The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers

Title:		The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter
Author:		Carson McCullers
Rating:

This is one of those reviews in which I let Doug down. If memory serves he loves this book.

Frankly, I didn't particularly like The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter. From what I've read elsewhere, it's a classic of American literature, but it didn't work for me.

I found it to be a disorganized presentation of several barely related stories, all of which were bleak, dull, or both.

I felt a small attachment to only one character - Mick - over the loss of her music at the end. Truth be told, though, none of the characters discussed seemed particularly real to me, and their struggles weren't all that important.

None of McCullers's characters grows much in any way during these pages. They just soldier on, suffering through their lives - we follow 6 or 8 of them for a year - and learn essentially nothing.

On a technical level I have to appreciate what McCullers did, though. As a rule I dislike excessive use of writing in the vernacular of the characters. When an accent or speech pattern gets to the point of inhibiting comprehension, I get frustrated. In this case the author walked a fine line. The southern speech was understandable, but because she wrote it in the vernacular it could never be called great English prose. Despite that her writing was pretty good. I give her credit for striking that balance.

I just wish the story had something in it for me. I didn't learn anything new about the human condition or about these people. I can't even tell you how the title is related to the contents.

In a week or two I'll have forgotten it all, and I won't be sorry.

Don't let my dislike stop you from reading this, though. There are a lot of things in the world that others love but which just aren't for me. This may be another in that category. A lot of reviews - and Doug's opinions - strongly support that theory.

Gardens Of The Moon, Steven Erikson

Title:		Gardens Of The Moon
Author:		Steven Erikson
Rating:

Gardens of the Moon is book 1 of a projected ten volume fantasy series. It's full of action and warfare, magic, political intrigue, assassins, thieves, and so on. It was recommended by a friend, so I ordered a copy from paperbackswap.com.

As it happens, what we have here is a HUGE pile of back story. Erikson's history is vast and deep. His notes about any single place he mentions - and he mentions a lot of places - must include at least 5 or 6 conquests spread out among the various races that have peopled his planet. If you want a world with history, this one has it.

But that's about all it's got. His characters are mostly cardboard cut-outs, with very little in the way of real depth, and despite the fact that they live in a world with all that history, we never understand it. Facts from that history are thrown at us as if we should know them, but there is no cohesive way to piece them together. And it gets worse. There are maps at the front of the book, but they don't cover everything described, and it was only at the very end that I learned one of the major characters was "2 continents away" from where she'd started out. Excuse me?

There are many different groups or individuals that could be viewed as major characters, but we have very little to go on for motivations, and they mostly react to things going on around them. Some of those potential major characters are on stage only briefly throughout the course of the novel, so we don't really even know if they're important. And as for that plot they're supposed to be a part of, it's almost a random series of events. Things - sometimes very improbable things that we as readers have no way to know anything about or anticipate - just happen, and these people (or creatures, or gods, or whatever) are bounced about like pieces on a checker board during a 6.5 earthquake. Whenever one of those potentially important characters winds up in a precarious position, we find ourselves introduced to a new player who gets him or her out of the jam. Sometimes those new players are mortals, other times they're not. Usually we had no idea they even existed when they are slapped in our face.

Another thing that pushes characters about is magic. Vast quantities of totally unexplained magic. We don't even get good descriptions of what is going on when magic is involved. And (of course) there are a zillion different types of magic - and a flock of gods, some current, some ancient, and some dead, but all (apparently) capable of other types of magic - that we're supposed to keep track of. Or maybe Erikson doesn't care that we can't keep track of it. I honestly couldn't say.

In a nutshell I couldn't follow the story, I got tired of the "here's something you didn't know" method of dealing with things, the characters (who could have been memorable) aren't, and it was all just too contrived.

So why did I finish it? I could have quit after 50 or 100 pages, but I didn't. I did regularly put it down - sometimes mid sentence - simply because I was sick of it, but came back and finished it in the end. (It took a while... I've been busy and this hasn't been a fun read.)

At some level I think Erikson has affected me in a manner similar to Martin's Fire & Ice series. There are major issues with it, but I kept reading in the vain hope that I would figure things out, or that it would all make sense at some point. Sadly that point never came.

With Erikson I don't think I'm going to bother continuing. Reading a few reviews on amazon.com I am convinced that the later volumes are more of the same and I have far too many other things to read to bother with them. That's a shame, but such is life.

Some people will love Gardens of the Moon, but not me.

