The last entry in my reading log of 2008, with quotes and commentary. Includes The Christmas Books and The Audacity of Hope, as well as many others.
God Bless Us Every One: The Chistmas Books, by Charles Dickens :
"What’s today?" cried Scrooge, calling downward to a boy in Sunday clothes, who perhaps had loitered to look about him.
"Eh?" returned the boy, with all his might of wonder.
"What’s today, my fine fellow?" said Scrooge.
"Today!" replied the boy. "Why, Christmas day!"
"It’s Christmas day!" said Scrooge to himself. "I haven’t missed it. The spirits have done it all in one night. They can do anything they like. Of course they can. Of course they can. Hallo, my fine fellow!"
"Hallo", returned the boy.
"Do you know the poulterer’s in the next street but one at the corner?" Scrooge inquired.
"I should hope I did", replied the lad.
"An intelligent boy!" said Scrooge. "A remarkable boy! Do you know whether they’ve sold the prize turkey that was hanging up there? Not the little prize turkey—the big one?"
"Wot, the one as big as me?" returned the boy.
"What a delightful boy" said Scrooge. "It is a pleasure to talk to him! Yes, my buck!"
"It’s hanging there now", replied the boy.
"Is it?" said Scrooge. "Go and buy it!"
"Walk-ER!" exclaimed the boy.
"No, no" said Scrooge, "I am in earnest. Go and buy it, and tell them to bring it here, that I may give them the directions where to take it. Come back with the man, and I’ll give you a shilling. Come back with him in less than five minutes and I’ll give you half a crown!"
"’Alf a crown!" Though the street was thick with slush, the boy managed to raise a cloud of dust that did not settle for many minutes afterward.
When someone mentions A Christmas Carol, the above scene is the first thing that comes into my mind, and I’ve always associated the term "Scrooge" with the "after" Scrooge, the laughing, generous old fellow who becomes a role model in how to keep Christmas. This leads to moments of dissonance, since most other people, when they speak of someone as "a regular Scrooge", tend to mean the "before" Scrooge, of "Bah Humbug" and "Are there no prisons" and all.
When I was a kid, I used to go to my grandmother’s every year for Christmas, and my uncle would always be standing at the door, and would greet me with the same mock-gruff "Well, hello and Bah Humbug, Miles!" And I would always respond with the same mock-horror "Christmas a humbug, uncle? Surely you don’t mean that!"
Do any of you have special Christmas traditions or memories associated with the tale of Scrooge and Marley? What’s your favorite moment from the book?
In addition to "A Christmas Carol", The Christmas Books contains four other long tales, each containing characters as memorable as Scrooge, Marley and Wee Tim. If there’s a reason Christmas Carol is universally known and "The Cricket on the Hearth" is not, it’s not because of any difference in quality.
Open-wound marriage: Now and Then, by Robert B. Parker :
"Did you give those tapes to my husband?"
"Those which captured the sounds of your indiscretion? I said.
"Don’t be evasive", she said. "Of course those tapes."
"So he played them for you," I said.
"Yes. Did you make them?"
"I did."
"You had no right to make them" she said.
"But I did," I said.
"And I may very well sue you," she said.
"Let me know what you decide," I said. "Would you like some coffee?"
"Don’t you realize you may have destroyed my marriage?"
"Shoot the messenger", I said.
"What?...Oh, you’re saying I destroyed my marriage."
"I guess it depends to some extent on how you and your husband feel about monogamy," I said.
She looked good. Blue suit with a skirt that ended above the knee. High black boots, a white turtle. Her makeup was good, her hair was in place, everything was swell, except that she looked tired. Given the length and vigor of her evenings, I might have looked a little tired, too.
And now I’ve gone and read all the Spenser there is. At least, unlike John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee series, Parker is still around to write more.
