Wednesday, January 06, 2010

Posted via web from "Here's to plain speaking and clear understanding."

Labels: Books, movies

19:25 cdogzilla

Monday, November 30, 2009

One Ol' Oscar (via Cecily) Got Wrong


Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde (16 October 1854 – 30 November 1900)

Labels: Books

18:35 cdogzilla

Wednesday, November 25, 2009

The best books of the ’00s | Best Of The Decade | The A.V. Club
+1 for "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" among several strong selections.
-1 for "The Road." "The Years of Rice and Salt" would've been a better choice. Or "World War Z."

Labels: Books, Lists

21:32 cdogzilla

Non-Random Book, Non-Random Passage #2
For the last twenty plus years, Kim Stanley Robinson has been my favorite writer. Prior to that, it was either Robert A. Heinlein or Mark Twain. I already hit Twain in the random series, so I'll pick a Heinlein passage to take me back to the those heady high-school days when reasonably bright (I'll be haughty here and put myself in that category) kids' brains are soaking up knowledge like sponges, awash in destabilizing hormones, and still, for having ten or more years of schooling, remarkably empty.

Heinlein is like crack for teen geeks with a sci-fi bent. All that machismo, science, solipsism, and wacky libertarianism: Danger, Will Robinson! I shudder to think some of the stuff I thought back then, but I still treasure these old books, and there are lots of them. The juveniles, the classics, and even the ones near the end where (To Sail Beyond the Sunset, I'm looking at you) things were just getting plain weird.

Since Starship Troopers is first Heinlein that leaps to mind, I've got go with Major Reid and Johnny Rico in History and Moral Philosopy class.

"Are a thousand unreleased prisoners sufficient reason to start or resume a war? Bear in mind that millions of innocent people may die, almost certainly will die, if war is started or resumed."

I didn't hesitate. "Yes, sir! More than enough reason."

"'More than enough.' Very well, is one prisoner unreleased by the enemy, enough reason to start or resume a war?"

I hesitated. I knew the M.I. answer -- but I didn't think that was the one he wanted. He said sharply, "Come, come, Mister! We have an upper limit of one thousand; I invited you to consider a lower limit of one. But you can't pay a promissory note which reads 'somewhere between one and one thousand pounds' -- and starting a war is much more serious than paying a trifle of money. Wouldn't it be criminal to endanger a country -- two countries, in fact -- to save one man? Especially as he may not deserve it? Or may die in the meantime? Thousands of people get killed every day in accidents ... so why hesitate over one man? Answer! Answer yes, or answer no -- you're holding up the class."

He got my goat. I gave him the cap trooper's answer. "Yes, sir!"

"'Yes' what?"

"It doesn't matter if it's a thousand -- or just one, sir. You fight."

"Aha! The number of prisoners is irrelevant. Good. Now prove your answer."

I was stuck. I knew it was the right answer. But I didn't know why. He kept hounding me. "Speak up, Mr. Rico. This is an exact science. You have made a mathematical statement; you must give proof. Someone may claim that you have asserted, by analogy, that one potato is worth the same price, no more, no less, as a thousand potatoes. No?"

"No, sir!"

"Why not? Prove it."

"Men are not potatoes."

What I still enjoy in Heinlein is captured here.  What I outgrew is as well.  He's very directly challenging his reader to tackle questions of ethics and morality.  And he's strident about it.  All those italics and exclamation points, I didn't add those.  I don't mind that so much, sure it's a bit florid but I think that's a great approach to go after a young reader.  Pose the questions, demand an answer, then demand a justification.  The problem is he's sloppy.  Where he has Reid say they've established an "upper limit" of one thousand, no, that's not what they did at all.  That's saying up to one thousand prisoners are enough to go to war over, more than that is not sufficient reason.  I know what he was trying to say but you can't have a character say they're being held to mathematical standards of proof and morality is an exact science and be so careless with your words.  The whole situation is the kind of overwrought there's-a-terrorist-who-knows-where-the-bomb-is-do-you-torture-him-for-the-information scenario.  Obviously, a nation should not just forget about a P.O.W. still behind enemy lines.  But, neither do we need to suppose that immediately after the last signature is on the armistice document, the presence of P.O.W.s behind enemy lines means lobbing a nuke or immediately picking the rifles back up.  (Demand their safety, work out the logistics of their return, explain the consequences of failure to comply or discuss in good faith, then act accordingly.)  At heart, Reid and Rico are right, you risk more than one life to gain the release of a prisoner -- if need be -- because saying, "Well, it's just one prisoner, screw him," would clearly be wrong.  Just like torture is wrong.   The problem is Heinlein's bluster obscures the real process of how you reason through a dilemma like the one discussed.

I'm glad I read Heinlein when I was young, I'm not sure I could stomach him now if I hadn't.  I'm glad because even though the prose and ideology are dodgier than I realized as a teen, the lesson that it's important to get to the right answer, that you arrive at it by reasoning, that there is a science to answering the hard questions (no appeals to mumbo-jumbo and mystical bullshit) -- as long as a kid comes away with that, that kid's going in the right direction.  I hope my kids read this stuff when they get older.  I also hope they don't stop with Heinlein.

And, I never did outgrow Twain.

Labels: Books, sci-fi

05:28 cdogzilla

Tuesday, November 24, 2009

Deals: 11/23/2009 - 11/23/2009 - Publishers Weekly:
"Orbit Signs Robinson

Orbit's Tim Holman inked Kim Stanley Robinson to a world English rights, three-book deal, with the first title in the agreement, 2312, slated to drop in 2012. Holman, v-p and publisher of the Hachette sci-fi/fantasy imprint, brokered the deal with agent Ralph Vicinanza. Robinson, who's won various genre awards including the Hugo and the Nebula, is best known for his Mars trilogy, published in the 1990s by Bantam's Spectra imprint. In the new novel, set 300 years in the future, human beings have fled Earth in favor of new homes within the solar system."

Labels: Books, sci-fi

21:18 cdogzilla

Monday, November 23, 2009

Non-Random Book, Non-Random Passage #1
Have I mentioned how much I love having my books all shelved and at hand? Yes. The random was fun (for me) but I'm itching to flip through some faves. Of course, it's Kim Stanley Robinson to start. The Gold Coast maintains a special place in my heart, even though The Years of Rice and Salt is currently my favorite of his novels. I've got a Hardback 1st and a paperback TGC -- liked it so much I bought it twice. Plus, I received a J'ai Lu edition en Français as a gift.

There's a bit that's always stuck with me, something I'd done, and I'm sure most folks have at one point or another where you count back generations to try to fit history in your head, make the scale of it intelligible. In the novel, the gang of friends need to get out of Dodge while some trouble blows over, so they jet off to Europe, hit some of the big tourist destinations, then decide to see the Pyramids in Egypt (and are underwhelmed), then Jim, our protagonist, suggests checking out Greece and getting off the beaten path to do some camping. They find some ruins and with the help of a few lines off the back of a map launch themselves into history:

"Well, the back of the map has a few sentences about it, and that's all I know, really. It began as a Minoan town, around 2500 B.C. Then it was occupied by the Greeks, the Romans, and the Byzantines. Under the Greeks it was an independent city-state and coined its own money. It was abandoned around either 900 A.D. or 1500 A.D., because of earthquakes."

"Only six hundred years' difference," Sandy says, "My Lord, the time scales!"

"Immense," Jim says. "We can't imagine them. Especially not Californians."

Sandy takes this as a challenge. "Can too!"

"Cannot!"

"Can too!"

About five reps of that, and Sandy says, "Okay, try this. We'll go backwards from now, generation by generation. Thirty-three years per generation. You tell us what they were doing, I'll keep count."

"Okay, let's try it."

"Last generation?"

"Part of Greece."

Sandy makes a mark in the dirt between flagstones. "Before that?"

"Same."

Five generations go by like that. Jim has his eyes squeezed shut, he's concentrating, trying to recall Cretan history from the guidebooks, his history texts back home. "Okay, this guy saw Crete deeded over from Turkey to Greece. Before him, under the Turks."

"And his parents?"

"Under the Turks." They repeat these two sentences over and over, slowly, as if completing some ritual, so that Jim can keep track of the years. Sixteen times! "That's one big Thanksgiving," Humphrey mutters.

"What's that?"

"Lot's of Turkey."

Then Jim says, "Okay, now the Venetians."

So the response changes. "And their parent?" "Venetian." Ten times. At which point Jim adds, "We've just no reached the end of Itanos, by the way. The end of this city."

They laugh at that. And move to the Byzantines. Seven times Jim answers with that. Then: "The Arabs. Saracen Arabs, from Spain. Bloody times." Four generations under the Arabs. Then it's back to the Byzantines, to the time when the church before them was functioning, holding services, having its doorsill scraped by the door's locking post, again and again. Fifteen times Jim answers "Byzantine," eyes screwed shut.

"And their parents?"

"In Itanos. Independent city-state, Greek in nature."

"Call it Itanos. And their parents?"

"Itanos."

Twenty-six times they repeat the litany, Sandy keeping the pace slow and measured. At this point none of them can really believe it.

"Dorian Greeks." After a few more: "Mycenean Greeks. Time of the Trojan War."

