Collected Miscellany

Long time readers of this site will know that I have rather eclectic reading habits. I read everything from literary novels and classics to mystery and thrillers (from crime to spy to supernatural) and even young adult fiction. On the non-fiction side I jump around just as much: theology, history, politics, sports, pop cultural, and inspirational/devotional to name a few. I just seem unable to focus my attention on one subject or theme for any significant period of time.

Well, another subject that is important to me and has been added to the list is parenting. As the father of a nearly two-year-old daughter, I find parenting to be the most frightening and fulfilling thing I have ever done in my life. As an avid reader, I of course often look to books for insight and help. I thought I would mention a couple of books that have crossed my desk in this area in case any readers are interested in the subject.

Tricia Goyer’s Generation NeXt Parenting: A Savvy Parent’s Guide to Getting it Right brings a unique perspective to the challenge of parenting. It is aimed primarily aimed at “Generation Xers” (born between 1961-81) and those relatively young parents faced with the challenge of raising children in today’s hectic world.

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The Litblog Co-op has announced the Read This! Winter selection: Wizard of the Crow by Ngugi wa Thiong’o. I am afraid the odds are very much against me reading a 766 plus page novel. I just know my limits and can’t see that happening (I read and enjoyed the Autumn 2006 selection Firmin which was a slim 162 pages).

My guess is I will have to learn about this interesting work via the comments and content over at LBC.

I have always found the well named Kevin Wignall a fascinating author. He is one of the authors I have had the privilege of interacting with on the web and that has only furthered my interest in his writing (for previous reviews see here and here). With that in mind I figured I should read all of his books. So I went and tracked down a copy of Among the Dead; a book that wasn’t released in the US. Looking for something different to read in 2007 I pulled it off the shelf.

The story opens with the aftermath of a tragic accident. A close knit group of college students are returning home after a night of drinking when a young women appears out of nowhere and is struck by their car. Finding her dead they panic and decide to flee rather than call the police. (I know what you’re thinking. Wasn’t this a movie? Don’t worry, it’s different. In the words of the author: “no fishermen, no horror, no Jennifer Love Hewitt (sadly).”)

After setting the scene, and the personalities involved, the story then jumps ahead ten years and focuses on Alex Stratton. Stratton it turns out is a successful psychologist – an expert in the field of disturbed sleep. It seems Stratton has been unable to put the past behind him. His life is slowly falling apart. He can’t seem to escape the guilt and it has poisoned his relationships.

To add another twist, Stratton finds out that one of the group has died in mysterious circumstances. When another member of the group dies just after reconnecting with Stratton, all sorts of paranoid scenarios begin to enter his mind. Stratton is soon forced to track down the remaining members of this once close group of friends to try and get to the bottom of these deaths. At the same time he is trying to reassert control of his own fragile psyche and life.

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I have not been reading much lately due to some family concerns, but I did recently begin to read Knights of the Black and White by Jack Whyte. The book is the first in a trilogy on the Templar Knights.

Unfortunately, I can’t give you a review of the book because I stopped about sixty pages into it. I stopped because I can’t agree on what the author is saying through his characters. The one character makes several claims which are completely false: that the apostle Paul was a gentile, not a Jew and that Jesus was not the Son of God in the flesh. At that point, I stopped reading and could not go on in good conscience. I know that this is fiction, but I can’t stomach even a fictional questioning of the beliefs that I know are true.

Before coming to this realization, I was getting a little sick of the book anyway because it was long on thought and short on action. In fact, in some parts, I was downright bored.

In short, I do not recommend this book at all.

Interesting contrast between the two reviews for Martin Amis’s soon to be released House of Meetings at amazon.com:

From Publishers Weekly

A unnamed former gulag inmate in Amis’s disappointing latest is now a rich, 84-year-old expatriate Russian taking a tour of the former gulags in 2004. The narrator chronicles his current and past experiences in a book-length letter to his American “stepdaughter,” Venus. Wry remarks on contemporary Russia and the U.S. run up against gulag reminiscences, which tell of the years 1948 through 1956, when the narrator and his brother Lev suffered in the Norlag concentration camp. The letter contains another letter, from the dying Lev, dated 1982, which was the year Lev’s son Artem died in Afghanistan. Lev’s first wife—and the narrator’s first love—was Zoya, a Jewish Russian beauty who by 1982 was an alcoholic married to a Soviet apparatchik.

