My Take: The things we do for those we love. When my future wife told me that “Gone With The Wind” was her favourite book, I thought the only appropriate thing to do was to head out and grab a copy as quickly as possible for my own consumption. Usually epics, especially those featuring ‘strong’ heroines, aren’t my style and as a result, I hadn’t even seen the iconic movie before being guided to the book by love. But “Gone With The Wind” did win the Pulitzer Prize in 1937 and has managed to sell more than 30 million copies to date, so I figured it must have something going for it.

And it does. To an extent. I’m glad to have invested the time to read GWTW and not just for reasons of domestic harmony. Margaret Mead has crafted an extraordinarily meticulous portrait of late 19^th Century life in the US South in GWTW based largely on the first hand accounts she heard from relatives as a child. To the extent that you can ever trust accounts like this, I learnt a lot from the sheer volume of detail that Mead packs into GWTW. So I felt like I got something out of the book there.

That being said, you don’t read GWTW for a history lesson. Most readers who are drawn to this book pick it for the grand sweep of its narrative and its iconic characters. It’s here that I part from the consensus (and the views of my better half). Margaret Mead has described the main theme of the book as ‘survival’:

“…what makes some people able to come through catastrophes and others, apparently just as able, strong and brave, go under? It happens in every upheaval. Some people survive; others don’t. What qualities are in those who fight their way through triumphantly that are lacking in those who go under…? I only know that the survivors used to call that quality ‘gumption.’ So I wrote about the people who had gumption and the people who didn’t.”

Ok. I can see this. Scarlett is able to survive the societal cataclysm brought on by the war through her determination and stubbornness and Rhett is able to survive through his cunning and pragmatism.

The problem is that I didn’t much like Scarlet O’Hara despite her admirable perseverance and fortitude. While she had spunk, she was also self-centred and ruthless. While her independence and spunk are undoubtedly good examples for young girls, especially in the less enlightened times in which this book was published, frankly Scarlett consistently treated those who cared for her (particularly Melanie and Rhett) appallingly. There’s no truer line in the book that Rhett’s frustrated explanation for why he could never show his love for her:

“You’re so brutal to those who love you, Scarlett. You take their love and hold it over their heads like a whip.”

For a book this long, you’re going to struggle to keep me interested if I don’t particularly like the protagonist. This was partially offset by the strength of Rhett Butler’s character (a rake, a speculator, a blockade-runner and a social pariah – but a romantic at heart) but not enough to save the book to my mind.

I’ll finish by noting that what GWTW needed more than anything else was an editor. There was simply no real reason for this book to be the giant that it was. It would have been a much better read if it was half the length.

Highlight:

Rhett Butler on the imminent war:

“‘All wars are sacred,’ he said. ‘To those who have to fight them. If the people who started wars didn’t make them sacred, who would be foolish enough to fight? But, no matter what rallying cries the orators give to the idiots who fight, no matter what noble purposes they assign to wars, there is never but one reason for a war. And that is money. All wars are in reality money squabbles. But so few people ever realize it. Their ears are too full of bugles and drums and fine words from stay-at-home orators. Sometimes the rallying cry is ‘Save the Tomb of Christ from the Heathen!’ Sometimes it’s ‘Down with Popery!’ and sometimes ‘Liberty!’ and sometimes ‘Cotton, Slavery and States’ Rights!’”

…

“There’s just as much money to be made in the wreck of a civilization as in the upbuilding of one.”

Scarlett O’Hara in the ruins of Twelve Oaks:

“Hunger gnawed at her empty stomach again and she said aloud: ‘As God is my witness, and God is my witness, the Yankees aren’t going to lick me. I’m going to live through this, and when it’s over, I’m never going to be hungry again. No, nor any of my folks. If I have to steal or kill – as God is my witness, I’m never going to be hungry again.’”

Favourite GWTW factoid found while looking for background to this post:

(Margaret Mead) originally called the heroine “Pansy O’Hara”, and Tara was “Fontenoy Hall”. She also considered naming the novel Tote The Weary Load or Tomorrow Is Another Day

My Take: I am a bit of a sucker for condensed knowledge. It’s a deeply shallow (if that’s possible) way of learning, but I love adding to my stocks of knowledge by digesting pre-masticated titbits of trivia. So when I came across “The Know It All” (first Chapter available online here) in my favourite second-hand store I had high hopes. Surely a condensed and accessible Encyclopaedia Britannica would be both an interesting and rewarding read?

Unfortunately, I was sadly mistaken. These kinds of eclectic narratives depend heavily on the judgement and personality of the curator and I just didn’t warm to “The Know It All’s” author, AJ Jacobs. Partly this was because I thought he came across as a bit of a wanker, but mostly what rubbed me up the wrong way was his approach to reading and learning more broadly.

