Books = Happy

In honor of Cyber Monday, I decided to do my part by purchasing two very coveted books:

I spent an entire night during my Thanksgiving break reading "Where the Sidewalk Ends" from cover to cover.  I was reminded how happy those poems and drawings made me...and that I can still recite "Homework, Oh Homework" from memory.  I decided that adding 2 more of these books to my collection could only be a good thing.  So many great poems to choose from, but I think my favorite is:

Worried

I worry about myself and my ability to remember things.  I have always had a bad memory, made worse by the fact that my brain spent a few years floating around in chemo.  I love reading, obviously.  But sometimes it feels like I'm barely retaining what I read.  I don't know if this is a problem particular to me, or a problem shared by other voracious readers.  I'm especially flummoxed by the current book I'm reading, Henning Mankell's Pyramid.  I bought this from Daedalus Books at a reduced price a few weeks ago.  Small bits and pieces of it are jumping out at me as I read it - mere hints of deja vu.  However, I wouldn't be able to honestly tell you whether I'd read it or not.  I went on to Good Reads today to log it as a "current read" and was told that I had read and posted about it in March 2009.

So...here I am, wondering what to do with this information.  I'm going to go ahead and blame it upon the repetitive nature of the crime / detective genre, rather than on complete memory loss.  I think most of these detective stories (they are my guilty pleasure and favorite quick read) are so similar that they sometimes all blend into one.

Well, I guess I will still go ahead and finish reading Pyramid, especially since I don't remember how it ends.

Vanished

I read a really fascinating story today about a young woman named Barbara Follett.  She was a published and accomplished author at the age of 13 (in the mid-1920s).  She was hailed by the New York Times and H.L. Mencken for her extraordinary talent and "almost unbearably beautiful" style of writing.  She would have likely had an amazing career if it were not for the misfortunes that fell upon her as she entered her twenties.  The abandonment of her father and the immediate need to quit school in order to work to support her mother meant she had to postpone her dreams of writing.  In 1939, she walked out after a nasty quarrel with her husband and vanished.  She was never seen or heard from again and her body was never found.  She was 26.

Here is an excerpt from a letter she wrote a friend about her heartache:

“My dreams are going through their death flurries,” she wrote that June. “I thought they were all safely buried, but sometimes they stir in their grave, making my heartstrings twinge. I mean no particular dream, you understand, but the whole radiant flock of them together—with their rainbow wings, iridescent, bright, soaring, glorious, sublime. They are dying before the steel javelins and arrows of a world of Time and Money.”

Thoughts for a Monday...

"Why do we get out of bed?" Mitch wondered.  "Is there any feeling better than being in bed?  What could possibly feel better than this?  What is going to happen in the course of my day that will be an improvement over lying on something very soft, underneath something very warm, wearing only underwear, doing absolutely nothing, all by myself?"  Every day, Mitch awoke to this line of reasoning.  Every day, the first move he made outside his sheets immediately destroyed the only flawless part of his existence.

- Chuck Klosterman, Downtown Owl

Wish I wrote that...

I was clumsy, easily distracted; I was "always in a dream."  [He] dug out the form of this hapless personality for me; out of perversity, defiantly, I felt myself pouring into it and setting hard.  I wasn't pretty or charming or malleable.  I went around with a suffering face.  I read my book with my fingers in my ears.

- Tessa Hadley, "Clever Girl"
Published in The New Yorker on 6 June 2011

Overqualified

I've been on a book buying binge rather than a book reading binge this summer.  I blame it on my new laptop and the discovery of a game called "Cake Mania."  However, I did read and then re-read a wonderfully intoxicating short book called Overqualified by Joey Comeau.

Literally five minutes after reading an excerpt from this book in the 2010 version of Best American Nonrequired Reading, I had purchased Comeau's book online.  At first I thought it was just a collection of off-beat and humorous cover letters; actual cover letters written by Comeau and sent to various companies.

"Dear Goodyear,

I'd like a job, please.  You probably don't hire strangers.  I used to climb mountains of your tires in my grandfather's salvage yard.  My name's Joey Comeau.  There.  Now we aren't strangers anymore."

