Hilary's Book Blog

Not as funny as I hoped it would be. These cute variations on fairy tales (“Hamster and Gerbil,” “The Three Little Penguins and the Big Bad Walrus”) rely heavily on the inherent laughter value of reworking the familiar tales. Bones are tossed to adults (the sexpot Hollywood-bound sheep in “Rumplesnakeskin” is called Norma Jean, Little Red Robin Hood’s grandma lives in a retirment apartment complex), and kids will like the irreverent humor, but it’s a little old hat after Stinky Cheese Man etc. My favorite was “Goldiefox and the Three Chickens,” which had a few bits that made me laugh out loud and also a very happy ending.

It’s a strange fact (maybe an outgrowth of reading too much) that I love reading descriptions of books I’ve already read. I suppose it lets me enjoy them again in an incredibly efficient way! So I read this book cover-to-cover, though it’s just an assemblage of brief reading lists with some commentary. Pearl (best-known perhaps as the model for Archie McPhee’s shushing librarian action figure) has very eclectic tastes (yay!) which don’t overlap with mine very much (too bad for me…) I’ve added a few to-reads to my ever-growing list, but I’m actually relieved there weren’t more (I couldn’t possibly make a serious dent in the list before I die, especially since I’m very attached to RE-reading). But if you don’t have such a list, this is a great way to start one; with segments from the Alices (Adams, Hoffman, Munro, Sebold, Walker, etc.) to Zero (books on the counter-intuitive concept that revolutionized mathematics), there’s something for most everyone. Especially intriguing: “Too Good To Miss” sections which highlight Hamilton Basso, Frederick Busch, George MacDonald Fraser, Robert Heinlein, Ward Just, P.F. Kluge, Mark Kurlansky, Jonathan Lethem, Elinor Lipman, Ian McEwan, Merle Miller, Iris Murdoch, Lewis Nordan, Richard Powers, Van Reid, Rex Stout, Ross Thomas, Gore Vidal, and Connie Willis. Heinlein and Fraser are the only two I’ve read; I agree with her on Heinlein (this book is what led me back to Red Planet, the only H. juvenile that was missing from my collection, though I don’t think it holds a candle to the later ones), not on Fraser, but reading at least one each of the others would be a good goal.

Recommended by the Adult Reading Round Table as a “Sure Bet”–and it was. A satisfying thriller, not great, but very hard to put down. One morning, everyone (his boss, his friends, his family) want Dave Elliot dead, and he has to figure out why while staying alive in the skyscraper where he works. Par for the course for a not-great novel: four brand names on the first page of the opening scene (Pratesi sheets/Panasonic clock radio/Nikes/Rolex president watch–it’s not just lazy, it’s obtrusively silly), cardboard characters, painful dialect (“Whut else can yew tell me ’bout him?”) But the popcorn-cruncher in me enjoyed it a lot.

It’s curious that this was marketed as a young adult novel–yes, the protagonist is young and the book is short (196 pages), but it’s a regular novel that some teens would enjoy if they are advanced readers. It even has a brief mention of sex (that was Robert Heinlein’s definition of his juvenile novels: short adult novels with no sex). In 4th century Britain, 23-year-old Centurion Alexios Flavius Aquila, in disgrace with his superiors, is exiled to take charge of the native Frontier Wolves. He grows into the command, gains the respect of the hardbitten Wolves, and makes friends with Cunorix, son of the local chieftain. It’s really about career: recovering from failure, learning a new job, dealing with the stupidity of management (Praepositus Montanus comes to visit and starts a chain of tragic events)–also touching on friendship, betrayal, and courage. Sutcliffe has a knack of making the past live. Most of her books seem to feature stoic male protagonists and lots of battles; they fit seamlessly into the stiff-uppper-lip school of British boys’ stories that I was weaned on.

Features the new-to-me word “kalegarth,” which isn’t even Googleable–now it is!–or in the OED. Looks like it’s more commonly spelled “calgarth” and means “kailyard”: “a cabbage garden, kitchen-garden, such as is commonly attached to a small cottage.” Here’s the context: “…this country that they knew as a man knows his own kalegarth.”