Jacobs’ body of work gives you a bit of a flavour for his approach; in addition to his Britannica reading stunt, he has also penned books on the experience of spending a year following every single rule in the Bible (“The Year of Living Biblically”) and on turning his life into a series of human experiments (“The Guinea Pig Diaries”). In short, he has become quite the exponent of the literary gimmick in recent times. You get the feeling reading “The Know It All” that despite the affectations, it’s all just a bit of a stunt for a book deal and he doesn’t have any real passion for his cause.

Yes, there are plenty of interesting facts, but Jacob’s self-reflection is facile and the bolt on memoir about his family is just dull (not all families are interesting enough to be memorialised sad to say). There are redeeming sections, but on the whole the book is formulaic and pitched at the audience of Entertainment Weekly.

One issue in particular that would have been worth some consideration, but seemed to be completely overlooked was whether Encyclopaedias have any role whatsoever in today’s society. In the times of Google, Wikipedia and the internet, is there any point in a generalist collection of introductory information on subjects chosen and edited by a chosen few? Jacobs claims that:

“The Britannica is still the gold standard, the Tiffany’s of encyclopedias. Founded in 1768, it’s the longest continually published reference book in history. Over the years, the Britannica’s contributors have included Einstein, Freud and Harry Houdini. Its current roster includes dozens of academics with Nobels, Pulitzers and other types of awards with ceremonies that don’t feature commentary from Melissa Rivers. The Britannica passed through some tough times during the dot-com craze, and it long ago phased out the door-to-door salesman, but it keeps chugging along. The legendary Eleventh edition from 1911 is thought by many to be the best-it’s inspired a fervid if mild-mannered cult –but the current editions are still the greatest single source of knowledge.”

Really? The ‘Greatest single source of knowledge?’ Come on. This is the gimmick wagging the book – a justification rather than an examination of the medium.

Jacobs almost stumbles an interesting insight into the changing role of the medium when he cites Hans Koning’s explanation for why the 11^th Edition of the EB, released in 1911 is considered by aficionados to be the greatest of all Encyclopaedias:

“The eleventh was the culmination of the Enlightenment, the last great work of the Age of Reason, the final instance when all human knowledge could be presented with a single point of view. Four years late, the confidence and optimism that had produced the eleventh would be, as Konig puts it, “a casualty in the slaughter at Ypres and Argonne.”

Now here’s a topic for some critical reflection – the changing role of the EB in a world in which there is no longer a single fount of knowledge and the internet is changing the way that we seek, find and use information. Unfortunately, Jacobs isn’t interested:

“Yes, there’s the Internet. I could try to read Google from A to Z. But the Internet’s about as reliable as publications sold next to Trident and Duracell at the supermarket checkout line. Want a quick check on the trustworthiness of the Internet? Do a search on the words ‘perffectionist’ and ‘perfestionist.’ No, I prefer my old-school books. There’s something appealingly stable about the Britannica. I don’t even want that new-fangled CD-ROM for $49 or the monthly Britannica online service. I’ll take the leatherette volumes for $1400–which is not cheap, but it’s certainly less expensive than grad school. And anyway, at the end of this, maybe I can go on Jeopardy! and win enough to buy a dozen sets.”

Sigh. All he’s interested in is his gimmick and as a result the level of analysis you get from him rarely rises above that that you’d get from a reality television show. In summary, an interesting concept poorly executed.
(Random) Highlights:

From the original 1768 edition of the Britannica on Cats:

“Of all domestic animals, the character of the cat is the most equivocal and suspicious. He is kept, not for any amiable qualities, but purely with a view to banish rats, mice and other noxious animals from our houses… constantly bent on theft and rapine, they are full of cunning and dissimulation; they conceal their designs; seize every opportunity of doing mischief, and then fly from punishment… In a word, the cat is totally destitute of friendship.”

On Nathaniel Hawthorne (of The Scarlet Letter fame):

Towards the end of his life Nathaniel Hawthorne “Took to writing the figure ‘64’ compulsively on scraps of paper’.

On Montaigne and the writing process:

Montaigne “coined the term ‘essay,’ which translates to ‘attempt,’ or a little ‘project of trials and error’.

On the quirks of fate:

“On the dropping of Fat Man on Nagasaki on August 9, 1945: “The B-29 spent 10 minutes over Kokura without sighting its aim point; it then proceeded to the secondary target of Nagasaki, where at 11:02am local time, the weapon was air-burt at 1650 feet with a force of 21 Kilotons.”

