Darwin8u

"Don't you be put out by anything. Keep her facing it. They may say what they like, but the heaviest seas run with the wind. Facing it -- always facing it -- that's the way to get through. You are a young sailor. Face it. That's enough for any man. Keep a cool head."

Conrad can take a simple idea and gradually pull out of it the deep complexities of man. Typhoon is a novella that basically cooks a brilliant story out of a storm + a boat + Captain MacWhirr and his crew. Setting was fantastic. Characters were perfect. Story was tight. Narrative was interestingly rigged with letters from MacWhirr to his wife, Juke to his friend and Rout to his wife. These letters framed the narrative with a reflected look at the distance between those at sea and those who remain safe on land.

I only gave it four stars because I've read/listened to better novels by Conrad (Victory, Nostromo, Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim), not because I've read/listened to many better writers

James Church's third Inspector O novel just doesn't quite deliver the goods. It starts out fine, blending hard-boiled noir (Hammett/Chandler) with international political thriller (le Carré/Steinhauer) mixed with a bit/dash of Hemingway.

Where Hemingway was fixated on food, wine and women, Church fixates on lack of food, the cold and wood. It all works, if you can ignore the sloppy pacing that creeps into the end of the novel. The novel's first 3/4 seems fine, not exceptional, but interesting and not too overdone, but with about 70 pages left it seems like Church loses all interest in the project and decides it will take entirely too much time and work to weave the various narrative threads back, so he just leaves them, or cuts them off completely.

The end of the novel reminded me of the butchered Geneva plane trees that Inspector O was so upset by. It is hard to love something that hasn't been allowed to freely grow to its potential. As Inspector O says of the plane trees, "They might wish they were dead. No, they have been mangled. Their tops have been hacked off. They are maimed."

An early Nabokov with many funky allusions to Tolstoy, early anticipations and presages of Lolita, and Nabokovian black humor from beginning to end. As a independent work, I don't think it belongs in the top tier of Nabokov's lush ouvre, but it seems to me to be a piece where Nabokov establishes his literary sea legs. The genealogy of most of his great later work seem to all thread back to 'Laughter in the Dark'/aka 'Kamera obskura'.

In this novel, Nabokov is playing with themes of vision, blindness, truth, deception, art and morality. You see many of Nabokov's later motifs surrounding vision floating (like mouches volantes) through this early work: mirrors, window pains, mimicry, scintillations, semblances, glasses, movies, etc. It wouldn't be Nabokov if he played any of these themes straight. He bends the narrative and plays with Tolstoy's belief that it is "the essential nature of truth to be hidden from, then revealed to, the eyes." Nabokov gives you the goods and gives them to you good and hard right between the eyes.

I'm not sure why I volunteered to jump into another D@mned Dan Brown novel. What Circle of Dante's Inferno was designed for a cynical, but weak reader who keeps returning to those crappy, popular authors (D@mn Brown Brown, Orson Scott Card, Tom Clancy) of their youth hoping to drink from the waters of Bimini? What circle do you consign the novel's author?

1. Limbo? Look, the novel isn't THAT horrible. D@mned Dan Brown can be tolerably entertaining if you SIMPLY ignore his actual writing. He IS (as everyone keeps telling me) the master of page-turning historical mysteries, but I'm just not sure if that says MORE about page-turning historical mysteries, Damned Dan Brown, or us as readers.

2. Lust? To be fair, while I despise D@mned Dan Brown's actual words, his style, and his in-artful language -- his plotting does somehow turn me on (occasionally) as a reader. While I am now convinced he hit his low-brow/high water mark with The Da Vinci Code (Yes, it's all down hill from Leonardo D@mned Dan Brown), this novel is slightly better than the The Lost Symbol so --- I can't absolutely pan it (thus 2 stars).

3. Gluttony? This is the most likely circle 'Inferno' belongs to. I think D@mned Dan Brown's major issue is his self-indulgence. DDB's style is inflated, but doesn't actually inform. His metaphors are swollen. His descriptions are possessed of a majority gristle with very little actual literary meat. Half of the book reminds me of some obscure teenager's fan fiction site cribbing a Lonely Planet Publication's guide to write about Florence, Venice, and Istanbul.

