Word Up

OK, you may ask, what have I been reading this summer? Well, glad you asked:

David Copperfield
Charles Dickens
May 2008
Fiction

Perhaps Dickens’ most famous novel—and the one he called his “favourite son”—this is the closest he ever came to autobiography, and even then he changed many things because, as he wrote to his friend John Forster, he was fearful of being too autobiographical. Young David is born shortly after his father has died, and his mother eventually takes up with the abusive Murdstone and his sister Miss Murdstone (wasn't Dickens great with names?). The Murdstones are not especially fond of children, and things come to a head when David bites Murdstone and is eventually sent away to boarding school. And thus begins David’s adventures, which will lead to abject humiliation in a blacking factory (the most autobiographical portion of the book) and his eventual rescue by his eccentric aunt Betsy Trotwood, whose only objection to him was that he was not born a girl. The loquacious Wilkins Micawber, who does a stint in debtor's prison, was a stand-in for Dickens’ father. David eventually finds fame and fortune as a writer. There was an amusing story behind one character; Miss Mowcher, a dwarf-like hairdresser and manicurist for David’s schoolfriend Steerforth, was apparently based on Dickens’ wife’s chiropodist, who after the chapter featuring her appeared (David Copperfield, like all of his books, was published serially in monthly editions), threatened Dickens with legal action. When Mowcher subsequently reappeared in a later chapter, her character had changed somewhat. David Copperfield may not be Dickens’ best novel, but it deserves its high reputation. It was also the point—midway through his bibliography—where he began planning out his books in advance, rather than writing them on-the-fly. David Copperfield was also much lighter in tone than his books would become from here after.

Bleak House
Charles Dickens
May 2008
Fiction

The one. The pinnacle (in my opinion) of Dickens’ career. This epic novel about the British legal system and all its flaws is the best of all his books. The book centers around the Courts of Chancery (well-named, since you “took your chances” in it), and the case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce, a dispute over conflicting wills that has dragged on for years and has become rather infamous. “Jarndyce and Jarndyce has passed into a joke. That's the only good that has ever come of it.” It concerned an inheritance that was gradually being consumed by its own legal fees. The two potential heirs, cousins Ada and Richard, are left in the care of benevolent John Jarndyce, who long ago gave up on the case. With them is the orphan Esther Summerson (who narrates about half the book) whose own lineage turns out to be a surprise to everyone. Meanwhile, the evil lawyer Tulkinghorn has uncovered a secret about Sir Lester Dedlock and Lady Dedlock—and is eventually found murdered. Part social satire, murder mystery (the first in English literature, and Inspector Bucket is an extremely funny character), convoluted legal thriller—Bleak House has it all. Great characters—and I think one of the best books ever written. (Although the scene in which Mr. Krook spontaneously combusts was perhaps a bit much.) Many of the locations in the novel were featured on the Charles Dickens walking tour Steven H. and I took last April in London, so it was cool being able to accurately visualize many of the locations. There was also an excellent BBC production of it that starred Gillian Anderson as Lady Dedlock that is probably the best Dickens adaptation I have ever seen, although like all of them tends to lose a lot of the humor of his prose.

Hard Times
Charles Dickens
June 2008
Fiction

The least subtle of all Dickens’ books (and the shortest), Hard Times is a diatribe against the kind of cold, emotionless, statistics-and-facts-driven social theorists who had emerged following the Industrial Revolution. Thomas Gradgrind, prominent resident (and eventual Member of Parliament) of the northern industrial town of Coketown, opens the book with his lecture to the young students of the Coketown school: “Now, what I want is Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else.” His own children are discouraged from doing anything but studying, and they are strongly reprimanded for playing or going to the circus—or, basically, doing anything fun. Naturally, this turns both his son and daughter into psychological basket cases; his daughter ends up in a loveless marriage to the blowhard banker Mr. Bounderby. (He is described thusly: “He had not much hair. One might have fancied that he had talked it off; and that what was left, all standing up in disorder, was in that condition from being constantly blown about by his windy boastfulness.” Heh.) His bluster about being a self-made man, as it turns out, is all a lie. Gradgrind’s son Tom ends up as a gambler and thief. Hard Times is social commentary with a sledgehammer and while it’s funny and rings true a lot of the time, it suffers from being a bit too “in your face.”

