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A quiz. About books. How can I not? Thanks to Sheila!

Which book do you irrationally cringe away from reading, despite seeing only positive reviews?

That’s a tough one. I tend to read on the basis of whims as opposed to plans, so I have a lot of books that are well-reviewed on my shelves that I haven’t got round to yet, and it’s not a case of “irrationally cringing away” from reading them. Books like The Corrections, The Lies of Locke Lamora, Dr. Strange and Mr. Norrell.

Maybe Neil Stephenson’s Quicksilver trilogy counts. I’ve owned them for years now, and I haven’t even attempted to open their covers. In fact, right now they are serving literally as bookends on one shelf. Why this is so, I’m not sure; I devoured Cryptonomicon. I don’t think I’m so much “irrationally cringing” away from them as thinking “Wow, that’s quite a time commitment. I think I’ll read something less long.” But that’s pretty irrational in itself, isn’t it? Hmmmmm.

If you could bring three characters to life for a social event (afternoon tea, a night of clubbing, perhaps a world cruise), who would they be and what would the event be?

I’d invite John Galt to dinner at Tom Joad’s house. That should be good for a few laughs. Then I’d have Hannibal Lecter cook Galt. Yippee!

OK, I know, that’s a pretty flip answer. I’d like to see a dinner featuring the three greatest wizards I’ve read in fiction: Gandalf from The Lord of the Rings, Loren Silvercloak from The Fionavar Tapestry, and Albus Dumbledore from the Harry Potter books. What can I say, I’m a sucker for wizards. What would we talk about? I don’t know, really. I would like Gandalf to tell me some more about the nature of magic in Middle Earth, since it can get a little hard for anyone who’s part of the AD&D Generation to understand why they’ve got this incredibly powerful wizard who never just uncorks a fireball on his enemies.

(Borrowing shamelessly from the Thursday Next series by Jasper Fforde): you are told you can’t die until you read the most boring novel on the planet. While this immortality is great for awhile, eventually you realise it’s past time to die. Which book would you expect to get you a nice grave?

Suicide by book? What a dreadful thought. The question’s slightly vague, though; would I have to finish the book before dying? Oh well, I suppose it doesn’t matter. I suspect that Battlefield Earth would do the trick, although I had a college roommate who insisted that it was a grand fun read of the pulp variety. My best bet, actually, would likely be some novel by a Parisian Existentialist.

Come on, we’ve all been there. Which book have you pretended, or at least hinted, that you’ve read, when in fact you’ve been nowhere near it?

The Bible, maybe? I tend to be upfront about my not having read something, actually. I can tend to claim love for authors on the basis of having read a single work or two of theirs, which can get inconvenient when I’m in the presence of a true fanatic: I’ll claim that I love HP Lovecraft, even though I’ve only read two or three of his tales, for instance.

As an addition to the last question, has there been a book that you really thought you had read, only to realise when you read a review about it/go to ‘reread’ it that you haven’t? Which book?

I’ve never done this, either. I must lead a pretty boring reading life.

You’re interviewing for the post of Official Book Advisor to some VIP (who’s not a big reader). What’s the first book you’d recommend and why? (if you feel like you’d have to know the person, go ahead of personalise the VIP)

Now, this question’s too vague as well. Do I assume the VIP’s tastes are similar to mine? Do I know what kind of mood the VIP is in when I make my recommendation? Anyhow, if their tastes mirror mine, I’d recommend The Lions of Al-Rassan by GGK if they’re in a sad epic kind of mood, or Island of the Sequined Love Nun by Christopher Moore for all other moods. I would, though, do everything in my power to keep the VIP from picking up anything by Ayn Rand.

A good fairy comes and grants you one wish: you will have perfect reading comprehension in the foreign language of your choice. Which language do you go with?

First choice would be Russian, so I finally would have no choice but to get through The Brothers Karamazov, since it would remove “I think my translations a dud!” as an excuse. Second choice would be German, especially if the fairy’s gift includes a hearing fluency as well, so I could see Der Ring des Nibelungen at last. Third? Spanish. I love the poetry of Iberia. (Here’s a good example, actually, of the phenomenon I describe a couple of questions above. How much of the poetry of Iberia have a read? Very little.)

A mischievious fairy comes and says that you must choose one book that you will reread once a year for the rest of your life (you can read other books as well). Which book would you pick?

The Complete Calvin and Hobbes, by Bill Watterson. You can’t get too much Calvin and Hobbes. (While I don’t own The Complete C&H, I do own every paperback of C&H released during the strip’s run, which is basically the same thing.) C&H is, as everybody already knows, full of humor, wisdom, poignance, imagination, and even joy. Yes, I think that comics and graphic novels count.

