Syrup
Max Barry
Comment: A fun romp through the next generation of marketing. Just fun... A poke at how bizarre and self-centered and mercenary the marketing world is...
Candide
Francois Voltaire
I had read Candide during history 1 at brown university my freshman year - I think. It may have been on the syllabus and I didn't read it or I did but I just didn't understand any of it and as professor rohr lectured on its role - again, I think - I sensed its importance but really nothing more than it was, well, important.
The fall of my freshman year at Brown was the point at which I decided to become a student, learned that I loved being a student and kind of quickly became a student and I am very very grateful for that period but the first part of my freshman year I was still in transition to be generous. So a few weeks back as a part of our family was prepping to go to France for 4-5 days I pulled out Candide and wow. First, I read the two intros which provided historical context and an understanding of Voltaire's life and my oh my... I gotta think this is perfect for a period piece hollywood blockbuster if speilberg or such wants to popularize this author that today most have never heard of... His life has it all including redical views, imprisonment, banishment, keeping register for a neighboring king, his most popular work coming at around age 65 if I recall it correctly and then a welling of populat adulation at his death at I think age 89... A national treasure at death though treated as a criminal, miscreant for most of his life. And then Candide... A black and white fantasty-like saga (if "fantasty-like" and "saga" can go in the same sentence it is here) pitting polar views of the world against one another. A main character Dr. Pangloss is the perpetual optimism-totting interpreter of the most wretched portions of life. Never losing faith that IT is all working in the perfect natural wondeful order. So after Pangloss is hung there is a vacuum in which the fantasy-like wild highs and lows are left for Candide to interpret without Pangloss his mentor. A wild ride... At times seems like Voltaire was channeling an as yet to be born Kurt Vonnegut (one of my favorites)... As in 100 years early! And to think people even read such fantasy-like torid and at times steamy if not "mature" material in the age! If you told me Voltaire was banished as the predessor to howard stern or don imus I would have believed it... Though it is clear Voltaire's larger life "crime" would be attacking the establishment and the common thinking of the day whatever those happened to be... Voltaire seemingly leaves no fool of society standing by the end. He attacks everything. No wonder he wasn't invited to the balls in Paris during his life and instead eventually retreated to Switzerland. In the final scenes of Candide a character names Martin who is the polar opposite of Dr Pangloss suggests a third way of looking at life that is neither optimistic or pessimistic: "Let us work without reasoning... It is the only way to make life endurable..." Candide soon after contributes "...we must all cultivate our garden." To be clear -- I suspect I could take professor rohr's class and understand more fully what the heck this book is about and why Voltaire was the figure he was... But I loved the tale and the contemplation and a taste of kurt vonnegut from a very different era.
Red Badge Of Courage
Stephen Crane
The last time I picked up this book was probably in fifth grade and to say I was ill positioned to read it would have been an understatement of monstrous proportions... And still today I think I am not fully prepared to grasp as much as I want from this story of an American Civil War soldier. (Btw... The "red badge of courage" is the blood on one's uniform that is easily identified after hostile engagements... A clean uniform suggests lack of bravery... In football the "badge of courage" long ago were marks on helmets - thankfully those days seem to have gone by and youths need not suffer potential damage to their brain from football taught "wrong") But here it goes... I was first struck in the introduction that soldiers who read the book insisted that the author must have been in the war to have experienced all the thoughts that race through his head as he encounters extreme circumstances that no one might be prepared for...
But the author was never in a war... He had read some accounts and talked to some veterans and then he holed himself up for 11 days at age 21 and wrote wrote wrote... Maybe a "zone" in today's vernacular... Maybe the power of focus and immersion and full engagement is what we are supposed to learn and maybe he was able to live the war for those 11 days with the deepest of empathy and produce such well thgt structured communication. The soldier (Crane refers to the main character as "the youth") flees his unit in the heat of battle, oddly rejoins, becomes a quasi hero... But I haven't ruined this story for you at all in that what this story is really about is not at all about how the action unfolds but WHAT goes thru his mind at every moment and the intense experiences he has from self-pity and self-blame to wildly demonstrated empowerment and bravery all inside a 48 hour period... Our minds lead us in so many ways whether we are in the American Civil War or just living our daily lives. The brilliance in this book I think is that the intensity of the circumstance provides a microscope to see what can race through all of our minds as we go from day to day hoping to find grounding and peace which is all but shaken completely out of "the youth's" life in this period. "The youth" doesn't really "grow" from this intense experience buit rather he mainly experiences and we get an inside look of what many many things happen in his mind. This book may allow us the room to not think we are crazy or wrong when thgts race through our brains which seem at odds with who we want to be or who we envision ourselves to be... Unlike "the youth" we do have an opportunity to grow, get more grounded, act in concert with the values we care about or who we want to be even when our mind suggests reason to justify doing something else. It is an amazing experience and I suspect could be as guide or companion for life. I will probably pick it up in another five years and experience it perhaps more richly.