The Physics of the Impossible
Michio Kaku
June 2008
Non-Fiction

Kaku is a physics professor and popular science writer and appears frequently on Discovery and Learning Channel documentaries. He is also a science-fiction fan so has decided to investigate how possible various sci-fi technologies are. Death rays? Transporters? Tractor beams? Faster-than-light travel? Time travel? How far away are we from these things? As it turns out, quite a ways. He organizes the book into Class I, II, and III “impossibilities” (in ascending order of impossibility), and even the most probable of the impossibilities are decades, if not centuries, away. Perhaps discouraging for those who were hoping to experience Star Trek in their lifetimes, still it does provide an excellent look at the current state of the cutting edge of physics research. Even if we won’t be beaming ourselves around any time soon, it’s interesting to know that there is actually fruitful research in “teleportation” going on. It’s a fascinating book, and Kaku does a good job of clearly explaining even the most abstruse physical concepts.

Gulliver’s Travels
Jonathan Swift
June 2008
Fiction

I don’t recall ever having read Gulliver’s Travels before, but my local Barnes & Noble was having a 3-for-2 sale on B&N imprinted classics, so I picked it up and took it away on vacation (appropriately). This is highly unsubtle social satire (some of it a bit too rooted in what was happening politically in Europe in the early 1700s). We all know about Lemuel Gulliver’s travels among the Lilliputians (the tiny people), less so his travels among the Brobdignagians (giant people), the flying island of Laputa, inhabited by pretentious intellectuals (an extremely funny chapter), the noble horse people the Houyhnhms, and the barbarous humans, the Yahoos. Good vacation reading and laugh out loud funny in places.

Dear American Airlines
Jonathan Miles
June 2008
Fiction

I blogged about this excellent book before.

Little Dorritt
Charles Dickens
July 2008
Fiction

After the social satire with a sledgehammer of Hard Times, Dickens returned to form with Little Dorritt. One of the traumas of Dickens’ childhood was seeing his father imprisoned in the Marshalsea Debtors Prison. (There was a tremendous illogic in the laws in Britain at the time where, if someone owed someone else money they could not repay, they were imprisoned—virtually ensuring that they could never work to earn the money to pay those debts. Dickens often pointed out the utter absurdity of these laws.) Debtors prisons thus appeared often in Dickens’ novels, even from the start (Samuel Pickwick in The Pickwick Papers is incarcerated in one). Little Dorritt explicitly looks at the psychology of those imprisoned. William Dorritt is put away in the Marshalsea Prison for 20 years, where he becomes “The Father of the Marshalsea,” earning a place of honor and respect among the inmates and turnkeys. His daughter Amy (the titular “Little Dorritt”) was born while he was an inmate, and has never known life outside the prison, and even though she is free to come and go, she chooses to return to the prison at night. She has a secret day job as a seamstress for the elderly Mrs. Clennam, whose son Arthur (the book’s main protagonist) has just returned from many years abroad. Arthur becomes interested in Little Dorritt and, after some investigation, ultimately manages to secure for William Dorritt an immense inheritance to which he is entitled. Released from the Marshalsea, William Dorritt and family travel around Europe attempting to distance themselves from their past life—not entirely successfully. (The scene where Dorritt has a stroke at a fancy dinner party and imagines himself back in the Marshalsea is completely heartbreaking.) There are also various other plots and admittedly things go a bit overboard toward the end when there is a rather convoluted plot involving evil twins and mistaken identity. Still, this is one of the last great Dickens novels, full of great characterization and social commentary. (The great wealthy capitalist Merdle, before whom everyone bows down, turns out to have been a swindler and forger who ends up being the ruin of many of those who worshipped him.) Oh, and let’s not forget the Barnacles who run the fictional but oh-so-aptly named Circumlocution Office, a government agency specifically designed to ensure that nothing is ever actually accomplished.