4. Greed? It is obvious why D@mned Dan Brown writes this way... because we (myself included) still buy it. It reminds me of why I hate it when directors in Hollywood become successful. They stop being interesting and instead become hacks. The reading public, much like the movie going public, demands mediocrity if the writer/director is going to be successful. Real art is not usually bought, real literature is most often ignored (I know that is a cliche, but it IS true). The amazing thing is that DDB started (in the beginning) as a hack and has just perfected hackery to a point where he will certainly be able to print money in 20 years by just publishing an Italian phone book.

5. Anger? No, not really. It is more like regret. If I am angry (Notice how I shifted from the circles being about DDB to the circles being about me? If you aren't comfortable with those kind of style abortions/grammar shifts, you should probably not read D@mned Dan Brown) it is an anger of what now passes as novel entertainment.

6. Heresy? No, D@mned Dan Brown definitely doesn't belong here. This is certainly a circle the Catholic church would have like to place him for The Da Vinci Code but 'Inferno' is mainly heretical to scholars of Dante, lonely Transhumanists, and perhaps the odd weekend, Malthusian alarmist.

7. Violence? Again, because D@mned Dan Brown is aiming for the center-mass of the pulp, paperback purchasing world, he isn't going to make his novel THAT graphic (plus DDB doesn't have the Cormac McCarthy writing chops to paste together a single sentence that would actually scare the beJesus out of anyone). He made 'Inferno' grim in parts, he made it painful to read cover-to-cover, but violent? Meh.

8. Fraud? 'Inferno' is simple and obvious rip-off of every dystopian SF novel about eugenics + a whole shelf of discount guide books + cheap James Bond knockoffs + a little bit of the 'Girl with the Dragon Tattoo'. But, since all writing is a crib, a rip-off, I can't really condemn D@mned Dan Brown to Hell, at least to this circle for doing what everyone does, but he just does poorly. If DDB is condemned to the 8th circle it will be more for The Da Vinci Code, which I believe is a boring, watered-down and mediocre version of Foucault's Pendulum.

9. Treachery? The further down into Hell you go, the more you realize it actually takes a lot of work to earn a place at these lower levels. That alone would discount D@mned Dan Brown. It would also probably discount my review, since I just couldn't bring myself to spend an inordinate amount of time reviewing a book I wasn't all that impressed by.

If for whatever reason, during the last twenty years, you've missed John le Carré's anger, and if his last 10 books were too subtle for you, and if you didn't catch le Carré's moral outrage in 'the Constant Gardner' and 'a Most Wanted Man', then you might need to skip 'A Delicate Truth'. In his newest novel, John le Carré tackles the amoral world of private contract espionage, rendition, and ineptness. Le Carré attacks Western ethics, Western hypocrisy, the West's venal “war gone corporate.”

John le Carré war is a battle of young idealism vs amoral and often incompetent mercenaries. It is a war of principled, but flawed individuals vs what Olen Steinhauer summarized as the "shortsightedness, hypocrisy, lies and unfettered greed that plagues the “post-imperial, post-cold-war world".

This isn't the most artful of le Carré's novels, but it is probably one of his sharpest. He dares the reader to follow him in his role as a latter-day Jeremiah of espionage and statecraft. He condemns the hypocrisy and the false gods of the Post-Iraq War/WOT West in his aim to "root out, pull down, destroy and throw down" the inhuman idols of the West. His NeoCon critics might aim for le Carré's eyes, but they can't destroy his vision or overlook his balls

There are many parts of Dickens' writing that I love and few pieces of his that fall short of complete adoration. 'Great Expectations' is one more of Dickens' absolute masterpieces. I love how with 100 pages left you can almost feel the universe shift as Dickens grabs the crazy, once loose strings of his moral narrative and begins to pull it all together.

I think a significant part of the magic, for me, of 'Great Expectations' is found in the minor characters. Everyone from Uncle Pumblechook, Miss Havisham, & Mr Jaggers, to Mr. Wemmick and the Aged Parent (the Aged P.) could be the center of their own Dickens novel; each life is given a warmth (or where there lacks warmth, a round coldness) that keeps the novel propelled on.

You can't have a Dickens novel without a little bit of melodrama and a bit of Victorian moralizing. However, with 'Great Expectations', Dickens does this with a soft touch. He isn't as confrontational about social ills as he is in 'Hard Times' or 'Oliver Twist' and he isn't as melodramatic as he was in 'Tale of Two Cities', but even so, I completely enjoyed this gentle, more muted Dickens.

