Under the Overpass by Mike Yankoski

I read this amazing book over the weekend. It is called "Over theUnderpass" by Mike Yankoski. Basically Mike, a college student at aChristian College, decided to go out with a pal and live with the homeless for five months.

They wanted to learn what it was to have faith in God when you HAD to rely on Him for truly everything. I guess they were typical folks who COULD rely on God to supply a need, but if it God wasn't working in their time frame they always had parents or friends or their ownpaycheck to fall back on.

When I first read abut the book I had a lot of doubts about the ethics of choosing to be homeless as if it were some sort of adventure whento the people who are homeless it is a horrible reality. It seemed odd to me and sort of disrespectful in a way I guess. Thankfully lots ofpeople felt that way about it and so he made a section specifically about that to put we doubters at ease.

First of all I was impressed with the time he spent praying, studying, planning and getting advice. It wasn't something he went into lightly at all. He started volunteering at shelters and meeting with shelter councilors to get a better idea of the world he was going into and then he started out by entering an addiction recovery program so that he wasn't dropped straight into the street.

The other aspect that changed my mind was that he had objectives, and they are good ones:

1. To better understand the life of the homeless in America, and tosee firsthand how the church is responding to their needs.

2. To encourage other to "live out loud" for Christ in whatever waysGod is asking them to.

3. To learn personally what it means to depend on Christ for dailyphysical needs, and to experience contentment and confidence in Him.

Oh, and the last thing, they didn't lie to anyone. They didn't tell people they were homeless, because in reality they could have given up and gone home. They did have homes. I respected that.

Upcoming Film Adaptations of Books

Atonement (Dec. 7)



This book is great; the cast (Keira Knightley, James McAvoy) and crew (Pride and Prejudice's Joe Wright) should make this a pretty awesome movie.

Beowulf (Nov. 16)



I'm not exactly sure what's going on here; apparently they decided to film this using motion capture animation instead of just using live people with CGI. Which begs the question: why go through all the trouble of animating Angelina Jolie when the character you end up with looks like... Angelina Jolie? She certainly doesn't look like Grendel's mother.


No Country for Old Men (Nov. 9)



Cormac McCarthy + Coen Brothers + Tommy Lee Jones = badass

The Golden Compass (Dec. 7)



Reports are that the movie tones down a lot of the anti-Christian sentiment in the children's book, so we'll see. In either case, I expect it to be controversial.

Love in the Time of Cholera (Nov. 16)



I can't seem to find a trailer for this, but here's a video about the making of the movie. The book is a very popular romantic novel by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

The Spiderwick Chronicles (Feb. 29)



This is based on a children's book in which ordinary children encounter an extroardinary magical world. So, basically, every children's book ever. I will be watching this solely to see if there is a sex scene between Andrew McCarthy and Mary Louise Parker.

To a God Unknown by John Steinbeck

I have not read much by Steinbeck. I read Of Mice and Men three or four years ago, and I am fairly certain that I was assigned The Grapes of Wrath in high school, although I am not certain that I actually read it. The cover of this book caught my eye, before I noticed anything else. It was a painting of a man approaching a large gnarled tree, which stood at the top of a hill. (The picture to the left is the only one on the official Penguin Classics website. I was unable to find the correct cover.) Seeing that it was written by Steinbeck, but not recognizing the title, I flipped the book over and read the first sentence of the summary on the back. It read, “Ancient pagan beliefs, the great Greek epics, and the Bible all inform this extraordinary novel, which occupied Steinbeck for more than five difficult years.” After reading this, I had to read the book.

That one sentence summarizes To a God Unknown very well. Set in the early 20th century, it is a story of four brothers who move from Vermont to California to homestead the land. Joseph Wayne is not the oldest, but he is the leader of the brothers since their father gave him his blessing before he died. Joseph becomes convinced that the spirit of his father inhabits a large tree on his farm. He secretly communes with the tree, talking to it, seeking advice, and even offering sacrifices.

Amongst his brothers and their wives, opinions about Joseph vary. Thomas puts up with it, seemingly amused. Rama, the wife of the oldest brother, reveres Joseph. She tells Joseph’s new wife, “I do not know whether there are men born outside humanity, or whether some men are so human as to make other seem unreal. Perhaps a godling lives on earth now and then. Joseph has strength beyond vision of shattering, he has the calm of mountains, and his emotion is as wild and fierce and sharp as the lightning and just as reasonless as far as I can see or know. I tell you this man is not a man, unless he is all men.” Later the priest of a nearby town mirrors her thinking. As Joseph leaves, the priest thinks, “Thank God this man has no message. Thank God he has no will to be remembered, to be believed in, else there might be a new Christ here in the West.” However others feel about Joseph, Burton, a staunch Christian, thinks that his brother is practicing a kind of devil worship. He fears that he is allowing evil to take root in their land, and voices his disapproval to Joseph on a number of occasions.

Whether as a result of Joseph's actions or not, the Wayne family does prosper. Their crops are bountiful, their livestock reproduce at an alarming rate, and there is never any want for wild game on their property. But it is not long before the ground begins to dry up and the animals begin to die and leave the land. Joseph is certain that he knows what brought on this change, and he knows what he must do.