A Tale of Two Cities
Charles Dickens
July 2008
Fiction

Dickens only wrote two historical novels and the more famous of the two (A Tale of Two Cities) actually is less successful than the less famous (Barnaby Rudge). A Tale of Two Cities is set during the French Revolution and features the famous opening line “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times” and the famous closing lines “It is a far far better thing I do than I have ever done before...” Charles Darnay, an expatriate Frenchman who has renounced his aristocratic family, now lives in London, choosing to earn a living rather than live as a parasite on the peasantry, which is how he sees his family. He falls in love with and marries Lucy Manette, the daughter of a physician who had been imprisoned in the Bastille for 18 years. Darnay is accused of treason against England, but is acquitted thanks largely to the efforts of his brilliant but drunken lawyer Sydney Carton who, as it turns out, is a dead ringer for Darnay physically. They all end up in Paris at the time the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror break out and Darnay is identified as being a relative of the family of Evremond, against whom the Defarges (including the perennially knitting Madame Defarge) have a specific grudge. Darnay is sentenced to the guillotine—but Carton arranges to swap places with Darnay and sacrifices himself largely for the sake of Lucy Darnay, with whom he is also in love, albeit futilely. Ultimately, A Tale of Two Cities is unsuccessful because the characterizations are not as strong as those in Dickens’ other novels (part of this was due to the short weekly serialization of the novel, which imposed more rigorous plot demands on him than the more leisurely monthly editions he usually published). But at the same time, he oversimplifies the French Revolution; he begins by sympathizing with the peasants and their revolt against an abusive, taxing, and ultimately useless aristocracy but then depicts the Reign of Terror as little more than insensible mob violence (depicted a bit more convincingly in the Gordon Riots scenes in Barnaby Rudge). Still, it’s Dickens, so how bad could it be?

Great Expectations
Charles Dickens
July 2008
Fiction

Widely regarded as Dickens “most perfect” novel, Great Expectations does encapsulate in a comparatively short novel (under 500 pages) all of Dickens’ strengths as a novelist. At the start of the book, orphan Philip Pirrip (Pip) is a small child, playing in the Kent marshes. He encounters an escaped convict and procures him food, which he tries to keep hidden from his abusive older sister (his guardian) and her husband, the simple yet kindly blacksmith Joe Gargery. Some years later, Pip is asked for by the reclusive and decaying Miss Havisham, whose early jilting has resulted in her spending her entire life in a dark house, occasionally wearing a yellowed wedding dress, and visiting the cobwebbed and rat-infested dining room where her wedding feast has been sitting for more than 30 years. Pip is smitten by Estella, Miss Havisham’s adopted daughter, but she deems him “too common.” After several years of his mysterious and bewildering visits to Miss Havisham, Pip comes into a fortune thanks to a mysterious benefactor, and moves to London to become a gentleman, full of great expectations. He distances himself from Joe, believing the blacksmith to be “too common.” Then he finds out who his benefactor really is...and all his expectations are dashed, and he realizes what a schmuck he was in thinking that he was somehow “better” than Joe simply because he had a few more pounds. A very very funny book, full of the characteristic Dickens characterizations and social commentary. If there is one Dickens novel to read (if the 900+-page Bleak House seems too overwhelming), this would be it.

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
Haruki Murakami
August 2008
Non-Fiction

My favorite contemporary novelist is Japan’s Haruki Murakami, and he just published a short memoir about running. In the mid-1980s, when he first decided to become a novelist (he had previously owned a jazz club in Tokyo), he decided to start running, as well. (There is a connection as both writing and running are notoriously solitary activities.) Even now, in his 50s, he still runs marathons, and much of the book describes his preparing for the New York Marathon. He also reprints an article he wrote about the time he ran the original “marathon”—that is, the route from Athens to Marathon in Greece, when the name and official distance of a marathon derives. It’s a slim book, probably not of much interest to anyone not a Murakami fan, but for those of us who are, it’s a somewhat revealing peek into his life.