The narrator’s own feeling of debasement, when, after Lev’s death, he finally meets Zoya again in Norlag’s conjugal cabin (the House of Meetings), is complicated to the point of impaction. Amis’s trademark riffs are all too muffled in his obvious research. And Venus, the narrator’s supposedly beloved stepdaughter, is such a negative space filled with trite clichés about affluent young Americans, and such irritating second guesses about her reactions, that it lends a distinctly bullying tone to the book.

From Booklist

Amis has said that he’s never been to Russia, but you’d never know that by reading House of Meetings, which stares into that country’s soul deeply enough to convince anyone who’s ever read its novels, at least. The narrator, an elderly man given to fits of rage and outbursts of generosity, is returning as a tourist to the work camp above the Arctic Circle where he was once a prisoner in Stalin’s Gulag. As he travels, he writes his memoir for an audience of one, reconstructing the love triangle that includes himself, his brother, Lev, and his brother’s wife, Zoya. (The House of Meetings is a building where Lev, also a prisoner, is allowed a single conjugal visit with Zoya.)

The grim story builds with a Dostoyevskian sense of doom and a Nabokovian dark wit. But, for a Russian novel, this one is exceedingly economical, encompassing in its brevity an exploration of Russian history and character, political intolerance and anti-Semitism, the psychology of incarcerated life and the problems of freedom, and the weight of crime on the conscience. The narrator is a man who’s done terrible things and is able to look at them philosophically–a perfect character for a fearless writer like Amis. His prognosis for Russia is grim, but fans of the writer will be gratified by this remarkable return to form.

Interesting thoughts from David Frum on the difference between Balzac and current novelists:

I first encountered Pere Goriot in a college French literature course a quarter century ago. Listening to it anew, I found myself thinking hard about why it is that modern France – modern societies generally – cannot seem to produce novels that matter in the way that Balzac’s novels mattered to his time (and still resonate in ours).

Let me try a theory:

The 19th century was a period in which different classes of people were coming more closely into contact with one another – and becoming more curious about one another. Pere Goriot for example traverses Paris from a shabby genteel lodging house to the ballroom of a great aristocrat. Goriot begins life as a journeyman baker, becomes a wealthy grain speculator, and marries one of his daughters to a count and another to a banker. The novel’s true protagonist, Eugene de Rastignac, is the son of an impoverished nobleman from southern France in Paris to study law. He becomes the lover of one of Goriot’s rich daughters; in later novels he will appear as a successful businessman, a patron of the arts, and ultimately a cabinet minister. Balzac moved in enough of these worlds to describe all of them with the ring of truth.

By contrast, so much contemporary fiction rings false, even when the details are painstakingly reported. I suffered a couple of years ago through Jane Smiley’s novel about evils of real estate and capitalism 1980s style, Good Faith . The woman did her homework! Dozens of pages about zoning, bylaws, financing …. all of it exhaustingly accurate … not a moment in which you felt the shock of reality that you can still feel in Balzac’s account of what it felt like to arrive at the door of a great house by foot rather than by carriage. Balzac was at least as disgusted by postrevolutionary France as Smiley was by Reagan’s America – but not so revolted that he hid himself away from the world on some college campus where he could spend all day every day with people exactly like himself; not so revolted that he substituted cartooning for writing.

Balzac’s France was an aristocratic society becoming steadily more egalitarian; we live in an egalitarian society that is becoming less so. Could it be that as the classes separate, they lose curiosity about each other – and become more readily satisfied by fantasy and caricature? Or could it be that the great modern masters of the 20th century taught too many of our writers to look for their material within themselves – but that unlike Joyce, Mann, and Proust, they cannot find enough there to entertain anybody but themselves?