This book is so unrelentingly sad. So, so sad. It finds a way though, despite naming every tragedy imaginable, to make the story of Mariam and Laila seem entirely believable, and even common. It's beautiful prose, full of personal touches - I felt just as home in it as I would reading Richler in Montreal. It was a reasoned view on the political front, that purposefully left unanswered the question of what would happen in halls of government next. Absolutely fantastic, and made me feel love despite being crushingly depressing.
9/10
Friday, December 2, 2016
#45 - Bossypants
Tina Fey is an excellent artist and businesswoman, and her memoir does a persistent job of conveying that. I loved the cruise scene in particular, reminding me of my mom. Once she got to her more current resume, it really picked up - she knew exactly what she wanted to share, and what people wanted to hear. I can see every one of her friends and coworkers reading this book and coming away happy - and it honestly seems like that's what Tina would have wanted.
6/10
6/10
#44 - The Gun
Simply going to drop shorter thoughts and a final rating on each of these - I'm posting these all together although it's been a few months since I expanded the list.
The Gun was a truly great non-fiction piece to get me back on track. Like Bowling Alone, it had a painfully balanced view of almost everything. However, The Gun has a constantly critical presence - judging mistakes in engineering and humanity alike. His use of both propaganda and critical reviews side by side was especially excellent.
8/10
Sunday, August 14, 2016
The Reading List v2.0
What was meant as a way of trimming the deadwood has been an explosion of growth. Huge thanks to everyone who contributed to this list - not that most of you will see it, I don't share this blog about anywhere. I'll be much more open with this list - jumping around the five of them, based on which of them cross my path, come up in conversation, or strike a fancy.
A) Non-Fiction
The Hot Zone by Richard Preston
Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond
The First World War by John Keegan (also WWII)
Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver
On Nature by Ralph Waldo Emerson
Walden by Henry David Thoreau
Tokyo Vice by Jake Adelstein
Superintelligence by Nick Bostrum
Creativity Inc by Ed Catmull
Tokyo Vice by Jake Adelstein
Superintelligence by Nick Bostrum
Creativity Inc by Ed Catmull
Peter the Great by Massie
Shakespeare, Sex and Love by Stanley Wells
Madness and Civilization by Michel Foucault
Rabid by Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy
The Age of Em by Robin Hanson
Red Queen by Matt Ridley
Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee
July 1914: Countdown to War by Sean McKeekin (revisionist)
Haunted Empire: Apple After Jobs by Yukari Kane
Secret History of the Mongol Queens by Jack Weatherford
Battle Cry of Freedom by James MacPherson
When Genius Failed by Roger Lowenstein
The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks
The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson
War by Gwynne Dyer
Consider the Lobster by David Foster Wallace
Farther Away by Jonathan Franzen
The Right Stuff by Thomas Wolff
Testaments Betrayed by Milan Kundera
B) Philosophy/Ideas
The Idea of Canada by David Johnston
Zealot by Reza Aslan
No God but God by Reza Aslan
Free to Choose by Milton Friedman
The Prince by Niccolo Macchiavelli
The Republic by Plato
Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali
The Republic by Plato
Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali
The Discourses by Epictetus
Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
The Concept of the Political by Carl Schmitt
Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl
The Moral Animal (evolutionary morality)
God Delusion by Richard Dawkins
The People’s Platform by Astra Taylor
The Art of Asking by Amanda Palmer
The Presentation of the Self by Erving Goffman
Among the Thugs by Bill Buford
The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman
World on Fire by Amy Chua
The Witness Wore Red by Rebecca Musser (Mormon/LDS)
Freakonomics by Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt
Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar by Thomas Cathcart
The Conquest of Happiness by Bertrand Russell
C) Modern Fiction - post-1900
Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson
American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis
Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
The Crow Road by Iain Banks
Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
Shogun by James Clavell
Fifth Business by Robertson Davies
White Noise by Don DeLillo
Madness by Marya Hornbacher
Kafka on the Shore by MurakamiThe Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
Shogun by James Clavell
Midwich Cuckoos by John Wyndham
Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood
The Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri
Flashman (series)
We by Yevgeny Zamyatin
Swastika Night by Katherine Burdekin
Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach
The Writing Life by Annie Dillard (or Pilgrim at Tinker Creek)
The Things We Carry by Tim O’Brien
Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
East of Eden by John Steinbeck
Siddhartha by Herman Hesse
