fatvegan

I've been reading it for the whole train trip home. All 800 pages of it. Pretty terrible book.

I read The Guns of Navarone the other week, mostly while I was tootling around Adelaide. It was a fun book. Good adventure, with the pleasant taste of literature. Far less transparent and thick-witted than someone like Tom Clancy, but just as entertaining.

How well Megan McArdle explains why I lost interest in Harry Potter. The arbitrariness of the details and the ad-hoc-ness of the plot distract me too much to enjoy the coolness of the rest of it. Narnia and Lord of the Rings got those parts right. So even if they weren't as "fun", they kept me absorbed and engaged.

Norwegian Wood is a pretty good book. I finished it last week after snuffling through it pretty quickly. I have trouble reading and finishing books these, and even though I didn't really like it at first and ended up being keen to get to the end. It's rather interesting because it has an intense atmosphere of autobiography, to the point that it starts to feel self-indulgent. But it actually isn't. The author did study in Tokyo, but that's the extent of the similarity.

The characters were very plain and offered no wisdom or insights. One of the things that really struck was the lack of substantive observation of the world. The characters were in they're late teens and they acted and talked exactly as people of that age would. That's a little surprising, because most authors want to look clever. There were long painful conversations where neither participate was making that much sense. When they discussed their feelings they used all the naive pop psychology that teenagers love. The author wasn't trying to make a comment about the world or offer insights into people. I really think the only thought on his mind was to tell the story. He said that he did it as an experiment because he'd never written a proper "novel" before that. It ended up selling far more copies than any of his other books.

The book was preoccupied with sex, which was a little unbecoming of writer of 50 or 60, but fitted the 20 year-old narrator perfectly. The fascination with sex mixed in with a desire to be adult and not become obsessed reminded me a lot of myself at that age. It was very similar to Youth in that respect, but without the amazing ponderings that Coetzee does so well. Some of the sex was really strange too. There was a several page long description of the "seduction" of a 30 year-old woman by a 13 year-old girl. The author offered no criticism or explanation. The main character just sat and listened to this older woman explain how her life had been ruined by a young girl who had seduced and had sex with her. She believed that girl was actually evil but was entranced by her beauty and confidence. The author doesn't offer any comfort by gently discrediting the woman. You actually have no idea what the author himself thinks about it.

It is also kind of a bloodbath. I knew suicide in Japan was common, but I didn't know it was quite like that. I'm assuming the book represents the situation in Japan in the 1970s, because everything else about it is so real. So most of the book was either reflecting on sadness or sex and more often both. For a book that is made up of personal reflection and thoughtful conversations the lack of actual insight is striking, and actually quite a credit to the author. I think this is the sort of book you get when a better than normal writer tries to write a normal book.

I just finished reading All Quiet on the Western Front this morning. It was a great book. It has forced me to think all over again about pacificism, which I've never been persuaded by. For anyone who's marginally pacifist, it's definitely worth reading.

I love it. Maybe less than Disgrace. But it's so groovy. I've got the old problem of wanting to quote half the book on the blog. But I won't. Except it's all about social appropriateness, and eating animals, and being a wanker. If I could make a compendium of all the things are think are interesting and really good to talk about, it would look like a really badly written Coetzee book.

I just read The Prince which Niccoló Machiavelli wrote way back in the olden days. It was very interesting. I disagreed with lots of it of course, but it was so ahead of its time. The interesting thing was that it wasn't amoral at all. I'd got the impression that he favoured pursuing power for power's sake, and any means were justified. I think this book is his best known one, and the one which gave us the meaning of the word machiavellian. But it's not nearly as distasteful as I'd expected. It's actually not that different from a lot of what goes on today. He talks about acceptable brutality as a path to stability and peace. And about the "vice" of generosity in a leader.

That's at the core of what people don't like it I think. But he was also describing very different times. I reckon he was in favour of free republics, but thought there was value in making for more efficient autocracies while there were so many of them. I really believe that if his analysis was right, and has been put into practice, then a lot of war would have been avoided.

