Sometimes I can be embarrassingly slow. Take the other day for example. I was reading a book about food and the author mentioned “coffee whitener” and I could not for the life of me figure out what he meant. I had never heard that term before. The next day, as I was adding non-dairy creamer to my morning coffee, it dawned on me. Duh.
Could I be any slower?
Sometimes I get so hung up on the idea of blogging well that I can’t blog at all. The only way to get past that feeling is to write and write and write and post it all, even if it sounds like crap.
Here we go again.
I love you, Faithful Reader. You add magic to my life. Happy Valentine’s Day!
I finally got my revenge against all those mediocre writers of modern fiction. I read a nonfiction book!
Doing Nothing: A History of Loafers, Loungers, Slackers, and Bums in America by Tom Lutz
Grade: B
I found this book in a display at the local library. The theme of the display, if you can believe it, was the Seven Deadly Sins. This book was one of the representatives of Sloth, my personal favorite of the sins. How could I resist a book on a topic so near and dear to me?
I really enjoyed the first chapter in which the author discusses his own contradictory feelings about work and the anger he experienced when he felt that his son, out of high school but not yet employed, was slacking. I think we all have mixed feelings about work, both as it pertains to ourselves and others, and it’s good to know we’re not alone in that. I also liked the parts about famous slackers, not all of whom are traditionally viewed as slackers, such as Ben Franklin, Samuel Johnson, Henry David Thoreau, and Jack Kerouac.
The book’s big failing is that it is just a little too long and covers a few too many slackers. My eyes started to glaze over at points, and I admittedly skipped some paragraphs here and there. That is one of the good things about nonfiction. You can often jump over parts without missing anything vital to the rest of the book.
With a little extra focus, Doing Nothing would have been 100% fun. As it is, I would estimate it at roughly 80% fun. For maximum reading enjoyment, just be a slacker and skip the boring 20%.
I haven’t been completely honest about my book-buying addiction. You see, around the holidays, I sort of fell off the wagon and bought a bunch of books. When that bunch was added to the pile that people gave me as gifts, it turned into a mountain.
Meanwhile, I have been trying to borrow books from the library so that I don’t buy them, but I have been spending more time on library books than on the GLP. Consequently, I haven’t gotten rid of many books lately.
Books coming in. No books going out. We will be squished flat when the cat knocks the mountain over. And he will knock it over. It’s what he does.
I’m going to have to read fast if I want to avoid this tragic fate.
Did you know that my Faithful Reader often makes coffee for me in the morning? Isn’t that super extra nice?
I will miss Galápagos. It was a nice-looking book. It had a blue cover featuring a pair of blue-footed boobies. Inside, there was a page with a picture of an iguana. A previous reader had colored it in prettily using two different colored pencils. The world’s next Renoir, no doubt.
As for the story, I was not quite as impressed.
Galápagos by Kurt Vonnegut
Grade: B
Galápagos is about a group of people who sign up for a tour of the Galápagos Islands, made famous by the great Charles Darwin, and who end up as participants in a new era of human evolution. How will a million years in the Galápagos change homo sapiens? His brain will shrink and his hands will turn into flippers and that, says Vonnegut, may be for the best. You can’t make big weapons without a big brain nor can you wield them with flippers.
Vonnegut likes to flaunt his narrative omniscience. He often makes himself, the author, a character in his stories. He changed the formula for this book by making himself a ghost, the ghost of Kilgore Trout’s son. One way in which he showed his omniscience was by putting asterisks before the names of the soon-to-perish. If any of the characters had been likable, maybe that would have meant something, but all it did was ruin any chance of suspense. All in all, not Vonnegut’s best, but it contains some information about the Galápagos. The blue-footed booby is mentioned often (yay!)
I returned the book to the library this evening and replaced it with Bluebeard. We are down to the final three!
The next classic I’ll be reading for 2008 is Thoreau’s Walden, which I will start any day now.
The Children of Húrin by J.R.R. Tolkien
Grade: C
The tale of the children of Húrin is one of mythical proportions. A hero refuses to reveal a secret to a dark and powerful being. For that, he and his family are cursed. As part of his punishment, he sees in his mind the horrible things that happen to his children but is powerless to help them. The brunt of the curse falls upon the son, Túrin, who unwittingly brings destruction upon everyone and everything he loves.
It’s a compellingly tragic story, but the telling is rough. Had Tolkien had time to tackle the story seriously and get it ready for publication, who knows how good it might have been. As it stands now, it’s a choppy namefest, a chore to read. The truth is that this book gets attention and positive ratings only because it’s by Tolkien and Tolkien is hot right now. Had it been written by an unknown, it would not have been published.
But it is by Tolkien and it was published. Many people have read it, and by their own accounts, they even enjoyed it. So is this book for you? If you’re a hardcore Tokien fan (i.e., you read and enjoyed The Silmarillion), then you might find it interesting. Otherwise, skip it.
On Saturday I watched the movie version of Persuasion (1995) starring Amanda Root and Ciaran Hinds. It was highly rated, so I thought it would be the best of the available adaptations to watch.
On the positive side, it showed me some of the things from the book that were hard for me to visualize, such as the grandeur of Kellynch Hall and the accident in Lyme. The actors and actresses were, for the most part, average-looking people, they were not heavily made-up, and the costumes and sets were perfect. It felt very real.
The music of Chopin was used in the soundtrack and it was beautiful, so beautiful that it was occasionally distracting. As Chopin would have been about 7 years old at the time of Austen’s death, his music was also slightly out of place. The actors were soft-spoken, almost to the point of mumbling. If I hadn’t already known roughly what they were saying, I would have found the dialogue hard to follow.
Some of the characters were not at all as I envisioned them. Anne’s sister, Elizabeth, was portrayed as lazy and psychopathic, while I had imagined her as regal and calculating. That, I think, was just a matter of interpretation, but the screenwriters took some serious liberties with other characters, their actions and their motivations. Perhaps they worried that a modern audience wouldn’t be able to understand the subtleties of Georgian society, but some of the changes showed, I think, a lack of respect for Austen’s intentions. They really went wild toward the end of the story, granting everyone way too much chutzpah. Anne would not have kissed Captain Wentworth in the middle of the street and he would not have interrupted the party to ask Sir Elliot for Anne’s hand!
Anne’s extreme passivity was, for me, the most interesting facet of her character in the book. By making her more aggressive, the screenwriters may have improved the story for the modern audience, but they also took away the audience’s opportunity to appreciate what it was like to be a woman during Austen’s time. The movie is missing that sense of claustrophobia, that sense of being stuck in one’s small circle of society and having no power to change it. Without that understanding, Captain Wentworth’s second proposal loses much of its power, because for Anne, it wasn’t just about love, but also about escaping from her horrible family and her limited social circle.
I wouldn’t say that my movie-watching time was a complete waste. The movie brought certain parts of the story to life for me, for which I am grateful. I recommend it for its realistic appearance. However, I advise readers to put a buffer of time between finishing the book and watching the movie, so that the screenwriters’ changes won’t be so glaring.
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