Deb's BookBlog

National Book Awards

2004-11-23T21:32:00.000-08:00

National Book Award Winners were announced a few days ago.
I'm not sure if I'm that into the National Book Awards. None of the finalists or award-winners really excited me that much. And any award committee that gives literary prizes to Judy Blume and Stephen King is just silly in my book.

More Book Orders--Literary Anti-Semites and Polish Intellectuals--not necessarily the same thing

2004-11-17T23:04:00.000-08:00

Just ordered another two books that I wanted from Readers Subscription:

The American Language, by H.L. Mencken. A rabid anti-semite, but a great writer.
New and Collected Poems, 1931-2001, by Czeslaw Milosz. I have only read a few poems by Milosz, but I have been reading a lot about Poland under the Communists lately, most recently, Milosz's The Captive Mind, where he speaks about his life under the Nazis and the Communists.

Also, I really loved Shah of Shahs and The Emperor by Ryzard Kapuscinski. That led me to order the rest of his books from Amazon:

The Soccer War about observations over decades of unrest in Africa and the Middle East
Imperium, about the collapse of the Soviet Union
The Shadow of the Sun, about western attitudes toward Africa
Another Day of Life, about the Angolan civil war

Lastly, my professor recommended Main Currents of Marxism: The Founders, by Leszek Kolakowski, who is apparently a famous Polish intellectual.

I like TNR

2004-11-15T19:36:00.000-08:00

The post-election wrap-up was too depressing so I went straight to the books section in the Nov 15 edition of The New Republic (one of my favorite magazines). They had a review of a new crop of Alexander the Great books, so I'm ordering some from Amazon:

Alexander the Great: Hunt for a New Past, by Paul Cartledge. (His book on The Spartans was excellent.)
Alexander: Destiny and Myth, by Claude Mosse
Alexander the Conqueror: The Epic Story of the Warrior King, by Laura Foreman

Book Club Orders

2004-11-15T18:28:00.000-08:00

I did a little shopping today at Readers Subscription and History Book Club. At Readers Subscription I got:

The Double, and Blindness by Jose Saramago
The Fourth Crusade and the Sack of Constantinople by Jonathan Phillips
Chomsky: Ideas and Ideals by Neil Smith
The Red and the Black by Stendhal (new Modern Library translation by Burton Raffel)
The Kill by Zola

At History Book Club I got:

His Excellency: George Washington by Joseph J. Ellis
1968 by Mark Kurlansky
The Turks in World History, by Carter Vaughn Findley
Making Friends With Hitler: Lord Londonderry, the Nazis, and the Road to World War II, by Ian Kershaw, author of The Hitler Myth and an excellent two-volume biography of Hitler (Hitler: Hubris: 1889-1936 and Hitler: Nemesis: 1936-1945.
The Nuremberg Interviews, by Leon Goldensohn and Robert Gellately.

New York Bookstores Part III

2004-11-14T21:21:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I went to Coliseum Books, which had a very nice selection of fiction and literature and a very crappy history and social sciences selection. Nevertheless, I was able to pick out some good stuff.

The Emperor, by Ryszard Kapuściński. You may remember that I recommended his book Shah of Shahs, about the Iranian Revolution. This one is about the Ethiopian dictator Haile Selassie and his overthrow in 1974.
Persepolis, by Marjane Satrapi. This is a memoir written in comic-book form (think Maus) by a woman who grew up in Iran and escaped during the revolution. Persepolis 2: The Story of A Return, is supposed to be out now too, so I will order it.
The Emergence of Modern Turkey, by Bernard Lewis. I am going to Turkey soon and also have been reading a bunch about the Balkans so it’s about time I learn more. I’m not sure Bernard Lewis is the right person for my first in-depth history of Turkey, since some have accused him of an “Orientalist” bias, so I will keep looking around and read this with an open mind. (I personally loved his book, Semites and Anti-Semites, however.) And of course the DK Eyewitness guides are my favorite travel books so I will get the one on Turkey as well.
The Aleph and Other Stories by Jorge Luis Borges. I have read a couple of these before, but have never read “The Aleph” itself. Will probably finish this on the plane before I post.
Women Who Dared: A Book of Postcards. Have to keep up my feminist street cred, nothing more inspiring than looking at Susan B. Anthony et al’s stunning visages. :)
Augustus: A Novel by John Williams. Yes, I’m not generally a fan of historical fiction but this has been compared to I, Claudius and Claudius the God by Robert Graves, which are two books that I forgot to put on my Best Fiction of All Time list. So I am taking a chance.
The Mrs. Dalloway Reader, Virginia Woolf. I am obsessed with this book so it’s great to have an edition that has additional literary criticism.

