Tag: books

I seem to be blogging about books and dogs more than anything else, but since the title of this blog is taken from a dog in my book, I guess it fits. I clearly spend too much time thinking about books though, but I guess I wouldn’t read and write them if I didn’t love them. Of course, when thinking about books I often find myself looking for new ones to read and that’s where LibraryThing once again proves its usefulness: book suggestions.

When I click on the suggestions button, it goes through and compares my libarary to others with similar libraries and lists 61 (why 61 I don’t know…maybe it thinks I don’t have time for more) books that I don’t have, but apparently should. Some I already have, some I’ve read, some I’m interested in. I struck out the ones that I either own, once owned, or have borrowed and read, or some combination of the three. Surprisingly, many of these are books that I have been wanting to read…

1. Ulysses by James Joyce
2. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
3. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Penguin Popular Classics) by James Joyce
4. The Mayor of Casterbridge (Penguin Classics) by Thomas Hardy
5. Tess of the Durbervilles by Thomas Hardy
6. Sister Carrie (Oxford World’s Classics) by Theodore Dreiser
7. Shirley (Wordsworth Collection) by Charlotte Bronte
8. Oliver Twist (Penguin Popular Classics) by Charles Dickens
9. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
10. The Handmaid’s Tale : A Novel by Margaret Atwood
11. A Journal of the Plague Year : Being Observations or Memorials of the Most Remarkable Occurrences, As Well (Penguin Clas by Daniel Defoe
12. Aspects of the Novel by E. M. Forster
13. Great expectations by Charles Dickens
14. The Mill On The Floss by George Eliot
15. Postcards by Annie Proulx
16. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
17. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn : Revised Edition (Penguin Classics) by Mark Twain
18. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
19. Mansfield Park (Penguin Popular Classics) by Jane Austen
20. The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton
21. Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco
22. Frankenstein by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
23. Romola (Penguin Classics) by George Eliot
24. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
25. The Vicar of Wakefield (Penguin English Library) by Oliver Goldsmith
26. Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier
27. The Telling by Ursula K. Le Guin
28. The Left Hand of Darkness (Remembering Tomorrow) by Ursula K. Le Guin
29. Ender’s game by Orson Scott Card
30. The waste land and other poems by T. S. Eliot
31. The Portrait of a Lady (Penguin Popular Classics) by Henry James
32. A Wizard of Earthsea (The Earthsea Cycle, Book 1) by Ursula K. Le Guin
33. Possession : A Romance (Vintage International) by A.S. Byatt
34. Bleak House by Charles Dickens
35. The English patient : a novel by Michael Ondaatje
36. Literary theory : an introduction by Terry Eagleton
37. The jungle by Upton Sinclair
38. The World According to Garp by John Irving
39. Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance : an inquiry into values by Robert M. Pirsig
40. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
41. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
42. A passage to India by E. M. Forster
43. Island of the Blue Dolphins by Scott O’Dell
44. Orlando: A Biography (Penguin Popular Classics) by Virginia Woolf
45. MLA handbook for writers of research papers by Joseph Gibaldi
46. Le Morte D’Arthur, Vol 1 by Thomas, Sir Malory
47. The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley
48. Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
49. The Silmarillion by J. R. R. Tolkien
50. Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
51. Far from the Madding Crowd (Signet Classics (Paperback)) by Thomas Hardy
52. Daniel Deronda (Penguin Classics) by George Eliot
53. Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
54. The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
55. Les Liaisons Dangereuses (Everyman’s Library (Cloth)) by Choderlos De Laclos
56. Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood
57. A room with a view by E. M. Forster
58. Othello (Folger Shakespeare Library) by William Shakespeare
59. Of Human Bondage (Bantam Classic) by W. Somerset Maugham
60. Midnight in the garden of good and evil : a Savannah story by John Berendt
61. A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving

Feel free to offer other reading suggestions in the comments section. I’m pretty open in my tastes.

Recently, I stumbled upon LibraryThing, a very cool site/web-based book cataloging application, which is still in its beta phase but developing new features on what seems to be a daily basis. It’s become a near obsession. Who knew how much fun pulling books off the shelves and entering ISBN numbers could be? I don’t generally go out seeking massive data-entry projects, but this is a pleasure. Perhaps because it gives me the opportunity to pick up my books and look at them and think to myself things like:

“I really need to read this one.”

“Wow, I forgot how cool this book is.”

“Why the hell do I have this book?!?”

Over the years, I’ve gotten rid of probably as many books as I own since I frequently vacillate between wanting to own every book I read (and keep them even when I know I’ll never read them again) and wanting to own fewer possessions. Sometimes I think I’d like to have a giant room filled with books on all subjects, and at other times I think it would be cool to have all my books digitized and only have a small stack of DVD-ROMs.

I suppose it comes down to the question of a book’s worth. Is it the content? Is it the object? Or is it both? I would like to think it’s mainly the content, but then a house without books would seem such a lonely place.

That’s really the coolest thing about Library Thing: As I enter books, I feel like I’m visting old friends.

Note: This is a review I posted one night in 2003 while playing with amazon.

After reading Mark Bowden’s Blackhawk Down, I wanted more of Mark Bowden’s gritty, exciting style. My only qualm with that book was the lack of sociopolitical background. Killing Pablo delivers that in spades. This book goes beyond the excitement of the chase and delves into the cultural forces that allow men like Pablo Escobar to exist in the first place. It is not a pretty picture, and it raises many questions for those of us living comfortable lives in the United States. What is our responsibility for keeping the world ‘safe’ and how much of the world’s ills are of our own creation?

