I'm still plowing through If Chins Could Kill by Bruce Campbell. It is enjoyable, but not exactly great writing. In other words I am enjoying the content and not the writing style of the author. I'm not sure what to read next. I have a number of books. I just got another one today. I ordered it last week; Byzantium Endures by Michael Moorcock. I read it once before about ten or twelve years ago. If I remember correctly I found it at Hornbake (aka Cornflake) Library at U of MD.
08/10/03
I'm Working my way through John's book, Nathan's Run. What do I think of it? Melodramatic. I think that sums it up best.
09/15/03
I finally finished off Byzantium Endures by Michael Moorcock. I think I enjoyed it more the first time around. In the past twelve years (or so) I think my tastes have gotten a little more refined and also it was probably just a case of it being the right sort of book at the right time back then.
I started reading Only Girl in the Car by Kathy Dobie. It is nonfiction. I heard the author interviewed on Fresh Air a few months ago. It sounded interesting enough. It is a memoir of a woman who was very sexually active as a teenager. Learned a lot of lessons about herself and life in general through her experiences. Not the sort of book I would walk into Borders and pick up, I ordered it through Amazon.com, but I feel uninhibited enough to read it on the train ride to and from work. So far so good.
09/23/03
I started reading The Girl Next Door by Hank Ketchum recently. I've been reading it on the train, but given the content, given that it seems to be getting more and more violent and that there is a good deal of sexual content in the book I think I'll continue to read it just at home. Instead I think that I will start reading Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser, which I bought not too long ago.
09/24/03
I started reading Fast Food Nation, by Eric Schlosser, this morning. I'm into it already. The man can write and the topic is fascinating, or at least I think it is.
09/29/03
I got some reading done. More of Fast Food Nation. I've gotten past the first four chapters which deal with looking at the corporate side of the fast food industry and started in on the rest of the book which deals with the food itself. If you have ever wanted to know what it means when one of the ingredients of a food product you buy is natural or artificial flavoring then you should read chapter 6 of this book. Chapter five is all about the fries.
10/01/03
I'm still plowing through Fast Food Nation. I'm up to the chapter about the stockyards and boy is it grizzly. I'll never complain about my job again. The number of on the job injuries and deaths is amazing. Given the connections of all the food companies reading the book even has me thinking about non-fast food that I eat.
10/07/03
I finished reading Fast Food Nation this evening on the way home. What a read. I highly recommend it. It will really make you think twice about eating fast food, and eating red meat for that matter.It also has a lot of good information about the food processing industry. Up next I think I am going to read Altered Carbon by Richard Morgan. Neal Conan of Talk of the Nation has plugged it more than once. I hope it turns out to be worth it. From what I understand it is a sci-fi detective novel.
10/12/03
I'm a good fifty pages or more into Altered Carbon. I like sci-fi and I like detective novels, and I love this story so far. It takes place in the future when people can be stored electronically and downloaded into another body. The main character, Takeshi Kovacs, is a criminal who has been let out of jail, temporarily to help solve a crime. Jail in this future consists of being stored on a disk somewhere until your sentence is up. The crime he is asked to solve is the attempted murder of a very wealthy man. The man was killed, but there was a backup copy in storage and he is back. The police have classified it as a suicide. Kovacs deal is that if he can solve the crime he will have the rest of his sentence nullified, otherwise he is going back to storage.
10/21/03
I'm still reading Altered Carbon. It is still good.
10/24/03
I'm winding down on Altered Carbon. So far I love it; probably because it combines two of my favorite genres: science-fiction and crime fiction. The author also does a nice job of occasionally emphasizing the ethical, moral, and philosophical issues surrounding a society in which a person's consciousness and intelligence can be downloaded on to a disk and then uploaded into another body. He doesn't come down on one side or the other of the argument. The main character (Takeshi Kovacs) is someone who has lived through countless numbers of bodies, but who has as a result become (in some ways) numb to living. Working with him is a cop (Kristin Ortega) who is still in her original body and does not relish the idea of changing bodies.
There are other supporting characters who range the spectrum. From assassins who have survived multiple deaths by having back up copies of themselves made, including one killed by Kovacs who later comes back and doesn't hold her death against him. the fact that she can't remember her death or ever meeting before probably has something to do with her forgiving nature. To a hacker who gets out of storage (jail) only to find herself in a body other than her own, because someone has purchased her body, or sleeve as they call them in the book, and is desperate to get it back.
I think that next I will read the book about Cantor Fitzgerald. That's the company that had offices on the top floor of one of the Twin Towers. Someone from my neighborhood, who I didn't know, worked for them. Needless to say, no one who was at the office that day made it out alive. I heard the author interviewed on the radio a few months ago and ordered it from Amazon a month or so ago.
10/29/03
I have started reading Top of the World, which is about Cantor Fitzgerald. The company used to have offices on the top five floors of one of the towers of the World Trade Center. Only four employees made it out of the building alive, none of them were at or near the top of the building at the time. 678 out of 1000 employees were killed. The CEO arrived late that day just as the first (or maybe it was the second) plane hit. He survived to rebuild the company.
