Cryptonomi-Comic-Con

In my desperate attempts to avoid reading the last 100 pages of Don Quixote, I have been reading pretty much anything I can get my hands on.

Of particular note are a bunch of graphic novels, some of which I’d read long ago, and some that I read for the first time.

Swamp Thing has always tugged at my heart - the misunderstood monster, sort of like Frankenstein’s monster; yet Swamp Thing is gentle, only rising to anger and violence in defense of humanity and Mother Earth.  I’d forgotten how much the love story of Abby and Swamp Thing swamped me with emotion when I first read it, at least until I started reading “Swamp Thing: Love and Death” by Alan Moore again last week.  It still holds that power for me, and I actually caught myself being titillated by the “vegetable sex” episode (as Neil Gaiman calls it in his introduction).  The artists, Steve Bissette and Jon Totleben, know how to capture emotion and, well, sex, but without actual copulation.

I also loved the Pog episode, a tribute to Pogo; but it is very sad, and sadly, it does seem like something that would happen on this lady.

Hellboy sort of ambushed me.  I didn’t know what to expect from it, and was pleasantly surprised to find that it wasn’t torture-porn - I think I was confusing it with Hellraiser, because I kept picturing something like Pinhead when I thought of Hellboy.  At any rate, I love a world where people can address a red demon with truncated horns on his forehead as “Mr. Boy”.  Here again, we have a sort of Frankenstein’s-monster-become-useful-member-of-society - Hellboy, summoned from ??? by Rasputin, kills his “father”; but without all the moral agonizing and self-justification of Frankenstein’s monster who took revenge through killing loved ones of *his* “father”.  Rasputin pulls a Darth Vader by trying to convert Hellboy over to the Dark Side, telling Hellboy it is his destiny, this is why he (Rasputin, his father) summoned him (Hellboy) - and Hellboy kicks his ass, instead of blubbering and trying to commit suicide like Luke Skywalker.  But does he get the girl?  Or maybe she’s his sister. . .

I remember reading one Sin City volume way back when, but only vaguely.  So I’ve started with The Hard Goodbye - definitely hadn’t read it.  Marv is:

a) Paranoid
b) Heroic
c) Crazy
d) All of the above
e) None of the above

but is he really dead?  I won’t know until I crack the next volume.

Heroes: Season 1 is 34 betweener tales about the characters in the television show - you can read these online at the Heroes website, although it is also in published form. It’s very cool to see some background for the characters, and it explains a lot that one may not have understood from the televised episodes.

But my biggest read was Cryptonomicon, by Neal Stephenson.  This book made me a little ashamed at how much popular literature I spend time reading.  It is written for people with attention spans longer than a breezy 250 or 350 pages; it uses language and vocabulary in a way that people as well educated as myself should *expect* to read and use it, and Stephenson never dumbs down his plot or his characters to try to suck in a few extra readers; nor does he rely on (or need to rely on) sex to make the story interesting.  I was hooked from the first page.  If Neuromancer by William Gibson is cyberpunk, then Cryptonomicon is cybergeek.

I will admit that there were a few places that out-geeked me - being a nerd, married to a nerd, I was pretty much able to keep up with the techno-language and scenarios; I can see where someone who is totally uninterested in or unfamiliar with computers and cryptology might have trouble with this aspect of the book, but it would be worth skimming those parts just to read the rest of the story.  Which is primarily about people.

The story is set up as alternating timeframes, between World War II and the late 1990s. It takes a long time to get around to the point of the story, but the journey there was fun. I have to admit some disappointment at the way it ended - something like 1160 pages of build-up, 6 pages of climax, and 2 pages of denouement. Don’t get me wrong, I loved the book, it’s just hard to get let down on the ending. It’s a problem, I’m sure, to end a story well - one of my favorite authors, Stephen King, writes incredible stories, but oftentimes the endings suck. And I surely couldn’t do any better, I’m just sayin’ …

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p.s. I actually started this post 2 months ago but real life intervened, to the point that I did not feel up to writing (see my personal blog for details - link is on the About page). However, I did get a bunch of reading done in the meantime. I will probably post about some of the books, but definitely not all. I’ll try to be better, but I’ve got a lot more real life heading my way, so no guarantees.

