Category: Books

In volume VII of Stephen King’s Dark Tower series, “The Dark Tower” Roland finally reaches the end of his quest. But does he achieve his “ka”? If we are observant, that question is
answered at the beginning of the book, on the fly sheet:

Reproduction

Revelation

Redemption

Resumption

But we, like most people, are not usually that observant, we note the fly-sheet in passing but it is only later that its significance comes home. Often the important things pass us by, just like those four words. In them are writ the ending of the book, but we don’t notice because we are focused on “the plan” and what is going to happen next. We are looking for the big things, and we forget that the big things are often disguised. Roland forgets this too, and he is far more observant than most of us, but as we were told in the beginning, in Volume 1, Roland lacks imagination, and imagination is a crucial human trait.

Although at various points in reading this series, and indeed in reading this last volume, I had doubts and felt frustrated at the development of the book, in the end I think it is quite masterfully done.  There is a sophisticated exploration of free will and destiny, of the ways humans perceive and pursue what they believe to be their “paths”. Although the book is not always consistent, for the most part I think it is a pretty brilliant conclusion to a long series. When you look at how King interweaves his own life and career with the story and the entire discussion as to whether King is writing and creating the world (does it exist outside of King’s imagination) or whether the world is expressing itself through King, or are the characters creating themselves through the writing of the novel, you get a rather interesting look at metaphysical solipsism and the many ways in which we can perceive the world, while reminding us that this world does not exist outside King himself (or does it). Philosophy hasn’t come up with an answer either.

There were a lot of diverse threads and elements, from many of King’s books, not just the Dark Tower series, that get resolved and many ideas that King explores. And yes there were parts of the story I found uninteresting, or I thought were weak, but generally I was not surprised by the ending. But then, I have never been one to think that knowing the end will ruin the appreciation of the book. The signs were all there from the beginning.

The deaths of Eddie and Jake were not pointless and were necessary, both for their own fates and for Roland. I was at first disappointed in the conclusion of Susannah’s role in this quest, but upon further reflection I realized that it was the only perfect ending. Susannah was the only one of the ka-tet who fully realized her ka, and who also realized that Roland would not achieve his, although she might not have figured out exactly why. I am not sure of this though.

The coda was the only answer. I do not find it disappointing. Anything else would have been a let-down, a pandering to popular philosophy, a lie. Roland learned a lot. He learned
to love, and because he did so he was given a key which might make a difference
in the future. Roland achieved the dark tower. What he didn’t learn is that the
dark tower, although real, is also a metaphor. He was so focused on what he perceived to be the goal that he marched right over the real goal, regardless of the cost. The cost is high.

Will Roland learn? Do any of us learn? There really are no answers no matter how badly we may want them. Stephen King has written a masterful conclusion to a rather complicated sequence of books.

Blink by Malcolm Gladwell was an easy to read, entertaining book, that was perfect vacation reading.  In fact I read most of it on vacation, nearly two weeks ago, and just got around to reading the last two chapters this past weekend; not because I wasn’t interested but because I was distracted.  I finished just in time too, it is due back at the library tomorrow.

I have to admit the book was interesting and it wasn’t exactly what I expected it to be.  Certainly it made me think about the world, how we perceive the world, and how and why we do the things we do in a different way.  Generally any book that makes me think about my life differently or change my perception of things is successful, whether I agree with the author or not.  Generally what I find enjoyable or interesting about a book is about the internal revelations or conversations I have with myself because I have read the book.  If the conversations lead to some kind of insight, intended by the author not, the book was an enjoyable and interesting experience.  This book provided that insight because it made me look at some of my assumptions and judgments and look at them in a different way.

But the book has its faults and in some ways the book can be used as an apology or a defense for all kinds of snap judgments and assumptions that a society or some aspect of it want us to make.  I don’t believe that is the intention here, but it is inescapable.   And at times the research seemed spotty or inconclusive, as if we had a bunch of vignettes or examples of things that may be true but it was a bit of a stretch to make them related.  At other times connections seemed more direct and inevitable. 

