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Death by Black Hole and Other Cosmic Quandaries by Neil deGrasse Tyson

If the lovely fact that our sun will probably burn out in 4 billion years and our beloved Earth will turn into a huge ball of black rock because of it (until it's vaporized that is) bothers you, keeps you up in the night, this book might not be for you. If you're worried about an asteroid hitting somewhere between Hawaii and California in 2039 and Idaho becoming ocean front property (hmm, maybe an improvement?), then this book might not be for you. If you're worried about what might happen to you if you inadvertently get a little, tinsy bit too close to a black hole of death! (even your atoms get pulled apart) then again, I might not read this book.Because, if you thought your ulcer was healing and you could eat salsa with your chips again. Think again! A collection of essays about a myriad of cosmic topics from Natural History magazine written by astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson (you've probably seen him on PBS, and no he's not the night sky guy with the weird voice), this book entertains. Frightens. Enlightens. And inevitably makes you feel much, much smarter for reading it. But believe me, sometimes this knowledge is a scary, scary thing! In fact, now I'd like to take some of it back. Oh, brain atrophy!

Except for a few about half way through that made my eyes start to glaze over, I found most of these essays really interesting and readable. Tyson is obviously one of those well known science professionals who is actually interested in, and good at, teaching (believe it or not!) instead of just doing research and publishing. So yes, they do exist..

Way, oh way back in the dark ages when I was in college I took a series of physics classes from an astronaut named Don Lind. He was a cocky ass who said stuff like, if you ever get a chance to fly in space.. . I wanted to slap him...anyway, I remember learning about prisms and color and how our brain interprets it, and thinking that was the coolest thing! I remember telling my twelve year old sister about it, about how a prism works and why we are able to see that myriad of colors without moving our eyes (look it up, it's really cool!). She looked at me like I was a martian from outer space who'd just landed and interrupted an episode of Get Smart, and made fun of me for years because of it.

Well, neiner neiner. Now I feel vindicated.
Sort of..
Crap, she's probably still making fun of me.
Oh well..
4 stars

Cheaper By the Dozen by Frank Gilbreth Jr. and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey

They had a dozen children, six boys and six girls, in 17 years. Somewhat to Dad’s disappointment, there were no twins or other multiple births. There was no doubt in his mind that the most efficient way to rear a large family would be to have one huge litter and get the whole business over with at one time.

First things first: this book has nothing in common with the 2003 movie starring Steve Martin except the title and the number of offspring in the featured family. Where the film was just a standard family comedy with a larger cast, the book is a genuinely sweet and funny look at an atypical family in the early part of the twentieth century. It’s also worth noting that this book doesn’t take much longer to read than the movie takes to watch.

Written by two of the dozen children, Cheaper By the Dozen is a memoir, basically a loosely-connected series of vignettes, mostly funny and occasionally moving. Although the title makes it sound like it focuses primarily on the children, the most vivid character in the story is actually Frank Galbrath, Sr., the father of the titular dozen. Both he and his wife Lillian are efficiency experts, making their living by showing companies and individuals how they can reduce “motion waste” and save time and money. They choose to apply these same principles to their family: irregular jobs are bid on by the children, with the job and the subsequent reward going to the lowest bidder; Morse code is taught by painting legends in every room of the house, and, similarly, foreign languages are taught by means of phonographs in every room.

Cheaper By the Dozen, like most funny books, doesn’t really benefit from a review. You can pick it up and read a couple pages and see if it’s for you. If you come from a family of thirteen, like me, it just might catch your attention.

Muriel Spark: The Biography by Martin Stannard

Brent recently noted that my reviews of Muriel Spark's books never seem to reflect a real enthusiasm, even as I claim to be a fan of her work. It's hard to argue with this; certainly I disliked both Aiding and Abetting and The Finishing School (the last two books Spark ever wrote), and while my esteem for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is clear, my reviews of Robinson, The Girls of Slender Means, and The Driver's Seat must seem rather indifferent.

But it seems to me that Spark's books function differently from other novels, that if I seem to not engage with them it is because they do not ask to be engaged with in that way. They offer little in the way of human connection. The characters are ripe, but they are also frequently grotesque and off-putting. You are not permitted under anyone's skin, and neither would they want you there. But they certainly attack the mind with some shocking precision; for such slim books they present quite a bit to think upon.