The Big Read - steady at 62

I have seen several versions of The Big Read list going around, and so far it seems that even though each list is slightly different, I have read 62 of the books on the list.

The instructions:
Look at the list and:
Blue font=you have read.
Green font=you intend to read.

1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6. The Bible
7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8. 1984 - George Orwell
9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11. Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12. Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19. The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch - George Eliot
21. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchel
22. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23. Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33. Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34. Emma - Jane Austen
35. Persuasion - Jane Austen
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40. Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41. Animal Farm - George Orwell
42. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46. Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48. The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49. Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50. Atonement - Ian McEwan
51. Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52. Dune - Frank Herbert
53. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66. On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68. Bridget Jones’ Diary - Helen Fielding
69. Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70. Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72. Dracula - Bram Stoker
73. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75. Ulysses - James Joyce
76. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78. Germinal - Emile Zola
79. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80. Possession - AS Byatt
81. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83. The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87. Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92.The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94. Watership Down - Richard Adams
95. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98. Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Quite a few of the green are actually on my shelves, and some of them (Ulysses, War and Peace; you know, the usual ones people never quite get completely read) have been picked up and started.  The few that aren’t marked may make it on the list of to-be-read - I’m always looking for new books.

And yes, I still have about 100 pages to go in Don Quixote - I’ll be updating the blog with all the books I’ve read while not finishing DQ, including “Cryptonomicon” by Neal Stephenson.

Plum tuckered

One of the books that I read this week is “Lean Mean Thirteen” by Janet Evanovich - I wanted something light and quick, and it was both.

I’ve read all of the numbered Stephanie Plum books, and they are very dependable.  Even though there isn’t any character growth; the plots between books are pretty much the same, just with different antagonists; and nothing is ever resolved between Stephanie and her brace of menfolk, I still enjoy reading them.  Evanovich can still make me laugh out loud, and she certainly has a way with dialogue.

I don’t mean to make it sound as if the books are poorly written - Evanovich is a good writer, and her plots are put together well - I don’t find myself jerked out of the story by unconvincing events, or by disconnected leaps or illogical actions.  In that sense, Evanovich triumphs in crafting her stories by making totally wild occurrences seem natural within the story - exploding taxidermy, anyone?

I think what I most enjoy is how everyone accepts the improbable events with barely a blink - this is part of what keeps the plot from exploding in disbelief.  I read somewhere that learning to make improv funny means learning to buy into the outrageousness that your partner feeds you, and vice versa - if you try to ground it in reality, it just becomes a crazy person talking to a sane person, which usually isn’t funny.  But two crazy people talking, now that’s a crack-up. . .

At any rate, the book was a fun read.  It certainly isn’t necessary to have read the first 12 Stephanie Plum books, but it might help if you have.  Otherwise, you’re being dropped into a whacked-out world totally unprepared for what you’re going to find.  On the other hand, maybe that would be a fun way to get to know Stephanie and her crew.

More infidelity

Sigh.

You would think that I could keep my eyes on the man in my life, that I wouldn’t be drawn by yet another adventurer, that I could remember that the argument between size and frequency has not been resolved.

But not only have I cheated, again, but I’m on my third infidelity of the week.

Don Quixote was my love, my life, for the first half of the story - my mantra for Part One of the book, in the words of Jessica Rabbit: “He makes me laugh”.

But with Part Two, the honeymoon was over.  Now I find myself avoiding him whenever I can - I go out with other books, while he stays home on the nightstand; even at home, I ignore him and flirt with graphic novels.

What is worse, I had a little fling with a female protagonist.  And it was fun, although it wasn’t a lasting relationship.

I wish I could say that it is because I’m acting out my grief, knowing that DQ is going to die - if it were only that, perhaps I could be forgiven.  But with less than 100 pages to go, there’s no denying the inevitable - and besides, I’ve been through too many deaths of beloved characters to use this as an excuse.

