming in four to eight days, and I've already got a shiny new lock and carrying case to go with it. The fun part will be trying to get all the software, connections, and settings I've accumulated in two years of using this computer into the new one. If by fun what's meant is "hours of the mind-numbing tedium of watching installation progress bars."

Other than that, life goes on as before. I'm reading a lot- The Diamond Age: or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer, by Neal Stephenson; Ma Rainey's Black Bottom and Two Trains Running, by August Wilson; and Cards on the Table and After the Funeral, by Agatha Christie. The Yankees are being carried by such luminaries as Aaron Small and Shawn Chacon, which says everything you need to know about their playoff chances. And the logistics of my trip to London are still an amorphous haze.

Impressive Stuff

Someone please explain to me how penis enlargement and online poker ads manage to spam blog entries I haven't even published yet. Come on, people! At least leave my drafts alone!

***

Anyway, I think I did something quite stupid today. I've been reading whatever small spoilers I can find about The Fountain, but the movie was still, thanks to the measures taken by Warner Brothers, shrouded in secrecy. Today, though, I think I found a big spoiler on IMDB, and if it's true I really wish I could forget it so I'd be surprised by the twist. Ah, well. There's no one to blame but myself.

***

In other news, everyone and their mother needs to read Bill Willingham's Fables right now. Collected so far into five trade paperbacks, it follows the stories of various fairy tale characters expelled from their magical worlds into New York. Willingham takes a lot more cues from the brothers Grimm than from Disney, and his ways of combining and explaining the various stories are deviously clever.

In the exiled Fable community, Prince Charming is a cad who falls for princess after princess but isn't very good at the "happily ever after," his ex-wife Snow White is the hard-nosed Deputy Mayor, and the Big Bad Wolf has reformed enough to become head of security. If that isn't enough, I guarantee that you'll never think of Goldilocks and the three bears the same way again after reading Animal Farm. The dialogue and characterizations are sharp, and Willingham has a great sense of pace, revealing and hiding just enough to keep the reader wanting more. Which is, of course, how you get me, waiting pathetically for the next collection to be released some time in the winter. *whimper*

Lenses

After weeks of reading Oscar Wilde, Chaim Potok, Agatha Christie, and Philip Roth, I finally said, "Enough with Englishmen and Jews" and deliberately set out to get other kinds of authors in the library today. Naturally, I ended up snatching more than I'll probably be able to read by the due date, but that's okay.

The results of my diversity-oriented haul? A bunch of August Wilson plays, the book of A Little Night Music, and judicious sprinklings of Neal Stephenson, Gabriel Garcia-Marquez, Roger Angell and Yasunari Kawabata. Some sci-fi and baseball essays should be a good mental pick-me-up. Of course, I have to finish Zuckerman Bound first. It's good stuff, but there's only so much Jewishness even I can take.

Taking advantage of a newly widened rush policy, I saw Glengarry Glen Ross last night. To be completely honest, I may or may not post a review. But I will say it was interesting to see a play after seeing the movie adaptation. For some reason, I usually like to go into theatrical productions with as little back information as possible, but if a movie is based on a book I'll try to do the reading first. Just me being strange, I suppose.

Oh, and I knew the Yankees' division lead wouldn't last. But sometimes it stinks being right.

Catch Up

Okay, I realize I didn't exactly post for...well, a month. I started a bunch of entries, never finished them, and kept telling myself I'd write again once I did. Anyway, that excuse only works for so long, so here's the roundup of what I've done between leaving school and my last entry:

Shows watched:
Perseus
The Apple Tree
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Dirty Rotten Scoundrels
The Pillowman
Spamalot
The Light in the Piazza
Doubt

Books read:
V for Vendetta, by Alan Moore
America (The Book): A Citizen's Guide to Democracy Inaction, by Jon Stewart et al.
Humboldt's Gift, by Saul Bellow
A Small Town in Germany, by John le Carre
Everything is Illuminated, by Jonathan Safran Foer
In the Beginning and Davita's Harp, both by Chaim Potok
The Big Four, by Agatha Christie
The Golem: As Told By Elie Wiesel, by Elie Wiesel
Mrs. Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf

I'm currently in the middle of reading Zadie Smith's White Teeth. I've gotten my hands on a copy of the original London recording of A Little Night Music, which has such glorious sound quality that listening to it is akin to discovering that score all over again. Thanks to winter_baby, I've watched all of Firefly and Veronica Mars, and I'm starting in on Wonderfalls. I've been working in web design, listening to every Yankees game I can despite the team's overwhelming mediocrity, and generally trying to squeeze everything I can out of this summer.

