Category: Books

Sometimes I wonder if I just happen to read books in a particular order, or if the connections my mind makes between books I read and the general thoughts and themes of my life at any given moment are just a grand illusion, a construct of the mind geared at making sense of the world.

 

The Invisible Gorilla is a very interesting book which addresses just this issue, along with others.  As you can probably infer from the title, the authors are the psychologists who ran that now rather well-known experiment where the participants either noticed, or failed to notice, a person in a gorilla suit walking through a basketball court while two teams of players were passing balls back and forth between them.   But there is more to this book than just this particular experiment and this particular illusion, the illusion of attention.  The book addresses the way we think our brains work, and therefore to some extent the way we think the world works, and how we deceive ourselves into thinking we are more in control of our brains and by extension the world than is actually the case.

 

The book basically revolves around six "illusions" devoting one chapter to each.

    1.    Attention.  

    2.    Memory. 

    3.    Confidence.      

    4.    Knowledge.  

    5.    Causation.  

    6.    Potential.  

I think the book is well balanced between the stories used to illustrate the points and the research being discussed.  The authors also make some very good points, tackling a host of popular and recent targets covering a wide range of situations and cover them well.  Some of the points made are likely to make any reader reconsider previously held opinions.  And this, I believe is what I like about the book the most.  It has made me realize that I should perhaps be less hard on myself as well as perhaps be a bit less self-secure and judgemental concerning the "mistakes" and actions of others.   After all, our brains have gotten us where we are, whether one deems that good or ill, so perhaps we should not be all too hard on them.  Despite the wording of the title, I am not sure our brains actually deceive us, but more that we deceive ourselves in our search for meaning and security and control, just as I deceive myself finding patterns where there are none.

 

But of course there are connections.  One of the protagonists of The Big Short, Eisman, appears in one of the chapters in The Invisible Gorilla.   Other connections are not perhaps so obvious buy may still be there.  It is likely for example that bond traders in general possess a high degree of confidence, and it may be dangerous to assume that confidence implies knowledge.   A character in a novel only believes what he can see, but what he sees is probably only part of the picture and is, even then, what he does see is subject to interpretation by his own brain and may not accurately reflect reality.

 

There is much to think about here, but I'll still make my patterns and connections.  Patterns are the way we define the world and our place in the world.  It is also wise to occasionally remember that what we think we know may not be what we think it is at all.

 

 

My reading of The Big Short, was drawn out a bit, not because the book wasn't good but because while I was reading it I was also watching The Civil War on PBS.  Although the situations are completely different, there are similarities that made my blood boil.   

 

 

The book was entertaining and informative. Lewis is a good writer, and his technique of portraying the financial crisis and the mortgage-backed security market through a small set of social misfits who saw the huge potential downside of the market was a good choice.  I found the story gripping, and I also found that Lewis's circular story-telling technique was helpful in painting an understandable picture of a system out of control and a society on the verge of collapse.   And yes, I am comparing the financial markets to a society in and of themselves, a society that has the potential to take everything else with it.

 

Although the main characters around which this story evolved were social, and to some extent financial market, outsiders, and although in the end their gamble was right and they made a lot of money, the fact of that they were right did not make them any happier.  There is a message in that.  Sometimes the view is sharper from the outside looking in.  At the same time society does not necessarily want to be reminded of its failures, and betting against one's society and a large driving force of culture may be exhilirating, but being right is not always an uplifting experience.  Even when we know we are right, sometimes we just want to be proven wrong, and even in their success, there is a good bit of discomfort in Lewis's portrayal of his main characters after the crash.  Words of warning perhaps.  Words that are basically unheeded, as it is quite evident that although the crash occurred, there have been no fundamental changes in the mind set and the systems that gave birth to the cataclysm.  A system that rewards people for callous indifference, for taking risks without regard to the consequences, that emphasizes short term gain over long term growth, that rewards callousness and outright greed is a bad system.  The people who get caught up in that system are not necessarily bad people, but the system corrupts.  People will follow rewards.  The mindset of making money by screwing someone else, ends up being a system in which most people are screwed.  The entire idea that one can make money by screwing people, and that people who practice this mindset live at the pinnacle of our society should give us pause.  There is nothing different here from Feudal lords and kings who had little regard for the serfs who maintained their land.  There is nothing different here from wealthy plantation owners who plunged a society into a war it could not win just so they could maintain their protected lifestyle built as it was on bondage and indifference to humanity.  Except that this time however little blood was shed and the perpetrators, for the most part, came out ahead.

