Issue 201
News: The Ten Best Books of (the many I read in the second half of) 2011.
Well, it's been a total of two months since I last posted, so I've decided that I'll write another list of books: this time, I'll cover the ones I thought were the best I read in the last six months of last year. Admittedly, the selection pool this time is much shallower than last time; I've had much less time to actually read, due to my new life in Columbia: I've had to turn in a 5-page story every week for four months, so I had much less leisure time to just read. For what it's worth, in my reading queues, I have two books which I hope could put into the next year's queue: The History of Love by Nichole Krauss, and The Life of Pi by Yann Martel.
10. I am a Genius of Unspeakable Evil and I Want to Be Your Class President by Josh Lieb.
For some reason, I wound up getting interested in this book during the summer even though I didn't get it in the previous year plus it was out. Anyway, when I was in Door County, I actually found a copy of the book in a bookstore in Bailey's Harbor. When it finally came up in my reading queue, I wound up enjoying it, as I knew I would; in the way Josh Lieb portrays his main character as being dim to everyone else, but is, in reality, an evil genius, he recalls, of all people, Jim Thompson's Lou Ford, the sheriff who seems a bit slow on the uptake, but is, in reality, a genius prone to going off on tangents related to people who are obscure to the target audience (well, at least more teenagers know who Captain Beefheart is than pulp fiction readers in the 1950s knew who Emil Kraeplin was.) The reason I put it so low on the list? The ending. In the end, instead of giving a speech explaining why the main character wants people to vote for him, he goes off on a big speech talking about how he's realised that all elections are just one big popularity contest. True as that may be, Josh Lieb has been building up a big climax, and all we get is this speech? This has to be the most disappointing ending to a book that I've ever read.
9. Silas Marner by George Eliot
I first read this book when I was a kid who loved the way Wishbone did it, but for whatever reason, I decided to revisit the book in October. I must admit that the big reason that this book made the list at all was because it was there for me at the right time: around the time I rediscovered it, I had to find a way to make a photo-roman: a selection of images that tells a story, and I was at an impasse; my previous two assignments were difficult enough, but to add to that, I had to create a big story; I decided to create a very loose adaptation of this book. Silas was a private accountant, Eppie was a dog, and Silas did end up getting his money back.
8. The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson.
A couple years ago, I saw a film called The Men Who Stare at Goats, and, as it turned out, it was based on a true story chronicled by a journalist named Jon Ronson. Recently, he wrote another book, in an area I find very interesting: mental illness. He wrote this relatively short book about psychopathy, and looked in a lot of places; from old psychological experiments, to Bob Hare and his split with the psychiatric community, to a young McMurphy type who is a psychopath, to the Scientologists who want him freed to possibly psychopathic CEOs to 9/11 Truthers who claim to be the Messiah. He ends up with more questions than answers, but even still, it is very informative.
7. Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer
I have a great variety of sources that I consult to see just what books I should put into my reading queue, and one of them is from the Art of Manliness, which has a list of 100 books every man should read. I've read 72 of them, and one of them is Into the Wild. What I found truly interesting about this book is the fact that Krakauer is able to spin the tragic story of Christopher McCandless in a way that is somehow both detached and sympathetic; Krakauer, as an outdoorsman who would, a couple years later, climb Everest, can definitely feel what McCandless sought in the Alaskan wilderness, but, at the same time, he knew that he was a fool for trying with so few supplies.
6. Like Water For Chocolate by Laura Esquivel
I have a book recommendation service online and, for a couple months, the program had decided to put this in my recommendations list. I decided to give it a miss until I decided to listen to the audiobook, and I was quite impressed, although if not for the fact that I had been assigned another multi-generational Latin American woman family saga (Cristina Garcia's Dreaming in Cuban) made me realise how good it was. The characters are interesting, a lot's at stake, and the plot was interesting.
5. Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
I'd been thinking of reading this book for a while, and when I decided to actually get it, I was really amazed. I had read three of Garcia Marquez' books this year (the other two being Memories of my Melancholy Whores and One Hundred Years of Soliutude), but this is really his best work. It's no wonder that the year after he had this published, he got the Nobel Literature Prize. In fact, I am seriously considering, if I ever end up as a filmmaker, adapting this into a film, and not just any film, a Spaghetti Western. The deconstruction of conservative values and unsympathetic main characters do seem like they would work well with the genre.
3 and 4. Look Me In the Eye by John Elder Robison, and Born on a Blue Day by Daniel Tammet.
The Autism Spectrum: its forms are legion. That's one thing that really makes autism spectrum disorders interesting to me (apart from the fact that I have one), and certainly what makes reading about Autism Spectrum Disorders interesting; it can have very different effects on the lives of different people. For instance, in John Robison's story, he wound up as a high school dropout who made a living working on electronics and touring with KISS. Meanwhile, there's Daniel Tammet; he has a savant syndrome, and broke the world record for reciting the digits of pi, and runs a language learning software. And then, there's Christian Weston Chandler, and the less said about him the better. As for the books, on the one hand, it's easier for me to identify with Robison (no doubt due to the fact that Tammet is both gay and Christian, and I can't see the point to memorising pi to several thousand digits when 39 digits is enough to calculate the circumference of a circle the size of the known universe with a margin of error the size of a hydrogen atom.) On the other hand, Tammet does have an extremely clear and concise writing style that does the job of describing what goes on in his head extremely well.
2. The Essential Schopenhauer by Arthur Schopenhauer.
I think I've mentioned before that I consider Arthur Schopenhauer to be my favourite philosopher. If I haven't, well, now you know. There's not much material that's new to me; indeed, there's quite a bit of overlap with Penguin's Essays and Aphorisms. But the fact is that there's not a lot of Schopenhauer's writing that's publicly available in book form (at least not in a form that you don't have to pay far out the ass for), but this is definitely one of the better compilations.
1. The Instructions by Adam Levin.
It's a book I've been wanting to read for a while, primarily because the sheer size of its paperback edition struck me. But then, I looked into the plot synopsis. In essence, it's sort of like Lindsay Anderson's If, if that were set in a Chicago-area primary school. And the idea of a revolutionary drama set in a public school is an idea I have long considered toying with, but after reading this book, I know that I can find a way to make such a story work without having the story remind one too much of Columbine.
Chick Tract Review: Here Comes the Judge. So, it looks like Jack's come full circle. In one of his early tracts, he put a "Here Come de Judge" reference (which shows how long he's been in the game), and now it's the title of his latest tract. It's a really incoherent tale of corruption. A judge hires a man killed for reasons never fully explained, and frames his wife on both murder and drug charges. For some reason, the governor has a guy put a hit out on the judge through video monitors. It's like The Wire, but even less coherent. But then, the judge's butler goes into his hospital room and talks to him about Jesus, including the bit about Revelation. After being rebuffed, the judge finally gets killed. Overall, it's a goddamn mess of a tract.
Well, it's been a total of two months since I last posted, so I've decided that I'll write another list of books: this time, I'll cover the ones I thought were the best I read in the last six months of last year. Admittedly, the selection pool this time is much shallower than last time; I've had much less time to actually read, due to my new life in Columbia: I've had to turn in a 5-page story every week for four months, so I had much less leisure time to just read. For what it's worth, in my reading queues, I have two books which I hope could put into the next year's queue: The History of Love by Nichole Krauss, and The Life of Pi by Yann Martel.