All throughout To a God Unknown, Steinbeck alludes to and borrows from Greek mythology and a wide range of religious traditions. In so doing, Steinbeck creates a mystical tale of his own, adding to his mythology of California.

Kiss Your Bookshelves Goodbye

I bought each of you a Bibliochaise for Christmas.

Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH by Robert C. O'Brien

The Secret of NIMH was one of those formative animated movies for me when I was a kid. My brother and I loved it, probably because it was one of the more violent films that we had seen up to that point. The final scene has the two main groups of rats battling each other, some get stabbed, some get crushed, and in the end there is some pretty sweet magic. I had no idea that it was based on a book, until the other day when I was in the children's section of Joseph-Beth, looking for The Wednesday Wars. I bought both of the books, decidedly more excited about Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH.

Mrs. Frisby is a widowed field mouse with four children. Every year they move out of their home in the garden, escaping the farmer’s plow. With the time to move approaching, Timothy, Mrs. Frisby’s youngest, gets very sick. She is afraid that moving him with be too much. At the behest of Jeremy, a crow that she rescued from the farmer’s cat, Mrs. Frisby goes to visit the old owl that lives in the woods, who tells her to ask the rats for help. These are no ordinary rats. Something is very different about them. As she works with them to solve her problem, Mrs. Frisby finds out that their past and hers are much more connected than she could ever have imagined.

I was interested to see how the magic at the end of the movie would be explained in the book, since often things make a little more sense in book form than they do as a movie (The Shining anyone?). However, O’Brien’s book has no magic in it whatsoever. His is a story that is easily explained, nearly plausible. I realized this about halfway through the book, and I was okay with it. As much as I like The Secret of NIMH, the ending never quite made sense to me. But I was looking forward to the big battle that took place as the rats were trying to move Mrs. Frisby’s house. The battle wasn’t in the book either. Now that was disappointing.

I would have like Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH much more if I had never seen The Secret of NIMH, which created certain expectations. The ending of the book was especially lackluster when compared with its cartoon counterpart. All in all, it was a good book, but I couldn't help but compare it with one of the greatest movies of all time. And in that comparison, it falls a little short.

Naked by David Sedaris

A few years back I caught David Sedaris on The Late Show. Letterman asked him if he would like to read an excerpt from his then-current book, Me Talk Pretty One Day. It was the first ever reading on The Late Show. I forget the passage that Sedaris read, but I remember thinking that it was really funny and deciding that I would read the book. From there I hopped around his bibliography, with no particular design or order.

While I remember enjoying Me Talk Pretty One Day – it was good enough to make me want to read more by Sedaris – it is not my favorite of his. Naked and Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim are vying for that position. Invariably, the essays that I find the most enjoyable are the ones that involve Sedaris childhood, and as a logical extension, his family. And essays of this nature are in abundance in both Naked and Dress Your Family. The interaction between young Sedaris and his siblings, especially Amy and Lisa, never fails to make me laugh.

In the essay “True Detective”, Sedaris describes how his mom and his older sister, Lisa, would watch detective shows on TV and then try to put what they had learned from these boobtube gumshoes to use, attempting to solve real crimes they came across in the local paper. “‘We know that the girl was held at knifepoint on the second floor of her house,’ Lisa said, tapping the pencil against her forehead. ‘So probably the person who robbed her was…not in a…wheelchair.’” Sedaris describes the fictional detective world that his sister and mother were so enamored with as, “a world of obvious suspects. Looking for the axe murderer? Try the emotionally disturbed lumberjack loitering near the tool shed behind the victim’s house. Who kidnapped the guidance counselor? Perhaps it’s the thirty-year-old tenth-grader with the gym bag full of bloody rope.”

Although I find Sedaris’ essays hilarious, I would not necessarily describe them as laugh-out-loud funny. There is a difference between Sedaris’ writing and that of Michael J. Nelson, and even Paul Feig. The humor in Sedaris’ essays builds slowly. Sedaris doesn’t rely on jokes or oneliners, but rather uses his cunning wit and vocabulary to describe the situations that he gets himself into. “Painfully humorous” is an apt way to describe his style. Sedaris mines humor in fairly serious situations such as, a horribly racist speech given by one of his grade school teachers when it was announced that their school would be integrated, a prostitute being beaten up a few days before Christmas, and even his mother’s death.

Sedaris is a excellent writer and a top-shelf humorist. I hope that he releases another book before I read Barrel Fever, thus exhausting his current oeuvre.

Crash by J.G. Ballard

Crash is not the source of the 2005 Best Picture film; it is, however, the source of a movie made by David Cronenberg of Naked Lunch fame. The plot is simple: a man (identified as James Ballard, ostensibly the author) is involved in a car crash in which the other driver is killed and the driver's wife seriously injured. Ensuing events lead Ballard, as well as the driver's widow, to meet Vaughan, a shady once-semi-famous television star now obsessed with car crashes. Ballard, the widow, Vaughan, and others form a casual group of car crash fetishists, who drive around visiting crashes they discover on a police scanner, and designing gruesome and erotic crashes for actresses and famous figures. In turn, Ballard has crazy automobile sex with every (yes, every) character in the novel, and Vaughan finally dies in a car crash meant also to kill Elizabeth Taylor.

