A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters

#584
Title: A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters
Author: Julian Barnes
Publisher:
Year: 1990
320 pages

This is my first Julian Barnes, and as I read I was very excited to have found him. I was all set to give this a five-star rating until I reached the half-chapter alluded to in the title. It's the only section of the audiobook I played at a faster rate so I could get through it more quickly. It's not clear to me whether it was an authorial intrusion or a fictive voice (either of which would have been fine); I kept wanting to yell at Barnes, "Don't wreck what you've made! It stands on its own! Don't bludgeon the reader with heavy-handed explanations that link the 10 stories!" In fairness, I shout this a lot at Chuck Palahniuk as well: "Trust your story! Don't undo it!" though, to be perfectly honest,. I've stopped reading Palahniuk after too many experiences of this type. Suggestion: Ignore the blundering exegetic half-chapter; read only the other 10 stories.

Those other 10 stories are varied and delightful. I enjoyed Barnes's wry and acerbic narration, and really admired the resonance across the stories, which mirror,amplify, invert, distort, and corrupt each others' symbols and tales in a way that wonderfully exemplifies the central themes of redaction and redemption, awe and doubt, and cyclicity and free will. Yes, at times these chapters can get a bit meat-fisted as well, but nothing like the half-chapter which, if I were Queen of the Universe (or at least in heaven), I would excise for the good of the masses, telling only the history of the world in 10 chapters.

Weeding the Flowerbeds

#583
Title: Weeding the FlowerbedsAuthor: Sarah Mkhonza
Publisher: Xlibris
Year: 2009
Country: Swaziland
180 pages

I can't find a single review of this self-published memoir online, which seems strange given that the author is previously published and has been working at Cornell. Weeding the Flowerbeds provides a good look at the daily life of a schoolgirl at a religious boarding school in Swaziland while South Africa still practiced apartheid. These political events are sometimes referenced, but the focus of the book is on the details and recollections of the author. There isn't much contextual information, nor is there a plot or moral--she goes to school, has friends, likes some teachers and not others, and describes in sometimes minute detail the various facets of her mostly-cloistered days. The prose could use an editor's eye, as could the grammar, but one is reading for the account of living in Swaziland, not for literary style.

Heart of Fire: From Child Soldier to Soul Singer

#582
Title: Heart of Fire: From Child Soldier to Soul Singer
Author: Senait Mehari
Publisher: Profile Books
Year: 2006
Country: Eritrea
268 pages

It's hard to know how much of this memoir is true and how much fictional. Often when an autobiographical work is denounced as fraudulent, at least one of the detractors provides an annotated list of errors, distortions, or misrepresentations. I've read everything on the first large number of Google hits about  Heart of Fire without being able to find a clearly articulated account of what the purported fraudulent material is. There are some concerns about whether she was a "child soldier" by some definitions; she is accused of defaming or misrepresenting two people (there has been a hearing about this, but as best I can tell, she has contested it); she is accused of claiming that a school was a paramilitary training camp. These possible sources of concern are buried and confused with long diatribes that make vitriolic and rambling accusations about her mental derangement, drug use, and lying, but the most consistent concern seems to be that she has made Eritrea or ELF (the Eritrean Liberation Front) look bad by asserting that the party used children in warfare. A cursory look around the web finds reasonably good documentation that child soldiers have been used in the Eritrean conflict, which will not come as a surprise to readers aware of child soldiers in other conflicts in the region and elsewhere. Whether Mehari is accurate or not isn't something I can assess, but I can say that her detractors don't present their arguments in a way that is easy to make sense of.

As to the book itself, it is interesting to read an account of child soldiers by a female, since most of the recent memoirs have been by men. Stylistically it's repetitive and awkward, so read this as a memoir (or fictionalized memoir).

Homer and Langley

#581
Title: Homer and Langley
Author: E. L. Doctorow
Publisher: Random House
Year: 2009
224 pages

Read this as an alternative history of the Collyer brothers. Not unlike Star Trek (2009), the main characters wind up where they were before and similar to themselves, though dislocated in time. I'm sure Doctorow had great fun coming up with explanations for the inexplicable--why so many typewriters in the house? Why the windows boarded up? As always, Doctorow's prose is lyrical and evocative.



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The Red Pyramid (Kane Chronicles #1)

#580
Title: The Red Pyramid (Kane Chronicles #1)
Author: Rick Riordan
Publisher: Disney/Hyperion
Year: 2010
516 pages

Between Riordan and Michael Scott, I'm getting awfully confused about which mythological pantheon is fighting whom, and whether on the side of chaos or order. that said, I enjoyed this first volume of a new series. If I were the age of the target audience, I'd be clamoring for mythology books to give me background and insight. The pace is good, the characters are well-drawn (if a little hard to differentiate from the protagonists of his previous series and Scott's Nicholas Flamel books). The first person voice didn't always work for me, especially in the siblings' asides to each other. Still, a strong opener.

The Mind's Eye

#579
Title: The Mind's Eye
Author: Oliver Sacks
Publisher: Knopf
Year: 2010
288 pages

I always enjoy Sacks, who narrated the prefatory remarks and the chapter about his own visual problems in the audiobook of this volume. The focus (hah) here is on problems (and compensatory strategies) related to seeing, sometimes optic, sometimes neurological. Sacks's appreciation for his subjects' humanity is refreshing compared to the objectifying and clinically distanced tone that is found in many case studies, including some that are trying hard to present people compassionately. For this alone, quite aside from my interest in neurology, I would praise and read Sacks.