I know that the book blogging community, and its various challenges, have pushed my reading borders. What’s one bookish thing you ‘discovered’ from book blogging (maybe a new genre, or author, or new appreciation for cover art-anything)?

Well, there is always the obvious: discovering new authors or tracking down books based on recommendations I see on blogs, et cetera. I also love reading what others have to say about books not so much for ideas on what books to read, but for ideas about how to read books, and how to write about books. There’s nothing better than other perspectives to challenge one, and blogs yield other perspectives a-plenty.

One perspective that almost certainly didn’t exist before blogs came along was that of the author while the book was in progress. The number of pro writers who blog gets longer nearly every day, and their perspectives on writing are (most times) interesting. What I’ve discovered that I appreciate the most, though, isn’t the blogging of the nuts-and-bolts stuff that writers do, but rather their daily lives and their own reading habits.

That good fairy is back for one final visit. Now, she’s granting you your dream library! Describe it. Is everything leatherbound? Is it full of first edition hardcovers? Pristine trade paperbacks? Perhaps a few favourite authors have inscribed their works? Go ahead-let your imagination run free.

Wooden floors with throw rugs. My desk in one corner, beside a large window. Every other wall? Books. Of all types. Some first editions, some antique volumes. Basically, books. Books everywhere. There’s got to be room for a door, and maybe a bit of wallspace around the desk for some wall art (probably Star Wars posters). A nice stereo system, preferably small but with big sound, speakers in each corner with a subwoofer. And books. Hardcover, trade paper, mass-market paper. Various knickknacks, tschotschkes, gewgaws, and the like. Candle holders galore; I love candlelight. And books, which I would arrange roughly by category but with the emphasis on “roughly”, as in, not terribly organized at all. My CDs would have to be in there somewhere, and the books. Maybe a comfy armchair in a corner opposite the desk, with a footstool. I expect that there would always be a cat in my library. Oh, and the books: lots of them.

Did I mention the books?

If you’re reading this, consider yourself tagged. You’re it!

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Recent Reading (KidLit edition)

In reading to The Daughter at night, we’ve recently started to read chapter books a bit at a time, each evening, as opposed to the single-volume storybooks that were the rule until then. This has opened up lots of new vistas for reading, and it’s really rejuvenated a time of night that had for a while felt more like a chore than a treasured portion of our daily routine. I’ve generally tried to choose books that are slightly above her reading level, so as to keep her challenged and exposed to new stuff, and I’ve tried to choose books that I’d like to read as well.

(UPDATE: A reader asks how old she is; The Daughter is eight, and she’s in third grade.)

Here are some of the books we’ve read:

:: Danny the Champion of the World by Roald Dahl. This is simply one of my favorite books of all time, be it for children or adults. This one is just sheer, total delight. This story of a young boy living alone with his mechanic father in rural England is full of charm, humor, and also some excitement when our hero, young Danny, learns his father’s deepest and darkest secret. It’s a wonderful “underdog blue-collar folks against the arrogant wealthy” type of tale, with one of the best endings I know. Why this book hasn’t been done into a proper movie, I can’t imagine. (Apparently it was filmed in Britain, but I’ve never seen it or even heard of that production until now — a TV film for the BBC, perhaps?)

:: James and the Giant Peach, also by Roald Dahl. This was new to me, actually; I love Dahl, but somehow I got through childhood without reading this one, although I did see the Tim Burton-produced movie several years ago, which turns out to have added quite a bit to the story. No matter; the main portion of the tale, in which James is liberated from the clutches of his vile Aunts when he comes into the possession of a giant peach, and the friends he makes inside that peach when he meets the insectoid denizens of the fruit, is the real meat of the story. This is classic Dahl, in which supernatural doings are presented simply as a normal part of the world, and in which our author thinks nothing of having the hero’s parents killed by a rhinoceros on page one.

:: Stormbreaker, by Anthony Horowitz. We bought this book at the book fair at the school’s Open House this year, mainly because it had a really cool cover. It’s actually a halfway decent book, the first in a series of spy thrillers featuring thirteen-year-old Alex Rider, who is recruited by MI6 after his caretaker uncle is murdered while investigating an enigmatic industrialist who is about to donate free computers to every school in Britain. It’s a pretty violent story, and there were times in the reading that I wondered if it would have been better left until she was older. She really enjoyed this one, however, finding the suspense sequences pretty spine-tingling. I imagine we’ll be tracking down the subsequent volumes in the future.