Paper Moon was one of my very favorite movies as a child, partly because Addie Pray represented something I wanted to be—the opposite of the shy, goody-goody kid I was. (Also it’s a great con-artist movie, a genre I’ve always liked, and Madeline Kahn is hysterically funny in it.) Tatum—what a great name—seemed in that movie, and later even more so in the Bad News Bears preview (never actually saw the movie) and International Velvet, like the ideal combination of tomboy toughness and comfort in her own skin. But man, what a screwed-up life she’s had. This autobiography details a horrible childhood with uncaring, troubled parents, and the subsequent trainwrecks of adolescence and young adulthood. Alas, it’s not particularly compelling, aside from my (not unusual, but somewhat shameful) morbid fascination with the travails of celebrities, nor is it insightful. O’Neal says she’s doing OK now and says she finds solace in her children, but one doesn’t really get a sense of how exactly she rose out of the pit. Good for her, but I’m sort of sorry I took the time to read the book. When will I get over this pull to the junk food of literature, which I gulp quickly but leaves nothing solid behind?

The only reason I checked this book out is that it’s large print but under 1 inch thick. I wanted something to read on the elliptical trainer, whose motion makes normal print impossible to focus on but whose acrylic slot for reading material is designed for thin things (magazines, presumably). I’ve now worked something out that will let me read normal large print books (usually a couple of inches thick), but I did read all 272 pages of this hodgepodge of travel essays. I predict that not too many of our large print patrons at the library will, however, even the ones who check it out. (We did not select it for our collection individually—it came in an assortment of titles we get automatically, and that annoys me because Thorndike is supposed to be choosing stuff that has wide appeal.) It’s not a bad book by any means, just a comically poor fit for an elderly rural American audience. The essays are individually interesting and well-written, but don’t really fit together and assume quite a lot of knowledge that most people don’t have—starting with who Eric Newby is. The sequencing is disorienting, as we jump from place to place and time to time in no particular order–Beijing in 1992, then Swanage in 1927 (I think they’re arranged by date of publication, but there’s no background information given. It would help to know where they first appeared at least). I don’t normally read large print, so I was also disoriented by the lack of white space between different essays—they’re run together to save paper, with little titles that look more like section headings than even like chapters. But there are good evocations of sights, sounds, and tastes of exotic places, and humorous descriptions (“… boys were playing basketball, so tall some of them that in their white gear they looked as if they had been extruded from a giant toothpaste tube”). He refers twice to “muffin-colored” houses—a silly image if you think of American muffins, but presumably he means English ones!

The first MP book is wonderful, with surreal vignettes like Mrs. Corry snapping off her fingers for the twins to suck on (they are barley-sugar sticks) and the zoo after hours where the animals walk around looking at the humans in cages (feeding time is particularly popular, with bottles for the babies, steak and porter for red-faced British gentlemen like Admiral Boom). The sequels basically repeat the formula of the first. This last entry in the series works better because it’s one long story instead of a compilation. It’s Midsummer’s Eve and all the Poppins universe characters show up in the park. The focus is mainly on the poor beleaguered Park Keeper, who as usual clings obsessively to his litany of rules (no walking on the grass, no picking the flowers) until he recognizes the mysterious visitors (this time Orion, Castor, and Pollux). Then he loses control and picks all the herbs in the herb garden in their honor. Mary Poppins is still scarily unpredictable—she’s no Julie Andrews in the books, in fact her relationship to the Banks children is a startling portrait of classic “elephant in the living room” dysfunctional communication in which they can’t say anything about the magical stuff they observe without her denying it and mocking them, yet there’s always an unspoken understanding at the end in which they know that she knows that they know. Yet the ending this time is more convincingly reassuring. Michael has asked Mary where she’ll be when she leaves them again:

Instead, she gave them her haughty glance.

“I know where you two will be in a minute. And that’s into bed, spit spot!”

They laughed. The old phrase made them feel warm and secure. And even if there was no answer, there had been a reply. Earth and sky, like neighbors chatting over a fence, had exchanged the one same word. Nothing was far. All was near. And bed, they now realized, was exactly where they wanted to be, the safest place in the world.

…Wherever she was, she would not be lost. That was answer enough.

• Doctor Dolittle’s Garden – Hugh Lofting, 1927
• Mary Poppins – P. L Travers, 1934
• Mary Poppins Opens the Door – P. L Travers, 1943
• State of Fear – Michael Crichton, 2004
• So You Wanna Be a Rock & Roll Star: How I Machine-Gunned a Roomful of Record Executives and Other True Tales From a Drummer’s Life – Jacob Slichter, 2004
• A Certain Chemistry – Mil Millington, 2003
• The Five People You Meet in Heaven – Mitch Albom, 2003
• Zee – Elizabeth Enright, 1965
• The Family Under the Bridge – Natalie Savage Carlson, 1958

