Don't Panic.

#20: The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, by Douglas Adams.

I've known that 42 is the ultimate answer since I was seven, along with the every line from Monty Python And The Holy Grail, because I lived in the same house with my middle brother. So it was about time I actually got around to reading the book--my middle childhood makes so much more sense now. The 2005 movie was pretty good, but the book is comic genius. What P.G. Wodehouse novels are to the English novel, Douglas Adams is to the science fiction novel. Science fiction is normally not a genre I gravitate to, but I would recommend this, only because if you like sci-fi then this is up your alley and if you don't you can view the whole book as a satire of the classic sci-fi novel, so you can't lose. On that note, so long and thanks for all the fish.

Sprechen Sie Daytshish?

When I took German in college, little did I know it would come in handy for reading a murder-mystery set in a fictional Jewish refugee colony in Alaska. That's right, it's book update time once again. I'm pretty far behind on posting about my reading progress, but I'll try to get it under control over the next few weeks.

#19: The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon.
This is the first book I've read by Michael Chabon (I know, I'm apparently the only one who hasn't read The Amazing Adventure's of Kavelier And Clay). Coming off a Dashiell Hammett's complete novels this book was a little bit flat for me as a genre book. It came really close to working for me, but was a little bit short in a few areas. I really liked the Yiddish for the first third of the book, after that it started to seem a little gimmicky. I also really liked the plot for the first third and the last third of the book, the middle was slow and not helped by my sudden irritation with the unblent Yiddish. That being said, knowing German added another layer to the characterizations for me. Since a good bit of Yiddish is the phonetic spelling of the German word (how you can be more phonetic than German I don't know), or just the German word, I was amused to find that the main character's ex-wife has the last name Gelbfish, or yellow fish. My favorite Yiddish transformation is familiar to most bagel-eaters of the northeast: lox = lachs = salmon. You can translate from Yiddish to English as much as you want here.

Turn! Turn! Turn!

Fall has arrived, inside my mailbox at least. Catalogues filled with fall clothing have started to pour in, just in time for August's humid ninety degree days. I understand of course, it's back-to-school shopping season. After 20 years of conditioning, I'm hard-wired to expect summer to end the third week in August, or Labor day at the very latest. Two years off isn't enough time to be reconditioned. I figure I'll be over it by the time my hypothetical future children are ready for school, thus ensuring that I won't fully recover until I'm well into my AARP years. I am ready for fall though- I want to wear sweaters again dammit! Also, I miss college football and scripted prime time television. But that is still weeks away, which means that the 'Fall Story' JCrew catalogue that came last week only made my summer ennui worse last weekend. This of course is a mood that makes me want to watch Pride and Prejudice (the 5 hour BBC miniseries no less!) and knit. Both of which I did; it helped enormously. Topping things off, the JCrew catalogue was insidiously full of sweaters that had been photographed in an historic Boston library. Nothing sells sweaters like books. Seriously. That's just mean. I love sweaters almost as much as I like books and libraries. So, inevitably, I had to order a sweater because by the time it is sweater weather they will be selling swimming suits and shorts again. To everything there is a season.


If you like looking at other people's libraries as much as I do:
The Your Home Library Project
Celebrities' bookshelves
Flickr Bookshelf Pool pictures

# 18: Out of Africa

Out Of Africa by Isak Dineson (Karen Blixen) is a memoir of a time and a place that don't exist anymore: European colonial Africa. This is one instance though where I was glad that I saw the movie movie before reading the book, in order to have a visual sense of the scenery. The movie is vastly different than the book because it is based on the life of Karen Blixen as opposed to what is in the memoir, which has sketches of life in Africa, no mention of her husband, and stories about her 'friend' Denys Finch-Hatton. What makes this book worth reading is Karen Blixen's ability to describe what it is to be a stranger in a strange land who suddenly feels at home there. When forced to leave Kenya at the end of the book she writes about how it feels to leave a place you have been of, rather than just in:

I was the last person to realize that I was going. When I look back upon my last months in Africa, it seems to me that the lifeless things were aware of my departure a long time before I was so myself. The hills, the forests, plains and rivers, the wind, all knew that we were to part. When I first began to make terms with fate, and the negotiations about the farm were taken up, the attitude of the landscape towards me changed. Till then I had been part of it, and the drought had been to me like a fever, and the flowering of the plain like a new frock. Now the country disengaged itself from me, and stood back a little, in order that I should see clearly and as a whole.

I've experienced a similar feeling when leaving a place that had become home without realizing it, and never would have expressed the feeling this elegantly or perfectly. These places, my college town and the cities of my internships, I don't think I truly saw until I was leaving them.

The other nice thing about seeing the movie first: its nice to have Robert Redford as the idea of what Denys looks like when reading about a character for whom little physical description is given. Substitute a young Meryl Streep for the narrator if that is your persuasion.

He's not like anyone, they're all like him.

