Tag Archives: fiction

BOOK REVIEW: A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki

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A Tale for the Time BeingA Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

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A struggling novelist named Ruth finds a watertight package containing a Hello Kitty lunchbox washed ashore on an island off the coast of British Columbia. Ruth’s initial assumption is that it’s debris from the March 11, 2011 tsunami that scoured a large swath of coastal eastern Japan out to sea. However, her husband, Oliver, who has more expertise in these matters, tells her that it’s unlikely that the box could cross the Pacific so quickly and that it would be jettisoned out of the currents that consolidate plastic rubbish into large debris fields like the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. When the lunch box’s contents turn out to include a teenage girl’s journal and a number of letters, it seems as though the mystery might be solvable.

The journal is written by a Japanese girl in turmoil named Nao. Nao grew up in American, her father working for a Silicon Valley computer firm until he lost his job. A major factor in Nao’s depression is that she has to return to her ethnic homeland of Japan as a stranger. Her formative years were spent in America, and she is out-of-place in Japan and—as a result—she falls victim to vicious bullying. Furthermore, her father is unable to find a job in Japan and becomes suicidal. The household has to tighten its proverbial belt because Nao’s father, Haruki #2, isn’t working and Nao’s mother has limited earning potential. (FYI: the “#2” refers to the fact that Nao’s father had an uncle for whom he was named who’d been a scholar forced to serve in a kami kaze squad during the war.)

Nao also becomes suicidal, but she is firm in her conviction that she will not fail like her father has done on two occasions. There’s one thing that she must do first and that’s to pen the story of her great-grandmother Jiko. Jiko is a centenarian Buddhist nun and the family matriarch on Nao’s father’s side of the family. Nao stays a summer with Jiko, and the old nun in all her wisdom becomes an anchor in the girl’s tumultuous life. With a level of narcissism appropriate to a teenager, Nao ends up telling us a story that’s more autobiographical than an account of Old Jiko.

A Tale for the Time Being interweaves two storylines. One line is Nao’s journal entries and letters from the lunchbox. The other line is Ruth’s journey as she reads the journal and becomes obsessed with discovering more about Nao and her family members. Eventually, Ruth’s investigation turns up information about Haruki #1 and Haruki #2 that Nao apparently didn’t know, and that both Ruth and the reader hope the girl will learn. Nao comes to idolize Haruki #1 in part because he was committed to his fate as a kami kaze. It’s not that she believed in the kami kaze objective (she identifies more as American than Japanese), but she sees Haruki #1’s commitment in contrast to her father’s behavior. Nao’s myth about her great-uncle turns him into a counterpoint to the father that she loves but thinks a pathetic loser. In a way, this novel is a cautionary tale about drawing conclusions about the virtues and vices of others without knowing their whole story.

Ozeki does a great job of creating characters multi-dimensional enough for us to become intrigued by. Just as Ozeki has her same-named secondary protagonist, Ruth, sitting on the edge of the seat wanting to find out what happened to Nao and her family, we—too–are pulled into that mystery. The challenging approach of weaving Ruth’s story into the journal’s contents works well.

Ozeki hints that there may be something supernatural about the world in which her characters inhabit. There’s a member of a species of crow that shouldn’t be on the American side of the Pacific who shows up at about the same time as the lunch box. Also, we can’t tell whether some of Nao’s stories are the wishful delusions of a tormented girl or whether they reflect some kind of subtle magic. It’s a similar approach to that of other literary fiction authors such as Haruki Murakami.

I’d recommend this novel. It’s gripping and readable.

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BOOK REVIEW: After Dark by Haruki Murakami

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After DarkAfter Dark by Haruki Murakami

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

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[Note to readers unfamiliar with Tokyo: There are a couple of facts about the city that one must understand for this book to make sense. First, while Tokyo is a city that’s always moving, the trains don’t run between roughly midnight and five am (your results may vary by station.) Second, because many people live far out in the suburbs and the cost of living is high, taxis aren’t an option for much of the population. These two facts add up to a slew of business for those industries that cater to the population caught out “after dark” (i.e. after the trains stop running–not after sundown) including: all-night diners, love hotels, c-stores, bars, pachinko parlors, bowling alleys, and manga bookstores.]

This novel takes place in Tokyo during the wee hours of a single night. Murakami satisfies a form of voyeuristic impulse by giving us a peek into the lives of a few of the people out and about while the masses are home slumbering, or—at least–whiling away insomnia-ridden hours in the privacy of their own homes.

The protagonist is a young college student named Mari. As she sits in a 24-hour Denny’s reading, Mari immediately triggers curiosity. She isn’t typical of the disheveled, boozy, or garish crowd out “after dark.” In a post-witching hour world of drunken salaryman, micro-miniskirted hostesses, tattooed yakuza gangsters, and nightlife-savvy travelers, the bookish young woman stands out. We soon learn that Mari didn’t miss the last train on accident, but rather is staying out all night on purpose to be out of the house. This further raises the level of intrigue.