Dead-Eye Dick, Kurt Vonnegut

Title:		Dead-Eye Dick
Author:		Kurt Vonnegut
Rating:

This book didn't exactly win me over. Unlike much of the Vonnegut I've read, this one actually had a recognizable plot, though, which was something in its favor. The premise, however, was pretty thin, and there just wasn't much meat here.

I finished reading it 3 weeks or so ago and I honestly don't remember all that much from it. Flipping open to a few pages at random I am reminded of things, but the whole work doesn't snap back to me.

What I am learning from my efforts at reading Vonnegut is that he's really a hit-or-miss writer for me, and this was a miss.

Sorry fans. I can't recommend this one.

Don't Panic, Neil Gaiman

Title:		Don't Panic
Author:		Neil Gaiman
Rating:

Subtitle: The Official Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Companion.

This was written in 1988, after So Long and Thanks for All the Fish, but before Mostly Harmless, and long before Adams died.

I can't find an ordered list of Gaiman's works all that quickly, but this one feels a tad off. Perhaps it was an early work, or maybe he just didn't take it all that seriously. Regardless, it doesn't feel like he put a lot of effort into it.

That said, there is still some good info in here for Hitchhiker's fans everywhere. I learned a few things, and seeing some of Adams's wit on display again was good. I need to acquire the BBC radio series, though, and listen to them. Believe it or not I haven't done that yet.

As always, I miss Douglas Adams. A lot.

Order of the Stick, Rich Burlew

Titles:		Order of the Stick Vol 1: Dungeon Crawlin' Fools Vol 2: No Cure for the Paladin Blues Vol 3: War and XPs Vol 0: On the Origin of PCs Vol -1: Start of Darkness
Author:		Rich Burlew
Rating:

What is The Order of the Stick?

Well, I'd never heard of it either until recently, but my gaming past is somewhat limited. In any event, OOTS is a webcomic that follows a party of D&D adventurers as they try to accomplish a large and difficult quest.

The books are essentially graphic novels. The art is deliberately simplistic - stick figures, in fact - but Burlew uses that to his advantage and lets the story shine with it.

If you were ever a gamer you'll get a good laugh out of the D&D rules jokes, particularly if you had campaigns cross rules editions. But beyond the rules jokes - which actually diminish over time - the story gets bigger and grander. At the end of War and XPs you've watched a huge battle - on the scale of things seen in the LOTR movies - and the outcome was not good for the heros. Still, there are lots of laugh-out-loud moments in these strips. Burlew is a good writer, and knows how to tell a story.

These are recommended, and you don't even have to buy them. you can read them all online at: http://www.giantitp.com/.

Suggestion: The titles above are listed in proper reading order, at least so far.

Woken Furies, Richard K. Morgan

Title:		Woken Furies
Author:		Richard K. Morgan
Rating:

Woken Furies may be the best Takeshi Kovacs novel so far. Once again it's a cyberpunk novel set in the fairly distant future, but this time I feel like Morgan has really hit his stride. The writing is crisp, the settings interesting, and the story well thought out. We learn a lot more about the motivations of the hero this time, which I found intriguing.

A short summary that doesn't give things away: Kovacs is on Harlan's World on "personal business" (my phrase, but I don't want to give away what he's doing there) when he gets involved with a group of people who specialize in destroying mechanized, semi-intelligent warfare equipment left over from a previous conflict. Each member of the team he falls in with has a slew of modifications to help them perform this work, and the commander is particularly well linked in with just about anything networked. She, however, goes down during a skirmish and Kovacs finds himself protecting her. He also learns that someone is coming after him, someone he knows very well and has reason to fear. And that's saying a lot for an Envoy. Soon, however, he discovers that he's not actually the primary target, and things get even more complicated.

Morgan covers a lot of ground here. Philosophy, violence, technology, surfing, weapons, rock climbing, sex, diving, you name it.

Recommended.

James Herriot's Cat Stories, James Herriot

Title:		James Herriot's Cat Stories
Author:		James Herriot
Rating:

A short review for a short volume. These are extracts from his earlier works, specifically about cats. They're nice, and I like his introduction - which was new with the volume - but overall I found the dog stories book a bit better, and the original books better yet. Still, these are warm, enjoyable stories. Don't hesitate to read them if you come across the book, but I don't think it has anything in it that you won't find in his longer works, except the introduction.