No, it is sheer selfishness, my tawdry little affairs; the lust for adventure and excitement; the desire to have someone new and unknown, perhaps even a little mysterious, in my life.

Dear DQ, part of me wants to lie to you, make you feel better, and even though it is trite, say, “It’s not you, it’s me.”

But it *IS* you.

Oddness

As I’ve been struggling through Don Quixote’s second half, I have breezed through a few other books. “Brother Odd” by Dean Koontz was one of the latest.

I absolutely loved the first two books about Odd Thomas. Odd is a very sweet, humble, loving character, and the stories managed to contain humor as well as thrill and suspense. The mix was right, and I was sucked right past the improbabilities into suspension of disbelief.

“Brother Odd” has an odd (pun intended) pace. Nothing really happens for the first half of the book - it’s all forebodings and maybe something’s happened, maybe not. Odd seems a little off, this time - still the same sweet, humble, loving character, but almost too much so. The relationship between Odd and the Russian seems rather contrived at first, although I think, overall, it was one of the best aspects of the book.

The first two books contain few, if any, supernatural elements other than those directly related to Odd and his abilities. This book is oriented around something that at least appears to be supernatural - magic is in the eyes of the beholder, and all we see at first is the completely different nature of the antagonists. Perhaps because of the lack of supernatural entities in the first two books, I had a harder time accepting them in this one. Even receiving the explanation for their presence in the end, it didn’t really work completely for me.

Yet, I enjoyed the book - it was still a good read, but certainly the weakest of the first three Odd Thomas novels.

Slow Going

I have been negligent in updating the blog, mostly due to the fact that I haven’t had a lot of time to read due to work pressures, and partly due to the fact that I’m *very* stuck in “Don Quixote”.

The first half of the book I took down in a week - for me, even that is slow reading (450 pgs in one week, compared to my normal monthly average of about 6200 pgs per month), but I was already starting to get swamped at work and I was coming down with a nasty cold, to boot.

But the first half was funny, compelling, and the interleaved stories that were not directly related to the story of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza added to the interest, rather than distracting me. In the second half (originally published somewhere around 12 years later), Cervantes whines about how readers of the first half complained about the interjected stories, and so in this half, he is only going to treat on the actual adventures of DQ & SP.

Sadly, although there is some good material in there, a lot of it is made up of long, didactic, even pedantic, monologues by DQ, setting forth his view of just about everything. A lot of the purported humor is lost, perhaps because of the gap of centuries between writing and reading; perhaps because even people reading at the time wouldn’t have gotten the humor; possibly because it was tailored more for the aristocratic audience of the day rather than the more plebian crowd; or maybe in spite of Cervantes’ intent, it just is not funny. He keeps telling the reader about how funny everything is - if it really were that funny, why does he have to keep reminding us? I don’t feel I can blame it on Edith Grossman, who did such a brilliant job translating on the first half - capturing the spirit and flow of a translation can’t be easy, and the first half was nearly seamless in terms of style and cohesion. I suspect that she did as beautiful a job on the second half, but unless you choose to alter the sense of what you’re translating to achieve a certain effect, you’re stuck with the original material and its flaws.

I’ve got about 100 pages to go, and it’s finally starting to pick up again. For the first half of the book, I was engaged and actively reading - the narrative gave me ideas to write on, made me think more about the context of the book’s time, location, and cultural setting, and the sub-text, as well as entertaining me; but very little in the first 350 pages of the second half has been more than just filler. Again, this may partially be due to my own circumstances, where my focus has been more on work than on what I’m reading; but I’ve been in similar circumstances before, and not had this much trouble with medieval, Renaissance, Enlightenment, or Victorian texts.

At this point, I feel committed to finishing the book, because I have high hopes for it to redeem itself, and bring back the enjoyment I had for the first half. However, in addition to the two books I read and wrote about already while I was working my way through DQ, I have read another two, quick reads that I will write about in later posts.

