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.