Reading Roth is almost a spooky, sexual experience. I say that knowing this will sound absurd, trite and probably hyperbolic. But with Roth, his words are imbued with an almost carnal power, a spectral courage, energy and life. IT is like watching an absurdly talented musician do things with an instrument/with sound that bends the edge of possible.

Reading Roth, I can understand how the audience in Paganini 's time wanted to burn the man for witchcraft, feared the man for his deal with the Devil. I'm not sure who Roth sold his soul to, but Roth's run of novels: Operation Shylock (1993) Sabbath's Theater (1995) >> American Pastoral (1997) >> I Married a Communist (1998) >> The Human Stain (2000) can only be thought of as the greatest series of novels produced by ANY writer at anytime. Maybe Shakespeare had a better run. Maybe Proust. Maybe. For me, these five novels, ending with 'The Human Stain' are the apex of 20th Century writing. Spooky.

While I enjoyed the book and my kids were entertained, like a lot of 19th century adventure stories I am more impressed by its staying power and influence than the story or writing itself.

The strength of 'Treasure Island' is its characters. Even minor players in this pirate/treasure/tropical adventure story are fascinating. The plot had enough ups and downs and twists to entertain, but like Jules Verne's and H.G. Wells' minor novels, Stevenson's writing just wasn't interesting enough to draw me back for a second draft.

Neil Hunt's narration was varied enough for the characters without being overly distracting from the story.

Haney's memoir of Delta Force is one of those influential military memoirs that sets the bar for future warrior authors. You can see its influence on the recent 'No Easy Day' (the memoir by one of the Navy Seals who hunted and killed OBL) and countless other minor trooper tales. That isn't to say this is a perfect memoir, nor a perfect history of Delta Force.

The very nature of Delta opererators, and the unit they served in, practically requires that memoirs of Delta Force (and the SF or Navy Seals) will always be viewed as partial truths, shaded stories, rumor, and myth. But like David Hackworth's 'About Face' before, this memoir is informative and entertaining. It is a single data point but shouldn't be taken as the gospel of anything, just a single (slightly biased) retelling of one man's memory of how things in a very elite military unit functioned.

One of my favorite memoirs of all time. IT was perfect in its pacing, its pitch. It was a beautiful, but unsentimental look at youth, poverty, family, and all the cracks and fissures that the world creates to swallow the dreams of youth. Wolff's language still rings with me. I find myself, going back and reading whole passages of 'This Boy's Life' just to drink the language and the rub against the energy and charge of Wolff's vitality. A good memoirist gets the reader to experience the artist's past life through his words, a great memoirist seduces the reader into a place where the reader suddenly recognizes the universal experiences in our shared lives.

There were parts of the book I felt like Tobias Wolff was not writing his history, but mine. The details of our lives might have been different, our stories might be adolescent antipoles, but I read Wolff and I think he has robbed me of my emotions, faked my youthful hope, slandered my stripling reputation, and squandered all of my schoolboy potential.

While I enjoyed this collection more than Sedaris' previous book 'Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk', it just didn't rise to the levels of his great collections ('Naked' or 'Me Talk Pretty Someday'), or even his very good collections ('When You Are Engulfed in Flames' or 'Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim'). I just feel like he is retreading the same ground, picking up the same litter, and is starting that phase in his career where he is like a band from the 80s that isn't creating as much as exploiting his better work.

I hope I am being overly pessimistic, and maybe I am just jaded from the horrible audio experience my wife and I had last night listening to him at Gammage Auditorium in Tempe, AZ, but it seems that the reading typified my feelings about his book. Sedaris was reading to a comfortable group in comfortable shoes, reading comfortable stories. We all laughed at the appropriate parts, we all knew what we expected and David Sedaris delivered the goods -- mostly.

The audio quality wasn't great, but I walked away mostly amused that I somehow ended up parting with 1 credit at Audible, $15 bucks on Amazon, $45 for a live reading, and while mildly entertained ... I wasn't particularly blown away. It was like I was a beer-bellied, middle-aged man at a Journey concert. I figure I didn't pay for the new set, just for the couple hours of nostalgia at how great it was ten or twenty years ago. Now, I've just got to figure out now how much nostalgia will cost me tomorrow.