One of my few bugs about the "honorable, soul-searching PI" genre is that occasionally, the protagonist acts like an utter shit, like beating information out of an innocent person, and it’s presented as somehow OK that he does that because he’s a hero, and he feels bad about it for a while afterwards. This one starts out with Spenser agreeing to do PI dirty work, spying on a woman to find evidence of infidelity for her husband, and he mopes around and lets Susan psychoanalyze him for a while afterwards because he finds it unseemly to do that kind of thing. So why does he do it? The plot that unfolds later on makes much less sense than most Spenser plots, both in terms of the guilty party’s motives (which even in retrospect seem like the equivalent of committing murder to cover up having shoplifted a lollipop), and Spenser’s less than rational full court hate-on on the guilty party. Spenser also manages to arrange for events to turn out worse than they otherwise would have, but hey. He’s the hero, so it’s OK. Not recommended, even if you like the other books.
WinterWorld: The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula LeGuin :
He saw away over the ice to the north a white tower like the tower of a Domain, and from this place far away one came walking towards him. After a while, Getheren could see that the person was naked, his skin was all white, and his hair was all white. He came nearer, and near enough to speak. Getheren said, "Who are you?"
The white man said, "I am your brother and kemmering, Hode."
Hode was the name of his brother who had killed himself. And getheren saw that the white man was his brother in body and feature. But there was no longer any life in his belly, and his voice sounded thin like the creaking of ice.
Getheren asked, "What place is this?"
Hode answered, "This is the place inside the blizzard. We who kill ourselves dwell here. Here you and I shall keep our vow."
Getheren was frightened, and he said, "I will not stay here. If you had come away with me from our Hearth into the southern lands we might have stayed together and kept our vow lifelong, no man knowing our transgression. But you broke your vow, throwing it away with your life. And now you cannot say my name."
This was true. Hode moved his white lips, but could not say his brother’s name.
He came quickly to Getheren, reaching out his arms to hold him, and seized him by the left hand. Getheren broke free and ran from him. He ran to the southward, and running saw rise up before him a white wall of falling snow, and when he entered into it he fell again on his knees, and could not run, but crawled.
This is a standard length novel, but it took me much longer to read than most, and required much more concentration. The narration shifts between two main characters in a way that makes it not easy to always know who is talking, and the style lacks emotional intensity, such that the description of someone being taken prisoner is delivered with the same emphasis as the information as to what month it is. There is a plot involving the envoy from one world on a mission to establish diplomatic relations with the two conflicting nations on a new planet, but the plot takes second place to a deep philosophical exploration of gender identity and of dualism—two seasons, two worlds, two nations within the world, two protagonists, left and right, light and dark, yin and yang...but not always two genders.
LeGuin won both the Hugo and the Nebula for this book, which doesn’t happen often, and the book is on most lists of the best SF ever, but it didn’t do much for me, I’m afraid. The writing is as cold and featureless to me as the icy planet it describes.
Sneer your way to Victory: Making Your Case—the art of persuading judges, by Antonin Scalia and Bryan A. Gardner :
Formality bespeaks dignity. I guarantee that if you use contractions in your written submissions, some judges—including many who are not offended by the use of contractions in the New Yorker, Time, Vogue, the Rolling Stone, Field and Stream, and other publications not addressed to black-robed judges engaged in the exercise of their august governmental powers—will take it as an affront to the dignity of the court ("Why next, to ensure a more conversational environment, this cheeky fellow will have us shed our robes, and start calling us all by our first names!") And those judges who don’t take offense will not understand your brief, or vote for your case, one whit more readily. There is, in short, something to be lost, and nothing whatsoever to be gained. Unless, of course, you and your client share with my esteemed coauthor the Jacobin passion to bring written discourse in the forum down to the level of spoken discourse in the marketplace."
That’s right. I read a book by Judge Scalia. Shuttup. I thought it might have something useful for me in my work.
Central thesis: Judges are from a planet may light years from our galaxy, and you must bow and scrape to them and write and speak in their alien language, admire the dazzling colors of their new clothes (which only the truly worthy can see), and in general, treat them like Gods, or else they will zap you and your client with laser beams from their eyes. Treason against the ruling masters will be dealt with extreme prejudice. Garner, the author of The Elements of Legal Style, at least attempts to make legal English move a little bit closer to regular English; Scalia provides the most entertaining passages, like the one above, by continuing his well-known habit of insulting his brethren (whether Garner or his fellow Justices) whenever he disagrees with them on any point, no matter how slight. He also scolds Garner as part of the politically correct thought police for advocating non-sexist language. Typical. The book jacket depicts Scalia grinning what he no doubt considers his "Kindly Uncle Tony" grin, but what actually resembles Mr. Potter from the Capra movies, preparing to foreclose on Bailey’s Building & Loan.