In the end, what we read and learn can add to our insights and our ability to make good decisions and do the "right thing".  But only if we allow our mind to grow and discern.  This is true of books or anything in life.  Blink made me think about the pros and cons of the kind of decisions we make on a daily basis.  It was a book I enjoyed reading.  It is not a book to treasure and come back to again and again.

I received a package today from my friend "Book Guy".  I haven’t heard from him in a long time.  Book Guy designs computer systems and chips and reads, although I hate to say indiscriminately, I can at least say widely.  He has time on his hands, he builds both hardware and software systems, contracts out to whoever pays him the most money, and spends most of the time he is not designing chips, software, or sleeping reading.  The ultimate computer nerd with a bookish bent.  Since he makes far more money than his lifestyle requires, he buys books in quantity and then periodically he sends stacks of books to his friends.  The only catch is that we have to pass them on when we are done, although passing them on to local libraries is also OK.  The books are nothing esoteric usually, but popular fiction, with the occasional surprise.  No surprises here:

Stephen King:    Liseys’ Story
David Baldacci:  The Collectors
Robert Ludlum:  The Bancroft Strategy
John Grisham:  The Innocent Man
James Patterson:  Cross

They might not have been things I would have read on my own, but Stephen King’s "Lisey’s Story" was on my list either for the library or to wait for the mass market paperback.  At the moment the wait list for "Lisey’s story is three times the length of the supply list for all the libraries in the 3 county system, so I was in no rush.  They will be good gym reading, and perhaps good travel reading for the upcoming Thanksgiving trip to Kansas.  I am not sure any of the bro’s will be interested so I might have to pass them on elsewhere.    Although I probably wouldn’t have bought these, I will enjoy reading them (I admit to not always being a critical reader) and brother C, who I tend to think of as being smarter and having impeccable taste, is probably far above this kind of thing. 

None of these books are in my local branch library although they are all represented in the local library system.  I will check tomorrow if they are interested in a donation of current fiction. I have been turned down before, although if they would publish a list of books they wanted to buy, I would consider purchasing same, reading and donating to a good cause.  In case the library isn’t interested, if you harbor a hidden penchant for popular fiction, please advise.

Whereas the last book was something I read compulsively, but did not always ENJOY reading, The Death of a Beekeeper was completely the opposite.  It seems surprising that this novel could be so entrancing, so personal, so involving, but something must have appealed to me because I did, after all, buy it.  And this one definitely goes on the permanent shelf.

Beautiful, spare, utterly captivating.  I absolutely loved reading this book and the only reason it took me two days was because I had to keep stopping to consider what I was reading, to let my mind wander through this new world that was being created by words, and occasionally to doze off into the world of dreams (decongestants).  Gustafson’s prose and power of description are wonderful.   The story is not really a story in the traditional sense, it purports to be the miscellaneous journals found in the house of a man who has died of cancer, the journals of a man dying of cancer.  But the writing draws one in to this world and makes the reader feel the world, as if these could be his or her journals (if most of us could write this well) and we feel these thoughts, this world, and the slipping away of this world very deeply. Rather than reading a story about someone else in someplace else in order to escape one’s self for a bit, the reader becomes the narrator, at least in part, and this becomes as much the reader’s story and the reader’s loss as that of some imagined character. One reads and begins to feel the events and thoughts as if one was a part of them, as if one’s own memories are being created.

A tremendous accomplishment.

It is time once again to fit the newly read books onto the bookshelves, always a challenge here as we by no means live in a book-free zone.

In doing so I have been faced with a bit of a  conundrum.  The books I think I want to save are stacked neatly, ready to be interfiled with their future shelf-mates and I find I must pause.  What do I do with the book I just read, The Tortilla Curtain.  As you recall, I said it was worthwhile reading, and the writing was good.  In fact it was a rather namby-pamby review because I didn’t really say what I thought about the story itself, except that it made me think about myself and society in a different way.  And herein lies the problem.