What I didn't realize was how revealing, bittersweet and wry these letters would also be.  Comeau wrote the book after a devastating drunk driving accident killed his younger brother.  This is revealed throughout the narrative of the letters, as well as the pain that Comeau experiences as his life continues to move on.  Family, regrets, uncertainty of the future, love, childhood...it's all in this book, in 95 short and truly sweet pages.

Favorite Passage
Dear Nintendo,

Thank you for taking the time to consider my resume.  I am writing to apply for the position of game designer.  We have a chance here to help children experience games that are more true to life than ever before.  Computer graphics have improved and improved and improved, and some day soon we're going to have to ask ourselves where we can go next in our search for realism.

We need virtual pet games where you clean and feed and love your furry little friend, but where that car still comes out of nowhere so smoothly, a god of aerodynamics and passenger safety.  Where your mother says, "Good thing we kept this."  And she takes a shoe box down from your closet.  Where you hear your father's quiet joke that night, when he thinks you are asleep.

We need an airport simulator, where the planes carry your whole family from A to B, job to job, and dad still drinks in the shower when you have to pee.  Your older sister still comes home at three in the morning and wakes you up so she can sit on the edge of your bed and cry.  Where you try to make friends faster at each new school, so you tell jokes even though you don't know anybody and nobody gets them.  Everybody says you're the weird new kid.  So at the next school you don't say anything at all and then you're the weird quiet kid.  The plane touches down and you all lean forward in your seats because of inertia, and again and again someone says, "I hate to fly."

We need a new Mario game where you rescue the princess in the first ten minutes, and for the rest of the game you try to push down that sick feeling in your stomach telling you she's "damaged goods," a concept-detailed again and again in the profoundly sex-negative instruction booklet, and when Luigi makes a crack about her and Bowser, you break his nose and immediately regret it. Peach asks you, in the quiet of her mushroom castle bedroom, "Do you still love me?" and you pretend to be asleep.  You press the A button rhythmically, to control your breath, to keep it even.

Yours, 

Joey Comeau

And one more short excerpt...
It's Joey, not Joe or Joseph.  My grandfather was Joe Comeau, and Joseph is my mother's name for me, but I have always been Joey.  I worry sometimes that it's a childish name. Would a "Joe" tell jokes in bed, perform puppet shows after sex, and give every body part a different high-pitched voice?  It seems unlikely.  The names we choose for ourselves aren't meaningless.  They're self-fulfilling prophecies.

So, I'm Joey and I will never be Joe.  When my grandfather died, I lost my chance to know him as anything more than a kiss on the cheek and a drive to the video store.   

Let's play catch up

I'm a delinquent blogger.  I've read SIXTEEN books since my last post in March.  Twelve since class ended in late April alone.  I was pretty serious when I decided to go on a reading rampage between the end of spring semester and the beginning of summer school.  It's helped that I've had some lazy weekends spent sweating out the sun on my balcony and a few nights of nothing on the old tv.  I guess maybe I'll recap just a few of the last ones I read.

Little Bee - Chris Cleave.  I was really excited to read this book because the copy on the book jacket promised a powerful, searing piece of art.  And I really am a fan of the cover art itself.  It started off strong.  I really loved the story - chapters alternating between the voice of a young Nigerian refugee and an American young mother/widow.  The downfall for me was that I just felt really sad at the end of reading it.  I was like, "Oh, I don't really want it to end that way."  And then my enjoyment of reading it was dampened by that feeling.

A Voyage Long and Strange - Tony Horwitz.  I am very much obsessed with Tony Horwitz after reading his book Confederates in the Attic.  He combines two things I love: travel writing and history.  For this book, Horwitz writes eloquently about all of the visitors, explorers and settlers of North America that came before the well-remembered Plymouth landing.  This leads us into histories of Vikings arriving, living and then leaving Canada / Maine; detailed adventures of Conquistadores like Cortez and Coronado.  It was amazing to me how much of the United States had actually been visited and explored before the whiteys from England came over.  But since we're Americans, we like to rewrite our history to have us as the explorers/pilgrims/adventurers in a new and unknown land.  This book gave me a really good understanding of the complicated relationship that the early explorers had with the Indians.  It seems that by the time the Pilgrims arrived, the Indians already knew plenty about the outsiders' propensity to kill with disease and violence.  I can't wait to get all of his books - I'm hooked.  You can read an excerpt from the prologue here.

