End of the Year wrapup

Anyways, it's the end of the year and I have to catch up on my blogging. So here are my as-concise-as-possible reviews of the books I haven't previously blogged about.

The Glass Menagerie by Tennesse Williams -- Brilliant family drama with odd similarity to Brighton Beach Memoirs in each's portrayal of lower middle-class longing. The twin metaphors of the gentleman caller and Laura's glass menagerie are great writing. For anyone who likes plays, or families, or glass sculptures.

Heaven Is A Playground by Rick Telander -- Similarly to The Last Shot, which I read over the summer, Heaven is a chronicle of urban basketball. It is far superior, however, because of its greater depth in storytelling and better characters. Even Stephon Marbury cannot hold a candle to Rodney Parker, the agent-cum-benefactor running the game at Foster Park. The book also documents the setting (1970's Brooklyn) in great detail. For people who like basketball or even just New York City.

Life of Pi by Yann Martel -- Boy floats to Mexico from India in lifeboat. Oh yeah, there's a Bengal tiger there too. Set up beautifully, the story is merely an above-average survival story, but the enchanting part of the book is the strange magnetism of Piscine "Pi" Molitor Patel, the polyreligious main character who dispenses wisdom in odd ways throughout the book. It is possibly to only read it for the adventure, but that's missing the fun. For pretty much anyone and everyone.

Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw -- Mildly entertaining, but a little long. Much better in stage production as "My Fair Lady". Skip the play and read a biography of Shaw instead.

A Portrait of the Artist as A Young Man

Saying this book was a little hard to read is like saying calculus is a little hard. At first, I was completely confused by how James Joyce writes. I think the best analogy would be a Jackson Pollock painting. Joyce throws words and punctuation onto the page in a seemingly random order, but there is also a method to his madness. His writing is a tumbled mix of well-turned phrases that ultimately come together to form a semi-coherent story. The book follows Stephen Dedalus, a young Irish boy at boarding school, as he grows up, contemplates the seminary, and eventually attends college. As with Dubliners, the book deals heavily with middle-class Irish life. Both books also deal with the life and death of Charles Parnell, a great Irish politician. In Dubliners, a group of low-level politicians memorialize the man. The scene in Portrait of the Artist is set shortly after Parnell dies, and takes the shape of an argument. Stephen's father and father's friend are arguing with another devoutly Catholic friend, accusing the Church of having abandoned and attacked Parnell in his time of need, contributing to Parnell's fall from grace and death. The friend defends the Church vociferously and calls them heretics for daring to speak against the Church. This was one of the most interesting and poignant scenes for me because it really painted a picture of what their life was like back then. The pervasive religion, ties to the British (Parnell advocated an independent Ireland), and how resigned they are to their current lives.

Summer for the Gods/Inherit The Wind Comparison

Summer For the Gods by Edward Larson and Inherit The Wind by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee are both about the Scopes "monkey trial", although they go about it in very different ways. Summer is non-fiction, a fact-based historical overview of the trial. Inherit is high drama, a courtroom confrontation between two great legal minds. To achieve this drama, Inherit bends the facts a tiny bit. Inherit the Wind was originally a Broadway play, and reads like such. The main characters are loosely disguised substitutes for the actual players in the trial (Matthew Harrison Brady for William Jennings Bryan, Henry Drummond for Clarence Darrow, Bertram Cates for John Scopes), and the influence of Bryan is greatly overstated. It does make an excellent story, though, pitting the agnostic big-city lawyer (Drummond/Darrow) against the populist oratorical lion. The brief historical background provided in the play deepens the divide. Darrow's last case before the trial was that of Leopold and Loeb, where he managed to avoid the death penalty for two teenage murderers, while Bryan is a former Presidential candidate whose shining moment was when he vocalized the complaints of working people all across the country in his "Cross of Gold" speech ("You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns. You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold"). The setting of the trial in small-town America, Dayton, Tennessee, also adds a layer of prejudice against Darrow because he is agnostic, which to the townspeople is the same thing as hating God. I found interesting the fact-based/narrative-based contrast between the books. I did not mind that Inherit was partially fictionalized, as it captured the essence of the trial while still being a good story. Finally, in case anyone was wondering, the title of Inherit The Wind comes from the Bible ("He that troubleth his own house shall inherit the wind", from Proverbs).

