15 posts tagged “books”
The larger part of the book is about the creation of the fair, the great personal stake that the country and particularly Chicago had invested in the fair's success, how it seemed an impossible enterprise cursed with setback after setback, and of Burnham and his team of the nation's most reputable architects and engineers, many of whom made great personal sacrifices for the fair's success. Larson does a great job of telling the tale of the fair and how magical and wondrous the fair was to its visitors, depicting a vision of what a great and beautiful city could be.
Juxtaposed against the wonders of the fair is the story of Dr. H.H. Holmes, who under cover of the fair led several victims - mostly young women - to grisly deaths. I found this section to be less satisfying and that it did not fit well with the story of the fair - as if Larson were torn between writing about the fair and writing about Holmes. In addition, there were a few - albeit minor - details which seemed more imagined for dramatic effect than researched, such as how white and crisp Holmes' suit was during a hot and humid summer day through the blackened, smog-filled streets of Chicago or what thoughts raced through the minds of certain of his victims in their final moments. I love nonfiction books which can breathe life and color into historical figures and events, but I get annoyed when authors take license but don't quite admit it. The overall events are true, but I disliked the dramatic ornamentation because the real events - such as how he laid the groundwork for his work and what he did with his victims - are lurid enough on their own. As it was, I didn't think Holmes played an integral part of the fair or that he was particularly influenced by it although he did take advantage of it to suit his particular ends.
Overall, it was a fun and entertaining read and very informative. Although I did learn about the fair in history class, lecture never quite conveyed what a singular and striking event it was and how it played in the national consciousness. Larson conveys well how impossible a task the fair was to conceive and build, how glittering and marvelous it was while it lasted, and of the many great things that came to be because of it.
There are a lot of characters in the book and several plot lines and it spans several ages, drifting between New York and the mystical Lake of the Coheeries, but the main story is about Peter Lake, an orphan with unknown family and country who grows up to be an expert mechanic and burglar, a very smart milk cart horse who runs away to seek adventure, and a beautiful piano playing, stargazing heiress. The book is part fantasy and magical realism, part science fiction, part cartoon, and part love song to the city of New York, which is a character itself, a living, breathing creature holding all the inhabitants within as part of a greater design.
It's a big ambitious, overflowing tale, which eddies about in the middle and loses focus, but I got caught up in the story - more than I wanted to be - and rushed through to the end so even now, I'm not quite sure I've absorbed it properly. The story is perhaps (a little reminiscent of Tolkien) too enamored with great men of genius and beautiful, pure, witty women and it does have passages with purple prose, but the language is for the most part lovely and the scenes colorful enough that I'm inclined to forgive it. The story and purpose does get murky so I don't think that it's of any use to describe the plot but there are scenes that lift the story up and odd moments, not entirely related to the story, where the book urges the reader to see the world with fresh eyes and understand more, and I haven't had a book make me feel that urge quite so piercingly in awhile.
Water for Elephants is not a book that would have recommended itself to me by it's premise - young man suffers a tragic loss and joins the circus - but the depiction of life in the circus behind the scenes made it an enjoyable read.
I loved the animals. I liked the details and stories about the circus workers and their life behind the scenes of the show - many of them based on true stories the author had come across in her research. I liked the Prohibition era setting. And I loved how behind the scenes, the circus was not really romantic or magical - although there are bits of that - but actually rather dirty, creepy, and sinister.
There were a few things I did not like. The story got off to a slow start but I found the very last pages satisfying. The plot was predictable but saved by the colorful details of life in the circus. I found switching back and forth between past and present distracted from the story, but I did like the writer's treatment of the very senior Jacob in the nursing home: although locked away in a sterile nursing home, a little old man who can barely walk with a big, colorful, dramatic story. Jacob was a good character, but many of the key characters were types such as August and Uncle Al and Marlena. The writer touches upon how memory can be slippery but ultimately does nothing with it. There was more to play with in terms of being trapped on the train, trapped in the circus, trapped in the nursing home, and not having anything outside of those worlds except for a great deal of fear and the likelihood of loneliness, starvation, death. The romance was not very interesting, just expected, and I was much more interested in the hierarchy within the circus, the social groups and their interactions, and the way the circus dealt with the citizens of the small towns they entertained or at times offended. Despite the flaws, there was enough still in there for a satisfying read.
