September 15, 2005
Recent books
I haven't done a post in a while about what I've been reading, but that doesn't mean I haven't been reading anything. Due to my 30 minute subway ride, I have plenty of time each day to read. Here's a few highlights:
- Guns, Germs, and Steel - by Jared Diamond. Everyone has read this book. Now I have too. I really enjoyed it, it blew my mind.
- Collapse - also by Jared Diamond. Great book. The historical sections were fascinating. The section on Rwanda was a revelation and a must-read for anyone interested in that genocide. Other chapters were also great, especially the one on feudal Japan and modern-day Australia. And in the last chapter, he brilliantly refutes the most popular anti-environmentalist arguments.
- Portnoy's Complaint - by Philip Roth. Hilarious!
- Sailor Song - by Ken Kesey. Recommended by my friend Greg when I went to St. Louis. Very well written, funny, and interesting. But the ending was very confusing, and thinking back about it, I'm not sure I even understand what the plot was about. Fun, though.
- American Pastoral - by Philip Roth. Great novel, although a bit of a downer. The contrast with Portnoy's Complaint is interesting. In that early Roth novel, the message is "My parents are amusingly neurotic, and I'm even worse!" In American Pastoral, written just a few years ago by a Roth who is getting a bit old, is a lot more serious, and more like "My child is fucking crazy, and not in an amusing way either."
Posted by ahyatt at September 15, 2005 05:31 AM
My favorite part about Sailor Song is the image of the hero swept out to sea and trapped in a whorlpool that's actually just an eddy in a larger whorlpool. It hearkens back to Yeats' widening gyre. Despite this, I caution against trying to read the book in literary terms; Kesey really got out of that game after Cuckoo's Nest. What I really enjoy about the book is the predictions he makes (writing in 1993-4) about what would be happening at about the present time. He's prescient in some predictions, premature in others, and way off on quite a few others. Hey, it's fiction, right?