The Fire Cat

#578
Title: The Fire Cat
Author: Esther Averill
Publisher: HarperCollins
Year:  1913/1983
64 pages

A childhood favorite, Averill's early reader tells the story of Pickles, an aggressive, maculate yellow cat. Given a chance to be a firehouse cat, Pickles realizes that he must become a source of succor.

Oracle Bones: A Journey Through Time in China

#577
Title: Oracle Bones: A Journey Through Time in China
Author: Peter Hessler
Publisher: HarperCollins
Year: 2006
528 pages

In some ways I enjoyed this more than Hessler's first China book, River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze. Oracle Bones alternates between personal, historical, and political narratives that usefully reflect each other. It is often funny and frequently poignant. Read River Town first.

The Guinea Pig Diaries: My Life as an Experiment

#576
Title: The Guinea Pig Diaries: My Life as an Experiment
Author: A.J. Jacobs
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Year: 2009
256 pages

Contrary to the opinion of some of my otherwise right-thinking online book review friends, I thought this was better than Jacobs's previous two books. Perhaps this is because those challenges' massive scope and long duration (reading the encyclopedia and living by biblical precepts) were enormous, which introduced too many opportunities for inconsistency, intellectual shallowness, and general pronouncements that seemed to me to miss the point of the experiment. Here, the scale suits the experiments, which are reasonably contained and do not have such grand philosophical rationalizations. In this, the book seems much more honest. I particularly like the exploration of outsourcing one's life. It was interesting, humorous, and Jacobs's analysis of its implications seemed reasonable and appropriately scaled. The chapter on cognitive errors and distortions was highly-notated but, as my students would attest, clearly the work of someone outside the field of cognitive therapy.

I mildly submit an addendum to the anecdote in which Jacobs's aunt sends him an e-mail about "God's Pharmacy," in which "the shapes of food contain clues from God about nutrition" (p. 89). Jacobs's informs his aunt that this is an example of the Texas Sharpshooter fallacy. Good start. However, this only scratches the surface. The technical name for the underlying philosophy of the e-mail is the Doctrine of Signatures. Also according to his source, Wikipedia, "herbs that resemble various parts of the body can be used to treat ailments of that part of the body." This was also extended to foods (e.g., eat walnuts for your brain; don't eat potatoes because they look like leperous fingers), which I know from recently reading a book about the history of the potato. I realize Jacobs is a magazine writer and that the point here isn't depth or interesting tangents, but it does surprise me a little that he doesn't seem to be familiar with the concept, since it figured heavily (and still does today) in the medical practices of much of the world and therefore surely appears multiple times in the encyclopedia, and the logic it relies on is repeated over and over in Jewish law, which uses a different form of analogy than does English Common Law.

Falling Off the Map: Some Lonely Places of the World

#575
Title: Falling Off the Map: Some Lonely Places of the World
Author: Pico Iyer
Publisher: Vintage
Year: 1993
200 pages

Since Iyer's account is dated, it's best to read this as a series of snapshots in time. Iyer muses on his experiences in a wide variety of countries. I don't agree with his "lonely places" premise, but the essays were otherwise enjoyable, though not illuminating. This might be interesting to read as a stimulus for a book discussion about one's own experience in any of these countries in relation to Iyer's.

An Abundance of Katherines

#573
Title: An Abundance of Katherines
Author: John Green
Publisher: Dutton Books
Year: 2006
227 pages

Attention, geeks, dweebs, and pasty effete intellectuals: This lovely young adult novel is for us. My inner nerd is met and mirrored in this very enjoyable coming of chronological age novel. Speaking to the fears many smart young things experience, it also shows the (stumbling, awkward) progression to, well, being a big old nerd and a more or less serviceable young adult. It's got everything you need: Relationships plotted on the ordinate and abscissa, word play, Quranically-driven discourse, Archduke Ferdinand, and, as promised, an abundance of Katherines.

Extreme Hotels

#574
Title: Extreme Hotels
Author: Birgit Krols
Publisher: Tectum
Year: 2007
192 pages

A trilingual coffee table book. The text and URLs are tiny, not terrifically informative, and sometimes not entirely English. Read for the photos, and wonder at some of these novel yet uncomfortable-looking hotels. Do I really want to stay in an igloo? An art installation? A cement tube?

The 14th Dalai Lama: A Manga Biography

#572
Title: The 14th Dalai Lama: A Manga Biography
Author: Tetsu Saiwai
Publisher: Penguin
Year: 2010
224 pages

An easy-to-read and generally engaging history of the 14th Dalai Lama's early life. Some of the action is a little hard to follow, in part because several people aren't drawn sufficiently distinctly. I'm not sure what makes this a manga rather than a graphic biography or even a cartoon history. It doesn't use manga conventions for graphics or layout. Perhaps all cartoons are now generically manga.

Suzuki Beane

#585
Title: Suzuki Beane
Author: Sandra Scoppettone
Illustrator: Louise Fitzhugh
Publisher: Doubleday
Year: 1961
96 pages

I haven't re-read this for many years and it seemed like time. A copy floated around the house when I was a child and I bought my own copy some decades later. I adore this faux children's book narrated by a beatnik child who lives on Bleeker Street in Greenwich Village with her parents, Hugh (a poet) and Marcia (a sculptor). The text is funny and poignant by turns, with cultural references that I didn't understand as a child but appreciate now. The illustrations by Louise Fitzhugh are charming and dynamic. I've always loved the illustration on page 86 where High and Marcia are asleep on a bare mattress, curled up fetally with their backs to each other. If you remember the Village when it was, like, not square, you'll, like, dig Suzuki Beane.