"So this generation could have gone to Troy?"

"Yes." And on it goes, for eight generations. Sandy's shifting to get some fresh dirt to scratch. Then: "Earthquakes brought down the Minoan palaces for the last time. This generation felt them."

"Minoans! And their parents?"

"Minoan." And here they fall into a slow singsong, they know they've caught the rhythm of something deep, something fundamental. Forty times Sandy asks "And their parents?", and Jim answers "Minoan," until their voices creak with the repetition.

And finally Jim opens his eyes, looks around as if seeing it all for the first time. "This generation, it was a group of friends, and they came here in boats. There was nothing here. They were probably fishermen, and stopped here on fishing trips. This hill was probably fifty feet inland, behind a wide beach. Their homes down near the palace at Zakros were getting crowded, they probably lived with their parents, and they were always up here fishing anyway, so they decided to take the wives and kids and move up here together. A group of friends, they all knew each other, they were having a good time all on their own, with their kids, and this whole valley for the taking. They built lean-tos at first, then started cutting the soft stone." Jim runs his hand over th eporous Minoan block he is leaning against. Looks at Sandy curiously. "Well?"

Sandy nods, says softly, "So we can imagine it."

"I guess so."

Sandy counts his marks. "One hundred thirty-seven generations."

They sit. The moon rises. Low broken clouds scud in from the west, fly under the moon, dash its light here and there. Broken walls, tumbled blocks. A history as long as that, and now the land, empty again.

At this point, some headlights break the characters' reverie and they are back in the present day. Whew, long passage to transcribe. I love it. Humphrey's Thanksgiving quip falls flat, unacknowledged once explained. The generations in the recounting wash up on empty land like a wave, then recede. The sand they are scratching in, the rocks that were scraped and cut, they abide. The repetition and ritualism, expanding their imagination of history. Jim's eyes are screwed shut until he reaches the first settlers. When he opens his eyes, I feel like I'm seeing the landscape the way he is.

And so we should, imagine backwards, then look at where we are. Where are we going next? How are we living in times that are like the times of our ancestors? How are things different? Then, of course, we need to think about what comes next, right? How to live now so when future generations count back, they don't say "bloody times."

Labels: Books, history

16:02 cdogzilla

Thursday, November 19, 2009

Slate's unauthorized index of Sarah Palin's autobiography, Going Rogue. - By Christopher Beam - Slate Magazine
Alaska
________autumn bouquet of, 1
________robin's egg sky of, 2
________superiority to Lower 48 of, 1-413

Labels: Books, Conservative Goons

23:34 cdogzilla

Tuesday, November 03, 2009

Random Book, Random Passage #11
Doctor Who and the Daemons, Barry Letts. I went on a tear in 1983 and 1984 reading all the Target Doctor Who novelisations and still have an entire shelf to prove it.

'Yes, sir,' replied the Sergeant, obviously not believing a word of it, and moved away to sort out the junction boxes ready for the link-up to the electricity supply. The Brigadier moved as a close to the Doctor the heat barrier would let him.

'Do you know what you're doing?' he asked quietly.

The Doctor smiled charmingly. 'My dear chap,' he said, 'I can't wait to find out!'

Great old Pertwee-era Who with the Master no less.

Labels: Books, doctor who

20:11 cdogzilla

Sunday, November 01, 2009

Random Book, Random Passage #10
Not sure how to handle this one? Comic books and graphic novels will prove tricky, me without my scanner set up. Here's a fuzzy photo and all caps quoting from Los Bros Hernandez's House of Raging Women (Vol. 5 of the Complete Love and Rockets).

"BUT TO MY SURPRISE, SHARPE IS A REAL GENTLEMAN! AS HE'S ABOUT TO WIPE HIS SOPPING BROW HE NOTICES ME IN THE AISLE SEAT AND STOPS HIMSELF IN MID-MOTION AS NOT TO DRIP SWEAT IN MY BEER. MY FAITH IN HUMANITY IS RESTORED ... FOR THE MOMENT."

Not positive but I think these Fantagraphics editions of Love and Rockets were my first foray into comic book anthologies/graphic novels. I had beat old paperback collections of newspaper comics (Peanuts, B.C., Andy Capp) that were passed down to me, but I was never a comic book guy. I am more today in my late 30s than I ever was as a kid, oddly enough, and that's still not very much.

Labels: Books, comics

19:36 cdogzilla

Thursday, October 29, 2009

Random Book, Random Passage #9
Old School Pulp Sci-Fi time.  Check out the cover on Andre Norton's Witch World, wouldja?

(Mine is actually the 1963 Ace first edition that retailed for 40¢)  I'm actually a little worried that opening it again may crack the spine but here's a bit from page 58:

"When a potter creates a vase he lays clay upon the wheel and molds it with the skill of his hands to match the plan which is in his brain. Clay is a product of the earth, but that which changes its shape is the product of intelligence and training. It is in my mind that someone - or something - has gathered up that which is a part of the sea, of the air, and has molded it into another shape to serve a purpose."

I never read any of the other books in the Witch World series, Norton's style is a bit stilted for my taste. But I dig that Blue Falcon with a Hair Dryer cover. I don't know much about Norton but a quick look up in The Anatomy of Wonder informs me she was a childrens librarian, so I like her for that.

Labels: Books, sci-fi

22:14 cdogzilla

Tuesday, October 27, 2009

Random Book, Random Passage #8
I didn't think it would happen so soon but random shelf, random book actually yielded a duplicate already, so I redid the book selection and got My Friends The Wild Chimpanzees by Baroness Jane Van Lawick-Goodall (the book was published in 1967 while she was still married to Baron Hugo van Lawick).  This is a slender hardcover volume with a bunch of beautiful color plates. I think I got this as a birthday present when I was living in Madison, WI. My memory is not so great. From page 75:

Nor do the adult male chimpanzees always sit huddled and passive in the rain.  Sometimes when the first drops hit them they begin a display, wildly and rhythmically swaying from foot to foot, rocking saplings to and fro, stamping the ground.  This spectacular performance we call a "rain dance."

Chimpanzees may also respond in the same way to a high wind and to a particularly stimulating social situation, but it is typically their reaction to a sudden downpour.  On two occasions I saw group performances of these rain dances. The first will always haunt my memory.

That I'm fascinated by apes and monkeys is no secret.  It would be hard to explain why beyond the obvious.  We have a cousin, out in the wild, an animal "other" that is very human upon closer inspection.  It is very possible that they will be extinct in my lifetime.  And it will be humanity's fault.  We're killing (and eating) the species, of all the animal kingdom, with which we share the most recent common ancestor.  Their greatest champion over the last 40 years has been been Jane Goodall; her descriptions of the family life of Flo, Flint and the other chimps in Gombe will always haunt my memory.

Labels: Books, chimps

20:22 cdogzilla

Sunday, October 25, 2009

Random Book, Random Passage #7
The Saint in Action, by Leslie Charteris.  A 1980 edition of the 1937 short story collection I picked up at Books 'N Such in Springfield, MA back in the mid 80s.  I was hoping to land on The Last Action Hero, my favorite of the Saint series, but am hoping a passage here will stir some memories of reading this one.

"You ruddy bastard --"

"That'll do, " Simon intervened crisply.  "And I wouldn't take any chances with my health if I were you, brother.  That Betsy of Hoppy's would just about blow you in half, and he's rather sensitive about his family.  We'll go on talking to you presently."

He turned to the others.

"I don't know how it strikes any of you bat-eyed brigands," he said, "but I've got a feeling that this is the best break we've had yet.  After all, a lot of weird things happen in this world of sin, buy you don't usually find girls in overalls riding on smugglers' trucks with a cargo of contraband swagger soup."

"You do when you hold 'em up, " said Peter stoically.

Yeah, fun stuff.  Makes we want to pour a glass of the ol' swagger soup and finish the story. It's a shame the Val Kilmer movie a few years back didn't lead to a revival.  Kilmer wasn't the right guy for the role though and I doubt we'll see another series or movie any time soon.  A shame, really.  AMC or Turner Classic played some of the old George Sanders Saint movies not that long ago. I was impressed by Sanders as Templar but not much else.  The novels and stories are just sitting there waiting to be made into a franchise for whoever the next George Clooney is. 

Labels: Books

22:15 cdogzilla

Thursday, October 22, 2009

One of My Favorite (Non-Random) Bookshelves

Labels: Books, pictures

22:42 cdogzilla

Random Book, Random Passage #6
The first reference book to come up in this series, Asian Cult Cinema. It's probably not totally random that I flipped and stopped at a picture of Chow Yun-Fat, but I could've stopped on Jackie Chan or Sammo and kept going. Here's a bit about Ringo Lam's Full Contact:

Filmmaker Ringo Lam delivers his masterpiece. While it may be too violent and bleak to woo the mainstream audiences, it emerges as a film that simply can't be ignored. Unquestionably, it's the final word on the ultraviolence craze in HK cinema. Plus the pic benefits from, perhaps, Chow Yun-Fat's finest performance.

