Project: Failed

So a year ago today I launched this blog with the intention of reading 52 books in a year, and writing  reviews of them. I added a few things along the way which seemed germane or interesting.

Between then and now, I started a second blog which was to chronicle my education as an AMT student.

Shortly after that, I got so busy I more or less quit bothering to update either of them.

The  official book count for 2011 is 42. I haven't reviewed Zamyatin's We, (which is badass, but can be rather annoying) nor have I done one over the Jeppesen books we used for class last year. They were horribly written, crappily edited. I could honestly write these books better, and some day, when I have a more full understanding of the subject matter, I will.

Anyway, this isn't a review. It's a declaration of failure.

I might keep up with this. I might not. Either way, I'm pretty sure that I could read 52 books in a year if I felt like it...

The reviews got worse and worse as time went on, because I was just doing them to do them, not because I wanted to, or because I felt like they were even worth my time.

To see good reviews, read the earlier ones.

In any event, I had fun with the project. I'm glad it's over because now I don't have this sense of urgency looming over everything else I do.  But, to be honest, I could've just quit any time I felt like it. I didn't because I knew this was a worthwhile project.

I've gone back and looked at some of the books I read and reviewed, and to be honest, I remember nothing about some of them. Nothing at all. Not even that I read them.

Delicious 

Perhaps a little too much JWR has dissolved my brain. I doubt it, though. Humans aren't that great at recall.

Any way, here's to 2012, the twilight of my twenties, and the turning of the tawdry and sometimes tedious alliterative phrase.

Birth

Today is more or less my birthday. It's the same calendar day, anyway.

So far, today has been pretty similar to my actual birth.

I woke up naked, not really remembering anything a whole lot before that point in time.
My eyes were kind of stuck together, and I was confused for a little bit.
I had a bit of a headache, and an acute sensitivity to light, which I'm pretty sure is how newborns would describe the initial symptoms associated with being alive. Fortunately, I wasn't covered in blood and/or effluvia.

I had to get out of bed, which was nice and warm, and the house was freezing.  I imagine this is also how newborns would describe, if they could, the process of being born. Although there was nobody there to spank me, I felt like I had abused myself enough-- no outside force was necessary.

I had a glass of milk and took a dump. So far, I'm batting 1000, and I don't even play baseball.

Then I warmed up, got some clothes on and felt better about being alive. Slightly.

Now I'm not sure about what to do.  I imagine that this is what's going on for newborns as well. They need to absorb information about the world around them.

I started reading the news, and I'm finding what's going on in the world to be distinctly un-awesome in nature.
I think that's pretty much what growing up is all about, though: it's the process of figuring out that reality often falls spectacularly short of the expectations we were lead to have for it. How we deal with that is how we mark maturity.  Often, I think, we find things that aren't worthwhile, and we learn how to deal with them. That is what we call experience.

Some things, though, are worthwhile. Love and companionship among them.  Story of my life.

Death

Christopher Hitchens died yesterday.

He is one of my heroes. Was and still is.

But he's dead now, and I'm not sure how I feel about that.

I'm obviously bummed out, and on the border of being upset. Morose? I don't know. Maybe.

I was just beginning my hum-drum pre-work morning routine of coffee and Facebook checkery when I saw that he had died, and my immediate reaction was anger. I guess I skipped stages 1 and 2.
I slammed the desk with my fist, cursed, and sighed the sigh of a loser, the sign of the lonely child I used to be.

I've never really been particularly troubled by death. From a young age I've recognized it as what it is: an unfortunate necessity. As morbid as that is for a child to come to terms with, it took several years before I realized that the same must also be true for every other living thing on the planet, most notably, every other human I've ever known.  It's something that I inevitably think about any time I meet someone new. Will I outlive this person? Will they be part of my life whenever one of us dies?