New York Bookstores Part II

2004-11-12T10:21:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I went to this huge Borders in Columbus Circle. I usually like Borders but this one was way too spread out and the sections were really disorganized. I did find one book though:

No Star Too Beautiful: A Treasury of Yiddish Stories, edited by Joachim Neugroschel. Nice paperback edition (I hate hardcovers).

This Country is Scary...

2004-11-12T10:15:00.000-08:00

...and here are a few books that won't make you feel any better about it:

Philip Roth's The Plot Against America talks about an America where Charles Lindbergh defeats FDR for the presidency in 1940. Charles Lindbergh--American hero, as well as Nazi sympathizer and rabid antisemite. What if the unspeakable happened in our country, how would "decent people" behave? Roth is of course most famous for Portnoy's Complaint, which is my personal favorite.
I went to a taping of The Daily Show yesterday (It was awesome!) and Kenneth Pollack was on talking about his new book The Persian Puzzle: The Conflict Between Iran and America. We often forget about Iran when we think about the complexities of the Middle East. This book reminds us of that.
And of course, I just finished America (The Book): A Citizen's Guide to Democracy Inaction by Jon Stewart. It is hilarious.
Censored 2005: The Top 25 Censored Stories by Peter Phillips. Read this stuff. It's important.
You Are Being Lied To: The Disinformation Guide to Media Distortion, Historical Whitewashes and Cultural Myths, by Russ Kick. Another great resource.

Really good books I have finished 3/4 of Part I...

2004-11-11T16:00:00.000-08:00

...but that doesn't mean that I won't finish them someday. Something to look forward to in my old age.

Mussolini and the Jews, by Meir Michaelis. I was looking for books on Italians and Jews during World War II, because I had heard that Jews were actually very active in the Italian Fascist party before Italy entered into its pact with Germany. Mussolini and the Jews is an excellent treatment of the origins of anti-Jewish behavior in Italy, Mussolini's evolving thoughts on the Jews, and how Jews were treated during the Holocaust. For some reason I've just never gotten around to reading the last 20 or so pages, but I need to.
Ulysses by James Joyce. I think I'm on page 500 or so, then I got bogged down :) One of my problems is I have never been able to find an edition of Ulysses that has the notes inline. I hate having to turn to the back or actually, what I got was an entirely separate book called Ulysses Annotated by Don Gifford and I would read them together. Some day I will finish it. There's also an excellent lecture on Ulysses as part of this Teaching Company lecture series that I like.
Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray. I started reading this a few weeks ago and then needed to get focused on my reading for class. As soon as I can get back to it I will finish it--it's pretty fantastic. Not going to see the movie until I finish it.

Books that should be read together Part I

2004-11-11T15:37:00.000-08:00

Mrs. Dalloway (another one of the great fiction books of all time) by Virginia Woolf
Eminent Victorians, by Lytton Strachey
Goodbye to All That, by Robert Graves
Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens
The Great War and Modern Memory by Paul Fussell

The Pyramid

2004-11-11T14:11:00.000-08:00

I finished The Pyramid. I'm now ordering The Three-Arched Bridge by the same author. Lately I have been reading a lot about the Balkans, and want to learn more. I also just finished Making a Nation, Breaking a Nation by Andrew Wachtel, in which Wachtel discusses the impact of culture on the notion of Yugolslavia as a country and it's eventual dissolution. It directed me to two books that seem very interesting:

The Dictionary of the Khazars by Milorad Pavic. This is a novel of intertwining stories told by Muslim, Christian, and Jewish figures who all want to claim the Khazars as converting to their religion.
The Bridge on the Drina, by Ivo Andric. This novel charts thousands of years in the same Bosnian town. Interesting that two books, one about Albania and one about Bosnia, each have this bridge imagery. Some say it relates to "Eastern" Europe as a "bridge" between Eastern and Western cultures.