In the Denny’s, Mari is approached by a gregarious young man named Takahashi who is grabbing a quick snack before going back to his nighttime hobby of jamming in a jazz band. Takahashi introduces himself as someone who already knows Mari from a party. He’s a couple years older than the young woman, and was a classmate of Mari’s sister, Eri. The party at which he met Mari was mostly attended by kids the age of Eri and himself, and Mari was just along for the ride with her more popular sister.

Eri is another major character in the book, although her mysterious presence is mostly in a sleeping state. Eri, unlike the plain Mari, is drop dead gorgeous, and has been doing modeling jobs since she was a child. Takahashi is but one of the young men infatuated with Eri—though we get the feeling that Takahashi realizes that Eri isn’t in his league. He’s a pragmatist—if begrudgingly so. The rest of the book hinges on this chance encounter between Mari and Takahashi.

Suspicions that the grim hours of circadian disruption are the domain of crime and vice are confirmed when a bulky former female wrestler turned love hotel manager, named Kaoru, rushes into the Denny’s seeking Mari. Kaoru is an acquaintance of Takahashi (who has since left the diner to play jazz) and she is seeking Mari because Takahashi told her that Mari spoke fluent Chinese. A Chinese prostitute was beaten up at the love hotel, the Alphaville, and Kaoru needs to talk to the foreign woman to get to the bottom of the matter. Kaoru’s investigation is in part driven by the fact that the Chinese hooker’s John dashed on the hotel bill, but the former wrestler also has a soft spot for the beaten girl and wants to do the right thing by her—though Kaoru knows the police can’t be involved because the Chinese working girl will, at a minimum, be deported by the authorities, or, worse, be punished by the Chinese mafia who pimp her.

As with a few of Murakami’s other books, this book might be labeled “slipstream.” Slipstream is a genre that blends mainstream literary fiction with supernatural elements / speculative fiction. However, the scenes that aren’t realist generally involve the sleeping Eri in her room by herself. So, it may be that Murakami is just conveying the hazy and illusory world of sleep and life at the edge of sleep. I’ll leave it to the reader to make their own interpretations of this. There are also coincidences that could strain credulity, but this may just be an attempt to convey that the world of Tokyo “after dark” is a small pond.

I’d highly recommend this novel. Murakami gives us likable characters and one can see why said characters are draw to each other despite their very different existences. Then he puts them into situations that demand resolution. It’s a short, readable, and interesting novel.

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BOOK REVIEW: Gotham Writers’ Workshop: Writing Fiction by Various

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Writing Fiction: The Practical Guide from New York's Acclaimed Creative Writing SchoolWriting Fiction: The Practical Guide from New York’s Acclaimed Creative Writing School by Alexander Steele

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Amazon page

This workbook-style guide to writing fiction is put out by the well-known New York City creative writing school. With 11 chapters, it delivers lessons on all the elements of fiction including: character development, plotting, establishing point of view, honing description, building realistic dialogue, varying pacing, establishing voice, determining a work’s theme, and carrying out revisions. It also has a chapter that goes into the business of writing (as opposed to the craft of writing which is the bailiwick of the first ten chapters.)

There are a couple of features of this book that set it apart from the vast canon of writers’ guides. First, this isn’t a single author work, which means the reader has access to a much broader pool of experience than one would in a single author text. It also means that an author can be assigned a topic according to his or her strengths as a writer.

Second, across the chapters, they use Raymond Carver’s Cathedral as an example work, and they provide that story in an appendix for those who haven’t read it. It’s not that the authors exclusively use this short story for examples. But it’s useful to have a common story and to include it because there are so many great stories and novels available that no matter how well-read one’s readership, there will be works that some haven’t read. (e.g. Much as I should’ve, I haven’t yet read nor seen the movie Gone with the Wind–a common exemplary work because it’s a beloved book, a movie, and because pop culture references [e.g. The Simpsons] have made the gist of it available to even those slackers who’ve neither read the book nor seen the movie.) There’s a reason why writers’ book authors often use movies to describe story elements, because there are many fewer movies than books and vastly fewer good movies—thus a higher likelihood of a common experience. Yes, there are a few works common across most school curricula, but there’s no better way to ensure that a book doesn’t get read thoroughly than to assign it as required reading.

A third useful feature of this book–but not one that is in any way unique to it–is that it offers writing exercises throughout to help build one’s skills through practice. This is where the value of such a book truly lies. The advice such books offer are almost always the same—sometimes hackneyed but almost always valuable. (A lot of tired advice is tired because it bears repeating owing to the constant infusion of new writers who repeat the same errors.) A final useful element of the book—but also one that features in many similar guides—is a checklist in the appendices that allows one to rapidly consider the book’s key questions as they apply to one’s own writing project.

