Book Review: Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov

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I’ve (finally!) posted my review of Nabokov’s Lolita, over at The Book Book.

It certainly made for a discomfiting read, on some levels. Anyone with a niece or daughter, as young as the title character or simply once that young — and, I’d bet, any one who herself was once that young — will find in its pages plenty to squirm over.

And yet, there are all those other levels: the annoyingly hard-to-resist charms of the voice of the narrator, the protagonist, Lolita’s stepfather (and abuser) Humbert; the lavish stylistic flourishes; the mounting tensions — leading first to the central “Will he or won’t he?” answer and, later, finally “…will he really kill? kill whom?”

Of course I’m writing here as a guy — a middle-aged guy, at that — and maybe this alone invalidates all my disclaimers to the contrary. But I have to admit that even while being most horrified, I could also feel a little frisson of titillation from time to time. This was especially true early in the book, before the “Will he or won’t be?” question got its (maybe inevitable) answer. It was like inspecting close-up the carapace of what looks from a distance like a beautiful beetle: the ugly hairs and horrible eyes jump out at you, and you almost can’t wait to back off again. It’s a grotesque parody, in a way — a Bruegel‘s-eye-view of infatuation.

(Of course the publisher knows and is quite willing to trade on, to toy with this. Just look at that cover from the book’s 50th-anniversary edition. Do you see the horrors of pedophilia there? I don’t, either.)

Anyway, obviously there’s a lot to feel ambivalent about. If you don’t mind ambivalence and messy morality, love language, and of course haven’t read Lolita, you might want to give it a try. Just don’t be surprised if, like me, you can’t imagine yourself ever reading the book again — and being grateful to have read it once.

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Book Review: Who Hates Whom, by Bob Harris

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My latest review is up at The Book Book. This time around, it’s a non-fiction title, Who Hates Whom. (Subtitle: Well-Armed Fanatics, Intractable Conflicts, and Various Things Blowing Up: A Woefully Incomplete Guide.)

In brief, it’s a good overview of world “trouble spots” — where they are, how they became troublesome in the first place, who the major players are — as of the time the book came out, in 2007. One man’s “good,” though, is another man’s “Huh?” So let me rattle off what I liked about Who Hates Whom:

  • It’s brief — 218 pages.
  • It’s not tedious. Harris’s past includes a stint as a stand-up comic; his previous book was a memoir of his time as a (successful) game-show contestant. He’s smart enough, in this case, to know that the reader will need relief from time to time, from the page after page of more or less exclusively bad news: he includes jokes, many of them at his own expense.
  • It’s informative. I left the book with a much better understanding of why Country X and Country Y have been at loggerheads for centuries — including the story, often, of what Country Z keeps doing to stir things up just as X and Y seem about to kiss and make up.
  • It’s fair. Harris is not out to grind any axes; as he points out, you can’t honestly consider all these situations in hopes of identifying the “good guys.” (Who the good guys are changes from one day to the next: yesterday’s officially designated terrorist is today’s freedom fighter.)
  • And ultimately — perhaps surprisingly — it’s hopeful. Harris points out, truthfully, that this is not the most dangerous time to be alive on Earth… not even close. Things keep getting better, on average. I like that.

Note for e-book readers: Who Hates Whom includes dozens of maps and photographs. You might want to consider that fact when deciding to go the e- vs. traditional book route. I read it on a Kindle, and didn’t mind it — but I know such things drive some people crazy!

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Book Review: Tender Morsels, by Margo Lanagan

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Here’s how I imagine it must have gone:

The woman went about her work calmly but with determination. Cupped in her hands before her, on the table, was a mysterious jewel; depending on the light in which and the angle from which viewed, sometimes the jewel glittered with color and sometimes seemed black enough to suck the air as well as the light from the room. The woman bent, and put her face over the jewel, and she breathed on it. As we watched, the jewel changed form, became a living, a visibly breathing creature.

It both made us clap, and scared the hell out of us…

The woman was Margo Lanagan; the jewel, the fairy tale of “Snow-White and Rose-Red.” And the creature? Oh my, the creature: Lanagan’s 2008 young-adult novel, Tender Morsels.

My review of this book is now online at The Book Book blog.

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Unbanning Books Month

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Miriam Forster, of the charmingly monikered Dancing with Dragons is Hard on Your Shoes blog, has issued a challenge to writers (and readers!). It springs from an annual event sponsored by the American Library Association, called Banned Books Week. From the ALA site:

Held during the last week of September, Banned Books Week highlights the benefits of free and open access to information while drawing attention to the harms of censorship by spotlighting actual or attempted bannings of books across the United States.