A Gate at the Stairs - Lorrie Moore.  I wanted to love this book.  I really did.  Lorrie Moore has written some of my favorite short stories; stories that make me turn dog-ear the pages and wish that I had written something as striking.  However, this book almost seemed like it was written by a different author than the one I so fondly remember.  It nicely captured the feeling of post-9/11 life for a drifting college student in the middle of the Midwest.  The big themes were there: love, war, self-deception...it was not a bad book.  I thought some of the characters were interesting and it was well-written - it just didn't do anything for me, really.  It took almost half the book for me to even feel like something was happening.  Then towards the end more things started happening but truthfully, it was all slightly depressing.  I didn't even dog-ear a page until almost the very end, and that was for something that just made me chuckle.  "If we were still English," said my father, "we'd be drinking more and driving on the wrong side of the road - pretty much what people do on the Fourth of July anyway."

Reminiscing

At my parent's house this weekend, my mom pulled out my massive collection of Berenstain Bears books to offer up to my nephew.  My brother exclaimed that they were some of the most awful books to have to read out loud, in some part due to the not-so-blatant sexist remarks made by Papa Bear to Brother Bear (about Sister Bear's baseball hitting ability).  I did not remember this myself, but it wouldn't be too strange.  Some children's books are really strange when you re-read them as adults.  Or just really pretty dull and trite (I'm looking at you Baby Sitters Club). 

I think my most favorite books as a little kid were the Mr. Men and Little Miss series done by British author Roger Hargreaves.  That's why I was so freaking excited when my mom called to tell me that Google was celebrating Mr. Hargreaves' birthday with Mr. Men and Little Miss themed mastheads.  I've been amusing myself all afternoon by hitting the 'refresh' button.  I decided to share my favorites below.

Thanks to Mr. Bump, Mr. Messy, Mr. Rush and Little Miss Tiny for making Monday a little less excrutiating.

Brave New World

Yes boys and girls, this book lover had never read Brave New World until this week. Whoopsie. Well, it is all part of my quest to bone up on the classics. I re-read The Great Gatsby, originally assigned to me as a junior/senior in high school where I pretty much enjoyed it. But, re-reading it as an adult, I realized how absolutely wonderful it was. Most of you will say, well duh. But, I'm getting distracted here.

I'm not going to tell you what Brave New World is about because I expect that, unlike me, you all have read it. Man, I love me some dystopian literature! I thought that the best and most moving parts of the book come in the last thirty pages, when the Savage and the Resident Controller (Mustapha Mond) duke it out over the meaning of...life, essentially. It was clear to me that the Savage was used as a sounding board for the philosophy and passions (including religion) of Aldous Huxley. I think that the Resident Controller played the role of the rest of the world - the scarily modernizing, and de-humanizing world that Huxley foresaw. The most interesting part of the character of Mustapha Mond was that he had once been like the Savage and was a man of great knowledge about the past: literature, religion, science, etc. In the end, he had given up his happiness in order to assure what he saw as universal happiness. The arguments between the two were really gripping and I wished I was underlining passages as I went but I was walking ten blocks down Wabash Avenue as I finished this up.

The ending is shocking and sad - dystopian literature at it's best. I think all adults should re-read the books they were forced to read as kids. I'm glad I got to read this as a 27 year old and not as a 17 year old.