I’d recommend this book as one of the most useful writers’ guides that I’ve read.

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READING REPORT: February 27, 2015

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I finished three books this week.

Antifragility

The first of these is Antifragile, the latest offering by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, whom you may know from Black Swan and Fooled by Randomness fame. While it’s his latest book, it came out a couple of years ago and I started it over a year ago.  The premise is that some entities become stronger when exposed to stressors and disorder,  and there are ways to nurture this tendency to be antifragile. While the ideas and many of the examples are fascinating, I put it down for a long time because Taleb is prone to rambling diatribes. After about the 1oooth time reading about how much he loathes the 98% of professors (we get it already), you may be ready to set it down as well.  [To be fair, Taleb probably gets a hundred death threats a year from enraged social science scholars whose life’s work will appear ridiculous to anyone who understands the gist of Taleb’s arguments in this and his preceding two books.] Taleb is a first-rate thinker who has delivered some very important messages about the misapplication of statistics, I’m not sure why he feels compelled go all Howard Stern about it–though it does probably sell a few extra copies and I suspect he is genuinely that way.

 

 

pyjamagameMark Law’s The Pyjama Game is in part a micro-history of the martial art and sport of judō, and in part is an accounting of his own experiences in taking up judō at the ripe age of 50. For me the history and evolution of judō is where the book is at its most interesting. However, if you don’t have any martial arts experience–or even if you don’t have any grappling-centric training experience–you may find Law’s discussion of testing and randori (free form training, the grappling equivalent to sparring) intriguing, or invaluable if you’re considering taking up judō, jujutsu, or sambo.

 

mantraSherlockHolmesThere is apparently a cottage industry of writers putting out their own Sherlock Holmes novels, and–in particular–writing about Holmes’s gap years. For those unfamiliar with the literary history of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, at one point he got sick of writing these crime fiction novels and killed off Sherlock Holmes. However, there was such a clambering for the master detective that Doyle resuscitated Holmes. These gap years in which Holmes was believed dead have proven fertile soil for writers who wish to write their own spin on where Holmes went and what he did when he was traveling incognito. I saw a press post for a new one the other day in which Holmes goes to Japan. The Mandala of Sherlock Holmes, however, speculates that Holmes traveled to Bombay, and from there to Tibet and eventually to Shangri La. It’s an intriguing premise and offers some good travelogue type description of setting–however as a story it’s not as artfully executed as the Arthur Conan Doyle books.

 

I bought four books this week, two of which–in part–because they’ll help me complete the Book Riot 2015 Read Harder Challenge, which I will talk about below.

 

Dinosaurs_wo_Bones

Admittedly, I bought this book, Dinosaurs Without Bones,  not because the subject jumped out at me (though I’m sure it will prove thrilling) but rather because I knew the author about a billion years ago (I know; I should take geological time more seriously when mentioning a book of this subject.) At any rate, we trained at the same martial arts school in Atlanta, Georgia. That disclaimer being made, the topic looks fascinating and I’m eager to learn more about paleontological detective work.

 

GoldfinchThe Goldfinch won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Literature, and so it meets an unchecked requirement for the Book Riot Challenge (recent award winner of one of the major literary prizes.) Honestly, if it weren’t for my desire to complete the challenge, I might have read Tartt’s The Secret History first. The latter books seems a little more up my alley, but I”m eager to see what this critically acclaimed novel has to offer. If it’s engaging, I’ll go back and pick up her first novel.

 

AMillionShadesofGray

No A Million Shades of Gray isn’t a mommy porn book 20,000 times more intense than E.L. James’ book. On the contrary, it’s an intriguing YA book about a teenage elephant handler who escapes into the jungle with his elephant to escape war-torn Vietnam. This book will hit on an unchecked category on the Book Riot Challenge (i.e. YA book)

 

Life of Pi

Life of Pi is a book that I intended to read long before the movie came out, but still haven’t gotten around to it. It was cheap on Kindle, and so I picked it up. I’ve seen the movie, so it’ll be interesting to compare, given how visual the movie was.

