A Wrinkle in Time, Redux

 A Wrinkle in Time

Madeleine L'Engle, 1963.

The Game of Reading recently celebrated its 10th anniversary. It has evolved and complexified over the years, but never faltered, and it is still among other things gradually frog-marching me through the books I read between 2009 and 2016.

Last month, I drew the card for the beloved fantasy classic A Wrinkle in Time -- the 293rd greatest book of all time, according to a literary data-grinder that I am very partial to -- and was surprised to see a two-star rating for it in my reading history.  When I finished, I slapped together this capsule review:

2026

This time, two prefaces shaped my reading of Wrinkle in Time.  One was an appreciation about how it's not just for kids, which, under the rules of this game, tipped me off that it should best be considered a book for kids.  The other was a note from the author about how adults don't always get this book, because it like blows their whole narrow world view, man, but the kids understand -- from which I gathered that critique on intellectual grounds would be considered unfair play and evidence of my narrow world view, man.

The strength of the book is its strong characters, set up in a lengthy opening here on good ol' planet Earth.  Its weakness is the sequence-of-random-events plot that follows, once Earth is left behind.  The jointure between the two sections is abrupt enough that I had to back up about a half hour to figure out why the kids who had been kicking around in the woods were suddenly flying on unicorn-esque beasts across alien planetscapes, breathing through flowers. 

Still, it's no 2-starrer.  Promoted!

---

This made me wonder where the 2-star rating had come from in the first place.  With a modest application of search engine, I was able to find and search this weblog, which still technically exists.  Turns out that me of December 2010, whoever he was, wrote a review that hits several of the same notes.  In some ways that guy is a stranger -- so arrogant in his relative youth, so ignorant of the allure of accounting, so airily dismissive of the notion that Don Trump might someday refashion the United States as a tinhorn dictatorship, driving such an old truck -- but he seemed to share a lot of my feelings about Madeline L'Engle's great work.  It's kind of a.... a.... wrinkle in time, if you will.

2010

I first read A Wrinkle in Time in third grade or thereabouts, and was vaguely conscious of being not as impressed as others seemed to be with this beloved classic of children’s science fiction. When the late Madeline L’Engle passed away shortly after the Reading List elections back in aught-seven, I decided to add Wrinkle to the List, expecting to be enchanted, or at least suitably impressed, this time around.

Alas, I am still a little underwhelmed. Whatever its virtues -- we’ll get to those in a minute -- A Wrinkle in Time is a real muddle. It involves a series of rather job-lot supernatural events -- some are fantastical, some are apparently mock-fantastical, some are science-fictionish -- that have only the thinnest logical connection among them. Villains with no clear motive must be fought within rules that are never really explained with the help of allies whose roles are unclear and whose tremendous powers, for reasons which seem rather arbitrary, have very specific limitations that force them to rely on a high school freshman and her little brother to save the universe.The primary characters bounce from event to event, having experiences that are only structured by the order the Ms. L’Engle wrote them in. That they by and large merely endure a series of trials, rather than actively engaging in a in a course of action, is a necessary side effect of a fictive universe with no particular rhyme or reason to it.
 

To be sure, Wrinkle adheres to the ground rules of children’s fiction. The characters succeed through perseverance and courage, their love of family and friends is affirmed as a principle human value, and it is stressed that it is OK to be and feel different than your peers. The book, published in 1963, is like much literature of that period in making a memorable assault on suburban conformity and the corporate mentality. Wrinkle is also lovable for its suggestion that it might be OK, or even kind of cool, to be smart and know things.

Most of my friends on the “GoodReads” online bookworm site rate A Wrinkle in Time very highly. One notes it as one of the books that opened up the possibility of realities other than the mundane one that we all had to wait through as children. From its reputation, it’s clear that Wrinkle played a similar role in the lives of a great many other of us bookish dreams. That’s a wonderful thing, and I can salute it, even while suggesting that this is not really a book that holds up well to an adult reading.

The Game of Reading and the Oobleck

Since last month's Game of Reading reminder, the reading went through a bit of a slow patch but has since picked up.  Here's how it all went down.


Christmas 2018 Bonus Card: Unrestricted Book: On January 14th, I burned a precious Unrestricted card and started Listen to This, a collection of essays by the excellent music critic Alex Ross that I had picked up at an odd little used book store down the way.  [I drew Card #425: Unrestricted Book!  Nice.]

Card #637: "Ask Maddy." When we last saw The Game of Reading, I had several audiobooks on reserve but had resorted to my long, periodic fallback listening of Gibbon's Decline and Fall.  When Fanny Burney's Evalina arrived, I switched over.  Now, an 18th century epistolary novel about a young woman's boy troubles is not what many folks will choose to run to.  Burney, though, was a pretty shrewd observer of the myriad ways that gallantry can be weaponized against women, and was no dull wit; you can imagine her trading sick barbs with an avuncular Benjamin Franklin in a London coffeehouse, had they ever met.  I had to relisten to long sections, sometimes more than once, when I had lost the thread of the period language and pacing.  But, I was willing to go back and try again, because it was a well crafted novel that rewarded attention.  Thanks, Maddy!  [I drew Card #569: Trollope.]

Card #484: Western. I read Riders of the Purple Sage, by Zane Grey.  If you imagined what a book about the American West written by a New York dentist and serialized in Field and Stream in the early 1910s would be like, you would be pretty close to Riders of the Purple Sage, and for good reason.  It is pretty bad.  When I drew a "Western" card last year, I was pleasantly surprised by Louis L'Amour, so I guess now I know which side I'm on vis-a-vis the twin titans of Western pulp.  I'm a L'Amour man! [I drew Card #382: Picture This, by Molly Bangs.]

Abandoned: 2017 Card #445.  While doing some literal housecleaning, I also did some housekeeping of my book lists and discovered that I had returned a hoary old History of the Willamette Valley to the library without finishing it.  That triggered the Abandonment Rule, devised in April 2017 but never before invoked; basically, it means the the old "History" card returned to my hand.

Card #288: Unnatural Death, by Dorothy Sayers.  Finishing Evalina, I decided it was time for some cozy British detective action.  Under the Serial Fiction Rule, I did not have to listen to Unnatural Death itself, but could pick any of the "Lord Peter Whimsy" books.  I chose Striding Folly.  It turns out that Striding Folly is just a collection of three short stories, two of which I've read in some other form before, so I burned through this card pretty quickly.  [When I took back the abandoned card, my hand grew to 11 cards.  Therefore, after I played Card #288, I didn't draw up.]

Card #631: Ask Chuckdaddy.  I began listening to The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, a snarky and amusing novel set against the unspeakable horror of mid 20th century Dominican history.  I'm about two-thirds through, and really enjoying it.  [I drew Card #312, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, and groaned a little.]

Card #382: Picture This, by Molly Bangs.  A short and charming illustrated guide to the basic psychology of pictures and illustrations, by an artist of children's books.  Simple, insightful, and short. [I drew...