Jacobs’ final insight from 44 million words:

“We have made our lives better. A thousand times better. Never again will I mythologize the past as some sort of golden age. Remember: in the 19^th Century, the mortality rate was 75 percent fro a caesarean section… the workday was fourteen hours.. the life expectancy in ancient Rome was twenty nine years. Widows had to marry their late husband’s brother. Originally forks only had one tine, and umbrellas were available only in black, and you ate four-day old fetid meat for dinner.”

(I don’t disagree with this BTW).

My Take: Let’s face it – the main appeal of historical fiction is the details of the alternative reality that the author creates and there’s a lot for history geeks to amuse themselves with in Robert Harris’ first work of fiction, “Fatherland”. A second major offensive through the Caucasus in 1942 allows Nazi Germany to defeat Stalin on the Eastern front in 1942. German counter-espionage enables the Nazi high command to first learn that the British have cracked the Enigma code and then lure the British fleet to its destruction. Cut off from the US, the United Kingdom is forced into an armistice in 1944 and a puppet government led by Edward the VIII is installed on the throne. Winston Churchill flees to Canada, where as he predicted, the remnants of the British Empire continue to resist. The German discovery of the nuclear bomb in 1946 leads to a cold war stalemate with Americans that continues until President Joseph Kennedy (Snr) initiates a détente between the two superpowers. The details of the Nazis’ Holocaust have been lost to the fog of war, but the Holodomor in Soviet Ukraine is known around the world as “Stalin’s Holocaust”.

Harris uses this alternative historical context to create a reality just as rich as that put together by any science fiction or fantasy author. Like Orwell’s 1984, it’s the details of Harris’s Nazi society that are most the effective in creating the claustrophobia of the totalitarian state. Particularly amusing in this regard was the following passage preceding a discussion of the State sanctioned torture practiced by the state security apparatus:

“Down in the cellar the Gestapo were licensed to practice was the Ministry of Justice called ‘heightened interrogation’. The rules had been drawn up by civilised men in warm offices and they stipulated the presence of a doctor.’

I quickly thumbed back to the publisher page of the book after reading this passage only to learn that the first edition of “Fatherland” was released in 1993, more than ten years before the Bush Administration sanctioned it’s very own program of “Enhanced Interrogation”. While the plot arc of “Fatherland” is nothing special and the prose is pretty ordinary, little gems of spot on historical imagination like this makes the book a worthwhile read.

Highlight: Wikipedia describes the landscape of the Nazi capital recreated by Harris in “Fatherland”:

Berlin has been extensively remodelled as Hitler’s “capital of capitals,” designed according to the wishes of Hitler and his top architect, Albert Speer. By 1964, the city boasts gargantuan Nazi monuments; the Great Hall holds over 160,000 people at the highest Nazi ceremonies; the enormous Arch of Triumph is inscribed with the names of German soldiers killed in the two World Wars, and straddles the Grand Avenue, an immense boulevard lined with captured Soviet artillery and towering statues of Nazi eagles. The Reichstag and the Brandenburg Gate are dwarfed by the vast, severe, granite civil buildings which dominate Berlin’s city centre; the Grand Plaza, the sprawling Berlin railway station, Hitler’s mammoth palace, the headquarters of the German Army, and the parliament of the powerless European Community.

My Take: WARNING RANT AHEAD

I would have never picked up this book if left to my own devices but I was bullied into it by both friends and family who accused me of being a shallow snob for turning my nose up at a book because the masses had embraced it. Given my love for Bundaberg Rum, a Holden V8 and Neighbours, I was unaccustomed to being labelled a snob and so resolved to see whether I really was being unreasonable about this and give Mr Brown a proper chance.

Having now actually read the book I now feel on firmer ground insisting that this book is crap. And it’s not that I don’t like trash, even popular trash. I love Tom Clancy. John Grisham is a great way to waste a couple of hours. It’s just that this book was shit. I thought it was poorly written (cringingly expositional in parts), implausible (as a thriller, not historically) and mind numbingly obvious. I’m sorry, but the fact that people who don’t often read read this book isn’t an advertisement for its quality. I do often read and my mind rebels at being spoon fed formulaic drivel aimed at US soccer moms.

Fatally for The Da Vinci Code’s chances with me, it reminded me of the plot of the grand novel that Ewan McGregor’s deadbeat character in “A Life Less Ordinary” was planning:

Richard: Perhaps this is a good opportunity… to tell you about my novel.

Celine: Look, I’m not interested in your novel.

