Birthday Reflections

I just added about two thousand pages to the great unread collection of books that I hope to eventually get to. This week, I completed another revolution around the sun. In recognition of this, Amy presented me with two books: 1) Christianity, The First Three Thousand Years by Diarmaid MacCulloch and 2) 2666 by Roberto Bolano. I am very excited to receive these books. The Christianity book was favorably reviewed in the NY Times Book Review section. The history of Christianity is essentially the history of western civilization. There are serious gaps in my historical knowledge that I am interested in discovering: what was it like for the early Christians to be persecuted by the Romans? What led to the schism between the eastern and western churches? What specifically happened during the crusades? These issues are relevant today as we see people of faith being persecuted around the world and we see people of faith practicing intolerance and persecution. This book will likely sit on my bedside table and take a while to finish. I have to finish the other book on my bedside first, The Cuba Reader. As for 2666 (see my post from April), I am really looking forward to reading this novel. I will start it immediately after finishing Gilead (and Hyperion and The Lost Symbol).

I have come to the point in my life where I realize that I will not be able to read all the books that I plan to. There is a serious backlog of books I want to read and I keep adding to it. But that's OK. I am simply going to focus on enjoying the books that I do read. It's not like I win a prize at the end. That being said, I want to make every choice count. If I am not enjoying a book, I will drop it and move on.

Dan Brown, (Not So) Guilty Pleasure

About 5 years ago, I started a book club at work with the idea that we would read bestsellers of the potboiler variety. I had been in a book club that read a lot of different things, but most of what we read was literary/artsy/highbrow. I wanted to read books that were similar to the types of books that were popular when I was a kid: Jaws, The Godfather, The Boys from Brazil, Looking for Mr. Goodbar; books that didn't necessarily have anything profound to say, but were riveting pageturners.

The first selection for this office book club was The DaVinci Code by Dan Brown. This was the most popular book on the planet at the time. Everyone had read it or was reading it. Is there anyone who hasn't read it? The story is bereft of any kind of literary ambitions, but boy what a hell of a ride! The story grabs you from the first chapter and doesn't let go. It is a masterful blend of history / religion / suspense / mystery. Yes, it almost reads like a movie, and, incidentally, it was much better than the movie version that later came out.

Alas, the great potboiler experiment did not last. The next office book club selection was The Kite Runner. No one wanted to read John Grisham or Sara Paretsky. We had reentered the world of deep characters and emotional journeys. Oprah would have been proud. However, this didn't stop me from reading Angels and Demons on my own. This book was published before The DaVinci Code and is better. It was even more suspenseful and quicker paced. The movie was mediocre (why are the movie versions of these terrific books so average?) Right now, I am in the early part of The Lost Symbol, the third in Dan Brown's Robert Langdon series. I totally think of Tom Hanks as the protagonist as I turn the pages.

Often, when I reflect on what I like about certain writers or books, I point to the prose style or the development of the characters. Sometimes the stories give me new insights on life. I am often enriched by the great books that I read. However, what I enjoy about these Dan Brown novels is that I am always thoroughly entertained, even if I am not edified. But that is ok. I can always read Umberto Ecco (Dan Brown's literary counterpart) for that.

Every Painting Tells a Story Don't It

...well perhaps every painting does not tell a story, but many do. I recently visited the Art Institute of Chicago. A long time ago I figured out that the best way to experience the "Toot" is to try to see a little bit during each visit. The collections are so expansive and varied that trying to take it all in at once is impossible and leads to burnout. My best experiences at the Toot have been when I have popped in for a couple of hours and have focused on no more that two or three areas. Every time I go, I discover something new or see something again with a fresh perspective.