The Hot Zone, Richard Preston

Title:		The Hot Zone
Author:		Richard Preston
Rating:

I don't remember why I ordered this one from paperbackswap.com. Something about it caught my eye and I have a ton of credits built up over there, so I requested it. Then it sat on my TBR shelf for a while, and got picked up a couple of days ago because it looked like some light reading.

And it turned out to be light reading, but not in the usual sense. I think it's written at about a 6th grade level, making it simplistic to read. The sentence structure got a bit repetitive at times, but the information it was interesting - and dark - so I didn't give up on it.

This is the true story of the first outbreak of Ebola in the US in 1989. What? You didn't know we'd had an Ebola outbreak here? You don't remember news stories about people dying in hideous ways? Well, I didn't either, and the story is interesting in various ways. We got very, very lucky in this case. I won't spoil it, though.

The story covers the historical background of Ebola and some other viruses. Some - like Marburg - are related to Ebola, while others - like AIDS - aren't related but came from the same area, and so share some of the same background.

On the whole this book was good, despite the simplistic writing style. It brought home the risks we face as a result of new viruses. Bird Flu is a new one - not mentioned in the book at all - that shows the planet actually is a really big petri dish, and we're just potential carriers for the next nasty disease to come along. One note: If you can't read about animals suffering, this is not a book for you. Monkeys play a major role here, one they did not willingly chose for themselves.

Cryptonomicon, Neal Stephenson

Title:		Cryptonomicon
Author:		Neal Stephenson
Rating:

This was an interesting read. At a bit over 900 pages in an oversize paperback edition, it was a huge, long read as well. That's part of why you haven't heard much from me lately. Well, that and work.

I enjoyed this book a fair bit, actually. The first third or so might have been a bit slow - it took me a long time to get through it - but the rest went reasonably quickly. This is a geek book, though. It discusses any number of topics in depth, possibly far more depth than you're interested in reading if you're not a geek. Happily I am a geek and it worked well for me.

The plot revolves around the interconnected lives of several people at two different times: during the second world war and now. In particular we follow a marine in WW II, and cryptographer and mathematician working in WW II, and a programmer working now. Others factor in, of course, but those are the three main points of view. The marine winds up doing and seeing all kinds of interesting things during the war, some of which are never adequately explained, the cryptographer is more straight forward in some ways, and the programmer could be any of a number of people I know, at least in terms of background.

I think that - apart from it's sheer size - Cryptonomicon is an approachable book by Stephenson. I've read two others by him Snow Crash and The Diamond Age. For my money, this may be the best of the three. If you're looking for something substantial to read, this might be it. I ought to get credit for 3 or 4 regular books on page count alone.

Programming in Python 3, Mark Summerfield

Title:		Programming in Python 3
Author:		Mark Summerfield
Rating:

I didn't finish this and I don't think I ever will.

We're thinking of doing development in Python 3 at work. For those who don't know, Python is an object oriented scripting language that has had a lot of people saying nice things for some time now. And Python 3 is the absolute latest version thereof.

Interestingly, Python isn't necessarily compatible between major versions, and since we hadn't been using much Python before, we decided to go straight to the latest. Given that I didn't know Python at all, I went looking for a book specifically about Python 3, and this was the only one I could find.

What a waste. I'm a reasonably good programmer, and this is a terrible book. It can't be used as a reference, so forget that. His examples and overview stink too, though, which means that newer programmers who need more to get the gist of things are out of luck as well. I was over 100 pages into it, for example, before I ever saw anything that showed how to open and read from or write to files.

At this point I've resorted to the documentation on python.org. If you're considering Python, I suggest you do the same and give this book a wide berth.

The Assassins' Gate: America In Iraq, George Packer

Title:		The Assassins' Gate: America In Iraq
Author:		George Packer
Rating:

This was a really tough read for me. Some of the reasons are my own fault, one is the fault of the book, and some are the result of all kinds of environmental things going on during the five or six months I've been slogging through it.

And there we hit my first problem: six months. I can't even remember when I started it now. It was a long time back, though, and anything I have to say here must be tempered by the fact that a lot of this book was read long enough ago that it's a hazy memory now.

So let's start at the beginning and I'll review and confess my way through this.

First off, this is an important work. I'd read a few NYT columns by Packer over the years, mostly sent to me as links by a friend. I found his insights into Iraq interesting and honest. When I heard about his book, probably on NPR, I thought it would be a good read. I got ahold of a copy through paperbackswap.com and here I sit.