Who Do You Think You Are by Alice Munro
Ragtime by Cory Doctorow
Foundation Trilogy by Isaac Asimov
Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip Dick
D) Current Fiction - post-2000
The Girls by Emma Cline
Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates
The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
Fifteen Dogs by Andre Alexis
Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
The Book of Negroes by Lawrence Hill
Curious Case of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon
Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers
All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews
Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom
All The Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
Freedom by Jonathan Franzen
The Visible Man by Chuck Klosterman
Black Hole by Charles Burns (graphic novel)
E) Reach Reading List
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
A Doll's House by Henrik Ibsen
Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels
Animal Farm by George Orwell
The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams
The Crucible by Arthur Miller
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger
Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett
Long Day’s Journey Into Night by Eugene O’Neill
Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
The Charge of the Light Brigade by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Stranger by Albert Camus
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry
The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe
My Ántonia by Willa Cather
Monday, June 27, 2016
#43 - A Prayer for Owen Meany
One of Amy's earliest additions to my list, I got to read Owen Meany at the end of my first year in Toronto. I'm glad it came when it did in my life, because Irving's Canada - cold and dry, grey and white, but well lit and secure - completed what is a distinctly North American setting. This novel has one of the most clear-eyed narratives that I've ever read - every line of it contained a healthy dose of truthfulness. Oddly enough, it took me a few hundred pages before I realized I hadn't remembered his name - and I was doubly shocked once I realized he It also captured such real abstract moments - different living situations growing up, the difference between high school and university - alongside hard factual critiques of politics - though he self-deprecates most of his comments afterwards.
Seeing cultural touchpoints discussed from a recent viewpoint was very exciting - seeing Marilyn Monroe's timeless appeal, Kennedy's changing (percieved) morality and Nixon and Reagan's steady (percieved) villainy. Ronald Reagan is a vapid young drunk - remember that? The humour was sharp, but the themes were spectacular. I've never seen what I suppose I must admit is my own religious background, meticulously profiled and rebuked, but it delivered. Amy's synchronicity was always present, and personally, I was thrilled with his sense of time - day/night, holidays and seasons, and building the dates and years together into their own historical record.
The part of A Prayer for Owen Meany that hit me the hardest was Harriet Wainwright and her belief in the power of reading. She believed that it was something you worked on, that was true exercise. TV (and as John admits, newspapers and magazines) do not satisfy the endurance requirements. This book, not through age but through determination, was a pchallenge of stamina - 90 page chapters, sturdy clauses and introspective paragraphs. For the last 5 years I've been working through classic literature, but I've got a long way to go when it comes to reading. Not long, so much as eternity.
That's why in the interest of new challenges, I'm going to trim down my remaining Literature list in order to try and pull together some other lists:
Non-Fiction - Learning about the world around us.
Philosophy - Learning about the world inside us.
Modern* Fiction - Learning about what brought us to today.
Current** Fiction - Learning about where things are going.
Seeing cultural touchpoints discussed from a recent viewpoint was very exciting - seeing Marilyn Monroe's timeless appeal, Kennedy's changing (percieved) morality and Nixon and Reagan's steady (percieved) villainy. Ronald Reagan is a vapid young drunk - remember that? The humour was sharp, but the themes were spectacular. I've never seen what I suppose I must admit is my own religious background, meticulously profiled and rebuked, but it delivered. Amy's synchronicity was always present, and personally, I was thrilled with his sense of time - day/night, holidays and seasons, and building the dates and years together into their own historical record.
The part of A Prayer for Owen Meany that hit me the hardest was Harriet Wainwright and her belief in the power of reading. She believed that it was something you worked on, that was true exercise. TV (and as John admits, newspapers and magazines) do not satisfy the endurance requirements. This book, not through age but through determination, was a pchallenge of stamina - 90 page chapters, sturdy clauses and introspective paragraphs. For the last 5 years I've been working through classic literature, but I've got a long way to go when it comes to reading. Not long, so much as eternity.