 

I’m almost halfway through the Book Riot 2015 Read Harder Challenge. The 19 books I’ve completed thus far this year include books in 11 of the 24 categories, including:

 

3.) Short story collection or anthology: a.) 999: New Stories of Horror and Suspense, and b.) I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream

 

6.) By someone of another gender: a.) Tears in Rain, and b.) Principles of Tibetan Medicine

 

7.) Takes place in Asia: a.) Quarantine in the Grand Hotel, and b.) The Mandala of Sherlock Holmes

 

10.) A micro-history: Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Postural Practice

 

12.) A science fiction novel: a.) Tears in Rain, b.) The Martian

 

17.) A collection of poetry: Leaves of Grass

 

18.) A book that was recommended: Key Muscles of Hatha Yoga

 

19.) A book originally published in another language: a.) Tears in Rain (Spanish), b.) Quarantine in the Grand Hotel (Hungarian)

 

20.) A graphic novel or comic book collection: The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (Vol. 1)

 

23.) A book published in 2014: The Martian

 

24.) A self-improvement / self-help book: Zen Mind, Strong Body

 

READING REPORT: February 13, 2015

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Welcome to a special Friday the 13th edition of the Reading Report. What’s so special about it? If you’re not deluded by superstition, then not much. If you are superstitious, reading this post may cause you to suffer a plague of locusts (or whatever plagues your particular geographic area.)

 

Now that we’ve gotten rid of the illiterate ninnies, we can get down to discussing books.

 

I finished two books this week–one nonfiction and one fiction. I’ll be posting book reviews within the next couple weeks.

 

The nonfiction book was called Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice. The author’s intriguing and controversial thesis is that yoga as it’s practiced in studios around the world today nothing to do with traditional Indian yoga, but, instead, owes it’s existence to European calisthenics and bodybuilding systems and the Indians that borrowed from them. I didn’t find the author’s argument compelling for a number of reasons that I’ll get into in my review. This isn’t to suggest that I’m certain he’s wrong. He may be right, but the way he constructed his argument left a great deal of room for doubt.

 

TLEG_Vol1

The fiction book was a graphic novel entitled The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (Vol. 1). For those of you who haven’t seen the movie featuring Sean Connery, this comic book gathers together a team of protagonists from 19th century science fiction and adventure novels. The team consists of Mina Harker (of Bram Stoker’s Dracula), Allan Quatermain (of H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines), Captain Nemo (a Jules Verne recurring character), Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde (Robert Louis Stevenson’s title characters), and Hawley Griffin (of H.G. Wells’ The Invisible Man). One needn’t have read all those classic stories to follow this book, but being a fan of 19th century tales of the fantastic definitely makes it more fun. The story depicted in this volume has nothing to do with the movie plot.

 

mantraSherlockHolmes

I’m more than halfway through a couple of books that I mentioned in earlier Reading Reports, they are Why Do People Get Ill? and The Mandala of Sherlock Holmes.  I read chapters 7 through 9 of the former book, which had to do with the expression of symptoms, the heart as a symbol and that symbol’s expression in illness, and the impact of mother’s experiences on infants and children. In the latter book, Holmes has arrived in Tibet, and the plot thickens. The author is Tibetan, and so has some unique insights. However, some chapters advance the story with action, and others are almost like travelogue.

 

I’m still early into reading two books that I’ve previously mentioned. The first is Zen and the Brain. In this book I’ve transitioned out of the part explaining Zen and the author’s experience of that tradition, and am now into the part that lays down the basic neuroscience. While the author writes in a readable style, for a neuroscientist, this is still challenging reading because of its scientific nature and the complexity of the brain. However, the chapters I read recently both raise some fascinating questions and provide useful information. The chapter I just finished dealt in part with the neurochemistry of addiction. I like that this book is divided up into short chapters. This is beneficial for taking in such complicated information. I need frequent think-breaks to ruminate on what I’ve read.

 

pyjamagame

The second is The Pyjama Game. After a slow start, the last two chapters have contained some fascinating information. One of these chapters dealt with the history of jujutsu, particularly as Japan transitioned from medieval to modern. The other chapter outlined Kanō Jigorō‘s development of judō.

 

I bought three books this week.

 

The first is entitled Healing Moves, and is by a married couple consisting of a fitness writer and a cardiologist. This book addresses a topic that is a prevailing theme in my nonfiction reading as of late, which is what movement, exercise, and physical activity can do to improve one’s health (not just one’s fitness.)

HealingMoves

 

The second book is Greatest Ever Boxing Workouts.  This book presents information about what boxers like Mike Tyson, Manny Pacquiao, and Floyd Mayweather do to prepare for fights. It’s a follow-up to an earlier book that included fighters like Muhammad Ali and Roy Jones Jr.

BoxingWorkouts

 

Finally, I just got a short story collection on Kindle Daily Deal the other day entitled Lovecraft’s Monsters.  This isn’t a collection of H.P. Lovecraft stories, but rather is an anthology of stories inspired by Lovecraft’s work.

LovecraftsMonsters

READING REPORT: February 6, 2015

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I polished off three books this week. That’s not as impressive as it might seem; they were all slim volumes. I’ll do reviews on these books in the near future, but a few words about each will suffice here.