:: Larklight by Philip Reeve is an amazingly fun book. We had a blast with this one, as we’d hoped, given that the book is subtitled “A Rousing Tale of Dauntless Pluck in the Farthest Reaches of Space”. It’s literally a steampunk space opera: a SF adventure that assumes that certain scientific theories of the nature of the universe long-since disproved in the real world are actually true. Hence, the book posits the existence of the aether, strange beings on every planet, spaceships that literally look like seafaring vessels in the sky. There are space pirates, malevolent aliens living in the ruins of Saturn, ancient races on Mars, a spacefaring British Empire, and a harrowing journey into Jupiter’s Great Red Spot. If you can accept the nature of the world Reeve has created here, Larklight is a rollicking blast of a story. We recommend it highly. Of all the books we’ve read lately, this is the one that earned the most heartfelt howls of protest from The Daughter when I told her that the page we were on was where we’d stop for the night.

Reading. I like it.

(Each of these books is good on the merits, so don’t eschew them if you don’t happen to have kids around.)

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Recent Reading

Here are some thoughts pertaining to some books I’ve read of late:

:: I often find biographies a mixed bag, as a reading interest. Autobiography is something special, but generic biographies can be tough. Even the most interesting of lives can be rendered dull and uninspiring in the hands of a dull writer; conversely, a life that wouldn’t strike anyone as especially notable can, when told by a skilled biographer, become utterly fascinating. In the latter category falls David Michaelis’s new biography of Charles M. Schulz, Schulz and Peanuts.

It’s a long and exhaustive book, providing great amounts of detail as to the life of the great cartoonist, gleaned from Michaelis’s access to Schulz’s private papers and his work in contacting the people central to Schulz’s life (the ones still alive, at any rate). Schulz lived a long and fruitful life, growing up in St. Paul (with a brief interlude in Needles, California). He had troubles in school. He was socially awkward, fiercely competitive, and (obviously) artistically gifted. He would serve in the Army in World War II, work for an art-lessons-by-mail firm, and eventually create the most famous newspaper comic strip in history. In chronicling this life in fairly impressive detail, Michaelis makes Sparky Schulz come alive. As the book went on, I felt that I was coming to know the great cartoonist. (This is odd in itself, given that a theme of the book is that Schulz was a hard person to get to know in real life.)

The book’s masterstroke is the inclusion of many strips from the fifty-year run of Peanuts. The strips are selected with care, with each one providing a window through which we gradually realize just how much of Schulz’s daily life informed the strip over its run. Anecdotes from Schulz’s life, wisdom from his parents, his fascination with the movie Citizen Kane, his love of classical music: all that and much more made its way into the strip. Schulz knew several Charlie Brown’s in his life, and his mother had once mentioned “Snoopy” as a prospective name for their next dog. Peanuts the comic strip, it turns out, is far more indicative of Schulz’s inner world than I ever realized before.

This is one of the best biographies I have read. (I wish I could quote from the book, but I’ve already returned it to the library. I did post on the subject of the early Peanuts strips here a couple of years ago, however. Here‘s a review of the book by Calvin and Hobbes creator Bill Watterson.)

:: Bill Bryson, one of my newer favorite authors (by which I mean newer to me, not new as in a new author), has penned a brief life of Shakespeare, helpfully titled Shakespeare: The World as Stage. I enjoyed this book for what it was: a biography of the Bard for those who aren’t really looking for anything exhaustive. The book is an entry in a series called “Eminent Lives”, which consists of “great writers on great figures, short biographies perfect for an age short on time”. At just under two hundred pages, this is exactly what the label entails.

In reading this book, I got the sense that frustration awaits anyone who tries to conclusively nail down the factual particulars of Shakespeare’s life. The unfortunate fact is that very little is known of the Bard and of his life, aside from the works he left behind, most of which would have undoubtedly been lost if not for the efforts of those who produced the First Folio. Bryson addresses this paradox thusly:

It is because we have so much of Shakespeare’s work that we can appreciate how little we know of him as a person. If we had only his comedies, we would think him a frothy soul. If we had just the sonnets, he would be a man of darkest passions. From a selection of his other works, we might think him variously courtly, cerebral, metaphysical, melancholic, Machiavellian, neurotic, lighthearted, loving, and much more. Shakespeare was of course all these things – as a writer. We hardly know what he was as a person.

Since so little is known of Shakespeare’s life directly, Bryson instead gives a compelling portrait of life in Elizabethan London and the atmosphere that confronted an actor and playwright in that period. Bryson also includes a chapter in which he strenuously attacks the notion that someone other than William Shakespeare penned the works now attributed to him.

Of course, the best way to get to know Shakespeare is not by reading about Shakespeare but by simply reading Shakespeare, but for a casual reader looking to place Shakespeare in some general context, this book suffices well enough.