Diamond Ruby
Joseph Wallace
I think this is the first historical novel I have read and I loved it. Ruby is a young woman who grows up in very difficult times circa 1920 in brooklyn and loses her parents to spanish influenza. She has a talent: throwing a baseball VERY hard and VERY accurately... She runs into babe ruth, jack dempsey, the ku klux klan, the mob, judge landis... The plot is intense... Ruby does whatever she can to support her family and especially her two nieces but turn after turn the dangers of being a woman in a man's world - and a dangerous world at that - present themselves.
The novel is based on a young woman named Jackie Mitchell who after striking out Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig in an exhibition learned that baseball commissioner judge landis would never allow women to play with men under the argument that it was too strenuous.
The author brilliantly builds so much history and cultural commentary into his book. The cultural commentary was a sensational reminder of different times and places... Much of the book reminded me in ways of Angela's Ashes. I may just not be a great candidate for Ian McEwan given my other reading options but clearly I am in the minority! (Happy to see the movie versions)
Amsterdam
Ian McEwan
I may just not be a great candidate for Ian McEwan given my other reading options but clearly I am in the minority! (Happy to see the movie versions)
The Futurist
James P. Othmer
This is one of my favorite writers period. And here is his first novel that dives into the bizarre world of "futurists" circa 2000... Stunningly good and parts nip at the edge of the role I had at UBS as the world's first Global Tech Strategist... Which was clearly a sign of a mania as I mentioned to many at the time.
The Sun Also Rises
Ernest Hemingway
I hadn't read a Hemingway since Old Man and the Sea when I was maybe 14 and I suspect I didn't come close to getting it so that one will go back into the queue... I loved this book. I loved his simple simple writing that is at the same time so perfectly rich. Hemingway speaks of the so-called Lost Generation through this book that weaves us through the dysfunctional (in some sense)lives of 5-6 people in Paris and then at a bull fighting festival in Spain... One common thread is the omni-presence of alcohol which is in sync with the inability of the characters to process their feelings in workable ways -- to say the least.
On the Road
Jack Kerouac
Whoa. I can see why its a classic but yikes it was disturbing and depressing. Very much worth the read so long as you can pop a romantic comedy in the dvd player just after
Hackoff.com
Tom Evslin
Tom is one of our Fellows and brilliant and clear -- Superb superb chronicle of ALL the indulgences of the Internet bubble set in a murder mystery. Wonderful.
Fountainhead
Ayn Rand
"Selfish" behavior could be explained away using Ayn Rand's character Howard Rourke
Holy Water
James Othmer
This is James Othmer's third book and I have read them all... I have been fortunate enough to get to breeze thru the last two pre-publication. He is simply a sensational writer who weaves cultural pop references seamlessly thru the pages of fiction that is both hilarious in its self-reflection of the age we live in as well as poignant with regard to what ARE we doing with the present moment all of us share. James Othmer is constantly digging for a truth about "what is the meaning we are aiming to be in register with in our lives?
Cat's Cradle
Kurt Vonnegut
Outside of breakfast of champions which is at an indescribably high level in my pecking order every other Vonnegut book is better than the next. If I had any writing ability I would want to be able to write like Kurt Vonnegut. In this novel a biographer of the man who "invented" the atom bomb winds his way to a fictional banana republic loaded with a concocted religion. Great fun.
"In the Country of Men
Hisham Matar
A novel about a nine year old boy in Libya in 1979, whose father becomes entangled in an extremely adverse political situation. A serious, short read.