I took this to Egypt, along with Tristam Shandy, in what was intended to be a tales-within-tales double shot of literary love. Unfortunately, laying on the pool deck of our riverboat in the oppressive heat was not conducive to reading Sterne. I needed something lighter, and this fit the bill.
The introduction, which discusses the previous translations of the tales, is perhaps the most engrossing part of the entire book. The excerpts from the overwrought European translations, some of which were filtered through one in a bizarre game of telephone, are cringeworthy in the extreme. The prose in this version is often flowery but never painful. There are less than 300 actual "nights" of tales, and though many of them took on a nightmarishly repetitive MadLibs-like quality* after a while, they really are the perfect thing to read while floating down the Nile. Recommended, with the caveat that you need to read the second volume to find the famous tales about Aladdin and Sinbad.
* For example: There once was a young man with a face like a [noun] who met a girl with a [noun, body part] like the moon). He saw her and was unable to [verb] for days. Finally he had to see her and disguised himself as a [noun] to get closer to her. When their eyes met they both fainted and had to be revived with [noun, fragrant liquid]. Etc.
Not the Nirvana song, the book. It's a horror novel, and the author is Stephen King's son, who tried a little to conceal his identity, but without much effect. The book ended up being a bestseller, which is deserved considering how well it fulfills the requirements of the genre.
The premise is simple: guy buys a ghost on Ebay, ghost turns out to be bent on revenge. The scares are effective, and the choice to have a death or two near the beginning of the book lets us know that's Hill is in earnest. The ending could have been silly but is instead fairly disturbing, although (sort of spoiler) the drawing a doorway to another dimension bit seemed a little cliched and I'm pretty sure we've seen that in one of his father's novels. The prose is nothing exceptional, but even that is saying something, considering the painfully bad writing prevalent in many genre works.
Characterization is less consistently good. The protagonist, an aging, broody death-metal guitarist, manages to be a relatively likable despite his commission of several deplorable acts. The flavor-of-the-month groupie who happens to be living with him when this all goes down remains pretty flat. The female character with the most depth is the groupie's predecessor, who is unfortunately dead and therefore MIA for most of the novel. Overall, though, this is a decent piece of popular fiction and well above the average for horror novels. Recommended for people who value plot and chills.
Much to the dismay of fans of his A Song of Ice and Fire series, George R.R. Martin also writes other things. His participation in the Wild Cards shared universe has always been an interesting sideline. It looks like that series will be enlivened by new authors and characters, with the first new volume of short stories being Inside Straight (two more collections are to follow).
What can I say? If you're a fan of the older Wild Cards collections, you'll like this one. The overall arc consists of a bunch of Aces participating in a reality show, "American Hero" and then deciding to intervene in a thinly veiled Darfur analogue. What their narrow victory says about our actual abilities to resolve foreign conflicts is an exercise left for the reader. Recommended for those familiar with the series.
Want to spend an afternoon cringing? Why not revisit some of your old college and high school writing? A sampling of titles, for your amusement:
Vital Tedium: Homer's Catalog of Ships
Faithful Five-Fold: Gawain Deserves the Pentangle
Crying for the Moon (on Plato's Symposium)
Faces of the Ivory Virgin: Tracing the Pygmalion Narrative in Drama
Then there's my thesis "Privatizing the Police: Historical Perspectives and Future Projections for Market Solutions in Policing," submitted just after DHS nationalized airport security.
Unfortunately lost to the ages: my Lit 10 sonnet, also Pygmalion themed and with an unfortunate and unintended allusion to a demeaning sexual practice, and my college admissions essay, which was about, no joke, jelly shoes and conformity.
Actual first lines from a high school poem, which I think was published in our literary magazine:
The shell of your translucent face lighted from within the moonglow lanterns of your eyes reflected on your skin.
Here's one from my backlog of read books. The Serpent's Tale is a sequel to the unexciting but well-executed Mistress of the Art of Death, which is essential Crusaders'-era England plus C.S.I. The sequel piles on more Gumpification* and makes the protagonist a single mother, which merits only an eye roll from this quarter. I hope the series stops here, although the market for Diana Gabaldon and Sue Grafton means that the author is probably sitting on a gold mine. Not recommended. * The phenomenon of having the protagonist interact with a inordinate number of prominent personages in a piece of historical fiction.
This is unquestionably one of the most engrossing things I've seen in a long time. Don't be put off by the title; it's a documentary on philosophy and film. Part Nine is a must see (possibly nsfw).
50 Book Challenge #25: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Is there anything more pathetic than a stupid nerd? Even our largely anti-intellectual society grudgingly makes room for the geeky genius. His awkwardness is offset by his keen intelligence. He has role models in the sciences, letters, and film. His academic triumphs balance out those of the jocks on the sports field. But the outcast of outcasts is the stupid nerd. A failure at the very things that are emblematic of his adolescent tribe, the dumb nerd is every man's goat.