:: Taking my own advice from the paragraph immediately above this one, I’ve started brushing up my Shakespeare, beginning with Macbeth. I last read this play in my junior year of high school, and it was the play that really started convincing me that maybe this Shakespeare guy wasn’t just some long-winded poof who couldn’t just have people say what they meant. I know, I know, the man wrote drama and as such it’s meant to be experienced as drama — not read but ‘seen’, in other words – but I like reading him. I’m halfway through Act II right now, and it partially amuses me that Macbeth seems to be willing to go along with the whole plan just because some witches and his wife say so.

(On a tangential note, is there such a thing as a Complete Shakespeare that isn’t at least three inches thick? I’m thinking of the way Bibles are printed, on that hyper-thin paper so that the thing can be carried around without causing back strain or so that it can fit into a normal book bag that is also containing other books. My King James Bible is only an inch thick; is there a Complete Shakespeare that accomplishes the same task? Anyone?)

:: On a lighter note, I enjoyed Bill Geist’s book Way Off the Road: Discovering the Peculiar Charms of Small-Town America. Geist is a long-time fixture on CBS Sunday Morning, doing the kind of commentaries on out-of-the-way places that used to be Charles Kuralt’s stock in trade. This is the kind of book where one learns of an Iowa town that holds a festival every year on the Summer Solstice, for on that day, the sun sets exactly in the center of the town’s railroad tracks. Or the town at the bottom of the Grand Canyon whose mail is delivered via mule train. Or the town whose claim to fame is that many years ago there a chicken was beheaded but lived on for eighteen months afterward. Or the town in Oklahoma where virtually every bomb used by the US military is manufactured.

In a key bit of wisdom referring to the town of Dyersville, Iowa, where the “Field of Dreams” ballpark-in-the-corn can be found (upon which I’ve walked!), Geist writes:

The most famous line from the movie is “If you build it, he will come,” most often quoted as “If you build it, they will come,” and which I’ve found to be true about 90 percent of the time. Towns build goofy museums and people come. They build biblically themed miniature golf courses, where I got a hole in one on Noah, and people come. They build whole domed stadiums on spec, and professional baseball teams come. Everybody’s looking for something.

How true is that.

More reading to come. I like the reading!

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Reading – A Quiz Thing

Snagged from Roger and T&C:

1. Do you remember learning to read? How old were you?

I don’t remember learning to read, per se, because it happened very early on, via my mother. I could read before I went to kindergarten, I know that much; my parents have often told the tale of how my kindergarten teacher was kind of dumb and didn’t even realize how it was that I was apparently shouting out the directions to the assignments before she could read them to us. I have no memory of doing that.

2. What do you find most challenging to read?

Academic writing, the real dry and scholarly stuff. Especially books that are doctoral theses reworking into book-form. From my college years, I loved my philosophy courses, but I had a terrible time with Existentialism; every one of the texts we read had me thinking, “Ye Gods, somebody open a window!”

3. What are your library habits?

Thursday night is Library night. We go there, get books and a movie or two and maybe a few magazines, and then stop at 7-11 on the way home for Big Gulps and a Slurpee.

4. Have your library habits changed since you were younger?

I have become more and more militant about the value of libraries. To reiterate something I often say in this space, I can’t understand people who refuse to use libraries because “they like to own their books”. Even before the price of gas started shooting through the roof, the notion that my reading should be limited by my paycheck or credit limit bugged the hell out of me.

5. How has blogging changed your reading life?

Well, there’s the standard “Hey, I should check that out” when some blogger I read strongly recommends a book. Here’s a recent example of such; I have that book waiting for me at the library. There is also the “Hey, this blogger I read has written a book!” factor; Alex Ross is a prime example of that.

Setting aside specific titles, I do find that a lot of times I read the blogs that I frequent most often and come away thinking, “Wow, I wish I was as well-read as that blogger.” This has the effect of fueling my desire to read more.

6. What percentage of your books do you get from: New book stores, second hand book stores, the library, online exchange sites, online retailers, other?

Hard to say. I don’t read everything I check out of the library, since a lot of it comes due before I can get to it. As noted above, money’s always an issue, so I have to be pretty careful about what I buy. I don’t use Amazon as much as I used to, although I do buy from them several times a year. For used books, I like eBay, although there are several used bookstores around the Southtowns region that I really need to scope out one of these days. And there’s always the quarterly library used book sale, which is always a source of treasure.

7. How often do you read a book and NOT review it in your blog?

I don’t know, really — maybe ten percent of books I read don’t get mentioned here, for whatever reasons may apply. It sometimes takes me a while to write about a book I read. (There are also the reviews I write for GMR.)

8. What are your pet peeves about ways people abuse books? Dog-earing pages? Reading in the bath?

If they buy the book, they can do whatever they want with it! As media go, paper is pretty forgiving, much moreso than any e-gadget invented yet, which is why I have no great fear that paper books are going away anytime soon.