These aren't things I choose to think about. They just happen. And it's not at all dark or worrisome. To consider death as some dark, mysterious phenomenon clouded with superstition and fear seems like a terrible waste of time and emotional energy.  It's sad whenever people die, but that's part of being alive. As much as I'd like to quote something pithy and inspirational, I think that to do so would be equally wasteful.

I don't mean to be cold, but really-- it's not like nobody sees it coming.

Sometimes death is a premature tragedy. Sometimes death is an unavoidable accident. But death comes for us all. To fail to recognize this is... stupid.

Death is hard, of course, but I think that people make it harder than it has to be. People turn it into a process, a labor. And because people so often take it harder than I do, I wonder if there is something wrong with me. I don't think there is. I don't think I'm a distanced or emotionally cold person. I just think that I react differently to something as inevitable as the rain after a drought, or the drought itself.

"These things happen, Timmy."

I would like to say that it is fair in that it reaches us all, but that's not the case.

While the end result is equalizing, its manner and timing are hardly ever fair, just or fitting.

I'm not a stoic, but to see me at a funeral would make a stranger doubt that assertion.

I wonder how things like this will influence my relationship with my unborn children. It's pretty easy for me to deal with the fact that when someone is dead, they're dead. Time goes on, and for the dead person, reality is as it was before they were born.

Convention would suggest that children want humans and animals to go on living in some kind of "better place."  Is it really better to tell that to a child? Doesn't that inevitably lead to the cognitive dissonance associated with everything being better off dead, in that better place? If they're smart enough to understand what you're telling them, they'll also be smart enough to know that there are some problems with your story. How do you know about this better place? What is it like? Why is it there? Why do we have to live to get there first? These are all questions we can't answer without out-right lying to kids. The best we could hope for, once we're committed to this better place idea, is some kind of  soothing non-answer.

Wouldn't honesty be the best policy?

"I don't know what happens when we die, Timmy. Nobody does. But everybody dies. The trees in the yard will die, Aunt Sally will die, and I will die. You'll eventually die. But it's not something to be afraid of, because you can't escape it. The best thing you can do is enjoy your life and make it meaningful."

Is that too much for a kid? It's too much for a lot of the adults I know.

Book 40: One Day In the Life of Ivan Denisovitch

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

First Published in 1962

I can't immediately recall a better display of character development in less than 150 pages before. Ever. S.E. Hinton tried with The Outsiders, but The Outsiders and One Day In the Life are on completely different levels, not to mention languages, times, motifs, genres and literary stages.

I didn't know much of anything about this novel before I read it. It was something I picked up at a Half-Price books in Austin several years ago. I was cleaning off my desk the other day and re-found it, pocketed it, and haven't really been without it since. It's even caused me to stop playing Borderlands for a day or so.

One Day In the Life is really one day in the life. The original narrative. And I've got to tell you: in this novel, my good buddy Sasha Solz is as much in love with the colon ( this one:   :   , not the poop chute) as I am. Constant usage. I like that. It fits where the translator put it, and although it's not always 100% mechanically correct, dammit: it works.

I have no idea why that giant white block is there, and I really don't care. 

Book 39: Brave New World

Brave New World

Aldous Huxley

1932

I read this when I was in middle school.

I don't think there is anything in my life I have ever NOT gotten as much as I didn't get this novel.

I wasn't too young for the subject matter when I was however-old-I-was when I read it. I just didn't have enough critical thinking skills, or the two semesters of college Shakespeare necessary to really appreciate what Huxley had to say here.

Of all of the things this book has to offer, the most shocking thing is that it was written in 19thirty-fucking-two.  I couldn't really wrap my mind around that at first. 1932? Really? Holy shit.

In 1932, in the US, only 11% of farm houses had electricity.  Can you believe that shit? In one part of the planet, we've got a guy writing about soma and rocketplanes, and in the other, we've got a pre-WWII population without electricity.

Wowza.

If you've not read or heard of Brave New World, well, my guess is that English isn't your first language or you're not much of a reader.  It's one of the cornerstones of the dystopian genre. Even if dystopia isn't your thing, and even if sci-fi isn't your think,  you should read it-- it was written in 1932, and it's about the future. Awesome stuff.