Martin Stannard's new biography of Spark is a welcome opportunity to see her fiction from another, more human angle. I am not usually a fan of biographies--I prefer to think that the literature ought to speak for itself--but something about Spark's coldness and sparseness makes me want to find out more about her. In fact, Spark was adamant that nothing could be gleaned about her from her work, even when it mirrored autobiographical details. She leaves precious few holes through which the author can be glimpsed. It is no wonder, I think, that one should be naturally curious.

This reflects one of the major themes that seems to arise in Stannard's biography: Spark's obsessive need to control her own biography. Stannard speaks early on of something he calls the "nevertheless principle," illustrated by an uncharacteristically stark, black cathedral spire in the middle of Spark's native Edinburgh--the idea that nothing is one thing only. In spite of this--or because of it?--she kept stern watch over her public image, threatening to sue those who got even the minutest details wrong or dared to mischaracterize her. Her own biography, Curriculum Vitae, is described as a disappointment, seeking to correct the inaccuracies of the way she was depicted, but offering no substantial insight into her own life. These details form part of a larger capriciousness, torpedoing friendships for small or perceived slights. As her friend Ved Mehta notes, "She'd absolutely conquer you immediately. And then of course she'd move on to someone else."

Stannard depicts all of this in what is probably the most charitable way possible. His work hews as closely to Spark's point of view as it is able, allowing her always the last word in her own defense. As an account of her life, I find this approach fairly reasonable. He does not, for instance, mention that although Spark asked him to be her biographer, she disliked the final product and tried to go at it with the proverbial fine-toothed comb to preserve her own careful conception of herself. This is probably much of the reason that it took eighteen years to complete. However, it is impossible to ignore what Stannard elides: frequently Spark could be a nasty piece of work.

Not a single friendship seems to last or simply fade, they all seem to implode. (The one exception being Penelope Jardine, who was her platonic companion for the last few decades of her life.) God help you if you were her agent, editor, or publisher. But most distressing was her relationship with her son, Robin. Born in Africa to Spark and her unstable, violent husband, Spark sent Robin to live with his grandmother when he was small, partly because of monetary and custody concerns, but also because, as Stannard admits, having Robin around interfered with her literary goals. As an adult, Spark and Robin treated each other with open contempt. He increasingly aligned himself with Orthodox Judaism, waging a public campaign claiming that Spark's mother was a Jewish convert and that therefore she herself was fully (not half-) Jewish, and that Spark, a Catholic convert, had purposefully concealed that part of her identity.

It is easy to see why Robin's actions enraged Spark, especially in light of her obsession over controlling her image. Her conversion was a fundamental part of her identity, and Robin's insistence on her family's Judaism in a way sought to annull her personal religious freedom and trap her in the traditions of her family. That would have been a gross insult to her independence. But Stannard cannot conceal a lifetime of indifference to her son, and even he lets in a little soft criticism when describing Robin's art career:

Muriel usually applauded those who followed Gaugin's example. She had followed it herself. But her son, she felt, was not Gauguin and she suspected ulterior motives: a flavour of competition ('Anything you can do...'), a desire to cash in on her fame. It seems not to have occurred to her that is desire to become an artist was a genuine passion perhaps connected with his craving for her approval. Instead, she saw the problem as twofold: he was fifty and lacked talent.

If I speak too much of Spark's negatives, it is because they are what Stannard leaves unsaid. She is also brilliant, and the biography is at its best when it attempts literary criticism--as it does for each of Spark's 22 novels--refracting the themes of her work in her life's prism. In her later years, Spark seems brittle, irritable, and often cruel, but it is those same qualities that make her, in her youth, such a compelling figure: fierce, independent, spiritually incisive but not dogmatic. Her palming off of Robin is more favorably mirrored in her slavish obedience to her writing, enduring long bouts of poverty and hardship in order to create. One of the most fascinating--though surely difficult--periods Stannard describes is a spell of strange hallucinations brought on by Dexedrine, which she took to help stave off hunger while she wrote. (Among other things, she thought that T.S. Eliot was concealing threatening messages to her in his work.)

She would have loathed being identified with Fleur Talbot, the heroine of her novel Loitering with Intent, even though it is cobbled together from the bits and pieces of her own personal history. But Fleur also says something that seems to me as good an epitaph as any:

When people say that nothing happens in their lives... I believe them. But you must understand that everything happens to an artist; time is always redeemed, nothing is lost and wonders never cease.

