PC Reading List

The book got me to thinking about a number of different things, and I wrote a review of it for the really cool new online lit mag Sloth Jockey.  There were a lot of things I could have included in the review, but didn’t want it to get too long for people to read (or for the editor to include).

One of the things that I had to leave out was the fascinating idea of H. H. Holmes, the serial killer whose story is one of the two main threads in the book, as a harvester of body parts.  Sometimes, I think we like to think of questions of harvesting organs and/or DNA as a new ethical dilemma brought about by the great strides we’ve made in medical technology in recent years.  That’s true, to an extent.  But I think it is easy to overlook that the progress has been strides, and not leaps.  There is a flow to the technology that has developed, and the ethical questions that are raised by the advances in technology don’t sit in a vacuum. Rather, these advances have taken place slowly over time, and the ethical questions have been there throughout that time.

When H. H. Holmes and that other famous murderer across the Pond were doing their gruesome dissections, it was only a relatively short time after the writing of Frankenstein, another book which considers ethical questions which might seem to be a bit  ahead of their time.    For me, one of the beauties of Larson’s narrative is that it gives some perspective about where we sit in the whole scheme of this flow of progress — and that this place is not really so unique (and exciting) as we might like to think.

And of course, the presentation of the attitudes toward progress that were largely held in Chicago — and the whole nation — at the time is pretty depressing.  Hubris sticks so close to humans that you might think of it as a faithful companion.  Too bad it’s the sort of companion that might be said to corrupt good morals.

I enjoyed Holt’s treatment not only of how Vikings might move about in today’s world, but also at how the world of Vikings and of today might not be so different after all.  That made for a very entertaining read, actually.  And of course, the connection (or the discontinuity in our minds) between technology and magic is always fun to consider.  I liked how Holt handled that in such a lighthearted fashion in the book.

This is one of those novels I picked up cheap somewhere at some library sale or another.  It was worth the small amount I paid for it, and also the time invested in reading.  It might not be the most brilliant book ever written, but it was fun all the same.

I’m not entirely surprised to hear this.

Probably the thing that was most troubling to me during the reading process was the uncertainty about who was narrating the tale.  At the end of nearly every chapter, there was an address to Palicrovol.  This is an example of one such address, from one of the book’s early chapters:

Ah, Palicrovol, will you not learn that mercy is as good as the person to whom the mercy is given? You spared Asineth, who should have died; now you will not spare Orem Scanthips, called Banningside, whose good heart should be born a hundred thousand times upon the earth. Are you like Asineth? Will you learn all your lessons backward?

  The problem that these addresses create is that it is hard to tell, throughout most of the book, who is actually making these addresses.  Who is telling us the story?  While it is not too difficult to hazard a guess (there are clues early on), there is enough about these addresses that are accusing that it becomes a little distracting.  To make matters more difficult,  there are often mentioned, in these addresses, events to which we are not yet privy.  That is a nice sort of foreshadowing, on the one hand, but it can begin to wear the reader down just a little.  And of course, about halfway through the novel we realize that our narrator is not even telling us events witnessed first hand, at least for much of the time.  Rather, many of the events are being retold by the narrator, relating tales told by Orem.   The question of the reliability of the narrator, then, has to be gnawing at the back of the reader’s brain.

What these addresses do manage to do is to show us, all along, that the character we are made to sympathize with, Orem, is going to be in imminent danger when we reach the end of the narrative.  That is actually a very nice effect.  What is more troubling, though, is that the danger (and, to a lesser degree, the build up of tension) is never quite resolved.   We are left with a big question mark at the end.  That doesn’t bother me too much, really.  In fact, I kind of like the lack of clear answer that we have, because it perhaps warns us that we’ve been looking at the wrong question.  What I like less, though, is the feeling at the end of the book that we’ve also been watching the wrong career, and that Palicrovol is the one we should have cared about (even though the narrative doesn’t allow us to, really).  That part is rather troubling, and the lack of resolution in the only life story that we can really care about in the book leaves me a little frustrated.

In fact, it makes me feel rather depressed, and that the book ends on a pessimistic note.  That is sad, in one sense, because there is a potentially beautiful and profound message to the lack of resolution.  However, it misses the mark, for me, not because of the ambiguity, but because of the complete lack of empathy I feel for the character who the story has, at the end of the day, “been all about.”

On the other hand, if one is to take the ending to mean that we are all, in one sense, Palicrovol, reading the Orem story with some hope that we will begin to sympathize with him, then the book seems to work very well.  One way or another, Orem is the character to sympathize with, and finding out at the end that he is simply a footnote in Palicrovol’s story leaves me a little unsatisfied.