On my most recent visit I discovered the artist Archibald Motley. He was part of the Harlem Renaissance and was known for his paintings of African American nightlife. In fact, the painting that caught my attention is titled "Nightlife". The museum caption for this painting lauds Motley's use of color and artificial light. The caption compares Motley's use of light in Nightlife to another painting located in the next room, Edward Hopper's iconic "Nighthawks". What drew me into both of these paintings were the scenes themselves. Both of these paintings are inhabited with strong characters and suggested stories. Look at the scene at the bar in Nightlife. There are two women sitting at the bar dressed to kill and having a smoke. One of the women is looking intenesly at a man standing a few feet away, who, in turn, is looking away from the woman and has his arm outstretched towards another woman who is dancing with another man. The woman at the bar is looking at the man with what may be described as exacerbation or intense annoyance. Maybe he is her man who is trying to make time with another woman. Maybe she is obsessed with the man who doesn't even know how she feels. Towards the middle of the painting there is another man sitting alone at a table, smoking and having a drink with his eyes closed. He is surrounded by people dancing and in happy revelry. He looks like the saddest and loneliest person in the word. He may have lost someone close and dear to him through some foolish action of his.

Nighthawks presents 4 people at a diner late at night. A man and a woman sit together; another man sits away from them with his back to the viewer; the diner employee looks like he is preparing something or putting something away. It is unclear if the characters are acquainted with each other, but there is definitely a tension in the scene. The couple may be on the verge of a split or maybe they are just bored with each other. Does the mysterious third diner patron bear them any ill will? Is the employee part of their lives in some way?

Unlike reading a text narrative, these type of paintings allow the viewer to construct his own story within the context of the scene presented by the artist.

Magazines and Wilson

Amy and I receive a slew of magazines. Some are weekly, biweekly, monthly and quarterly. This is in addition to a daily newspaper. Aside from contributing to global deforestation (I still like the physical copy versus the on-line versions), the magazines present a lot of text for me to read in addition to the books that I read. I enjoy reading magazines (mostly of the non-fiction variety) in a different way that I enjoy reading books. Magazines, with their glossy photos and snappy text layouts, are often inviting to read, but do not compel me to keep around for any long period of time. In fact, my rule of thumb is that I only keep a particular magazine around until the next issue arrives. I them pass it along to a friend or recycle. If I didn't get around to reading the magazine, too bad. I get rid of it and move on to the next issue. This helps me manage the pile-up of unread material. There are enough books that I want to get to before I turn to dust. The last thing I need is having to make time to read the Time Magazine cover story about Afghanistan from March that I never got to. If I really want to read it, I have a whole week to find the time.

A friend of mine takes a different approach. She keeps the zines around so that she has more choices when she has the time to read. I guess I am hard-wired differently. I can be a lazy reader. If I did not impose the deadlines on myself, the zines would pile up. What my friend views as having more choices by keeping old zines around, I would view with a creeping anxiety as the piles of unread material gets larger.

On a different note, I just read Daniel Clowes latest graphic novel, Wilson. My friend Jimmy loaned it to me. This is the first book that Clowes has written which did not originally appear in one of his comic books. In other words, the material was first published graphic book format. Clowes is at the top of his game. He has really matured from his early punkier days. Wilson is a middle aged man living in Oakland who has no real connections with other human beings. He tries very hard to force square pegs into round holes and the results are hilarious and depressing. Kudos to Clowes for hitting one out of the ballpark. My only regret is that I read the whole thing in about an hour. Thanks Jimmy!

War Without End

Sorry for the hiatus. I just finished a book entitled The Body and The Blood. It is a great book with a terrible title. It is a non-fiction book written by Charles Sennott, a Boston Globe reporter who lived in Jesusalem for 4 years during the late 1990s/early 2000s. In his book, he documents the fragile state of the Arab Christian communities in Israel, Palestine, Lebanon and Egypt at the turn of the third millennium. He uses the conceit of travelling to the places where Jesus was said to have lived or visited during his life (and resurrection). This book was given to me by a friend at my church and I highly recommend it to anyone that would like to get a sense of how the three Abrahamic religions coexist in this fractious region. I was totally riveted reading the stories of Palestinian life under occupation and the tensions between the Arabs of Christian and Islamic faiths.

The Arab/Israel conflict is not what I would call light reading. There is probably a library full of books on the history and politics of the region. Much of it is written from the Israeli perspective. Even the works that are sympathetic to the Palestinian cause are often written by Israelis or by Americans. Very few mainstream books available in the west are written by Arabs, but there are some. In order to get a deep and nuanced understanding of the conflict one must read multiple books with different perspectives. Here are some of the better books that I have read:

Out of Place by Edward Said - This is a memoir of growing up in the Middle East by the now deceased Columbia University professor. Said is the most eloquent of Arab writers.