I recently finished reading Dashiell Hammett, The Complete Novels.
(#'s 13-17)
Red Harvest, The Dain Curse, The Maltese Falcon, The Glass Key, The Thin Man

I ended up reading this book because I saw the Humphrey Bogart version of The Maltese Falcon because it was on the list 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die. First, I've realized since starting the 1001 Movies project that Humphrey Bogart is amazing in everything (I've seen anyway). Now about the books...Hammett is credited with being the first hardboiled detective writer and had real world experience working for the Pinkerton detective agency before he started writing. I liked The Dain Curse, The Maltese Falcon, and The Thin Man the best of the five.

If you've seen The Maltese Falcon, the book reads almost exactly like the movie-I'd be surprised if they made too many dialogue adjustments for the screenplay. The famous line at the end "The stuff that dreams are made of" was added though. The film version of The Thin Man was also made more humorous than the book as well-and lots more Asta was added (who can blame them?).

Now really about the books...In the notes of the version I have the editor points out that several of Hammett's novels started as a series of stories in magazines that were then modified to fit together as a novel. This is most obvious in The Dain Curse, but I didn't find it troublesome. Hammett was once quoted as saying that the Continental Op detective in the first two books was based on his partner at Pinkerton who taught him to be a detective and that Sam Spade was the kind of detective that all the detectives he worked with would've like to think they were. In contrast to the prevalent English literary detectives of his time, Hammett's detectives are all flawed and involved in the crimes they are trying to solve to the point of being suspected by the police at least once per novel, if not once per chapter. They aren't unreliable narrators though. The real reason to read Hammett however, other than being the first of his genre, are for his descriptions and the style of prose. For example, his description of Sam Spade:

Samuel Spade's jaw was long and bony, his chin a jutting v under the more flexible v of his mouth. His nostrils curved back to make another, smaller, v. His yellow-grey eyes were horizontal. The v motif was picked up again by thickish brows rising outward from twin creases above a hooked nose, in a point on his forehead. He looked rather pleasantly like a blond satan.

Or this description of Sam Spade's apartment:

Cold steamy air blew in through two open windows, bringing with it half a dozen times a minute the Alcatraz foghorn's dull moaning. A tinny alarm-clock, inseburely mounted on a corner of Duke's Celebrated Criminal Cases of America--face down on the table--held its hands at five minutes past two.

These aren't challenging reads, each novel runs about 180 pages in my edition, which I think is the only in print edition of his novels right now--and would make good "beach reading" though I'm not sure I would take this out by the water since it's a nice hardback novel with very thin 'dictionary' paper for the pages.

It was the Matryoshka doll of stories*

I'll update my 50 books progress today, before I get too far behind...

#9. The Blind Assassin
by Margaret Atwood
Apr. 7-Apr. 15, 2007
This is the book the title of this post refers to. There are 4 nested stories in this book: 1) Newspaper reports about an important Canadian family. 2) A first person narrative by one of the members of the family, Iris, about her family and the circumstances surrounding the writing of a famous novel (called The Blind Assassin) by her sister. 3) The text of the novel. 4) And a story told by one the characters in the novel, about a blind assassin. The nested stories work together to reveal a mystery such that I was trying to piece together what really happened, and how it related to the novel, based on the different points of view. If I were giving gold stars, this would get 5 out of 5.

#10. Thank You, Jeeves
by P.G. Wodehouse
Apr. 15-Apr. 19, 2007
Bertie takes up the banjolele, which Jeeves hates, so Jeeves leaves his employment to work for one of his friends. Said friend is in love with Bertie's ex-fiancee, an American girl, whose father is considering buying the friends unwieldy estate and hates Bertie. They all end up on the estate together for a weekend. Hilarity ensues.

#11. Gulliver's Travels
by Jonathan Swift
Apr. 20-May 5, 2007
This is one of the books that has sat on my shelves unread for over a decade--according to the front I paid $3.99 for it, probably in the mid-nineties. It was probably unread because I've seen a number of made-for-t.v. movies of it, so I knew the story, and didn't find it particularly motivating. But in an effort to keep my book-buying addiction in check, I'm trying to read the books I already have, so here I am. Well, this was a pretty sharp political satire dressed in an adventure story when it was published. I prefer my political satire to be funny too, though. I'd probably give this 3 stars, though they'd be the red ones, since this is a historically important book but not my particular cup of tea.

#12. The Polysyllabic Spree
by Nick Hornby
Apr. 26-Apr. 27, 2007
Speaking of buying too many books, this is a collection of columns from a magazine about Nick Hornby's book-buying addiction replete with books purchased and books actually read lists at the beginning of each column. He does better with reading the books he buys each month than I think I do, but I suspect he has more reading time too. As usual, he's funny and self-deprecating.

*yes I looked this up in wikipedia to see what the official name for Russian nested dolls was...fact-checking is the most frequent reason for the yawning space between posts here. I'll think, hey I should put something up about X, but then think of the research I would have to do to have an informed opinion about the topic, and by the time I get done the impulse has passed. C'est la vie.

