"Cloud Atlas", David Mitchell: Connections Through Time and the Ether

This novel by David Mitchell was another one of the "recommended by my dad" series while the missus and I lived in that tiny little back-house in our college town. I bought it in 2004 or '05. It is one I recommend to other folks all the time, recommend to kids who are inspired by my informal lectures about the differences between literature and genre fiction. Not all literature is stuffy fights between dysfunctional families. (Why is that what I think other people think literature is?)

So...Cloud Atlas.

This has been called a "nested puzzle-book" before, and I suppose that is an accurate statement. For anybody wanting a good book to get into, this one here is rewarding and exciting.

It starts out in the 1840s, and you're following a doctor on a whaling vessel, and the language in which it's written is just like it would be from that era. At the bottom of page 46, it stops mid-sentence.

The next section starts and it's presented as a series of letters from a musical conductor living in the 1870s Hapsburg Austria. The letters proceed for another 40 or so pages, until they end, and a section starts where a young lady is reading the letters. Her story is a pulpy '70s style detective story.

In the middle of the action that story stops, and we get the story of an older man who feel he's been wrongly committed to an elder care home. While he's plotting his escape, the story stops and we're sent to the future, where an uprising of the android/clones is beginning.

This sections stops abruptly and we get to a future way after the fall of civilization. This section doesn't end abruptly, it is twice the size as the other parts, and ends regularly. The next section wraps up the futuristic uprising plot, then the story about the man stuck in the home ends, and then the detective story ends and the main character goes back to reading the letters. Then we see the end of that Austrian conductor, and, in his last letter, he claims to have found the other half of the whaling ship novel.

The last section is the end of that storyline.

This novel has a direct influence on the novel I'm finishing the first draft of now, and I realized it after I excitedly watched the trailer.

That's right, this book is getting a big Hollywood treatment, and by the Wachowski Brothers (makers of the Matrix) to boot. Here's a link to the extended trailer on Youtube.

This book is just fun.

"Nobody Move", Denis Johnson: Easy Does It?

This is one of Denis Johnson's newest novels, being published in 2009. Johnson's one of my favorite authors, and a guy I try to emulate.

I bought it at the Barnes and Nobles across the way from the Union Square one Wednesday afternoon working for the dairy company.

It seemed like a pair of my authors were publishing books at the same time that were in the same vein. This entry from Johnson, and Inherent Vice from Pynchon, were those specific writers' feelings on genre fiction. Inherent Vice is Pynchon's play at detective novel, and this tiny tome is Johnson playing with a quick pulp crime novel.

This is a quick read. And by "quick", I mean it's like cotton candy and can be sped through in a long afternoon if you so desired. I liked it, but it didn't make me think of Denis Johnson inherently. It was generic for all I could tell.

Inherent Vice, which will be here someday, was at least noticeably Pynchon's work.

The title of this book comes from a line from a song that comes in over the radio during an early scene: "Nobody move--nobody get's hurt." The novel claims it comes from a reggae song, but I know it from somewhere else, an Eazy E song from the album "Eazy Duz It".

"A People's History of the United States", Howard Zinn: The Zinn Master

First, let me say that I know I don't have too many readers for this autobiographical blog about my library. And secondly, I apologize for the lagging...I went away to help my brother's wedding, and then I came back and broke my leg, which has left me laid up and less motivated to work on my peripheral blogs.

But this is one of my favorites, so I couldn't stay away for too long.

And, this book, Howard Zinn's must-read history told from the point-of-view of the losers, A People's History of the United States, is one of my favorite books. I bought this myself in 2004 sometime, and I'm pretty sure I bought a few copies, with the others going to close friends. It's an updated version that has the 2000 election and the War on Terror, going up to 2002.

Any honest history class should have this book, or sections of this book as needed for counter points. See how Columbus slaughtered the Arawak of Cuba, effectively exterminating them. See how the native opposition to the government worked on the ground. See how...well, let's just say this is an angry book.

Conservative pundits decry it as liberal revisionist history, but the facts of history tend to be ugly and wart covered. Sometimes it's just a point of view. Two of my favorite lines in the book are the opening lines from the chapter on the Vietnam conflict:

"From 1964 to 1972, the wealthiest and most powerful nation in the history of the world made a maximum military effort, with everything short of atomic bombs, to defeat a nationalist revolutionary movement in a tiny, peasant country---and failed. When the United States fought in Vietnam, it was organized modern technology versus organized human beings, and the human beings won." (Page 469)

That chapter went goes on to discuss how the Vietnamese were a pain in the butthole for the Japanese, who occupied them during WWII, then, after the end of that mega-war, how the Vietnamese were a pain in the butthole for the French (but also from before the Japanese as well as after), and about how they declared independence and had a constitution and were supported by the US. Until they decided to adopt a more socialist government structure.