The book was good.  I do not regret reading it, in fact I am probably even glad I did.  Initially I put it on the "to be saved" list, but now I have doubts.  Is this the kind of book I really want on my shelf?  I don’t save books because they are uplifting.  I even have been known to save books I don’t agree with but which make me think and look at the world in different ways.  This book might meet that criteria, as it has made me look at myself and my society and the ways our lives and our values are often in conflict.  But it is also a novel, and it is a novel in which one character, Delaney, runs down another character, Candido, gives him $20.00 in payment for the severe injuries he has incurred, and then later feels he (Delaney) has been "taken" by the Mexican, whom he later tries to kill.  In many ways I find Delaney to be despicable, even though I can understand how his view of life has turned down the path to destruction.  Is this a book I will ever read again?  Is this a book I want my grandchildren to read?

Well, I think I have answered my question.

I finished The Tortilla Curtain.  It took me longer than most "bicycle books" do but then it is a novel that holds up well on its own, not just as a distraction while riding an exercise bike.  I hadn’t expected to like this book  as much as I did.  The only other Boyle novel I had read, World’s End, had not been a favorite despite much acclaim at the time.

Boyle is an excellent, skilled writer and the book is quite enjoyable to read.   Yes, it is a book about California, about the extremes of not just California but the American Lifestyle.  Yes, in many ways the characters are stereotypes of the poor immigrant and the rich, liberal, shallow, white American.  Yes both families experience a series of disasters that are unlikely to occur in such short order in "real life".  But Boyle does not get trapped in the assumptions and the stereotypes. Each of the primary characters, Delaney and Candido are given equal weight.  Neither one is treated as a stereotype and Boyle makes no effort to say "this is the typical member of his tribe".  I would get completely wrapped up in the lives of the characters even though I might find them each quite unlikeable at times.

As I said, these characters are not stereotypes.  They are individuals, but there must be many people like them in many degrees and variations.  Each character rings true, and I can see the basic traits that I see in other people, and myself in each of them.  Each of them reacts in ways that seem completely in keeping with what we have learned of their characters and their lives.  While the book highlights the dichotomy of rich and poor in this nation, quite brutally at times, Boyle does not belittle either side. I don’t think the point of the book is to damn or praise anything in American Culture.  It is about miscommunication and what happens when people come up against a wall, what assumptions they make and how they react and how our circumstances and background affect the judgments we make about other people. 

Yes the book is unrealistic in many ways, but a good novel often has to be unrealistic.  Tragedy, Comedy, The Unexpected.  These are what highlight the experiences of life and a good novel must draw our attentions to things that we might miss in the normal boring day-to-day flow of life (Anne Tyler excepted perhaps).  Delaney may be shallow and self-righteous.  Candido may be ignorant and even "hopeless" at times.  But their reactions ring true on many levels.  But the book is about how people react under extreme circumstances  and about how different our expectations and judgments are, about how difficult it really is for people to understand and judge others whose upbringing, language, and circumstances are quite different. "Walking a mile in another person’s shoes" does not come naturally to any of us.

It is a good book.  The story is gripping.  The characters are very clearly drawn and the reader is drawn into their thoughts.   The book is sympathetic even as it is damning.  In short it is about our humanity and how we perceive the world around us, strengths and shortcomings and all.  The novel doesn’t really seem to judge, but the reader might find herself thinking much.  In keeping with the theme of the novel, different readers may bring in different perceptions as well, adding more or less weight.  I might damn Delaney more than Candido, because I can relate more to Delaney’s background than to Candido’s.  Even though I might despise some of his decisions, I feel angry at him, I feel that he, with his privileges and better education, should have known better.  But that is the point.  We are all prisoners of our backgrounds and in extreme circumstances it is our backgrounds that determine our biases and how we react, now matter how much we might try to overcome these assumptions at other times in our lives.

Individually we are doomed to misunderstanding.  But there is still humanity and there is still a shred of hope.