It goes on to describe the typically over the top plot and acknowledges the importance of the bullet's-eye view shot.  The writing style of the reviews isn't this book's strong point, so I'm not going to quote the whole thing.  I haven't seen Full Contact in a long time, I wonder how it's held up?  It's certainly not Chow Yun-Fat's finest performance.  At least, not any longer.

Labels: Books, movies

11:20 cdogzilla

Wednesday, October 21, 2009

Random Book, Random Passage #5
Randomness brought me to The Year's Best Science Fiction 1984 this time. It's got Lucius Shepard (twice), Kim Stanley Robinson, Gene Wolfe, Robert Silverberg, John Varley, William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, it's quite a collection. But my random page puts us in Dozois's Introduction. Random giveth and random taketh away. Still, he writes:

So instead I'll limit myself to commenting on the novels that I did read this year, I was most impressed by Neuromancer, William Gibson (Ace Special); The Wild Shore, Kim Stanley Robinson (Ace Special); The Man Who Melted, Jack Dann (Bluejay Books); Them Bones, Howard Waldrop (Ace Special); Green Eyes, Lucius Shepard (Ace Special); Frontera, Lewis Shiner (Baen Books); The Man in the Tree, Damon Knight (Berkley); Heechee Rendezvous, Frederik Pohl (Del Rey); Across the Sea of Suns, Gregory Benford (Timescape); Stars in my Pocket Like Grains of Sand, Samuel R. Delaney (Bantam)...

I'll stop there even though several more outstanding novels follow in his list (Icehenge and Job: A Comedy of Justice not the least of them).  Many of the books Dozois lists are classics, and are sitting on shelves in front of me, waiting for the randomizer to select them.  How about they eye for talent whoever did the selecting for the Ace Specials had, eh?  My Ace Special editions of The Wild Shore (signed) and Green Eyes are prized possessions.  (I sure hope my kids like to read sci-fi when they get a little older, I can't wait to share these with them.)  A little further down the page where Dozois discuss the small press, it brings a smile to my face to see how he acknowledged Zeising for publishing novels by Gene Wolfe and PKD.  

Labels: Books, sci-fi

13:12 cdogzilla

Tuesday, October 20, 2009

Random Book, Random Passage #4
Nice Vintage edition paperback of Martin Amis's The Rachel Papers. Read this back in 1992 or 1993, I believe. I've soured a bit on Amis (Martin, not Kingsley though) over the years and haven't read him since The War Against Cliché. I remember liking this one though. Flipping at random to:

It seems improbable now, but on the way there we talked about DeForest's infrequent and ham-cocked performances in bed. (We laughed, too, wholly without malice: an example of prelapsarian high spirits which as of tonight will be another experience unavailable to me.) DeForest's chief, though by no means his only, problem was that he tended to come before either he or Rachel could say - 'Jack Robinson'. He would slap on the contraceptive and surge into her with the look of someone who had just remembered he ought to be doing a terribly important thing elsewhere, like attending his mother's funeral.

Is it possible to grab a passage from Amis and not have it be immediately recognizable as his?  I've learned that bit about Jack Robinson doesn't refer to Jackie Robinson, as I thought (being quick on the basepath), but is a British turn of phrase with cloudy origins.

I should probably revisit Amis.  I think I went off on him because I got a vague, and perhaps ill-informed sense, that he might be a bit of a ... well, not racist ... but that is anti-Islamism might be sort of racially motivated.  He's against nuclear proliferation, as all rational people are and I've learned he endorsed Obama, so I can be reasonably confident he's not a right-wing nutter.  Around the time he was jousting with left-wing nutter Terry Eagleton I probably camped him in my mind with the right.  It didn't help that I found TWAC tedious.  Money, though, brilliant.

Labels: Books

14:18 cdogzilla

Monday, October 19, 2009

library joke:

Labels: Books, pictures

20:21 cdogzilla

Random Book, Random Passage #3
My random picks just took a turn for the totally random.  I seriously spun myself around and waved my arm with pointed finger at the bookcases with eyes closed and wound up picking Luke Rhinehart's The Dice Man.  Instead of flipping through the book, I'm going to get extra random and use a random number generator for page and line number.

'Obviously the old therapies couldn't solve this dilemma.  Whereas conventional psychoanalysis sees the desire for an Immaculate Anus as neurotic and counterproductive, we maintain that the desire, like all desires, is good, and causes trouble only when followed too consistently. The individual must come to embrace, in effect, both the Immaculate Anus and the excreted lumps of turd.'

He was standing in front of Dr. Cobblestone and leaned on the table in front of him with both immaculately tailored arms.  'We look not for moderation in the excretory functions, but a joyful variety:  a random alteration, as it were of constipation and diarrhea, with, I suppose, sporadic bursts of regularity.' 

Oh yeah. The Dice Man.  First, I'm not sure "alteration" is the mot juste in that last sentence?  Maybe if it went on to say "from constipation to diarrhea" instead of "of constipation and diarrhea"?  You can alternate between the state of being constipated and the state of having diarrhea -- things taking turns -- where alteration is the act of making something different. That aside, if you haven't read The Dice Man, I would suggest you get a die, roll it, and, if you roll a 1-5, then read it.  If you roll a 6, then wait a day or two and roll again.

Labels: Books

19:51 cdogzilla

Sunday, October 18, 2009

Random Book, Random Passage #2
I went left last time, so right this time. I reached for a middle shelf last time, so this time a little lower. Eyes closed, fingertips run over the tops of several pocket size paperbacks and the first one I bump into and pull is Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose. This is a book club edition, one I got back in high school, probably 1985 or 1986. I don't remember if I saw the Sean Connery/Christian Slater film in theaters, but I'd be willing to bet this was right around the time of its release. Don't recall what else I got in that introductory special offer ... whatever they were, likely sold them to used book stores long ago. I watched the movie recently, so the memory files of reading the book are partially and indistinguishably overwritten by scenes from the movie. For example, I knew full well that William of Baskerville was the investigating monk, but couldn't recall the narrator's name; it's Adso, of course, but I easily recalled he was played by a still fresh-faced Mr. Pump Up the Volume.

Jorge sneered. "Even in the episodes the preachers tell, there are many old wives' tales. A saint immersed in boiling water suffers for Christ and restrains his cries, he does not play childish tricks on the pagans!"

"You see?" William said. "This story seems offensive to reason and you accuse it of being ridiculous! Though you are controlling your lips, you are tacitly laughing at something, nor do you wish me to take it seriously. You are laughing at laughter, but you are laughing."

Baskerville goes on to go reference Biblical passages from which one could infer the Christ character was written with a sense of humor, infuriating bitter, twisted old Jorge.

Random reflection: every year around this time some religious leaders get their undergarments in a twist about Hallowe'en and the danger of kids frolicking around dressed like devils.  Hallowe'en, of course, being the gateway drug to Satanism, blood sacrifice, ritual murder, and the like.  Parishioners are warned, fun-loving parents and teachers chastised, and every attempt made by the pious to shame normal people into feeling like they do -- guilty and repressed. There are still plenty Jorges out there who would poison the page of any book that makes people laugh because they can't laugh themselves.  Fear of laughter is fear of self-knowledge.  What are all these religious nutters so afraid of?

Labels: Books

14:45 cdogzilla

Saturday, October 17, 2009

Random Book, Random Passage #1
Now that all my books are within arm's reach, I can play grab, flip, and share. I have a lot Mark Twain, so it's fitting that when I lurched towards the left-most bookcase and grabbed a book it turned out to be The Innocents Abroad. It's a Signet Classic edition from 1966. Obviously a used bookstore purchase as it's got "J. Borell" scrawled in ink along the bottom (the part that sits on the bookshelf) but I don't remember when or where I picked it up. Probably while in high school or college, so the off-campus bookstore in Storrs or the great used bookstore in Manchester (the name of which frustratingly escapes me right now Books & Birds) are likely candidates. Flipping and stopping at pg. 120 I let my eye drift to the first paragraph break and read:

I only meant to write about the churches, but I keep wandering from the subject. I could say that the Church of the Annunciation is a wilderness of beautiful columns, of statues, gilded moldings, and pictures almost countless, but that would give no one an entirely perfect idea of the thing, and so where is the use? One family built the whole edifice and have got money left. There is where the mystery lies. We had an idea at first that only a mint could have survived the expense.

I love it. Note where the mystery doesn't lie. It warms my atheist heart.  As with all expenditure of resources and time for religious purposes, I wonder how much better the world might be already if yesterday and today's wealthy elites decided to pour that wasted energy into building quality public schools or other infrastructure improvements for the common good instead.

Labels: atheism, Books

14:24 cdogzilla

Tuesday, September 29, 2009

If “Mark Twain Said It,” He Probably Didn’t | GOOD: Twain cited as America's leading recipient of Churchillian Drift.

I wonder if even us non-famous folk have a similar effect with our name on it. Like, C-Dogian Drift might be when you think you know somebody who has a copy of that book, and whether it's c-dog or not, that's who you cite as having it? I hope it's something that mildly endearing. More likely, it's someone got drunk, hurled, was thrown out of the bar, and eventually passed out someplace in Storrs, CT. "Oh, I think that was c-dog."