First finished book of the year. Next up: Winter's Tale by Mark Helprin.
M has been nagging me about the holiday baking because although chocolate gingerbread cake, chocolate Guiness cake, chocolate chip cookies, ginger spice cookies, and oatmeal cookies are all well and good, these are not the best items to eat nutritiously and light. I have dutifully hunted for healthy recipes and last night made a pretty tasty curried lentil soup, which was healthy and filling without being heavy and had a nice spicy kick to it (I will experiment with the spices more though).
I have laid off the baking.
And then, this afternoon, I received a belated Christmas gift from my college friend Jo.
I am so glad that work has a gym.
Despite what my vox posts might indicate, I have been reading and not just watching a lot of movies.... I started August buried deep in work so when I read it was to let my mind turn to mush and retreat deep into comics and fantasy.
I liked Robert Kirkman's Walking Dead series but never bother with Invincible which is the series that made his reputation as a comic book writer. M has been trying to make me read it for years. My initial reluctance was due to over exposure to too many superhero stories that have been badly done, but I enjoyed Invincible. The characters and even the plots make sense, which is well, rather incredible for a superhero story.
I started to worry that my brain really and truly was turning to mush because I was not in any way reading or watching anything that challenged it, so despite my dislike of Camus (seeded from a bad experience with The Plague in high school) I fished The Stranger off my shelves and read it. The simple prose and the odd perspective of the narrator made for a beautiful and haunting read. I've seen that lack of self awareness the narrator has around, and I would keep approaching it differently each time I entered the book. Highly recommended.
Afterward, I read The Quiet American. I like Greene's writing which is what pulled me through, but I did not like the story. I found the character of Phuong too problematic. Phuong annoyed me. The men's attitude toward Phuong annoyed me, too. At best, she was represented as a child to be subjected to the tutelage of either old world European colonialism or naive American idealism. At worse, she was a piece of Asian exoticism which both male characters want to claim. I'm so tired of women used as the symbol of exchange. Obviously characters will serve as symbols in stories (Pyle and Fowler certainly are symbols but they are also depicted as people), but I would have loved to see a little bit more depth to make her something more than a cipher which white men can't and don't really try to understand. I liked Our Man in Havana and The End of the Affair much better. On the other hand, The Quiet American is almost a timely read given the current Administration's approach to foreign policy.
Since it's 928 pages and a bit larger than your normal hardcover and a nonfiction book about the history of oil industry to the first Iraq War, I'm reading The Prize in spurts. I actually started it shortly after The Quiet American but it's a big book and uncomfortable to carry about. It's packed with information and chock-full of economics and politics which are not my forte, so I'm trying to read it when I can actually concentrate.
I've also started The Gastronomical Me which is a series of essays which is about food and love and hunger prior to WWI, so I've been reading about food when I don't feel like reading about oil.
M and I ended up at the Harry Potter party at Kepler's last night. I hadn't planned to go - I had an Amazon order put in - and was expecting my book to arrive early today, but I figured it was the last book and wanted to check out the festivities. So, after dinner, we stopped in downtown PA because M wanted to check out the iPhones at the Apple store there.
We found the roads blocked off around downtown. It couldn't be for the book, we thought. No, really, maybe it's that summer art fair - but no it was for the book. A band played at one end of the street with a few people listening but there were no other booths and a swarm of people in front of Border's. The Border's front courtyard was packed with no sign of order anywhere. We didn't bother trying to go in, so we decided to check out Kepler's once we finished with the Apple store.
Apple and Harry Potter - signs that M and I are geek yuppies.