The Drawing of the Three by Stephen King

Maybe it wasn't so bad, he thought. He had staked everything, and that was all he had lost. [Then] the thunder of his own guns filled him with stupid wonder.

So I decided to take a break from the Song of Ice and Fire series (because none of the books really ends, they just pause and pick up again in the next one, making it like reading one several thousand page novel, which hasn't gotten tedious yet, but could...) and go back to the Dark Tower. Brent commented that as the series goes along the novels become more Stephen King-esque, and I can already see it in this installment. I enjoyed this book more than The Gunslinger and am looking forward to the third one.

This book was interesting because we got to know a little more about Roland and his relationship to his companions. When he draws Eddie, Eddie is hooked on heroin and struggling to handle himself, not to mention the trek and quest for the Tower. He hates and resents Roland, thinking only of himself. When Roland draws Odetta/Detta, she is still tormented by the split in her personality and is more of a liability and danger than an asset. But by the end Roland has basically saved Odetta/Detta from herself and she emerges as Susannah, capable and strong, but still kind and caring, while Eddie has found strength, love, and someone to take care of, undertaking some serious character building. By the end of the book, Roland acknowledges that he loves them both, though his profession intrigues me. It seems that in the end Eddie and Susannah are only Roland's tools and he'll use them in whatever way helps him get to the Tower. He admits to Eddie that even though he loves them, he won't hesitate to let them die or kill them, as he did the boy in The Gunslinger, but I think it goes further than that. Early in this one, he recognizes Eddie's capacity to love and the way he has let that capacity atrophy in himself in his single-minded pursuit of the Tower. Roland realizes that reaching the tower stripped of his humanity might be worse than not reaching the Tower at all, which makes me think that deep down he is only using Eddie and Susannah as people to love. I'm interested to see how this dynamic evolves over the course of the series.

The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler

"You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep, you were not bothered by things like that, oil and water were the same as wind and air to you. You just slept the big sleep, not caring about the nastiness of how you died or where you fell. Me, I was part of the nastiness now.”

First up, confession time. Apart from Harlequin-grade romance, I’m less familiar with crime fiction than any other genre. I cut my grown-up teeth on John Grisham and Stephen King and moved on to classics, so with the exception of Victorian crime novels like The Woman in White, I’m unfamiliar. That said, there was an awful lot in The Big Sleep that felt familiar. As Chris mentioned in his review, this isn’t really Chandler’s fault. His books and his protagonist Philip Marlowe have been so influential that returning to the source is a little like watching your first performance of Romeo and Juliet.

That said, it’s worth noting that The Big Sleep, like Romeo and Juliet, is much better than most of its derivatives. This is hard-boiled crime fiction at its most hard-boiled: The women are all beautiful femme fatales, the men are all tough guys, and the plots are twisted and complex in all the ways you’d expect. A plot summary would probably run longer than one of Christopher’s reviews, so just think about a noir you’re familiar with, say, L. A. Confidential, and imagine it’s a lot like that, because it is. For better or worse, it was almost exactly the way I expected it would be. That’s not to say it’s bad. Marlowe is a likeable guy. In spite of his noir exterior, he repeatedly resists seduction by various women, large bribes from dangerous men, and polite conversation with, well, everyone to pursue the best interests of his client. The ending is pretty surprising, and the book doesn’t take too long to read. If this all sounds like damning with faint praise, that’s not exactly what’s up—it’s just that The Big Sleep is out of my regular ballpark and I don’t really know what to say about it.

It’s worth noting, though, that Chandler is quite a good writer, and sometimes he’ll turn out a surprisingly evocative paragraph, like the excerpt above. He’s also quite good with similes—witness, “He wore a blue overcoat that fitted him like a stall fits a horse” or "The General spoke again, slowly, using his strength as carefully as an out-of-work show-girl uses her last good pair of stockings."

As for themes, I struggled to find anything in particular beyond “the world is a violent, dangerous place”, but a repeated line in the novel, “This is a big city now” might give some insight into Marlowe’s mind and help explain the popularity of Chandler’s novels seventy years after their publication. Marlowe is a complex character, but his motives are simple. He wants to complete the job and be able to live with himself. However, throughout the novel, he finds himself stymied by the big world: gangsters, police, women. Through it all, Marlowe is true only to himself and his own moral code. To him, the world is still, at its heart, a simple place, full of complex people with complex motives who are nevertheless the same as they’ve always been: petty, greedy, sometimes noble, and, in spite of their complex circumstances, simple.

Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

On the day they were going to kill him, Santiago Nasar got up at five thirty in the morning to wait on the boat the Bishop was coming on.

Spoilers, such as they are.

I realize that, for most people, the best place to start with an author is one of their most acclaimed works. You wouldn’t read Youth for your first Tolstoy, The Original of Laura for your first Nabokov, or The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner for your first Meyer. Still, there is something to be said for starting with a lesser work, particularly if the works upon which an author’s reputation has been built are massive, and you happen to stumble across a much shorter, lesser-known work by a well-regarded author at Goodwill for 50 cents. It gives you a chance to check out an author’s style and themes without investing hours and hours of reading; however, the downside is that some works are minor for a reason. All of which is a long way of saying that Chronicle of a Death Foretold was my first Marquez, and I really didn’t like it.

The story opens by introducing us to Santiago Nasar, a young Arab who, we learned in the first line of the book, has been murdered. The day of his death immediately follows the biggest wedding in his town’s history, that of Bayardo San Roman and Angela Vicario. As it goes, Bayardo San Roman returns Angela Vicario to her parents’ house the night of the wedding after learning that she isn’t a virgin. When her brothers find her the next morning, laying in the living room bruised from the beaten her mother gave her upon her return, they demand the name of her love, intending to kill him and thus preserve Angela Vicario’s honor. She gives them the name of Santiago Nasar, even though the narrator tells us that he couldn’t possibly have been her lover, and the twins make preparations for the kill. While doing so, they tell virtually everyone they come into contact with that they are preparing to kill Santiago Nasar, and soon everyone in the town knows, except Santiago Nasar himself. The murder becomes a sort of spectator sport, with no one intervening even as the twins brutally murder Santiago.

I don’t know where to start with the things that bothered me about this book. By the time I finished the first ten pages, I was tired of the writing style, which is, I guess, magical realism. The narrator, unnamed but certainly a resident of the town, delivers the story, injecting asides about dreams and mystical occurrences that seemingly have nothing to do with the story. He also repeats himself, over and over. Indeed, the book would be half its length if he didn’t spend time meeting every resident of the town and telling us that they all knew that Santiago Nasar was going to be killed, and didn’t do anything about it. By the end of the first chapter, I already felt like I was being bludgeoned over the head with the point. I get it—everyone in town is complicit in the murder because they did nothing to stop it. What’s this a reference to? World War II? The Catholic purge in Mexico? Rwandan genocide? Basic human nature? We’re left to speculate, which is fine.

Less fine: throughout the book, we’re introduced to dozens of characters—indeed, Chronicle may have the highest character-to-page ratio I’ve ever seen—but we never learn enough about anyone to much care what happens to them. Even if we did, everyone here seems pretty terrible, or at least terribly apathetic. Again, I get it, that’s the point, but without any sort of relatable or sympathetic characters, the blurb on the back of the book is almost as impactful as the book itself. Angela Vicario probably gets the most development of anyone, and yet, when the narrator speaks to her years after the murder, she laughs about the things that happened, and admits that she picked Santiago Nasar’s name out of thin air. Intended or not, this makes her seem just as terrible as everyone else in her stupid town.

I’m not glad I read this book. It was awful and pointless and the writing style bothered me, although I can’t put my finger on why (although always using everyone's full names probably contributed). Can anyone who’s read any of Marquez’s major works tell me if they’re better, or am I better off staying far away?

Jim's One Hundred years of Solitude review, in which Jim is also bludgeoned with themes.

Samuel Johnson Is Indignant: Stories By Lydia Davis

At a certain point in her life, she realizes it is not so much that she wants to have a child as that she does not want not to have a child, or not to have had a child.

Some weeks back, while the upstate winter was still in full swing, I bundled up and drove over to the University at Albany to hear Lydia Davis give a reading from her most recent collection of short stories. I had never before read any of Davis’ work, but after an hour or so of listening to her material I resolved to remedy this posthaste. I went directly to the library and checked out her celebrated 2002 book Samuel Johnson Is Indignant.