Labels: Books

05:30 cdogzilla

Friday, September 25, 2009

Ralph & Ayn: "
The other day, browsing at the local B&N, I came across an alarmingly thick novel written by Ralph Nader, and now the New Yorker takes a closer look at this development. The book — Nader eschews the term novel for it; prefers the hilariously oxymoronic “a practical utopia” — is called Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us!. (The exclamation point is a part of the official title and “super-rich” is even underlined on the front cover, leading me to believe the novel — sorry, the practical utopia may have been ghostwritten by an 11-year-old girl.)

This is, as far as I can tell, the final step in Nader morphing into the left’s Ayn Rand. For instance, the naming department: Not cowed by the difficulty of beating Rand’s Ragnar Danneskjöld, Nader’s stand-in for the real world’s already-goofily-named Grover Norquist is “a conservative evil genius named Brovar Dortwist.” (The magazine deserves a major prize for coaxing this from Norquist: “I have warm fuzzies for [Nader] on a number of levels.”) But surely Nader can’t match Rand’s imagination when it comes to outlandish blueprints for ideological wish fulfillment? Well, check out this sentence fragment: “Yoko Ono, who in the book invents a logo called Seventh-Generation Eye that causes millions of people suddenly to shed their political apathy . . .”

Oh, my. The book is ranked 166 on Amazon as I write this, so it appears people are actually reading it."

I saw this the other day and thought maybe it was a joke, so didn't post it.  Now it's showing up all over and doesn't seem to be a hoax.  As ridiculous as it sounds, it can't be as ridiculous as Objectivist fiction.  Can it?

Labels: Books, progressivism

19:25 cdogzilla

Wednesday, September 23, 2009

Ellroy in Paris:

The new fall issue of The Paris Review features an interview with James Ellroy. In the excerpt available online, he trashes Raymond Chandler and praises Dashiell Hammett:

Chandler wrote the kind of guy that he wanted to be, Hammett wrote the kind of guy that he was afraid he was. Chandler’s books are incoherent. Hammett’s are coherent. Chandler is all about the wisecracks, the similes, the constant satire, the construction of the knight. Hammett writes about the all-male world of mendacity and greed. Hammett was tremendously important to me.

But what wisecracks and similes! Ellroy also accounts for himself during the years 1965-1975 — a section that is, er, not G-rated — and bemoans the focus of the attention he gets:

I’ve told many journalists that I’ve done time in county jail, that I’ve broken and entered, that I was a voyeur. But I also told them that I spent much more time reading than I ever did stealing and peeping. They never mention that. It’s a lot sexier to write about my mother, her death, my wild youth, and my jail time than it is to say that Ellroy holed up in the library with a bottle of wine and read books.

Still getting used to blogging items from other folks Google Reader Shared items. Credit this to Jorn Barger. I wish when using the 'send to blogger' function, Reader made it a little easier to cite the original sharer.

Labels: Books

21:54 cdogzilla

Monday, September 21, 2009

Locus Online News: Powers Novel Optioned for New Pirates of the Carribean Movie: On Stranger Tides becomes grist for the Disney mill.

Labels: Books, movies

20:45 cdogzilla

Saturday, September 19, 2009

ohnotheydidnt: Dan Brown's 20 Worst Sentences:

17. Deception Point, chapter 8: Overhanging her precarious body was a jaundiced face whose skin resembled a sheet of parchment paper punctured by two emotionless eyes.

It’s not clear what Brown thinks ‘precarious’ means here.

16. The Da Vinci Code, chapter 4: A voice spoke, chillingly close. "Do not move." On his hands and knees, the curator froze, turning his head slowly. Only fifteen feet away, outside the sealed gate, the mountainous silhouette of his attacker stared through the iron bars. He was broad and tall, with ghost-pale skin and thinning white hair. His irises were pink with dark red pupils.

A silhouette with white hair and pink irises stood chillingly close but 15 feet away. What’s wrong with this picture?

15. The Da Vinci Code, chapter 4: As a boy, Langdon had fallen down an abandoned well shaft and almost died treading water in the narrow space for hours before being rescued. Since then, he'd suffered a haunting phobia of enclosed spaces - elevators, subways, squash courts.

Other enclosed spaces include toilet cubicles, phone boxes and dog kennels.

14. Angels and Demons, chapter 100: Bernini's Fountain of the Four Rivers glorified the four major rivers of the Old World - The Nile, Ganges, Danube, and Rio Plata.

The Rio de la Plata. Between Argentina and Uruguay. One of the major rivers of the Old World. Apparently.

I don't have anything against Mr. Brown. I read The Da Vinci Code and didn't think it was the worst pop novel I've read, or the worst written. FCOL, remember The Historian? Anyways, I feel a little mean and would hope that if I ever lived the dream and published well-loved novels that I wouldn't have my every sentence diagrammed and critiqued. Check the history of my posting here for a lesson on How to Mangle Syntax -- I'm clearly in no position to judge. I do think it's worth pointing out that you can be a hugely successful author with, one supposes, handsomely compensated editors reviewing your work and still produce your fair share of laughable clunkers.

Labels: Books

21:50 cdogzilla

If You Are Among the Very Jung at Heart

Labels: Books

17:35 cdogzilla

Science fiction author hits out at Booker judges |Books |guardian.co.uk:
"Kim Stanley Robinson, one of science fiction's contemporary greats, accuses the Booker prize judges of ignorance"

Sadly, I haven't read the winners or his suggestions for who should have won. But now that I know, I can take the list to Lazy Lion tomorrow when I collect my $10 gift cert won for getting their Twitter trivia question right.

"He believes this year's prize should go to Adam Roberts's science fiction comedy, Yellow Blue Tibia, which didn't even make the longlist. In 2005, when John Banville took the Booker for The Sea, he believes that Geoff Ryman's Air should have won; in 2004 – when Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty won – it should have gone to Gwyneth Jones's Life, and in 1997, the year of Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things, Signs of Life by M John Harrison should have triumphed."

Labels: Books, sci-fi

00:08 cdogzilla

Saturday, September 12, 2009

Book Review - 'Inside of a Dog - What Dogs See, Smell, and Know,' by Alexandra Horowitz - Review - NYTimes.com:

Dogs do not just detect odors better than we can. This sniffing “gaze” also gives them a very different experience of the world than our visual one gives us. One of Horowitz’s most startling insights, for me, was how even a dog’s sense of time differs from ours. For dogs, “smell tells time,” she writes. “Perspective, scale and distance are, after a fashion, in olfaction — but olfaction is fleeting. . . . Odors are less strong over time, so strength indicates newness; weakness, age. The future is smelled on the breeze that brings air from the place you’re headed.” While we mainly look at the present, the dog’s “olfactory window” onto the present is wider than our visual window, “including not just the scene currently happening, but also a snatch of the just-happened and the up-ahead. The present has a shadow of the past and a ring of the future about it.” Now that’s umwelt.

Sounds like an interesting book. As a dog lover, I'd like to read it. And, I like the title -- "inside of a dog it's too dark to read." But the problem I have with the passage above is the idea that because dogs smell things on the breeze, they have this totally different perception of time that includes "the up-ahead." Sounds kind of cool and mind-blowing at first glance, but don't we see things up ahead as well as what's right in front of us when we're walking? And we can smell the peanut roasting wagon that's around the street corner that we can't see yet, too. So, maybe not as much as dogs do, our perceptions would seem to give us the now and the up-ahead in the same way. This reminded me of the whole "eskimos have twenty words for snow" thing, like it's supposed to blow my mind there's more than one way to refer to snow. I'm no eskimo, but I have lots of words for snow myself: flurries, flakes, blizzard, white-out, drifts, slush, powder, sleet, etc.

Labels: Books, non-monkey animals

21:20 cdogzilla

Friday, September 04, 2009

The Joy of Reading in the Subways of New York - NYTimes.com: This is the real reason I support public transportation. Sure, it's 'green' and all ... but there is nothing better than turning a crappy commute into a chance to read.

Labels: Books

21:18 cdogzilla

Tuesday, September 01, 2009

Geek With (Lots of) Books: The First Step is to Admit You Have a Problem: I like this because I'm bad but not as bad as this guy. Did I mention my new Ikea bookcases are up and looking wonderful? A few things to tidy up and then I'll be flickring my new beauties.
----------------
Now playing on YouTube: Lloyd Cole and the Commotions - Are You Ready to Be Heartbroken?
via FoxyTunes

Labels: Books, shadowboner

22:23 cdogzilla

Saturday, August 29, 2009

The Future of Reading - ‘Reading Workshop’ Approach Lets Students Pick the Books - Series - NYTimes.com: I would've loved to spend school time reading the Heinlein novels I was reading at home. I don't think I'd have been any worse off for it. But, I wonder if I'd been allowed to indulge and didn't have some of the classics assigned, how long it would've taken me to get to them? In some cases, I might've been better off getting to them late. If kids aren't picking up Mark Twain on their own, the schools better dang well be making sure they're getting their RDA.

----------------
Now playing: The Toasters - Havana (This Gun for Hire)
via FoxyTunes

Labels: Books

20:52 cdogzilla

Thursday, August 20, 2009

Why we don't use Galileo's last name. - By Brian Palmer - Slate Magazine: "Why Do We Call Galileo Galilei by His First Name?We don't go around saying 'Albert' discovered relativity."

