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.