Introduction:
This, my fifteenth reading list on this blog, is evenly divided between works of fiction and non-fiction; there are five books in each category. The most interesting of the works of fiction is The Reluctant Fundamentalist. The most rewarding of the non-fiction books is The Best American Essays 2004. The Elements of Style, a book with which I’ve been familiar since college days, is the most useful to writers – including writers who wish to post to Knight’s Castle. Also on the list is another of David A. Drake’s Lord of the Isles novels, the fifth of that ilk. The seventeenth book featuring Elizabeth Peters’ irritating Egyptologist and sleuth, Amelia Peabody, is here, too, along with another travel book from Bill Bryson, and several Best American books. I have not provided reviews or comments on all ten books.
Reading List:
Bryson, Bill. Notes from a Small Island.
Carroll, James. House of War.
Drake, David. Goddess of the Ice Realm.
Ellroy, James, editor. The Best American Mystery Stories 2002.
Hamid, Mohsin. The Reluctant Fundamentalist.
Menand, Louis, editor. The Best American Essays 2004.
Miller, Sue, editor. The Best American Short Stories 2002.
Mladjenovic, Paul. Stock Investing for Dummies, 2nd edition.
Peters, Elizabeth. The Serpent on the Crown.
Strunk, William, and E. B. White. The Elements of Style.
Non-Fiction:
Bryson, Bill. Notes from a Small Island. New York: Harper Perennial, 2001. Copyright 1995. 324 pages. Glossary.
Bill Bryson worked and lived for twenty years in England. This book was his farewell to the island, chronicling his farewell tour. There are many flashbacks to his earlier encounters with the places and people of his “small island.” Bryson’s tales are humorous, but his affection for England and the English shines through, however irritating he finds some of their incomprehensible habits. For those thinking of a trip to England, this book includes some less well-known corners of that “sceptered isle.”
Carroll, James. House of War. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2006. xiv + 657 pages. Acknowledgments. Notes. Bibliography. Index.
Carroll was involved with the Pentagon and its doings both personally and politically since his birth at the time the building was dedicated. His father, a former FBI official, was brought in to create the Air Force Office of Special Investigations and rose to the rank of Lieutenant General. Carroll himself was in the anti-war movement, Catholic sub-division, and has much to say about the evils of the building. This ought to have been a fascinating book, but Carroll’s deep personal attachments, and conflicts, get in the way of his writing skills. For one thing, his obvious affection for the Berrigan brothers leads him to exaggerate their importance in American political life. For another, he apparently took those elementary school air raid drills a little too seriously; his terror and abhorrence of nuclear war carries him away into flights of fancy about the cloud of fear looming over America.
Perhaps most damaging to this book is that, due in large part to his conflicted relationship with his father, Carroll takes the whole of American defense policy as a personal affront to him. Reversing the same coin, he imagines that his personal feelings matter because his teen-age angst was about nuclear war, rather than acne. This would have been a better book, and a much shorter one, if Carroll had written a history instead of a memoir.
Menand, Louis, editor. The Best American Essays 2004. New York: Scribners, 2004. xviii + 323 pages.
If you’d like to write better essays, one of your best options is to read some good ones. Even if you don’t want to write, a well-written essay is a real pleasure to read. I’ve enjoyed the essays of Carl Sagan, Stephen Jay Gould, and others, but The Best American Essays 2004 (or any other year) has the advantage of collecting essays by a number of different authors, published in different markets (though The New Yorker is a popular venue), on widely varied topics. A terrific sampling of good writers writing well.
Mladjenovic, Paul. Stock Investing for Dummies, 2nd edition. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Publishing, Inc., 2006. xx + 336 pages. Index.
Now might be a good time to read up on when you might want to start investing again. We might be near the bottom of this market! And we might be near the beginning of a great bear market. At the very least, this book may help you to decide that you don’t know nearly enough to risk your money on Wall Street.
Strunk, William, and E. B. White. The Elements of Style, 3rd edition. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1979. xvii + 92 pages. Index.