Galileo figures prominently in Kim Stanley Robinson's next novel, so he's on my historical blogging radar.

Labels: Books, history

21:15 cdogzilla

The Millions: The Best Book Blog, Bar None: "The Millions, online since 2003, is a book blog of exceptional breadth and depth, and 'an independent literature and culture publication that pays its writers.' Until recently, that breadth and depth was hard to fathom, as the site had outgrown its infrastructure. Now, however, its excellent features are easy to find, as are series like The Future of the Book, Ask a Book Question, and The Millions Interview. Superb reviews can be found as they happen or in the Book Review Index, and, a vestige of when The Millions was a one man operation, you can find out what C. Max Magee, founder of The Millions, is reading on the Book Lists page."

Labels: Books

20:55 cdogzilla

Sunday, August 16, 2009

Perhaps There Aren't Any Grown-Ups Anywhere
The Nobel laureate Sir William Golding, whose novel Lord of the Flies turned notions of childhood innocence on their head, admitted in private papers that he had tried to rape a 15-year-old girl during his teenage years, it emerged today.

Golding's papers also described how he had experimented, while a teacher at a public school, with setting boys against one another in the manner of Lord of the Flies, which tells the story of young air crash survivors on a desert island during a nuclear war.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/08/16/william-golding-lord-of-t_n_260674.html

--
This article was sent using my Viigo.
For a free download, go to http://getviigo.com

Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

Labels: Books, crime

19:57 cdogzilla

Sunday, July 05, 2009

It Doesn't Have To Be Right...: Sexy Sci-Fi: Heaving Bosom Sci-FI is too often missed in sub-genre lists. I dig the similarity to the similarly pulpy crime novel covers of the 50s-60s.

Labels: Books, Lists, sci-fi, shadowboner

15:09 cdogzilla

Text on the beach - the 50 best summer reads ever | Books | The Observer

Labels: Books, Lists

14:58 cdogzilla

Friday, June 26, 2009

Gov. Ted Strickland Responds to Library Outcry in New Letter | Cleveland Leader: "Ohio Governor Ted Strickland, who proposed cutting state funding to library's by 50 percent, has responded to the enormous outcry by libraries and his constituents in a letter posted to his website just moments ago."

Sad. A community without is a decent library is not a place I'd want to live.

Labels: Books

21:11 cdogzilla

Saturday, June 20, 2009

A Literary Legend Fights for a Ventura County Library - NYTimes.com: "'Libraries raised me,' Mr. Bradbury said. 'I don't believe in colleges and universities. I believe in libraries because most students don't have any money. When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money. I couldn't go to college, so I went to the library three days a week for 10 years.'"

Labels: Books

12:34 cdogzilla

Thursday, June 18, 2009

New Features Added to Google Books

This is just a little test to see how it looks, but it is something I am meaning to get around to reading one of these days.

Labels: Books, interweb

20:50 cdogzilla

Tuesday, June 16, 2009

Science fiction's vital contribution to the life of English | Books | guardian.co.uk: "If you measure the health of literature by its impact on language, than [sic] there's no genre in better condition than SF"

Labels: Books, sci-fi

14:15 cdogzilla

Saturday, May 30, 2009

For Baseball Card Loving Bookworms:

Seen at the library this morning. Cool idea. Artist Trading Cards (ATCs) are mixed media cards that you make and trade. The only rule is that they be trading card sized.

This message was sent using the Picture and Video Messaging service from Verizon Wireless!

To learn how you can snap pictures and capture videos with your wireless phone visit www.verizonwireless.com/picture.

Note: To play video messages sent to email, QuickTime? 6.5 or higher is required.

Labels: Books, pictures

10:13 cdogzilla

Friday, May 01, 2009

New Book Revisits Roosevelt’s Policy on European Jews - NYTimes.com: We may have been closer to a world like Chabon's in The Yiddish Policemen's Union than any of us realized.

Labels: Books, history

09:59 cdogzilla

Thursday, April 30, 2009

“War of the Worlds Plus Blood, Guts and Zombies” : Slice of SciFi: Not interested in this but thought if I could be the final judge of what the next and last public domain book to be injected with zombies, what would it be? I'd do Sherlock Holmes and the Red-Headed League of Zombies. What would you do? (Feel free to reframe your pick.)

Labels: Books, zombies

12:30 cdogzilla

Sunday, April 26, 2009

A novel idea: The machine that can print off any book for you in minutes | Mail Online

Labels: Books

17:42 cdogzilla

Friday, April 24, 2009

The Monty Hall Problem: Switch.

P.S. For long-time readers, the last time I posted about this was after reading the curious case of the dog in the night-time and I linked to a different simulator with more background about the puzzle.

Labels: Books, games

21:57 cdogzilla

Thursday, April 23, 2009

Regift, Please!:

"A decade ago, I and the other two co-authors of the 'Guide to the Perfect Latin American Idiot' devoted a chapter to refuting the historical and ideological fallacies contained in Galeano's tract, which we called the 'idiot's bible.' Everything that has happened in the Western Hemisphere since the book appeared in 1971 has belied Galeano's arguments and predictions. But I guess Chavez has given it the kiss of life and, since people are asking, here I go again."

I opened Galeano's Century of the Wind to a random page and read:

1980: Santa Marta
Marijuana
Out of each dollar of dreams that a U.S. marijuana smoker buys, barely one cent reaches the hands of the Colombian campesinos who grow it. The other ninety-nine cents go to the traffickers ...

... [T]he drug mafiosi live in ostentatious mansions. In front they like to display on granite pedestals the small planes the used in their first operation. They rock their children in gold cradles, give golden fingernails to their lovers ...

The mafiosi habitually fumigate their forces. Four years ago they machinegunned Lucho Barranquilla, the most popular of the traffickers, on a streetcorner in the city of Santa Marta. The murderers sent to the funeral a floral wreath in the form a heart and took up a collection to erect a statue of the departed on the main plaza.

It was pretty easy to find something relevant and topical in Galeano's 20+ year old writings. I'm not familiar at all with Open Veins, and maybe it is bad, but I'm inclined to give Galeano the benefit of the doubt here.

Labels: Books, crime, history, Obama

16:56 cdogzilla

Saturday, April 18, 2009

Chávez Proposes an Ambassador to the U.S. - NYTimes.com: Galeano (author of the book Chavez is handing Obama in the articles lead photo) was required reading in my Latin American studies class back at UConn. Century of the Wind was pretty amazing.

Labels: Books, Obama

23:54 cdogzilla

Friday, April 17, 2009

ThinkGeek :: Zombie Haiku:
"Brains, BRAINS, BRains, brains, BRAINS.
BRaiNS, brains, Brains, BRAINS, BRains, brains, BRAINS.
BRAINS, BRains, brains, BRAINS, brains."

Labels: Books

19:03 cdogzilla

Friday, April 10, 2009

Zombies mash-up author receives rumored $575,000 for Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter | SCI FI Wire

Labels: Books, sci-fi

16:04 cdogzilla

Thursday, March 19, 2009

Coming to a Remainder Bin Near You!
"I'm going to put people in my place, so when the history of this administration is written at least there's an authoritarian voice saying exactly what happened." —former president George W. Bush, in Calgary yesterday, discussing the book he plans to write. [AP via Google]

Labels: Books, Bush

15:06 cdogzilla

Monday, January 19, 2009

Barack Obama, Reader-in-Chief. (via to wit) Mrs. BoneDaddy recently finished Marilynne Robinson's Gilead, recently read by the President Elect, and seemed to like it.

Labels: Books, Obama

18:37 bone daddy

Wednesday, December 31, 2008

2008 in Books
I took up the 888 challenge this past year and succeeded, although with much less ambition that I intended. I tracked my books through my LibraryThing, which was a blast even while it managed to show me just how middle and lowbrow so much of my reading has become in the past year. In the 888 challenge, you read eight books in eight different categories and are allowed eight repeats. My initial categories were things like politics, history, over 25 years old and books I've been avoiding (generally meaty classics). By the end of the year, poker had its own category, I had split crime and pulp into two separate categories while combining history and politics into one and filling it out with a history of the World Series of Poker, and those books I'd been avoiding? Still generally avoiding them.

That said, my reading has always had more than its share of comics, sci-fi and crime. I shouldn't be shocked by how it looks in cover view.

Two of my favorite books of the year were admirably lowbrow. I can't say enough good things about Lucky at Cards and Grifter's Game, both reprinted by Hard Case Crime. Both are long on obsession and cons and short on meandering. Someone once described a good novel as being like a Ramones song. Bang! Bang! Bang! and you're done. Grifter's Game was initially published as Mona, but you should get the reprint because the cover of the original, while much more lurid, gives away the shocking and poetic ending. And Lucky at Cards features my favorite tag line of the year - "He could handle cards like a master. But could he handle her?" If that doesn't crack you up, go read James Patterson.