I’m glad I never took the “experiment” out of the title of this blog, because it’s now January 16, 2005 (I’m going to backdate this) and I’m giving up the illusion that I’m going to “catch up.” (Good decision, hard to make). At least I have a list of all the books I read but didn’t write up, and here it is:

• French Spirits: A House, a Village, and a Love Affair in Burgundy – Jeffrey Greene, 2002
• Understanding the Borderline Mother: Helping her Children Transcend the Intense, Unpredictable, and Volatile Relationship – Christine Ann Lawson, 2000.
• Sense and Sensiblity – Jane Austen, 1811
• Pride and Predjudice – Jane Austen, 1813
• Mansfield Park – Jane Austen, 1814
• Northanger Abbey – Jane Austen, 1818
• Emma – Jane Austen, 1815
• Persuasion – Jane Austen, 1818
• Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte, 1847
• The Alphabet of Modern Annoyances – Neil Steinberg, 1996
• Don’t Give Up the Ship: Finding My Father While Lost at Sea – Neil Steinberg, 2002
• Up On Cloud Nine – Anne Fine, 2002
• The Sense and Sensibility Screenplay & Diaries: Bringing Jane Austen’s Novel to Film – Emma Thompson, 1995
• The Other Wind – Ursula K. LeGuin, 2001
• Victorian Doll Stories – Brenda, Mrs. Gatty, and Frances Hodgson Burnett, 1969 (1879, 1862, 1907)
• The Lost Prince – Frances Hodgson Burnett, 1915
• Requiem for Twelve Cows George Rehm, 1962
• The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett, 1911
• A Little Princess – Frances Hodgson Burnett, 1905
• Little Lord Fauntleroy – Frances Hodgson Burnett, 1886
• The Non-Runner’s Marathon Trainer – David A. Whitsett, Forrest A. Dolgener, Tanjala Mabon Kole, 1998
• T. Tembarom – Frances Hodgson Burnett, 1914
• September – Rosamunde Pilcher, 1990
• The Fan – Bob Randall, 1977
• Island of the Blue Dolphins – Scott O’Dell, 1960
• The Girl Who Heard Dragons – Anne McCaffrey, 1994
• The Telling – Ursula K. LeGuin, 2000
• The Dawn of a To-Morrow – Frances Hodgson Burnett, 1906
• A Fair Barbarian – Frances Hodgson Burnett, 1880
• Pretty Polly Pemberton – Frances Hodgson Burnett, 1877
• Louisiana – Frances Hodgson Burnett, 1914
• Other Times, Other Worlds – John D. MacDonald, 1978
• The Star Beast – Robert Heinlein, 1954
• Have Space Suit, Will Travel – Robert Heinlein, 1958
• Red Planet – Robert Heinlein, 1949
• Podkayne of Mars – Robert Heinlein, 1963
• Double Star – Robert Heinlein, 1956
• Time for the Stars – Robert Heinlein, 1956
• Between Planets – Robert Heinlein, 1951
• Tunnel in the Sky – Robert Heinlein, 1955
• Starman Jones – Robert Heinlein, 1953
• The Menace From Earth – Robert Heinlein, 1959
• Space Cadet – Robert Heinlein, 1948
• The Empire of Tea: The Remarkable History of the Plant That Took Over the World – Alan McFarlane & Iris McFarlane, 2003
• The Puppet Masters – Robert Heinlein, 1951
• Waldo – Robert Heinlein, 1950
• Magic, Inc. – Robert Heinlein, 1940
• Piano Lessons: Music, Love & True Adventures – Noah Adams, 1996
• The Piano Shop on the Left Bank: Discovering a Forgotten Passion in a Paris Atelier – Thad Carhart, 2000
• Why Courage Matters: The Way to a Braver Life – John McCain with Mark Salter, 2004
• The Last of the Really Great Whangdoodles – Julie Andrews, 1974
• Christmas Ghosts – ed. Seon Manley & Gogo Lewis, 1978
• Tim – Collen McCullough, 1974
• Beezus and Ramona – Beverly Cleary, 1955
• Ramona the Pest – Beverly Cleary, 1968
• Ramona Forever – Beverly Cleary, 1984
• Ramona and Her Father – Beverly Cleary, 1977
• Ramona Quimby, Age 8 – Beverly Cleary, 1981
• Duran Duran – Susan Martin, 1984
• 3 To the Highest Power: Bradbury, Oliver, Sturgeon – ed. William F. Nolan, 1968
• Kiss Kiss – Roald Dahl, 1959
• The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More – Roald Dahl, 1977
• Follow the River: A Novel Based on the Ordeal of Mary Ingles – James Alexander Thom, 1981
• Blown Sideways Through Life – Claudia Shear, 1995
• The Oxford Book of Fantasy Stories – ed. Tom Shippey, 1994
• No Plot? No Problem! A Low-Stress, High-Velocity Guide to Writing a Novel in 30 Days – Chris Baty, 2004
• A Treasury of Modern Fantasy – ed. Terry Carr & Martin Harry Greenberg, 1981
• Seven Footprints to Satan – A. Merritt, 1928
• Vice Versa, or, A Lesson to Fathers – F. Anstey, 1882
• The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle – Hugh Lofting, 1922