Another piece of advice from the book: Some people, it must be said, are inherently likeable. If you’re not, work on it. (It may even improve your social life.) I sincerely hope it was Garner and not Scalia who wrote that.
Nebraska on the St. Lawrence: Shadows on the Rock, by Willa Cather:
Now, on the Rue de Figuier stood a house that had long been closed, for the family had gone to live at Fontainbleau, and the empty coach house was used as a store room for old pieces of furniture. The caretaker was a careless fellow who went out to drink with his cronies and left the place unguarded. In the coach house were two brass kettles which had lain there for many years, doing nobody any good. Bichet must have seen them often, as he went in and out to sharpen the caretaker’s carving knife.
One night, when this fellow was carousing, Bichet carried off those two pots. He took them to an ironmonger and sold them. Nobody would have missed them, but Bichet had an enemy. Near us there lived a degenerate, half-witted boy of a cruel disposition. He tortured street cats, and even sparrows when he could catch them. Old Bichet had more than once caught him at his tricks and reproved him and set his victims at liberty. That boy was cunning, and he used to spy on Bichet. He saw him carrying off those brass kettles and reported him to police. Bichet was seized in the street, when he was out with his grindstone, and taken to the Chatelet. He confessed at once and told where he had sold the pots. But that was not enough for the officers; they put him to the torture and made him confess to a lifetime of crime; to having stolen from us and from the Frontenac house—which he had never done.
Your grandfather and I hurried to the prison to speak for him. Your grandfather told them that a man so old and infirm would admit anything under fright and anguish, not knowing what he said; that a confession obtained under torture was not evidence. This infuriated the Judge. If we would take oath that the prisoner had never stolen anything from us, they would put him into the strapaddo again and make him correct his confession. We saw that the only thing we could do for our old lodger was to let him pass quickly. Luckily for Bichet, the prison was overcrowded and he was hanged the next morning.
For me, 2008 was the year of Willa Cather. I read six of her best known novels this year, and it’s time to move on to something else, as the pattern has become familiar. As usual, what passes for plot is a series of light vignettes more important for what they reveal about who the characters are, as people, than for anything monumental that happens. This time the action is in 17th century Quebec, and flavored with the politics of King Louis XIV, half a world away in distance and culture, but the characters are the same. There’s the tall, boyish heroine who grows to womanhood taking her strength from the earth and nature; the large disfigured man with the heart of gold who is beaten into defeat by that same nature; the upright, uptight, unpleasant representatives of civilization who don’t recognize a good thing but merely see opportunity for their own profit; the small boy under the girl’s protection; the wilderness as a fully included character itself. Worth the read.
Chasing Happy Fun Burger: Happier, by Tal Ben-Shahar :
The first archetypal hamburger is the one I had just turned down, the tasty junk-food burger. Eating this hamburger would yield present benefit, in that I would enjoy it, and future detriment, in that I would subsequently not feel well.
The experience of present benefit and future detriment defines the HEDONISM archetype. Hedonists live by the maxim "seek pleasure and avoid pain"; they focus on enjoying the present while ignoring the potential negative consequences of their actions.
The second hamburger type that came to mind was a tasteless vegetarian burger made with only the most healthful ingredients, which would afford me future benefit, in that I would subsequently feel good and healthy, and present detriment, in that I would not enjoy eating it.
The corresponding Archetype is that of the RAT RACE. The rat racer, subordinating the present to the future, suffers now for the purpose of some anticipated gain.
The third hamburger type, the worst of all possible burgers, is both tasteless and unhealthful: eating it, I would experience present detriment in that it tastes bad, and suffer future detriment, in that it is unhealthful.