The little book is still going strong! I got my first copy when I was a freshman at Macalester College, and I picked up my current copy at the bookstore at Pikes Peak Community College. For the writer, the aspiring writer, and particularly for the writer whose education has left him unsure of the proper usage of the objective case, The Elements of Style is a great, short guide.
Fiction:
Drake, David. Goddess of the Ice Realm. New York: Tom Doherty Associates, 2003. A Tor Book. 496 pages. The sequel to Mistress of the Catacombs.
Ellroy, James, editor. The Best American Mystery Stories 2002. New York: Scribner’s, 2002. xv + 405 pages.
Hamid, Mohsin. The Reluctant Fundamentalist. 2007. 184 pages.
This is an odd little book, and very affecting. It is in the form of a one-sided conversation between a Pakistani intellectual, who may or may not be a terrorist, and an American, who may or may not be an intelligence agent. That is, we read everything the Pakistani says, but we must surmise the content of the American’s comments and questions that lead our “reluctant fundamentalist” to give the responses he does. This is a portrait of a man who knows America well and feels that America has rejected him because of his religion and his culture. This is not an explanation of anti-Americanism so much as an explanation of why many Muslims find that America reacts to them as an individual might react to a foreign body – a mutual rejection, damaging to both participants.
Miller, Sue, editor. The Best American Short Stories 2002. New York: Scribner’s, 2002. xviii + 375 pages.
Peters, Elizabeth. The Serpent on the Crown. New York: William Morrow, 2005. 350 pages.
My wife really enjoys Elizabeth Peters, whose Amelia Peabody novels are set in Egypt in the days of British domination. The seventeenth in the series brings us up to 1922, but Amelia is still overbearing, opinionated, nosy, and humorless. Oddly enough, I don’t find her a sympathetic narrator, or a trustworthy one.
Glenn A Knight
In my study
Showing posts with label essays. Show all posts
Showing posts with label essays. Show all posts
Sunday, December 7, 2008
Wednesday, October 8, 2008
Knight's Reading List VII: July 2007
Knight’s Reading List VII: July 2007
Now that I’ve posted a reading list – see “Knight’s Reading List VI: June 2007” posted October 6, 2008 – I keep thinking how long ago I read those books. I feel the need to bring things closer to the present, to my present concerns and what I’ve been reading lately. In part, I think this may be helpful to those who read my other contributions to this blog, by letting them know more about my sources and inspirations.
In July 2007 I finished seven books. One of them had been “in the works” for a couple of years. Several were books about Al-Qaeda and the war in Iraq that I read while traveling in the Pacific Northwest. One was a mediocre historical novel set in Byzantium. This was, perhaps, an odd mix.
1 July: Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays of Montaigne, translated by Donald Frame. 1958. xxiii + 883 pages, including Index. I began reading this book in 2004 or early 2005, and started up again in July 2005. It took me an incredibly long time to read Montaigne, particularly as I enjoyed the essays greatly while reading them. The very richness of the essays was part of the problem I had; the classical allusions alone in some of the essays would give me material for reflection for days. Montaigne sends one scurrying off to Ovid’s Metamorphoses or Plutarch’s Lives, just to find out the meaning of some intriguing passage. There is in these essays a model for the would-be essayist, as well as reflections upon many affairs of interest. The man was his work, and the work is the man, and many will find Montaigne a good companion.
4 July: H. N. Turtletaub, Justinian. 1998. 511 pages. I began reading on 12 May 2008. I had read a number of books by Harry Turtledove, who writes alternate universe science fiction. He is workmanlike, but he is, if anything, too prolific. He spreads himself and his subject matter a bit thin at times. This historical novel was readable. Compared to Gore Vidal, however, Turtletaub is crude and amateurish at his task.
7 July: Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower. 2006. 470 pages. I began reading it on 7 June 2008. This is a sinister book. It starts with Said Qutb, the Egyptian Islamist who visited the United States back in the 1950s, and went back to Cairo determined to reject the materialist ways of the West. It picks up with the Egyptian Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, and it comes, eventually, to Osama bin Laden himself. Part biography, part the history of a political movement, The Looming Tower doesn’t really explain why bin Laden became the head of Al Qaeda, or how it works, but it provides a lot of interesting insights into the revolutionary as capitalist manqué. I found that my concept of how the U.S. and the West could deal with the challenge of Islam challenged by the complex implications of Wright’s description of this multi-faceted movement.