The Big Book Post

The 50 books challenge/resolution has been around for a while...the basic idea being to read 50 books in one year...but it's new to me this year. I'm only sort of halfway going to do it though--we'll see how many I get to. Now that I've set the bar sufficiently low I'll get around to the books, it's week 15 and I'm woefully behind having made it through only 8 books so far. Number 5 is at fault for the behindedness.

#1. Death's Acre: Inside the Body Farm, the legendary forensic lab
by Bill Blass and Jon Jefferson
Jan.1-Jan.5, 2007
I read this book after being fascinated by Stiff: the Curious Lives of the Human Cadaver by Mary Roach over the summer. I don't have a weak stomach--at least when I'm reading--so I find this topic endlessly fascinating. This book had a nice blend of forensic problem solving, anthropology, biography, and scientific method.

#2. His Excellency: George Washington
by Joseph J. Ellis
Jan.5-Jan.18, 2007
The theme of this book was: George Washington had demons, flaws, and was generally human...these turned out to be a) He wanted power, but didn't want to appear to want power; b) He worried about what people thought of him; c) He married up (see social climber); d) He edited his diaries so as to look better in the eyes of history. Despite all the flaws, Ellis manages to make him sympathetic, if a little stiff. Ellis makes Washington look best when describing his presidency- that he knew he was setting precedents, and that the most important thing for the country was to manage to stay together. A good book even though the subject matter wasn't all that new.

#3. Life Of Pi
by Yann Martel
Jan.10-Jan.25, 2007
The first two-thirds were really good, then the ending fell apart. The writing was good enough to make an unbelievable plot seem possible, until (and this doesn't seem like a fair criticism for a fiction novel) he started making things up. The beauty of the first two thirds was that everything that happened seemed possible, albeit unlikely, then Martel broke a sort of pact I believe all author's have with the reader-he broke his own set of rules, or maybe just changed them to get out of the plot alive. Fantasy is great, but if you are going to start telling a story with a real life setting, and suddenly decide you need an algae island populated by meerkats that becomes poisonous after dark.

#4. George Washington
by James MacGregor Burnsand Susan Dunn
Jan.19-Feb.1, 2007
Nothing new, nothing surprising, but a good overview-you know if you have to write a 9th grade history paper.

#5. John Adams
by John Patrick Diggins
Feb.1-Feb.13, 2007
After reading the George Washington volume in this series I am glad I read the 'overview' book before I get to David McCullough's John Adams which I have on my pile to read. John Adams may have been the most underappreciated of the founding fathers-so I'm really interested in reading a more in depth book about him.

#6. The Pickwick Papers
by Charles Dickens
Jan.26-Mar.29, 2007
This book is the reason I'm so behind-because I felt like killing the main character through much of the book for being so naive. I liked Bleak House a great deal, so I had high hopes for this book. Also, it is given high praise in one of my favorite books Anne of the Island for all of the great food descriptions. I really liked Sam, which I suspect is the point- he was making fun of the upper and middle classes while the real intelligence is in the lower class hero. It was Dicken's first novel and alot of later themes are evident- the backwards legal system for example. I enjoyed reading the book when I was reading it, but wasn't motivated to pick it up most of the time because it lacked an overarching storyline that I was interested in finding out the resolution too.

#7. Pigs Have Wings
by P.G. Wodehouse
Mar.30-Apr.3, 2007
I realize by now I sound like I've hated every book I've read this year-although not true-the sound is about to change. P.G. Wodehouse is the master of the comic novel, sure you can see all or most the plot devices and twists coming, but the execution and language are so good it doesn't matter. If reading Dickens was like eating cold oatmeal then reading Wodehouse is like eating Pop Rocks. If you haven't read Wodehouse, then do it now, it doesn't matter which one.

#8. Things Fall Apart
by Chinua Achebe
Apr.3-Apr.6, 2007
This book deserves its reputation for the last paragraph alone. The title of the book tells you what will happen, the anticipation is part of the beauty, the ending is the kick in the stomach. It is a surprisingly short book-an economic use of words as one review put it-just don't read the ending first.

When books and travel collide

Recently The Washington Post travel section had two articles on book related travel. The first is about the Library Hotel in Manhattan, a hotel with books in every room and room numbers based on the Dewey Decimal System. The second, is about bed and breakfast's with books in the rooms spread across the states. I like to travel, and I like to read, but I'm not sure I've reached the point where I want to go somewhere just to read. The Library Hotel seems like it would be fun to stay in, just to see what books were put in the particular subject of your room, but I doubt that I would actually read a book from the room while I was there. I'm a somewhat compulsive reader, and once I start a book I want to finish it. Plus, if I go somewhere, I usually want to see the place- not that I don't read on vacation- but I'm probably going to bring my own reading material. I like that there is this option though. Finally, the spring book preview. I don't read too many books as soon as they come out, but of this list I'll probably eventually read (like in 3 years...) Generation Loss, by Elizabeth Hand and Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power, by Robert Dallek. Note, a login id is required for washingtonpost.com, but it's free and no one is stopping you from making up an identity just for them.