One of the things I have noted over the years is how so many people seem to think that things are simple. Yes or no. Right or wrong. Paper or plastic. In reality the world is a lot more complicated than that, and the Iraq war is a good example of that fact.

Saddam Hussein was a bad guy. Of that I have no doubt. At one point he did have WMD, and his regime was brutal in every respect. That's all well documented from many years ago, long before we went to war in Iraq. But at what price is a thug like Saddam removed, and when does it become the responsibility of the United States to make that happen? That isn't a simple question. The neoconservatives, for all the difficulties the war had and created, take the long view that it will all have been worthwhile in the fullness of time. But there's no knowing that now, of course. Others think that we should never go to war, or that we should only do so when forced. But Saddam had gassed people living in his own country, had threatened neighbors, and was brutal in the extreme. Where is the moral high ground if you leave someone like that in power?

The Assassins' Gate discusses the Iraq war in a mostly unbiased way. It was ground researched in Iraq by Packer himself, and he presents it with all the complexity from which an event like this actually suffers. Even more interesting, part of his presentation is specific stories about specific people living in Iraq as the chaos goes on around them. The writing is eloquent and well edited. It should have been a smooth and satisfying read, but it didn't go that way for me.

In truth my reading of this book was in trouble long before I went back to work. There are so many names and places presented I couldn't keep them all straight. Not even close. Coming back to it after having set it down was always an exercise in trying to remember what I'd read before, even when it had been interesting and enlightening.

Some of the problem stems from the organization of the book, and this is the only thing I can lay at the feet of the author. I had the hardest time telling when something I was reading was related to. Chapters would go by without a date - not even a year - and I couldn't pin down where we were in the process as a result. This made various sections disjoint to the point that I couldn't hold them in my head. The addition of a time line, calling out major events and when the various people he mentions were in the places described, would have helped me immensely.

In any event, I struggled on, knowing I was learning things, if only peripherally. Then came November and I went back to work. I was at least 2/3rds of the way through when that happened, and for a while all progress completely stopped. Coming back to it after that was even harder, but once again I managed it.

Now I'm finally done, and what have I really learned? Alas it isn't as much as I'd like, but that's basically all my fault, not the author's.

Packer managed to reinforce my conviction that Iraq was a mess from the start. That we totally botched the planning by thinking all we had to do was win the fight and get out, making no plans for winning the peace. It is clear that many are responsible for that horrible miscalculation, but the Rumsfeld and Cheney seem to be on the top of that list. Whether or not Bush himself was planning an Iraq war on coming into office I can't say with certainty, but it's still possible as far as I can tell. Those who were in charge actually believe that what we did (and are doing) there will transform the entire middle east, making us all safer in the end. I retain my doubts. Strong doubts.

In human terms the Iraq war has, so far, lead to mixed results. Some Iraqis think they were better off with Saddam. Others disagree, confirming the complexity of the situation. What we've done, though, is unleash the religious differences that had been held in check in Iraq and greatly increased the influence of Iran. I doubt those were the administration's goals going in, and they clearly weren't expected by the exiles and outcasts who pushed for this intervention so forcefully.

Whether history will be kind to President Bush I can't say. It is entirely possible that I won't live long enough to know. Sadly, though, I believe there were other avenues we should have taken that might have lead to Saddam's ouster in ways that were better accepted - by the region and the people of Iraq. The loss of those opportunities is something I believe we should all regret.

Those wanting more information - deep and detailed - about the first half of the Iraq war are encouraged to read The Assassins' Gate. I think it's got a lot to recommend it, even if I had trouble.

The Dangerous Book For Dogs, Joe Garden

Title:		The Dangerous Book For Dogs: A Parody by Rex and Sparky
Authors:		Joe Garden, Janet Ginsburg, Chris Pauls, Anita Serwacki, and Scott Sherman
Rating:

This is - as the title suggests - a parody of The Dangerous Book For Boys. Fortunately, it's much better than that, since the original was junk. (I read and reviewed it some time ago. I hated it. I'm not even going to give it a link here. It was awful.)

This is funny, at least. And that makes it worthwhile. The authors are all contributors to The Onion, which gives you some idea of the kind of humor involved. They've also got a similar volume out for cats. I suspect we may be taking this entire concept way too far, but what the heck.

It's light reading - I got it for xmas, had to wait for my wife to read it, mostly recover from a cold, and deal with other issues before I could start on it, and still I finished it today. As you can tell, it's not all that long or that deep.

