Mother Night

"This book is rededicated to Howard W. Campbell, Jr., a man who served evil to openly and good to secretly, the crime of his times."

Kurt Vonnegut

Mother Night

Its turning out to be a summer of Vonnegut. And what a summer it has been. With church shootings, attacks on beach goers, and the beginnings of the the presidential campaigns I find that with every book of his I read, that he is still relevant.  The satirical ways he deals with race, politics, war, the lies we tell ourselves to make it all seem O.K. have become lessons that need to be re-examined and re-evaluated. After all "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be."

Mother Night follows the story of Howard W. Campbell, a man who was a radio announcer in Nazi Germany. He was also an American agent, though he himself barely knew it. Years after the war, while living in New York, he is confronted with the things he said while pretending to be a Nazi, and the hate that was spread on both sides.

I love this book. It was dark and touching. I liked it more than Breakfast of Champions, and more than God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater(which rocked my socks off). The way he addressed this fury, this righteousness that people found in themselves when they allowed themselves to hate like they did, like we do even today, was striking....and terrifying. He explained it in such a clear way:

'"Where's evil? It's that large part of every man that wants to hate without limit, that wants to hate with God on it's side. It's that part of every man that finds all kinds of ugliness so attractive.

"It's that part of an imbecile," I said, "that punishes and vilifies and makes war gladly."'

I think this is a very important idea for us to examine. This whole idea of hating without reservation, whatever the reason (race, gender, sexual orientation, ect...) is terrifying, but I feel that it is something that I see often, which is even more horrific. And I find that it can only lead to more horrific acts. I'm not saying that we should forgive people for the atrocious actions they may commit, but that we should not let ourselves fall into that kind of a hate as an alternative.

I loved this book, I really do think that everyone should read it. Its a wonderful story of a man who is trying to live with what he has done, and the hate that has encompassed the world. It's one that I can't wait to read again.

The Little Prince

"And no grown-up will ever understand how such a thing could be so important"

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

The Little Prince

This was one of those books that cause people shock when they found out I hadn't read it. Now that I've read it, I really can believe that I didn't read it before. It's beautiful. Truly beautiful. And heartbreaking and touching and important. The way it handles the joy in the little things, and how those little things that bring us joy are different for everyone because we experience them differently, and how we should try not to loose the wonder of the universe as we get older were amazing. It reminded me that we can't set the scope too narrow, so that we loose context like the business man, and that we cannot ask of people things that they cannot do, from the just king. We cannot become overburdened by guilt like the drunkard, and that to be tamed risks tears.

I loved this story. The drawings were beautiful, the language was phenomenal. I feel like this is one of the books that I will have to read once a year to remind myself not to grow up, and to look at the stars and hear the twinkling of all the little bells, to see roses blooming in all the stars. I will have to remember to not give in to despair. It was beautiful.

Knockemstiff

"A lot of people get the wrong impression, think there's something romantic or tragic about hitting bottom."

Donald Ray Pollock

Knockemstiff

I started this collection of short stories by Donald Ray Pollock because I loved his book Devil All the Time. And they didn't disappoint. Set in the small town of Knockemstiff, Ohio, they were a wonderfully gritty set of stories. And when I say dark and gritty, I mean dark and gritty. The stories are violent, and they take a look at subjects like domestic violence, drug addiction, discrimination, crime. It was a very frank assessment at what rock bottom really can be and how, even when you pull yourself up, it can be scarring. 

I really liked this book, but I felt guilty for liking it because the subject matter was so gritty and violent. It's kind of like the guilty feeling that comes from ruins porn, or bad reality shows. It looked at what it's like to try to make ends meet, to exist, when there is no one in your corner, and no where you can turn to. Wonderful american noir.  

25%

Well folks, its been two and a half months and I have read 25 books. I'm ahead of schedule, which is a relief, but I still have a long way to go.

I started this project for a couple different reasons. The first was to see if I could read a hundred books this year. Considering that 33% of high school graduates never read another book and the average American reads an average of nine books a year, I think this would be quite an accomplishment.

I've also found myself missing the academic mindset that I had in college. I've been graduated for two years, and I love raft guiding and working in ski rentals and selling books, but I miss the pointed search for knowledge, the project. I've missed writing (I loved writing essays). This project has forced me to write again, and, while it isn't up to the standards of academia, it gets the creative juices flowing.