Kepler's did not disappoint. We arrived at 11pm and the party was going strong. We ran into friends who were there with kids and chatted with other customers in line who had wandered in like we did and decided to buy a copy. The Stanford band played in costume. There was a trivia contest, a quidditch area - a little batting cage - really, HP swag, and mobs of people dressed like Voldemort, Hagrid, slutty Slytherin girls, etc., kids running around, kids acting out mock wand fights, or kids curled up against their parents, fighting exhaustion but eagerly waiting for their book. Kepler's organized the night well and once midnight hit the line moved fast.
I started reading as soon as I got home and finished before my Amazon order arrived, so I guess we didn't need the two copies for M and me after all. Anyway, I liked it. I thought the ending was satisfying and that Rowling planned it well.
Kitten's First Full Moon is a Caldecott Winner and a book that I bought for my nieces, age 1 and 2. Given their ages, I probably should have just gotten them a board book but the story is cute and I loved the strong bold lines of the illustrations. It's about a little kitty who just wants a nice bowl of milk. A little sweet but I've decided it's a little too soon to nurse their dark side.
The Omnivore's Dilemma was my first experiment with an audiobook. At first, I didn't like the reader who I thought was a little overly thespian for some already precious verse on corn fields and pastures and the perfect meal, but I got into it and was overall satisfied - both with the experience and the book (although I think I'll stick with non-fiction audiobooks). Pollan pulls together a lot of good information from various sources and presents a good description of how food is much more mechanized than grown, showing how far food production is from "natural" in that bucolic, pastoral sense of the word. The idea of how conventional farming methods have created this huge biomass for bacteria to feed on was a interesting and disturbing. The chapter on organic farming is worth reading on it's own.
Case Histories is less a mystery novel than interlocking family dramas. It's a good vacation book which one can read without guilt. It's a pretty conventional story but the one interesting twist to the book was that although it was firmly placed in the mystery genre, it did question whether solving the mystery actually resolved anything.
The Shadow of the Wind was an entertaining read. I loved the world and the language but the end disappointed me.
The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down is a study of how modern medicine clashed with Hmong culture over the care of a young child with epilepsy. I would recommend this if you're interested in the Hmong, anthropology, and/or social medicine. Fadiman does a nice job of depicting the complexity of the situation and how even with the best intentions on both sides, the cultural misunderstandings led to tragedy. Good read.
The latest Walking Dead trade revived my interest in the story by bringing in some new characters and showing how some of the main characters are changing. This book was much less about the zombies and more about the people. I'm interested in seeing how the tribes develop.
Runaways was fun although these two books finish off Vaughn's contribution to the story and the next installments will be written by Joss Whedon. I like Whedon - but I like these characters and part of me wishes Whedon would put his stamp elsewhere. I'll read the next trade to see what he does with it though.
The beginning of the book especially is written in a rather pulpy, overblown style that was rather off-putting, too full of machismo, but eventually the tone settles down a bit and the stories themselves are interesting.
Gann was around before La Guardia and describes it is a little grass field. He and his co-pilot fly over the jungles of Latin America in a cloud-filled sky and then realize they're approaching a mountain range and the chart doesn't accurately list the mountain elevations or even how far it is from one lonely landing field to the next. And Gann is among the first to start making long ocean flights for cargo trips during WWII and eventually commercial passenger flights overseas. He describes the danger of ice and their inexperience with flying through cloudy weather and storms. He describes engine failures in air, mechanical glitches, pilot errors. And at the heart of those early flights, when they were learning so much about flying, is luck. Bad luck. Good luck. The sane thing to do is to focus on the good luck.
Gann knew a lot of unlucky pilots, most of whom were smart, accomplished pilots. He mentions them throughout the book. A brief sentence or two about how one pilot was in a plane that inexplicably dove straight down in clear weather, a bad landing, or flew into a mountain. Very brief descriptions. Of course, they wouldn't really know the cause since there aren't any witnesses. While reading I would think, those were commercial passenger flights.... Best not to dwell on that.
