Mary’s Bookblog

by Lucia Nevai

I thoroughly enjoyed this book, although at first I wasn’t sure why. It is a gritty story of a girl raised in abject poverty in rural Iowa, along with her half-siblings. The parents are bizarre but oddly believable—a devout woman, a swindler-and-charlatan-preacher father, and a prostitute.

Crane’s life is mostly heartbreaking but throughout there is a sense of hope because one knows from the outset that she rises out of her disadvantaged situation. Probably this is why I liked it. In the end, it seems sort of predictable, but then again, I have no experience with rural poverty, so what would I know about it? It’s fascinating to me how an author can make characters and situations so tangible that fiction reads like non-fiction.

read: 10-2008
****/5

by Will Clarke

I loved this book— it’s an adventure in the mind of a crazy person. In a good way. Travis Anderson, an alcoholic on the edge of financial ruin, has a psychic gift. His family doesn’t know about it, but the government does and Travis is recruited, partially against his own will, to work as a “remote influencer.”

It’s all about plot. It’s surprising, fun, dangerous, nutty. The sci-fi mind-control aspect is a great device. I would put this in the same category as James Hynes (http://www.marypenn.com/bookblog/?p=4). I’ll look for more from this author.

read: 10-2008
**** 1/2 /5

by Alessandro Baricco

I thought this was a lovely book in the beginning. I think it would be categorized as “magical realism” with quirky individual characters whose lives intersect at the Almayer Inn, by the sea. There is the Baron’s daughter, plagued by a mysterious illness that might be cured by the sea; Bartleboom, who writes daily letters to a woman he has yet to meet; Plasson, who wishes to paint a portrait of the sea; and others, including the mysterious man named Adams and the children who are the propriators of the Inn.

“And so Elisewin went down to the sea in the gentlest way possible… borne by the current, along the bends, pauses, and hesitations that the river had learned in centuries of journeying; a great sage, the river was the only one who knew the gentlest, mildest, most beautiful way one could get to the sea without harming oneself. They went down the river… slipping gradually into a world of odors and colored things that, day after day, revealed, with extreme slowness, the presence, at first distant then ever nearer, of the enormous womb that awaited them.”

It’s probably worth reading this book just for the language; almost. Because for me, the whole thing was ruined by one character’s storyline—that of a sailor or a soldier, or maybe he was just a passenger on a ship that ran aground. Those on a raft drifted out to sea; “Savigny” tells his story of the ravages of starvation and brutal cannibalism on the raft. Why this little horror story within what was otherwise a lovely book? At any rate, the abruptness and repetitiveness of the horror story doesn’t fit with the rest; why not abbreviate it and still make the same point, I wonder. Still, I suppose it is there for contrast.

Baricco surprises in other ways, too, because what appears at first like intertwined fairy tales is not, as some reach happier endings than others.

read: 09-2008

Edited by Peter R. Mitchell & John Schoeffel

Noam Chomsky is a respected linguist who is also known as a political dissident and writer. His best-known work is probably Manufacturing Consent, in which Chomsky and Edward Herman examined “how the media ought to function and how they do function” within a framework of propaganda.

Years ago, I remember picking up something by Chomsky and finding it very academic and dry. Understanding Power, on the contrary, is infinitely readable. Discussions among groups of activists, from dozens of “Teach-ins” and question-and-answer sessions, were transcribed and organized into a readable format.

From the editor’s preface: “Chomsky’s great contribution is his mastery of a huge wealth of factual information, and his uncanny skill at unmasking, in case after case, the workings and deceptions of powerful institutions in today’s world. His method involves teaching through examples—not in the abstract—as a means of helping people to learn how to think critically for themselves.”

Chomsky never offers specific solutions to specific problems; rather, he reveals underlying power structures and suggests that his audience trust their own judgments and believe in their own ability to see, understand, and dig deeper for the truth. Consistently, Chomsky takes a positive view of where we are in the struggle for human rights and democracy, and his overarching concept is that change comes through the hard work and combined efforts of many (often anonymous) people.

The main reason I decided to get involved with a local activist group was because of Chomsky’s stance that effective social and political change can only happen when people work together. Alone, one is easily overwhelmed by the world’s problems: what could I possibly do about these huge, complicated issues? Chomsky seems to suggest that you won’t know what you could accomplish until you sit down with others and try to work it out.