The parallel to this burger is the NIHILISM archetype. This archetype describes the person who has lost the lust for life; someone who neither enjoys the moment nor has a sense of future purpose.
The three archetypes that I came up with did not exhaust all possibilities. There was one more to consider. What about a hamburger that would be as tasty as the one I had turned down and as healthy as the vegetarian burger? A burger that would constitute a complete experience with both present and future benefit?
This hamburger exemplifies the HAPPINESS archetype.
Notice how all the self-help books divide everybody into pigeonholes? Since mine is the Path of the Frosted Mini-Wheat, I would have called those four archetypes the NICELY SWEET side, the CRUNCHY WHEAT side, I SUCK!, and IN THE ZONE (or perhaps The Cocktail Satyr, Miss Demeanor, Orggg and Admiral Naismith)...but hamburgers will do just as well, I suppose.
Tal Ben-Shahar is Regius Abba Dabba Professor of Happiness at Harvard, and his class on how to be happy is so popular that he probably has to deliver lectures from the middle of Fight Fiercely Stadium with his image on the big screen. You might expect his book to have a big picture of himself on the cover, smiling with all 32 teeth showing and pointing directly at YOU. But not really. It’s an unassuming little yellow book with no photo, and it made it on to my exponentially growing "gotta read this someday" list following a Ben-Shahar appearance on the Daily Show to promote the book, maybe as long ago as 2006. He seems like an unassuming guy, neither pompous like a bad professor nor garish like a huckster.
And the book is a workbook. It’s well under 200 pages, but requires as much concentration as The Left Hand of Darkness, and has exercises at the end of each of the 15 chapters. I’ve copied those sections and intend to work on them further over the next few months. The first part is about ritualizing the behavior you want to make habitual, and making the equivalent of regular "Thankful Thursday" posts to focus on finding things to feel gratitude about. For the most part, there’s nothing breathtakingly new about it so much as a reminder of what really counts as you go through life watching the donut not the hole.
Seems to me the single most useful piece of advice I’ve ever seen in print is still the proverb that Success is doing the things you already know you should be doing, and not doing the things you already know you should not be doing. Really, can you add anything to that?
Early lessons in Monkeypaws: Five Children and IT, by E. Nesbit :
We want", said Robert, slowly, to be rich beyond the dreams of something or other."
"Avarice", said Jane.
"So it is," said the fairy unexpectedly. "But it won’t do you much good, that’s one comfort," it muttered to itself. "Come, I can’t go beyond dreams, you know! How much do you want, and will you have it in gold or notes?"
"Gold, please...and millions of it..."
"This gravel pit full be enough?" said the Fairy in an off-hand manner.
"Oh, YES..."
"Then get out before I begin, or you’ll be buried alive in it!"
No, "Five Children and IT" is not about Intel’s Junior Programming School. It’s about a sand-fairy that grants the five children who find it one wish a day, except that they’re the kind of wishes that always have ironically bad outcomes, and so, for example, the kids take all that gold to spend in their sleepy little Kentish village and none of the shops will accept gold instead of regular money, and they can’t explain where they got it, and...the moral is supposed to be along the lines of "there’s nothing worth wishing for, since you have what really counts already", but really it’s "Don’t wish like a child, and if you get the nasty monkey’s-paw wish giver, you need to either explain in great detail what you want and don’t want, or maybe not wish at all when the wish-giver is not your friend." I ever get three wishes, I’m going for the nice explainable Powerball jackpot to go with something very carefully worded to deal with my family’s health issues and my own peace of mind.
This is another book that I got from the library in the hopes of reading it to Twofoot, who ignored my voice and so I re-read it to myself, decades after it enriched my childhood.
One Night in London and the Tough Guys Tumble: Above the Dark Tumult, by Sir Hugh Walpole:
Snow was now falling with a soft determination, settling against the cheek like the touch of a dove’s wing, touching the hand with an intimacy that seemed to be the privilege of oneself alone.