Somewhat foolishly, I read the bulk of the book before I boarded my plane to Cancun. D found out about the book before my trip. She advised me to stop reading and leave the book at home because it would be bad luck or at least keep me in fine-tuned hysteria throughout the flight. I was 80 pages from the end, so of course, I went against her advice and brought it. And what happened?
That's a separate entry.
For all the unlucky pilots that Gann knew, I found the book oddly reassuring - even if there's a lot going in the cockpit that I will never know about. We've come a long way since Gann's time, which were pretty much the pioneering days of long-range flying. He focuses on luck as what kept him alive, and he had a lot of luck, but he became a good pilot through experience, and I figure pilots today have benefited from the hard-earned knowledge of their predecessors.
Of course, I hope all the pilots for my and my family's flights are lucky pilots.
While Fraser glosses over the the poverty, the hunger, and the political pressures which led to the French Revolution, she points out that it was a system and way of life that was collapsing and not the actions of an individual, even a queen, which brought about the gross inequalities between the nobility and the masses. The excessive and extravagant customs of the ancien regime were a way of life that Marie Antoinette came to as a follower of her new country's customs rather than as a leader. Although the revolutionaries blamed her for a multitude of sins, Fraser provides ample evidence to show that Marie Antoinette was securely locked out of policymaking because of her status as a woman and foreigner (she is a Hapsburg). She is easy to blame for political decisions she never brought about because she is a highly visible foreigner, a daughter of the powerful Empress Maria Teresa, easy to scapegoat as the ultimate Other for the French to demonize.
One quick note: she probably never uttered the words "Let them eat cake!" with regard to the poor during a famine. It was a statement often attributed to various princesses married to the nobility of other countries. The story was used even a century before Marie Antoinette came to France to describe Louis XIV's wife. Marie Antoinette is just the most famous of the accused.
Fraser argues that Marie Antoinette just wanted to please the people around her and to have a family. Because of her birth and her marriage, she was thrust into a political position she was ill-equipped to handle - and what was needed was someone with a politically adept and delicate hand. Granted, anyone labeled a despot would probably be defended along similar lines, but she was locked out politically. French queens, because they were often foreigners from countries with whom France might have only an uneasy alliance with, were in powerful positions because of their access to the king but were actively discouraged from trying to wield political power and also distrusted. Although she spent a lot of money, Marie Antoinette was far from alone in this at that time and the decadence had been typical of the French court for generations. More to the point, the French Revolution was about more than one woman's shopping habits.
Much of the book is filled with the elaborate court life of Versailles, but the barbarous events that punctuated Marie Antoinette's life get their due as well. One of the most horrific stories in the book was the execution of the Princess Lamballe, Marie Antoinette's earliest and one of her most closest confidantes. The Princess Lamballe dies brutally. She is hit with hammers, her corpse (at least one hopes the hammers provided a quick death) violated, beheaded, savagely torn apart, and her various body parts paraded around Paris by an angry and still bloodthirsty mob. Along the way, they drop her head off for a wax molding by the lady who would become Madame Tussaud (and who was a friend of the Princess) and later on to get the head's hair dressed before bringing it to Marie Antoinette so they can demand the queen to bestow a parting kiss to her friend. I shared this story with my husband and since then, he has been faintly discouraging of my reading.
In the end, I couldn't help but admire Marie Antoinette a little - don't be silly, not for her style - but for the courage with which she faced the violent years of her later life. While the mobs would several times over the years demand her head or threaten to tear out her intestines (an all too real fate as her friends' deaths made clear), she would consistently place the safety of her family first. She would place her apartments in the more vulnerable and less secure areas of a building - usually the ground floor while her family was above - so that if the mob stormed past the guards, which they did at one point (the guards were ripped to shreds), they would only get her and not have as much a chance to harm her family. When faced with the most savage and brutal fates, Marie Antoinette showed admirable personal courage, and I think how one meets death should hold some weight in measuring a person's character.