Favorite Passage

"My dear young friend," said Mustapha Mond, "civilization has absolutely no need of nobility or heroism. These things are symptoms of political ineffiency. In a properly organized society like ours, nobody has any opportunities for being noble or heroic. Conditions have got to be thoroughly unstable before the occasion can arise. Where there are wars, where there are divided allegiances, where there are temptations to be resisted, objects of love to be fought for or defended - there, obviously, nobility and herosim have some sense. But there aren't wars nowadays. The greatest care is taken to prevent you from loving any one too much. There's no such thing as a divided allegiance; you're so conditioned that you can't help doing what you ought to do. And what you ought to do is on the whole so pleasant, so many of the natural impulses are allowed free play, that there really aren't any temptations to resist. And if ever, by some unlucky chance, anything unpleasant should somehow happen, why there's always soma to give you a holiday from the facts. And there's always soma to calm your anger, to reconcile you to your enemies, to make you patient and long-suffering. In the past you could only accomplish these things by making a great effort and after years of hard moral training. Now, you swallow two or three half-gramme tablets, and there you are. Anybody can be virtuous now. You can carry at least half your mortality about in a bottle. Christianity without tears - that's what soma is."

Never Let Me Go

I feel a bit daft. After reading this book, I mentioned it to Kate who I thought might like its sci-fi aspects. She mentioned that it had been made into a movie. I was like, "Oh, yeah, that makes sense." Well, then I just realized that I have this movie on my Netflix list and was totally into seeing it.

I'm sure it's a good movie, it's a really good concept for a book. I'm not going to ruin it for you (if you were interested in reading or seeing the movie) by explaining any key plots. Which means that I can't really talk about the book at all, ha!

How about this: it's a story told by the main character in first person narrative about her life and the lives of her friends from an elite (and mysterious) boarding school in England called Hailsham. The book follows three main friends as they grow up and move out of the school to fulfill their (mysterious) destiny. OK?

I liked the concept more than I liked the actual writing. I did get a bit teary eyed at the end. There is this beautiful idea that somewhere in the world (in this book it's Norfolk, England) everything that you've ever lost in your life can be found. The author used this imagery at the end for a very moving closing.

I feel that this is worth a look (either in movie or book form) for it's cool storyline.

My New Favorite Bookstore

It's not what you would expect. The White Elephant Resale store in Lincoln Park is a great place to find gently loved books at an amazing price. Gently loved? Sorry, that sounds perverted. Anyway, in the back wing of the store they have four aisles of donated books. I've taken to stopping in every Monday after my research at Children's Memorial Hospital ends. Here's what I've added to my collection so far:

• Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky. A favorite of mine that I, gasp, surprisingly do not own. Until now. $1.
• Philistines at the Hedgerow by Steven Gaines. The back review was deliciously enticing. $1.
• A trilogy of Adam Daligilesh murder mysteries by PD James. I've only read one of them before but I never remember who did it anyway! $1.
• As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner. Kevin told me that this was his favorite author. Now I feel better having this in my bookshelf. $1.
• A Photographic Record: The Chicago World's Fair of 1893. Unbelievable. $1.
• The Murder Room by PD James. OK, so I'm kind of a PD James fan. $1.
• Just So Stories by Rudyard Kipling (hardcover featuring his drawings). Was going to give it to my nephew, extremely tempted to keep it for myself. $2.
• Hardcover collection of Beatrix Potter stories. Illustrated. My nephew can keep this one. Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle was my favorite. $2.

The only sad thing about all the English murder mysteries I've been reading lately is that there really isn't anything to blog about. They're just my guilty pleasure!

Getting Into Guinness

This is a fascinating history of the world's most famous record book, the Guinness Book of World Records. Its inception was as a limited print encyclopedia for pubs in the UK. The brainchild of Sir Hugh Beaver (the assistant managing director of Guinness Brewery and philanthropist) the aim was to settle those never ending pub debates of which bird was the fastest game bird in England. It soon became a fixture of pub life, and then literary life, in the UK and has spawned umpteen volumes and TV shows since its first publishing in 1955. Larry Olmsted, the author and owner of two Guinness titles, starts the book off with an introduction to Ashrita Furman who currently holds 113 current records and overall has set or broken 300 Guinness World Records, more than anyone in history. Olmsted goes on to explore some of the fabled legends of Guinness including the guy who won the world record for holding live rattlesnakes from his mouth and the creepy fingernail guy that terrified me as a child (I can't even post a picture, it still makes me want to vomit).