10. I am a Genius of Unspeakable Evil and I Want to Be Your Class President by Josh Lieb.
For some reason, I wound up getting interested in this book during the summer even though I didn't get it in the previous year plus it was out. Anyway, when I was in Door County, I actually found a copy of the book in a bookstore in Bailey's Harbor. When it finally came up in my reading queue, I wound up enjoying it, as I knew I would; in the way Josh Lieb portrays his main character as being dim to everyone else, but is, in reality, an evil genius, he recalls, of all people, Jim Thompson's Lou Ford, the sheriff who seems a bit slow on the uptake, but is, in reality, a genius prone to going off on tangents related to people who are obscure to the target audience (well, at least more teenagers know who Captain Beefheart is than pulp fiction readers in the 1950s knew who Emil Kraeplin was.) The reason I put it so low on the list? The ending. In the end, instead of giving a speech explaining why the main character wants people to vote for him, he goes off on a big speech talking about how he's realised that all elections are just one big popularity contest. True as that may be, Josh Lieb has been building up a big climax, and all we get is this speech? This has to be the most disappointing ending to a book that I've ever read.
9. Silas Marner by George Eliot
I first read this book when I was a kid who loved the way Wishbone did it, but for whatever reason, I decided to revisit the book in October. I must admit that the big reason that this book made the list at all was because it was there for me at the right time: around the time I rediscovered it, I had to find a way to make a photo-roman: a selection of images that tells a story, and I was at an impasse; my previous two assignments were difficult enough, but to add to that, I had to create a big story; I decided to create a very loose adaptation of this book. Silas was a private accountant, Eppie was a dog, and Silas did end up getting his money back.
8. The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson.
A couple years ago, I saw a film called The Men Who Stare at Goats, and, as it turned out, it was based on a true story chronicled by a journalist named Jon Ronson. Recently, he wrote another book, in an area I find very interesting: mental illness. He wrote this relatively short book about psychopathy, and looked in a lot of places; from old psychological experiments, to Bob Hare and his split with the psychiatric community, to a young McMurphy type who is a psychopath, to the Scientologists who want him freed to possibly psychopathic CEOs to 9/11 Truthers who claim to be the Messiah. He ends up with more questions than answers, but even still, it is very informative.
7. Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer
I have a great variety of sources that I consult to see just what books I should put into my reading queue, and one of them is from the Art of Manliness, which has a list of 100 books every man should read. I've read 72 of them, and one of them is Into the Wild. What I found truly interesting about this book is the fact that Krakauer is able to spin the tragic story of Christopher McCandless in a way that is somehow both detached and sympathetic; Krakauer, as an outdoorsman who would, a couple years later, climb Everest, can definitely feel what McCandless sought in the Alaskan wilderness, but, at the same time, he knew that he was a fool for trying with so few supplies.
6. Like Water For Chocolate by Laura Esquivel
I have a book recommendation service online and, for a couple months, the program had decided to put this in my recommendations list. I decided to give it a miss until I decided to listen to the audiobook, and I was quite impressed, although if not for the fact that I had been assigned another multi-generational Latin American woman family saga (Cristina Garcia's Dreaming in Cuban) made me realise how good it was. The characters are interesting, a lot's at stake, and the plot was interesting.
5. Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
I'd been thinking of reading this book for a while, and when I decided to actually get it, I was really amazed. I had read three of Garcia Marquez' books this year (the other two being Memories of my Melancholy Whores and One Hundred Years of Soliutude), but this is really his best work. It's no wonder that the year after he had this published, he got the Nobel Literature Prize. In fact, I am seriously considering, if I ever end up as a filmmaker, adapting this into a film, and not just any film, a Spaghetti Western. The deconstruction of conservative values and unsympathetic main characters do seem like they would work well with the genre.
3 and 4. Look Me In the Eye by John Elder Robison, and Born on a Blue Day by Daniel Tammet.
The Autism Spectrum: its forms are legion. That's one thing that really makes autism spectrum disorders interesting to me (apart from the fact that I have one), and certainly what makes reading about Autism Spectrum Disorders interesting; it can have very different effects on the lives of different people. For instance, in John Robison's story, he wound up as a high school dropout who made a living working on electronics and touring with KISS. Meanwhile, there's Daniel Tammet; he has a savant syndrome, and broke the world record for reciting the digits of pi, and runs a language learning software. And then, there's Christian Weston Chandler, and the less said about him the better. As for the books, on the one hand, it's easier for me to identify with Robison (no doubt due to the fact that Tammet is both gay and Christian, and I can't see the point to memorising pi to several thousand digits when 39 digits is enough to calculate the circumference of a circle the size of the known universe with a margin of error the size of a hydrogen atom.) On the other hand, Tammet does have an extremely clear and concise writing style that does the job of describing what goes on in his head extremely well.