If you're a curious person, you'll learn lots about contemporary world history of the 30s and slightly previously. Huxley name-drops all over Brave New World. Too bad most people now don't know who many of the referred-to are.

Awesome novel, from both a SF/dystopian standpoint and as a social critique (while those two usually go hand-in-hand, that's not always the case).


While I was reading it, I found myself, from time to time, thinking that the world Huxley described wouldn't be all that bad. It's the notion of hypnopaedic conditioning that really makes it not all that uncomfortable for me.

If you went through your entire life confident with the knowledge that yours was the best life there was, would you really have that much to complain about? Probably not, because you had been conditioned since before you were conscious not to think about it.

If you could take a pill that carried with it no risk of social, moral, ethical of physical repercussions, a pill that made you forget about your worries and enjoy your mind, wouldn't you? A pill with no unpleasant side-effects, even.

If you could live your life knowing that anything you needed was within your capabilities to have, and that you would always be perfectly content knowing that there would be no war, no strife, and no social instability, wouldn't that be appealing?

This sounds like it would be a terrible and very un-free world to live in, right? But if you had been conditioned since birth to think that it was the best possible way to live, and that there was no option, you would know nothing of freedom and think only about how awesome it was to be alive.

Doesn't sound like too bad of a deal.

Book 38: Marine Sniper

Marine Sniper: 93 Confirmed Kills

Charles Henderson

2001, Berkley Trade

Self-Discipline. Lots of it.

Carlos Hathcock was a freakin' badass. That's all that needs to be said about that.

Whenever I read books like this, or watch a circus, or hear about some monk living for 3 years off of a handfull of rice, it makes me feel really, really, really worthless. We're all made up of the same stuff, but some people are capable of amazing things, while the most of us struggle with our own mediocrity.

Speaking of Mediocrity, It's nearing the middle of December. I don't think I'm going to make my 52 book mark. No way.

Book 37: Knock on Wood And other Superstitions

Knock on Wood, and other Superstitions



Carole Potter

1984

With most entries being less than a page, this 263-page book provides a decent sampling of some of the weird, odd, nonsensical things humans have come up with over the years.

Some of this shit is just wonky. Completely off the wall. Some were pretty interesting, but others were just insane.

Insane: If you find salt in your right pocket, turn three times in a counter-clockwise circle and then spit over your right shoulder 3 times while clapping the tune to jingle-bells to ward off evil spirits.

That isn't a direct quote, but it's the kind of thing one might find in this book.

Humans... weird, weird creatures we.

Sane: The Rx prescription abbreviation is the Roman alphabet equivalent of the symbol for Jupiter, who was apparently thought to be able to offer protection from illness... or something along those lines.

What did I learn from this book?
Well, I learned that if a person collects a bunch of nonsense, they can alphabetize it, call it a book and sell it.

I also learned, or reaffirmed my notion, that ignorant humans will always try to explain things they don't understand-- even if the explanations are completely absurd. Completely.

Book 36: Man's Search for Meaning

Man's Search for Meaning

Viktor E.Frankl

1946

Viktor Frankl was in a handful of concentration camps in Nazi occupied Europe. As a psychiatrist, Frankl made observations, suggestions, and was able to detatch himself from the horrible suffering of the camps.

Reading this was like reading Gulag Archipelago or  Death March.: utterly heartbreaking and not at all inspiring.  I doubt the authors of any of these two books intended for their works to be inspiring. They are some of the most damning works concerning the development of systematic fucked-upness that humans so frequently exhibit.

Frankl explores the conditions of the camps and the psychological toll of such an existence. Ultimately, he argues that if a person has a reason to live, he can endure almost any condition. But if that "why" is not satisfied, then survivability of extreme conditions is unlikely. I am reminded of stories of individuals, lost in the woods, desert, or mountains, who should not have survived, but simply refused to die.