Still, it was amusing, though not laugh out loud funny most of the time. If you're a dog lover you'll probably enjoy it. If not, it won't make much sense to you.

And with that my first review of 2009 is done. I just hope it isn't also my last. There are far too many things going on in my life and my reading has been impacted in too many ways. Still, I'll be here reading and learning.

Serenity: Better Days, Joss Whedon, Brett Matthews, Will Conrad

Title:		Serenity: Better Days
Authors:		Joss Whedon, Brett Matthews, Will Conrad
Rating:

This is my last review in 2008. Several things wiped out my time at the end of the year and slowed me way down. But I'm still trying to read, even if things keep getting in the way.

Serenity: Better Days is a short comic book about the crew of the space ship Firefly, who were featured on the TV show of the same name. If you don't know the setting, this review isn't going to help much, I'm afraid.

As usually happens with tales of this crew, it's the story of a "job" gone wrong. Our heroes are minor criminals, living on the edge of a corrupt society. We applaud their willingness to go it alone and do the right thing in the face of adversity, even if it violates the law, simply because that law is so obviously overbearing and unjust. (You know, simply writing that sentence makes me stop and think about the state of America in a new way, but I digress.)

Amusingly, this story actually starts with a job going well, but then things turn. I won't give away any more than that.

What I can say is that it was a bit disjoint. There were a few places - in a very short book - that I had to back up and reread to try and figure out what had happened. I suspect the authors actually had more material but lacked the page space to include it, so it was cut to fit. The result is OK, but not as easy to follow as I'd like.

I enjoy the Serenity series, and I hope it continues. But I also hope the next one is a bit better edited than this one, so the story flows a bit better.

All Things Wise and Wonderful, James Herriot

Title:		All Things Wise and Wonderful
Author:		James Herriot
Rating:

I finished All Things Wise and Wonderful some weeks back, but I've been too busy with winter preparation and getting ready to go back to work to write up even a simple review. Things are finally settling down, though. I go back to work on Monday, and since it's started raining and will continue to do so for some time, those projects are coming to a close. As a result, I finally get to write this up.

I greatly enjoyed All Things Wise and Wonderful, as I have enjoyed the other books in the series. Herriot - a pseudonym, I know - writes with obvious love of his home, family, and job. Most of the stories have are positive in nature, but a few are sad. I know some don't like his works but I find them quite nice.

This book details some of the author's war experience. He trained as a pilot for the RAF but just as his training finished it was then found he had a medical condition and he wasn't allowed to fly. I can relate to his tales of the bureaucracy in several ways now that I'm in a volunteer fire department and going back to work. Somehow, red tape is in our blood.

If you're looking for some light reading that will leave you feeling good about people, any of the books by James Herriot will do the trick. You can read a chapter or two at a time or consume an entire book in a few hours. Either way you won't do yourself any wrong. Recommended.

Six Degrees, Duncan J. Watts

Title:		Six Degrees
Author:		Duncan J. Watts
Rating:

Six Degrees is subtitled "The Science of a Connected Age". It discusses the emerging science of networks, and does so with some flair, though I found the first half more interesting than the second half.

In the first half, Watts actually discusses the science of networks in some detail, with charts & graphs. He explains how he and others worked out some interesting results in network science, and even shows where they made assumptions that others overturned. For me, this portion of the book was fascinating, and fun reading.

The second half loses that level of detail and instead becomes more of a survey of ongoing work in networks and how it can apply in the real world. There are some interesting stories here, but nothing quite grabbed me the way the first half did.

In any event, if you're interested in the Small World Problem, or (more colloquially) whether or not everyone really is only six degrees of separation apart, this is an interesting read.

Blink, Malcolm Gladwell

Title:		Blink
Author:		Malcolm Gladwell
Rating:

What can I say about Blink aside from the obvious jokes?

Well, I started out being really interested in it, but that's an oddity of my personal nature. The opening vignette is about an ancient Greek sculpture that a museum bought. It that turned out to be a modern fake, and the story of how the mistake was made and uncovered was presented. As a sculptor, it resonated with me, but that's probably just me.

After that it goes down hill. While the research Gladwell summarizes is interesting, there is nothing really useful presented here. His underlying thesis - that we all make snap judgements based on very little information, and that sometimes those judgements are good ones - seems obvious on the face of it. But the repetitive nature of his assertions gets old, and the fact that he never once indicates how to change one's skill at "thin-slicing" is irritating in the end.