The air was colder, and the arena wore now a fiercer colour. Through the snow all the sky signs danced in a fresh activity, and the white surface that began thinly to encrust the paths and borders made the walls and roofs velvet in a dim and gentle dusk. The hour of release from the caves had completely passed, and now the arena was filled with figures all bent upon the warfare of the evening—warfare of all kinds, duels between man and woman, between woman and woman, dog and rat, elephant and spider, boa constrictor and rhinoceros. All the combatants could be seen moving to their especial places, and over everything there was the pause and hush of preparation.
The place is Picadilly Circus between the wars, the "hour of release from the caves" is when the theaters let crowds out into the streets, and all the fighting animals are the crowds milling and fighting and having drunken quarrels and revelry. The plot is a crime potboiler with elements of After Hours and the Day of the Locust, involving the adventures of one man in one neighborhood over a single night, and his encounters with a couple of ex-cons, a former love interest, a blackmailer, a beggar, a street Santa Claus, a barber, a party hosted by Major Escott in the flat upstairs, several eateries, bars, theaters and salons, and always, the moving crowd, the pulsing rhythm of the street, teetering on the edge of civilization and always about to dissolve and make Picadilly Circus into the kind of circus with freaks and wild animals.
For anyone who’s seen the nightlife of a modern city, it’s hard to see what all the fuss is about London in the 1920s. The enticements and behaviors of those days are nothing to what people endure now, and Walpole’s lamentation of the degradation we’ve sunk into sometimes seems like the raving of an old prude. However, the gripping characterization and atmosphere can still take you where Walpole wants you to go.
Suckered like a Charms Blowpop: The People Trap, and other Pitfalls, by Robert Sheckley :
"Got it now,"Arnold said. "It says, ‘The Meldge Free Producer, another triumph of Glotten Laboratories. This Producer is Warranted Indestructible, Unbreakable, and Free of All Defects. No Power Hookup Is Required. To Start, Press Button One. To Stop, Use Laxian Key. Your Meldge Free Producer comes with an Eternal Guarantee against Malfunction. If Defective in Any Way, Please Return at Once to Glotten Laboratories."
"Perhaps I didn’t make myself clear," Gregor said. "We are planetary..."
"Don’t be stodgy," Arnold said. "Once we get this thing working, we can retire. Here’s Button One."
The machine began to clank ominously, then shifted to a steady purr. For long minutes, nothing happened.
"Needs warming up", Arnold said, anxiously.
Then, out of an opening at the base of the machine, a gray powder began to pour.
"Probably a waste product," Gregor muttered. But the powder continued to stream over the floor for 15 minutes.
"Success!" Arnold shouted.
"What is it?" Gregor asked.
"I haven’t the faintest idea. I’ll have to run some tests." Grinning triumphantly, Arnold scooped some powder into a test tube and hurried over to his desk.
Gregor stood in front of the Producer, watching the gray powder stream out. Finally he said, "Shouldn’t we turn it off until we find out what it is?"
"Of course not, Arnold said. "Whatever it is, it must be worth money."
I met the late great Robert Sheckley at a convention once, and I’m afraid I kinda gushed and babbled about my fandom and ended up feeling embarrassed about the encounter. To put that in perspective, I’ve also met Lois Bujold, the creator of the original "Admiral Naismith", and was able to not do that; that’s the amazing effect Sheckley had on me. His short fiction flows effortlessly through my head, with the same quirky humor I have, and I feel like his work comes closer than anyone else to the kind of stories I’d write myself, if I wrote good science fiction.
These short tales are classic Twilight-Zone era what-ifs, involving the world populated entirely by Disney creatures; the world where the greatest honor people can give you is a slow, painful death; the world taken way beyond population limits, where people will kill for a square foot of land to call their own. Most of them are funny; and yet, they gave me nightmares days after the fact. Highest recommendations.
One Ring to Fool Them All: What’s the Worst That Could Happen?, by Donald E. Westlake:
May appeared in the doorway with a mug of tea. She looked around at everything and saw the black box and said "What’s that?" just as the box suddenly made a loud, high pitched, horrible noise like a lot of baby pigeons being tortured to death all at once. May’s eyes widened and the tea sloshed in her mug and she said, "What’s that?"
The pigeons died. The box chuckled to itself. Dortmunder said, "It’s a fax. Apparently, this is the only way Wally likes to talk now."