Card #655: Immediately return one card to the deck, and draw two.  That was exciting, but I didn't have to think very hard about my choice.  I immediately discarded the extravagantly tedious Bulwer-Lyton saga of 2018 Card #279: The Last Days of Pompeii.  [I drew Card #611: Pick a Book off of a Randomly Selected Library Shelf, and Card #287: Anna Karenina]

Card #425: Unrestricted Book.  I used this to read Dr. Seuss's Bartholomew and the Oobleck, which is an undisciplined use of an Unrestricted card bordering on recklessness.  But, I remembered that it was a favorite when I was a wee bairn, and wanted to see how it had held up.  It's pretty good.  [I drew Card #597: Something From the (literal) Home "To-Read" Shelf.]

Card #597: Something From the Home "To-Read" Shelf.  Bartholomew didn't take me too long to get through, so I went upstairs and grabbed J.G. Farrell's The Singapore Grip.  I was hoping it might match the off-kilter acidic comedy of his terrific Troubles, and so far it seems like I'm in luck.  [I drew Card #472: Detective.]



The Current Hand

Here's what I'm holding at the moment.

• 2018 Card #257: Master and Commander. 
• 2018 Card #190: On Beauty
• 2018 Card #346: Beowulf
• 2018 Card #632: "Ask Chuckdaddy."  This will be James Baldwin's Another Country, on audiobook.
• Card #569: Trollope.
• 2017 Card #445: History
• Card #312, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest
• Card #611: Pick a Book off of a Randomly Selected Library Shelf
• Card #287: Anna Karenina
• Card #472: Detective. 

I like this hand!  Good balance of specifics and options, good balance of ease and challenge, good options for the page and for audio alike.  I like this game!

The Game of Reading Becomes Even More of a Closed Loop Than Usual

Hey, let's check out how things are going with the Game of Reading! Looks like the last update here was in, hmm, April 2017, when I came up with a policy for what to do if I wanted to abandon a book.  Haven't actually used that policy yet, as it turns out, but it's certainly good to have it in place!

Yes, I am still playing the Game of Reading.  To recap: I only begin a book when I can play a (virtual) card from my (virtual) hand of ten.  Yes, it is often inconvenient, thanks for asking.  But, it's has also given the long-term planning version of Michael5000, the version of him that's all like "Here's the Kind of Reading I'd Like to be Doing in My Life," a great deal of power over the indolent day-to-day version of Michael5000, who would probably just be re-reading The Alchemist and Eat, Pray, Love and the manga version of The Life-Changing Joy of Tidying Up over and over again if someone wasn't exerting a strong hand.

What's the Game of Reading, again?

The basic structure has stayed the same.  When I started the project in 2016, with an intention to explore the concept of re-reading, I brought the complete list of everything I had read from 2009 to 2011 (as logged on Goodreads.com) over, each as a card in a (virtual) deck.  Then, there are a bunch of other cards: genres, challenging book types of various kinds, ask-a-friend cards, and a small handful of "game" cards that allow you to do things like, for instance, "discard three cards from your hand and draw up."

In 2017, I added the 2012 books and fine-tuned the deck a little bit.  In 2018, when the 2013 books came in, I capped the size of the deck at 700 cards and added a minor innovation: for a number of the "game" cards, I have to run a certain number of miles to trigger them -- cross-endeavor pollination!  2018 turned out to be a tough Game of Reading year, in that the top hundred or so cards of the deck were overwhelmingly individual titles, which didn't give me a lot of wiggle-room, and many of the titles were a bit on the challenging side too.  Which in turn meant that I got to do a lot of interesting re-reading, for instance of War and Peace.  It's all good.

New! for 2019!

With the 700-card cap in place, it put a real squeeze on this year's deck when the 2014 books were added.  I resolved this in part by further reducing the number of precious, precious "Unrestricted Book" cards.  This increases the difficulty level, but will make the "UBs" even more of a treat when they come along, I suppose.  (You, who basically have a full hand of Unrestricted Book cards all the time, don't know how to savor them.)  I also made room to raise the number of "game" cards, because those are always a hoot when I draw them.  Some of the new ones are inspired by cards in the game Pandemic.

The Current Hand

Here's what I'm holding at the moment.

•  2018 Card #257: Master and Commander.  This is the first book of Patrick O'Brian's magnificent 20-volume "Aubrey/Maturin" series.  By rule, I could play it on any volume, but I recently finished my second reading of the entire series, and I've been hanging on to this card because I haven't decided whether I want to eye-read or ear-read the cycle the next time around.
• 2018 Card #190: On Beauty
• 2018 Card #346: Beowulf
• 2018 Card #632: "Ask Chuckdaddy."  Chuck, who is himself off on a tear with that 100 Great Books list that was going around last year, assigned James Baldwin's Another Country.  I decided to do an audiobook, and have been waiting in the reserve line for a couple of months.
• 2018 Card #279: The Last Days of Pompeii.  This is a real poison pill of a card.  No less a commentator than, um, me, has described this Victorian potboiler as "so tedious that to read it is an act of sheer willpower carried out chapter by slow chapter."  In this situation, you just hope for a "game" card to come along that will let you discard it.
• 2018 Card #646: "Ask Morgan."  
• Christmas 2018 Bonus Card: Unrestricted Book: By special rule, I get two of these for Christmas every year.
• Card #637: "Ask Maddy."  Maddy, who is all about the early 19th century novel, has assigned me Fanny Burney's Evalina.
• Card #288: Unnatural Death.  This title from Dorothy Sayers's "Lord Peter Whimsey" series is a nice piece of light fiction in a rather heavy hand.  Using the serial fiction rule, I will use it to ear-read another Whimsey book, Striding Folly, when it comes off of hold.
• Card #631: "Ask Chuckdaddy."  Well, that's an interesting coincidence.  Chuck got into the spirit of the thing and had lots of ideas about what he might recommend back at card #632, so it was easy for him to pick a second choice: The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.  I've got it on hold!

 Let's Play!

So, about that "Ask Morgan" card.  When I told Morgan I had drawn it, he said "Do some Game of Reading write-ups on the Blog."  Now, that's an unorthodox response, so it had to go up to the reviewing officials in the booth, but the determination was that it was sufficiently analogous to the cards that require me to write posts in my Bible blog, and book-related, to be within bounds.

So, what am I doing right now?   Right now, as I write this post?  Why, I'm doing a Game of Reading write-up on the blog!  That means I have played 2018 Card #646!  Which is very exciting, because it means that I must now draw up!  Here goes:

It's Card #484!  That's too high to be an individual book, but too low to be a "game" card.  Let's check the chart!

Card #484 is one of the four "Western" cards, ladies and gentlemen!  How interesting!  The last time I drew one of these, I read my first ever Louis L'Amour.  This time, I'll read my first ever Zane Gray.  Fresh literary territory for Michael5000!  Thanks, Game of Reading!

The Game of Reading Deals With its Abandonment Issues

Ever since the Game of Reading began, 10 months ago tomorrow, I've been a little unclear on whether or not I am allowed to abandon books. It's a tricky point, because if I can just abandon books willy-nilly, it defeats the whole purpose (?) of having a mechanistic book-selection system in the first place! On the other hand, I don't think I ever really intended to put myself in a position where I could never again (or even for as long as the game lasts, which is starting to look like it will be quite a while) give up on a book halfway.