The book covers the insane lengths that communities, cities and countries have gone to to earn a place for themselves in the book (the construction of a 28-mile long sausage or a village in Australia trying to host the world's largest pub crawl). Even more insane is the dedication, time and effort people put into winning or breaking records. Furman has done 131,000 pogo stick jumps in 24 hours, walking 80.95 miles with a milk bottle balanced on his head (never touching it or letting it fall), and somersaulting the entire length of Paul Revere's ride - over 12 miles in 10.5 hours.

The author talks about how some of the records have gotten stranger and stranger - fastest time to place six eggs in eggcups using the feet, most snails on face, heaviest vehicle pulled by eyelids, etc. The author himself has won two awards - one for the Greatest Distance Traveled Between Two Rounds of Golf Played on the Same Day (he golfed in both Australia and California on the same calendar day). His last record was for the Longest Marathon Poker Game at 72hr and 2min without sleep.

I found the stories about the crackpots who try and set new records (without getting clearance first) to be the most shocking - a Doctor in India let his 15 year old son perform a C-Section on an anesthetized woman in an effort to get him the title of "youngest surgeon." Also, some categories such as most wine consumed in an hour and most beer chugged while upside down have sadly (but smartly) been retired. One man, Frenchman Michel Lotito, has eaten the following in his quest to enter the book (and enter it again and again): eighteen bicycles, fifteen shopping carts, seven television sets, six chandeliers, two beds, a pair of skis, a computer, and an entire airplane (a Cessna 150).

So, it was a really interesting and fun read. I highly recommend it.

My Name Is Red

I got this book from the farmer's market in Pilsen in the summer. While I was browsing the book table, a woman and I started talking about which books we had already read, which we loved, etc. I pointed out Suite Francaise and mentioned that it was one of my favorites. She recommended a massive tome called My Name is Red. She said she loved it and encouraged me to take it. I saw that the first chapter was titled "I Am A Corpse" and said, hey why not.

Well, it did not make my favorites list. It also didn't really make my recommendation list either. I have never read anything in this genre before and it was an interesting experience. The book is set in 16th century Istanbul. And the main plot premise is that a group of miniaturists commissioned by the Sultan (miniaturists are artists) begin to earn the wrath of others because of their attempts to paint like the infidels of the West. This infidel style involves painting images of people and things in a way that makes them identifiable (what we know of today as portraits). This style is said to be against the Sultan's and the Koran's will. Anyway, there is a murder of one of the artists and the book takes 413 pages to reveal the identity of the murderer. Along the way there is a love story between a man and his cousin and much historical and social commentary about life in 16th century Istanbul. I did find some of it interesting; however sometimes the tangents about artistic style completely lost me.

My favorite part of the book was its use of multiple narrative voices to tell the story. As I mentioned before, the first chapter was told from the point of view of the murdered artist, laying dead at the bottom of the well. Some of the narrative voices are from the drawings, yes the drawings, themselves (including a tree, the devil and a gold coin).

So, it was interesting to read a story like this. Not really my style though.

Favorite Passages:

Before my birth there was infinite time, and after my death, inexhaustible time. I never thought of it before: I'd been living luminously between two eternities of darkness.

I hear the question upon your lips: What is it to be a color? Color is the touch of the eye, music to the deaf, a word out of the darkness.

This is what occurred to me the moment before I was beheaded: The ship shall depart from the harbor; this was joined in my mind with a command to hurry; it was the way my mother would say "hurry" when I was a child. Mother, my neck aches and all is still. This is what they call death. But I knew that I wasn't dead yet. My punctured pupils were motionless, but I could still see quite well through my open eyes. What I saw from ground level filled my thoughts: The road inclining slightly upward, the wall, the arch, the roof of the workshop, the sky...this is how the picture receded.

Old Dog, New Tricks

Strawberry Fields

I am not going to lie. This book caught my eye simply because of the title. Well, that sounded stupid, isn't that how a lot of books catch people's eyes? OK, well this title caught my eye because I am a huge Beatles fan. Now, this book has absolutely nothing to do with the Beatles, but on first review it still looked interesting.

