Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone

This book amounts to nothing more than a How-To book for kids about witchcraft. I am surprised that there weren't any boycotts by religious groups around the time of its publication. Go ahead. Let your kids read this book if you don't care about where they are going to spend eternity.
Now to read the next one.

The Children of Men by PD James

Christopher has already reviewed this book and most of us have seen the movie, so I'm leaving out any synopsis. There isn't much to synopsize anyway. Sorry if my review is more negative than Christopher's; I don't like being disappointed or bored.

If from infancy you treat children as gods they are liable in adulthood to act as devils.
(I probably could have found a quote that relates more directly to the novel, but I like this one.)

Boring: I swear, nothing happens in this book until the last 70 pages. The first two thirds is just stuff. I don't even know what was in there. A lot of stuff I don't need to know to understand the book, obviously.

Insulting: I found her writing style to be a little insulting. What I do remember about the first 2/3 of the book is that she talks a lot about Theo's character: selfish, self-centered, uncaring, inconsiderate, et cetera, et cetera. And then Theo of course has a change of heart, in late middle age his personality suddenly changes for the better as a result of the extraordinary circumstances and people he's encountered. And Ms. James must think I'm a total idiot because before she explains to me this new change, she boils down Theo's personality into a Cliffs Notes-like paragraph. Maybe she thinks that after 150 pages of only Theo's character development, religious philosophy, and explanation of the Omega, I might have forgotten that first part.

Dialogue: This might be the worst dialogue I've ever read, excepting my little sister's short stories for her 5th grade writing class. I'm gonna take up a lot of space and give an excerpt of dialogue between Theo and an old woman who runs a B&B.

Theo: I'm afraid I've had an accident. I'm very wet. I don't think I'm fit to drive home tonight. Have you a vacancy? My name is Faron, Theo Faron.
Old Woman: I have a room vacant if you would just wait until I've taken Chloe for her evening duties. There's a special little place reserved for the dogs. We take care not to soil the beach. Mothers used to complain if the beach wasn't clean for the children and -- old habits remain. I'm EMO -- Evening Meal Optional. Would you be wanting that? ... I'm afraid I haven't very much in the refrigerator tonight, but I could give you soup and an omelette.
T: That would be wonderful.
O: The soup isn't home-made, I'm afraid, but I mix two tins to make it more interesting and add a little something, chopped parsley or an onion. I think you will find it palatable. Did you want it in the dining-room, or here in the sitting-room, in front of the fire? That might be cosier for you.
T: I'd like to have it here.

It's so terrible. There was actually a line where I sat up in bed and said, "Whatttt?" I would tell you, but I can't remember what it was. (Hey, it was 4 in the morning and I had insomnia. How much do you expect me to remember?)

Overall: All in all, the writing gave the impression that it was an undergrad's first attempt at novel writing -- she had already studied Philosophy 101 and Character Development 101 but hadn't yet made it to the courses on Dialogue and Plot. Interesting concept of a novel, poor execution. Because I'm feeling hateful, D+.

Falconer by John Cheever

Farragut was adrug addict and felt that the conscious of the opium eater was much broader, more vast and representative of the human condition than the consciousness of someone who had never experienced drug addiction. The drug he needed was a distillate of earth, air, water and fire. He was mortal and his addiction was a beautiful illustration of the bounds of his mortality... Yesterday was the age of anxiety, the age of the fish, and today, his day, his morning, was the mysterious and adventurous age of the needle.

Falconer is the story of Ezekiel Farragut, phlegmatic university professor, heroin addict, and new inmate of Falconer prison, where he has been sentenced for ten years for fratricide. It is the prototypical "on the inside" novel, about how prison changes people and brings out qualities that had yet lay dormant--like bisexuality. There's very little prison rape or intimidation; this isn't Oz. Instead it's more about the culture that develops inside prisons, the strange friendships and connections, the unusual rituals and desires that surface.

I included the quotation above because I think it's a good sample of the writing in this book, which is very good. The characters are interesting and some of the episodes very clever--my favorite is the episode in which Farragut's lover, a man named Jody, escapes from the prison by arranging to buy a red robe from the outside and posing as a visiting priest when a Catholic Cardinal comes to speak at Falconer, and then leaving with the Cardinal's entourage on a helicopter. But as a whole Falconer seems somewhat lacking, and slight at around 200 pages, as if the book were a vignette of life in prison instead of a comprehensive study of it. (Spoiler) It seems like Farragut barely gets in prison before he escapes. Maybe if the book were longer, or more focused, it would have been more satisfying.