And today? I donated blood, so I'm a bit light-headed. But at least I have an excuse to be sedentary for the rest of the day, other than my general laziness. In conclusion: the Yankees really do suck, the Tonys are mediocre, Veronica Mars (along with Scrubs) is the best show you're not watching, Saul Bellow's appeal escapes me, and Jennifer Holliday performing "And I Am Telling You" is about as close as you can come to a religious experience in musical theater.

Letters to the Abyss

Dear Queen Mary college- why must you offer all your good English classes in the spring when I'm coming in the fall? And worse yet, why must all your politics and law classes be full-year? And why, oh why do your French culture classes require a generalized European culture class first? Doesn't knowing French count for anything?

From,
Scarred by Scheduling

Dear person in the library- you sound very ill. In fact, your cough brings to mind words like "pleurisy" and "tuberculosis." Why must you sit in the library and subject us all to your continual hacking? Honestly, I was concerned for you, coughing person. Go to the health center.

Sincerely,
Striving to Study

Dear Chaucer,
Even having to read them in Middle English doesn't change the fact that The Canterbury Tales rock.

Love,
Me.

My Spring Vacation in Numbers

Okay, so it wasn't really spring by any stretch of the imagination, and it fell too early for my taste, but this past week was a vacation, and I really think I used it pretty well.

What I did on my spring vacation:
Shows seen: 2
Books read: 2
Books not read: 2
Busses missed: 3
Lectures attended: 1
Hours of television watched: 25

Now, on to the details. The shows seen were The Producers, still going strong with Richard Kind bringing his air of wounded dignity to the role of Max Bialystock, and Dessa Rose, a very promising new Ahrens and Flaherty musical about the pregnant leader of a slave rebellion, a Southern belle abandoned by her husband, and the other people in their lives, past and present. I'm really resenting my "don't talk during previews" policy right now, but let's just say that with some work on Act I, this could be a Best Musical winner in a year.

The books read were A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, by David Eggers, whose dense and self-conscious prose didn't quite live up to its title but didn't need to, and The Bronte Myth, by Lucasta Miller, which was a pretty interesting look at the history of the perception of the Bronte sisters, especially Charlotte and Emily.

My books not read were the only major disappointment of the break. I just didn't give myself enough time to finish them, I guess. They were Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything is Illuminated and Davita's Harp, by old favorite Chaim Potok.

The busses missed were all the same line, of course- the one from my stop to Port Authority. I missed my bus twice in the morning (once because I was 2 minutes late, and once despite being on time) and once at night (because I was directed to the wrong gate by an oh-so-helpful Help Desk employee). Maybe I should add another statistic to the list- Total time spent standing in sub-freezing weather waiting for a bus that won't come: 1 hour. And that doesn't count the time spent waiting indoors.

The lecture attended was one with the aformentioned Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty, the book writer/lyricist and composer, respectively, of Dessa Rose. Despite some hangups due to the fact that certain audience members had a hard time hearing, it was an interesting and rather engaging discussion.

And the television seen comprises 7 episodes each of Gilmore Girls and Scrubs, the Candide concert on Great Performances, Robert Altman's The Company, and the entirety of The 10th Kingdom, an old mini-series I adored when it originally ran.

When I wasn't watching or listening or standing and waiting, I went to 2 grocery shopping trips and 1 sorta-family dinner, baked 1 loaf of banana bread, and told my brother to turn down the volume on his video games 3,629 times.

And that was my spring vacation in numbers.

Beowulfs in Abundance

My Old English professor is a big-time "Beowulf" fan, and much to our amusement, today he showed us a couple of pieces of "Beowulf"-related merchandise he'd picked up.

First on the list was the "Beowulf" comic book. I kid you not, folks- this was Beowulf as Viking superhero, complete with a scantily clad female sidekick. Unferth was cast as the slimy villian- which is sort of appropriate, actually- but the great part was seeing the Scandinavian hero fight off space aliens as if he were Superman or something. Hilarious.

Now, you'd think nothing could top off a red-headed Beowulf spouting horrible comics dialogue. But you'd be wrong. Because the second thing our prof brought in was a tape of the "Beowulf" musical.

*insert screams of horror here*

He played a few choice ditties for us, including an upbeat "Unferth mocks Beowulf" number that reminded me of a cut-rate "Master of the House," a big wannabe-Andrew Lloyd Webber love ballad for Welthow, and best of all, Grendel's distorted growls singing about how much the partying at Herot irritates him. It was unbelievably cheesy all the way though- the class was practically rolling on the floor from laughter.

Of course, this is exactly the stuff that gives musical theater a bad name, but I made myself feel better by remembering that Sondheim was at his prime when this was written. And we don't judge all movies by Battlefield Earth, do we?