From Beirut to Jerusalem by Thomas Friedman - This is probably the best overall book I have read regarding the region. Friedman was the New York Times correspondent in Lebanon in the early 1980s during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. He then became the Jerusalem correspondent just in time for the Intafada in the late 1980s.

Jerusalem in the 20th Century by Martin Gilbert - This is a decidedly pro-Israel book. Gilbert's account of the civil strife in Jerusalem leading up to the 1948 is gripping.

Six Days of War by Michael Oren - This book provides great detail regarding the 1967 war where Israel routed three large Arab armies. Israeli and Western writers have never been able to access the Egyptian, Syrian and Jordanian archives to present their side of the political and military story in any real depth. Until then, we can only wonder.

Peace Not Apartheid by Jimmy Carter - President Carter was unfairly labeled an anti-Semite for writing this book. He is extremely critical of Israel's policies towards the Palestinians. This book also contains his recollections of the Camp David meetings when he helped negotiate the peace between Egypt and Israel.

What Went Wrong by Bernard Lewis - This short book discusses why the Islamic world, once a beacon of progress, was eclipsed by the West in the last three centuries.

There are so many more books. I hope you all read one of these selections. We can then meet at a local hookah bar and discuss.

Peanuts

When I wrote about graphic novels earlier this month, I should have also mentioned comic strips. Although strips initially appear in newspapers, they are often compiled and released in book form. In my late teens and early 20s, I remember The Far Side and Bloom County being popular. I have to admit that I don't pay much attention to contemporary comic strips, and neither do my children. This is too bad as I imagine there must be some well drawn and imaginative strips being produced these days.

The other day I read that licensing rights for the Peanuts gang was sold to a company that manufactures Joe Boxers (among other things) for $175 million. This reminded me how much I used to love Charlie Brown, Lucy, Linus, Sally, Shroeder, Pig Pen and Snoopy. When I was in early elementary school, my mother bought me a number of Peanuts-related books. I still own them. I pulled then off the shelf and read through some of them for the first time in decades. They still make me chuckle. The strips aren't as lacerating as Doonsbury or as clever as The Far Side, but Charles Shultz perfectly captured the innocense of childhood. These characters relate to each other without any of the worries of the adult world. In fact, there are no adults featured at all. Yet, their observations display a wisdom that is both believable and unexpected.

A friend of mine recently told me that the early Peanuts strips were drawn differently that the later ones. He mentioned that Linus was drawn as a toddler. I went to my bookshelf and found that the earliest of my books, The Wonderful World of Peanuts, was published in 1952. Sure enough, the characters look younger and, yes, Linus is a toddler. One of the central characters is those days was Shermy. Does anyone remember Shermy? I do because I played him in 4th grade in a school play. These strips are a joy to read and they totally hold up.

Roberto Bolano - Chilean Fiction Writer

I first heard about Roberto Bolano a year or two ago when his novel 2666 was first published in English. The book received tremendous critical acclaim. However, any thoughts I had of reading this novel were scuttled when I realized that the book is about 1,000 pages in length. I don't mind long stories, but 1,000 pages!!! Bolano, who died at the age of 50 in 2003, was a poet, who turned to writing fiction in his 40s. 2666, which was originally published in Spanish in 2004, was heralded by some as the first great novel of the 21st century. I figured this was one of those novels that people were buying as a result of the buzz, but not actually reading.

Recently, a couple of Bolano's short stories appeared in The New Yorker. (I keep mentioning this magazine, but it is a great source of short fiction). I don't remember the name of the first story I read, but it was a taut crime/mystery story. The more recent story is called the Prefiguration of Lalo Cura. It is about a man who grew up with his mother and aunt while these ladies were involved in the Columbian porn industry. They worked exclusively with this German director who strove to make "art porn". The story was strange, but I can't get it out of my head (and not because of the subject matter). There is something hypnotic in his writing that I can't quite put my finger on. Below is the link to the story. I hope you check it out. I may have to bite the bullet and commit to his 1,000 page magnum opus after all.

http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/features/2010/04/19/100419fi_fiction_bolano