Blink - The Power of Thinking without Thinking - Malcolm Gladwell
Since I had enjoyed The Tipping Point so much I decided to read this other book by the same author. It's an interesting premise, that we can rely on our brain to make quick and reliable decisions for us that are often better than those arrived at through long drawn out reasoning processes. He gives a lot of interesting and convincing examples, but on the whole this book was a little one sided and lacked the depth and breadth of the other one.
This is an interesting book but not something you have to have read.
March 10, 2006
Saturday - Ian McEwan
I really liked Atonement and although I thought the plot was better than in Saturday I still enjoyed this book very much. Not a lot really happens, he more or less descibes a Saturday in the life of a brain surgeon in London but I like his style and he makes the most mundane happenings seem interesting. Ian McEwan is for me the complete opposite of John Banville although there were some similarities in these two books.
It's not quite true that nothing happens, but this book got a lot of publicity because there was a "terrorist act" in it. Well, I wish I hadn't read that because I kept waiting for something awful to happen and there is an incident but it's not nearly as horrible as I expected. This book is defintely a good read.
March 1, 2006
The Sea - John Banville
(I don't know why there is no picture of the cover available.)
I bought this book because it won the Booker Prize in 2005. Maybe some day I'll learn that that isn't necessarily a good reason to read something. In short, I did not enjoy this book, although I did manage to finish it. By accomplishing that feat at least I know the book actually had a plot, however weak.
However, what really annoyed me was the language. It seemed like on every page there were at least two or three words I had never seen before. Where did he find all these strange words? Random example, page 184: "...sitting up in my ornate bed as on a catafalque, if that is the word I want..." (I'm sure I wouldn't know!) and "...in a new and crepitant light..." When reading English (not so much in German) I expect to run across unknown words and sometimes I might even look them up, but I read this mostly at night in bed and had no desire to balance a dictionary on my stomach.
From the back cover: ".... he has a gift for enigmatic clarity." Is that an oxymoron, or what?!? At any rate it makes me think I wasn't the only one to wonder.
February 20, 2006
The Lemon Table - Julian Barnes
I’ve never been a big fan of short stories. Either they are good and over much too quickly, or they are bad and not worth the time spent reading them. Of course there are exceptions and after years of teaching I have a long list of short stories that I really like, but I would never buy a book of them without some compelling reason. As you may have guessed The Lemon Table is a book of short stories and Frank practically insisted that I try them because he had heard such good things about the book. The overall theme of the book is growing old and since I’m just a few months from my 60th birthday it seemed appropriate to see what wisdom I could obtain from the experiences of others. I enjoyed reading them because there is a lot of humor and no silliness.
The first one (“A Short History of Hairdressing”) is about a man getting his hair cut at a barbershop at three different times in his life. It’s amusing to see how his attitude towards different things changes over the years. My favorite story (“Vigilance”) is of a man visiting a concert, or a number of concerts and he becomes increasingly annoyed at the people in the audience. The escalation in the end is a little macabre but very amusing. There is also an interesting story (“The Revival”) about Ivan Turgenev’s last love. It sounds authentic; I wonder how much of it is fiction. In the last story (“The Silence”) he slips into the mind of the eighty-something Sibelius and it is in this story that the meaning of the title of the book becomes clear. The lemon is a Chinese symbol for death and Silbelius has a Stammtisch where he goes regularly to talk about old age and death with his friends. His wife does not approve, nor did she approve of his heavy drinking, but he found comfort evidently in these things. I’m not sure I would recommend this book to young people, although as I mentioned there is a lot of humor in it. Most of the stories are quite good though and more than worth the time it takes to read them.
February 5, 2006
The Broker - John Grisham
I like a good thriller as much as anyone, especially if it’s well written, and as a John le Carré fan I certainly have nothing against spy stories. I particularly liked his cold war novels. There just seemed to be something lacking in some of his later books without George Smiley.
However, I didn’t want to talk about le Carré but rather about John Grisham. I just read his latest book, The Broker. I can’t really call myself a Grisham fan although I have read most of his books. His plots are often a little weak in my estimate and rely too much on convoluted events that are difficult to follow. Or maybe I just don’t have the right kind of mind. One book that I really liked though was The Client and I thought the movie was mighty fine too.
Actually I enjoyed reading The Broker – as long as I was actually reading it. I thought the ending was really lame, so in the end I didn’t like the story as much as I could have. It has the same basic plot weakness as most of his other books. You have to just accept certain things and not consider how illogical or unlikely they are. Of course, the inept president, the corrupt politicians, the evil lawyers, the conniving CIA keeping secrets from the unaware FBI, the really evil red Chinese, the superduper Israeli intelligence agency are such clichés that you hardly notice them. Is this really what Washington and the world are like? If so, let me bury my head a little deeper in the sand.