He doesn’t focus on sustainability issues per se, but one of the main themes that emerges is that our current political and social system is unviable. Just to give an idea of how he phrases the problems, here’s an excerpt from page 316:

“Alright, it’s not a very big secret who owns the country: you look at the “Fortune 500” every year and you figure out pretty well who owns the country.…a network of conglomerates that control production and investment and banking…[who] are tightly inter-linked…. And the principle of American democracy is that they also ought to govern it. … Now, whenever you have a concentration of power like that, you can be certain that the people who have the power are going to try to maximize it—and they’re going to maximize it at the expense of others, both in their own country and abroad. And that’s just an unviable system, I think.

Let’s put international violence aside for a minute and take environmental issues…. Well, it’s been obvious for centuries that capitalism is going to self-destruct: that’s just inherent in the logic of the system—because to the extent that a system is capitalist, that means maximizing short-term profit and not being concerned with long-term effects.…

But just keep in mind what we’re dealing with: the predictable effect of an increase in the world’s temperature through the greenhouse effect will be to raise the sea level, and if the sea level begins to rise a few feet, it’s not clear that human civilization can continue. A lot of the agricultural lands, for example, are alluvial—they’re near the seas. Industrial centers, like New York City, could be inundated. The climate is going to change, so the agricultural-producing areas of the United States could become dust-bowls. And when these changes start to be recognized, they’re going to set in to motion social conflict of a sort that we can’t even imagine….

Alright, right now we do not have the forms of internal democracy or international organization which will allow us even to begin to cope with these sorts of problems. The very concept of social planning, of rational planning for human concerns—that’s regarded as virtually subversive. And that’s the only thing that could possibly save people: rational social planning, carried out by accountable people representing the whole population rather than business elites. Democracy, in other words—that’s a concept we don’t have.”

How Today’s Internet is Killing Our Culture

author: Andrew Keen

First of all, I find it highly amusing to review this book on my blog, since Keen thinks the proliferation of blogs is the scourge of all culture.

The first few chapters are one long, often repetitive, diatribe. He bemoans the “editor-free world” on the Net because the result is propaganda, deception, and advertising disguised as entertainment or news. Plus, people lose jobs, since traditional media outlets for paid reporters, editors, and music labels are losing their consumer base to the new Internet outlets, where amateurs post content for free. Wow! I just summarized 95% of this book in two sentences.

Keen tries to tease a great deal out of his simple premise by going on and on about the concepts of trust, authorship, objectivity , annonimity, and reliability. He ends up seeming alarmist partly because he does such a poor job of exploring or even admitting to any of the positive aspects of the new “Web 2.0 world,” such as egalitarianism, freedom of expression, and expanding grassroots organizing. He waits until the very last chapter to breeze through “solutions” that should have been integrated with chapters to systematically explore both positive and negative aspects of specific technologies.

Although Keen makes a good case for never using Wikipedia again (because of its lack of professional oversight), and supporting well-researched, reliable sources for news and information (such as Encyclopedia Brittanica), he otherwise sounds like a technophobe who wishes it were still 1982. But my biggest problem with this book is the way Keen implicitly supports non-internet main-stream media as the best source for reliable news, as well as traditional non-internet outlets (i.e., big music labels) for consumer goods.

As I am reading The Cult of the Amateur, I have also started Noam Chomsky’s Understanding Power. So far, this is an amazing book. Among other things, Chomsky addresses deeper issues that Keen doesn’t seem to recognize when it comes to media outlets. Keen firmly puts forward a division between the Blogosphere or Web reporting and traditional news outlets: the former is the source of propaganda, advertising disguised as news, and unreliable information, and the latter is not. This is so laughable I cannot believe Keen could put it to paper. Traditional media doesn’t feed us propaganda every day?! Are we not saturated with advertising disguised as news, from the local broadcaster to NPR? Keen’s edited news world promotes the status-quo, where powerful media conglomerates control everything we see. Personally, I’d rather have my “editor-free world” any day.

read: 06-2008
*/5

author: Sarah Dunn

Allison Hopkins’ live-in boyfriend has left her for his ex-girlfriend and then comes back to her after two weeks. In the meantime, she gets fired from a low-brow periodical and has a fling with her boss. Her life is a mess, and Allison isn’t sure what she wants or how to get it.