But I can’t abide people who write or underline or highlight in library books, or people who rip articles or recipes they want out of the magazines, and the like. If it’s not your book, treat it like it’s not your book.

Ultimately, the worst abuse a book can receive is to go unread. I’ve got shelves upon shelves of books being mistreated thusly myself, so I can’t cast the first stone on that basis.

9. Do you ever read for pleasure at work?

Yes, at breaks and at lunch. Never while I’m “on the clock”. When I’m on the clock, I’m the very model of a productive maintenance guy. Yesiree Bob!

10. When you give people books as gifts, how do you decide what to give them?

I think of what they’ve told me they like in the past, and if I identify a book that I think may line up with their tastes as I know them, I give it as a gift. I tend to only give books that I have personally read; it kind of seems rude to me to give someone a copy of a book that may or may not be Teh Suck. Now, an exception to this might be if I find some kind of unique or special edition of a book by a friend’s favorite author; that I might give them, regardless of whether I’ve read them or not.

What I don’t do, regarding books as gifts, is hector my friends after I’ve given them the book as to whether they read it or if they liked it or if they want to talk about their favorite characters. That seems rude to me, and I don’t do it. I’d love to hear a friend tell me that the book I gave them is the best thing ever, but there’s no guarantee that they’ll like it, and really, nobody likes to be hectored over their opinion of a gift.

This is a tag-free quiz, by the way. Grab and go!

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Books: I like ’em

Time for a rundown of some reading I’ve done lately:

:: Born Standing Up, by Steve Martin. If you come to this book expecting a “wild and crazy” book of comedy-in-print, you’ll walk away disappointed. If you come, instead, looking for Martin’s insights as to the early parts of his career when he toiled in obscurity before finally bursting onto the national scene, then you’ll find the book worthwhile. It’s a surprisingly unfunny and unflinching look from afar at Martin’s career. It’s not completely unfunny, mind you, but the prevailing tone is one of seriousness, and reading it, I get the impression that Martin’s own feeling is that, despite the things he’s accomplished, he’s missed as many opportunities as he’s taken advantage of.

The book starts off with Martin’s early life, and he doesn’t flinch as he reveals the emotional distance at the heart of his family relationships for much of his life. His father, it turns out, was largely emotionally abusive (and sometimes physically, as well), while his mother mostly looked the other way. Martin’s show-business career started not with comedy but with magic, and he only came to comedy gradually as opportunities arose and others fell by the wayside. It’s interesting, then, to read Martin’s analytical and theoretical approach to the craft of comedy, such as the theory he creates about an act that contains no punchlines, so that the audience will eventually start laughing out of a response to unresolved tension.

I’ve seen Martin in interviews in the years since his stand-up career ended, and he always seems reluctant to discuss those years in any great depth. It’s telling that the book’s discussions of Martin’s legendary appearances on the early years of Saturday Night Live are fairly brief, and he doesn’t mention what might be his most famous sketch, “King Tut”, at all. (It’s referenced in a single photograph of Martin, in his trademark white suit from the time with his Tut head-dress on, walking onto the stage at a stand-up show of his from the era. The photo is taken from behind.)

The book ends pretty much as Martin’s movie career begins, which I hope implies that a follow-up volume is in the offing, since I find Martin’s film work more interesting. Only The Jerk is much covered here at all, which is a shame because I’d like to know more about his better films, such as Roxanne, LA Story, All of Me, Bowfinger, and his dramatic turn in Grand Canyon. (Hell, I wouldn’t mind reading about his work on such “Huh-whuh?” projects as Sgt. Bilko and the recent Pink Panther remake, which I found funny but, well, definitely not good.)

:: I’ve noted a number of times that comics might be the ideal medium for Joss Whedon to maintain the Firefly universe; little did I know (because nobody told me!) that he’s already been doing so, with a graphic novel called Those Left Behind. The book is set before the movie, apparently, and while I enjoyed it, I was surprised that it basically feels like a standard episode of the TV series. In a comics series, the concerns over effects budgets and pacing for commercial breaks don’t exist, so I was surprised at the still relatively limited scope of this series.

It’s a typical kind of Firefly plot, where Captain Malcolm Reynolds and crew are struggling for money and looking for any kind of job they can get, eventually settling on a gig that’s probably more risk than reward, as many of their jobs end up being. In terms of story, Those Left Behind is nothing really spectacular, but the tone of the dialogue and the character interactions are spot on. Early on, there’s a moment when a villain has the upper hand on Mal and crew, but when he decides to rub Mal’s nose in it, Mal simply says, “This thing’s goin’ your way. Don’t make it go another.” And there’s this exchange after a job falls apart completely and Mal, Jayne and Zoe have to make their escape via the sewer:

JAYNE: Gonna take a while for the stink of this to pass.