Understandably, this book caused a bit of controversy when it was published, controversy that was fomented on a larger stage by the release of Cronenberg's film (which puzzlingly stars James Spader and Holly Hunter). I have some sympathy for those who object to this novel, as I'll explain later, but my larger objection is this:

Crash is boring. Its conceit sounds promising, I think, but instead of dealing with any of the deeper issues that exist at the nexus of sex and violence, Ballard provides a litany of gross-out images and blankly pansexual and unreflecting characters. He has nothing to say about, say, the way that looking into our own death molds our understanding of what is exciting, or the parallels between the sexual act and violence (it has been suggested by feminist scholars that the sexual act itself resembles and symbolizes violence), or the conflation of sex, power, and technology in the modern era. This book is so unconcerned with deeper issues and unexplanatory of the origin of the character's fetishes that it approaches the level of pornography, not only for its graphicness but because it seems to lack insight as a stylistic choice. The sex is mildly disturbing, but also banal. For a book about thrills, it is unexplicably thrill-less.

As for the controversy, in most cases I'm suspicious of such claims. Usually they're ill-informed, prudish, or artless. In this case, I think, there is one serious objection to the content of Crash: Instead of creating an actress to be the focus of Vaughan's insane fantasies, Ballard uses Elizabeth Taylor, who would have been in her early forties at the time of this publication (and whom I thought was dead until looking it up on Wikipedia). The fantasies are at times disturbingly graphic, referencing not only the most intimate parts of Taylor's anatomy but alluding to various imaginary wounds to those parts of her body. It seems to me that while most content is permissible in a novel, books that deal so frankly with sexual and violent fantasies concerning real people ought to be condemned. In Crash's case, Taylor is presented as a cipher for fame with no real qualities as a character; why couldn't Ballard have used a fictional person if their character doesn't matter?

But Crash isn't really concerned with thought processes like that; it's more of a dull fever dream that you float through unawares. If you want to read a book like this, read Palahniuk instead, whose third-rate hackery is much more interesting.

P.S.: Here's an angle I forgot to cover: What is the point of Ballard using his own name for the main character? To suggest that this mirrors his own life? I tried to think of all the books I've read where the author includes themself as a character (Money, Everything is Illuminated, Absurdistan), and I can't think of any as unabashedly unnecessary and egotistical as this one.

P.S.S. check out that stickshift-penis in the picture.

The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisernos

This was a bus read, meaning I only read it on the bus to and from campus. It worked out pretty well and I finished it surprisingly quickly considering I read about 15 minutes per day.

The book is written from the point of view of Esperanza, a young Latina living in the inner city of somewhere. Rather than a narrative, it consists of 2-3 page "stories" that jump around, but do seem to signify that Esperanza is growing up. This is an interesting style because you can meet a million different intriguing characters without having to worry about following them, but I prefer novels with a clear direction. It's also interesting to read from the point of view of a child, but after a while, it gets annoying reading awkward writing and poor metaphors. Seemed to me like Cisneros was trying a little too hard to be both childish and poetic. But as I said, it was rich in character and culture, and it was a quick read. Not a bad book to choose for reading away from the complexity of school textbooks.

Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman

The first book I ever read of Neil Gaiman's was Good Omens, the one he cowrote with Terry Pratchett. My feelings pretty much mirrored Nathan's. I'm a big fan of Pratchett, and after reading Anansi Boys, I'm guessing that Good Omens' shortcomings were a case of too many cooks in the word processor, because Anansi tops it in every way.

The protagonist is Fat Charlie, who is not particularly fat. He is leading a relatively normal, boring life, engaged to a girl who doesn't seem to like him much, stuck in a job under a weaselly boss, and basically spending life in as average a way as possible. However, things are about to change.

Charlie's father dies, and, surprise, he learns that he has a brother and that his father was the god Anansi, a sort of Loki for the Indian set. Hijinks ensue.

This book is very funny and well-plotted, and worth reading if you like light fantasy. And this review sucks. It is not recommended to anyone.

The Greedy Bastard Diary by Eric Idle

Well, this book was a truck book, which is to say that I'd read it during lunch break or while sitting in drive through. It still didn't take long to read, since most of the pages aren't even totally full of text.

Eric Idle, of course, is part of the legendary Monty Python comedy troupe. The Greedy Bastard Diary chronicles his experiences touring the united states on a "greedy bastard" tour, that is, a tour that's just the singer and his guitar, intended to make a lot of money quickly. The title is something of a misnomer since a) Idle takes an entire cast with him and (SPOILER!) b) he doesn't make any money.

The parts about the tour itself are interesting, but more worthwhile are Idle's thoughts about everything from sex to religion. Particularly touching are his comments about his late friends George Harrison and Graham Chapman. And, now for something completely different.