The Assistant by Bernard Malamud

In The Assistant, a hard-working and selfless but unsuccessful grocer named Morris Bober is held up by a pair of masked "holdupniks" late one night in his store who beat him and take all of the money in the cash register. One of these men is Frank Alpine, a young Italian who only joins the hold-up reluctantly and later returns to become an assistant to Bober, without confessing his part in the crime, in order to make up to himself for some of his transgressions. Frank is continually caught between his respect for Bober and his desire to pocket more money from the grocery, and eventually falls in love with Bober's daughter, Helen.

The first thing I thought about this book is that it would make a good indie film. It's subdued, but not so philosophically complicated that it would lose much in the filming, and the characters operate on the slightly superficial but often heartbreaking model of so many indie film characters. My second thought was about Jews--Malamud was one of the century's first and foremost Jewish authors, and his depiction of Bober, a kind and dignified but long-suffering man, seems to be the model for many modern Western depictions of Jewish people. At the end of the book (SPOILER), Frank becomes a Jew, but only after learning the value of suffering, hard work, and selflessness. Isn't it interesting, I think, how Western stereotypes about Jews have developed through Jewish literature and art from the money-hungry, sub-human depictions that characterize much of non-Western depictions of Jews? It fascinates me to think about how Americans understand the concept of Jewishness, and how different it must be from a century ago.

But anyway, this book was kind of boring. It was a lot like the Philip Roth book I read, but without the nasty sex. And what book is complete without nasty sex?

I am the Cheese by Robert Cormier

I worked at Blockbuster for over five years. I know. It’s kind of depressing to think about. But during that time, I contemplated renting I am the Cheese a number of times. It must have been the title that drew me to it – that and the cover, which was a drawing of a young boy on a bike. I never read the back, so I had no clue what it was about. At some point we purged the store of VHS and I am the Cheese was not on the list of movies to order on DVD. It was by no means frequently rented. The other day I found out that it was a book, and decided that I should take a break from Lolita and read it.

I am the Cheese is written almost exclusively in the present tense, much of it first-person. This always takes some getting used to for me. Robert Cormier’s novel begins with a boy, of undetermined age, biking to see his dad. This is no short trip, but one that will cross state lines and no doubt place the boy in some degree of peril. This is where the first-person, present tense really adds to the book. It creates a sense of immediacy, putting the reader in the moment right along with the character.

The second chapter begins with what appears to be a transcript from a recorded interview. After a page or two, it is obvious that the person being interviewed is the boy on the bike, and that the interviews are taking place after the bike trip. The chapters alternate this way throughout the book, allowing the reader to slowly piece together the story and fill in the gaps that Cormier intentionally left blank.

I am the Cheese is relatively short, well-written, and an easy read. It was published back in 1977, winning many prizes and awards. I liked Cormier’s style and am planning on reading other works of his.

Now to track down that VHS.

The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster

When the final Harry Potter book came out a couple of weeks ago, I found a lot of the comments left by people on articles discussing the book went something like, "Harry Potter is a children's book and I am an adult. As an adult, I don't read children's books." The obvious question about whether or not the Harry Potter series is really meant for children notwithstanding, I think this is a pretty forced piece of logic. Adults are certainly not precluded from reading children's books; in fact I like to read many books that I feel have been written for some demographic other than myself. Secondly, books that were once considered or written as juvenile literature have since become widely read by adults, like Tom Sawyer or The Hobbit. Furthermore, to write a good children's book requires a certain kind of talent for distilling information, and the kind of children's book that can tackle topics of great importance while simultaneously employing the kind of adventure and clarity to which children respond is a pretty impressive feat.

The Phantom Tollbooth isn't just one of those books; in many ways it's a book about writing that kind of book. It is an allegorical romp through the world of knowledge, and part of what its protagonist Milo learns in the land of Dictionopolis is to value clarity, brevity, and simplicity.

But more than that, The Phantom Tollbooth is a primer for young kids about the nature of knowledge itself. In it, the smart but bored-of-school Milo comes home one day to find a tollbooth (some assembly required) left for him at his door, and in his wind-up car he passes through it, ending up in a strange land. This land is split into two parts, the Kingdom of Dictionopolis, ruled over by King Azaz the Unabridged, and the Kingdom of Digitopolis, ruled over by the Mathemagician, King Azaz' brother. The kingdom has fallen into shambles since the exile of princesses Rhyme and Reason and the disagreement between the two kings about whether words or numbers are more important. Milo, with his friends the Watchdog and the Humbug, sets off through the Mountains of Ignorance to free the princesses.