My political reading of late has been largely depressing. I'm sending Worst President Ever off with a bunch of anti-Bush books. Trainwreck:The End of the Conservative Revolution (and Not a Moment Too Soon)by Bill Press (and researched by Kevin at Ghost in the Machine) bookended the year nicely with Paul Krugman's Conscience of a Liberal. Jacob Weisberg's The Bush Tragedy spends no time establishing that W was a horrible president - you already knew that - but tries to explain the possible psychological/Shakespearean family dynamics that lead to W's awful mental make-up. It's a slightly rude poke in the brain of the president. (Excuse the word brain there.) It does contain a lot of personal and Bush family information that may be new to you.

For complete and utter depression, however, I recommend The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How America's War on Terror Turned into a War on America's Ideals by Jane Meyer. It exhaustively details our inexcusable rendition and torture program. Dick Cheney is the star of the book, to his eternal shame. I'm glad I read it, but it truly made me sad.

Kid's books did not. I proudly used children's literature as one of my 888 categories. Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing was even better than I remembered. Peter is a true character, in every sense, and by the end of the book I disliked Fudge just like one might dislike a younger sibling - and this comes from someone who is but does not have a younger sibling. I'm too old to have read Holes as a kid, but I can easily see why it is heading for classic status. It will be read by generations of subversive kids. Tightly plotted and funny.

Nothing blew me away in 2008, the way Watership Down did in 2007. Although with two strong Lawrence Block novels, a new name may have achieved "Grab at Any Library Sale" status. I'll start 2009's 888 challenge conceding that poker, crime and children's literature may as well be categories and we'll see where it goes.

Labels: 2008, Books, Bush, crime, Lists, poker

14:49 bone daddy

Sunday, November 16, 2008

Hardback or trade paperback or mass market paperback?
Any. Do people really only buy or read hardcover? I mean, if it's a book that I've already read and I want for my shelves forever, I get a hardcover. Otherwise, it's whatever is available or cheap.

Bookmark or dog-ear?
Dog-earing is terrible. It also leaves evidence of where you stopped reading for the next person. I prefer to pass through a book without leaving a trace. My daughter went through a phase of using a stuffed animal as a bookmark. Every time she did this Mrs. BoneDaddy or I would pull the stuffed animal out and lose her page until she stopped doing it and could tell us what "broken spine" meant. Now she just remembers her page number.

Alphabetize by author or alphabetize by title or random?
I guess people who only buy hardcover can keep books alphabetized by author, but it seems impossible when shelf space dictates where paperbacks and hardcovers go. I try to keep to keep them roughly grouped - my history area, my comic shelf, my poker spot and the crime/pulp corner. I have a "masterpieces" shelf in the kitchen. After that, it's organized aesthetically.

Keep, throw away or sell?
I sell on eBay, and donate a bunch to the library. I've thrown out very few books that weren't wrecked or moldy or in some way evil. I think I recycled The DaVinci Code because the world already has too many of those. I think I tossed Rand's The Fountainhead because I got sick of looking at it.

Last book you bought?
Not counting books I buy for the kids, since I do that all the time. I grabbed When the Women Come Out to Dance by Elmore Leonard at a library book sale. With 30 Leonard books, I'm about ten inches short of a complete Leonard shelf in my living room. Mrs. BoneDaddy gave me a gift certificate to Labyrinth Books for Christmas and I spent it (so far) on The Manchurian Candidate, A Disorder Peculiar to the Country (already read, but I wanted my own copy) and Vegetariana a sort of hippy-ish vegetarian cook book.

Last book someone bought for you?
Mrs. BoneDaddy got me The Dark Side (NPR story), the unbelieveably gut-wrenching chronicle of our rendition and torture program, A Few Seconds of Panic about an old guy who tries to make it in the NFL and a while back she came home from a conference with The Delivery Man by Joe McGinniss Jr., about gambling, Vegas and prostitution. Is Mrs. BoneDaddy the best? Yes, she is.

What are some of the books on your to-buy list?
I'm in more of a pruning mode than a buying mode right now.

Harry Potter, Lemony Snicket, or the velvety embrace of Death?
There's really no underestimating how much Potter we've had in the BoneDaddy house, thanks mostly to my oldest. This was the first Halloween in three years she hasn't dressed as Harry Potter. Instead she dressed as a book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. When it came time to explain something like Hitler, the SuperBowl or economics to her, we used Harry Potter (and Voldemort, the Quidditch World Cup and the Weasleys) as our reference point.

The books you need to go with other books on your shelves?
I could use about ten inches of Elmore Leonard. Feel free to take that out of context. My gift to you.

Do you read anywhere and anytime you can or do you have a set reading time and/or place?
Whenever.

Do you have seasonal reading habits?
I try an anti-beach read once a summer. I try to pick out a dense or difficult book to work through instead of a Grisham.

Do you read one book at a time or do you have two or more books going at once?
One at a time. Except once in a while I get sucked into a book that I know will only take a day or two.

What are your pet peeves about the way people treat books?
I generally don't care until I wind up with the books and find the marks, folds and crumbs. As a side note, when c-dog and I were room mates, I used to wait until he was out and lick the spines of all his books. What can I say, we didn't have cable.

Name one book you surprised yourself by liking.
World War Z, by Max Brooks.

How often do you read a book and not review it on your blog? What are your reasons for not blogging about a book?
I put up an end of the year list and that's pretty much it. Books aren't like movies with everyone saturated with the same few selections. I need a compelling reason to review a book up on TC. It's everything I can do to keep my LibraryThing updated.

Labels: Books

11:27 bone daddy

Saturday, November 15, 2008

Book/Reading Meme
via It Doesn't Have To Be Right...

Hardback or trade paperback or mass market paperback?
For Kim Stanley Robinson, it's Hardback & first available paperback. For all others, it's whatever the library has or I can get on bookmooch.

Bookmark or dog-ear?
Bookmark! Dog-earing is vandalism.

Alphabetize by author or alphabetize by title or random?
Well, I used to alpha by author, then chronological within author. Now, I'm lucky to keep authors together.

Keep, throw away or sell?
Depends, mostly keep. Doing lots of bookmooching though.

Keep dust jacket or toss it?
Keep. But I took the dj off "Quicksilver" while reading it, lost it for a while, found it, then lost it again during the move, and found it in the car after the move - trashed. I'm starting to wish I didn't care about djs. I like the plain, no dj, look. And they're a pain when you're reading.

Last book you bought?
Wow. I can't remember. It may be a couple years since I bought a book? I'm a library guy. Oh wait, "Sixty Days and Counting" was a 2007 book, that was the last one I bought.

Last book someone bought for you?
Would've been last Christmas ... so Quicksilver from my mother-in-law.

What are some of the books on your to-buy list?


Collection (short stories, same author) or anthology (short stories, different authors)?
Collection, I suppose.

Harry Potter, Lemony Snicket, or the velvety embrace of Death?
Potter.

Morning reading, afternoon reading, or nighttime reading?
Nighttime.

The books you need to go with other books on your shelves?
I'm still missing a few Lucius Shepards.

Do you read anywhere and anytime you can or do you have a set reading time and/or place?
Whenever and wherever I can. Which is not often. I've got an office/library in the new house though, so that's nice.

Do you have seasonal reading habits?
No.

Do you read one book at a time or do you have two or more books going at once?
I'd prefer one at a time but I'm all over the place lately. Audiobooks in the car. Picking up graphic novels before I've finished other books I've started. Keeping one book in the living room and another in the office. A mess.

What are your pet peeves about the way people treat books?
Seriously, don't me started. Books are not coasters. Bookmarks are a must. Don't lick your finger before turning the page of my book, you sick f*ck, that's just gross.

Name one book you surprised yourself by liking.
"Atonement."

How often do you read a book and not review it on your blog? What are your reasons for not blogging about a book?
I don't think I ever put book reviews on TC. I review books on LibraryThing when I have the energy. So, not that often.

Labels: Books

22:46 cdogzilla

Saturday, October 04, 2008

What makes me return from blogging hiatus? I wish I could tell you it was something insightful or highbrow but it's justthe possibility of Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars coming to TV. As a movie it seemed like it would be desperately cramped so I like the idea of a TV series and since I'm (yeah, just now) getting into Mad Men I don't have a problem with AMC either.

Labels: Books, sci-fi, TV

16:45 bone daddy

Sunday, September 21, 2008

Settling In Here In North Cackalacka
Home projects will probably keep posting on light on my part; however, I'm still clicking 'share' now and again when I get a chance to scan my Reader. If you were to go over there, you'd find items on the following topics in the last few weeks:

• McCain's cluelessness
• Palin's inability to tell the truth
• Sylvester McCoy
• Pedro & Manny
• A Monkey Taking a Shower (video)
  
• The Flaming Lips
• Calexico
• Cussing in a Comic Book

This weekend's project was to stain the fence. Home Depot didn't have a sprayer to rent so I bought one of those 2 gallon lawn sprayers and used that. 16 (!!!) gallons of stain later, it turned out pretty nice. If I do say so myself. I'm pretty sunburnt and worn out. The next project I take on will be an inside job: either painting the kids' room or the living room. Tile backsplash, some landscaping, sealing the garage floor, not to mention all the unpacking still to be done ... I can see where this owning a proper home thing is going to keep me busy

My other ongoing project is to get my books out of attic boxes and into my LibraryThing. Once out of the box, they're either going onto a bookshelf or on BookMooch. Trying to pare down to essentials and books I'm saving for Blake and Amelia when they get a little older. So far, it's been tough putting anything up for Mooching, but I'm making the hard choices to get down to a manageable number.