13 July: Thomas Ricks, Fiasco. 2006. xiv + 482 pages, including Notes, Acknowledgements and Index. I began this one on 2 July 2007. As you can tell, Fiasco was a pretty fast read. Ricks is a reporter for the Washington Post, and he got to meet a lot of people, both in Washington and in Iraq. This is almost as high-level as Bob Woodward’s book, and gives one the same sense that a lot of the people charged with setting Iraq policy either didn’t know what they were doing, are were so encumbered by ideological blinders that they couldn’t bring themselves to do what needed to be done. I have the feeling that instant history of this sort will be supplanted, one day, by more thoughtful histories, which may, however, lose a lot of the atmosphere.
15 July: Bob Woodward, State of Denial. 2006. xiv + 560 pages, including Sources and Index. I began reading this on 4 July 2007. This is the third of Woodward’s books on the post 911 military actions of the U.S. Government. I intentionally read the first two – Bush at War and Plan of Attack before tackling State of Denial. My main reason for that choice was that I read in many reviews, favorable and unfavorable, from the right and from the left, that Woodward in this book “turned on” George W. Bush. (I finished Bush at War in October 2006, and Plan of Attack in November, so it took me a while to execute my program.) I don’t think Woodward changed at all. A lot of comments in the earlier books sounded like compliments as long as everything was going well; once the war turned sour, the same kinds of comments seemed uncomplimentary. Woodward’s technique is much like Ricks’, or any good reporter: He talks to a lot of people, records what they say, and then collates all of these interviews into a picture. That picture becomes grimmer and grimmer in the course of State of Denial, but I don’t think that Woodward was cooking the books. Like a good camera, he was presenting what he saw, and what he saw no longer made the White House look good.
19 July: Deborah J. Bennett, Logic Made Easy. 2004. 256 pages, including Notes, References and Index. I began this book on 4 July 2007. I’ve read quite a few books on logic, some more academic than others. I’m not sure where Deborah J. Bennett goes wrong, but this is less engaging than the ultimate dry logic book, W. V. Quine’s Elementary Logic. I don’t recommend this one. Not at all. Nope.
24 July: Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Imperial Life in the Emerald City. 2006. 320 pages. I started reading this on 10 July 2007. This is most enjoyable of the several Iraq books I read during this period. The “emerald city” of the title is a play on the “Green Zone” in Baghdad, and the resemblance to Oz is not accidental. An American outpost in a Muslim country where pork chops, bacon, ham, and hot dogs were served in huge quantities by the Muslim kitchen staff, the Green Zone had very little connection to the real world, and most of the people there treated it entirely as a way station en route to their next assignment in the States. Chandrasekaran, who, like Dexter Filkins of the New York Times, lived outside the Green Zone, tries to focus on the contrast between what was happening in the real Iraq, and the perceptions inside the hothouse atmosphere of the Pentagon’s Middle Eastern branch.
Now that I’ve posted a reading list – see “Knight’s Reading List VI: June 2007” posted October 6, 2008 – I keep thinking how long ago I read those books. I feel the need to bring things closer to the present, to my present concerns and what I’ve been reading lately. In part, I think this may be helpful to those who read my other contributions to this blog, by letting them know more about my sources and inspirations.
In July 2007 I finished seven books. One of them had been “in the works” for a couple of years. Several were books about Al-Qaeda and the war in Iraq that I read while traveling in the Pacific Northwest. One was a mediocre historical novel set in Byzantium. This was, perhaps, an odd mix.
1 July: Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays of Montaigne, translated by Donald Frame. 1958. xxiii + 883 pages, including Index. I began reading this book in 2004 or early 2005, and started up again in July 2005. It took me an incredibly long time to read Montaigne, particularly as I enjoyed the essays greatly while reading them. The very richness of the essays was part of the problem I had; the classical allusions alone in some of the essays would give me material for reflection for days. Montaigne sends one scurrying off to Ovid’s Metamorphoses or Plutarch’s Lives, just to find out the meaning of some intriguing passage. There is in these essays a model for the would-be essayist, as well as reflections upon many affairs of interest. The man was his work, and the work is the man, and many will find Montaigne a good companion.