Reading the OED
Ammon Shea
August 2008
Non-Fiction

Ammon Shea is a fanatical collector of dictionaries and he decided to spend a year doing something that actually sounds pretty cool: reading the entire 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary. Now, you may ask yourself: why would anyone want to read a book about a guy reading a book? That’s a perfectly fair point, and about as good a point as the question, Why would anyone want to sit down and read the OED from beginning to end anyway? But then I inevitably ask, why would anyone want to watch Survivor, Dancing with the Stars, or any movie that’s playing at the mall, so to each his own.... I actually found Reading the OED very entertaining—not only the author’s struggles to physically read it (he was plagued with headaches throughout the project and at one point finds that he suddenly needs glasses). The trick is not to think of the OED as a dry reference book, but an entertaining history of the English language, which any good dictionary is, really. Words some into fashion, they go out off fashion—some words have only ever appeared in dictionaries and have never been actually seen “in the wild.” The OED is rather like a natural history museum, or a zoo, if you prefer. The bulk of the book (and, unlike the author’s subject, it is not a weighty tome; I finished it in about two hours) comprises highlights from the OED. Very often, the author exults in discovering “I never knew there was a word for that!” Or, every once in a while, “Why on earth is there a word for that?” The poster child for the latter is unbepissed, which means “not having been urinated on.” The author comments, “Who ever thought there would actually be a need for such a word? Is it possible that at some time there was such a profusion of things that had been urinated on that there was a pressing need to distinguish those that had not?” One shudders to think.... Other examples he cites are:

Fornale: to spend one’s money before it has been earned. Kind of the basis for our economy, it seems.

Gove: To stare stupidly. The author notes that every dictionary has defined this word this way, save for Webster’s Third, which defines it as “to stare idly.” Perhaps it is a coincidence that the editor of the Webster’s Third was named Gove...

Hypergelast: A person who will not stop laughing.

Kakistocracy: Government by the worst citizens. No comment...

Marterteral: Having the characteristics or qualities of an aunt. Why avuncular (having the characteristics or qualities of an uncle) is somewhat popular but marterteral passed out of common parlance—and, unlike avuncular, is flagged by Word’s spellchecker—remains a mystery.

Natiform: Buttock-shaped. Ironically, not used as an insult.

Onomatomania: Vexation at being unable to find the right word. We’ve all had this problem at times.

Peristeronic: Suggestive of pigeons. Gotta love it.

Petecure: Modest cooking. That is, more or less the opposite of an epicure.

And my favorite:

Constult: To act stupidly together. For those in my line of work, it’s that first “t” that makes all the difference!

The Magdalen Martyrs
Ken Bruen
August 2008
Fiction

Steven H. sent me a CARE package of books from Britain for my birthday and one of them was The Magdalen Martyrs by Irish author Ken Bruen. It’s of a genre I guess one could call British neo-noir, as it is a modern version of the kind of dark crime novels (featuring a bitter, battle-scarred anti-hero as the detective/narrator) commonly attributed to Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain. Bruen’s anti-hero is alcoholic, drug-addicted former “Guard” (I really don’t know what that is, some kind of Irish police, I suspect) named Jack Taylor. Taylor becomes involved in two cases, one involving tracking down the “angel of the Magdalens”—that is, the person who helped unfortunate girls escape from an abusive Catholic laundry. The other case involves proving that a local businessman's father’s death was not accidental. I can’t say that I ever really cared about either case, as I really disliked the Jack Taylor character and found much of the novel a bit of a bore, as Taylor really did little more than drink and consume enough drugs to kill a medium-sized rhinoceros. Not one of my favorites.

The Devil’s Home on Leave
Derek Raymond
August 2008
Fiction

I read Derek Raymond’s He Died With His Eyes Open last year, and liked it (though not hugely). Steven H. also sent me this one, which I ended up liking more. Raymond is another of the British neo-noir writers, but I like him a lot better than Ken Bruen. (I did have to e-mail Steven H. and ask what certain British slang terms meant! A “grass” or “supergrass” is apparently an informer. So now you know, even if you have never bought a Supergrass album.) The no-name anti-hero is a lot more likable than Bruen’s Jack Taylor, and has more in common with Chandler’s Philip Marlowe. The novel begins with a body being discovered—bled, boiled, cut into several pieces, and placed in plastic shopping bags. (OK, I probably should not have started reading this while eating dinner.) The book is set in the 1980s and as no-name starts investigating, espionage, treason, and people selling out to the Russians come into it. A Defense minister is involved, as is a vicious soldier who was deemed too brutal and violent even for the Army. No-name has is requisite fights with authority and the powers-that-be but turns out right in the end. It’s all rather along the Chandler formula, but then it’s a pretty good formula. (I was reading this in a pub in Chicago after a day of conference sessions, and some folks I had met came in and joined me; they asked me about the book, and I said “It’s rather a British Raymond Chandler.” The response was, “Oh, I don't like spy novels.” Sigh.)