To call Davis’ stories “stories” seems an understatement. Drawing from Proust - she’s translated much of his work – Davis spins out little poems, or rather, tiny vignettes filled with humor, philosophy and even bleak depictions of life, although some are surrealist depictions of what could only be described as dreams. Davis finds that liminal space between poetry and prose and its here that she does her best work. Rarely do her stories spill onto a second page - the title of the book is itself a story - but when they do readers will no doubt greedily flip the page for more.

Davis gives readers an intimate glimpse into her own life in musings like a funeral parlor's letter, one of the best ruminations of the commercialization of death that I have ever read. All in all Samuel Johnson Is Indignant is an engaging book, and while occasionally marred by excessive introspection, readers are sure to enjoy its petite, philo-poetic treats.

King Lear by William Shakespeare

Close pent-up guilts,
Rive your concealing continents, and cry
These dreadful summoners grace. I am a man
More sinn'd against than sinning.

So, four years into 50 Books, I’ve finally read my first Shakespeare. I can’t say, not having read anything else by the bard, whether King Lear was a good or bad choice. It seems like a mixed blessing. On the one hand, I was unfamiliar with the story, so there was some suspense that wouldn’t have been present had I chosen, say, Romeo and Juliet. On the other hand, King Lear may be Shakespeare’s most complex play, and, reading it mostly without commentary like I did, I’m sure I missed a lot.

But the real question is, is it good? And I am thankful to validate Shakespeare scholars everywhere when I say, yes, it is. King Lear is a seriously dense play, full of double crosses, emotional subtleties, eye gouging, and swordfighting. The basic gist is this: One day, King Lear, old and ready to pass on his power, gathers his three daughters, Gonreil, Regan, and Cordelia. He asks each of them how much they love him, and while Gonreil and Regan answer with flattering hyperbole, Cordelia attempts to give an honest answer, and, for her troubles, is banished. The remaining daughters set in motion a fairly complex plot, most of it out of their control, which ends with almost the entire cast dead, including King Lear himself, who first has a short period of being completely bonkers. And yes, these are spoilers, but Lear is a tragedy, after all.

I don’t feel competent to really dissect Lear, but here are a few observations. King Lear himself is a pitiful character, overthrown by his own pride but unable to see it. It’s ironic that he makes almost as much sense crazy as he does sane, having the gall to claim himself wronged after banishing his truest daughter for the unforgivable sin of honesty.Not that the moral/sane characters get off much better. Many of them receive their unearned comeuppance. In spite of Albany’s late declaration that divine justice has been served, it’s difficult to see any justice or order at all by the end of King Lear. In that way, the play functions as a critique of divine intervention, and takes no sides. Good does prevail in the end, but at what cost? Is justice gained through injustice just at all? In the same vein, it’s interesting that Shakespeare chose to set Lear in a pre-Christian world. It allows him to ask difficult questions that nevertheless require some transposition to consider in a Christian context.

Although Lear is hundreds of years old, it’s likely to always be resonant. Leaders don’t change much, and neither do men. Kings will always be brought low by pride, the good will always die at the hands of the wicked, and the question will always remain, can it really be any different?

Chris's Review

A Song of Ice and Fire (books 1-3) by George R.R. Martin

Winter is coming.

Those are the words of the house of Stark, but in Westeros winter isn't coming, it's effing there. Kings and lords fight and betray, heroes and villains are killed and maimed alike, and the people of the realm face numerous and unspeakable dangers. Dun dun dun DUN! (dramatic music)

I won't say a lot about these books because they aren't too deep or meaningful (of if they are I've ignored it because I think over-analyzing them would ruin some of the charm/magic). A Game of Thrones, A Clash of Kings and A Storm of Swords are the first three books in the (as yet unfinished) epic chronicle, A Song of Ice and Fire. I have to say they kind of remind me of Tolkien or Rowling, though the magical element is a little bit dialed down (though it's still there). The books take place in a different world, made up (as far as I can tell) on two continents, Westeros (which is more or less like medieval Europe and is where the majority of the action takes place) and another (which is more or less like North Africa/the Middle East, at least as far as the terrain goes). I won't go into the plot much, because it's detailed and the books are long, but I will say that these books are fun and addictive. Certainly not high literature, but just about everything I want in a book: an interesting, compelling story that I want to read for hours on end with characters I both love and hate. Jim got me turned on to these books (I also started because they are going to turn it into an HBO mini-series, which I'm quite looking forward to). If you are looking for something fun and entertaining with some dragons thrown in for good measure, I definitely recommend these books.