The writing is so clever, and the topics so complex: One of my favorite parts is when, while traveling through the Mountains of Ignorance, the three heroes meet a character called the Terrible Trivium, who sets them to tasks like moving water from one well to another with a dropper or digging a hole through a cliff with a needle. This sort of lesson--that to live life fully, one must ignore trivial tasks and focus on important ones--is something that many adults live their entire lives without learning. That's what impresses me about this book: the whole thing tackles concepts of knowledge and learning that border on the philosophical, while being written simply enough for kids to understand.

Naked Lunch by William Burroughs

Aztec priests strip blue feather robe from the Naked Youth. They bend him back over a limestone altar, fit a crystal skull over his head, securing the two hemispheres back and front with crystal screws. A water-fall pour over the skull snapping the boy's neck. He ejaculate in a rainbow against the rising sun.

What. The. Fuck. I don't even know how to describe this book to you--at some level, it seems to be about a drug addict who undergoes recovery and then is cured, but along the way it takes on the form of an extended fever dream of drug use, sexual perversion, and graphic obscenity. Much of the book takes place in Interzone, a city of unspecified location (and perhaps meant to represent the state of a junky's head) where the inhabitants perform a lot of fellatio and other sexual acts on each other, as well as the strange creatures that live there. Youths hang each other, excited by their death spasms. Some people are addicted to the semen of strange translucent creatures called Mugwumps. A man teaches his asshole to talk, and eventually it takes over his body and eliminates his other parts.

If that sounds less than appealing, you're not the first to think so--this book set off a firestorm of media frenzy and obscenity charges in the early Sixties. It's not hard to see how that happened; lacking any semblance of a narrative (some episodes are arranged at random, using a Dada-like system of "cut-up"), and often being nigh incomprehensible, it is hard to piece what artistic value, if any, Naked Lunch has. I think that on a deeper level, Naked Lunch probably makes many interesting satiricial points--commenting on commercialism in society, the idea of normality, the relationship between sex and destruction--but who wants to read this revolting book closely enough to better understand them? Plus, for some reason, Burroughs has a knack for using verbs without any sort of augmentation--the phrase "he ejaculate" in the quote above is not a typo.

I've decided to officially call bullshit on the Beat movement. Having read its two flagship novels, On the Road and Naked Lunch, I can't imagine any genre in which its seminal works are of such mediocre quality.

A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian by Marina Lewycka

Nadia is a Ukrainian woman raised in Britain with her older sister. The story begins just after her mother's death, as her father falls in love with a bombacious 30-something Ukrainian woman. Nadia and her sister Vera try to team up together (after a long history of fighting) to convince her father not to marry this woman, attempting to make him see that all she wants is British citizenship. When he marries her, the two begin to tackle the question of divorce and deportation. Along the way here and there, Nadia adds in excerpts from her father's memoir (A Short History of Tractors) and stories of what she knows to be her family's past.

This book was okay, I guess. There were some funny parts, mostly her father's ludicrious behavior. His eccentricity is amusing. There were some sad parts, like when she finds out about her family's history in Soviet labor camps, or when she realizes her father's new wife is beating him. But mostly, it was just kinda ho-hum. Not bad, but not that good either. Easy and short to read, I guess I recommend it if you're at the beach and forgot any other books.

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

This is the first book I read this year that I didn't enjoy. The blurb on the back sounded like a good enough set up, but Conrad failed to deliver. It's a frame story, but the frame doesn't enhance the book at all. More than that, the so called "heart of darkness" isn't really that terrifying.

The main character takes a steam boat into then unexplored Africa in search of an ivory trader named Kurtz. Turns out Kurtz doesn't live up to his reputation as the ass-kicking, elephant-hunting, all-around frontiersman that Marlow, the protagonist, builds him up to be.

The book just kind of peters out and ends without a discernible climax. Thankfully it was only a shade over a hundred pages long.

Also, Conrad comes off as a bit of racist in his depiction of the Africans in this book. He doesn't seem to have a problem with poaching elephant tusks either.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J.K. Rowling

Oh my goodness, oh my goodness... wow... I mean, just... amazing... just go read it... read the whole thing, read all of them... wow...