Surprisingly, the issue hasn't come up in all this time.  But it is bound to eventually, and one must be prepared. So here, in all its proactive splendor, is the Game of Reading 1.01 Rules Patch, in which the parameters for allowable book abandonment are lain down!!

Game of Reading 1.01 Rules Patch
[Thanks to Morgan for his key contribution to the general approach of this rules patch.  Responsibility for any ridiculousness in the details, and in the overall concept, are entirely my own.]

1. Books may be abandoned, but no more than one in any two consecutive calendar months.

2. If a book is abandoned, the card that was played to begin reading it is drawn back into the hand.

a. Clarification: since this will ordinarily result in an eleven-card hand, I may not then "draw back up to ten" after the next card is played.

b. If the abandoned book is a specific title, that card must remain in the hand until either (i) I play the card and try reading the book again, or until (ii) it is discarded through the action of another card.

c. If the abandoned book is one that has been assigned via an "Ask" card, I may ask the person if they are willing to suggest an alternative title. However, I must also inform them that the rules of the game entitle them to refuse to do so. [cf. Miranda v. Arizona]

d. For all other cards, the card for the abandoned book may be played again to initiate the reading of a new book. Example: I abandon Zane Grey's Thirty Thousand on the Hoof, and retrieve the "Western" card into my hand. I may then replay the "Western" card to read Louis L'Amour's Showdown at Yellow Butte. At least one other card must be played, however, between the abandonment and the replaying of the retrieved card.

e. Clarification: Rule 2d also applies to "Try again on a book that you have previously abandoned" cards.

3. The exception to Rule 2 is "Unrestricted" cards. If an "Unrestricted" card was used to begin reading a book, and that book is abandoned, the "Unrestricted" card remains discarded and may not be retrieved.


What's the State of Play?

I'm currently listening to something called Daughter of Smoke & Bone, for which I played a "Young Adult" genre card, and eye-reading Roberto Bolaño's sprawling 2666, for which I played a "From the Spanish" card.

The cards I'm holding are strong for written material and weak for audio material, which is a bit of a pain as I'm finishing up Daughter and will be chewing on 2666 for quite some time to come.  I've got an "Unrestricted" card in hand, though, and might have to burn in on the longest audiobook I can come up with -- a nice thick Trollope novel, maybe? -- in hopes of letting some turnover shuffle some easier listening into the mix.  Or, I might just go ahead and re-listen to Tony Judt's Postwar, which would serve the same purpose and spare the unrestricted card.  Yes, that's what I should do.

And of course...

What do you have on your to-read list?

The Game of Reading Redux, Redux

It's time once again to revisit The Game of Reading!  What, already?  It's only been a month!  But nevertheless.

MRtB

A few weeks ago, I finally played Card #263 from the 2016 deck, The Bridge on the Drina, and I've been reading it steadily along with other stuff every since.  The card I drew up was a bit mischievous on the part of my Christmas Eve self, the guy who set up this year's deck.  It was Card #527: "MRtB."

You probably don't know, or have forgotten, that I theoretically have another online periodical, older than this one, called Michael Reads the Bible.  I seem to have forgotten it myself, as it turns out I hadn't written anything for it since August of 'aught fourteen. So, what Card #527 meant was: "Read a book of the Bible, and write it up for that other blog."

A spot of research revealed that I was two posts into the Book of Daniel, and that I had written a third but never posted it.  In obedience to the card, I finished Daniel and wrote up a post, which should be running today.  Here: go take a look!  If you like what you see, there's another post coming soon about some material that is in some Books of Daniel, but not others, and also has racy pictures. There are also 150 back episodes.  Knock yourself out!  Make Comments!

What Happened with the Cards I Was Holding on February 24

Card 263 [2016 Deck]: The Bridge on the Drina.  I'm currently reading it!
Card 498 [2016 Deck]: Ask J***.  I've still got the same issues with this card as I did before, viz. not liking the book that J*** assigned me.
Card 273 [2016 Deck]: The Time Traveler's Wife.  I've currently got in on my headphones.
Card 78 [2016 Deck]: Rabbit Redux.  I listened to it -- or rather, Rabbit, Run -- a few weeks ago.
Christmas Free Book!  I used this one on an audiobook version of The Semi-Detached House, a Victorian light comic novel.  It was OK, but not worth a Free Book.
Card 457: Other Non-Fiction.  I used it for Stuff Matters, a well-reviewed book about materials science that turned out to be a bit on the lite side.
Card 397: Unrestricted New Book.  I used it to for Logicomix, a graphic novel, or graphic non-fiction I suppose, about Bertrand Russell's work in mathematics and logic.  More fun than it sounds. 
Card 320: Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy.  Happily, I was able to return this one to the deck with a "Return one card to the deck and draw two" card.
Card 321: Resurrection Men (Inspector Rebus, #13).  I invoked the serial fiction rule and used this one to listen to Standing in Another Man's Grave (Inspector Rebus, #18)
Card 396: Unrestricted New Book.  Having read Richard Russo's Nobody's Fool to satisfy a "Reread Something from Before You Were Using Goodreads" card, I then used this card to read the recent sequel, Everybody's Fool.

Ninety percent turnover, not even including nine cards that have come and gone in the interim!  Backed into a reading corner, I have not been.

The Cards I Have In My Hand Right Now

Card 498 [2016 Deck]: Ask J***.  Still a problem card, as discussed above.
Card 514: Shakespeare.  I decided to use this one on Merry Wives of Windsor, then discovered it's not on my Shakespeare shelf!  That's no way to run a railroad.  So, I've bought a copy.  You'll probably get a write-up here. 
Card 354: Unrestricted New Book.  I might use this to read Universal Harvester, a horror novel by the Mountain Goats' John Darnielle. 
Card 557: Reread Something pre-GR.  I might use this to re-read Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum.
Card 480: From the Spanish.  I'm excited about this one -- I have a copy of Roberto Bolaño's 2666 on order.  It looks great!  I hope I like it!
Card 110: Watchman.  A book from early in the career of a detective writer, without his famous detective.  I've apparently read it before, but I have no memory of it.  I look forward to it with little enthusiasm.
Card 470: From the French.  Okay, I'm really tempted to use this one to re-read Georges Perec's Life: A User's Manual.  If I do that, though, there's a risk that I'll draw Card #281: Life, a User's Manual.  What happens then??? You can see my hesitation.
Card 210: Kate Atkinson, Emotionally Weird.  I just picked it up at the library tonight.  A treat!
Card 378: Unrestricted New Book.  This is what I drew when I started on the Book of Daniel.  I suppose it is a card of virtue rewarded.
Card 43: Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945.  Really, a pretty terrific history.  I fondly remember listening to it during the great run-cation of 2012.  It might be a bit heavy to take on again, or, maybe it would reinforce my learning.  At my age, do I still need to bother with reinforcing learning?  Well, it can't hurt I suppose.

The problem with the hand is that there's lots of great stuff to eye-read, but not much ready to roll when I finish my current audiobook.  I suppose I could lay off the headphones, like I did the first 38 years of my life, but that would be weird.  I might have to sacrifice some of the Unrestricted and less restrictive cards in order to keep the ear-reading going, which would ordinarily be a real sacrifice but perhaps less so when the other holdings are so rich.