Unable to look away

Rather than returning immediately to Don Quixote, I picked up “Running with Scissors” by Augusten Burroughs as my next read.

I had read “Possible Side Effects” previously, and found it both funny and touching. The ride is much more intense in RwS. Suffering from insomina anyway, I couldn’t put the book down, and even when I tried to get to sleep once I felt sufficiently exhausted, I lay there thinking about it. In spite of the humor in Burroughs’ book, I was horrified at the situation this young boy was thrust into; and I was also amazed by just how crazy people can be (and how normal they can think themselves).

It was mesmerizing - the type of horrible fascination where you want to look away from something awful, but can’t stop yourself from watching - it felt the same as the time I was going through another insomia bout, watching some videos on YouTube; I thought I’d clicked on a picture of a video about some cute kittens, but instead, what came up were some cars in a brushy field with a man in a blue shirt taking photographs of something I couldn’t see - all of a sudden a lioness comes running up behind the man and takes him down - he fights, trying to block her, but she, of course, overpowers him. The video keeps rolling, and even as the man is struggling, the filmer pans back and shows the man’s wife and children in the car next to him, screaming and crying; and the man in the car on the other side starting to rush forward, but realizing that there’s nothing he can do and moving back again. As the camera turns back toward the lioness, the man is lying still, and she bites at him again - his body, perhaps in some nerve-response because he’s unconscious but not dead, jerks into a sitting position, then sinks backward again.

Even as I desperately wanted to stop watching it, I was unable to stop - I had nightmares for nearly a month after; and even years later, now, the images remain in my mind, and are still as disturbing as when they were fresh.

Reading RwS was disturbing in a similar way. Although it hasn’t caused nightmares, I can’t forget the callous selfishness of Burroughs’ mother; the cold anger and rejection of his father, and the genial predation of Dr. Finch.

Burroughs managed to survive, mauled but still alive - to come through with his humor intact, despite everything.

His book wounds like a lion.

Why didn’t I ever think of this?

I took a break half way through reading Don Quixote - not because I wasn’t enjoying it, either. I do tend to read multiple books at one time.

This past weekend, I read “How I Paid for College - A Novel of Sex, Theft, Friendship & Musical Theater” by Marc Acito. It had been recommended to me by my friend David S., who, I believe, went to school with Marc (at any rate, he knows him). It’s been on my reading list for a while, and when I saw that his next book is out (”Attack of the Theater People”), I decided it was high time I read the first one.

I loved it! The characters are complex, experiencing problems that anyone might face, and, well, to say they approach solving them creatively is an understatement. In the same way that a movie such as “Arsenic and Old Lace” is a farce, yet deals with serious subjects (murder, madness, illegitimacy), so “How I Paid for College” is a farce, yet deals with sexuality, sex, depression, and, as the subtitle says, theft, friendship, and musical theater. However, there is a depth to the serious side of “College” that you don’t see in “Arsenic and Old Lace”. Perhaps because I found myself relating to the main character, Edward Zanni, in a way that I never related to Mortimer Brewster (I’m pretty sure I’m not the son of a seacook - or the daughter of one either. . .); I did have self-esteem problems when I was a teen-ager, I got involved in the high school theater group (techie, rather than acting), had some friends that I did crazy things with, and faced problems with a dysfunctional family.

I must say, I never considered extortion as a means to solve my problems, although murder occasionally crossed my mind.

As the situation goes from bad to worse, Edward and his friends escalate their efforts to find a way to pay for Edward’s tuition at Juilliard.  The potential consequences don’t faze the group, at least not much; and when the law catches up with them for a relatively minor offense, they all step up to spread the blame out, rather than let Edward take the rap.  Friendship does have its limits, however, and all of the friends are capable of rejecting sex with someone they’re not comfortable with (hetero and homosexual encounters alike) - no rape or pity fucks here.

Thinking back on the ending, it seems a little anti-climactic; but while I was reading it, it seemed very natural, and an appropriately ironic solution to the story.  I definitely recommend this book, and am looking forward to reading the sequel.