4 July: H. N. Turtletaub, Justinian. 1998. 511 pages. I began reading on 12 May 2008. I had read a number of books by Harry Turtledove, who writes alternate universe science fiction. He is workmanlike, but he is, if anything, too prolific. He spreads himself and his subject matter a bit thin at times. This historical novel was readable. Compared to Gore Vidal, however, Turtletaub is crude and amateurish at his task.
7 July: Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower. 2006. 470 pages. I began reading it on 7 June 2008. This is a sinister book. It starts with Said Qutb, the Egyptian Islamist who visited the United States back in the 1950s, and went back to Cairo determined to reject the materialist ways of the West. It picks up with the Egyptian Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, and it comes, eventually, to Osama bin Laden himself. Part biography, part the history of a political movement, The Looming Tower doesn’t really explain why bin Laden became the head of Al Qaeda, or how it works, but it provides a lot of interesting insights into the revolutionary as capitalist manqué. I found that my concept of how the U.S. and the West could deal with the challenge of Islam challenged by the complex implications of Wright’s description of this multi-faceted movement.
13 July: Thomas Ricks, Fiasco. 2006. xiv + 482 pages, including Notes, Acknowledgements and Index. I began this one on 2 July 2007. As you can tell, Fiasco was a pretty fast read. Ricks is a reporter for the Washington Post, and he got to meet a lot of people, both in Washington and in Iraq. This is almost as high-level as Bob Woodward’s book, and gives one the same sense that a lot of the people charged with setting Iraq policy either didn’t know what they were doing, are were so encumbered by ideological blinders that they couldn’t bring themselves to do what needed to be done. I have the feeling that instant history of this sort will be supplanted, one day, by more thoughtful histories, which may, however, lose a lot of the atmosphere.
15 July: Bob Woodward, State of Denial. 2006. xiv + 560 pages, including Sources and Index. I began reading this on 4 July 2007. This is the third of Woodward’s books on the post 911 military actions of the U.S. Government. I intentionally read the first two – Bush at War and Plan of Attack before tackling State of Denial. My main reason for that choice was that I read in many reviews, favorable and unfavorable, from the right and from the left, that Woodward in this book “turned on” George W. Bush. (I finished Bush at War in October 2006, and Plan of Attack in November, so it took me a while to execute my program.) I don’t think Woodward changed at all. A lot of comments in the earlier books sounded like compliments as long as everything was going well; once the war turned sour, the same kinds of comments seemed uncomplimentary. Woodward’s technique is much like Ricks’, or any good reporter: He talks to a lot of people, records what they say, and then collates all of these interviews into a picture. That picture becomes grimmer and grimmer in the course of State of Denial, but I don’t think that Woodward was cooking the books. Like a good camera, he was presenting what he saw, and what he saw no longer made the White House look good.
19 July: Deborah J. Bennett, Logic Made Easy. 2004. 256 pages, including Notes, References and Index. I began this book on 4 July 2007. I’ve read quite a few books on logic, some more academic than others. I’m not sure where Deborah J. Bennett goes wrong, but this is less engaging than the ultimate dry logic book, W. V. Quine’s Elementary Logic. I don’t recommend this one. Not at all. Nope.
24 July: Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Imperial Life in the Emerald City. 2006. 320 pages. I started reading this on 10 July 2007. This is most enjoyable of the several Iraq books I read during this period. The “emerald city” of the title is a play on the “Green Zone” in Baghdad, and the resemblance to Oz is not accidental. An American outpost in a Muslim country where pork chops, bacon, ham, and hot dogs were served in huge quantities by the Muslim kitchen staff, the Green Zone had very little connection to the real world, and most of the people there treated it entirely as a way station en route to their next assignment in the States. Chandrasekaran, who, like Dexter Filkins of the New York Times, lived outside the Green Zone, tries to focus on the contrast between what was happening in the real Iraq, and the perceptions inside the hothouse atmosphere of the Pentagon’s Middle Eastern branch.
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