I Always Like to Ask

Anyway, that's where things are at in my reading life!  What are YOU reading?

The Game of Reading, Redux

Last June, I introduced my plan to embark on a “Game of Reading” that would structure my reading and audiobook listening by limiting my choices to a “hand” of ten cards. To start reading a book, I would have to play an appropriate card; having done so, I would draw a new card from the “deck” in order to have ten new cards available the next time I started a book. The game was set up to encourage rereading, with the deck heavily seeded with books I had read in the past.

After I introduced the idea I checked in twice in July to tell you how it was going, but since then haven’t said a word. So, you might be a little surprised to hear I am still playing the Game of Reading. I like it a lot! It’s fun!

People give me two types of reaction when I explain the Game. A polite, mild statement to the effect that “that’s a neat idea” is the norm, indicating that the listener is hoping that I will stop talking about the Game of Reading now. The other reaction is a gleeful prediction that I will be forced into a miserable reading experience, followed by outrage that I haven’t created an actual physical deck of cards (I manage the deck in an Excel spreadsheet). This latter reaction shows that someone “gets it.”

Now, it’s true that I haven’t always been thrilled by my available choices in the moment, so far I have been uniformly delighted in retrospect about what the Game has forced me to read. Not only have I never “cheated,” I have so far never even been tempted. I got trained pretty quickly to the idea that since starting a book means playing a card, and since playing a card means drawing a card, and since drawing a card is quite fun – somewhere between opening a Christmas present and making a bet – starting a book, even a formidable book, has become quite an event.

I tinkered with and “reshuffled” the deck at the new year, when all the books I read in 2012 entered play. The individual titles now make up 331 cards. The other half, more or less, of the now 650 cards are like so:

65 Unrestricted New Book Cards
67 Genre Cards ("Science Fiction," "Western," "History," etc)
34 “International” Cards ("From the German," "From the Italian," "African," "Indian," etc)
33 Challenge Cards (a real grab-bag of categories of books that I would find difficult)
39 “Ask” Cards (In which I ask people to assign me a book.)
40 “Game” cards (Which allow or compel me to do game-like things with the cards in my hand.)

For a sample of the action, here’s what’s in my hand right now and how I’m thinking of playing the cards I’ve been dealt.

Card 263 [2016 Deck]: The Bridge on the Drina

This is a really fine novel, but it is by no means easygoing, so this card has been sitting in my hand for quite a while. I’ve been thinking that maybe I’d buy my own copy. In fact, there. I just did.

Card 498 [2016 Deck]: Ask J***

I’ve drawn six other “Ask” cards, and they’ve all been interesting and fun one way or the other. My favorite moment was when Nichim assigned me a title that wasn’t available at the library, and I asked if I could read a different book by the same author. “No,” she said. “You know how to use interlibrary loan.” She gets The Game of Reading!

I’m not sure, however, that J*** gets the Game of Reading. She assigned me Munich, 1938: Appeasement and World War II, I think because she was trying to force herself to read it at the time. I’ve got a library copy upstairs right now! I’ve had it for quite some time. I’ve been hoping that one of the “Game” cards would come along and let me discard it – but see Card 320, below.

Card 273 [2016 Deck]: The Time Traveler's Wife

I listened to this one the first time through, so I thought I’d eye-read it this time. I had it out from the library for a while, but didn’t get around to playing the card.

Card 78 [2016 Deck]: Rabbit Redux

One of the rules of the Game is that for serial fiction, a card can be used for any entry in the series. My logical choices for Card 78 would be to try again with Rabbit is Rich, which I abandoned halfway through the first time around, or to go back to the original, Rabbit, Run. I broke for the latter option, and have an audio version ready to go.

Christmas Free Book!

To facilitate Deck maintenance and allow for the possibility of incoming gift books, I gave myself two unrestricted free books for Christmas. I used one of them on Adam Thorpe’s Ulverton, which incidentally I found pretty darn interesting. This second one is still in my hand – you don’t want to be careless with your unrestricted cards!

Card 457: Other Non-Fiction

Yeah, I wasn’t sure what “Other Non-Fiction” meant either. From context, I figured out that I meant “Non-Fiction Other Than History.” My plan was to use this card to listen to Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything (which, despite the title, is not really history in the conventional sense). Then, oddly, I drew Card 331, A Short History of Nearly Everything, so I’m currently using that card to listen to the Bryson. That freed up this card, for which I’ve downloaded a well-reviewed book about materials science.

Card 497: Unrestricted New Book

I drew this card ten days ago. Who knows what I’ll do with it!

Card 320: Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy

I really can’t see myself reading this book a second time. It replaces Munich, 1938 as the book that I’ll pitch overboard first if one of the Game cards gives me the option. That means that drawing this card puts more pressure on me to actually read J***’s selection. Maybe that’s a good thing!

Card 321: Resurrection Men (Inspector Rebus, #13)

Yay, serial detective fiction! I’ve downloaded Standing in Another Man’s Grave, the 18th Inspector Rebus novel, and am looking forward to a fresh installment of Scottish gloom.

Card 396: Unrestricted New Book

I drew this a few hours ago, when I played the Timon of Athens card that I’d been sitting on for a few months. It felt like virtue rewarded to decide on the difficult text and receive the reward of being able to read whatever I want sometime in the near future. Of course, if I wasn’t playing the Game of Reading, I could always read whatever I wanted. But if I wasn’t playing the Game of Reading, it wouldn’t be such a treat!

And that’s the state of play. What are you reading, lately?

Trying Again With The Trial

I read The Trial again.  I honestly didn’t think much of it the first time, but with anything that packs as much reputation as The Trial it only makes sense to give it a second shot.  Most of the classics, I’ve found, turn out to be pretty damn good.  Maybe I would have grown into Kafka!

The Trial, this time around, reminded me of another classic from a couple decades earlier: Richard Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra.  Both of the two works begin with a dramatic flourish that everybody knows: the big famous 2001 fanfare in the Strauss tone poem, and K’s arrest in Kafka’s book.  And afterwards, both pieces fade into a long series of murky, dark-hued passages that are a bit of a chore to get through.  Kafka at least has a pretty good second movement – er, chapter – in which K has to wend his way through tenement housing looking for the absurd court in the attic, an episode poised between nightmare logic and slapstick silliness.  It’s a tone that the remainder of the book tries to maintain, but without much success.

Living in Central Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century, Kafka would have been no stranger to the presence of secret police and occasionally dodgy legal proceedings.  Still, on second reading I think that it’s a bit literal to think of The Trial as being “about” totalitarian societies.  On this reading, it seemed pretty easy to construe the novel as being “about” the futility of human existence, when viewed in a grumpy mood. 

In this interpretation, Kafka creates a kind of twentieth century Pilgrim’s Progress, an analogy to everyman’s crisis of mortality or, if you like, the mid-life crisis.  At age 30, K is suddenly beset by an unsettling force that seems to doom him.  He spends chapter after chapter seeking solace in the various diversions and social institutions that are supposed to structure our lives: family, the rule of law, romantic adventure, professional life, and lastly (in most arrangements of the book, which Kafka didn’t finish) religion.  Nothing really helps, and the relentless march towards his doom continues.  Sound familiar?  If not, wait until you turn 30!