ZOE: Just a sewer, Jayne.

JAYNE: Weren’t talking about the sewer.

MAL: Now ain’t the time, Jayne. Understood?

JAYNE: Well, you just be sure and say when.

I like that exchange. All through this book, you can hear the show’s actors saying these lines.

As I noted the other day, another Firefly comic is in the works. Since the next one will be a three-issue series, as was Those Left Behind, I’m concerned again about the scope of the story. Those Left Behind is simply too short. Maybe I’m overestimating the size of the market for Firefly comics, but I do wish that Whedon would be given some room to really tell a big whopper of a story…

:: …kind of like how he was allowed to do on The Astonishing X-Men. I’m not sure how long Whedon’s run on Astonishing lasted (or if it even ended), but what a run it was! Fun and exciting, with lots of terrific character moments as well as that typical Whedon “snap” in the dialog. A lot of the generic plot-devices of your typical X-Men story are on display here: the constant “anti-mutant hysteria”, the rivalry between Logan and Scott Summers, the fact that the X-Men can save New York City in full public view of just about everybody and still get absolutely no credit for it, and so on. This was the first X-Men story I’ve read in quite some time, so I was unaware of some of the more recent developments in the X-verse, such as Emma Frost joining the X-Men (other developments I’ll not mention, since they could be spoilers), but for the most part, it was very easy to get back into the swing of it all.

(And whoever’s fault it is that Whedon’s not on the Wonder Woman movie anymore can bite me.)

:: Saving the best for last in this post, Alex Ross‘s The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century is a remarkable book. It’s a history of the classical music of the twentieth century, a century that saw classical music fall from grace in the eyes of many as other forms of music took hold of popular imagination. Ross’s gift is his ability to show the continued relevance of classical music, and to demonstrate that it has, in many ways, remained vibrant all along, even as it moved into territories that most listeners were unwilling to go.

Ross takes a wise approach of avoiding a rigidly chronological approach to his subject, instead focusing each chapter on a specific subject: sometimes a single composer (Sibelius and Britten), sometimes a group of composers (American composers from Ives to Ellington), sometimes the musical life of a particular nation. The overall organization of the book is chronological, but the chapter-by-chapter focus is maintained in such a way as to keep the book from becoming a slogging parade of names and dates and musical works and musical terms. In this, Ross’s approach reflects that of the great history writer Barbara Tuchman.

A book on this topic cannot succeed, however, unless its author is good at writing not just about personalities and historical trends but about the music. Here, Ross’s gifts, long on display at The New Yorker as a classical music critic, shine especially brightly. He has that unusual ability to write about a musical work in such a way as to make you feel like you’re actually hearing it (although I did find myself often wishing for a companion CD, only to learn of this page of audio samples after I finished the book).

The Rest is Noise is one of the best books on classical music I’ve read. Strongly recommended.

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Stuff!

Some lazy linkage for a snowy Thursday evening:

:: Lynn Sislo hasn’t posted in several days. As she lives in Oklahoma, I assume that this is due to the ice storm they had in those parts. I hope she’s back online soon.

:: Do check out this wonderful article about visual injokes in Pixar’s movies. I love stuff like this.

:: I suppose I should start reading Terry Pratchett sometime soon. He has been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.

:: When I become Supreme Ruler of Teh Universe, my first decree will be that all gas stations shall be one-way only, and that it will be illegal to swing your car into the opposite direction just because the one open pump is on the opposite side of your car as the gas cap. I am really tired of trying to figure out how to line up for a pump, when more often than not, the cars at the pumps will be facing me no matter which way I queue up.

:: Via Michael May I see that Joss Whedon’s not done with the Firefly universe, and will tell more stories there in the best medium for the job: comics. In fact, he’s apparently already done a comic of Firefly; I’ll have to track that down. It’s called Those Left Behind; the new one will be called Better Days. Cool. (Note to self: finish watching Firefly and then watch Serenity one of these days.)

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The siren call of a blank endpaper….

Sheila has a pretty wonderful link: the Book Inscriptions project. (As of this writing, the site’s not loading, but it was loading an hour or so ago, I swear!) The site posts images of inscriptions written in the fronts of books, typical of the kind of thing people write when they give a book as a gift. As Sheila notes, this sort of thing is like crack cocaine to a person like myself. Go have a look, when the site starts loading again.