Intellectual freedom — the freedom to access information and express ideas, even if the information and ideas might be considered unorthodox or unpopular — provides the foundation for Banned Books Week.  BBW stresses the importance of ensuring the availability of unorthodox or unpopular viewpoints for all who wish to read and access them.

Here’s Miriam’s call to action for the month of September:

Since 1990, according to the ALA Challenge Database, over ten thousand books have been challenged in our country. These include The Diary of Anne Frank, The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien,1984 by George Orwell, the Bible, and the dictionary. [JES: ?!?]

The last week in September is Banned Book Week, a way to celebrate and highlight these and other censored books. In honor of Banned Book Week, a community of writers and readers have decided to be part of the Banned Book Challenge.

The Challenge is simple: Read one or more banned or challenged books during the month of September, and post reviews  of them. The reviews will be collected and posted to a central site so that people can find out more about these books.

The above comes from the official invitation at the new Banned Book Challenge site which Miriam has set up.

So how do you participate?

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Book Review: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, by Stieg Larsson

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My review of this book is now up over at The Book Book.

So is another reviewer’s, as of yesterday — and we’re just following on the heels of the first, from a year ago. Clearly a book that draws reviewers like flies!

I liked the book very much although (as you can see from the review) just why sort of escapes me. You’ve got to get out of the gate fast with a grabber of an opening, we’re told, or no one will buy your crime story/mystery/thriller (and probably your collection of baby names). This one doesn’t start that way; nor, throughout, does it share the sort of propulsive arc which the vast majority of such stories have.

In a way, it’s something like being at the ocean shore, watching the waves. Those six were sort of interesting, weren’t they? And then, oh boy, here comes the seventh!…

…and then suddenly you notice the water is being drawn away from you, towards the horizon, and waaaay out there is a narrow line growing gradually thicker, and then you remember what all these symptoms mean and you think:

Holy crap, a tsunami!

At which point you start looking around frantically for an exit which, alas, does not exist.

If you think you can get used to this rhythm, absolutely give Dragon Tattoo a try. Even if you think you can’t, well, if you’re comfortable with crime stories/thrillers/mysteries/baby-name books in general, it still might be worth a look. It might catch you by surprise, as it did me.

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Book Review: War, by Sebastian Junger

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Habitués of Running After My Hat know, I think, that I resist the intrusion of politics into my posts here. And although I’ve never been tested on this, I’m pretty sure that’s one area in which I would likely resort to editing (or outright banning) comments of certain kinds. If you’re after debate, even of the reasoned sort, there are plenty of other sites around the Internet whose proprietors are more than happy (and better equipped than I) to offer it.

As my newest review at The Book Book begins:

Like (probably) most Americans, I have never fought in a war, and am unlikely ever to do so. Like (probably) most Americans, I nonetheless hold plenty of opinions about war in general as well as about specific conflicts. Those opinions are important to us, and we regard holding onto them in the face of opposing views as a matter of psychological — almost theological — life and death.

But civilian opinions one way or the other about war, any war, shred like tissue paper when you try to wrap them around the hard, spiky reality of soldiers’ experiences. It simply doesn’t matter what John Q. Public (let alone his favorite talk-show host) thinks.

War, by Sebastian Junger, is all about the daily lives of soldiers on the front line in the war in Afghanistan. (He spent a year embedded with a company there, in 2007-2008.) I won’t kid you: although it is a quick read, it’s not easy reading. What these young men have to deal with, and how they deal with it, is so far from the experience of civilian life that wanting it not to exist, or pretending it doesn’t, is completely understandable. Even if you’re open to knowing about it, I likewise understand the difference between that agreeability and a willingness to spend a few days reading about it.

But I think one thing Junger says, almost in passing, strikes me as one of the main reasons to read the book:

Perfectly sane, good men have been drawn back to combat over and over again, and anyone interested in the idea of world peace would do well to know what they’re looking for. Not killing, necessarily — that couldn’t have been clearer in my mind — but the other side of the equation: protecting. The defense of the tribe is an insanely compelling idea, and once you’ve been exposed to it, there’s almost nothing you’d rather do.

What soldiers are looking for: If you think it’s a desire to win their particular war, or to “get” the “enemy,” or, simply, a desire to get home ASAP (where the “S” represents Safely as well as Soon), you might want to at least sample some of Junger’s book.

Again, though, despite the title and the above quoted passage: this isn’t a book about war, but about battle — combat — and how men adapt to it. If you undertake reading War, prepare yourself for some moments of high intensity (also some low comedy, and emotionally moving passages).

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Book Review: Spook, by Mary Roach

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I’ve just posted my latest review for The Book Book; it covers non-fiction author Mary Roach’s Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife.