That's why in the interest of new challenges, I'm going to trim down my remaining Literature list in order to try and pull together some other lists:
Non-Fiction - Learning about the world around us.
Philosophy - Learning about the world inside us.
Modern* Fiction - Learning about what brought us to today.
Current** Fiction - Learning about where things are going.
Almost forgot - Amy picked another perfect winner:
10/10
* Post-1900
* Post-1900
** Post-2000
Sunday, February 14, 2016
#42 - The Odyssey
What a long, strange trip it has been. Since starting the list, I've lived in 3 cities, visited 11 countries (do we count Wales?), and read 42 literary classics. Reading the Odyssey makes you think about the journeys in your own life, and I'm just so pleased that this list has managed to keep on growing through it all. I have continued to make an effort to work in books from off the list though. Ready Player One by Ernest Cline is an excellent vision of the future in the vein of Little Brother by Cory Doctorow (who warranted a shoutout in RP1), but I do wish that he had focused on the early 90s a little more than the straight 80s fare. Choose Your Own Autobiography by Neil Patrick Harris was hilarious and a quick read over the Christmas holidays, exactly what I would've imagined from him.
With this, I've completed the main Greek cycle - Iliad, Odyssey, Aeneid. Couldn't be happier to be done - despite appreciating them, they were such a dry read compared to modern literature. I'm a 21st-century reader, what can I say? That's something that's even more apparent when the Odyssey is compared to Ulysses. Despite both of them being well beyond my full understanding on a first readthrough, I felt myself becoming attuned to the natural flow of Joyce's work much more readily than I did trying to reach back to Homer. The translation of this work certainly didn't help - picked out of the Norton anthologies that Amy has, it had some very strange spellings (Akhilleus instead of Achilles, for example) which always made it feel somewhat more stilted than it had to be.
That said, there were some interesting highlights! The ending was a "false close", much like the 19 Years Later epilogue closing Harry Potter. It may have been bolted on by later creators, and mostly deals with the gods running around settling scores. Wholly unnecessary, but ah well. They killed the dog off in XVII 370-375, so if you're sensitive I suggest avoiding that part. Finally, this raunchy passage made up part of my Valentine's card this year, because it was just that fantastic:
Now Penelope sank down, holding the weapon on her knees, and drew her husband's great bow out, and sobbed and bit her lip and let the salt tears flow. Then she went back to face the crowded hall, tremendous bow in hand, and on her shoulder hung the quiver spiked with coughing death. (XXI, 54-60)
7/10
With this, I've completed the main Greek cycle - Iliad, Odyssey, Aeneid. Couldn't be happier to be done - despite appreciating them, they were such a dry read compared to modern literature. I'm a 21st-century reader, what can I say? That's something that's even more apparent when the Odyssey is compared to Ulysses. Despite both of them being well beyond my full understanding on a first readthrough, I felt myself becoming attuned to the natural flow of Joyce's work much more readily than I did trying to reach back to Homer. The translation of this work certainly didn't help - picked out of the Norton anthologies that Amy has, it had some very strange spellings (Akhilleus instead of Achilles, for example) which always made it feel somewhat more stilted than it had to be.
That said, there were some interesting highlights! The ending was a "false close", much like the 19 Years Later epilogue closing Harry Potter. It may have been bolted on by later creators, and mostly deals with the gods running around settling scores. Wholly unnecessary, but ah well. They killed the dog off in XVII 370-375, so if you're sensitive I suggest avoiding that part. Finally, this raunchy passage made up part of my Valentine's card this year, because it was just that fantastic:
Now Penelope sank down, holding the weapon on her knees, and drew her husband's great bow out, and sobbed and bit her lip and let the salt tears flow. Then she went back to face the crowded hall, tremendous bow in hand, and on her shoulder hung the quiver spiked with coughing death. (XXI, 54-60)
7/10
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