In my first review, I mostly missed this angle, although I did speculate that Kafka’s “literary star must have risen hand in hand with existentialism, a philosophical movement perfectly attuned to his protagonists' alienated struggles against the absurd.…”  Now, the philosophy of existentialism and the experience of an extended mid-life crisis aren’t exactly the same thing, of course, but they’re certainly within hailing distance of each other.

Did The Trial grow on me on a second reading?  No, dang it, it did not.  I continue to find it a rather dull story, and as a document of its times I’m distracted by my knowledge that it was never finished and not published until well after the death of its author.  It is more of an interesting document of the times forty years later in which it became popular, but now we’ve left literature behind and have moved on to the history of intellectual trends.  That’s cool, and The Trial is arguably worth reading, but it doesn’t make the book more of a success either as a work of art or as an entertainment. 

Crime and Punishment 2016

I read Crime and Punishment by eye in 2011, wrote a generally hostile review of it here, and gave it four stars on GoodReads. Over the last few weeks, I listened to it and thought it was terrific! I'm giving it four stars!

What changed? Well, for one thing I've obviously become more parsimonious with my GoodReads stars.

Why did I like it better this time? To start with, I listened to a very strong performative reading (Anthony Heald, in a Blackstone recording), which is kind of like having a Shakespearean actor helping you understand Shakespeare. It helps! The translation was, I think, a little more lively; Blackstone doesn't credit a translation but -- oh hey, it's on the image I just found!! It helped, in a densely written book, that I already knew what was going on (I think of this as "The Ulysses Effect"). Probably, in a densely written book, it's just plain easier to listen than read.

But also, I understood the book differently as a whole this time than I did the first time around. It seemed like an organic whole with conceptually related parallel plots, rather than one central plot with subplots that mostly served to mark time. The heightened emotional states, for whatever reason, didn't seem as extreme as they did before.

But the main difference was that this time I found Crime and Punishment kind of... well... funny! Not a knee-slapping, chortling kind of funny, but wry and ironic. The first time through, I felt that Dostoevsky was trying to refute the Nietzschean claptrap that Raskolnikov has hooked his wagon to. On second reading, I think he's just making fun of it. He certainly has fun with Raskolnikov's critical thinking; the lad doesn't have a single thought in his pretty little head that doesn't have a completely contradictory concept, held with an equal passion, bouncing up against it. He is the classic college sophomore, knowledgeable and foolish. His clumsy crime that opens the book is a horror, of course, but it is also a carefully planned and hopelessly inept farce. Other scenes -- the bickering of Sonya's mother and her German landlady, or Porfiry's jovially relentless interrogations -- are equally comic under the stern surface of their dry, just-the-reported-speech-ma'am narration.

I've had a lot of people tell me that my "Game of Reading," with all of its re-reading of books I've already read, is kind of crazy. Well, it's obviously not for everyone. But, it really is giving me some new... what? Perspectives and insights? Which is kind of fun! I'm glad I reread Crime and Punishment!


p.s. One of my Goodreads friends has a one line review of C&P: "Raskolnikov thinks too much." Nah. Hamlet thinks too much. Raskolnikov just talks too much. If he did a little more actual thinking, he wouldn't decide that it would be cool to kill somebody.

Behind the Scenes at the Game of Reading

Reaction to The Game of Reading among friends of the blog has ranged from thinking it’s a mildly cool idea to a malicious hope that I will trap myself into a joyless, grinding reading experience. Let’s see how things are going!

After last time, I had these cards in my hand:

• 5 "Any New Book" cards from the starting hand
• an "Unrestricted New Book" card (which is the same thing)
• "Non-Fiction"
• For Whom the Bell Tolls (cool!)
• How Literature Works (eh!)
• Behind the Scenes at the Museum (cool!)

And I was worried that it might be hard to keep a steady flow of usable cards for “ear-reading” on audio. Since I will probably want to re-read on paper the books that I listened to the first time around, and because audio reading is faster than eye-reading, I could easily end up without any cards to play on audiobooks if I’m not careful. It would be easy to get trapped with a backlog of ten cards, all of which needed to be played on paper books.

That was the state of play when I finished listening to the surprisingly not-Japanese Howl’s Moving Castle (**** -- 4 of 5 stars on GoodReads), a charming young adult fantasy, on July 6. I burned one of my precious free cards to wallow in detective fiction, firing up Ngaio Marsh’s Death of a Fool (***).

• Card played: 00 - "Any New Book"
• Card drawn: 464 – Re-read something from before you were on GoodReads

I knew immediately what I wanted to do with that draw, so the next morning I plucked Italo Calvino’s 1980 landmark If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler (****) from the stack under my night table.

• Card played: 464 – Re-read something from before you were on GoodReads
• Card drawn: 75 – Strong Poison (Lord Peter Wimsey #6)

On consultation with a bookish associate, I decided to invoke the serial fiction option and read a different Wimsey mystery, one I haven’t already read, and to read it by eye. I reserved it from the library, and went to work on the Calvino.

A few days into the Calvino, a book that I had been looking forward to – How Not to Write a Novel (***) – came in at the library. I jumped into it immediately!

• Card played: 381 - "Non-Fiction"
• Card drawn: 396 - "Non-Fiction"

…which meant I still had a non-fiction card in the hand when I finished the Ngiao Marsh and needed a new audiobook. I didn't want to burn any more free cards, so I needed to listen to something that wasn’t, like, pretend. The only immediately available non-fiction title was Atul Gawande’s somber Being Mortal (*****).

• Card played: 396 - "Non-Fiction"

Time out! Did you notice what just happened there? I had wanted to read Being Mortal for about half a year, but never got around to it. Why not? Because there is always something relatively light-hearted around that can give you an excellent excuse to put off an exploration of the nature of death in our society! But since the structure of the game is based on my theoretically mature and sophisticated long-term reading goals, instead of my demonstrable short-term reading sweet tooth, it pushed me into choosing something Good For Me. THE SYSTEM WORKS!!!

• Card drawn: 521 – Return One Card to Deck, Draw Two

Hurray! I could get rid of the book that, as I saw immediately when I checked it out from the library, was even worse than I remembered!

• Discarded: 20 - How Literature Works  (**)
  
• Replacement cards: 202 – Strip Jack (Inspector Rebus #4) and 25 – Otto: the Autobiography of a Teddy Bear

Drawing the Rebus card gave me an obvious light fiction – well, light grim fiction – choice for audio, once I was done learning about death.

• Card played: 202 – Inspector Rebus #10, Dead Souls
• Card drawn: 159 – Eragon.

I’m not really sure I remember what Eragon was, or why I read it in the first place. But, that’s all part of the re-reading experiment.

Otto (****) is a child’s book, but a good one.

• Card played: 25 – Otto: the Autobiography of a Teddy Bear
• Card drawn: 221 – Nice Work

After finishing If on a Winter’s Night I started Kate Atkinson’s Behind the Scenes at the Museum (*****). It is magnificent.