The first was Zen Mind, Strong Body; a book about which I had mixed feelings. It’s by a calisthenics expert named Al Kavadlo, who is a personal trainer, author, and YouTube phenom. On the positive side, Kavadlo is a sharp guy with many useful insights into bodyweight exercise and fitness in general. Additionally, Kavadlo eschews the snake-oil salesmanship that is rampant in the fitness world.

On the other hand, the book is basically a rehash of blog posts, and the “new / first time seen pictures” aren’t useful for learning the exercises because they’re mostly just the author standing in random places with his shirt off. Furthermore, there’s no such consolidating theme to the book as is suggested by the title. I think it just has that title (a take-off on DT Suzuki’s classic work on Zen) because “The Best of Al Kavadlo’s Blog Posts” doesn’t scream “buy me.” I thought a little extra value-added could have been provided for the people who paid for the book, but you will learn from it.

The second book was Quarantine in the Grand Hotel. This novel brings satire and humor into a locked-door mystery. It was written by a Hungarian author in the 1930’s, but remains a readable and enjoyable book.

IHaveNoMouthThe third book was the short story collection by Harlan Ellison that I mentioned I would begin this week. I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream consists of seven stories that are nominally in the genre of science fiction, but could also be classified as tales of the strange. This book was first published in 1967. Ellison writes stories in a readable style, though one that can sometimes be called “trippy.” If I were going to award a “book of the week” for the book that I found most engaging, it would be this one.

I only got a couple of chapters each into the Mo Yan novel Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out and the epic poem The Aeneid. The former is readable has a fascinating premise, but the latter–not unexpectedly– is a little more of a chore to read (but is a classic and seems worth the difficulties.)

Having finished off some nonfiction in the preceding week, I made room to resume reading a book that I started a couple of months ago entitled Why Do People Get Ill? A two-man team consisting of a psychoanalyst and a neuroscientist joined together to write this book. It examines the role that stress and the mind play in illness. Yes, things like germs (i.e. bacteria and viruses) cause illness. However, that’s not the whole story, and a couple of key questions remain. First, how come some people can be repeatedly exposed to causative factors and their bodies knock out disease leaving them asymptomatic. Second, how come others readily come down with ailments–sometimes even when they haven’t been exposed to causative factors. To put matters in scholarly terms, germs may be a necessary condition for disease, but they are rarely a sufficient condition.

WhyDoPeopleGetIll_Leader&Corfield

 

I didn’t do much yoga or martial arts specific reading this week. However, today I finally began The Pyjama Game, which is a book about Judō that I mentioned in one of my previous Reading Reports.

I purchased four books this week, all on Kindle and mostly on sale.  Those books, which I’m sure to be discussing and reviewing on later dates are:

TheThreeStigmata

The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch: Because I’m a huge PKD fan, and this is said to be one of his best books–of his books that I haven’t yet read. This was in the Kindle Monthly Deals.

FirstHubby

First Hubby: This will be my first Roy Blount Jr. book, but I did enjoy him on that NPR game show (i.e. Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me!) This was also a Kindle Monthly Deal as I recall.

Ikkyu_Berg

Ikkyu: Crow with No Mouth: This is the story of a Zen master who lived in Kyoto in the 15th century. He sounds like a fascinating man, and was also a skilled poet. This one wasn’t on sale, but neither was it expensive at the usual price.

TheElementsThe Elements: This book is a Kindle Daily Deal as I’m writing this. I love me some science. I did have to look through the sample pages before buying. Even though it was inexpensive, I was concerned that it might not have much usefulness on my black&white, base-model Kindle because the graphics are an important part of the book. However, it looked like there was enough text explanation to be worth the $2.00–even if the graphics don’t show up well.

And that was my week in books.

BOOK REVIEW: The Martian by Andy Weir

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The MartianThe Martian by Andy Weir

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Amazon page

If you like suspenseful science-fiction, humor, and are fascinated by science, you must read this book. I’m not kidding.

The premise is a simple cast-away story, except that it takes place on Mars—an environment in which a human can’t last for seconds without a lot of properly functioning technology. Astronaut Mark Watney is left for dead when a severe storm blows in, impaling him with a piece of metal, knocking out his vital statistics monitor, and blowing him into a drift. Having lost visual contact with Watney, showing no vital statistics, and facing the toppling of the crew’s escape vehicle by high winds, the mission commander decides that she can’t risk the lives of the entire crew to cart Watney’s body back home. The thing is; Watney isn’t dead.

The book is a rollercoaster ride of highs and lows associated with events that nearly kill Watney—either in an instant or by making his long-term survival impossible. The botanist / engineer must figure out how to survive for four years (until the next Mars mission is due—if it doesn’t get cancelled) with less than six months of supplies. (The mission was supposed to be one month but was aborted in the first week, but there were five other crew members whose rations were left behind.) If you think Tom Hanks had it bad in Cast Away, imagine having to produce food on Mars.