That whole scenario got me a little obsessed with Vietnam for a while. All they wanted was independence, from the 1880s on, and fought for it that whole time. They fought China, they fought France, they fought Japan, they fought France again, and then they pushed us out.

In any case, if you want to get angry and feel like you're getting the whole story, this is the book for you. If you want a spike in your blood pressure, this is the book for you. Honestly, I can't read it from cover to cover like I would other books...it angers up the blood.

Howard Zinn, late as of 2010, inspired a slew of "People's History" books, written by experts in certain fields, all collaborated with the Zinn master and covering a wide range of topics. An example I have that'll show up here at some point is Dave Zirin's People's History of Sports.

I like Dave Zirin, and another one his other books that I have, Bad Sports, is another tough, blood-angering tome.

Wordsworth, Coleridge, Melville: Lines Composed Above the Bluffs of Long Beach

Apologizing for the time off, even though there aren't too many readers, I'm guessing. But here I am and here we are and here are a pair of books that come to you by way of a class I had during my senior year of college. I wrote about that class already, in maybe my favorite post from this site as of yet.

But there were other inspirational moments from that English class.

Our teacher provided us with the cheapest editions around, a topic I touched on in the linked post above. In the Melville book we only read "Bartleby".

Now, I'm having a hard time remembering having read the entire story, or novella, because I don't think I did. I do have a pretty firm grasp of what happens in it, because I was somehow focused in class long enough to listen to the lectures.

By the time you're a senior in college, I guess, you've figured the way to pass most classes is to just listen to the teacher and regurgitate the stuff they say onto tests. But I've always felt like going back and experiencing the story for myself.

Bartleby is the name of a guy, a scrivener in the story. The narrator is an old man who runs an agency that employs scriveners. In the time before photocopying, people with good penmanship, low occupational opportunities, and a high threshold for boredom could become scriveners--workers who spend all day copying legal documents and the like.

It was one of the tragic ironic jobs--a writer, for all intents and purposes, but one who never writes anything of their own creation, at least while on the job.

Bartleby, though, not long after getting hired, begins to show up for work but, upon being new assignments, protest to the narrator "I prefer not to." This confounds the narrator/business owner, but he keeps Bartleby employed. "I prefer not to." "I prefer not to..." it becomes something of a mantra and bonds the narrator to Bartleby.

I won't say anything else really, because that's almost all I remember from the lectures. But I would like to check it out again. Melville was way ahead of his time...

We also touched on the Romantics, the biggies anyway, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats...I was able to feel Wordsworth, and even went up to an old dorm hangout one day during this quarter and sat and tried to fashion my own facsimile of "Tintern Abbey..." set of lines, although mine's prose.

I respected Coleridge's wasted talent (pfff, junkies), and liked the stuff he actually finished and it's far out zaniness.

Keats, well, Keats was ultimately the heavyweight, if I remember correctly, having come in a world where Wordsworth and Coleridge were already well known. Too bad he died of tuberculosis when he was 26.

It may have been because of the later timing of the material's lectures, and a serious senioritis-fueled bender, but I don't remember too much of the Keats lessons, besides the names of some of his famous odes, like the Grecian Urn and the Nightingale.

Which is too bad. It's something else on the list of things to get back to. That whole "get back to old things" activity has actually been started, using a book from this exact class, but not one I've talked here yet about.

Uh...okay, so that's how that is...

I do, still today, have a soft spot for that stuff I wrote that day up in the dorm area of campus, aping Wordsworth. It needs a quick edit, and then it'll be even better. I usually resist editing certain things, wanting to keep them captured with all their flaws still speaking to my flaws. Sometimes, though, I have the urge to make one break through, speak to something human, something true...you know, become art...

Shakespeare and Poe: Necessary Library Staples

These two works, the complete Works of Shakespeare, and the complete works of Eddie Poe of Baltimore, are two things that when I was younger I figured any self-respecting library would have to have.

Is that still the case? Or, rather the question might be, do I still feel that way? Uh, sure. I've dragged these two volumes with me everywhere since leaving Sacramento in the summer of 2000. The Shakespeare book was my dad's, I'm fairly certain, and I snatched it up when I was ready to move back to San Luis. Those books, "the complete Shakespeare", tend to be affordable and easily found in either used book stores or in new volumes at discounted prices at major chain stores...