Yes, he does indicate that experts are better at thin-slicing in their domains, but "Become an expert" is a useless answer to the question "How do I get better at thin-slicing?"

And he fails to explain certain things. For example, the museum that bought the stature hired experts to authenticate it. Why did those people fail to note the problems that others noted later? Why didn't they thin-slice the problem as well? Clearly becoming and expert isn't enough, and there are no other answers given in here.

This would have been better in a much shorter format. As it was, I feel like I wasted a lot of time with it.

Gladwell's earlier big work was The Tipping Point and I thought I might read it, but after reading this I'm not so sure. There's more PR than substance in Blink and the reviews on amazon.com make me think that could be the case there too. Oh well.

The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood

Title:		The Handmaid's Tale
Author:		Margaret Atwood
Rating:

This is only the second thing I've read by Margaret Atwood, and I found it pretty powerful stuff. As far as I can tell Atwood writes dystopian fiction from a woman's point of view. I don't think she's generally classed as a science fiction writer, but there is some element of extrapolation about the future in the works I've read so far.

The Handmaid's Tale takes place in a near future society in North America. The US government was violently overthrown, the constitution suspended, and most women's rights revoked. Within the very strict regime that took power (in what is now called The Republic of Gilead) women are essentially property. And here we meet Offred, the heroine of the story, and a handmaid to her Commander, one of the people in power.

The term "handmaid", though, doesn't convey the nature of the relationship. It's a euphemism. As it happens, the Caucasian birthrate has dropped severely. Many or most of those still in Gilead are infertile for various reasons having to do with pollution, nuclear leakage, etc. But it isn't acceptable for a leader to have no children, so if someone important is in that situation it is assumed his wife is infertile (it must be the woman, of course; men can't be infertile) and he is given a handmaid to bear his children. A bit of the Bible (Genesis 30: 1-3) is cited to justify this.

Amusingly, when I did a google search on "Genesis 30: 1-3" the first hit that came up was Study Guide to Margaret Atwood: The Handmaid's Tale (1986).

Atwood discusses the history that brought about this challenging culture, and the personal events that got Offred into her current situation in flashbacks. It's a dark and difficult story, with enough possibility in it to scare any sensible reader.

Highly recommended. I'll be reading more of Atwood's work.

Radio On, Sarah Vowell

Title:		Radio On
Author:		Sarah Vowell
Rating:

I've liked other work by Sarah Vowell, and I enjoy her pieces on NPR, but this book hits all kinds of hot buttons for me.

Let's start with the premise. The author spends a year listening to the radio - a lot - and keeping a journal about the experience. Those journal entries are the contents of the book, listed by date, station frequency and call letters. There are a few other things scattered in there too, but mostly it's journal entries. As such, it's not all that coherent. There isn't a story line, plot, history, or even a guiding theme to hold them together.

Actually, I suppose it could be argued there is a theme of sorts: Vowell's hatred of just about everything she mentions. But if vitriol is all that's supposed to hold this collection of paragraphs together, it didn't work for me.

Vowell's not shy about letting her opinions out. She has nothing but scorn for Rush Limbaugh. (That, at least, I can agree with.) Her taste in music is critical to her existence, and those who disagree with her are entirely in the wrong. With the exception of a few bits of ancient history (Elvis, for example) she mentions almost exclusively bands and artists that I've never heard of or never listen to. (For the record, I don't listen to Elvis either, but at least I've heard of him.) Kurt Cobain figures heavily into her rock god pantheon, as does Courtney Love. You're clearly a waste of skin if you can't name every song these people have been involved with.

Sadly I can see myself in her rant to a degree. My own musical preferences were completely different, but there was a time when I thought the "right" music was all important. Thankfully I got over that phase shortly after leaving college. Vowell is (or was) still stuck there over ten years after she graduated. Looking back, I was an ass about things like this on far too many occasions, but at this point I can admit it and move on. It's not clear that Vowell can do so.