This book taps into the visceral feeling that works so well in the movie Gravity (but Weir does more homework on the science.) For tension, it’s hard to beat being adrift in space, utterly isolated from one’s species—or any species for that matter–and knowing you will die when your resources run out.

The main character, who is the only character for the first six chapters or so, is intensely likable. Mark Watney is funny, intelligent, self-deprecatingly humble, and can confidently problem solve in the midst of any crisis. If there’s a critique of the realism of this story (as sci-fi goes it is extremely realistic), it’s that Watney is preternaturally skilled at adapting to complete solitude. However, I don’t deduct for this, because if it showed him at the depths of despair that someone in his circumstance would inevitably go through, it wouldn’t be nearly as pleasing a book to read. If you’ve read a lot about sensory deprivation and / or what happens to prisoners over long stints in solitary confinement, I’d suspend the disbelief that might come from that knowledge and just accept that Watney is exceedingly good at saying, “Pity-party over. It’s time to make this work.” In short, humorous Watney is just a lot more fun to read than would be a despondent astronaut.

I think I’ve been clear that this is an outstanding book, and everyone should read it. I guess if you absolutely hate science (of any kind–because there’s botany, biology, physics, chemistry, engineering, etc. all rolled up into this book), you may find that it’s hard to stick with the glut of scientific / engineering discussions coming at you. Still, you shouldn’t hate science that much—what the hell is the matter with you. Weir writes in a readable style and the reader doesn’t get awash in minutiae. (For example, Watney even names the unit kilowatt-hour/sol [sol=a Mar’s day] the “Pirate-ninja” to make it more palatable and humorous.)

Read it. You’ll like it. Also, don’t wait because the movie is supposed to come out in the Fall.

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READING REPORT: January 30, 2015

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Welcome to my second weekly dispatch on what I’ve been reading. Owing to my weird approach to reading, I tend to finish books in clusters, and this week I polished off the novel The Martian, the horror short story anthology 999, and three nonfiction books (Principles of Tibetan Medicine, The Key Muscles of Hatha Yoga,  and How Pleasure Works.) The only one of these that I’ve completed a review on is Principles of Tibetan Medicine, but reviews of the others will be in the works in the upcoming week(s.)


The star of my completed pile was Andy Weir’s The Martian. It’s a spectacular science fiction read that’s engaging from beginning to end. Readers who love science will find it particularly fascinating and well-researched. For the yogis and yoginis out there, Ray Long’s book on muscles as applied to Hatha Yoga is well-organized, easy to follow, and easy to use.

 

The completion of several books this week creates openings in what fiction and poetry I’ll be reading on Kindle in the coming weeks. Drum-roll please… I will be starting the following books this week:


MoYan_LDWMO

1.) Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out by Mo Yan: Mo Yan won the Nobel Prize for Literature back in 2012, and this 2006 book is about a benevolent land owner who is killed on orders by Mao Zedong, and is subsequently reincarnated as a series of farm animals.


 

IHaveNoMouth

2.) I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream by Harlan Ellison: The title of this collection of short stories is also the title of the most prominent piece in it. The 1968 Hugo winning story is a post-apocalyptic tale of artificial intelligence run amok.


 

Aeneid

3.) The Aeneid of Virgil: I’m overdue to read this epic poem by the famous Latin poet written during the first century B.C.


 

In nonfiction, I made an impulse purchase this week that I’m about half way through reading. It’s called Zen Mind, Strong Body and it’s by Al Kavadlo. I’m having minor buyer’s remorse, not because it’s a bad book, but because it turns out to be a collection of blog posts, and so I could have probably gotten all this for free by digging around the world wide web a little. (Moral: always read the fine print on the dust jacket. I wouldn’t mind, but it was a bit pricey for rehashed blog posts.) Kavadlo is a personal trainer and advocated of calisthenics and advanced bodyweight exercises, and he has many interesting ideas on both mind and body. It has provided some interesting food for thought, but I don’t really need the hundreds of pictures of the author with his shirt off.

ZenMindStrongBody



 

I’m about halfway through Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s latest book, Antifragile, and would like to make some headway on that in the upcoming week. While I’m a fan of Taleb’s work, I’ve gotten bogged down in this one because it keeps going and going and going on about a rather simple concept–i.e. that some things become stronger or more robust when exposed to stressors. I’m not sure the book needed to be this long. I suspect that Taleb is the kind to throw a world class tantrum if an editor took a hatchet to a word of his writing–and now he has the following to make it work. He’s a smart guy and raises many excellent points, but he seems like a major prima donna. At any rate, maybe he’ll surprise me in the second half with something novel and interesting–in lieu of endless restatement of his (admittedly fascinating) thesis.