...Which is how I acquired the Poe volume. I try not to do that anymore, really, buying copies of classic books from big-box-bookstores that have printed the classics themselves--that's really a double whammy attack on the publishing industry: paying big-box booksellers besides indie bookstores as well as not paying a separate publishing house.

In the Poe volume I've read "The Maelstrom" and "The Tell Tale Heart". In the Shakespeare collection I don't think I've read any of the selections. I've used sonnets before for projects, and read a smattering of plays for pleasure and school--"The Merchant of Venice", "Othello", "Hamlet", "A Midsummer Night's Dream", but never from this volume. I used to have a Shakespeare'S Sonnets book, and had other items for each of the plays I read.

It was still important for me to stock both of these books.

The First of the Frank Burly Books

These are the first two books in John Swartzwelder's Frank Burly series. They're Swartzwelder's first and third books, sandwiched around the cowboy story Double Wonderful. He's up to 8 as of 2011, each as great as these two, I'm imagining.

Frank Burly is a private detective who's real name is never revealed in these first two books, and who chose "Frank" and "Burly" as names because that was how he aspired to act.

John Swarztwelder is the most prolific writer of The Simpsons, having penned--according to the cover--59 episodes. I've heard him described as a first draft machine. The tone of many of the most beloved early episodes can be attributed to his world vision. That all becomes clear after reading these books.

These are two of the funniest books I've ever read. Well, make that the two funniest books I've ever read. They are really full of laugh-out-loud material, which, for someone who reads Gilbert Ryle and Thomas Pynchon for pleasure, has to mean something.

After hearing about the books while listening to the commentaries on the Simpson DVDs, I found them on Amazon.com and ordered them one at a time from there.

If you like The Simpsons, you must read these books, and frankly, everything by John Swartzwelder. You'll be better for it.

Humor writing is difficult, very difficult, and there are a few of the "famous" humor writers that are pretty good and show up in the New Yorker's "Shouts and Murmurs" feature. They're all right. The two best for my money are John Swartzwelder and an old friend of mine (who's material is very hard to come by) named Pat Yamamoto.

These are two of my favorite books ever.

"Picasso at the Lapin Agile", Steve Martin: "...Comes From the Future..." "Wrong!"

This is one of my favorite books in my library. I bought it while I was living in San Luis Obispo and saw some show late at night about Steve Martin, the comedian, movie star, and writer. Martin got a degree in Philosophy, which made his transition to night-club hopping comedian pretty easy.

They mentioned this book during the program--I don't remember what it was--and I went out and bought it pretty much the next day.

Picasso at the Lapin Agile is a collection of plays that Martin wrote, and my favorite--and the reason I bought the book--is the eponymous "Picasso at the Lapin Agile".

The Lapin Agile is the name of a bar in Paris that Pablo Picasso would frequent. During the actual time that Pablo was living in Paris another titan of the twentieth century had also visited the City of Light: Albert Einstein.

Both men would have been young and both not yet presented the world with their momentous ideas: for Picasso it was Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) and for Einstein it was his theory of Special Relativity esposed in his Annus Miribilus papers (1905). The play is an imagined meeting of the two most important men of the twentieth century in their respective fields.

The two guys meet at the Lapin Agile, shoot the breeze as only two geniuses can, and we even see Einstein correcting Picasso on his theory of what I call the Ganzebilde. The men don't know each other before, and a future meeting is unlikely, but their time spent together has left an indelible mark on one another.

Steve Martin, a noted art collector, let his feelings about which was more important be known with the title of the play, and eventually, the book. Eh, maybe not..."Picasso at the Lapin Agile" sounds better than "Einstein at the Lapin Agile", and in the play the bar is Pablo's hangout, and Albert does get the last word in their competing theories of the nature of the cosmos...

In any case, the copy of the book has a picture from one of the first productions of the play, and the great casting allows us to imagine how the scene could have looked:

Now, this meeting may never have happened. In fact, it likely didn't. But, in the realm of crazy science guy hanging out with crazy thinky art guy, I have the great pleasure of announcing that such a meeting did happen, and it blossomed into friendship.

Here, the science guy was more of a mad scientist and has actually been labeled the Father of the Twentieth Century, and the thinky art guy was actually a writer, one of  America's most beloved:

Oh yeah, man, that's Nikola Tesla and Mark Twain. That'd be a hell of an evening.