 

After reading Lewis I needed a novel.  I was hoping for something uplifting, but really I just grabbed something off the shelf.  I picked up Chasing Fireflies by Charles Martin, a book I had originally purchased on a visit to Knoxville and never gotten around to reading.  I knew nothing about the author or the novel, but the prose and the story had intrigued me.

 

It is a good novel.   The novel meanders a bit between past and present, intertwining the stories of the three main characters, but Martin handles this well and effectively.  The characters are well drawn with depth in the relationships between them.  The characters draw the reader in and although the ending was somewhat redemptive, I give the author credit for not resolving all the story lines and leaving somethings unexplained and unresolved.  

 

There were some downsides.  There are some glaring factual errors. Sometimes the pacing was off a bit.  Much of the direction of the book is pretty predictable, but in the end this is not really a book about the plot but about the characters and their development, about surfaces and shadows, about what is hidden and what is revealed, about the relationship between fathers and sons specifically, but also about relationships in general, and how we are all looking for someone or something to fill the hole in our chest. Often we are looking in the wrong place.  If we are lucky we find it.  If we are very lucky we find it has been with us all along.

 

But the story doesn't get to its resolution easily.  There is much pain, fear, despair and general nastiness in this book.  It does not paint a rosy picture of the human condition, and yet it is a book filled with hope, a reminder that there is hope.  I found it deeply enjoyable and deeply satisfying.

I've just finished reading Peter Hoeg's The Woman and the Ape.  It is an interesting novel, without the warm lyricism that I found in Smilla's Sense of Snow and even Borderliners, and this is quite interesting because these novels are in one sense more chilling in their subject matter and yet warmer in the way that subject matter is addressed, whereas this, which could be a love story and an awakening is told in icily cold prose.  But of course this is a novel by Peter Hoag, so this novel is not merely a love story but also a commentary on contemporary society, science, and what makes us human. 

 

It is an interesting novel, and yes it is about a woman who falls in love with an ape.  But one should get beyond that, and not just because the ape is not really an ape, as we perceive "ape" that is, although the woman is really a woman, but because they are both more and less than what they appear to be.  The choice of this woman is an interesting one, and if one allows oneself to get beyond one's initial dismissal of "rich upper class woman has everything turns to alcohol" one can see that the woman herself is just as isolated, controlled, and under-appreciated as the ape — assigned her role in life and imprisoned in this role much like an animal in a zoo.  Hoag's woman has isolated herself from herself in order to cope with a world in which she is already increasingly isolated.  The author is good at outlining the depths of her isolation without really doing so directly just as he circles around the issues of science, humanity, and nature obliquely.  

 

It is a good book and unsettling. Hoag writes with dry wit.  No one is what they seem and in the end, the "good" are not always good and the "bad" are not as bad as one had supposed although the end seems a bit rushed and faded after the initial promise of the beginning of the book. It is not that I expected a more specific finish, rather that the end is so unfinished, leaving so many loose ends, just, I suppose, as most personal crises (midlife or otherwise) leave chaos around them.  

 

In many ways the book was about the personal crises of two people, Madelene and Erasmus,  and how this crisis was resolved.  Our protagonists found themselves after passing through chaos, probably as most people in crisis hope to find themselves, and this always involves some amount of chaos, and the rest of their personal world was left to pick up the pieces.  That there are greater implications than expected to the pieces left behind is also not unusual, it is always a matter of perspective.  Madelene and Erasmus break with civilization and its expectations.  The rest are left to pick up the pieces.  All are changed by the process.

 

Interesting book.

 

I've been indulging in a bit of light reading of late.  It started while the flooring was being installed, I needed a rather mindless escape from the hammering and sawing and general disruption, when I read James Patterson's The Postcard Killers.  I know a lot of people who love Patterson but truthfully I have never really become a fan.  The plots are predictable and I feel no connection with his characters.  In fact, to my mind, the best Patterson books are the ones that move quickly from the get-go and keep moving without any attempt at character development.   As this perfectly describes The Postcard Killers, I was perfectly happy reading it.  It caught my interest and there was enough going on that I didn't  really waste any time fretting over the plot or the lack of characterization;  I just wanted to know what happens next.  In short it was perfect escapist reading and just the thing for those times when you just want to pass the time and escape from reality and thought for a while.

