2011 Global Reading Challenge Europe #2

    Double Jeopardy is the second book by Jean Echenoz that I have read, the first being the 1999 novel I'm Gone: A Novel which won the Prix Goncourt the most prestigious literary award in France.
    The best way I can think to describe this book is to posit that it would be the spy/intrigue novel Le Carre would've written if he were born 20 yrs later as a contemplative cafe'd Frenchman.  The core of the story is about a half baked insurrection at a Malaysian rubber plantation, spearheaded by an Ex-Pat frenchman, a self titled 'Duke', and two native brothers, and of course the Duke and the brothers have different priorities.  During this Echenoz gives us several other stories that all coincide and eventually intersect, a la "Pulp Fiction", one being an Odyssean chronicle of a homeless wanderer through France going underground to meet 'cannibals' and on a long ocean journey to battle.  As I write this thinking back it almost seems an intentional tribute to Homer, making me want to revisit it already.
    Surely more meandering than casual readers would be familiar with, Echenoz writes in what I'd describe as a 'French' style, looking out at the world with patience almost as if sitting at an outside cafe sipping coffee and eating a croissant.  Obviously I'm romanticizing, but in my defense, when speaking of Echenoz, it is so easy to romanticize because of the ease with which he weaves poetry into his prose, describing what many of us would see as wonder-less and mundane he injects with beauty and symmetry.
   So, find a copy, pick it up, take your time with it, and enjoy.

2011 Global Reading Challenge Asia #1...The Other Murakami

    I've known about this author for some time now as he shares the last name of one of my favorite writers Haruki Murakami, but have never before gotten around to reading him.  Popular Hits of the Showa Era: A Novel is Ryu Murakami's latest available English translation, and if its any indication of his other works he is one strange dude.
   The story revolves around two groups of people that have latched onto each other in hopes of staving off the harsh isolation of their Japanese society.  The first group is a collection of six socially awkward sexually frustrated loners who've each developed similar ticks of bursting into bouts of laughter who get together weekly traveling to an isolated location and sing karaoke, usually cross dressed.  The second is a group of what are called Oba-sans, 30 something single women, some divorcees, that are a sort of curmudgeonly type.
    Each one of these people evoked very real sympathy from me when not committing the horrendous (and absurd) acts that begin to unfold starting when one of the young men, hungover from one of their nights of Karaoke, ventures out from his isolation and sees one of the Oba-sans carrying grocery's home, and though he finds her all but revolting walks up behind her and begins to 'poke her' with his 'tented' pants.  Of course she is scandalized and begins to walk quickly away.  He continues and when she turns around to object he stabs her in the throat.  These two groups then begin to go tit for tat, building to the use of explosives.
    If your upset because you think I've revealed to much, you're wrong.  There is still plenty more violence and odd sexual awkwardness left, enough to fill 200 pages in fact.
    BUT, before you turn away in abject disgust, understand what Murakami is trying to say.  He is not glorifying random violence or sexual assault or even cross dressing for that matter, nor is he condemning any of these things.  What he is trying to say is that these oddities, and many more, are symptoms of a broken society, a society of crowded loneliness, deafening silences, and isolated alienated citizens.
    When taken at face value this book is at worst offensive and at best a freakshow, but once you make the attempt to understand why and how those horrible things are taking place and what sort of circumstances could grow them you (or at least I) begin to see the profound quality of Murakami's prose.

2011 Random Read #7...Wondrous & macabre happenings in 1890's Chicago

The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America is two stories, one the mad construction and wonders of the Chicago's World Fair of 1893 and the other the terrible career of conning and killing by a young man going by the name of H.H. Holmes, juxtaposed in order to give the full picture, light and dark, of a certain time in a a certain place.
    Erik Larson, the writer of this book, has proven himself capable of adequately handling this sort story.  I use the word 'adequately' because at times the complicated score of characters involved in the building of the Fair becomes jumbled and occasionally the artistic license necessary to convey the story of Holmes becomes a bit heavy handed and overly evident, but with that said he was able to illustrate the wonders the Fair held and the horrors that Holmes committed evocatively.
   Just to talk of the Fair for a moment, to learn of all the amazing innovations that it presented was astounding.  Firstly, as a person raised in Florida, to learn that the bedtime stories of this Fair told by his father may very well have been what inspired the vision and drove Walt Disney to create the wonderland that is Disney World is amazing, and truly self-evident once you look closely, everything from the purposefully laid landscaping to the intentional uniform planning all echoes back to the Fairs execution.
   Also, that this Fairs choice of alternating current over direct current, chosen so based on the bids given by the respective contractors, is what may have won the war for AC current and shaped the way all of us power our homes is fairly fascinating.  Lastly, the centerpiece of the Fair, what the architects of the event chose as their way to 'Out-Eiffel Eiffel' and his tower in Paris, was the worlds first Ferris wheel, a monstrous marvel of engineering which stood at over 260 feet with 36 cars each of which could accommodate 60 people each for a max occupancy of 2160 people.
   A fun book for history buffs, Chicago lovers, or serial killer nuts, and on related note this book is said to be soon made into film starring Leonardo DiCaprio as the killer himself Mr. H.H. Holmes.