Although Allison’s journey is hampered by her conservative Christian upbringing, Dunn handles this aspect of the story well– she brings it up only a few times, but enough to show that she knows what she is talking about. Allison’s neurotic personality is coupled with direct, fresh wit that I found quite likable. This is the kind of book you can read in one sitting, a throwaway summer beach book, and a lot of fun.

read: 05-08
****/5

Adrift in the equatorial pacific

author: J. Maarten Troost

It reads like fiction, but is apparently based on J. Maarten Troost’s real experiences. An idealistic 26-year-old, he and his partner Sylvia lived on the remote island of Tarawa, Republic of Kiribati, in the South Pacific.

This is an awesome book. Funny and amazing. There are fascinating native customs, local characters, corrupt government officials, stifling heat, & sharks. I don’t think I can do this book justice by trying to summarize it here– just check it out.

read: 05-2008
*****/5

author: Andre Dubus III

Strangely, even though I sort of hated this book & skimmed parts of it, the main plot points and some of the characters have stayed with me.

The story is a train wreck, as I was warned by my friend Heather who loaned me this book. A woman’s house is taken from her by the state, due to a clerical error. Deep in depression, the woman (Kathy) had ignored all the notices she received about it. I had little sympathy for her plight, because her own incompetence was at the heart of her problems. After the house is sold to another family, Kathy tries to get it back. Her new boyfriend, Lester, is a police officer who leaves his family for Kathy. Lester descends into thughood, harassing the new owners of the house. Things get really out of hand and turn disasterous.

The high skim factor is due to the fact that the writing is not that good and becomes very repetitive at times. The plot reads like a B movie screenplay, with all the attendant melodrama. What a shock, the novel was made into a hollywood movie.

The new home owners are Iranian immigrants. They are the most believable–and the only likable–characters. But their end is rather grim. My advice: if you get sucked in by this one, be prepared to see the wreckage.

read: 05-2008
*** /5

author: Philippa Stockley

I kept this book out from the library forever, but only because my spouse wanted to read it too. As artists ourselves, we were sucked in by the storyline — a painter makes it big then crashes & burns — and the fact that it is set in London.

None of the characters is particularly likable, except perhaps Alice, who develops a huge crush on the egocentric painter Gilver Memmer.

Although the characters are developed unevenly, there are enough surprises and the plot keeps moving. But like Kate Christensen’s The Great Man, I wanted deeper insights or insider witticisms about the contemporary art world. Instead, it was just a generic backdrop — the character may as well have been a famous musician or banker, really. Even the descriptions of the paintings themselves, wherein Stockley attempts to intertwine her themes of desire & violence, were unconvincing to me. The reliance on biblical characters as subject matter for Gilver’s paintings seemed like silly metaphors to me, and ones I’ve read before.

Stockley has a tendency to repeat sentence structures to the point of monotony. She doesn’t let the dialog stand on its own. Conversations were rendered melodramatic, because after each line of dialog Stockley inserted explanations and psychobabble. At first, knowing the inner thoughts surrounding the characters conversations was revealing. But after a while, it became redundant and only served to interrupt the dialog.

As I write this, I realize it sounds like I hated this novel, but in fact I did not hate it! I rather enjoyed it. Stockley packs in self-destruction, a vindictive friend, lovers, ex-lovers, lifestyles of the rich & famous, redemption & romance. I kept reading because the narrative pull was strong enough, and I wanted to see how Gilver would or would not get himself out of the mess he was in.

read: 04-2008
*** /5

author: Rachel Cline

I thought the book jacket was pretty deceiving on this one (okay, I know I shouldn’t pay attention to the jacket!) but come on, “A seductive charmer of a novel” it is not.

The book opens with a memorial service for Annabeth’s ex-boyfriend who committed suicide. This should have been the tipoff for me to set this one aside, but I kept reading. Annabeth is a compelling character, somehow, despite the flaws in the novel. Her career as a film editor in Hollywood comprises the bulk of the story, in addition to the backstory of her relationship with the ex-boyfriend. Maybe people involved with film or living in LA might find this interesting, but I thought the details of her work were rather dull. Annabeth sort of drives home the idea that we are all equally self-involved, I guess. There is a theme about growing up with alcoholism, but it is a weak one. When I finished this book, I thought “well, at least that didn’t take very long to read.”

read: 03-2008
**1/2 /5