During the past two and a half months I've made in through twenty five books, fifteen of which were fiction. Nine of the authors were women, which seems to lean a bit. In the next two and a half months, I would like to try to read more broadly, more female authors, more subjects I know less about.

If you would like to see something in my writing that I am not including, or have any book recommendations, please let me know in the comments. This is my first project like this, and I would love the constructive criticism, and I would love to see what everyone else is reading and has loved.

War of the Encyclopaedists

"She wept into her pillow as the crushing futility of a generation descended on her"

Christopher Robinson

Gavin Kovite

War of the Encyclopaedists

This is the best book I've read yet. I don't mean to gush, but, honestly, this book was amazing. And everyone should read it. It is the first novel I've read that focuses on millennials as a generation, and looks into the issues that their (read: my) generation faces. It's extremely well written, eloquent in a dark, humorous, and uplifting way. The characters are real and complex, and their relationships complicated. It looks at the tribulations behind growing up in this day and age, grad school, student loans, deployment, and it deals with them in a wonderfully compassionate way. Christopher Robinson and Gavin Kovite, I applaud you.

The story follows two friends who are preparing to go to Boston for grad school. As the date approaches one gets deployed to Baghdad, while the other has to wade through a new relationship, and whether or not its too early for his girlfriend to move in with him. Through the next turbulent year, they deal with the outcomes of those decisions. Months later, they find themselves having to deal with their new identities, one trying to make it at grad school, and the other trying to lead is platoon in  the war, which becomes more violent and absurd every day. They keep in touch through a Wikipedia article that they edit (there are screen shots of it in the book), and and they change the document and how they write to each other changes as well.

This book was incredible. From its descriptions of Baghdad during the war to the deconstruction of the Star Wars movies in a grad school class (they're Rebel propaganda, which is why well trained troops never seem to hit a target), the language used is poetic, and right on target. I am so impressed with how it dealt with the feelings of helplessness and ineptitude that the characters faced, and the way it portrayed historical events. The way it described Kerry's defeat in the 2004 election, and how people felt about it was phenomenal. 

This book hit me on such a personal level. I lived through these events. America has been at war for most of my life, and I have dealt the the uncertainty of the future when you owe your soul to the Bank in student loans. I highly recommend this book. I think that everyone should read it.

"We will give up our flesh but not our souls"

Breakfast of Champions

"We Americans require symbols which are richly colored and three-dimensional and juicy.Most of all, we hunger for symbols which have not been poisoned by great sins our nation has committed, such as slavery and genocide and criminal neglect, or by tinhorn commercial greed and cunning."

Kurt Vonnegut

Breakfast of Champions

I am constantly amazed how relevant all of Vonneguts books are, even years after they were written. God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater took a scathing look the distribution of wealth, Cat's Cradle at what makes creations destructive and the role science and technology plays, and Breakfast of Champions was no exception. Following the lives of Kilgore Trout, a science fiction writer who's works are only published in porn magazines and who assisted Mr. Rosewater in his recovery, and Dwayne Hoover, a used car salesman who starts mistaking Trouts fiction for reality, Breakfast of Champions takes a good look at sex, politics, pollution and racism in America. 

This book was wonderful. Filled to the brim with Vonnegut's witty one-liners and satiric passages. I loved this book. It had

this wonderful, absurd aspect of the writer interacting with the characters he has created and had the added layer of drawings throughout the book, both of which added an additional dimension to the book. The characters were all fairly complex, and I loved how Vonnegut awarded quite a bit of page time and backstory to his minor characters, as if he's implying that even though there time is brief in the story, they still have their own separate story that matters just as much.

I really loved how the book showed how absurd it is to treat people as objects and machines, and how the lack of this humanity affects people in an extremely negative way. This idea was extremely poignant, especially with the tragedy that has happened in South Carolina this week, and the speculation surrounding those murders, especially with regards to race. There is a huge racial wound in the country that we cannot seem to heal, and I think a large part of why is because of the denial that it exists. We cannot seem to grasp that people are not stand ins, they aren't machines and they aren't less than anyone else.

This book was wonderful and I highly recommend it.  Vonnegut doesn't disappoint.

"We are healthy only to the extent that our ideas are humane"

Kurt Vonnegut

Breakfast of Champions

Kushiel's Dart

"Questions are dangerous, for they have answers."