Antifragility



 

I also started a book a few weeks back called Zen and the Brain by James H. Austin that I’d like to get back to. It examines what science has to say about the practice of meditation from the perspective of a neuroscientist who’s also a Zen practitioner.

Zen&Brain



 

At the end of last year, I did a post about the Book Riot 2015 Read Harder Challenge. It’s a sort of scavenger hunt for readers. There are 25 categories of books, of which one is supposed to read at least one book each. If you can count the same book for several categories (I don’t see why not as long as they fit the description) then I have so far covered seven categories. (Not bad for the first month of the challenge.)

-Collection of short stories: 999: New Stories of Horror and Suspense

–Author of a different gender: Tears in Rain (Rosa Montero) and Principles of Tibetan Medicine (Tamdin Rither Bradley) [Both females]

–Science-fiction novel: The Martian

–Collection of poetry: Leaves of Grass

–A book recommended for you by someone else: The Key Muscles of Hatha Yoga

-A book originally published in another language: Tears in Rain  (Spanish)

–A book published in 2014: The Martian (Some might dispute this as it was self-published in 2011, but not picked up by a publisher until 2014.)

READING REPORT: January 23, 2015

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If I were a kid today, I’d be diagnosed with ADD in a heartbeat. I rarely read one book straight through. However, I read a lot, and that means I switching from one book to the next–reading a chapter at a time. I do try to read no more than one book of a given type/genre at a time–often unsuccessfully, as you’ll see. With this in mind, I thought I’d experiment with a weekly post on what I’ve been reading that week.

Book-Review-The-Martian

Fiction: The novel that I’m currently reading is Andy Weir’s The Martian. This book is gripping. It’s considered to be one of the best–if not the best–science fiction works of 2014, although it was self-published in 2011. This is a great example of a book that couldn’t get published despite being spectacular, and which will now make a bazillion dollars. It also explains how a 2014 novel is set to have a big budget movie adaptation come out in late 2015. This book is like the movie Gravity set on Mars, except that it’s smarter.  It taps into that visceral fear of what it would be like to die alone in space–not in a flash but with time to know you are going to die. An unlikely, but plausible sounding, set of circumstances result in astronaut Mark Watney being left for dead on the surface of Mars. But, of course, he’s not dead. Watney has to be creative to figure out how to live for four years in hopes that the next manned Mars mission will go forward as planned. It’s a roller coaster ride between him thinking he will surely die and him coming up with clever solutions. If you are into science, it’s particularly intriguing. I’m about 20% of the way through.

 

Foreign Fiction: I’ve also continued to read a Hungarian novel called Quarantine in the Grand Hotel by Jenő Rejtő. This is a silly (in a good way) locked-door murder mystery. I picked it up in Hungary over the holidays, and will probably finish it in the next week or so. (I’m about 2/3rds of the way through, and it’s only a 160 page book.) It’s short, highly readable, and humorous.

I also read a chapter from The Mandala of Sherlock Holmes by Jamyang Norbu. A number of authors have picked up the mantle of Sherlock Holmes from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.  (Not to mention TV shows and movies.) This book is published in India by a Tibetan author who imagines Sherlock Holmes traveled to India and Tibet after he was believed to have been killed (along with Professor Moriarty) in Switzerland. (Going over the falls as depicted in the second Sherlock Holmes movie featuring Robert Downey Jr.) There are three parts to the book: India, Tibet, and Beyond. I’m in the last couple chapters of the first part, most of which takes place in Bombay.

 

Short Stories: I’m about 85% of the way through 999: New Stories of Horror and Suspense. This is a collection of short fiction of horror / dark suspense. It features authors such as Joyce Carol Oates, Stephen King, Neil Gaiman, Eric Van Lustbader, and David Morrell.  All of the  works are short stories except for a novella/short novel by William Peter Batty. The novella is the last piece, and I’ve just started part II of it.

999_Horror&Suspense

 

Martial Arts: I just finished Dr. Anthony Catanese’s The Medical Care of the Judoka, but I posted a review yesterday so I won’t get into that book. My next martial arts book will be The Pyjama Game by Mark Law, but I haven’t yet begun it.

 

Yoga: I’ve been reading two books related to yoga this week. I just finished Chapter 2 of Coulter’s Anatomy of Hatha Yoga. This chapter dealt with the anatomy and physiology of breathing. This book is an excellent resource for yoga teachers, but it’s pretty dense–which may explain why I’m only on Chapter 3. Not only does the chapter give general information on respiration, it also provides information specific to various yogic breathing methods such as abdominal, yogic, thoracic, paradoxical, and diaphragmatic.