New York Bookstores Part I

2004-11-10T20:28:00.000-08:00

I'm in New York right now and am trying to hit a couple of bookstores that I haven't been to before. Today I went to Argosy Books, which specializes in old and rare books but also has a pretty decent used selection for history, philosophy, and fiction. The atmosphere also was really great, very British, green lampshades and old maps. I got the following books ($3 each!) there:

The Pyramid, by Ismail Kadare. I had never heard of this author before, he is Albanian, writes in French, and treats issues of despotism/totalitarianism. It is a Vintage International book, an imprint I love, and lately I have been reading a lot about Eastern Europe as part of a class I'm taking. Next quarter will be Modern Russian History, and I've already started my reading list for that.
Tolstoy, a biography by George Rapall Noyes. I haven't read a biography of Tolstoy, and I've been meaning to. It was originally published in 1918, so I am going to have to search out some modern stuff as well.
Masters of World Literature: Tennyson, by Christopher Ricks. I love literary criticism and Christopher Ricks (his latest collection of essays, Reviewery, is very good), and even though Tennyson is not my favorite, this looked interesting.

Best Books of All Time: Fiction

2004-10-25T21:04:00.000-07:00

Here are what I consider the best books of all time (fiction; more on non-fiction later), in no particular order:

A Confederacy of Dunces, by John Kennedy Toole. After you read the book you will realize how tragic it is that the author killed himself after not being able to get it published. It was later published by his mother and won The Pulitzer Prize. They are making a movie out of it that will be coming out soon, starring Will Ferrell as the main character, Ignatius J. Reilly, which in my mind is perfect casting.
God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, by Kurt Vonnegut. Not his most famous but definitely his best. And I've read his entire bibliography more than once, including Bagombo Snuff Box. :) Which reminds me not of a greatest book of all time but a pretty good one by Vonnegut's wife, Jill Krementz, called The Jewish Writer. It's a series of portraits of authors like Saul Bellow, (whose Mr. Sammler's Planet is on my list) and Isaac Bashevis Singer (whose Collected Stories is on my list.)
Oedipus on the Road, by Henry Bauchau. This is another writer, like Par Lagerkvist below, who just came out of the blue for me. This book was like a fever dream--I had to finish it in one sitting and was stunned when I closed it.
Barabbas and The Dwarf, by Par Lagerkvist. Lagerkvist's choice of heroes (in the former book, the title character is the convicted thief who is spared by the crowd at Jesus' expense, in the latter it is a dwarf in the court of the Medicis) is striking and his prose is spare and powerful. Both of these books will knock you for a loop.
Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison. I will never know what it's like to be the victim of racism. This book gives one the smallest of glimpses into that world.
The Fixer, by Bernard Malamud. This is one of those books that gets to the essence of what it means to be Jewish.
The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoevsky. What can I say. They always make you read Crime and Punishment in school but this is the truly subversive of the two.
The Color Purple, by Alice Walker. I think I saw the movie (which was also great) before I read the book. The book is still worth it.
The Tin Drum, by Günter Grass. This is a book about life in Poland under the Nazi occupation and post-WWII that never mentions the Jews. This is only one of the reasons this book is spellbinding. I must warn you this book is vaguely magic realist (which I hate with a passion) but still great.
Sula, by Toni Morrison. Toni Morrison is another writer that I have read quite a bit of. My first experience with her was when I read Beloved in 12th grade. (That was a while ago...I can't imagine an English teacher in George W. Bush's america being able to get away with that. Please please please VOTE for KERRY.) Sula along with Honore De Balzac's Cousin Bette is one of the great novels about how evil women are to each other. (Pere Goriot, btw, is Balzac's best novel, IMO.)
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller. Yossarian. Major Major Major Major. The nurse with nipples like bing cherries. If you read one book on this list, read this one. His other major books, Something Happened and God Knows, are also quite good, but this is the one I can recite practically from memory.
Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace. Fiction with footnotes! And actually, while I was looking for the link on Amazon I saw Infinite Jest: A Reader's Guide, which I wish I had had when I was originally reading the book. I will purchase it next chance I get.
A Prayer for Owen Meany, by John Irving. The main character exclusively SPEAKS IN ALL CAPITAL LETTERS and it works! I'm a sucker for a good gimmick.
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and the Restaurant at the End of the Universe by Douglas Adams. The rest of the books in the series are good, but these are masterpieces. I also hear there's a movie coming out soon. Hurray!
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey. I read this in one night at my grandmother's house when I was 12. It scared the crap out of me. And again, I'm no snob, the movie is excellent too.

There are many more. I will think of them in the course of writing. More later.