2011 Gothic Reading Challenge #2

    I was having a hard time deciding what to read next, and I was searching through my goodreads.com account reviewing what I've been reading recently when I saw they were holding a book challenge, to read Jane Eyre, take a 5 question quiz, and pick your favorite line from the book.  By doing those things I've been entered in a chance to win a new Kindle, so I figured what the hell.
    Well, am I ever glad to have stumbled upon that contest because 'Jane Eyre' stands as one of the single best books that I've read.  A Bildungsroman in type, simple enough, a story telling the tale of a young Jane Eyre grown to young woman and the roads she traveled thus, though it is the writing itself that makes this book something special and made me thirst for more Charlotte Bronte.  It is striking how obviously this book has influenced so much of what we read in fiction and see in film today, the subtle touches of heartbreak and the aching pangs of regret have echoed from these pages and have reappeared countless times, though unfortunately rarely if ever as effectively as Bronte herself did.
    A pleasantly unexpected element of this book were all the subtle touches of the supernatural, some explained away and some not, that litter these pages.  Strange and haunting apparitions and distant psychic communication.  Again, not expected in what I expected to be a stodgy tale of the Victorian era.
    Another mark to how well this was written (in my opinion, of course) was how intensely the complex and heartfelt emotions of these characters' relations resonated with me.  I couldn't help but to physically react toward certain passages.
    All said I greatly enjoyed this book and cannot more strongly recommend it to all, both young and old, both well read and not, simply put, for any wishing for as good a reading experience as is at all possible.

2011 Random Read #6...Screenwriter Diablo Cody

    Candy Girl: A Year in the Life of an Unlikely Stripper is the memoir of Diablo Cody, Academy Award winning Screenwriter of 'Juno', in which she recounts her adventures, which she was driven to by the sheer boredom and monotony of modular office life, in the sex industry (stripping and peepshows) in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
    Written with observations made with eyes for the grotesque and ears for the absurd, Cody spun it all with the wit viewers of her movies are fondly familiar with.
    While I don't recommend this book to any in the possession of either a weak stomach or of a puritanical disposition, I found it a quick (at just over 200 pages), funny and lighthearted departure from the average fare.

2011 Haruki Murakami Challenge #3

And so it all makes sense, sort of. A Wild Sheep Chase: A Novel is the third book in Haruki Murakami's 'Trilogy of the Rat', and having read the first two I was really depending on this one to bring it all together. I have to say it did, and it even wrapped the whole of it up quite well with the last chapter, which was my big complaint with the second book in the series, that it had no real end. That all makes a sort of Harukian sort of sense now because the second book didn't have an ending it was just a sort of throughway to this book.

With all that said, I have read a few reviews online about this book, '..Sheep Chase', and have found that many readers have read it knowing it was the third book of a trilogy without feeling they'd missed anything. They're right, you can absolutely read this book without having read the other two because this book is, in my never humble opinion, the an actual novel, while the other two feel to me know as little more than extended prologues, or even something written after to illuminate a few things. That sounds harsh and dismissive, but I don't mean it to. The previous two are good, they are just very different, and without a few subtleties they would have no connection to each other or this book at all.

This is also the most complete book of the three, it is evident when reading it that it took some planning to get right, he had to know an ending in absolute terms to even begin, and that's what makes these three books taken together as such a great discovery for any of Haruki's longtime fans. You can clearly see a writer flexing and building his talents to what they have become today. In the first of the three he started with his meandering sort of everyday prose that best evokes the 'lost in a crowd' feeling that is so prevalent in Japanese fiction. In the second he first uses his alternating stories tool that has become almost a trademark of his style, though he does not use it in the third. Then, in this the third, he finally uses the part of his writing to imagine, untethered by convention, unique oddities, like a demon sheep with a star on its back, and to build mythologies around them.

I loved this book for a laundry list of reasons. Haruki Murakami is capable of making the mundane captivating and the alien seem coffee shop normal.

2011 Random Read #5...More Philosophy

I've always been interested in the French Existentialist writers Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre and have read most of their fiction, but I've always found the actual philosophical writing difficult to read because of the philosophical vocabulary that is used. Then I found The Ethics Of Ambiguity while deciding which Simone De Beauvoir fiction book I would read. It seemed to be a bit more accessible as far as the language was concerned, so I picked it up.

The premise of her proposition (she even has me using the philos. lingo) is that the meaning of our lives is what we make of it and that it is up to us to give our lives meaning. Also, she states that freedom is not an end result, that it must be continually cultivated in ourselves, through giving our lives meaning, and in the world at large.

I found it interesting how prescient her writing is almost as if she was peering into 2011 from her 1940's Parisian window. Or, maybe its that the times in which we live are just so aligned with her writings to make it seem so. All over the world we see people fighting for their freedoms in such organized direct ways. Maybe her views on freedom just needed the age of the internet to be fully realized.

I'm sure there is more that I can get from this book, not just because there is more there if only I'd dig, but also because of a deficit in my philosophy comprehension, so don't be surprised to see more philosophy books reviewed here.

I definitely recommend this book to anyone interested in the discourse on freedom and what it means, or anyone just looking for a book to think over.

As always, Good Reading!