The second yoga book I’m reading is Singleton’s Yoga Body, which is a history of yoga postural practice (asana practice). This book presents a controversial thesis, which is that postural practice (asana) wasn’t really a part of mainstream yoga until quite recently, and that it’s as much a product of what happened in the Western world in the early 20th century as it is a result of Indian yogic traditions–if not more. Having finished the first three chapters (about 30% through), I’m not sure whether I buy his argument or not. He has some documentary evidence on his side, but I know there is also a proclivity to equate the current era in which everybody documents laundry day with the past in which many people were much more secretive. It’s also often not true that the most vocal are not the mainstream. He may be correct, but he has yet to wow me. (Part of his argument is people like Max Muller and HP Blavatsky found hatha yoga [the style which most emphasizes posture] to be the domain of conmen and beggars.)


AnatomyHathaYoga_CoulterYogaBody_Singleton

 

Miscellaneous Nonfiction: I’ve got about 70 more pages to finish in a book called How Pleasure Works by Paul Bloom. As the title implies, this book is about the science of why people get pleasure from various things from food to sex to freaky sex to art to music, etc. The primary thesis is that there are hidden essences that are the source of pleasure. The chapter I just finished talked about an interesting study in which violinist extraordinaire Joshua Bell went into a subway station and played his $3.5million violin, and barely netted $30–even though there were people passing him who’d paid $200 to hear him in his tuxedo at a concert hall later that evening. The chapter also talked about art forgeries, and how some art is valuable when it’s associated with a famous painter and worthless when it’s a forgery by a presumably equally skilled forger (I say equally skilled because these individuals have been able to pass their work off to experts as a painting by a famous artist. In some cases, they weren’t forgeries but rather originals in the style of the famous artist and submitted as an unknown work found in a basement somewhere.)

HowPleasureWorks

 

I also finished the letter “B” in the book The Painted Word  by Phil Cousineau. This book is organized like a dictionary, except that it only contains certain English language words that the author finds particularly intriguing, and it gives background on usage and how the meanings have migrated. If you love language, you’ll find this book much less painfully boring than I have made it sound.

Painted Word

 

That completes the books I’ve been reading over the past week. I did purchase two books this week, but they’re far down the queue to be read. One is the graphic novel The League of Extraordinary Gentleman by Alan Moore, and the other is Right Ho, Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse.

BOOK REVIEW: Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman

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NeverwhereNeverwhere by Neil Gaiman

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Amazon page

Neverwhere taps into a reader’s imagination and the fantasy that beyond closed doors and locked grates, beyond the prying eyes of common men, lies something magical—not just the mundane sewers and conduits our rational mind tells us exist there. This magical world is “London Below,” and–to a lesser extent–rooftop London. It’s a world that exists below the workaday London that we know. It’s a London of angels and cutthroats, witches and warriors. It’s a London trapped in time, but unconstrained by the laws of physics or men as we know them.

The lead character is Richard Mayhew, a perfectly normal resident of London Above. He has a fine—if boring—job in the business world, and a fiancé isn’t right for him, but who he believes is close enough for an imperfect world by virtue of her being pretty, smart, and capable.

Mayhew is living an ordinary and comfortable life until he and his girlfriend come across an injured young woman on the street. While his fiancé, Jessica, steps over the girl because the couple are on their way to meet Jessica’s VIP boss, Richard refuses to leave the girl. The injured girl is a resident of London Below, and had collapsed to the sidewalk after escaping from the two London Below master assassins who killed her family. It turns out the girl, Door, is from a family whose magical gift is the ability to open doors—even doors that are locked, sealed, or that no one even recognizes the existence of. As no good deed goes unpunished, Richard’s assistance of Door pulls him into the world of London Below, and he soon finds that he’s almost invisible to the residents of London Above and that he’s been forgotten by Jessica, his friends, and his coworkers.

The rest of the book is a hero’s quest in which Door is trying to discover who ordered the assassination of her family and why, and Richard is trying to find out whether (and, if so, how) he can get back his life in London Above. Because the fates of Richard and Door are intertwined, they travel together along with a bodyguard named Hunter and a Marquis / conman in the debt of Door’s father named the Marquis de Carabas.

I enjoyed this book immensely. It’s highly readable and the reader will be drawn to the fate of the characters. It has that page-turner quality. I’d highly recommend this book for anyone who reads fantasy / speculative fiction–or who doesn’t but is willing to give it a try.

Neil Gaiman is, as always, the master storyteller. When the story calls for humor, it is genuinely funny. When it’s time to be scary, it creates shivers. The storytelling was good enough that I was willing to overlook an ending that—in less capable hands—would have felt flat and too easy.

I didn’t realize that Neverwhere was based on a BBC miniseries. In other words, for a change the book is based on the movie rather than the other way round. However, the book does concisely but vividly portray setting—a task that one might imagine being easier having gone in this developmental direction. And, of course, setting is extremely important in this book. The distinct feel of London Below, London Above, and Rooftop London must be conveyed.

Here is a link to a piece of said BBC miniseries:

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