This was Roach’s second book. The first, Stiff, was about what happens to the human body after death. You can see that she’s attracted to odd, even icky topics; and you may guess from the title, too, that she uses humor to distance the reader from the ick. She’s one of my favorite non-fiction writers, certainly among the most enjoyable.

As I say in the review, my only real reservation about her work has to do with that sense of humor. Sometimes she drops a punchline into the text just a little too insistently, and it falls flat.

Compare this approach to, say, Bill Bryson’s. He too loves to make people laugh, and he too never shies away from the humor in a situation. But the jokes are good ones, not limp asides inserted for the sake of comic timing.

But I don’t want to hammer at that point too hard; I don’t want you to think I don’t enjoy Roach’s writing. Whatever she comes up with, I expect to be among those happily reading it.

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Review: Shades of Grey, by Jasper Fforde

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My review of Jasper Fforde’s newest novel, Shades of Grey, is online over at The Book Book blog.

Maybe I’m just lucky to have read and savored everything else which Fforde has written. His work is without peer, I think — not necessarily in the sense of “none better,” more in the vein of “nothing else like it.” He’s endlessly inventive, does not take himself too seriously, always takes the story seriously, and somehow — despite his literally fantastic plots and alternate-universe settings and characters — escapes categorization as a writer of fantasy and/or science fiction. He probably belongs the “Pantheon” list in the right sidebar here. I desperately want his job.

In any event: Shades of Grey is highly recommended for readers who don’t mind being challenged by strange, even slightly loopy ideas, and who can recognize tongue-in-cheekery when they see it.

For more on the plot and so on, check the Book Book review. And of course, feel free to ask questions here (or over there) if you’d like.

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On another note…

You may notice signs of some construction here for a little while. From time to time I think about messing with the overall “look” of the blog, but that’s not likely to happen; I’ve invested too much time in customizing what I’ve already got.

So far, two changes:

  • I replaced the ever-expanding list of month-by-month archives, in the left sidebar, with a little calendar doo-dad which lets you move around among the stacks here. Once you’ve got a particular month displayed, you can see the titles of posts from that month by clicking on the little «-» link below the calendar proper.
  • At the bottom of the left sidebar, there’s now a list of my five most recent Google Buzz entries. I keep finding these little Webly tidbits which are hard for me to justify turning over to a whole blog post, but which I think might be interesting to what passes as my “readership” at Running After My Hat. At the same time, this obviates the need for you to “follow my Buzz!” or whatever the hell cheerful thing Google is calling it in Gmail.

Not sure what else I might fool with. The list of categories bugs me a little, but I haven’t really given much thought what (if anything) to do with it. In the meantime, as someone or other has been saying around the Web since the early 1990s, I’ll try to keep the sawdust to a minimum.

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Sorting Through an Old Hive

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As some of you on Blogger-based weblogs may know, a fraction of those sites recently had to convert from a particular old technology to a newer one. The owners of affected blogs received a series of email notifications from Blogger tech support, and by now any such sites have been converted over to The New Way… or can no longer be updated.

Running After My Hat is my first non-Blogger blog. But over the years — for myself and for others, some paying and some not — I have built and otherwise had a hand in contributing to a total of twelve Blogger sites. I got notifications that four of them had to be converted to Blogger’s current service level, and somehow managed to get them all switched over about a week before the May 1 deadline.

One of the four was a real relic — one I’d almost forgotten about.

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Review: Enlightenment, by Maureen Freely

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My review of this novel is now online, over at The Book Book blog.

I don’t normally write reviews of books which I don’t recommend. I don’t even like to. It’s possible to have fun with a writing a bad review, yes, a sort of malicious glee. But the fun is diminished — especially in reviewing a debut novel, like Enlightenment — by knowing what the author often had to go through for his or her book to see the light of day. So many good books await our attention, after all: why beat up on one that didn’t succeed for me?

Enlightenment was a special case. I began it with — and was for a while sustained by — high hopes. The exotic, almost completely unfamiliar setting (contemporary Turkey); the tangled web of international relationships both during the Cold War and post-9/11; the jacket copy description; even the cover — it all said that the book would appeal to me, a thought-provoking relief from my usual fare.

But wow, I didn’t like Enlightenment much at all.

And I was disturbed that I didn’t like it. When I finished it I checked up on the bona fides of the jacket blurbs — maybe they’d just been highly selective, y’know? Not only did it receive high critical praise, but reviewers often praised it for elements which I thought to be missing, or at best unconvincing.

So I don’t know. Maybe I was just in a weird psychological place for the first quarter of the year. Whatever the reason, frankly, I’m not even convinced by my own review — so do read it skeptically.

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