Book List

One of the great ironies of my life is that my elite liberal arts education leaves me with almost no time to read books unrelated to school. So I've spent this vacation making up for my deprivation at a breakneck pace, reading books almost as fast as my local library system will provide them. I'm a squirrel hoarding stories. Some of the books I've read so far:

A Wizard of Earthsea and The Tombs of Atuan, by Ursula K. LeGuin. I bitched about the SciFi channel's atrocious Earthsea mini-series a few entries back, so obviously this wasn't my first time reading these books. After watching that misinterpreted monstrosity I felt the overwhelming need to read the source material again to reassure myself that I was remembering it correctly as a uniquely spare and beautiful fantasy rather than the bizarre WB story of destined romance I saw on TV. I was.

LeGuin weaves a story with a lot of the typical trappings of fantasy- wizards, dragons, and hidden damsels- put into a very special storytelling style and world. The magic of Earthsea is in words; when you know the true name of something you can bind it. It's typical of LeGuin's approach- her magic is literate and her story has almost no violence or sex. Instead there's philosophy, and somehow it's not ever boring. Along with The Farthest Shore, these books make up a truly fascinating fantasy trilogy.

***

Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, by Susanna Clarke. This book is an absolute epic, over 700 pages long. I was completely drawn in by it and it still took me 3 days to finish. Like most of the fantasy stories I love- the Earthsea books are an exception- this one comes from England. The two men of the title live in that country during the Napoleonic wars, and are notable for being the only practical magicians in an era when magic is only studied in theory. Norrell and Strange, his student, want to bring magic back to England, but exactly what that means becomes the book's central mystery and point of contention.

Strange is a character you've probably read before- the gifted, adventurous man who may be too confident in his skills for his own good. Norrell is a more atypical combination of qualities- he's cowardly, paranoid, anti-social and possessive, but also extremely intelligent, hard-working, and driven. It's magic that binds them- each of them cares more about magic than anything else, and as they're England's only two practicing magicians, only they can understand each other. Their student-mentor bond leads to some of the most poignant and wonderful scenes in the book.

The only complaint I would have against Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell is that it needed more of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. Clarke paints their relationship masterfully, a few powerful strokes serving to say a great deal. But I wish that perhaps there had been a few more scenes of them working together. Similarly, when you can go for tens of pages without hearing from them, it might have been good to have more scenes between Strange and his wife Arabella, especially as she becomes more central to the story. The elaborate footnotes and multitudes of characters and small sub-plots made these relationships lose focus a little bit. But to Clarke's credit, she could reinvoke everything that went on between characters 100 pages before in a few short sentences.

***

Skinny Dip, by Carl Hiaasen. Comparitively, this book is total fluff. It's the story of Joey, a woman who gets pushed off a cruise ship by her husband for reasons unknown during their anniversary cruise. Wacky hijinks involving Jamaican pot, dancing bears, skydivers, pythons, a hairy painkiller addict and a sheep farmer ensue. Confused yet? Well, the story takes place in Florida, which seems to be some kind of weirdness magnet, and the author evidently has a reputation for filling his stories with the over-the-top bizarre.

My biggest problem with this book is that some of the characters needed a little more development- Joey seemed too good to be true, and Mick Stranahan, the man who pulled her from the water, had a colorful past but didn't show why during the course of the story. But the secondary characters were a lot of fun, and overall, the book was a nice read. It flowed well and had a lot of moments of surreal humor (one of my favorite kinds.)

***

The Last Night of the Yankee Dynasty, by Buster Olney. My interest in the New York Yankees was at its peak during the 2001 World Series. I was still in high school and able to access New York radio broadcasts, which came in handy, as I wasn't allowed to stay up and watch the games. I spent nights that autumn lying in bed, pretending to sleep while I actually listened to games on my Walkman. I cheered silently the double miracles of that World Series, lay there bug-eyed with shock as Byung-Hyung Kim failed in the exact same way two nights in a row. And I read every single Yankees-related news story I could get my hands on, which, considering my Google access, was quite a lot. So maybe it's no surprise that when I read this book, I felt like I wasn't getting anything new.

It doesn't help that Olney was the beat writer covering the Yankees for The New York Times that year- I read that newspaper every morning and never failed to read all the Yankees stories that season, so I was already extremely familiar with Olney's ideas, insights, and turns of phrase. Still, though, I expected the book to feel like more than just all of Olney's stories blended together.