The short version: told from many different perspectives, Strawberry Fields is the story of a group of immigrants from Europe and Africa who find themselves picking strawberries on a farm in Kent, England. This is the premise that brings them together, and then, of course, many things happen and they begin a journey together (somewhat) around England.

Here was my inner monologue when reading this book and there is a spoiler, if you consider revealing a major part of the book's ending a spoiler.

1. Well, this isn't too bad.

2. I really like how the narrative voice keeps changing and keeping things interesting. Irina, the young Polish girl is in first person. Andriy, the handsome Polish miner's son is in third person. Emmanuel, the God-fearing singer from Malawi tells his stories through broken English letters to his sister.

3. Is this part being told from a dog's point of view?

4. It is. This is the single best character in the book. "I AM DOG I AM GOOD DOG I RUN FAST."

5. The whole chapter of the book that takes place at chicken farm / processing plant is horrifying. I had to skip most of it. I never want to eat a chicken again.

6. Maybe I shouldn't read this book...

7. Ooh! Eco terrorists!

8. You know, the single best part of this book is the inner monologue of the dog. It reminds me of the movie "Up".

9. Did they SERIOUSLY just kill the dog? A few pages from the end? What the *#$@.

Favorite passages:

It is the privilege of young people to fall in love with the wrong person, and they did.

I AM DOG I AM GOOD DOG I SIT WITH MY MAN I EAT DOG FOOD MEAT MAN EATS MAN FOOD BREAD FISH WE ALL EAT WE ALL SIT ON SMALL SMOOTH STONES NEAR BIG WATER SUN SHINES HOT THIS WATER IS NOT GOOD TO DRINK BAD TASTE BIG WATER RUNS AFTER DOG DOG RUNS AFTER BIG WATER BIG WATER HISSES AT DOG SSSS DOG BARKS AT BIG WATER WOOF DOG SNIFFS BIG WATER SNIFF SNIFF NO DOG SMELL NO MAN SMELL ONLY BIG WATER SMELL EVERYWHERE STONES WOOD WEEDS WASTE DOG FINDS MAN-SHOE BESIDE WATER WET SHOE GOOD MAN-SMELL SHOE DOG BRINGS WET SHOE TO SOUR-PISS-STRONG-FEET-SMELL MAN HE IS HAPPY GOOD DOG HE SAYS I AM GOOD DOG I AM DOG

The World Without Us

If ever a book makes you want to root for the end of humankind on earth, it is Alan Weisman's The World Without Us. Man, by the end of reading this last night I was depressed and definitely on Team Nature.

Billed as a grand "thought experiment", the book explores what would happen to Earth (and thus all contained in it) if mankind were to be wiped out. Kaput. Weisman begins by helping us understand what the world was like before we evolved into mass-migrating and weapon using hunters. One word: megafauna. My favorite part of any book is when the author starts talking about 13,000 pound ground sloths and glyptodonts "resembling armor-plated Volkswagens, with tails that ended in spiked maces."

The book presents a really-well written and devastating portrait of the collateral damage that comes with an evolving and ever more technologically advancing human race: extinctions, extreme pollution (literally an ocean full of plastic), eroding ozone layers and melting ice caps.

On that feel good note, Weisman turns his attention to what would happen to all aspects of life on Earth if we were no longer there to bug it. What would happen to the cities, the farms, the nature reserves, the nuclear power plants? What would the world look like without war (he visits the DMZ in between North and South Korea for an idea of how nature would fill in the spaces) or electricity (what would happen to those nuclear reactors)? Would we basically just leave the earth with a legacy of non-destroyable plastic and rubber tires?

Well, it's not all hopeless, I guess. But this book was massively thought-provoking, however much it might have depressed me. I definitely recommend it.

My Favorite Passage:
"I'm so amazed," he says, "by the ability of life to hang on to anything. Given the opportunity, it goes everywhere. A species as creative and arguably intelligent as our own should somehow find a way to achieve a balance. We have a lot to learn, obviously. But I haven't given up on us." At his feet, thousands of tiny, trembling shells are being resuscitated by hermit crabs. "Even if we don't: if the planet can recover from the Permian [age], it can recover from the human."