Madness, War, and Peace

Every person who meets Don Quixote during the first third of the book sees madness in Don Quixote, including Sancho Panza. And indeed, between tilting at windmills, seeing a barber’s basin as the Golden Helmet of Mambrino, and freeing galley slaves who were sentenced for crimes against the King’s justice (and who then turned around and beat both DQ and SP), the kindest words that can be used about him are that he has very poor judgment and little common sense.

Don Quixote recognizes no madness in himself, and so when he desires to bring even greater glory and fame upon himself by performing penance in the mountains, he determines that the way to do it is to imitate the greatest of chivalric knights in literature, “playing the part of one who is desperate, a fool, a madman;” and he bids Sancho not to advise him “to abandon so rare, so felicitous, so extraordinary an imitation.”

In essence, the episode of performing penance in the Sierra Morena is play-acting on the part of Don Quixote; under that same umbrella, his whole imitation of chivalrous knights and their lives and deeds is a type of play-acting, with Don Quixote trying to shape the world he lives in to be more like the Golden Age of Chivalry, which is delineated in so much detail in the romances he reads.

Is it madness that we try to shape our own worlds through our actions, either positive or negative? One person provides free legal services to poor people in an attempt to shape their world on his model of justice; another person becomes a suicide bomber to shape the world according to her beliefs. Each of these might perceive the others’ actions as madness, yet believe that their own actions are perfectly logical and sensible with the context of their world view.

At the inn where Don Quixote and his friends meet with the captive and the Lela Zoraida, DQ speaks to the assembled group, telling them that arms are superior to letters (i.e., being a knight or soldier is superior to being a priest or scholar). “The purpose and aim of letters . . . is to maintain distributive justice, and give each man what is his, and make certain that good laws are obeyed.” Whereas the purpose of arms “is peace, which is the greatest good that men can desire in this life. . . . This peace is the true purpose of war, and saying arms is the same as saying war.”

Cervantes describes DQ’s arguments in favor of arms and war as rational, “and no one listening to him at that moment could think of him as a madman”.

However, isn’t war just another way of trying to shape our world? If Don Quixote is mad to think that chivalry is an appropriate way to shape his world, isn’t he equally mad to think that war is an appropriate way to shape his world? Isn’t war just chivalry expanded to include a country or regime rather than just a single enemy knight?

The claim that peace is the purpose of war sounds mad to me.

Mixed Feelings

I’m loving “Don Quixote” - it is hilarious, interesting, romantic (OED: Romance - A tale in verse, embodying the adventures of some hero of chivalry, esp. of those of the great cycles of mediaeval ages, and belonging both in matter and form to the ages of knighthood; also, in later use, a prose tale of similar character).

Having studied medieval literature when I returned to school to get my degree (was it only 4 years ago that I graduated?), I have a particular fondness for this kind of story. The digressions and disquisitions that Cervantes throws in, if anything help keep the medieval flavor of the tale, with a more updated feel to the language (which is appropriate for a book written during the Renaissance).

Although Don Quixote and Sancho Panza are the official protagonists, we learn much more about the peripheral characters, their feelings, beliefs, and motivations. So far (roughly 1/3 in), the tale of DQ’s adventures seems more like a framework used by Cervantes on which to hang the stories of other characters than the point of the book itself. Time is very flexible - in a couple hundred pages, barely three days pass, but then in just a couple pages, three more days are blithely mentioned as having passed.

The mixed feelings come from the peripheral characters’ reaction to Don Quixote and his perceived madness. His friends laugh at him secretly, manipulate him through lies, and even strangers make fun of him by pretending to go along with his worldview and beliefs in order to see what sort of outrageous things he will say or do. On one level, I find the story amusing as DQ does say and do more and more outrageous things; but I also cringe when I read about his friends the priest and the barber telling him lies and laughing behind his back at how DQ believes the lies.

Madness is next up on the table - who is, who isn’t, what is it anyway? Perhaps that will be answered as I read further…