This book causes one to really ponder the moral implications of our government’s actions, and at its heart is the timeless question of when does one act and when does one hold still. By the end of the book, I agreed that Escobar had to be killed, but I was left asking that ancient and uneasy question: Do the ends justify the means?

Powerful, well-written, significant. I couldn’t put this one down. By the end of reading it, my house was a wreck, and I had a stack of work that I was behind on simply because I couldn’t stop reading, even though the book’s cover gives away the ending. I had to know how it came to that.

Note: This is a review I posted one night in 2003 while playing with amazon.

Anthony Aveni’s Empires of Time is a fascinating portrait of the rhythms and roles of time-keeping in a variety of cultures including the Aztec, Inca, Maya, and ancient Chinese. This is a thrilling exploration of a topic we all too often don’t bother to consider.

Note: This is a review I posted one night in 2003 while playing with amazon.

Stephen Harrigan’s A Natural State, a collection of essays originating in Texas Monthly does an exceptional job of taking the reader through the natural wonders of Texas, from the beaches to the deserts, and finally to the Hill Country’s Enchanted Rock.

By the end of the book, I had no other choice than to hop in my own car and hit the Texas highways and rediscover this natural state for myself.

Note: This is a review I posted one night in 2003 while playing with amazon.

A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson is quite possibly the funniest book I have ever read. Bryson’s opening chapters covering his fear of bears had me laughing so hard, that I actually cried. A must read for not just a great laugh, but an impassioned exploration of our country’s natural wonders.

When I read it, I often found myself moved to hit the local trails for my own walks in the woods.

Note: This is a review I posted one night in 2003 while playing with amazon.

Philip K. Dick’s Valis is at once sublime and unsettling. From the schizophrenic changes from third to first person point of view (“I am writing this in the third person to gain much-needed objectivity”, the narrator reminds himself as much as the reader) through the brilliant “Tractates: Cryptica Scriptura” that comprise the appendix, we see a work that goes beyond mere science fiction and attempts to wrestle with the insane story of life itself.

This is a novel that seeks no less than the ultimate answers to life’s biggest questions. Philip Dick in attempting to make sense of his own life gives us a work that is at once thrilling, empassioned, beautiful, funny, and sad.

This is truly one of the greatest (and least appreciated) works of American literature. I can’t say it gave me all the answers, but it raised many questions and new ideas as well as inspiring me in my own writing. Isn’t that what great literature is about? Thank you, PKD, wherever you are.

I’ve been putting away one Harry Potter book per film release for the past few years and enjoying each book more than the last. About a month ago, in anticipation of the release of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, I began reading the mammoth tome that describes Harry’s fourth year at Hogwarts. What immediately struck me was the substantially darker tone and the transformation of Dumbledore into a character less like Santa Claus and more like Gandalf. The book was well-done and thankfully (relatively) free of Quidditch. The book, of course, ends dark and the next book, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (because this time I couldn’t wait another year or more) picks up right where it left off – Harry’s situation progressing from bad to worse.

I sped through the fifth book enjoying more than anything else the way Rowling grows her characters. The series opens dealing with kids, but by the end of Order of the Phoenix, Harry and company are on the fast road to adulthood, firmly believing they are already there, but still making the kind of rash and impulsive decisions that we all make as teenagers. Of course, none of us have the kinds of problems that Harry has nor the means of solving them. Still this provides a layer of depth to Rowling’s writing that I was not at all expecting when I picked up the first book and read it over the course of several hours on a Thanksgiving afternoon. She does a fine job turning Harry into a confused, angry, and possibly dangerous young man who wants nothing more than to be normal but who must shoulder a burden far beyond what anyone would want a kid to have to handle.

It is not just Harry’s maturation process that makes the series so interesting to me, however, but rather his relationships with and discoveries about the older wizards who seem increasingly human the older Harry gets. This is a natural phenomenon that kids experience as they grow older and their parents, teachers and other adults around them lose some of their grandeur, and once again Rowling handles it well. Especially fine is her portrayal of Severus Snape, the spooky potions professor we all love to hate. This guy clearly despises Harry and never misses an opportunity to viciously run him down, and yet just as Harry and his friends, time and again know he’s surely evil, he does something that saves Harry’s neck and yet still finds time to sneer at Harry just as cruelly as before.

Rowling’s ability to undercut expectations is, for me, a large part of why these books are so fun. The early books are enchanting, mysterious, yet rather predictable. They all end with Dumbledore patiently explaining The Moral of the Story to Harry and what he should have learned, but as Harry and his friends grow up, the universe in which they live expands, becoming increasingly complicated, nuanced, and more dangerous to the point that not even Dumbledore can adequately explain everything to Harry other than Dumbledore’s own mistakes and failures. Dumbledore, Sirius Black, Mrs. Weasely, Hagrid, Harry’s dead father, all of the adults to whom he has looked up through his life in the wizarding world emerge tarnished, slightly smaller, yet infinitely more human. And of course none of them are able to provide all of the advice and answers to the big questions that Harry so desperately wants and needs. Rowling’s ability to capture this painful aspect of growing up so poignantly and believably is, more than anything else, why I immediately began reading Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince as soon as I finished book five.