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Listenin’

I’ve just started reading Alex Ross’s The Rest is Noise. I’ll have more to say on the book when I’ve finished with it (and that’ll be a while; I’m only about fifty pages in as of this writing), but in reading the passages early on about Richard Strauss and Gustav Mahler, I realized that I haven’t listened to the music of either composer in a great while – years, for most of their works I have on disc, and in several cases, over a decade. Ouch. That’s too long to spend out of the company of such great composers. So, as I’m writing this post (and playing Mah-Jong on the laptop), I’m listening to Mahler’s Symphony No. 1 in D (the “Titan”).

I’m struck anew by this symphony’s earthiness. I knew a number of things about Mahler’s life before I ever heard any of his work, and the things I knew mainly concerned his preoccupation with death, the giant scale on which his musical thoughts formed, his gargantuan orchestrations, and the like. When I first listened to the Symphony No. 1, with its dreamy an mysterious introduction, I heard nothing aside from what I expected. But then the work’s first melody proper begins, a gentle tune in the low strings that is by turns jaunty and lyrical, almost like a folksong. In the second movement, the rhythms are straight out of folk dance, and the third movement relies on a minor-key rendition of “Frere Jacques”. Only in the last movement does the symphony seem to reach the sense of scale and plumbing of epic depths that are thought to be typical of Mahler.

I’d forgotten how much I like this symphony.

(My recording of the Mahler Symphony No. 1 has Leonard Slatkin conducting the St. Louis Symphony.)

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Readin’

Time to catch up on some recent reading I’ve done:

:: As research for a short story I finished drafting a few weeks ago, I read a fascinating book called Stradivari’s Genius: Five Violins, One Cello, and Three Centuries of Enduring Perfection by Toby Faber. This is exactly what the title suggests: an examination of the violin making of Antonio Stradivari, the great Cremonese master whose hand produced stringed instruments that have never been surpassed in quality despite the fact that Stradivari died in 1737. I was most interested in the early parts of the book, the ones that deal specifically with violin making and the technical aspects of Stradivari’s craft, but the remainder of the book traces five specific Stradivarius instruments through the history of Western music. It is a fascinating survey of classical music history not from the typical point of view of the composers, but from the instruments that play the music.

:: My space opera reading project continues at its stready, if slow, pace. A short while back I read A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs (published in this omnibus). Strictly speaking, this isn’t space opera at all, but rather its sister genre, planetary romance. After reading some early space operas months before, I expected the Burroughs work to be enjoyable but generally suffer the same faults of anachronism commonly found by contemporary readers in early SF. I was surprised to find that this was actually not the case, at least to a much lesser degree. Burroughs, it turns out, was a much stronger writer than E.E. “Doc” Smith or Edmund Hamilton, and thus his work seems to fare better in the light of the decades that have passed since he penned these tales. (I say “seems to” because, after all, I’ve only read the one Burroughs book thus far.) A Princess of Mars turns out to be tremendous fun, a rollicking tale of adventure in which Captain John Carter is mysteriously transported from a cave in Arizona to the plains of Mars, where he falls in with various cultures of beastly beings, engages in fights to the death, discovers tremendous powers and abilities, escapes various dangers, and falls in love with the titular Princess of Mars, Dejah Thoris. Make no mistake: this is one fun book, and you can bet I’ll be returning to Barsoom sometime soon. (“Barsoom” being what the natives of Mars call their world.)

Of course, in reading a book like A Princess of Mars, one must suspend disbelief entirely. We now know that Mars holds no ancient civilizations that existed thousands of years before we emerged from the primordial ooze of our own planet, and we likewise now know that there are no canals on the Red Planet. I always find, though, that whether I’m reading Burroughs or a writer like Leigh Brackett, I just don’t care if the stories invent their Marses out of whole cloth.

While I was reading this I saw via Jason Bennion that Pixar is developing the Barsoom novels into a possible trilogy of movies. Now having read A Princess of Mars at last, I’m not sure what to make of this. I don’t know if the books can, or even should, be filmed as they are. Fiction from the early 20th century tends to be, well, less politically correct, and there were a number of spots in A Princess of Mars where I felt a bit of human, or even male, chauvinism creeping into the story. Additionally, the book contains more than a few scenes that are not suitable for the kinds of audiences at whom Pixar tends to aim its films. We’ll see.

:: The Andromeda Stories is a manga that I picked up, assuming it to be space opera, but so far it’s more of a mix of planetary romance and science fantasy. No matter; it’s actually quite engaging. The story involves a world called Cosmoralia where the crown Prince is about to get married and become King; meanwhile, a strange star appears in Cosmoralia’s sky, and then disappears as something strange crashes in a remote part of the planet. Of course, this presages invasion. Subplots include the birth of twins to the new Queen, and the identity of a mysterious female warrior. It’s all enjoyable stuff, even if the book’s lettering style makes it hard to read at times. I find that with reading manga, it’s not the reading right-to-left thing that trips me up, but rather the stylized lettering and the fact that the Japanese sound effects (the “BAM” and “ZOOM” and “KRA-POW!” stuff) are left untranslated. (In the case of the latter, there’s not really a way around this that I can see, other than destroying the feel of the panel by removing the Japanese onomatopoeia and replacing it with English.) Anyhow, I’m liking this story and definitely plan to get the next two volumes as they appear, as well as seeking out the earlier To Terra, by the same creative team.