I have draft posts on the first two, so I could actually finish those at some point. The re-reads (Burnett, Heinlein, LeGuin, Cleary, Lofting and a few more) I’ll no doubt read again in a few years or a few decades, and I could always write them up them. The library books I could borrow again. The hardest to give up on are the few I’m getting rid of. The perfectionist in me feels like this is an opportunity I’m letting slip away. And it is, but I can’t take advantage of all opportunities. To feel bad as I fall further and further behind would be silly. Books I’ve read six months ago I’d have to re-acquaint myself with anyway. So, yes, I had some thoughts about books on this list that it would have been good to write down, and it’s too bad that they’re lost–but that’s life, which rolls on and doesn’t wait no matter how much I might wish it would. I’m forty now and I’m learning!

So that’s about 144 books I read in 2004. Not that many? Too many? I’m not sure. Probably too many…

It took me a long time to digest this book, which is jam-packed with quoteable insights, new perspectives on familiar ideas, and inspiring thoughts. Reading this collection of essays, which were written as periodic email columns over a span of seven years, felt like trying to eat a rich, dense dessert in one sitting. This is a book that should be savored slowly–by everyone who has any connection to technology. It’s an amazing work.

I can’t think of any book that’s quite like Islands in the Clickstream–it doesn’t fit into any established categories. Syngress Press, the publishers, describe themselves as providing “Career Advancement Through Skill Enhancement,” and say it should be shelved in “Computers/General.” But what this book actually contains is a collection of secular sermons. They fill the niche of an idealized homily–a short talk that reconnects its listeners to a larger context for their daily lives, inspires them to be better people, and makes them think about deeper issues than the everyday grind–but without any religious context, and addressing technology specifically. Thieme says

…these are sermons…in the sense that sermons form and inform a community that chooses to gather to hear them.

It’s not too surprising, then, that Thieme tells us he was an Episcopalian priest for sixteen years.

These essays do have a few flaws I associate with a genre like sermons, ie basically ephemeral and not designed to be read en masse–sometimes there’s a palpable stretch for the inevitable clever final sentence, and we get some repetition of favorite concepts and quotes like “sanity is contextual.” There’s also a hint of bombast, not exactly pretentiousness, but a weakness for over-stated metaphors and over-heated symbolism. Thieme’s got a liberal hand with buzzwords: nexus, fractal, cyborg, panoptic, granular, convergence, paradigm, morphing, etc. I also think he’s barking up the wrong tree in one or two essays where he talks about UFOs and remote sensing, but he’s not credulous by any means.

These are minor quibbles. To give an idea of how much this book impressed me: I typically collect a quote or two from a book I read. A great book will yield four to six. I copied down about FIFTY quotes from Islands in the Clickstream–new ideas, brilliant encapsulations of thoughts that have vaguely crossed my mind, inspirational statements. Here’s just a small sampling:

“The edge is the new center. The center of a web is wherever we are.”

“When things are going well, accountability diminishes. Then when things don’t go well, there’s chaos.” (written in 1997, with a prescient reference to the financial tech bubble)

“‘Out of the box’ thinking is just a name for climbing out of one box into a little bit bigger box.”

“Good tools work regardless of why we say they work. Technical tools and spiritual tools alike.”

“That’s the problem with oracular truth: the opposite is nearly always just as true. Oracular truth is more like a mobius strip than a yes/no binary system.”

If you’re someone who’s been involved with computers long enough that “hacker” doesn’t sound like a dirty word, you’ll feel like Thieme is speaking directly to you. If you ever wonder about the effect of technology on how we think and communicate, you’ll find a lot of food for thought here. If you’re professionally involved with the Internet in any way (as a techie or in business), you ought to read this book. If you’re looking for inspiration to be a better person, without being expected to believe in a personal god, check this out.

I would love to hear Thieme speak. He seems like a truly amazing person. Thieme’s website can be found at www.thiemeworks.com.