• Card played: 136 - Behind the Scenes at the Museum.
• Card drawn: 502 – Ask Morgan

Morgan’s choice was Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman, a book that I’ve always kind of felt like I should read. THE SYSTEM WORKS!!! Also, it is available on audiobook. Hurrah!

However, it wasn’t instantly available in audiobook, so I had to burn another free card to get something to listen to. I figured I’d use it on something Good For Me, and chose the second book of Laurence Durrell’s monumental, universally respected, and insufferable Alexandria Quartet.

• Card played: 00 – Any New Card.
• Card drawn: 344 – Unrestricted New Book

But it turns out that Balthazar (**), bless its heart, is quite a short little thing. Knowing I would need to burn another free card, but also that audiobook help is more or less on the way, I decided to pick something that would not only be Good For Me, that would not only satisfy my sweet tooth, but that would also last a long time: The Duke’s Children, the last of Anthony Trollope’s six Palliser novels.

• Card played: 00 – Any New Card.
• Card drawn: 213 – Jane Eyre

Finally, finishing the Atkinson, I relaxed into some good old-fashioned Wimsey.

• Card played: 75 – Have His Carcase. (Lord Peter Wimsey #8)
• Card drawn: 135 – A Thousand Acres

Although I praised Jane Smiley’s agricultural setting of King Lear the first time I read it, I praised it awfully faintly, and I confess my heart sank a little to see it come up in my hand now.  But, the point of a game is that it has turns of fate and challenges to be overcome, is it not?

The State of Play

Well, I’ve had a program of summer reading that has been enriching and brought joy to my life!

My current hand seems to be resolving the audio-vs-paper problem pretty nicely. In addition to four unrestricted books, I’ve got three books slated to eye-read: The Hemingway, the Smiley (alas, not available on audio), and Eragon, which I apparently listened to last time. But I’ve also got two books for ear-reading, the Feynman and Jane Eyre (which I eye-read last time). Nice Work, a David Lodge book, could go either way, and is part of a trilogy to boot. So I have plenty of options there.

Basically, I’m totally winning this game so far.

And You?

Read any good books lately?

The Game of Reading, a Few Weeks In

A couple of weeks ago, I announced my latest harebrained scheme for organizing my reading life, The Game of Reading.  I'm sure no one is exactly on tenterhooks wondering about the state of play, but there has been what you might call "polite interest."  So here, whether you need it or not, is the play by play of the first weeks.

You might remember that I started with a hand of ten "Any New Book" cards.  That evening, I picked up The Art Forger's Handbook, a dapper little guide to art forgery by an actual art forger, and after reading the first few pages realized that I had thereby played a card.

• Card played: 00 - "Any New Book"
• Card drawn: 533 - "Discard one card from your hand"

And so we leapt immediately into the meta-reading game mechanics.  Since my hand consisted only of "Any New Book" cards, I was forced to sacrifice one of them.  Ouch!

• Discarded: 00 - "Any New Book"
• Replacement cards: 480 - "Ask Patrick" and 438 - "Shakespeare"

Now the game was on in earnest.  I emailed Patrick for his mandate, and started looking at the Shakespeare list to think about what play I'd like to read.

Meanwhile, in the earbuds, I reached the end of David Copperfield and moved on to a book I had already picked out, Howl's Moving Castle.

• Card played: 00 - "Any New Book"
• Card drawn: 381 - "Non-Fiction"

The next day, I was at the beach.  I finished a piece of light fiction that was already in the works, and picked up a Scandinavian detective procedural from the summer reading pile.

• Card played: 00 - "Any New Book"
• Card drawn: 333 - "Unrestricted New Book"  Score!  We love these.

At this point I had drawn five times without picking any of the individual books that I'm supposed to be re-reading.  Since those make up 55% of the deck, the odds of this run were less than 2%.  The law of averages would soon reassert itself.  Still at the beach, having plowed my way through the latest Inspector Harry Hole adventure, I started into a new-to-me Shakespeare comedy, As You Like It.  You'll get the run-down on that in a "Michael5000 vs. Shakespeare" this Friday or thereabouts.

• Card played: 438 - "Shakespeare"
• Card drawn: 98 - "For Whom the Bell Tolls"

Well OK!  I ear-read the Hemingway classic on audio last time, and have yet to eye-read anything since a high-school era go at Old Man and the Sea.  So, I'll probably go at my re-read the old-fashioned way, with paper and such.  Meanwhile, though, I woke up on Saturday and picked up another Scandinavian detective procedural -- this one Swedish instead of Norwegian, because it's important to have a diverse diet of leisure reading.

• Card played: 00 - "Any New Book"
• Card drawn: 20 - "How Literature Works"

I remember How Literature Works as being a distinctly mediocre treatment of the subject by a star professor type, marred by memorably bad book design.  But maybe when I re-read it, I'll discover nuances!  Or, maybe I'll have another chance to blacken its name on Goodreads.

Finally, I woke in the night on Sunday and wrapped up the Swedish detective story.  In the morning, I decided -- although without cracking the cover just yet -- that the next book up is to be Dept. of Speculation, as directed by Patrick.

• Card played: 480 - "Ask Patrick"
• Card drawn: 136 - "Behind the Scenes at the Museum"

Now, there are two kinds of Kate Atkinson books: most of 'em I love, and a few of them I dislike but kind of feel like I should return to and figure out if there's something there I missed the first time.  I don't remember which Behind the Scenes is, but either way I win, right?  RIGHT?

The Hand in Hand

So, I'm currently at some stage in reading on a dozen or so books.  To start any new book, I have to finish one I'm working on, and then play one of my ten cards.  I've still got five "Any New Book" cards from the starting hand, plus an "Unrestricted New Book" (which is the same thing) that I drew from the deck.  I've got one genre card, "Non-Fiction," and three specific titles, For Whom the Bell Tolls, How Literature Works, and Behind the Scenes at the Museum.  Of these last three, I'd say I'm "game" for the first, "resigned" to the second, and "enthusiastic" about the third.  That's pretty good odds.

A game should involve gamesmanship, naturally, and this one is working out pretty well.  Drawing the "Non-Fiction" card after starting The Art Forgers Handbook, for instance, provoked a satisfying feeling of "aw, man, if I had this card a few days ago I wouldn't have had to blow one of my 'Any New Book' cards."  A lot of the strategy is obviously to avoid getting yourself painted into a corner with a hand of books that all seem like a chore.  One tactic to this end is to leap on the challenges as they appear -- hence my mid-summer's night reading of As You Like It, which turned out to be a fine choice.  Another will undoubtedly be to sit on less desirable titles until one of the discard cards happens along.  Heavens, it just occurred to me that it might be sensible to deliberately keep an undesirable title on hand so that a discard card doesn't repeat its trick of forcing me to toss out a valuable card.  Permutations, people!!

And You?

I'm curious if anyone else has a consciously-applied system of selecting their reading material, such as "going through the Booker Prize winners" or "attending graduate school."  Or, perhaps you have an unconscious system that you didn't realize you were applying until you read these very words!  Do tell!  Or, if you need more system in your life, let me know and I will send you a semi-flexible system for picking your next ten books.  Mind you, you will be expected to report back.