Richard: It’s 1960 right? And Marilyn Monroe… is giving birth to a baby girl. She’s on the phone to Jack Kennedy… saying, “Jack, it’s yours. It’s yours,Jack.”

Celine: So the orphan grows up… And she solves some great mystery, right? It’s kind of obvious, Robert.

I couldn’t have said it better myself: It’s kinda obvious Dan.

My Take: Hmmm. I was rooting for this one to come off. The subject matter has great potential – very emotionally rich.

Unfortunately, the author can’t quite pull it off. I felt like the book couldn’t decide whether to be serious literature or a magazine feature (the author is a writer for Rolling Stone) and ended up as a not particularly good hybrid. The whole idea of framing the relationship through 15 mix tapes the couple made for each other I’m sure sounded like a good idea at the time didn’t really work in my opinion.

It’s a shame because it’s a horrific thing to happen to someone and he clearly loved this woman so much, but just wasn’t able to convey this in an engaging way. It was a NYT best seller though so lots of people clearly disagree with me.

Highlight:

Renée and I met at a bar called the Eastern Standard in Charlottesville, Virginia. I had just moved there to study English in grad school. Renée was a fiction writer in the MFA program. I was sitting with my poet friend Chris in a table in the back, when I fell under the spell of Renée’s bourbon-baked voice. The bartender put on Big Star’s Radio City. Renée was the only other person in the room who perked up. We started talking about how much we loved Big Star. It turned out we had the same favorite Big Star song – the acoustic ballad Thirteen. She’d never heard their third album, Sister Lovers. So naturally, I told her the same thing I’d told every other woman I’d ever fallen for: “I’ll make you a tape!”

My Take: I hadn’t even heard of Richard Price when a friend recommended “Lush Life” to me, but when a friend told me that he was a writer for the superb HBO series, The Wire, I grabbed a copy as soon as I could. Happily, “Lush Life” delivers exactly what any fan of The Wire would expect from one of its writers; a brilliantly observed, Dickensian panorama of inner city American life. This is not your average police procedural, linear crime novel – it’s a rich, detailed and wide-ranging portrait of Lower East Side New York amidst which a murder happens to occur.

The shining highlight of “Lush Life” is the absolutely brilliant dialogue. Reviews rave about Price’s mimetic gifts and pitch perfect language. In fact, The New York Times went so far as to open its review of “Lush Life” by claiming that:

“no one writes better dialogue than Richard Price—not Elmore Leonard, not David Mamet, not even David Chase.”

The New York Magazine gushes in its brilliant in character review that Price is the:

“Best writer of dialogue since Plato. Slang you never even heard of. Keep expecting the page to stand up and wander off somewheres, make a pass at your wife, order a bacon sandwich.”

It’s not just hyperbole – Price really is a virtuoso of verbal interaction. At one point in “Lush Life” Price writes a 75 page police interrogation scene that doesn’t lose momentum once; an amazing achievement.

Despite this, critics are divided as to whether the “Lush Life” constitutes a great book of substance and narrative or simply an impressive collection of scenes. I can see the concern – while the dialogue is brilliant, I wasn’t exactly clear what Price himself was trying to say through “Lush Life”.  Similarly, as a result of Price’s reliance on dialogue, the book is much longer (over 400 pages) than it could have been with a bit more narration. But I’m not too fussed by this. It wasn’t so long as to be painful and Price’s prose offers delights on every page to compensate for any passing lack of direction.

Highly Recommended.

Highlight:

Lugo rests his crossed arms on the open window as if it’s a backyard fence. “License and registration, please?”

“For real, what I do?”

“You always drive like that?” His voice almost gentle.

“Like what?”

“Signaling lane changes, all road-courteous and shit.”

“Excuse me?”

“C’mon, nobody does that unless they’re nervous about something.”

“Well I was.”

“Nervous?”

“You was following me.”

“A cab was following you?”

“Yeah, OK, a cab.” Passing over his papers. “All serious, Officer, and no disrespect intended, maybe I can learn something here, but what did I do?”

“Primary, you have neon trim on your plates.”

“Hey, I didn’t put it there. This my sister’s whip.”

“Secondary, your windows are too dark.”

“I told her about that.”

“Tertiary, you crossed a solid yellow.”

“To get around a double-parked car.”

“Quadrary, you’re sitting by a hydrant.”

” That’s ’cause you just pulled me over.”

Lugo takes a moment to assess the level of mouth he’s getting.

As a rule he is soft-spoken, leaning in to the driver’s window to conversate, to explain, his expression baggy with patience, going eye to eye as if to make sure what he’s explicating here is being digested, seemingly deaf to the obligatory sputtering, the misdemeanors of verbal abuse, but… if the driver says that one thing, goes one word over some invisible line, then without any change of expression, without any warning signs except maybe a slow straightening up, a sad/disgusted looking off, he steps back, reaches for the door handle, and the world as they knew it, is no more.