It is not a long book, or hard one to understand, but that doesn't mean it isn't a tough read. Very emotional stuff. Gut-wrenching at times.
11/01/03
Still reading On Top of the World. I'll probably finish it by this time next week. I can't empathize completely with Howard Lutnick, the CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald. He is richer than I'm sure I'll ever be. There are things that I feel go unsaid that a more objective account would probably encompass, but it is tough not to feel some compassion for his loss and some awe for what he and the other surviving employees managed to do in pulling the company back together (practically overnight) after 70% of the staff was killed.
One more thing worth mentioning about the On Top of the World. Lutnick definitely got a raw deal from the media in the first weeks following September 11, 2001. Eventually their coverage of him improved, but he certainly doesn't pull any punches in the book, when it comes to naming names of people who gave him a very hard time when he was struggling to pull his company back together and provide for the literally hundreds of widows left in the wake of collapse of the World Trade Center. In particular he singles out Bill O'Reilly, who it could probably can be argued singled himself out, for some very harsh criticism.
11/02/03
I was looking through the photographs in On Top of the World this morning, before I went to do my laundry. I had to stop before I got through all of them. It got me all choked up thinking about the loss. It wasn't much easier reading the book at the laundromat.
11/05/03
On the way home I finished reading On Top of the World. It's a good book, but I didn't find it terribly uplifting. Up next is another downer, I can't remember what the title is, but I'll write about it once I can. I'll probably start it tomorrow morning.
11/06/03
I started in on The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things by JT Leroy. It's rough stuff. I'm starting to question the value of reading such emotionally charged material on the Metro. If I were home I am sure that I would be shedding tears, but I don't feel comfortable doing that in public, every morning, or even on a regular basis. So I tap my foot instead and do my best to make sure that my eyes don't tear up. It doesn't dull the intensity of the words, but it keeps my potential public display of emotion at bay.
Anyway, the book is not a novel, but a collection of short stories about a young boy. In the first story he can't be more than four, I'm guessing. He has been returned to his birth mother, who was 14 at the time he was born, and now at 18 has decided she wants him back. She treats him pretty badly, lies to him about his foster parents, and verbally and physically abuses him.
The story is told by the boy. The author (so far) has done a great job. Showing, but not telling. Including all the sorts of details that help to give me a picture of what the main character is experiencing. It's powerful stuff, but it is good.
11/07/03
I'm all worn out. I worked late tonight, a couple hours late. I read some more off The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things on the train ride home; heartbreaking stuff. I think the fact that the main character is a male child makes it that much tougher to take. Why? Because females are often portrayed as victims, males are supposed to be strong. Listening to a young child talk matter of factly about wetting the bed or his Bugs Bunny doll for some reason gets to me. I don't know why, but they get to me. It probably has to do with the main character juxtaposing those memories with ones of abuse and neglect. Excellently written, but not for the faint of heart.
11/10/03
I'm still reading The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things. It is getting truly disturbing. Glad I didn't read it over the weekend. I am almost halfway through and, depending on my schedule, may be able to finish it before next Monday. I need to look for some happy books to read.
11/11/03
I decided to start another book this morning, How I Lost Five Pounds in Six Years by Tom Arnold.
I still plan on finishing The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things, but I don't think I want to read it on the train anymore. It is just too dreary, depressing, etc. In the last story from the book that I read, Babydoll, what was hinted at before becomes very apparent. The main character, Jeremiah, has some serious sexual identity issues.
Anyhow, I needed to read something a little more upbeat so I started in on Tom Arnold's autobiography. I know that at times he had it rough growing up but from what I read about the book I get the impression that he also does a good job of not weighing the book down too much.
11/14/03
I'm almost finished reading The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things.
I am about halfway through I lost Five Pounds in Six Years.
11/18/03
I almost finished Tom Arnold's book this evening. I only have about ten pages to go. I think I'll just start in on another book tomorrow and finish off How I Lost Five Pounds in Six Years later this week. At the moment I am down to two books: Half Mast by Christopher Null and At Play in the Fields of the Lord. I'm leaning toward At Play... because I think it will probably be a little more up beat than a book about a high school kid getting revenge on the jock who has been bullying him.
11/19/03
I started in on Half Mast, by Christopher Null, on the train ride in this morning. I was gonna pass on it for now, but I took a look at the first couple pages and I liked the tone of the narrator, so I decided to give it a try. Well worth it, so far; that's my assessment. Well written. Brought back some memories of high school, when I felt picked on at times, but not consistently so, and also elementary, when I also was picked on occasionally. Fifth grade was a different story. I didn't take it lying down, not all the time. There were fights. I was usually on the losing end, but I suppose they helped to toughen me up some. Anyway, I never went though anything like the narrator of the book goes through.
