Say You're One of Them

#1049
Title: Say You're One of Them
Author: Uwem Akpan
Publisher: Little, Brown
Year: 2008/2009
358 pages

This collection didn't work for me in many ways (not even including the very accented readers for some selections on the audiobook). There was entirely too much telling and not enough showing. Several of the narrative child voices seemed contrived and overly expository. Overall, this seemed like a writing workshop thesis. That's a fair place for a writer to start, but it feels like it got big play because it's about how terrible life in Africa is, not because it's written well.

Passage through India: An Expanded and Illustrated Edition

#1048
Title: Passage through India:  An Expanded and Illustrated Edition
Author: Gary Snyder
Publisher: Grey Fox Press
Year: 1983/2009
152 pages

A delightful and sometimes deep travelogue of Snyder's visit to India. Spare language and targeted details make this narrative, which was written more or less as a letter based on his journals, both insightful and poetic even when the prosaic is being described. Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky figure, as do a certain number of drugs and a reasonable amount of gastric upset. There's one photo of a Buddha statue that I could look at for hours--and have.

The Island of Doctor Moreau

#1047
Title: The Island of Doctor Moreau
Author: H. G. Wells
Publisher: Bantam
Year: 1896/1994
160 pages

Fascinating less for the story (which is entertainingly horrifying and must have been quite scandalous in its day) and more for the pseudoscientific tone, including the disclaimers and apologies of the narrator. This might be usefully compared to Atwood's Oryx and Crake as a cautionary tale about how humans paradoxically degenerate when they play god.

Sadly, as with Paolo Baccigalupi's halfmen, I can't help but picture McGruff the Crime Dog at times.

Brief Lives (Sandman #7)

#1046
Title: Brief Lives (Sandman #7)
Author: Neil Gaiman et al.
Publisher: Vertigo
Year: 1993/2011
168 pages

Perhaps the best so far, this is the family drama volume. Delirium is sheer visual pleasure and a contrast to the always somber Morpheus. More back story on Morpheus and Orpheus; much loss and sadness, well-portrayed and emotionally deep.

Heat and Dust

#1045
Title: Heat and Dust
Author: Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
Publisher: Counterpoint
Year: 1975?/1999 (reprint)
192 pages

Somewhat mannered, somewhat overwritten, and perhaps with too much parallelism, yet I still enjoyed this exercise in comparing and contrasting two women's lives in India across generations. The unnamed contemporary woman's experience seems like a somewhat tawdry version of Olivia's, but I suppose it is progress of a sort for exoticism to yield to the prosaic, and for one woman's Nawab to be another woman's anxious civil servant.

Fables and Reflections (Sandman #6)

#1044
Title: Fables and Reflections (Sandman #6)
Author: Neil Gaiman
Publisher: Vertigo
Year: 2011 (new edition)
168 pages

These are stories loosely linked by the help or meddling of Morpheus over a long span of time. Notable in introducing Orpheus, of whom more later.

Six-legged Soldiers: Using Insects as Weapons of War

#1043
Title: Six-legged Soldiers: Using Insects as Weapons of War
Author: Jeffrey A. Lockwood
Publisher: Oxford
Year: 2009/2010
400 pages

In The Simpsons, Season 7, Homer finds occasion to taunt: "Or what? You'll release the dogs? Or the bees? Or the dogs with bees in their mouths so when they bark they shoot bees at you?" At its best, Six-legged Soldiers is very much about dogs with bees in their mouths so when they bark they shoot bees at you. Or at least, about bee and hornet nests catapulted over the parapets. Or the biblical plagues of Egypt understood through the lens of causal insect action. Or scorpions in overhead trap doors. Or torture involving fleas and lice. Or the refinement of insect-delivered diseases, or the development of insectoid weapons. This is all riveting. Unfortunately, Lockwood's writing drags and bogs down at times, even with such exciting subject matter. It's worth working your way through it, though there isn't really a conclusion or climactic payoff. Still, despite the sometimes-slog, you'll learn a lot about attempts to weaponize bugs.

The Time Machine

#1042
Title: The Time Machine
Author: H. G. Wells
Publisher:Unknown
Year: 1895
~104 pages

Re-reading Wells's classic after many years, I'm struck by the "scientific" style, also used by Poe for his science fiction. The learned exposition about physics or the material world; the careful articulation by the protagonist of the limits of his expertise or possible lack of objectivity at times; the proofs that lead to the suspension of disbelief; the citing of authorities (here, though unnamed, Darwin plays a major role)--I just love the tone and the techniques used to reel the reader in.

Strip away the science and you've got a story which, although ostensibly about the future degradation of human nobility, reads very much like a colonial tale about the debased indigenes. This makes me think about how much of science fiction follows this model, though the noble rather than monstrous savage sometimes takes center stage.

I can poke some holes in the plot, but why bother? It's still a good story and in its day must have galvanized many readers.

Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth

#1041
 Title: Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth
Author: Reza Aslan
Publisher:Random House
Year: 2013
327 pages

Like many books about Jesus (or, for that matter, HIV), the reviews are reasonably shrill, accusatory, and polarized. Aslan does a good job of contextualizing the period in which Jesus preached and making is accessible to the non-technical reader. I can't evaluate his contention that Jesus's activities can be understood as emerging from and buttressing the framework of zealotry, in its technical sense; I think he makes a case for this, but as I'm not a biblical scholar, I can't critique the argument. I felt that his analysis made more sense than most interpretations I've read, particularly his discussion of post-crucifixion politics and Paul's reinterpretation or reinvention of Jesus.

Read well by the author, but hunt up a visual copy for the end notes.