I like to think of myself as an intelligent and moderately sophisticated despite frequent appearances of evidence to the contrary.  I have been lucky enough in my life to count among my friends and family truly exceptional individuals, and I realize that I am not in the same league, but at times I hope that I display some sense of taste.  But not perhaps always.      Perhaps it is just that I have been so well indoctrinated into the culture of the educated elite, that it seems somehow shameful to admit that I adore truly trashy romantic novels and sappy television shows with happy endings.  I can watch every movie made by Fred Astaire or Gene Kelly over and over without remorse, and I love Danielle Steel novels.

By Friday I was beginning to feel a little at loose ends in Knoxville.  I had been away from home for almsot two weeks, and although I love to travel, I love being home even more.  I was longing to be back in my own space.  The kids were also getting the hang of their new schedule and getting used to spending time with Owen so I wasn’t really needed as much as I had been in at the beginning of the week.

When I saw this novel alongside the checkout line in the grocery store, I snapped it up.  Danielle Steel novels may be formulaic, but they provide a perfect escapist fantasy with a happy ending and triumph over adversity and unkindness.  Just what I needed.

So I took my book over to Starbucks and ordered a Grande Mocha and curled up in a comfortable chair and started reading.  In fact I drank two Mochas during that interlude and it doesn’t seem to have hurt me any.  I finished the book in about 2 1/2 hours and felt relaxed and refreshed.  I think the money was well spent for the time — I would have spent nearly the same for a movie and probably not have enjoyed it as much.

Having enjoyed my little escape I was able to throw myself wholeheartedly back into my cooking and cleaning duties and get everything ready for my departure from Tennessee and return to New York. 

And upon my arrival, just to prove that sometimes life can be a little bit like a sappy novel, when I came down the escalator at the airport I saw G standing right outside the security doors, waiting.  Both our eyes lit up and we went running into each other’s arms as he swirled me around in a giant hug.  Who says happy endings can’t happen every day?

Why do we choose a biography to read?  What do we expect to find?  Do we expect that by finding out something about a person’s life, we will learn something that will explain their work, or is reading a biography simply a voyeuristic exercise?  It is, of course, human to want to know about other people’s lives.   We look to a person’s life to see if it will explain how or why they became famous or successful; we want to know how they are different from us, and yet at the same time we look for similarities to see how they might be like us.  This is especially true if the biography is of someone we think we admire, or whose work or accomplishments we admire.  Do we feel more justified in our admiration if we can also find that the person is like us in someway?, Does the knowledge that they are not like we imagined change our judgement of their work?   Do we think that by understanding an artist we can understand his or her work?

I often have mixed feelings about biographies of writers, be they writers of fiction or people who write about ideas such as philosophers.  Because writing seems so personal, there is a tendency to think that we are familiar with the person who did the writing because of what we read and admire in their work.  But this may not be the case.  If you love a person’s writing, does that mean you must love them in some way?  Or does learning that a beloved writer is all too human, that he or she has great failings or flaws inextricably alter the perception of the works themselves, as if learning of the flaws of their creator renders the beauty of the work invalid.

Still, I was eager to read The Narnian, even though I was not sure what I would find there. Except for that part of his life popularized by Shadowlands, I was not at all familiar with Lewis’s life.  But I had read a great many of his books and admired his work.  Perhaps I was intrigued by the man who could write such magnificent scholarly works such as The Allegory of Love and also the science fiction/fantasy world of Out of the Silent Planet and the Narnia books.  I can’t say that the fiction is of the same merit, in a purely literary sense, as Lewis’s scholarly works, but the novels do show a deep love fo fantasy and imagination, and a deep love of STORY in and of itself. 

I did not read the Narnia books until later, after the age of childhood, after I had read some of his works about Christianity.  My father gave me Mere Christianity and The Screwtape Letters to read when I was 12.  I did not discover Narnia until several years later.  I was, in fact, despite being beyond my years in my selection of reading matter at times, not quite ready for those books although they made deep impressions on me.  Screwtape frightened me terribly for a long time.  It took some time before I could appreciate the satire and irony in that book, but I suspect that a true understanding of satire is not yet fully developed at age 12, except perhaps in the most precocious.  But I remembered both books and read them again later, when they actually made a deeper impression on me.