 

Maggie Kozel's eloquent memoir, The Color of Atmosphere, was a much better book although it too was a very quick read. Dr. Kozel's accounting of how she found her calling in medicine, and her journey through medical school, residency, and into practice as a pediatrician, first in the military and later in private practice is poignant and at times heart-rending.  It is also a not too subtle indictment of many of the problems with the health care system in this country.  In my case Dr. Kozel was "preaching to the choir" because I already agreed with her on most issues.  But her story touched my heart and forced me to think more clearly.   The book is not fiction and yet it reads like a good story with the requisite happy ending, while still managing to make you think along the way.  It deserves to be widely read.

 

Then, still feeling rather mentally unsettled, I opted for more mindless fiction. I honestly cannot say that Stuart Woods is a better writer than James Patterson, but I enjoy his books more.  Or perhaps I just enjoy the Stone Barrington novels.  They are easy enjoyable reads and Lucid Intervals was no exception.  The books are not complex or heavy on plot.  There tend to be a lot of dangling ends in the story, but they move quickly and are not particularly violent.  I will also admit that I just like the character of Stone Barrington, not because I would necessarily like him in real life, but because he appreciates a good suit and understands the details of of fit and tailoring and I have a bit of a weakness for a man who likes a good suit and a good bourbon.  Even though I certainly understand the appeal of a man who can be both a little polished and rough around the edges, and I am certainly no prude, the women in the novel continue to be mostly vehicles for sex, with very little development rather than their availability to jump into bed and although the sex scenes in this book are not graphic they seem to be increasingly a substitute for plot.  Unfortunately the main character, like the book, has slipped into a kind of mid-life hollowness where he is still coasting by on looks and his delusions and pretensions, unaware that the promise of his youth has slipped away and failed to gain substance.  I have a couple more of these books.  They will be perfectly good for riding on the exercise bike, which I desperately need to resume, and where I prefer mindless entertainment that merely keeps me pedaling and turning the pages.

 

Lastly I read Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, which was in a class far above those previous reads.  Of course Chabon writes beautiful sentences.  Even better he writes beautiful sentences that do not detract from the joy and magic of his stories.  The book perfectly encapsulates its own little world and the reader feels and experiences all of it, words, thoughts, smells, desires.  It is really perfect, and perfectly engaging. Joe and Sam are marvelously drawn, complex characters and Chabon manages to write a book about the holocaust, loss, survival, and love without becoming at all trite or sentimental. In fact this novel, set in the world of pulp fiction and comic book heroes, has all the characteristics of the pulps:  incredible luck and happenstance, adventure, magic, nick-of-time rescues and characters saved from the brink of disaster.  And yet the book moves beyond these conventions, making use of them to tackle serious subjects and complex human issues.  It is literature thinly veiled as escapism, admitting that escapism is often exactly what we need to get through the tragedy of life.

 

Of course all these books end well.  People move on with their lives, they find happiness or at least the road to happiness.  This is exactly what escapism is all about, the happy endings, the magical unreality and simplicity, the hope that everything will be alright in the end if we just do the right thing.  This is  what comic books provided, as did movies in the golden age of Hollywood.  

 

But movies have become darker and happy endings, when they occur are hard won.  Sex and Violence more pervasive in escapist fiction, although the good guys still tend to come out ahead.  Perhaps the resurgence of animated films is the modern answer to the pulps.  But that is another post.

Reading this week was lighthearted.  I got started on a book, misplaced it, picked up another, and as I sorted through the piles of book on the living room floor, kept coming across book after book that I had meant to read by never gotten to.  It was time to stop and read something now rather than just continuing to pile things up for the future.

 

I stared with The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver and found it surprisingly enjoyable.  It was surprising because the only other novel by the author I have read was The Poisonwood Bible, and although that book has stayed with me and had a great affect on me, I did not find it particularly enjoyable.  Maddening yes.  Enlightening yes.  Poignant yes.  Enjoyable, most definitely not.

 

But back to The Bean Trees.  Kingsolver has a remarkably astute way of capturing an image or dialog or a moment of drama, making it poignantly real, and even though there are many events and many characters in this book, and even though some of them are not developed beyond being symbolic "types", she manages to weave all the threads and all the bits and pieces into a harmonious whole where every detail fits.  She writes a novel with a poet's sensitivity to language and to structure and that is not an easy task for either a poet or a novelist.

 

That said, I thought the beginning was stronger than the ending.  The narrator, Taylor Greer, is a dynamic and vividly drawn character who draws the reader in.  But then as the plot becomes more complex and more things happen to Taylor, she seems to become more vague, too much of a symbol of what the author wants to portray and less of a person in her own right.  Despite this, I remained vested in the plot, probably because the plot became stronger even as Taylor's individuality seemed to fade.  I worried about Turtle, the little girl who eventually became Taylor's own, and I followed Taylor as she grew up and accepted the one thing she never wanted (a child) and went from being a smart, engaging young adult, to a resourceful, caring woman.  But I no longer cared as deeply as I might have and although the book remained enjoyable, it fell short of being enlightening or moving.