Yet more things are wrong with this diatribe. Vowell has absolutely nothing good to say about any radio station except KGLT, the college station she worked for. She does like Ira Glass - famous for his NPR program This American Life - but everything on WBEZ except his show is terrible. The DJs on the myriad of other stations she mentions are all held up as examples of stupidity, or - at the very least - cluelessness. You can get a sense of the depth of her disgust from this quote, taken from the back cover, where you'd normally expect to find some blurb recommending the book in question:

"Vowell's touch is about as delicate as Teddy Kennedy's after a pitcher of martinis."
-- Richard Roeper, Chicago Sun-Times

In reality, though, I could set all of those issues aside. At some level I can even relate to it, as I have my own inner grouch who wants to complain about everything and everyone. Admittedly I don't usually let him out long enough to write a 230 page trade paperback, but I can identify with at least some of what she's whining, grousing, and bitching about. But what bothered me most is that Vowell holds everyone up to a higher standard than herself, fails to admit the purpose of things, or both.

By way of example, she excoriates NPR (National Public Radio) in many, many places. As far as I can tell, only Ira Glass's work there has any value. She calls out the various programs by name, trashing them repeatedly, and does the same for the various people who work there. It matters not what your race, gender, or vocal characteristics are, if you work on All Things Considered or Morning Edition it is quite obvious that Vowell finds you repulsive. Not quite as repulsive as Rush Limbaugh, but damn close.

With that as a background, it comes as no surprise that she complains bitterly - and mentions it again later - that one of the NPR announcers working on Morning Edition or All Things Considered (sorry, I didn't mark the pages where I saw this, and I can't bring myself to read it all again just to find the exact quotes) worries about screwing things up. She complains that this is an attitude she never saw back in the good old days working at KGLT. They were happy to screw up. They clowned around all the time.

Excuse me? You're trying to compare some Podunk college radio station staff with those of a major national news program, and because they differ in how much they worry about screwing things up you're bothered? To the point of rage?

But it doesn't end there. Elsewhere in these pages Vowell admits to being a teacher at an art school. Guess what? She found herself nervous early on because people were listening to her and writing down what she said.

Surely I'm not the only one to see the irony there? She rants that the people at NPR are afraid of screwing up, but can't see that she, herself, has the same issue in front of her class? To be afraid of making an error in public is only natural. Surely she knows that. And yet she can't acknowledge the difference between Bob Edwards messing up on Morning Edition and Tom the two-bit DJ doing so on the local college station. Given her other writings, I honestly thought she was smarter than that.

And then, as mentioned above, there's her unwillingness to acknowledge the purpose of things. The NPR programs she hates with so much passion for their their "boring" presentation and "snooty" announcers are actually doing the right thing. They're serious news programs. They tell people about the important events of the day; they do not air artsy, experimental radio pieces that no one will understand. They address a much larger audience - millions, not hundreds - and while a few whoopee cushions and some rambling, selected news headlines for college kids might be amusing, it doesn't (and cannot) do the same job as All Things Considered. Vowell can't see this, and aims a huge barrage of insults at quite a few excellent programs and people as a result. They do not deserve such treatment.

I can be an opinionated SOB, and I'd guess that some things I've written have or will offend some. But I hope I'm a bit less hysterical in my presentation than Vowell, and more willing to see others in the light of reason.

Radio On was published in 1996, and Vowell suffered through some nasty political times given her particular views on the world - Newt Gingrich, for example. Perhaps that added to her misery and lead her to be more harsh than she should have been. And obviously she was younger then, about 28, I believe. Maybe she has (or will) mellow with age. But none of those things excuses the gross mistreatment of others I found in this book. I'd skip it.

Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Frank Miller, Klaus Janson, Lynn Varley

Title:		Batman: The Dark Knight Returns
Authors:		Frank Miller, Klaus Janson, Lynn Varley
Rating:

This is only the third graphic novel I've reviewed here, but I really like it. It's isn't great literature in the classic sense, but it tells a good story, and it kept me interested and entertained.

Batman: The Dark Knight Returns is a set of four stories, originally published separately, I believe. Collectively they tell of an older Batman, one who had retired but has to come back to defend Gotham City, a Batman driven by his inner demon.

This follows the real point of Batman in my mind: he's dark, tormented, and borders on doing evil while fighting evil. His history is revisited here again: the street corner where Bruce Wayne's parents were killed is present, and a couple of the classic villains make their appearance too. But here Batman also faces a new kind of evil, one with less restraint and more random in nature than he's faced before. He thinks of them as the decedents of the one that murdered his parents. "These are his children. A purer breed... and this world is theirs."

Originally published in 1986 - before the fall of the Soviet Union - these stories tell of a superhero coming out of retirement with a different twist than the much latter movie The Incredibles. Why Batman retired - vanished actually - isn't made clear. Perhaps I'd know that if I followed comic books, but I don't, and it adds a layer of mystery I actually like.