Labels: Books, monkeys

21:03 cdogzilla

Thursday, June 19, 2008

Nutmeg News
The All-Bad Edition
So everyone has probably seen the video of the hit and run in Hartford of Angel Torres. If you type "Hartford" into YouTube search, about four of the suggestions lead you to it. Nothing else you'd want to see in Hartford, I guess. Or you probably saw it on your local news. (So no, I don't feel like linking to it.) What's shocking is after two cars race into the wrong lane and one of them hits the 78 year old nobody does much of anything for forty seconds or so. None of the bystanders reach him and not one of the ten passing cars stop. Of course it's the existence of video that turned Hartford into the latest example of man's inhumanity to man.

Colin McEnroe, as usual, has the thing worth reading about this. Sometimes, we want to believe the worst about ourselves. Or hey, not ourselves, we're good people. I'm talking the worst about people who live in cities. There's a reason the legend of Kitty Genovese (referenced by Colin) has lasted for so long. Ånd if you think none of this has anything to do with race, you're welcome to visit the Hartford Courant's reader forums, which have gotten pretty ugly, even by Internet standards. So ugly that Mayor Perez has complained to the Courant. Meanwhile, the police chief has complained about our "toxic relationship with ourselves." Okay guys, maybe you could do something better with your time, like catch a hit and run driver or something.

I won't excuse the people in the video who do nothing except to point out that four people called 911 within a minute, a fact being dropped from almost all reports.

Forgive me for thinking this is mostly an excuse to call blacks and Hispanics "sub-human" and "savages." I don't remember this rhetoric being quite this heated for the college students responsible for the fatal hit and run of a 19 year old. Heck, the parents chipped in after the fact to help cover it up so you have some man's inhumanity to man there too and for longer than 40 seconds.

Meanwhile, the Mark Twain House and Museum is in financial trouble, despite some recent state grant help. The Twain house is much more than just a house he happened to live in. Twain designed it and the house remains imbued with his personality and life story. It's a literary and architectural landmark. I've taken the tour three times now and each one was different (except for the "tainted money" line, which was included on all three). Most of the trouble comes from a visitor's center built a few years ago. It is impressive, but seems in size and design better suited to a convention center and it's probably a monster to heat, even in reasonable times.

There are also layoffs and news page reductions coming at the Hartford Courant, which does not currently exactly overflow with news coverage.

Also, what the Courant calls "possibly the state's single most recognizable product" (Hey, not an insurance form!), the United Technology spacesuit, will now be made in Texas by a deep sea company with no space experience. Thanks for forty years of problem-free performance, too bad you HQ in a blue state. At least the company that won the bid isn't named Halliburton Space & Sea.

Also making us sad around here is the news that UConn recruit and national player of the year Elena Delle Donne has left the summer program after two days to return home. I take the statements at face value that this has nothing to do with UConn or her teammates. I'd guess that if she plays basketball it will probably be for UConn. While it would be a shame for someone so talented to give up the sport, you just have to wish her the best and hope things work out for her.

Meanwhile, Dodd looked like he wouldn't be a VP candidate, now maybe he will be. I like Dodd and he certainly didn't get a chance to shaw what a good campaigner he can be during his bid, still I'm not sure what he adds politically to the Obama ticket. Connecticut is certainly in Obama's column and Dodd is nothing if not a Beltway insider. Still, I think he'd be a far better campaigner than the miserable performance turned in by our other senator in 2000. I was rooting for Webb, but that's not to be.

I will be posting even less than usual around here because I'm going on vacation for the week. Any wonder why?

Labels: Books, crime, local flavor, Obama, sports, uconn

23:11 bone daddy

Sunday, June 08, 2008

Following c-dog's advice, I've been keeping track of my books this year on LibraryThing. I like seeing the covers collected together on my page. It also shatters any idea I may have had about having a highbrow reading list this year. This year I've been trying to concentrate on poker, pulp, crime, books written over 25 years ago and books I've been avoiding, which makes Lawrence Block's Lucky at Cards the near-perfect book for early 2008. ("He could handle cards like a master, but could he handle her?")

I recommend LibraryThing if you're getting to the age where maybe you can't remember the name, author or plot of a book you read two months ago but know that maybe it was good. For the second half of 2008, I'm thinking about reading some history, memoirs, and books about movies and would love to hear any suggestions.

Labels: Books, Lists

22:41 bone daddy

Thursday, May 01, 2008

Stuck in the Middle
Fittingly for a band that pissed away so much of its potential, the Replacements still haven't really gotten the posthumous treatment they deserve. Rhino will be reissuing all the 'Mats albums, the Twin/Tone era is already out and getting good reviews. Rhino generally does a good job with this sort of thing and it'll certainly be better than All for Nothing/Nothing for All the greatest hits/B-side collection that was limited to only the major label years.

Still, a slew of reissues, featuring some bonus tracks looks more like a money gouge for those of us who already have the original and some boots. I can't buy a CD for one song. I just don't work that way. Sooner or later they'll get a boxed set. Every moron with more than six albums gets a boxed set eventually, are you telling me the 'Mats won't?

I recently finished The Replacements: All Over But the Shouting, An Oral History by Minneapolis rocker and writer Jim Walsh. Good enough, I'd even say it's must ... for the fans. A really great history of the Replacements would probably be interesting even to people who didn't like indie music. The youth - Tommy Stinson really was 14 when they started - the booze, the expectations, pissing away those expectations, playing the greatest rock songs ever written, playing so poorly you get things thrown at you. All Over But the Shouting captures some of it, but it's not the history they deserve.

Apparently the story about the 'Mats sneaking back into Twin/Tone to toss their master tapes into the river is true. Manager Peter Jeperson had made other copies, making the reissues possible. Smart guy.

Labels: Books, music

12:20 bone daddy

Tuesday, April 22, 2008

How Did I Not Know About Moe Berg?
Tooling around Barnes & Noble before seeing "The Forbidden Kingdom" this past weekend, I read the first few pages of The Catcher was a Spy: The Mysterious Life of Moe Berg. Berg was a back-up catcher for the Red Sox in the late 30s, then a coach for a couple years, and (as you may have guessed) eventually a spy working for the OSS during WW2. One of his assignments was to attend a lecture by Werner Heisenberg, determine if the Germans were close to developing an A-Bomb, and shoot him if they were. Fascinating stuff. [Moe Berg Wikipedia page]

Labels: Books, history, sports

21:51 cdogzilla

Friday, March 21, 2008

Lucius in Stride
Lucius Shepard's Hugo Nominated short story, "Stars Seen Through Stone." The intrusion of other realities into troubled relationships is Shepard's meat and potatoes. I like this as a relatively upbeat alternate version of his recent short novel, "Softspoken."

Labels: Books, sci-fi

10:57 cdogzilla

Tuesday, March 18, 2008

Arthur C. Clarke dies.
And so the last of the triumvirate of early sci-fi giants, along with Heinlein and Asimov, is gone. Phil Dick once said that every time someone used a robot that thought it was human he should get paid. For Clarke, it's every time a giant spaceship hovers over a city and people gather together to look up in awe and fear. Childhood's End is a legitimate classic. The stories stay with me more. "The Star" and "Nine Billion Names of God" are perfect, mind-blowing constructions. R.I.P.

Clarke is eulogized at Salon.

Labels: Books, obit, sci-fi

23:31 bone daddy

Thursday, March 06, 2008

Bookstore Fun
If you ever want to the see the extent of the right wing publishing noise machine, well, why the hell would you? It's much more fun to kill your brain cells with alcohol. But if you must check out the extent of the "Hate the Left" type books, go to one of those remainder and overstock stores. I was in one today and was struck by the sheer number of unwanted screeds. Unsurprisingly, many lonely Ann Coulter books haunted the shelves along with Trent Lott's memoirs. What a cute couple.

The Vast Left Wing Conspiracy: How the Left is Blah, blah, blah I passed by. I almost picked up Intellectual Morons: Why the Left believes Blahbity Blah just to see if it had a real publisher or came from one of those phony conservative clearinghouses. Many of these books are published just to be bought in bulk to make the author a name and then they have to go somewhere. I think they should insulate houses with them. I mean, no one appears to want these books.

Liberals Hate Us was the reoccurring theme and gibberish predominated. They couldn't even name a powerful figure. It was "liberals" or "the left." Way to have some facts. I know left wing books also get remaindered, but I didn't come across any on this trip. The closest I could come was Mo Rocca's All the Presidents Pets, which didn't seem as political or angry.