2. The Essential Schopenhauer by Arthur Schopenhauer.
I think I've mentioned before that I consider Arthur Schopenhauer to be my favourite philosopher. If I haven't, well, now you know. There's not much material that's new to me; indeed, there's quite a bit of overlap with Penguin's Essays and Aphorisms. But the fact is that there's not a lot of Schopenhauer's writing that's publicly available in book form (at least not in a form that you don't have to pay far out the ass for), but this is definitely one of the better compilations.
1. The Instructions by Adam Levin.
It's a book I've been wanting to read for a while, primarily because the sheer size of its paperback edition struck me. But then, I looked into the plot synopsis. In essence, it's sort of like Lindsay Anderson's If, if that were set in a Chicago-area primary school. And the idea of a revolutionary drama set in a public school is an idea I have long considered toying with, but after reading this book, I know that I can find a way to make such a story work without having the story remind one too much of Columbine.
Chick Tract Review: Here Comes the Judge. So, it looks like Jack's come full circle. In one of his early tracts, he put a "Here Come de Judge" reference (which shows how long he's been in the game), and now it's the title of his latest tract. It's a really incoherent tale of corruption. A judge hires a man killed for reasons never fully explained, and frames his wife on both murder and drug charges. For some reason, the governor has a guy put a hit out on the judge through video monitors. It's like The Wire, but even less coherent. But then, the judge's butler goes into his hospital room and talks to him about Jesus, including the bit about Revelation. After being rebuffed, the judge finally gets killed. Overall, it's a goddamn mess of a tract.
- You, too, can be a rebel with neither a cause nor an effect.
- Never take anything the Ultimate Warrior says seriously.
- There is no such thing as a “Siamese Pecker.” Nor should there be.
- Just because Debbie Gibson and Tiffany have made a movie together does not mean they'll finally make the video of them going gay that Bill Hicks suggested they do 20 years ago.
- Just because Bill Hicks' material has aged better than any comedian who dealt with topical issues 20 years ago has any right to doesn't mean that he is a physical manifestation of some God.
- It is too late to seek out Billy Mays and have gay sex with him.
- If David Icke is right and the world is secretly ruled by lizard men, they must be headquartered in Los Angeles.
- Some people apparently can sleep without showing any signs of life.
- People tend to take the news that you have a history of going into fugue states and threatening people's lives pretty well.
- Regardless of what Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon may imply, The Chinese are still subject to the laws of gravity.
- No self-respecting American film studio will ever pick up a film made in Esperanto, specifically designed to make as little sense as humanly possible entitled Death To America, no matter how steeped in cinematic history the script may be.
- Charlize Theron is the only real African-American star in the film business today.
- Telling white people who have done good things for you that they are a credit to their race will not get them to think critically about race relations.
- If Trent Reznor can win a Grammy for singing a song about fisting, who knows how long it'll be before necrophilia becomes mainstream.
- Film was at its best in the 1970s.
- Happiness is smoking hashish out of a human skull.
- The platform of the Republican Party is not “The Gun is Good, the Penis is Evil.”
- Back up your hard drive.
- It is, in fact, possible for an author to completely screw up even the most basic aspects of Earthly existence.
- It is still possible for a thirty-year old Jewish Princess to become the very embodiment of lolicon.
- Just because something really absurd happened in real life doesn't make it automatically believable fiction.
- Owning a Hutu machete is not braggable.
- Somdomy of the dead stall be the whole of the lawr!
- Sometimes, theatre directors really just don't care.
- To some people, any sentence spoken in German is indistinguishable from the words “Sieg Heil!”
Labels: Books, Jack is Whack
posted by DerekAxe at 9:08 PM
2 comments