I did not expect the book to change my perception of Lewis as a writer because whatever the life of the person, it is the life of the mind that is reflected in written works and anyone with an imagination knows that the mind can offer a totally different life than reality.  In our minds we can be the best that we can be, we can be unfettered from the constraints of our lives.  The value of a writer’s works has very little to do with the life of the writer itself, except in how the shaping of the writer occurred. 

Perhaps that is what I am seeking when reading a biography of a writer, some kind of knowledge of how they became a writer.  Perhaps I want to know what shaped them and gave them the gift of placing words and thoughts on a page.

The Narnian did not disappoint.  I enjoyed the book, and yes, I was thrilled to find things that Lewis and I had in common, especially the fact that we both loved Spenser’s Faeroe Queen and the stories of George MacDonald as young people.  It was a thrill to hear about how Lewis loved the imaginary world and the life of the imagination, and how he despaired of a generation of young people growing up without that sense of the endless possibility to be found in fantasy worlds, but even that should not have surprised me.  Allegory and fantasy are not unrelated and they both seem quite outdated in modern life and our belief in science and the practicality of the “real”.   It did not surprise me that he described himself as a dinosaur.  I have felt at times to be out of touch with the modern world myself, but I am no CS Lewis.

And so I felt thrilled that I could share some interests with Lewis, even though much of his life seems incomprehensible to me.  I should not have been surprised to find some common thread, because I have admired and read such a broad assortment of his works, and his writings have made a deep impression on me.  As should be the case after reading an inspiring biography of a writer, I wish to reread many of the works and perhaps over the next few months I shall pick up a few volumes and re-acquaint myself with Lewis’s writings.

I am not very far into The Waste Lands yet and it is already starting to be a very interesting book.  Although I don’t usually ponder and make notes on popular novels as I read them, this one has me changing my ways.  Oh it is still a great story, and so far each volume has been a great story in itself, with a complete ending so that one does not fee the rush to move on to the next novel.  But each subsequent volume (subsequent layer) adds and builds on the ones that have gone before it.

The symbolism and sense of dichotomy that is building in this, Volume 3, is particularly interesting.  This is the third Volume of a series (3).  In the second Volume, called The Drawing of the Three, there were three doors and at the end there were three companions embarking on a quest.  And here things get more complicated.  One of the companions was a person divided, one who had become two, and who in the end is reunited and made whole, two who are made one by the uniting factor of a third.  So the one who becomes two becomes three in a sense.  At the third door Roland realizes that the person who acts as his bridge is not the person he will bring back to his own world, but that rather, he will become the third, or he will become Death as he thinks at that time.  But at the same time the third door leads to something that unites all the companions.  And Roland’s actions when he enters the third changes the past, both his and someone else’s.

In book 1 Roland met the boy Jake, and at the end of book 1 Jake died. Jake’s death will always affect Roland’s fate.  In Book 2, Jake resurfaces behind the third door, but here he is only a secondary character, something that happens, the righting of a wrong perhaps, but it does not seem primary to the plot.  In book 2 Roland saves Jake from the fate that he had faced in book 1.

But Roland remembered Jake from when he was in Roland’s world.  And Roland remembers the death of Jake.  When Roland prevents Jake from dying in his own world and entering Roland’s world he changes both of their fates.  Now he is divided in two.  There is the Roland post door #3, who knows there was no Jake, and yet he remembers the other history as well, the Roland who knew Jake and it was Jake and his fate that sent Roland on the path that lead him to the doors to begin with.  Roland knows two pasts, knows they cannot both be correct, but knows they are.

At the same time, in another world there is a little boy named Jake, a little boy who is not run over by a car, a little boy who does not die.  All this is true.  But this boy Jake also knows that he was run over by the car, that he died and went to Roland’s world and that Roland let him die again.  He knows both stories cannot be true and yet he knows they are. 

Although I haven’t gotten there yet, it seems that Roland has set in course a path that must result in his being reunited with Jake.  And so at the third door, Roland did not draw a third companion and yet he did, as he made it possible for Jake to live and by doing so changed both of their fates.

This is proving to be a very sophisticated novel, and a great read as well.