Lots of it was about military strategy, which is always cool. He talked about the military strategies of all sorts of blokes from 500 BC through to the 1500s AD. The history was really interesting too. I love history. Some of the characters in Gladiator were based on real people. Marcus Aurelius and his son Commodus were real people. They were both quite similar to the characters in the movie, but Marcus Aurelius was killed by his own soldiers. And Commodus was well known for fighting against gladiators in the Colosseum and was a really nasty chap that no one liked. There was also a big famous general guy, called Maximinus, who became emperor. Some people reckon he organised the plot to kill Marcus Aurelius. So maybe the Gladiator character was based on him. It's made me want to go and read some history books. Although history books about the BC bit of the Roman Empire, rather than the Renaissance. The Roman Empire was bloody amazing. It went for a hell of a long time, and survived a lot. It's all so groovy.

I'm reading a book at the moment called The Rhythm Section. I don't like it much, but apparently it was recommended by The Economist, so I must be wrong.

It's all about terrorism and this girl who becomes a secret agent because her parents die and she gets depressed and then gets sick of being a prostitute. The interesting thing is that the big plot at the end of it is about a suicide hijacking. She's got to try and stop it by infiltrating this Muslim terrorist organisation. The plan is for 5 suicide hijackers to hijack a plane flying out of Italy or Greece, and fly it into Manhattan in New York. The organisation is funded by wealthy Arab oil families, and the guy who runs it trained in one of Osama bin Laden's camps.

I checked the date on the book, and it was published in 1999. That's pretty amazing I reckon. I wonder if Osama (or whoever did the bombing) read the book and got the idea from there. This guy here noticed it too.

What's the equivalent verb for the noun resilience? Resile?

Resilience is one super duper book. Everyone should read it. I finished it back some time in March or something. It's about resilience, of all things. It's written by Anne Deveson who I love. It's a shame she's in her 70s.

I finished reading Perfume fair while ago. It was Jo's Christmas present from me a couple of years ago I think. It was very good, although I'm not sure that Jo would like it. It's very black and sordid. Just the sort of book I like.

Grenouille reminded me a lot of myself. He was born without a scent. No one liked him because they couldn't smell him. Or not that they didn't like him even; they were just disconcerted by him. I often feel like I have that effect on people. Sometimes they dislike me. But mostly I think people are just disconcerted. I'm pretty sure I wasn't born with anything particularly wrong with me. I think it's just the way I behave. However that is.

But it was very good.

With some of them he would have liked to go to bed, that he could not deny - only by bringing a woman to her own dark core, after all, could a man reach his own dark core - but he was too scared. Their ecstasies would be volcanic; he would be too puny to survive them.

I'm reading Youth again. I love it. So, so many wonderful little passages.

I found a wonderful book today, while looking for mum's birthday present. I wasn't sure what to get for mum, but now I've got too many ideas, and I'm not sure which to pick. I may have to borrow some money from her to pay for it too. Funny funny.

But this book. It's about this rabbit and this hedgehog. They give each other presents. And the pages are huge. Like 50x50cm. Just huge. And the drawings are really big. Ooh, I found a blob on the back.

Rabbit and Hedgehog don't know when their birthdays are. So they decide to celebrate them tomorrow, just in case. But what should they give each other as a present? Both come up with the perfect solution - but not for the reasons they first thought of...

The God of Small Things is definitely my favourite book ever. Sometimes I forget that, and will tell people it's some other book. But really, that is my favourite.

I'm reading this book called Pedagogies of difference : rethinking education for social change. I'm up to chapter 6 which is especially interesting. It's called The Struggle for Happiness: Commodified Black Masculinities, Vernacular Culture, and Homoerotic Desires.

That damn homoerotica keep rearing it's ugly head in the oddest places. I'm not really reading that book. But I wish I was. It popped up in my searches for books for my social science project. God bless nutty social research.