Jacqueline Carey

Kushiel's Dart

Think Game of Thrones, only so much better! I was really impressed with this book. Recommended to me by Rose, it follows the story of a girl named Phedre: orphan, spy, professional seductress, and her incredible story of court intrigue, conspiracy, and war. This book was incredibly entertaining.

It is set in a world that is like our's, but slightly off, as if something in the past had been different. A wonderful bout of high fantasy, it is just familiar enough to generate a really cool, old feel in the setting. The world building in this book was incredible, from the landscape to the religions in different areas of the map, it was really well thought out, and the descriptions of things were wonderful.

The characters were amazing. Phedre is an interesting character. She is extremely feminine and sexual, and is still kicks so much ass. It's kinda rare to find a girl in fantasy, that is a strong female lead, that still retains her girl-like traits. It was refreshing. The way that no one disrespected her for her sexuality was wonderful as well. She was, in fact, respected for her job, and it was really refreshing to see all of the other characters consistently treating her as a human being throughout the book.

This was a wonderful epic, perfect for those who loved the Lioness Quartet as kids or The Kingkiller Chronicles as adults. I highly recommend this book. It had me hooked for all 654 pages, and I was always waiting for what would happen next.

The Woman Who Would Be King

The number of women who ruled, and ruled successfully, in the ancient world can be counted on one hand, and it can be argued that the Egyptian king Hatshepsut was the most successful of them all. In the book The Woman Who Would Be King Kara Cooney explores what we know about Hatshepsut, who ruled Egypt from 1472-1458 BCE, and examines the possible narratives that follow this woman who we know very little about. She rose to rule in a society that didn't have a feminine version of the word king when she was twenty, increased the wealth of Egypt, commissioned an impressive number of monuments that were colossal in scope (the pic at the bottom is her temple of Djeser Djeseru, which was only one of her building projects. She also commissioned the rebuilding and construction of many new temples in stone and erected the two tallest obelisks that had been built at that time), and, yet, twenty years after she died her depictions on walls and monuments were systematically destroyed.

This book was amazing on so many different levels. The author analyzes what we know about Hatshepsut and then examines all the different possible reasons that events would have occurred the way that they did. Her knowledge of ancient Egypt is extraordinary, and she explains the lives of the people who lived in that time in a very accessible way.

It was so different from how things are here and now. The religion played a much larger part and the gods were thought to play a very personal part in every one's daily lives, and people could influence the cosmos through their interactions with them. For example, the book opens with the morning rituals that Hatshepsut would have performed when she was acting as the God's Wife of Amen. She would go to the temple and wake the god, Amen, who was embodied in a living statue. She would 'wake' him gently with chanting, bathe the statue, feed him by presenting food, and then she would complete his morning renewal. Its hard to describe this without sounding lewd, but for this last part she would bring him to climax using her hand (the statue featured an erect penis). And this wasn't considered weird. It was extremely necessary, so they believed, because Amen was reborn from his own seed every day and if he didn't orgasm he wouldn't be born the next day and the world would end.

This book was fascinating. The fact that we really can infer this much about someone who lived three thousand years ago just astounds me. I think it is very important as well, that we look back at the civilizations that came before and examine what led them to greatness, and what led to their downfalls. Ancient Egypt is one of the longest running civilizations that we have seen and, because of their extensive monument building and dry climate, we have an amazingly good history of them and the time periods they embodied. It is also interesting to examine their gender norms, especially as we rewrite our own. They didn't have the word queen, or even a feminine version of the word king, and yet there is very little evidence that they didn't embrace Hatshepsut as king, and she led one of the most gainful reigns in Egypt up to that time. It is important to examine her life, and learn what we can from her experiences. This book was wonderful.

Our Souls at Night

"It's just two old people talking in the dark."

Kent Haruf

Our Souls at Night

This novel was beautiful. Kent Harufs writing style is amazing and poetic, I read the entire thing in one sitting, just being pulled along by the magnificent sentence structure and story telling. This is the first of his books that I have read and I cannot wait to read the rest.

One night Addie, an old woman whose husband died and son moved away, asks her neighbor Louis, a widower, if he would come sleep in her bed at night and talk to ward of the loneliness. This wonderfully awkward and forward invitation leads to the sweetest and most heartfelt of love stories that I have ever read. As the two get to know each other, Addies young grandson, Jamie, comes to live with her for the summer, and the poignant story that follows is a wonderful tale about making the most of life, dealing with the curve balls as they come and living with no regrets. 