Where I get my books

2004-10-22T18:02:00.000-07:00

Not only do I like to collect books, I like to collect bookstores as well. Amazon is of course my favorite online bookstore ever. I started using it when it first launched and I've bought over 2,000 books there. It is not only a great bookstore, but a great piece of software. Every time I think about a feature I'd like to have, it pops up on the site a day later. Also, I love the UK version of Amazon; remember, people actually read over there so the selection is quite different!Although I buy lots of books online when I know what I want, I still love physical bookstores of all kinds. Here are some of my favorites:

Every week or so my father would take me to Johnson's Bookstore, in Springfield, MA. It had both new and used books, and I always used to get something from the used section or from the 50 cent titles that they stored outside the shop. Johnson's opened in 1897 and closed in 1997.
University bookstores in general are interesting, because I like to browse the textbooks and see what's new for each of the classes. I used to work at the Boston University Bookstore in Boston, MA, and used up all my savings buying books with my discount. It's a Barnes and Noble now, but I can still find great stuff there. And I really like the University Bookstore in Seattle, WA as well. And of course the Harvard Bookstore is good.
Some non-chain bookstores that are wonderful: Bailey/Coy Books in Seattle, WA is very hip, good political stuff and interesting fiction. Twice Sold Tales, also in Seattle is a good used bookstore--lots of classics and other good stuff cheap. And Elliott Bay Book Company has a great selection of History, Biography, and Fiction.
London is the best book city ever. I highly recommend the book Book Lover's London, because although there are many famous bookstores in London that are fabulous, like Foyle's, there are little-known bookstores that are great as well. For example, I love museum bookstores in general, and the bookstores of both the British Museum and British Library are fantastic. And although people usually go to Harrod's for other types of shopping, including the food halls, its bookstore is quite excellent. And of course if you are already in London and are really into books, you should take a trip to Hay-on-Wye in Wales, otherwise known as the "town of books." They have more bookstores per square foot than anywhere in the world.
New York is a city I have yet to explore fully in terms of bookstores. I am going there in a few weeks and will give the report at a later date. I have been to the Strand, however, which was slightly disappointing. This is NYC's most famous bookstore but it was not very user-friendly. Really hard to get around and get at the books. I heard they are redoing it though so we will see when that is done.
And of course, Powells, the "city block of books" in Portland, Oregon. Great selection, great layout, great customer experience. This is one of my favorite bookstores to browse in.
Lastly, many people pooh-pooh chain bookstores, but I'm a big fan of both Barnes and Noble and Borders. Their fiction sections are consistently excellent. If you want history or other more obscure subjects, look somewhere else.

I'll talk about Greatest Books of All Time and book magazines and journals in my next few posts.

NOT your father's Book-of-the-Month Club

2004-10-22T07:31:00.000-07:00

I have always hated the Book-of-the-Month club. Super-expensive, only selection is what's on the New York Times' bestseller list. That's fine if all you're interested in is the Da Vinci Code. BTW, I actually read the Da Vinci Code--I usually hate those Tom Clancy-esque pseudo-intellectual thrillers, and Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum covers the same subject matter and was much better--but my husband was reading it on the plane and I started looking over his shoulder and all of a sudden I was reading it too and then all of a sudden I had finished the book. It was like eating a bunch of candy bars, it felt good going down but I was sick afterwards; the characters and dialogue are atrocious, the trivia was fun to read. What was good about reading the book is that it actually led me to another book by the only author of historical fiction (another genre I usually hate) I ever read: Margaret George, who wrote the following excellent books: Mary, Queen of Scotland & the Isles, Memoirs of Cleopatra, and the book the Da Vinci Code led me to, Mary, Called Magdalene.

Anyway, there are a lot more book clubs out there that are not like the traditional BOMC. (Although I think most of them are owned by BOMC. And by book club I'm talking about a place to get books, not Oprah and her friends sitting around gossiping about some Nicholas Sparks piece of shit. I hate that kind of book club mostly because I hate talking to other people about books. Mostly because I don't give a crap about other people's opinions on books, with the exception of certain journals--which I'll get to in the next post--and literary criticism that is art in its own right. And partly because I hate talking to people in general.) What's great about book clubs like Quality Paperback Book Club, History Book Club, Children's-Book-of-the-Month Club, and Readers Subscription are that you can do all of the administrative work online now, you no longer have to send in the cards. Also they are starting to each come out with interesting new editions of classics and have a much better selection in general. The other book thing that I subscribe to is Library of America, which just has great editions of American classics. I get one in the mail every month and it is nice to be surprised.