 

To reiterate, we start the novel with a strong engaging female lead, and we lose her somewhere along the path, even though the novel is very much about her growth into adulthood.  Taylor Greer seems to become just another symbol who reacts to situations as needed to fit the author's goals, but there is no longer any sense of Taylor as a person making these choices, something that is mourned simply because Taylor started out so very very real. This is one of the problems I had with The Poisonwood Bible as well, that too many of the characters were unrealized shadows that were drawn with large brush-strokes dipped far too heavily in the ink of stereotype.  In that later novel, however, Kingsolver does manage to maintain the richness of her portrayal of the characters that seem dearest to her heart.  In this early novel, she seems to lose the person in the pursuit of the idea.

 

The ideas set forth in this book are good ideas. Even as Taylor fades, the plot seems to become stronger and clearer although perhaps a little too certain.  In this world, terrible realities do surface, but then they fade back below the surface if they cannot be handily resolved, a kind of selective awareness that all humans actually must practice in order to survive, but in this book, perhaps the answers seem to pat, too simple, achieved to easily to be quite real.

 

Still it was a good novel and better than most with excellent writing and several interesting subplots revolving around language: how language defines identity and the various ways it affects political and sociological reality, and most importantly how the child, Turtle, picks up the mantle of language, beginning with the naming of things, particularly vegetables, and yes, beans, and how these words paint a portrait of Turtle's past and future.  Very interesting.

 

Three Books this week, all generally brief reads, beginning with Larry McMurtry's Books.  At the time I started it I was obsessed with reading it right at that moment even though I am not quite sure what possessed me, as book-collecting, or the collecting of anything particularly, is not one of my interests.  But I was interested and I enjoyed the book, particularly the small bits about McMurtry's life. The early chapters particularly appealed as the author manages to capture his early pre-book life on a ranch in Texas in a way that was richly evocative, at least to me, in spare words that fitted the spare Texas landscape.   I read those opening chapters aloud to G as we enjoyed our second cups of coffee and it was a lovely way to start a morning.

 

 

 

I found The Unthinkable by Amanda Ripley far more fascinating and at times as gripping as a good novel.  I didn't really read the book expecting to learn how to survive a disaster, I just wanted to read survivor's stories and get a sense of what they remembered.  And I believe this was a good way to read this book; it does not hold up to great scrutiny.  It is not particularly technical, and there are considerable oversimplifications.  It is not a "how to" book, but it is interesting.  The basic points are that people don't tend to panic as often as one might suppose but they do tend to freeze, and that we are each responsible for our own survival so that it would serve us well to think about what could happen and know our options before hand because we really won't be likely to figure them out when the unthinkable actually occurs.

 

Lastly, I read Peter Ackroyd's  The Trial of Elizabeth Cree.  This is something I just picked up from the library on a whim.  I've never read any of Ackroyd's fiction and thought it would be interesting.  It was well written with a colorful and  atmospheric protrayal of Victorian London.  At first I thought it was rather predictable, since we knew the ending at the beginning but appearances are deceiving in this novel.  Even though I figured out the plot twist before the end, I still found the ending to be surprisingly haunting.

 

The critical point in my understanding of The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger came about 1/3 of the way through the book.

   "Henry sighs.  "It's very charming of you to be ignorant of the twisted logic of most relationships.  Trust me.  When we met I was wrecked, blasted, and damned, and I am slowly pulling myself together because I can see that you are a human being and I would like to be one, too.  And I have been trying to do it without you noticing, because I still haven't figured out that all pretense is useless between us.  But it's a long way from the me you're dealing with in 1991 to me, talking to you right now from 1996.  You have to work at me; I can't get there alone"

 "Yes, but it's hard.  I'm not used to being the teacher."

"Well, whenever you feel discouraged, think of all the hours I spent, am spending, with your tiny self.  New math and botany, spelling and American history.  I mean, you can say nasty things to me in French because I sat there and drilled you on them.""

 

So where does that leave me?  

 

During the first hundred pages or so I found the book moderately interesting, but I could not relate to the characters.  I didn't have to like them, or feel any kind of sympathy or similarity with them, but I found them inexplicable.  A man in his 30s and 40s comes back through time and visits a little girl beginning at age 6.  He continues to visit her through her 18th birthday.  We learn that they are in love and that she will eventually marry him.  But there is nothing in these ruminations on the part of both characters to help me understand why she falls in love with him.  