Perhaps the last straw was that the overarching framework of the book was Game 7 of that World Series, which remains probably the most agonizing loss I've ever witnessed. It felt like a punch in the stomach, and as stupid as it sounds, I'm not entirely over it. And maybe that's partly because of what Olney's book is about- that World Series game in November marked the end of a chapter for the Yankees. Paul O'Neill, Tino Martinez, Scott Brosius, and Chuck Knoblauch all left afterwards, and the team never quite felt the same. I don't care what Jerry Seinfeld says- I cheer for people, not just laundry. And when half the roster seems to turn over every year and my favorite people aren't on the team anymore, it gets harder and harder to be enthusiastic about the pinstripes. I didn't just stop following the Yankees so closely because college leaves me without time or access. I stopped because the team just doesn't feel the same. And dammit, don't get me started on that stupid Randy Johnson trade.

***

I'm now in the middle of The Epicure's Lament, by Kate Christensen. The epicure of the title is the book's narrator and a total bastard. But he still has over 200 pages in which to redeem himself, so I won't make judgements for now. After that, I have to finish Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights (oh, the melodrama) and I'm off to the library again. I need a book to read on the bus to see Democracy.

Did I mention I love vacation?

No Respect

Yesterday I watched the SciFi channel's two-part Legend of Earthsea mini-series. As a tremendous fan of Ursula K. LeGuin's original Earthsea trilogy, I approached the mini with trepidation- I already knew that Shawn Ashmore, aka Bobby from the X-Men movies, was cast as Sparrowhawk, and I didn't exactly have the greatest faith in his acting skills. Nor was I particularly happy with the fact that he was white, which his character certainly was not.
I should have realized that the casting of teen favorites Ashmore and Kristin Kreuk (of Smallville) was part of a pattern. This was Earthsea as WB melodrama, complete with Ashmore and Kreuk sharing a smooch at the end. Of course, no such thing happened in The Tombs of Atuan. But who cares about the text when you can add sex to the story, right?

By combining the plots of A Wizard of Earthsea and The Tombs of Atuan into one timeline, the creators of this series could have done something interesting, I guess, showing the parallel maturations of Sparrowhawk and Tenar in their respective worlds. But they passed up even that opportunity and instead mutilated the storylines of both books for the sake of some half-assed romance between the two characters. Tenar was turned into a bright-eyed, smiling priestess-in-training and Sparrowhawk became a typically petulant WB bad boy. There were girls at the wizarding school in Gont and no mention of the fact that wizards weren't supposed to consort with women. Oops.

They couldn't even keep Sparrowhawk's "public" name and his true name straight, and I'm supposed to settle for that? No one who has even an ounce of appreciation or respect for LeGuin's text should watch this mini-series. Avoid it like the plague.

What I'm listening to today: Rockin' the Suburbs, by Ben Folds

The Joys of Home

One of the nicest things about being home from college, believe it or not, is the books. My school has a lovely library for studying and research, but its offerings in the fiction department are less comprehensive. Hey, I don't blame them. Those science journals and things cost a lot to subscribe to, and school is about studying, after all. But I've been abusing my home's library system every since I got here, and it's great.

On the book front, I've discovered the joys of Alan Moore. Watchmen is one of the most delightfully dark and twisted stories I've ever read- "comic" or not, it's absolutely not for kids. Moore regularly switches voices throughout the book, going from comics-style bubble dialogue to the inside of another graphic novel to a magazine article to a tell-all memoir by one of the characters, all without losing his footing or the flow of the story. There's action, philosophy, politics, genuinely interesting characters, and a mystery that weaves together so many threads of narrative it can get hard to keep track of them all. It's great stuff.

After that, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen didn't seem nearly as impressive, but judging from the reviews the movie did it an injustice. The story doesn't have half the complexity or weight of Watchmen, but it is a much funnier, easier read. The book is worth getting for the hilarious fake Victorian writing alone, right down to the author's biography, which describes him as a former circus exhibit. The biography of Kevin O'Neill, the illustrator, is even better. *snigger*

As for CDs, I'm wallowing in cast recordings right now, especially those of my beloved Rodgers and Hammerstein. I've got three versions of Oklahoma! alone, though I couldn't find the 1998 London version, which is what I actually wanted. Ah, well. I have the movie of that one in the Tivo. :) I didn't like the original Broadway Carousel nearly as much as I thought I would, but I might try a different version of it. Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd, however, was just great- both funny and macabre. And it has Angela Lansbury singing "The Worst Pies in London." It doesn't get any better than that.

Yes, I'm a geek. But I'm happy that way, thank you very much. Now, when does the library open tomorrow?...

What I'm reading today: Tears of the Giraffe, by Alexander McCall Smith

My Goodness

You know, when you've read 669 pages of a book, you'd expect to be almost finished, right? Unfortunately (Or fortunately, depending on how you look at it), the book in question is James Clavell's Shogun, which means I have about 500 pages to go. Craziness. I haven't read a book this long since The Fountainhead. Or maybe one of those Tom Clancy things. In any case, it's long. Really really long. Yup. Just thought I'd say that.