So what did I like about the book? The whole middle section was about becoming Italian (as a disguise) with all that entails – learning the language, learning to dress fashionably, learning to eat slowly and well, learning to interpret a foreign body language, learning to book into a hotel room without a passport (almost impossible!). Most of this takes place in Bologna and it was interesting enough for me to put Bologna on my list of places to visit. We have spent about 12 weeks in Italy on vacation over a period of many years, but for some reason never visited Bologna. Of course, actually I know the reason. There are so many beautiful and interesting towns in Italy it’s almost impossible to see them all. Still, my interest has been piqued and one of these days I will retrace some of the main character’s steps. Maybe I’ll even put on a straw hat and pull it down to shadow my face and pretend the CIA, the Mossad, the red Chinese and the Saudis are all on my trail and the only thing keeping me alive is my natural talent for deception.
January 26, 2006
The Winds of Change - Martha Grimes
I’ve been a fan of detective stories since I was a child. The first books I remember reading were The Bobbsey Twins. These weren’t actually mystery books, but rather problem solving adventures. I wonder if children still read them. There were 72 books in the series but I outgrew them before I managed to read them all. My mother gave me a Nancy Drew book one year for my birthday, because she had enjoyed the series when she was a girl. The first book came out in 1930 and the series continued for 78 books until 1985. Obviously I didn’t read all of them but I read quite a few. For some reason the title of one in particular has stuck with me - The Whispering Statue. I don’t actually remember what it was about, but it was exciting and a little scary in any case. Later I became an avid Agatha Christy fan and although I wasn’t systematic about it, I expect I did read almost all of her 80 some odd books. I even used one of them several times when I was teaching English in school. There was a simplified version of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd for the tenth grade and I always enjoyed teaching it. Of course, some of the students were terribly put off by it, but you can never please everyone.
Although my tastes have changed quite a bit, I still enjoy a certain kind of mystery or detective novel. My favorites have several things in common. They are a series with the same basic characters in each book, almost always set in England. There is a minimum amount of violence and the characters develop over time. A dab of humor is always welcome. There are several series that fit this description and the latest book I have finished is from one of them.
The Winds of Change is the latest in the Richard Jury series by Martha Grimes. She is a little unusual in that her stories take place in England and are very English in tone and character, but she herself is American and lives in America. I was surprised when I found this out, but it doesn’t bother me because she does a good job of creating atmosphere. Her main character is a Scotland Yard detective who has several demons of his own to contend with, aside from the sometimes horrible cases he has to solve. The subject this time is very dark – child abduction and prostitution. She portrays this realistically, at least as far as I can tell, and at the same time with a lot of sensitivity. There is nothing sensationalist in her story, but there is a lot of sadness. She balances this with several humorous characters and, as in all her books, a young precocious girl who isn’t easily fooled, although she might not understand everything going on around her.
Martha Grimes isn’t my number one favorite author of detective fiction, but she is certainly among the top five and I’m always glad to see another book by her appear.
January 24, 2006
The Tipping Point – How Little Things can make a big Difference - Malcolm Gladwell
I used to read a lot more books than I do now. It’s certainly partly because I spend a lot of time reading things on the internet, but it’s also because I don’t always have anything interesting to read. My favorite authors are just not quick enough. I expect them to come out with a new book in the time it takes me to read their latest. Sadly it doesn’t work that way. And then my tastes have changed. I have enjoyed a number of non-fiction books recently and will look for some more. I have also decided to keep a list of what I read this year, so I don’t forget the good ones and can give them as presents, for example, or at least recommend them to others.
Frank asked for this book for Christmas and I ordered it for him. I didn’t realize he wanted it in English and the title is the same in German, so he got the German translation. I told him I would order the English version (which I have just gotten around to doing) and in the meantime I have read it and been fascinated by it. It’s unusual, or at least not very much like any book I have read recently. It came out in 2000 so it’s probably old hat to readers in America but it was completely unknown to me. The topic is what enables epidemics (in the broadest sense, not just medical) to occur, although he does use a syphilis epidemic in Baltimore as one of his examples.
Without going into the details of how he claims epidemics work – you can read the book if you are interested, let me mention some of the varied phenomena that he explains with his theory. Paul Revere is used as an example of how one person can change the course of history. He was not the only person to ride out that night to warn that the British were coming, but he was the only one people listened and reacted to. There were several reasons for this and they illustrate Gladwell’s theory very well. Another topic he spends quite a bit of time on is the development of Sesame Street and then later Blue’s Clues. My kids grew up with Sesame Street and it was very interesting to learn how the program was conceived and developed. And it was even more interesting to hear how Blue’s Clues proved some of the assumptions Sesame Street was based on to be false. Then in the fashion sector he talks about how Hush Puppies suddenly became all the rage, even without advertising, much to the surprise of the manufacturers who were considering discontinuing the line. Also very interesting is a sudden and long-lasting surge of suicide in Micronesia and what caused it.
However, the areas I found most engrossing had to do with the prevention of crime. He talks about how New York City cleaned up its act in the 90s and the resulting fall in the crime rate. He describes the influence a broken window can have on a housing area or graffiti in the subways on the crime rate. At the end of the book there are two case studies, one about the successful merchandising of Airwalk sport shoes, and more interesting to me, the problem of teenage smoking and why all the campaigns to end it haven’t worked.
There’s a lot of food for thought in this book and a number of suggestions about how to solve some of the problems modern society faces. It might be a good idea to make it required reading for politicians.
January 14, 2006