My Take: I only picked this one up because I thought the little Asian girl on the cover of the Australian edition was cute – and yes, you can judge a book by it’s cover. A totally lightweight book targeted at stay at home mums. Not that there’s anything wrong with being a stay at home mum, but the author was trying to tug at heart strings that I just didn’t have.

Highlight: Yeah, it was the front cover.

My Take: The cover blurb of Norwegian Wood describes the novel thus:

“When he hears her favourite Beatles song, Toru Watanabe recalls his first love Naoko, the girlfriend of his best friend Kizuki. Immediately he is transported back almost twenty years to his student days in Tokyo, adrift in a world of uneasy friendships, casual sex, passion, loss and desire – to a time when an impetuous young woman called Midori marches into his life and he has to choose between the future and the past.”

This could easily be off putting to my mind. Stores of teenaged first love and ‘impetuous young women’ set against cultural upheavals can easily cross over into the twee if not handled well by the author. However, this is anything but trash teen lit. Murakami’s prose throughout Norwegian Wood has an affecting, melancholic sensuality and the story arc is anything but formulaic. In fact, The Guardian’s review of this book describes Murakami’s writing as ‘gossamer’ which I think perfectly sums it up. As such, the ultimate impression left by the book is not one of teen-hormones ran amok, but of an otherworldly, dreamlike reminiscence. In fact, it has something of a Gatsbyesq quality to it in the way that it meditates on the nature of the past and how much of what has past is a part of you and how much you can escape from.  This is really one of my favourite books and one that I have come back to on a number of occasions.

This was also the book that first got me into Murakami as a writer, which is ironic, because it’s really not illustrative of his work. Norwegian Wood is a straight narrative and forgoes the more fantastical quirks of his other works (there are no talking cats anywhere to be seen in this book). It’s easily the most accessible of Murakami’s novels and made him a super-star of Japanese fiction when it one of the highest selling books in the nation’s history. Apparently Murakami strongly resented the attention at the time of the book’s release, and you can understand a degree of frustration at being fated for a book that doesn’t really reflect the core of your writing. That being said, probably as a result of the prominence that Norwegian Wood has afforded him, Murakami has been able to carve out a very successful career for himself writing pretty well whatever he wants (however bizarre). So there are some upsides to success I guess.

Highlight:

“Each day the sun would rise and set, the flag would be raised and lowered. Each Sunday I would have a date with my dead friend’s girl. I had no idea what I was doing or what I was going to do.”

A further highlight of Norwegian Wood are the exquisite different covers that the book has been released with. You can browse through them at a dedicated page on the publisher’s website.

On a final note, thanks to the loving thoughtfulness of JJ, I have a beautiful first edition of this novel that comes in two small red and green miniature books designed for ease of reading on public transport. A treasured possession.

Synopsis: Set in a dystopian 1980s cold war alternative reality in which superheros help America win the Vietnam war and Richard Nixon stay in the White House well beyond constitutional term limits, a group of out of favour and long retired superheros investigate a series of attacks on ‘masked adventurers’.

My Take: I can’t say I’ve ever had much of a desire to read comic books ( ‘Graphic Novels’ for the sophisticates). However, I decided to dip into the medium for the first time after The Watchment was given a big wrap in Slate’s excellent Culture Gabfest.

The general consensus was that while the recent CGI-fest blockbuster movie adaptation of the book was a disappointment, the 1986 original was a classic of the genre. In fact, The Watchmen is listed as one of Time Magazine’s 100 Greatest English Language Novels since 1923 (don’t ask me how they chose the parameters for this list).

So, ever keen to broaden my horizons, I prized open my mind, cast off my preconceptions and dived into the unfamiliar. I really did give this book a chance.

Unfortunately, while the world created by The Watchmen was engaging, the storyline and characterisation really were a bit childish. Maybe the concept of flawed superheros was innovative enough in itself in the mid-eighties to carry the book, but really, the flawed heroes weren’t THAT interesting. And the plot, while creating a decent build up of tension, ended with a twist that was positively absurd and unbelievable even in the context of a comic book fantasy world. While not wanting to spoil the conclusion for those still intrested in picking it up, suffice it to say that it involved the end of the cold war and the teleportation of a giant squid infused with negative mental vibes.

A deeply unsatisfying ending.

Highlight: There certainly wasn’t any writing in this book worthy of highlighting. Rorschach’s mask was pretty cool though I guess…