Oscar Wao is a painfully drawn example of just such a figure. I generally enjoy any novel with footnotes, especially one that trades on knowledge of geek pursuits, but this was less pleasurable of a read than it might have been. The point of view is at first indistinct, then varied, then disappointing. Relatedly, the style is slangy and informal in a way that some may find grating. The narrator's characterization seemed inconsistent, but perhaps I underestimate the likelihood that an empty-headed youth with no evidence of intelligence or drive could become a college instructor. All this is separate from the oddly-formed central character of Oscar, whose personality is achingly real but whose final actions are melodramatic in the extreme. Recommended with reservations (check it out from a library).
Growing up, I remember that the strange or funny-looking kid in class was always commonly assumed to be brilliant, even if no one had any evidence of this, even if the kid got bad grades and never said anything sharp in or out of class. It's hard to accept that beauty and brains are not distributed equally by a fair-minded higher power ... [b]ut parents and teachers want children to respect their classmates, and so they imply that there's always an inside balancing out whatever is not going so great on the outside. This would all be well and good, except that it causes the attractive and intelligent (or moderately well-put-together and intelligent) not to be taken seriously.
I've never been particularly pedantic about the terminology, but one might argue that a stupid nerd is a contradiction in terms. Is Oscar a geek? Maybe a dork?
I hate [haggling]. I am terrible at it. As a consequence, I bought nothing in Turkey other than tickets to various things, room, food, and a poster of Ataturk. And I overpaid for all of these things, I’m sure, which has left me a bit bitter about the place. Surely this is inefficient overall, no? I understand the price discrimination argument for haggling, especially in a country with a lot of poverty and tourism. But probably hundreds of my dollars stayed in my pocket because I didn’t have good information about the quality of products and I knew the retailer is better at bargaining over the surplus than I am, so… there was no transaction and no surplus.
In Egypt, I bought a dress, a shirt, a couple of papyrus paintings, some perfume, and a necklace. I would have spent about ten times that amount I did had it not been for the incredible hassle posed by purchasing anything. If you walked through a market area (required to exit all historical sites: very clever), you were immediately swarmed by touts. If you glanced at any of a shop's wares, it was worse. Everything is "in the back" or "upstairs." You are pawed at, your hands are shaken, and you're blatantly lied to. All that is aside from the actual haggling process, which almost inevitably starts at a figure at least 200% more than you would pay for a similar object in the States. I figured by the end that I had paid about the same for my purchases as I would have for equivalent items in America (which is of course overpayment in Egypt), but consoled myself with the idea that at least I had only bought from the least aggressive vendors. Hopefully rewarding the more Westernized way of doing business will place a little pressure on the market.
50 Book Challenge #24: No One Belongs Here More Than You
Even someone with a black, withered heart like mine can appreciate Miranda July. The subject matter is a little repetitive, but the prose is light and lovely. Highly recommended for short story lovers, fans of Me and You and Everyone We Know, and people who secretly are less cynical than they appear.
The education system in Saudi Arabia must really suck:
“One of the most important Arab traditions is honor,” Enad said. “If my sister goes in the street and someone assaults her, she won’t be able to protect herself. The nature of men is that men are more rational. Women are not rational."
You could fit a waist or shoulder holster under an abaya quite easily. I'd be extremely surprised if women were permitted to carry weapons, though, even given permission from their male guardians and the nation's relatively lax gun laws.
At the edge of the city, I sat with the friend and a female Egyptian journalist I was traveling with to talk to six Saudi men, ages 19 to 26. They all worked for the Saudi military. ... “You’re reckless,'’ one of the young men said to me.
He said that it was dangerous to drive into the desert with a group of Saudi men we did not know well. He said we were lucky to have been invited by someone who was honest and trustworthy. Otherwise he said, we might have been attacked.
“The way a Saudi would think is ‘What is this girl doing here alone?’ If you are with a man, you better be his sister or his wife.”
That was Fahd’s explanation. He was 26 years old. ... The Egyptian woman asked how he would treat us if we had not been introduced by our friend.
“What would you do if we were with someone else?'’ she asked.
“I would get rid of him and try something with you,'’ he replied. “Not rape, I would try to do something, to get you to do something.”
“And if I said no?” she asked.
“Then I would rape you.”
That was it. None of the other young men seemed surprised, or sounded an objection. Would he really do it? Probably not. And neither would the other young men there, the ones who quietly nodded. But no one said “just kidding.” What they said was that this was a serious possibility we needed to be aware of. They acknowledged that rape was against their religion, but as a sin, they put it in the same category as a woman working with a man in the desert trying to understand young Saudi men.
‘Ninety percent of Saudis would think it is not right,'’ Fahd said. “An Egyptian girl with an American man, or a girl alone, what is she doing here?”
I'm back, having spent the last 24 hours catching up on sleep and blogs, reading a fantasy novel, and trying to fix my computer's Blue Screen of Death problem.
Still in Aswan, preparing to begin our cruise. Got my feet wet in the Nile and am now convinced I will get a horrible disease. Today was pretty cool, though.