And oh yeah

I was supposed to acknowledge that the "Game of Reading" masthead uses a photograph by Alyssia Suffrin, whose name I might not be spelling right, and who retains the copyright thereto and so on.

The Game of Reading

I keep track of my reading on the Goodreads.com website.  You probably used to do that too, but fell off at some point.  Me, I’ve been pretty dogged about it, logging every book I’ve read (or abandoned) since I started the account in February 2009.  It’s getting up toward a thousand books.

With all this data available, I’ve been toying with the idea that it would be interesting to spend a decade re-reading the books I had read the previous decade.  It would!  But of course, one only has so many decades.  So I’m not going to do that.

What I ~am~ going to do is make a little game out of book selection that encourages lots of rereading, and also tries to steer my reading diet in various directions, without being so programmatic that it sucks every last drop and dreg of joy from my life.  It will be fun!  Maybe!

The Game of Reading is a card-deck game, and might be a little bit like Magic: the Gathering.  I’m not sure, because I don’t really know that much about Magic: the Gathering.  My sense is, though, that it’s a game where taking a turn means playing a card from your hand, then drawing a replacement from a big complicated deck. 

(A source close to the enterprise points out that Magic: the Gathering is also a game that involves interaction with other humans.  The Game of Reading isn’t like that.  There’s no interaction with other humans, except authors.)

In the Game of Reading, I’ll be “taking a turn” every time I select a book to read.  To pick a book, I will play one of the ten cards in my “hand,” and then draw a new card to replace it.  For instance, it’s possible that I might play a “Science Fiction” genre card in order to read something by Ursula LeGuin, and then draw a “Western” genre card as its replacement.  That doesn’t mean that I have to read a Western next – I’ve got ten cards to choose from in my hand, after all.  But, I should start thinking about what I want to read that will let me play that Western card in the fullness of time.

With me so far?  If so, you realize that, as in Magic: the Gathering (or so I am told), the game is really all about the deck.

The Deck

The Deck, like the Electoral College of the United States of America, is composed of 535 items.  I spent a very entertaining evening tinkering with it.  (I won’t really make the physical cards until I “draw” them, mind you.  The conceptual deck exists in the form of a numbered list of cards-in-waiting, and a randomized list of numbers representing their shuffled positions.)  Here are the contents:

• Two hundred ninety-five of the cards – a little more than half – are the Individual Books I read from 2009 to 2011, plus a smattering that I read before I started my Goodreads account but entered on my account anyway.  Card #87, for instance is Anna Karenina.  Card #91 is Crime and Punishment.  Card #84 is Carry On, Jeeves.  It’s a mixed bag.  Card #92 is something called Slouching Towards Kalamazoo, of which I have no memory whatsoever.  But I might be rereading it, sooner or later.
• There are 50 Unrestricted New Book cards.  I can play these to read anything I want.
• There are 60 Genre Cards: 10 each of Science Fiction, Detective, and Fantasy, 3 of Western, 2 of Romance, and 25 of something called “Non-Fiction.”  That last category is admittedly rather broad.
• There are 20 International Cards, calling out books from the French, German, Spanish, Russian, “other European” languages, and Japanese, as well as books from India.
• There are 20 Challenge Cards designating books that are in some way “hard,” for instance old or long.  For instance, there are 3 Shakespeare cards, 5 cards that compel me to advance the moribund Michael Reads the Bible Blog, and 4 cards that require me to try again with any book that I’ve listed as “abandoned” on Goodreads.
• 10 cards tell me to read something from that shelf in the bedroom, where I’ve parked books that I plan to read someday.
• 15 cards tell me to re-read something that I read before I started the Goodreads account.
• Then, there are 30 cards that tell me to solicit a recommendation from someone – five cards for Mrs.5000, smaller numbers for various bookish friends and regular IAT voters.
• Finally, and in the gaming spirit, there are 18 cards that let me return a card from my hand to the deck, and another 12 that let me discard a card from my hand entirely.

Getting Started

To transition in, I have dealt myself an initial hand of 10 “Any New Book” cards that are not from the deck.  See?

Also, the 10 or 12 books that I have started but have on the back burner don’t require a card.   Tomorrow, though, I will probably finish my audiobook of David Copperfield.  When I pick my next audio book, I will have to play one of the “Any New Book” cards – they’re all I have for my initial play – and make my first replacement draw. SO EXCITING!!!

Three Rules

1. I listen to a lot of audiobooks. For the Game of Reading, eye-reading and ear-reading are equivalent – both require a card, from the same hand and the same deck. It would be cool to eye-read books I listened to the first time around, and vice versa, but that’s not a requirement.

2. Book Group selections are exempt from the game.

3. The Serial Fiction rule: Any time I draw a specific book from a series, I may substitute in another book from the same series. Card #170, for instance, is The Naming of the Dead, the 16^th entry in Ian Rankin’s Inspector Rebus detective series. If I draw that card, I can read any of the Inspector Rebus books. This will keep me from being forced to read series out of order.

So, This Deck Will Determine the Next 535 Books You Read?

Nah. Assuming I enjoy the system – and you know what happens when we assume – the top 60 or 70 cards from the deck will steer my reading for the rest of 2016. When 2017 starts, all of the books I read in 2012 will be added to the deck, the ratios will be adjusted to reflect evolving priorities, the deck will be shuffled, and we’ll go from there.

Bookish: Michael5000 vs. the White Whale

Moby Dick
Herman Melville, 1851

I read Moby Dick 23 years ago, and was left with the impression that the dull technical chapters ruined what was otherwise a fine novel of the sea. I was wrong about that. It's not that the technical chapters are dull; they aren't, especially. It's rather that the whole sprawling massive length of the thing is dull. This is a shame, because it is also a quirky and epic piece of writing that often shines. Melville threw everything but the kitchen sink into this novel -- as with War and Peace, you kind of wonder if it is really a "novel" -- and much of it sticks. There are many passages of brilliance and many snarky passages of biting wit. The tale as a whole is simple but sound, and you can reasonably approach the thing as a treasure-house of odd facts, opinions, incidents, and bluster.

But if there were ever a book that needed a firm editorial hand, man, this is it. If it were just to weed out the ceaseless apostrophizing that passes for dialog, that would tighten things up beautifully. Or if the secondary characters, Starbuck, Flask, and Stubb, could not just be cartoonishly different from each other, but could be actual characters with something of the breath of life in them, that would be great too. Or if Melville could keep the grandstanding of his intimacy with Shakespeare, scripture, and mythology under control -- catch up to the 1850s, grandpa! -- then I might be able to get through more than five pages at a stretch without nodding off.

Moby Dick was a flop at first publication, and that was partially bad luck -- the final chapter was left out of the original edition, and you can see where that could be hard on a book. But it must also have struck its original readers as awfully old-fashioned, and perplexing in its anything-goes structure. Seventy or eighty years later, it began its rise as a critical darling. It has a lot to recommend itself as such. Since it's old, we are required to forgive it for being archaic; because we are interested in form, we are intrigued by its one-of-a-kind narrative architecture; since we are smart and catch the references, we end up being flattered by Melville's overattachment to his influences.