 

But then of course I realized that the book isn't really about time travel.  Nor is it a romance or a romantic novel even though the plot revolves around this relationship between Henry and Claire, that is unless one views romance as a dark creative process.  But it is a novel shaped by and imbued with art, art as creative force, art as an idea, art and the creation of art as a the creation of a world unto itself.  It is also a book about the creation of the self, about the balance of the inner and he outer life and how one needs both to be able to become "a human being".  These are big difficult subjects, and am ambitious project.  I believe the author managed to pull most of this together admirably well,  although I think the book fails as a story, and would be perhaps better if it worked on that level as well.

 

Claire falls in love with Henry because she has already fallen in love with Henry when Henry first meets her.  He knows her as he has come back from her future, and he shapes her into the person she is to become.  Claire later meets Henry in her time, a Henry who does not yet know Claire, and she helps transform him into the Henry she knows, the same Henry who will later, in their joint temporal time go back and help Claire become the person she becomes.    Many people, when they fall in love, think they can transform the other making themselves and the other better.  Henry and Claire actually do this and their world becomes insular revolving only around themselves and the space they have made.  This is not the way real life works however and the world interferes.  But it doesn't really interfere with Henry and Claire.  It throws obstacles their way and they absorb them or grow around them or apart from them.  Henry and Claire's story is less about relationships than it is about art, how art is created and how it art itself creates something separate and outside life which at the same time contains and reflects back on life.  Henry and Claire's story is less about Henry and Claire as  two separate people who fall in love than it is about Henry's evolution as Henry and Claire as a part of Henry.

 

Note the names:  Noble Henry, the ruler and the creator of himself.  Henry's life is a work of art, and all of the novel revolves around Henry's development from small child exploring new worlds he does not understand (time travel) danger (arriving naked and exposed), despair (drug use and alcoholism) and eventually his redemption through Claire, about whom he is rather obsessive and understandably so.  Now Henry's development mirrors the development of all children, who do not time travel, but who are faced everyday with new and complicated worlds which they must piece together as they form their own path to adulthood.  And Henry leads a dual life.  There is the outer Henry, who works in a library,who is an alcoholic and messed up punk until he meets Claire, and there is the archetypical Henry who travels through time, experiences danger and tragedy and shapes the life of both versions of Henry in the process.

 

Claire is less multi-dimensional than Henry in the novel.  But note the name again, Claire, Henry's enlightenment.  Claire is the artist.  She is the artist who creates Henry as well as art, and she is the medium by which Henry creates himself and the materials he uses to shape her adulthood as well as his own.   

 

Everything is circular in this book.  The outside characters are shadows, not fully drawn, but also complete in their simple sketchiness.  Each one has a role in the story.  Each is defined by a few broad brushstrokes, at least in terms of how they relate to this relationship, the main story, the work of art that is Henry and Claire.  

 

At times the book seemed to make no sense.  Henry couldn't control where in time he went or when he travelled, but when he needed money to buy Claire a studio it was nothing to look up a future newspaper and remember the lottery numbers.  Henry claimed to be reluctant to change the future, to do anything that would change the future, but he was altering it all the time, much the way a work of art builds on itself and doubles back and recreates itself in its own world, altering space and time.

 

There is a scene where Henry tells Claire there is something they have to watch, a big event, and it ends up being 9/11.  But there is no other mention of it, as if it is something outside life, to be watched and then forgotten.  But at the same time Claire goes through a series of miscarriages, often told in gut wrenching detail.  The tragedy in the world is mirrored in the tragedy of the personal as this is a tale of the personal, of the microcosm that is Henry's life, the world that is also the creation of a work of art, in this case a work of art named Henry, who leaves a daughter named Alba, a daughter who is literally conceived in the maelstrom of Henry and Claire's overlapping lives. 

 

As I have mentioned many times, art figures heavily in this book.  Creation figures heavily.  The psyche and the juxtaposition of the inner and the outer lives in the creation of personhood figure heavily. As I mentioned above it is not a simple book, and the author doesn't quite manage to pull it all together into a cohesive whole, but it was worth reading once I opened my mind to the possibilities, possibilities that may only be present in my own mind. But that, in the end, is one of the hallmarks of good fiction, that it opens our minds to connections and possibilities beyond the words on the page.  Unfortunately it is not the only requirement.  I personally would have preferred the book had it been more engaging as a story, and on this level I feel it failed.  It remains a better book than many, and a book I am happy to have read.