I can't get over how wonderful this book is. The way he wrote about the landscape and the weather (it's set in a fictional town in Colorado and the way Haruf described all of these places I had been made me feel like I had stepped into a patch of home in a book) was phenomenal. The characters were charming, and the story was amazing and heartfelt.

The Meursault Investigation

"My brother's name was Musa. He had a name. But he'll remain the "the Arab" forever.

Kamel Daoud

The Meursault Investigation

This book was amazing. A response to Albert Camus's The Stranger, it is both a critique and endorsement of the original story. It is the story of the brother of "the Arab," who was shot on the beach by the anti-hero of the stranger. Seventy years after the crime, Harun is attempting to live with the murder of his brother and come to terms with how the seemingly senseless violence has shaped his life. 

All at once this book is a coming of age story, a love story, and a political commentary that examines post-colonial Algeria, Islam, and the western indifference to Arab lives. So much of Haruns rage centers around the fact that his brother, the victim, was not even named in the book written by the murderer. His brother, Musa, was just a speed bump in the murderers life, while his death profoundly shaped the lives of Harun and their mother.Because of these frustrations Harun turns away from God, and in doing so becomes a stranger to among his own people, outcast and recluse. 

I thought that the commentary on race and colonialism was extremely interesting. While Musa is referred to as the "the Arab," they did not consider themselves Arabic. That is a generalization that is commonly made in the western world, the most Muslims are Arabic, when, in fact, that is far from the case. I think that it is an important distinction to make, as it is a huge and arbitrary generalization that impedes conversation with Muslim people who are from other parts of the world, because of all of the preconceived notions that come with the label.

I loved this book. Harun is an incredibly compelling character, complex in his emotions and responses. I loved that this book questioned the limits of how far out our actions resonate, and looked at the lives of those affected by violence. The language was also beautiful. Written originally in French (like The Stranger) and then translated to English, it has beautiful pace and incredible voice. A must read for this summer!

"The murderer's words and expressions are my unclaimed goods. Besides, the country's littered with words that don't belong to anyone anymore."

Tinkers

"When his grandchildren had been little, they had asked if they could hide inside the clock. Now he wanted to gather them and open himself up and hide them among his ribs and faintly ticking heart."

Paul Harding

Tinkers

This story had an amazing opening line: "George Washington Crosby began to hallucinate eight days before he died." Tinkers is the story of an old man on his death bed, remembering his childhood and his father who disappeared when he was a child. As time collapses in his mind, the story jumps back and forth as he processes the trials and triumphs that was his life.

This book was wonderful. The language was beautiful storytelling breath taking. It was filled with beautiful sentences, for example: "I was just thinking that I am not many years old, but that I am many years wide," and "the universe's time cannot be marked thusly, such a crooked and flimsy device could only keep the fantastic hours of unruly ghosts." 

The characters as spectacularly complex, working through various emotions and they are described in a way that is so very real. I can definitely see why this book won the Pulitzer in 2010 and I highly recommend this book. It is a wonderful book club book (its our Rebel Alliance pic for this month), and a short one, so you can easily fit time to read it into a busy schedule. Short, sweet, you won't regret reading it. 

Dispatches From Dystopia

"Others will speak in mournful tones of what is lost, what I call rustalgia. As opposed to ruins porn, rustalgia can help show how sketchy is the long standing faith in the necessity of perpetual economic growth."

Kate Brown

Dispatches From Dystopia

This book piqued my interest, initially, because it was in the travel adventure section in the store. A travel adventure about the places that no one wants to go is bound to be interesting. So, I picked it up and was not disappointed.  Kate Brown tells a very interesting story; the book is a genre bender. It could easily fit in history, social sciences, and biography. 

In the book, the author talks of the trips that she has made to Russia for historical research. By including herself in the narrative, something that few do in academic writing, she allows us to see how she has shaped the stories she found, either by the questions she asks or the topics she focuses on. By doing this, she argues that history is tied to place. She looks and interviews people in Ukraine and Russia that were involved in the resettlement that occurred, and compares their stories to those told in the united states, particularly in the west and Midwest during the turn of the century. The stories of the people from those two very different parts of the world are not as different as you might think.

I enjoyed this book. The writing is academic but highly accessible, and by including her own narrative the author made the stories very relate-able. A mixture of biography, anthropology, travel memoir, and academic essay, this book kept me on my toes, and was a wonderful look at life in the USSR.