The power of the mind over the functions of the body are pretty well-understood. We understand that mental stimulus, whether real or perceived, can be a large determining factor in healing and endurance. Mind over matter is more than just a pithless phrase. 

Man's Search isn't long, and while some parts of it seem incoherent, non-relevant, or repetitive, it is worth a reader's time. Frankl's logotherapy seems, to me at least, to be a rather dated and axiomatic way of looking at things. Some of his clinical examples from the second half of the book seem awfully convenient. I'm not saying he lied, I'm just suggesting that telling a man who is unhappy with his occupation to change jobs isn't exactly groundbreaking. 

Like I said, it's worth the reader's time, but I would venture to guess that if the holocaust was not a centerpiece, this book would not have enjoyed the success it has. It's interesting, but transplant the narrative to any other human-caused disaster with equal or greater amounts of suffering (is there such a scale?), and I doubt as many people would've picked it up.

3/5 monkies. 

Book 35: The Demon Haunted World-- Science as a Candle In the Dark

I'm busy. I'm tired. I read this book. I loved it. It was awesome. 5/5 masturbating monkeys.

Book 34 Billions and Billions

Billions and Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millineum

1998. Ballantine Books

Carl Sagan died before he could finish this book. 

The Afterword is written by his surviving wife, who finished proofreading it. He didn't live long enough to finish the Acknowledgement, and one of the last things he was able to do was finish the prologue.

Carl Sagan. What a dude. 

Billions and Billions was not necessarily what I thought it would be. Though, honestly, I didn't do any research before jumping into it.

I was surprised (although I'm not sure why) to see the clarity with which the great doctor was able to convey his ideas. If nothing else, Sagan was a great teacher. A sage, one might say. The Sagacious Sagan.

Billions and Billions  deals, as one might expect from the subtitle, with considerations of life and death at a point in time just after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The world was very much in fear of total nuclear annihilation just a few years before, and Carl Sagan, an outspoken voice against nuclear proliferation, brings not only concern for mutually assured destruction to the table, but also global warming and the destruction of the environment.

The pleas against animal testing, which were thinly veiled in Dragons of Eden,  are almost absent in B&B. But that's not necessarily what the book was supposed to be about.

It's unfortunate that so many of the concerns voiced in Billions and Billions, which are still valid concerns, are not higher priority items today. There still exist a great many social, environmental and political problems which have been forgotten in the Palin-plagued media crapfest which is the American dialogue. 

I'll not quote too many passages, as the book does best on its own. It speaks for itself. Sagan, no advocate of religion and the notion of an afterlife, still lives on through his work. 

It's a very touching plea for common sense.

"Along with progress in literacy such trends are the allies of Jeffersonian democracy. On the other hand, what passes for literacy in America in the late twentieth century is a very rudimentary knowledge of the English language, and television in particular tends to seduce the mass population away from reading. In pursuit of the profit motive, it has dumbed itself down to lowest-common-denominator programming-- instead of rising up to teach and inspire"

A man after my own heart, that Carl.

"Perhaps the most wrenching by-product of the scientific revolution has been to render untenable many of our most cherished and most comforting beliefs. The tidy anthropocentric proscenium of our ancestors has been replaced by a cold, immense, indifferent Universe in which humans are relegated to obscurity. "

Yes! It's true. Taking this into consideration, we can see the obvious selfishness associated with modern findamentalism and superstition. The unwillingness to realize that we are, in the grand scheme of things, individuals without a central importance in the universe, is difficult for us to accept. Thinking of one's self as not being the center of the Universe doesn't exactly have evolutionary advantages. 

But, to think that we are special; that we have a special place, are some sort of a plan or prospectus makes us feel better. Especially when we don't enjoy our lives.

So, while we may feel less comforted knowing that we are on a mote of dust in the endless, cold sea of space, we should all the more appreciate the life we do have, and the ones we do love. 

And banjos.