About A Boy by Nick Hornby

I picked up this book not knowing what to expect. I loved "High Fidelity", both the book and the movie, and the other book by Hornby that I had read was decent. This book, while set up fairly differently from "High Fidelity", has similar plot threads. The main characters in each book are similar, but their foils are different. "High Fidelity"'s Rob Gordon is a neurotic, bored record store clerk who spends his days looking for women. The main character in "About A Boy", Will, is a lazy, bored man who spends his days listening to music and looking for women. Aside from a time period difference (Rob listens to the Clash and Marvin Gaye, Will to Nirvana), and Will having inherited a large sum of money, the men are carbon copies. The initial premise of the book is that Will invents a fictitious two year old, Ned, in order to be able to join a single parents group. However, the book quickly becomes more than that once Will meets Marcus, an eccentric twelve year old. Marcus is a loner at school, and he latches onto Will as a possible friend. I have not reached farther in the book, but it seems intriguing to say the least.

A Beautiful Mind by Sylvia Nasar

The book I am reading this week is A Beautiful Mind by Sylvia Nasar. The book follows mathematician John Nash, his descent into madness, and his eventual resurrection. I am only mid-way through the second part of the book, so don't expect it to have a happy ending yet. Nash, as most great mathematicians are, was a boy genius, finding an alternate solution to a famous proof in his teens. He graduated his high school in West Virginia and won a scholarship to attend Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh, which is now part of Carnegie Mellon University. This was interesting to me because in the book Carnegie is referred to as not a top-notch school, whereas now it is one of the best engineering schools in the country. Nash spent three years there before deciding to attend graduate school at Princeton. As is extensively described in the book, Princeton at that time was the greatest math school in the world, boasting an impressive faculty and an even more impressive roster of residents, such as Einstein, Godel, and von Neumann. Nash spent a few years at Princeton, where he wrote maybe his most famous paper, one that would eventually win him a Nobel Prize. His paper created the idea of Nash equilibrium points, which are points in two-player games where each player has maximal benefits. While this concept may seem to only apply to games, it has been used in economics, market theory, even military strategy. And yes, the book did become a movie with Russell Crowe.

Dubliners by James Joyce ("Ivy Day in the Committee Room")

The story "Ivy Day in the Committee Room" follows a small group of Dubliner politicians who have gathered in their party headquarters on Ivy Day. For those not familiar with this holiday, Ivy Day in Dublin is in memory of Charles Parnell, the great Irish politician. The group has gathered in the committee room seemingly by chance, but they end up reminiscing anyway about Parnell and how none of their current troubles would have occurred had Parnell been in charge. Their remembrance is touching, because it carries with it a sense of acknowledgement, that Parnell was better than any of them could hope to be. The meeting ends with a sad, almost elegiac ode to Parnell, written by the youngest member of the group. On a completely unrelated note, check out this link.

Dubliners by James Joyce/Nine Stories Reflection

Dubliners is a collection of short stories by the Irish author James Joyce. Similarly to the other collection of short stories I read earlier this year, J.D. Salinger's Nine Stories, Dubliners, rather than focusing on any particular family or series of events, is meant to evoke a time and a place. For Nine Stories, the place was the lives of the American upper-middle class, 1940s through 1950s. Dubliners crosses the Atlantic to middle-class Dublin, where everybody knows everybody and everybody is the same. The stories in these two collections are not particularly intriguing or noteworthy in any way, but the way the character's lives are painted by Salinger and Joyce makes the stories fascinating. The consciousness of the reader in "A Perfect Day For Bananafish" that something bad will happen soon is a result of the dread infused into the tale by Salinger's words. Each writer also uses the innocence of children as a device in certain stories. In Salinger's "The Laughing Man" the reader can see how the story the leader is telling reflects how his own relationship with his girlfriend is going, while the child in the story cannot connect the two instances. Likewise, the death of Father Flynn in "The Sisters" is told through the eyes of a child who knew the priest well, not to deaden the loss, but rather to enhance it. The reader and the child both realize that the priest is dead, but it is the reaction of the adults that make the story.