"Here it comes," Andy said.
Dortmunder and May watched in appalled fascination as the box began slowly to stick its tongue out at them; a wide, white tongue, a sheet of shiny, curly paper that exuded from the front of the thing, with words on the paper.
Andy smiled in paternal pleasure at the box. "It’s like a pasta machine, isn’t it?" he said.
"Yes," said Dortmunder. It was easier to say yes.
The white paper, curling back on itself like a papyrus roll, kept oozing from the box. Then it stopped, and the box made a bell bing! sound, and Andy reached down to tear the paper loose. Straightening, he went back to the sofa, sat down, took some beer, unrolled the fax—he looked exactly like the herald announcing the arrival in the kingdom of the Duke of Carpathia.
This was my selection to read in the cozy chair on Christmas Day, and it was a good choice. Dortmunder, the NYC master thief with the motley team of henchmen, is always a great choice. For some reason, young Robert Redford was picked to play him in the movie of The Hot Rock; I would have picked Harvey Keitel. In fact, most of the Reservoir Dogs would be decent as part of the Dortmunder crew.
This set of adventures begins with Dortmunder trying to burgle a powerful billionaire’s Long Island summer getaway house, and getting caught at gunpoint by the billionaire, who seizes Dortmunder’s "lucky ring" (which, given Dortmunder’s history, and what happens to the billionaire for the rest of the book, is maybe not such a lucky ring at all). The ring has no financial value, but its sentimental value and the insult to him are enough to turn Dortmunder into the Gollum of New York, single-mindedly doing ANYTHING to get the ring back, ransacking the billionaire’s successively more elaborate properties, getting more and more loot—and getting sorer and sorer because he can’t get the stupid ring back! And then....OMG!!!
A near-perfect Delightful Romp! Highest recommendations.
The Audacity of Hope, Ghostwritten by William Ayers, Jeremiah Wright and Osama Bin Laden for Barack Obama :
Most blacks who grew up in Chicago remember the collective story of the great migration from the South, how after arriving in the North blacks were forced into ghettos because of racial steering and restrictive covenants and stacked up in public housing, where the schools were substandard and the parks were underfunded and police protection was nonexistent and the drug trade was tolerated. They remember how the plum patronage jobs were reserved for other immigrant groups and the blue collar jobs that black folks relied on evaporated, so that families that had been intact began to crack under the pressure and ordinary children slipped through those cracks, until a tipping point was reached and what had once been the sad exception somehow became the rule. They know what drove that homeless man to drink, because he is their uncle. That hardened criminal—they remember when he was a little boy, so full of life and capable of love, for he is their cousin.
This is definitely a book by a man who is running for President. Everything in it is calculated to offend nobody and persuade everybody. Obama exhorts us to believe in such controversial things as opportunity, values and families, and when he gets more specific than that, it’s almost always to nod sagely and tell us that important topics are important, and that people on both sides have something worthy to say.
George Bush and John McCain only wish they could write like this. Then again, maybe they don’t. Being able to see two sides to a question could be a sign of liberal weakness, after all.
Most of the time, Obama is downright reasonable (is that allowed in a politician?), as when a true believer on the left calls the Bush Administration the worst crisis America has ever faced, and Obama points out that those who faced the Civil War, the Depression, and Jim Crow might think that the present times might not rise quite to those levels. On the other hand, his eagerness to reach out to the Religious Right and the neoconservatives in the belief that they’ll do something other than chop his hand off the first time he tries it...that kind of political naivete is the stuff that makes conspiracy theorists wonder if Democrats aren’t really all that dumb or weak, but are using the myth of incompetence as an excuse for willful collaboration with the neocons. How many times will the "We didn’t know Republicans were lying to us about something so important" excuse hold up?
Could be, I’m just a typical American, in that I love my politicians only when they agree with me. Your mileage may vary. Not really the book of revolutionary new ideas it purports to be, but still well worth reading for anyone who cares what our new President thinks. After all, those of us who’ve read it weren’t surprised at all that he wants to be Rev. Rick Warren’s good buddy.