How I read

2004-10-20T13:22:00.000-07:00

Odd, but this blog is mostly for me to track my own reading habits. I want to trace the path from book to book and eventually organize my library by when read or purchased vs. subject. I have this great software called Readerware that catalogs my books. It even sucks in information on purchases from Amazon. I'm doing the cataloging in Readerware (about 2,500 books so far, still have a lot of manual entry to do) and then will match what's on my shelves to the database.

I'll normally track my reading and purchases from week to week and maybe write a little bit more about each book, but for this first post, I'll list my recent reads (and maybe a few purchases, there are too many to remember) over the past couple of months:

Reading for "fun"

To the Scaffold (Biography of Marie Antoinette) by Carolly Erickson, Pushkin's Children by Tatyana Tolstaya, and Shah of Shahs by Rysard Kapuscinski. After I read these three books I realized that I was reading along the theme of fallen monarchies/dictatorships (Pushkin's Children contains several essays about the fall of Communism).
The Tragedy of Puddin'Head Wilson by Mark Twain. This was one of my father's favorite books but I never ended up reading it until recently. You should read it free of summarization from me. All I'll say is if you have to choose between reading The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn or Puddin'Head, go with Puddin'Head.
Barabbas and The Dwarf by Par Lagerkvist, Gertrude and Claudius by John Updike. I found both of these books in this used bookstore in Kent, WA of all places (I don't remember the name of the bookstore, but it was right near the Kent county courthouse--I was on a break from jury duty.) The weird thing is that these books have something in common--Barabbas and The Dwarf are from this amazing Swedish writer I had never heard of before, and never seen in a traditional bookstore. But he apparently won the Nobel prize in literature in 1951! John Updike, on the other hand, is obviously a very famous author but I had never heard of this particular work before. I'm not a super John Updike fan, but you must read Gertrude and Claudius. As you can tell by the title, it's a story about how the Gertrude and Claudius characters in Hamlet fell in love. Think Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead but much nastier and better.
The Crazed by Ha Jin. This is a remarkable book in that really gives the reader insight into what it's like to live in "Tiananmen" China. Yes, lately I am really into this "despotic" theme.
Slab Rat and Funnymen by Ted Heller, son of Joseph Heller, who of course wrote one of my favorite books of all time, Catch-22. (More on favorite books of all time in a later post). These are about too very different subjects: The first is about an editorial assistant trying to make it up the ladder at a magazine suspiciously similar to Vanity Fair; the second is about the rise and decline of a comedy team suspiciously like Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. Much funnier than it sounds.

Reading for school

I'm doing three things that can be characterized as "school": 1) finishing my master's in modern European history (specialty in post-war Germany) 2) taking some online business courses b/c I'm considering getting my MBA after that and 3) taking "living the jewish year" class at my synagogue so I can be a better-informed Jew. Here's what I'm reading right now:

When Nationalism Began to Hate: Imagining Politics in Nineteenth-Century Poland by Brian Porter. The course I'm taking is about Eastern Europe from the 19th century to 1939. This book's main thesis was that National Democracy, a quasi-fascist Polish political party that gained prominence in the 1920s and 30s, was borne out of liberal, "modern" ideas of the nation vs. from a reactionary, backward looking school of thought. The thing that was really interesting about the book was that in tracking the discourse of Polish political thought it pointed out that certain types of "liberal" (liberal in the 19th century European sense, not the "Masschusetts liberal" sense) rhetoric could "open spaces" for more sinister thoughts and actions to become acceptable. This definitely reminds me of the rhetoric that "compassionate conservative" George Bush uses that has opened up the path to huge deficits and encroachment on fundamental American ideals such as civil rights and the separation of church and state.
For next week, I need to read Fields of Wheat, Hills of Blood: Passages to Nationhood in Greek Macedonia, 1870-1990 by Anastasia N. Karakasidou. I don't know anything about modern Greek history so it should be interesting.
Managerial Accounting, 10th edition. The less said about this, the better. The book is fine. It's accounting.
The Book of Jewish Values, by Rabbi Joseph Telushkin. I haven't started reading this yet. Will start tonight.

Reading for work

I work at Microsoft and from time to time do some reading either on technical issues or things that help me do my job better in general. Here's what I'm reading for work lately:

Execution: The Discipline of Getting things Done, by Larry Bossidy, Ram Charan, and Charles Burck. Lots of common sense that no one ever actually follows.
Harvard Business Review on Effective Communication, by Ralph G. Nichols, Leonard A. Stevens, Fernando Bartolome, Chris Argyris. HBR never fails to pinpoint the exact issues that plague my organization.