The truth, as we say, is somewhere in between. Moby Dick is a quirky, individual piece of literature that didn't deserve to be a flop. Conversely, it is a deeply flawed book that doesn't really earn its household-name status in the literary landscape. It is bloated. To make a painfully obvious metaphor -- and why not, Melville's characters can barely speak without doing the same -- the lean musculature is there, but it's buried under tiresome layers of blubber.

Which is to say: three stars. "I liked it."

This little book report was posted last week on GoodReads, hence the star rating.

Annals of Random Reading: The Eight Shelves, Part Two.

In December, I chose one audiobook per shelf from a column of eight shelves at my local branch library.  Last Monday, I told you how things went with the first three books.  Now, the exciting conclusion!


#4 Strata, by Terry Pratchett, 1981 (read in February)  * * *

Variations on a theme by Douglas Adams. Cute.

Terry Pratchett writes in a genre of “funny science fiction” that I tend to find rather grating. I’ve got friends who are fans, and from the choices at hand I picked this book to give him another try at winning me over. It wasn’t terrible, but it wasn’t really a win either.  And it really shares an awful lot of ideas and gags with the planet-factory episode in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.  Which was written first, I wonder.


#5 The Quickening Maze, by Adam Foulds, 2009. (read in March)  * * *

Nicely written literary historical fiction, a series of vignettes really involving the staff and patients of a Victorian sanitarium. Good scenes and passages, but there's very little momentum driving the book forward. Fails to avoid landing on exactly the shocking dark secrets that you would expect from a novel treating of this time and setting.

I’ve since learned that this is a historical novel about the madness and incarceration of the famous British poet John Clare. What, you’ve never heard of John Clare? Oh good, than I feel better about not catching on.

#6 The Song Remains the Same, by Allison Winn Scotch, 2012. (begun in May) Abandoned

Adequately well-written soap opera. But life is short.

This was some sort of business about a woman who is one of only two survivors of a plane crash, and the other one is a famous but troubled movie star, and she has total amnesia, and must try to piece together her troubled relationships with her husband, mother, and sister. In retrospect, I probably should have jumped ship earlier than I did.

#7 Children of God, by Mary Doria Russell, 1998 (read in June)  * * * * *

I love this book.

This one was a real astonishment. Expecting nothing in particular, I wandered into a deeply intelligent science fiction novel that explores ecology, anthropology, history, ethics, and theology with wry wit, a full cast of well-drawn characters, plentiful violence, and a ripping story. I was stunned to discover this exciting new science fiction novel, and then more stunned to find that it’s fifteen years old; why haven’t I read this before? Why haven’t we all read it?

It turns out that it is a sequel, although it stood up just fine on its own. Mrs.5000, having noticed my stunned look, has eye-read both the first book (The Sparrow) and the second, and asked me the other night, “Why haven’t I read this before?”

A thoroughgoing win.

#8 Sea Change, by Karen White, 2012. (begun in June) Abandoned

I have no reason to think there's anything ~bad~ here, but it was emphatically not "my kind of thing," in that I was unable to pay attention to it.

Can’t win ‘em all.


Final Score

From my experiment of picking one audiobook each from eight shelves, my results were:

1 - Really Extraordinary novel
1 - Introduction into a rich seam of genre fiction.
4 - Books that did me no particular lasting good, but which all kept me company through a certain volume of road running or household chores
2 - Books that just sort of wasted my precious time, but only for as long as it took me to toss them overboard.

All in all, I’d have to say I fared pretty well. Maybe I’ll try it again sometime.

Annals of Random Reading: The Eight Shelves, Part One.

When I first moved to the City of Roses, I was for some reason a little at a loss for what to read.  I remember being downtown at the Central Library thinking that it would be interesting to pick a column of shelves, to choose one book apiece  off of each of the shelves, and to see what happened. 

I never actually did that, but one day last December I found myself in front of the “books on CD” shelves in an empirical mood, and started picking one book apiece from each of the eight shelves.  I took them home and ripped them to the little electronic gadget I use to read while I run (I call it the “stories,” often in the sentence “I can’t find my stories!”).  After six months, I have now given my best shot at all eight of the books (in and among plenty of others, of course), and am ready to report my findings.   

Initial Lessons

The initial stage of the experiment – that’s too say, the part where you pick out your books – is a bit eye-opening.  Obviously, there are bookshelves in the world where it would be painful to have to limit yourself to a single choice amongst all of the awesomeness (my brother’s personal bookshelves jump to mind).  But when you are choosing from among an essentially random selection of books washed up on the shelves of a branch library, you really start to realize that there is a lot out there that you would never, ever want to read.  There are plenty of books, for instance, in genres that just don't appeal to you, or on topics that you are simply not interested in.  There are furthermore many books that survive on past their mayfly lifespan (Running Microsoft Access for Windows 95, say), and are really just waiting to be claimed by the dustbin of history.   There is also of course a surprising volume of twaddle – diet books, political screes, conspiracy hooey, instant histories of insignificant events, and worse.  You know this stuff is out there, but when it appears on a menu that you are actively choosing from, its volume can be a little alarming.

Secondly, when you are choosing a book without prior knowledge of its contents, you must take advantage of information and cues provided on its surface by the publisher.  Fortunately, this is not hard to do: it is necessary and fairly easy to judge a book by its cover.  But everyone knows this.

The Books

Here’s what happened with my eight selections.  I’ll include the rating (out of five stars) and review (in italics) that I gave it on my Goodreads account.

#1 Right Ho, Jeeves, by P.D. Wodehouse, 1934. (read in January)  * * *

Right ho. Extremely light reading, but one a year during the winter months is not entirely without merit, sir.

Of the eight books chosen, this was the only one where I had a good sense of what I was getting into.  I had listened to Wodehouse’s Jeeves stories before, and while they can be a bit precious in bulk, they are a perfectly good lighthearted entertainment in limited doses.  I count this one as a win.

#2 League of Frightened Men, by Rex Stout, 1935. (read in January) * * * *

Good writing about a brilliant detective and the oddball shut-in blowhard he attaches himself to. Not to be read for feasibility of plot or special insights into human character, but an entertainment that has aged well.

League of Frightened Men is the second book of the Nero Wolfe series.  I’ve seen Nero Wolfe paperbacks lying about all my life without ever being especially tempted to pick one up, but apparently it was the best thing I could find on the shelf.  This was a big win.  After listening to this one, I got an audio version of the first book in the series and have since eye-read books number three, four, five, and thirty-one (books number five and thirty-one having been packaged weirdly together in a two-books-in-one-volume sort of deal).  I am hooked.  Archie Goodwin, the point-of-view character, is a terrific character, and the background teems with the flavor of New York in the 1930s and the ideas, values, and ways of life in the United States of eighty years ago.  And there are FORTY-SEVEN books in this series.  It’s like Christmas.

                                                                                                   

#3 Pictures at an Exhibition, by Sara Houghteling, 2009. (read in February)  * * *

No Goodreads review.

This was a reasonable piece of fiction about art and art dealing in Paris before and during the Nazi occupation.  I don’t remember it very well, which is not necessarily the best of signs.  You didn’t think I was going to hit strikes with all eight books, did you?

- - To Be Continued - -