One of the places where I’d hope to see more participation is on my entry calling for suggestions of books that offer good reads about a particular place.  I’ve made two such entries, one filled with books about Singapore and the other with books about Shanghai.  If you have found some good books that speak well to a specific place, post a review, drop me a comment at the new blog, and I will add you to the index.

Hope to see you there!

I have read several novels by the Waugh brothers, this one just being the latest in a line of their novels that I’ve read over the years.  I don’t often love their books, but there generally is enough there to make them interesting enough to read.  There usually will be something worth further thought somewhere on the pages of the books.

One of the things I always enjoy is reading about the places that Waugh (whichever brothers novel I happen to be reading at the time) traveled, and seeing those places through such different eyes than what we might today.  The attitudes of colonialism are so prevalent on the pages, even when those attitudes are being mocked, that it is well worth reading novels by the Waugh brothers just to gain a better understanding of an age now past.  One of the first stories I ever picked up by the Waugh brothers was Alec’s The Fatal Game.  I bought it simply because it was set in Dominica, and so few books ever are.  Having spent some time there myself as a teenager, this intrigued me.  It was interesting, in that book, to see how different some things are today (or, rather, 15 years ago, when I was last in Dominica), and yet how much things never really change.

A Handful of Dust is well worth the time it takes to read.  It is easily read, and it is engaging.  It has been a fun read for me.

I can’t help it.  I posted this on my High Fidelity blog, which is made up entirely of top five lists.  It was fun.  So I am reposting it here.

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5.  Jacques Derrida — I was surprised by just how many of his books I have; if I included books about him, he’d probably move up on the list

4.  William Shakespeare — as above, if I counted books about him and his works, he’d move up, quite possibly to the top of the list

3.  George MacDonald — loads and loads of great fiction

2.  Diana Wynne Jones — it was close, but I think she  was just edged out

1.  C. S. Lewis — with both fiction and nonfiction in, he takes it by a nose; his nonfiction really put him over the edge, considering that my interests so thoroughly overlap with his, apparently

To make this list, a author has to be (or have been) very prolific, and I have to like a lot of what s/he has written.  There were other authors who came close, but didn’t quite match these five — J. R. R. Tolkien and Ursula Le Guin were probably the closest.  Douglas Adams, J. K. Rowling, Charles Williams, and Geraldine Harris would certainly have made the list if they had written in larger quantities.  Ellen Gunderson Traylor comes near making the list just because she has written so much and I like her novels reasonably well.  Other near misses include Francis Schaffer, Jean Paul Sartre, and G. K. Chesterton.  Given a few more years, I think Jasper Fforde is a sure thing.

I am reposting this from my blog where I often muse about the whole genre of the fantastic

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I made some predictions on [this] blog about how I thought the  7th Harry Potter book should go to wrap things up, and so here I am to discuss how close or far from the mark my predictions hit.

The one that I felt I hit spot on was Snape.  I knew it had to go this way, but I have to give Rowling a whole lot of credit for keeping the suspense going as long as she could on this question.  It was, in my estimation, the best handled of the 3 things I’d made predictions on.  The whole ending to the Snape thread of the story was very, very well done.  I had not thought of the use of the Patronus or the Pensieve, but they were both perfect touches.  I liked the name of the 2nd son too.  Nice.

I was a little off the mark with the does-Harry-die question, but also sort of on the mark too.  I said he had to die (and he did), but also that I didn’t think and author would quite dare to depart from the Hollywood ending these days (and she didn’t).  For me, this was a bit disappointing.  I liked it all the way up to the 19 years later.  I mean, for all that I liked the name of the 2nd son, I’d rather not have seen the whole tidy, suburban family ending.  Though I suspect I know a couple of boys who are going to find great satisfaction in this ending when they are old enough to read the story themselves.  I think I will let that be the thing that makes the ending satisfying for me.  Otherwise, it was an anticlimax and, in that sense, disappointing.

Where Rowling never disappoints is that she makes you care about the characters.  She just has a knack for that, and is an incredible story teller.  You even have a bit of a soft spot for the Malfoys, at last, don’t you?  I would still, though, liked to have seen my version of the ending. I thought that Draco might get to play a part in destroying the diadem, thus uniting the houses.  I still think incorporating him in the saving the day would’ve helped to make for a less polarized world, which I thought was part of the goal all along.  But this seemed to be overlooked in the writing altogether, and is probably the point that disappointed me most.  I would’ve liked that to be a part of it.

But, when all is said and done, I have enjoyed the series immensely.  Watching the unfolding of the story has been great fun.  I don’t know when I have ever looked forward to a book’s release with quite the same sort of innocent anticipation as I have with this one.  And, even though I’ve used the word “disappointed” above, I really wasn’t.  It’s been a fun read.

Well, I’ve decided to try doing that on one of my other reading blogs.  I don’t know how long it’ll last, or how it will go, but it is going to be fun to see.