The way the book starts is by telling you the ending, that the main character killed this guy who was bullying him, when they were in high school. It is now 10 years later and he is having trouble sleeping and his therapist has recommended that he keep a journal. So the novel consists of journal entries about his memories of high school, along with odds and ends about his life, now and then. I'm thirty pages in so far.
12/03/03
I've started reading At Play in the Fields of the Lord by Peter Matthiesen. It's about missionaries and mercenaries in South America. I'm about 65 pages into it and so far so good. They made a movie out if it which I saw part of several years ago. IIRC, it stars John Lithgow, Tom Berenger, Kathy Bates, and Daryl Hannah. It is a long movie (3 & 1/2 hours) but the book is about average length (320 pages). The movie still hasn't been released on DVD so if I am ever going to see it again I'll probably end up having to buy a VHS cassette of it.
12/17/03
Thanks to the delay, I did manage to read about fifteen more pages of At Play in the Fields of the Lord on the ride home and while waiting for the Orange Line. I've got about fifty pages to go.
12/18/03
I did get some reading done on the train and bus this morning. I'm down to 30 pages in At Play in the Fields of the Lord. It certainly has enough twists and turns, and doesn't seem too predictable to me. Not the easiest novel I've ever read, but it's I'm thinking I'm going to read The Time Traveler's Wife next.
12/19/03
I started reading The Time Traveler's Wife this morning. I have ten pages to go in At Play in the Fields of the Lord.
12/24/03
I've been reading The Time Traveler's Wife for the last few days now. The parts I was reading this morning got me feeling a little bit weird. Let me explain.
Henry is eight years older than Claire. They get married sometime after they meet, when she is 20 and he is 28. He has this disease that causes him to jump backward in time for relatively short periods of time. In the part I was reading today (and last night), Claire is twelve to thirteen and has developed a crush on Henry. When Henry visits her, during this period in her life, he is usually in his thirties. He knows that he is eventually going to marry her, but doesn't tell her. There is a tension between them that I find to be very erotic, despite her age. He doesn't do anything or take advantage of her crush, but there is definitely something unspoken, some tension in the air. And I find it erotic; he wants to tell her and sometimes he sees her as he knows she will be, but he doesn't, won't try to change the past or take advantage of her crush (when she is 12-13) or the love he feels for her.
This gets me feeling a little bit weird. You couldn't get away with showing something like this on TV or in a movie, but in book you can.
Anyhow, I am also starting to put together a chronology of events, since it gets very confusing very quickly as to when he visited Claire and how old he was each time. For instance, the first time he vists her he is 36, but the second time he is 35. It might be simple enough if he kept getting younger and younger, but infortunately it doesn't work that way.
12/28/3
I have started on a chronology of The Time Traveler's Wife. Why? Because I want to. I have only done the first five chapters.
The Time Traveler's Wife: Chronology
Book - Listing of Henry and Claire's encounters in the order in which they appear in the book.
Note: Underline indicates time travel.
First Date, One
10/26/1991 - Claire: 20, Henry: 28
A First Time for Everything
06/16/1968 - Henry: 5, 24
First Time, Two
09/23/1977 - Claire: 6, Henry: 36
02/09/2000 - Claire: 28, Henry: 36
09/29/1977 - Claire: 6, Henry: 35
Lessons in Survival
06/07/1973 - Henry: 9, 27
12/10/1978 - Henry: 15, 15
11/17/1982 - Henry: 19
09/28/1982 - Henry: 19
05/14/1983 - Claire: 11
04/12/1984 - Claire: 12, Henry: 36
06/27/1984 - Claire: 13
09/23/1984 - Claire: 13, Henry: 35
After the End
10/27/1984 - Claire: 13, Henry: 43
02/02/1987 - Claire: 15, Henry: 38
06/05/1987 - Claire: 16, Henry: 32
09/27/1987 - Claire: 16, Henry: 32
09/18/1987 - Claire: 16
07/12/1995 - Claire: 24, Henry: 32
09/11/1988 - Claire: 17, Henry: 36
01/13/2000 - Claire 28, Henry 36
Christmas Eve, One
(Always Crashing in the Same Car)
12/24/1988 - Claire: 17, Henry: 40
Christmas Eve, Two
12/24/1988 - Henry: 25
04/08/1989 - Claire: 17, Henry: 40
Eat or Be Eaten
11/30/1991 - Claire: 20, Henry: 28
12/14/1991 - Henry: 36
05/09/2000 - Henry: 36
12/15/1991 - Claire: 20
12/22/1991 - Claire: 20, Henry: 28, 33
12/29/03
Dead Men (pp. 1 - 15)
- Fast Read
- Smooth Flowing, maybe a bit too smooth
- Some dialogue, but not too much.
- Seems to be about a woman who was raped in a motel room. She wakes up the next morning hung over. She wants revenge. She doesn't remember who she is or who the man who raped her is, but she wants revenge.
12/30/03
I've started reading Dead Men, although on the train this morning I read from The Time Traveler's Wife.