Also present is a long standing conflict between Batman and at least one of the other famous superheros. I won't say who - no need to spoil it for you if you don't already know - but that conflict is built right into the psyche of the two characters in question. If Batman represents the dark side of doing good, you can probably guess who's on the opposite side of things, so good he's hard to stomach for someone like Bruce Wayne.

The art here is well done, stylized but not so much as to be silly. And the story is more interesting than someone who doesn't read comic books might expect. Batman is always conflicted over what he does - what he has to do - and the philosophical issues there are deep. Not that this is a textbook from a college class on ethics, but you will ponder the limits of power, the role of vengeance vs. justice, and even simple aging. As I grow older these things all get to be more interesting to me, and they are well presented here.

This is highly recommended. I got my copy through paperbackswap.com, but I won't be passing it on. This one I'll keep and reread every so often. This Batman deserves no less.

Thanks to Patguy for recommending this one. It's definitely worth it.

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Mark Twain

Title:		The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
Author:		Mark Twain
Rating:

I moved around a lot when I was a kid. In fact we moved so often I am still regularly asked if my father was in the military whenever my childhood comes up in conversation.

Moving a lot has any number of repercussions, one of which is that the regular changes in school district mean you see no one system's complete education plan from start to finish, and often wind up suffering overlap or missing things in the process. I'll never forget my move from Kansas to Illinois, where - halfway through my sophomore year of high school - I was stuck into a freshman biology class and bored out of my mind.

In my Kansas school, biology had been a difficult class, taught very well. But in the Illinois school it was taught to younger students and didn't cover nearly as much material. I sat in the back of that new classroom and waited for the teacher to call on me. "Does anyone know the answer to the question? I'll bet Jeff does. Jeff?" And sure enough I did. Every stinking time. In half a year in Kansas we'd covered everything that class was ever going to cover, and in spite of the fact that the teacher tried, I really hated being there.

I had similar experiences with English classes. The first day of the 9th grade English we were given a test just to see what we did and didn't know. I was working along answering questions and came to the statement: "Diagram this sentence." Some (now forgotten) sentence followed that, and then a large, blank space on the page. I had no idea what was being asked of me. I'd never seen nor even heard of diagramming sentences at the time. I wandered up to the teacher's desk and asked what this meant. She told me not to worry about it and go on.

And the oddities don't stop there. Literature is another place where my education got out of whack. I know I read Julius Caesar at least three times in various schools. Correspondingly there are all kinds of things I never managed to read, and that list includes The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Well, now I have read it, and I'm wondering what all the fuss is (or was) about.

Perhaps if I'd read it when I was twelve it would have made more of an impact, but at the age of 42, it seems rather pointless. What happens is fairly predictable, and yet it's not really all that believable. Tom winds up in too many situations that just don't ring true to me, and they certainly happen far too quickly. Amusingly, the most famous scene - in which Tom tricks the neighborhood kids into painting a fence for him - is near the beginning of the book, raising the question of just how many people actually read the entire thing.

I'll give it a pass for it's treatment of native Americans and blacks. It is a product of it's time, as was Samuel Clemens. I'll also forgive the use if dialect, which I generally find only obscures the author's intent. And I'll ignore the author's word choice. It was probably just fine for the time it was written, but a number of those words have dropped out of the dictionary since 1876.

More problematic, in my mind, is the apparent anti-intellectualism I see here. Sawyer and his friends are the most superstitious lot imaginable, and few in the town are any better. It's easy to see the American nation turning its collective back on the enlightenment if you read this in the right way.

In addition, while I've read that Twain wasn't a friend to Christianity in his later years, he mentions religion quite regularly here. Perhaps he was only chronicling how people really lived and believed at the time. Perhaps he's poking fun at it in some places, but in others he seems sincere, and I found it a bit distracting.

I know this book is a classic, but I've had my battles over classics before. I remember coming home one day from school and telling my mother we were reading Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck. I hated every single word of that book, and I told her so. Knowing me, I was probably quite loud in my presentation of that opinion. She responded in kind - I come from a loud family - and told me that I had to like it because "it's a classic!"

I've been a bit leery of classics ever since, but as the irregularly spaced interruptions of my education continued, I didn't have to read many of them. By reading The Adventures of Tom Sawyer I've now moved one of those missed classics on the list of things I've actually read.