Labels: Books, Conservative Goons

20:14 bone daddy

Tuesday, January 29, 2008

Knows When to Hold 'Em James McManus on Barack Obama's poker history. Obama took up the game in the Illinois legislature apparently as a way to make connections. This is the third time or so I've heard he's a decent player, which makes me more inclined to vote for him. (I plan to drop this info at my next home game, which has members that lean too far rightward. That Obama's poker playing may switch votes says a lot about the fanaticism my group has for poker or the utter lack of enthusiasm many republicans have for their field.) McManus wrote Positively Fifth Street, about covering and playing in the 2000 World Series of Poker and the Binion murder trial. It's a decent book and he's supposedly at work on a book about the history of poker, which might be even better since the parts of Fifth Street that I didn't like were mostly autobiographical. (Link via Ghost in the Machine, which has become a nice clearinghouse for all things Obama.)

Labels: 2008, Books, Obama, poker

20:18 bone daddy

Friday, January 04, 2008

Top Six Novels of 2007

6) The Saturdays, Elizabeth Enright - This is a reissued, nearly lost gem of a juvenile novel, first published in 1941. The four Melendy kids decide to pool their allowances so once a week one of them can have a forty cent adventure instead of each of them trying to have a ten cent adventure. As history, the book is fascinating. A six year old walking alone around New York City to get to the circus! There's something beautiful about Enright's vision of childhold here that probably makes The Saturdays more appealling to grownups than actual kids. (My seven year old read this but only once and didn't seem to like it as much as me and Mrs. BoneDaddy.) She romanticizes siblings and long afternoons with little to do, out of the way playrooms and "what I want to be" dreams. Adults probably like that stuff more than kids.

5) Gone, Baby, Gone, Dennis Lehane (1998) - I've had this book forever. Fear of spoilers surrounding the movie convinced me to finally pick it up. Lehane doesn't do anything great, but he does a lot of things well. His dialogue is good, but I didn't put this away with my Elmore Leonard or anything. The sense of place is strong, if one note - this is not a Boston novel, it's a south Boston novel. And the plot ... well, if you've seen the movie you know the plot. The resolution is sad, mostly earned and admirably unflinching. I did tear through this in a day, so it also works as a good, but not really great thriller.

4) The Abstinence Teacher, Tom Perrotta (2007) - For me it was a better year in non-fiction (with two giant exceptions coming), since I have to start talking about Perrotta's latest by saying it's not as good as either Election or Little Children. Ruth Ramsey accidentally tells the truth while teaching high school sex ed (oral sex - "some people enjoy it") and the Tabernacle of the Gospel Truth begins a crusade against the school, sex ed and Ruth. They insert in the classroom a Tracy Flick-ish co-teacher, who is the only part of The Abstinence Teacher to be truly satirical. Perrotta writes with a lot of sympathy for Tim - former addict, Tabernacle member, soccer coach for Ruth's daughter and other half of the novel's focus. I suspect this novel signals Perrotta stepping away from satire towards a contemporary Updike area. He is a master of suburban unhappiness - which is rarer than it sounds - but also great at comedy. A slightly unsatisfying finish keeps this from finishing higher on my list.

3) The Intuitionist, Colson Whitehead (2000) - Imagine if the elevator were more important than the car and the computer. If Otis were better known than Ford and Edison. Then imagine the power a corrupt union of elevator inspectors could have over a city, if that city existed in some kind of Brazil-ian (the movie, not the country) non-time, non-place. That's odd enough. But what if a new way of inspecting elevators split the union into the traditionalists and the intuitionists, who can feel what an elevator will do? If one side wanted to discredit the other side, they could frame Lila Mae, the first black female elevator inspector and an Intuitionist to boot, right? (Racism, by the way, is rampant. And it's a sign of the maturity of Whitehead's vision that Lila is the second black elevator inspector and the first one hates her because he feels he paid all the dues for her and she's stirring up the trouble that had settled down.) Odd, dense and certainly not for everyone, but I liked it.

2) Watership Down, Richard Adams (1972) - Now we get to the reccomendations without reservations. There's a long list of movies I won't see because I loved the book. The list of books I wouldn't read because I loved the movie too much was one book long. Watership Down, the movie, probably isn't nearly as good as I remember it. When I was nine, this movie had more of an impact on me than Star Wars, not that I'd have ever admitted it.

So I refused to read the book for a few decades. I'm funny that way. To my surprise - I have read other Richard Adams books - Watership Down is a masterpiece. The heft of the book always made me think it was crammed full of naturalistic garbage and meandering nature writing in British and/or rabbit slang, but the book is terrifically paced. Ultimately it's as much an adventure novel as an allegory with the nature writing complementing the story.

Watership Down is filled with chill scenes, and I don't think it's entirely because certain quotes ("There's a dog loose in the woods...""Can you run, rabbit?") are indelibly marked on my brain. Bigwig in the tunnel was utterly gripping and people, we're talking about rabbits here.

1)Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, J.K. Rowling (2007) - My No Duh choice. The publishing event of the year was also the book of the year. Some of the nitpickers make some good points about the book. I have complaints here and there about other Potter books, but I'm also upping the degree of difficulty here. Rowling had to finish an epic story, tie up a bunch of loose ends, give many characters their due and tell a self-containted story for children and adults, all under a spotlight brighter than has ever been put on an author and Deathly Hallows got it done.

For me, the hype built up the experience. Because I partially experienced it all through the eyes of a seven year old I was reminded that story-telling is often a social activity. Round the campfire, in front of the TV, whatever. Stories and masses aren't enemies. The articles, the book discussions and yes, even the balloons in the Stop-n-Shop added to the fun but only because the book delivered. (Also helped that I managed to finish the book without encountering spoilers - even from my own house.) Harry walking through the woods surrounded by ghosts (you know what I'm talking about if you've read the book) is the quintessential moment of the series and it happens at the end. You don't get that often. And you get a fantasy like this probably once in a generation.

My honorable mention for 2007 goes to Richard Matheson's I Am Legend (1954), not on the list because I'd read it before. It really holds up. I read it in preperation for the movie, then never saw the movie. Based on the reviews, I think I got a better experience. Dan Harrington's Harrington on Hold 'Embooks also almost made it onto my non-fiction list, but I figured that's kinda niche.

Labels: 2007, Books, Lists, movies, poker

10:55 bone daddy

Friday, December 28, 2007

Top Four Non-Fiction Books of 2007

Why four? Because sometime soon I'll be back with my top six novels of the year and this saves me from shuffling them together into a top ten.

4) About Alice, Calvin Trillin (2006) - This expands a lengthy essay Trillin wrote for the New Yorker about his late wife Alice. He recounts a letter he received after the original essay's publication from a young woman worried that her fiance doesn't love her "the way Calvin loves Alice," which sums up the feel of the book. About Alice is an ode to love itself. A bone-deep sadness pervades this humorist's book. Although she led a long, full life, this is not a "well, at least she led a long, full life" eulogy. What happens after you lose your soulmate? About Alice will give you empathy for those old couples you see shuffling along. And it will make you, like that young letter-writer, want to eventually become one of those old couples shuffling along.

3) Friday Night Lights, H.G. Bissinger (1990) - This book is ridiculously good. In any other year, it would top my non-fiction list. The TV show, even in its superb first season, is no substitute. And forget about the movie. Written before "A Year in the Life of X, Y or Z" books became a cliche, Friday Night Lights is more about the locale than the kids and more about the kids than about football. The chapter about the use of "nigger" in Odessa should be essential reading in American high schools. With the corrupt and arrogant boom and bust oil business of west Texas as a backdrop, Friday Night Lights also marginally qualifies as the first in my string of anti-Bush books.

2) Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone, Rajiv Chandrasekaran (2007) - It's amazing this book could be so readable when it's basically the same story over and over. Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld again and again picked loyalty over experience, ideology over practicallity, and P.R. over reality when it came to choosing leaders to rebuild Iraq's health-care, business, education, industry and government. And then they stumbled supporting these Bushies who were already doomed to fail. Guess what? It didn't work. Again and again. The chapter about a handful of guys trying to privatize Iraqi factories is this close to being a living Tom Tomorrow cartoon.

"Yeah, we've got this factory for you to buy and privatize. We think it makes olive oil. Hard to tell, because of the bombing. I bet it'd be real productive too, once the electricity gets turned on. Now, you can't visit it because of the security situation and there's a good chance that whatever government eventually runs this hell-hole will just nationalize it again. You also have four times the number of workers you need but if you fire anybody, they'll blow the place up, but other than that, you're good to go! Two hundred million sound about right?"

1) The Greatest Story Ever Told: The Decline and Fall of Truth in Bush's America, Frank Rich (2007) - There are a lot of anti-Bush books out there and I've read my share. If you're looking for screeds, rants, insults, etc. they're out there and many of them are certainly justified given the tragedy that is the Bush administration. Rich's book tops my list first of all because of the scope. There are good books about the military mistakes (Fiasco), the intelligence manipulation (Hubris) or the rebuilding incompetence (see above), but The Greatest Story Ever Told covers a lot of the flim and the flam behind selling the Iraq war in succinct fashion. It's also well-written. It's easy to fall into hyperbolic rants and cheap insults when discussing Bush (again, many justified). Rich lets the facts do the damning. Even if you have scandal fatigue and wish to ride out the last 385 days with low blood pressure, you should check out this book.

Labels: 2007, Books, Bush, Conservative Goons, Lists, sports

08:56 bone daddy