:: Sticking with space opera, I’ve read a few stories in the anthology The New Space Opera, edited by Gardner Dozois and Jonathan Strahan. So far I’m highly impressed with this antho. The four stories I’ve read thus far are “Saving Tiamaat” by Gwyneth Jones, “Who’s Afraid of Wolf 359” by Ken MacLeod, “The Emperor and the Maula” by Robert Silverberg, and “The Art of War” by Nancy Kress. I enjoyed each of these tales, although I found the Silverberg the finest. There’s a lot of fine fiction here, and I’m looking forward to the follow-up volume.

:: Returning to comics, I was in the library and spotted Joss Whedon’s name on a graphic novel, so I grabbed it. It’s called Fray, and it turns out to be a “Vampire Slayer” story, although one set some indeterminate time in the future from the Buffy TV show, with a new slayer in the lead. Her name is Melaka Fray, and by trade she’s a thief who steals antique artifacts for her criminal boss, when she’s approached by a demon who informs her of her true heritage as a vampire slayer. There’s a new vampire uprising taking place, and it’s Melaka’s job to destroy it. The main problem is that Melaka has no real sense of her own heritage as a slayer, and little desire to live up to it.

As one who found the few individual episodes of Buffy I ever watched quite entertaining but who never bothered to learn the show’s dense mythology in order to really get into the show, I was glad that this graphic novel gives pretty much exactly as much backstory as is needed to understand what’s going on. I assume that a lot of this stuff will be old hat to Buffy fans, but for me, it was easy swallowing. The book also boasts a lot of the snappy dialog one expects from Joss Whedon.

All of this, plus Whedon’s admission in the foreword that he plans to write more comics, makes me wonder why on Earth no one’s decided to do a series of Firefly stories as comics. Talk about a perfect medium for keeping those characters and settings alive!

:: Back to short fiction. As always, The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror offers a huge amount of excellent fiction in books that are worth buying just for the introductory essays on the status of the genres alone. This year’s edition features, as always, a large amount of short fiction. Good stories here that I’ve read so far are “In the House of the Seven Librarians” by Ellen Klages, “Lionflower Hedge” by Ira Sher, and the delightfully twisted “Dog Person” by Scott Nicholson.

:: Some years ago a friend sent me a copy of The Land of Laughs by Jonathan Carroll. Over the course of two or three moves, this book wound up on a back shelf, forgotten until last week when the friend goosed me about it. Thus I read it in just a few days. What a remarkable tale this is! Thomas Abbey is a quiet teacher in a Connecticut school who harbors an intense fascination for the books of childrens author Marshall France, so much so that he wishes to write a biography of the man. Into his life comes a young woman named Saxony Gardner, who shares his fascination with the same author. Together they begin delving into Marshall France’s life, eventually traveling to his final hometown of Galen, Missouri where they find that France was…ah, but that would be telling. I’ll just note that what starts as a literary love story gradually shifts into horror. Carroll’s characters are among the best I’ve seen in a book; I had that rare feeling of getting to know the people in the story, as opposed to merely watching them. And even though a back cover blurb promised that “the epilogue is a masterpiece of surprise”, I was still surprised when I got there. This is a great book.

And that’s what I’ve been up to, reading-wise.

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Bring your kids!

About a month ago I mentioned a new children’s bookstore opening soon in Orchard Park, “B is for Books”. Well, the store is going to open this week! They’re doing a soft-open on October 9, with a grand opening bash to come on October 13. Check out their website, bis4books.com, for more information. These aren’t the best of times to be opening independent bookstores, but here’s hoping they make it — consider them, for instance, for your next big birthday party for your kid, if you’re sick of the whole Chuck E. Cheese scene. And support a local business while doing so!

UPDATE: I see that their website doesn’t include directions. For those unfamiliar with Orchard Park or with the Southtowns in general, take the 219 south to the Orchard Park exit, and take Route 20A (which becomes Quaker St. in Orchard Park). When you come to the intersection of 20A and 277/240 (Buffalo St), keep going straight, and Bis4Books will be on the left not more than a few hundred feet past the intersection. They have parking in the rear. And while you’re here, check out some of the other nifty little shops and eateries we have to offer in Orchard Park! We’ve got a great little town here, I’ll tell you what.

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