The lesson of every extinction, says the Smithsonian's Doug Erwin, is that we can't predict what the world will be 5 million years later by looking at the survivors. "There will be plenty of surprises. Let's face it: who would've predicted the existence of turtles? Would would ever have imagined that an organism would essentially turn itself inside out, pulling its shoulder girdle inside its ribs to form a carapace? If turtles didn't exist, no vertebrate biologist would've suggested that anything would do that: he'd have been laughed out of town. The only real prediction you can make is that life will go on. And that it will be interesting."

Saturday

You don't read Ian McEwan, or at least, you don't read Ian McEwan's Saturday, for it's fast-paced, non-stop action filled scenes. Indeed, this book spends much of the time inside it's own head, or at least, the main character's head. Saturday takes place on one day in February 2003, in London. The morning starts off with Henry Perowne witnessing a near catastrophe and slowly, very slowly, ravels and unravels from there.

That's not to say that this book is boring. There are some slow moments but the book is written very gracefully and there are both lovely and nail-biting moments. The climax of the novel almost comes without warning.

My favorite passage:

No longer tired, Henry comes away from the wall where he's been leaning, and walks into the middle of the dark auditorium, towards the great engine of sound. He lets it engulf him. There are these rare moments when musicians together touch something sweeter than they've ever found before in rehearsals or performance, beyond the merely collaborative or technically proficient, when their expression becomes as easy and graceful as friendship or love. This is when they give us a glimpse of what we might be, of our best selves, and of an impossible world in which you give everything you have to others, but lose nothing of yourself. Out in the real world there exist detailed plans, visionary projects for peaceable realms, all conflicts resolved, happiness for everyone, for ever - mirages for which people are prepared to die and kill. Christ's kingdom on earth, the workers' paradise, the ideal Islamic state. But only in music, and only on rare occasions, does the curtain actually lift on this dream of community, and it's tantalisingly conjured, before fading away with the last notes.

Confederates in the Attic

Who would have thought that I would enjoy reading a book about the Civil War and the people who love it as much as I did? I sure didn't. I love travel writing, and historical travel writing at that, but I often overlook books written in and about my own country. Tony Horwitz's book Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War was a tremendous eye-opener to some of the beliefs and passions of the lower-half of this country. I had heard of Civil War reenactors and knew that people were still attached to the Confederate flag - enough to stand screaming in the streets to protest it's removal from this or that state's capitol dome. However, I really hadn't given much more thought to them than that - until this book. Living in a liberal, urban city like Chicago, it is easy to forget that at least half of the population of this country is vastly opposed to my politics.

Horwitz is a clear Civil War and history buff, and his travels throughout the South and major landmarks of the Civil War are refreshingly eager and passionate. Even when he disagrees with the people he meets, Horwitz portrays them in an even and honest light, not allowing his personal views to influence the reader's experience, and not turning the people into caricatures. This book was not only an engaging historical overview of the Civil War and major battles, it was a great insight into the mentality of those who still remember and revere the Confederate States of America and men like Jefferson Davis and Robert E Lee.

On his tours throughout Alabama, Virginia, Georgia and other southern states, Horwitz befriends a hardcore Civil War reenactor and spends many a night in filthy, stinking period piece clothing, marching towards Gettysburg with other hardcore reenactors. He visits the last living widow of a Confederate soldier and sits in on many a Sons/Daughters of the Confederacy meeting. Horwitz visits a town in Kentucky torn apart by a recent murder of a white man (by a young black man) sparked by the flying of the Confederate flag. He discovers that certain cities in the south rebuilt themselves with little to no recognition of their divided racial history, while others still revel in their rebel status.

I most appreciated the historical lesson about the Civil War that this book provided. I remember covering it in middle school but don't remember much about the war, a problem that Horwitz discusses in the book. The staggering amount of blood shed and lives lost is almost unbelievable. Horwitz also clears up many myths and misconceptions about the war (on both sides) for the reader.

Definitely a good book and a recommendation from me...if you like this sort of stuff.