Books this year: a book diary

I didn’t know anything about this book before I started reading it, and I’m glad for that, so this will be a short post. After reading the book, I discovered through Wikipedia that there are apparently a lot of philosophical underpinnings to what’s going on, in particular that this is supposed to be an Absurdist novel.

The main character of the book is a really weird guy, but I can empathize with him. That probably makes me a weird guy too, but it might be that I have Absurdist feelings. He doesn’t really care about things and choices that people are supposed to care about, but it works.

I wouldn’t say I would buy the book for my friends or pull anyone’s arm to read this, but it satisfies my effort/reward limits. It’s a teeny book you could knock out in a few hours, so even with a tiny reward it’s probably still worth the read. On the other hand, if you can find a similarly teeny book which you think will have a lot of reward, you’re economically and morally compelled to read that one first.

I became interested in this book because it is about a former atheist who turned to Christianity because of rational considerations. I had hoped that he would talk a little more about what those considerations were, but it never really came up.

This is a rebuttal to Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion, a book which I have never read. I have seen a few lectures and interviews with Dawkins and feel I know where he’s coming from. To me, it seems like he thinks atheists as a group are misunderstood and attacked, particularly in America. As such, atheists need to get angry and verbally attack religious people, in particular Christians who believe in Creationism or Intelligent Design. He thinks it is a good strategy to compare people’s belief in God with a childish belief in Santa Clause and doubts whether most Christians will respond to anything other than an emotivist attack.

So, on to The Dawkins Delusion. I didn’t really learn much from the book. One interesting point which I’d never heard before is in answer to the claim that there is an infinite regress in causality so it doesn’t make sense to look for a final cause of the world. The authors say that this is precisely what physicists look for when they search for a “Theory of Everything”. I don’t know how true this is. I’m reminded of Hawking’s musings in A Brief History of Time that, even after discovering the single set of equations that describe all of nature, we will still have to wonder what breathes life into them.

I was unsettled by the authors’ rejection of the idea of “viruses of the mind” and “memes”. I always thought these were some of Dawkins’s most loved devices among academics, but the authors’ of this book seem to think it’s superfluous to use memes to understand culture and belief, and that many academics don’t think memes exist.

I was also happy to see the authors’ refutation of Dawkins’s belief that atheists are nonviolent. The authors’ bring up historical cases such as the Soviet’s destruction and elimination of churches and priests between 1918-1941 and other violent persecution of Christians in the name of Atheism. The authors’ also make the point that, based on Robert Pape’s study, Dying to Win, suicide bombings have a political rather than religious motivation, and that religion is neither sufficient or necessary to account for such radicalism.

Well, I’m still not religious, and I think the author isn’t going to get any converts out of this, despite the authors hope in the introduction that the book would be read by atheists as well as Christians. It might change some people’s minds about being militant a la Dawkins, but I think that’s unlikely and it will probably serve Christians looking for refutation more than anything else.

One Hundred Years of Solitude is a novel detailing the rise and fall of the fictional village of Macondo and of the family that founded it, the Buendias.  Since the book has already been outlined here before, I decided to concentrate on the parallels between the book and the life of the author.  There are seven generations of Buendias in this story, and throughout all seven generations this family is plagued with incest.  The couple who founded Macondo, Jose Arcadio Buendia and his wife Ursula Iguaran, were cousins.  So were Marquez’s grandparents.

Jose Arcadio Buendia created a village that seemed at first to be perfect, and no one did anything without asking his advice.  However, whenever troops of gypsies came to visit the town he couldn’t help but get wrapped up in whatever great new invention they brought with them.  He was aided in his scientific pursuits by Melquiades, a mysterious gypsy.  Unfortunately, rather than finding success in his experiments he went completely crazy and spent the last part of his life tied to a tree mumbling incoherent phrases in Latin.

Ursula, the family matriarch, was a no nonsense woman who was completely devoted to the well being of her family.  She also managed to start a successful business making candy to support the family after Jose Arcadio Buendia went crazy.  She lived so long that she lost track of her age, and the only concession that she made to aging was that she went blind, although she never let anyone know it.  Soon after, the house began to fall to ruin, the flowers quit blooming, and the ants took over the place.  Ursula was based on Marquez’s grandmother, whose house suffered a similar fate after she went blind.

You would think that since Ursula was based on Marquez’s grandmother Jose Arcadio Buendia must be much like Marquez’s grandfather.  Instead, Marquez used his grandfather as the inspiration for the first human born in Macondo, Colonel Aureliano Buendia.  Just like Marquez’s grandfather, Colonel Aureliano Buendia served as a Colonel for the liberals in the Thousand Days War.  Also, Marquez’s childhood experience of having his grandfather take him to see ice for the first time figured prominently into the book, and is mentioned in the first sentence in quite a remarkable way.

The Thousand Days War is the first time that Macondo was ever exposed to the outside world other than when they were visited by the gypsies.  It was also the first time that there was ever a death in Macondo, and in many ways it was the beginning of the end for both Macondo and the Buendias.  Shortly after the war ended a banana plantation was started at the edge of town.  There were lots of tensions between the people of the town and the people of the plantation, and Macondo wasn’t really peaceful anymore.  Eventually the plantation workers went on strike in order to procure better working conditions led by Jose Arcadio Segundo, the great-grandson of Ursula and Jose Arcadio Buendia.  The workers were eventually massacred, and their bodies were spirited away by train.  The only person to remember it was Jose Arcadio Buendia, and he lived the rest of his life crushed by the weight of it.  This was also inspired by something that happened during Marquez’s childhood and shows his frustration with the fact that there is still no official record of it ever happening.

Even the style of writing in the book was influenced by the stories that Marquez was told as a child.  His grandmother would tell stories of the magical and absurd as though they were simple fact, and that is something that is definitely displayed in this book.  There are all sorts of crazy things such as someone being whisked up to Heaven while hanging up the laundry and a mechanic that is followed by clouds of butterflies.  Not even time really makes sense, because in this book it tends to travel in circles rather than a straight line.

Lots of people walk away from this book hating it, some people (like me) love it so much they could read it over and over again.  I have yet to meet anyone who remained neutral.  Either way, it’s definitely worth reading and it’s a story you won’t soon forget.

The Subtle Knife is the second in the His Dark Materials trilogy, composed, along with The Subtle Knife, of The Golden Compass and The Amber Spyglass. I read the first book almost a year ago, and though I liked it, I have only now gotten around to book two.

Fantasy books are not usually my bag. Especially children’s fantasy that adults read. I haven’t read, monolithic in the fantasy genre, Narnia, Harry Potter, or the Lord of the Rings. I am missing the essential building blocks of the fantasy genre. So, why start with a second-tier series like His Dark Materials?

The reputation of the trilogy is that where Narnia and, to a lesser-extent, Lord of the Rings (from what I have read of them, and not in them) are Christian tales, His Dark Materials is an atheistic rebuttal. I would like to state that if I chose to read a rebuttal of a style before reading what it is refuting because of some minor confluence of deistic opinion, which at best might be mere surface agreement, I should be beaten about the town square and forced to carry a sign that reads “Jackass.” The sort of small-mind that can only stand that which agrees with it, and will seek it out in a manner that allows it to ignore what that material itself very well might be referencing, is so child-like and retarded as to appear crippled irreparably.

I chose to read His Dark Materials based on strong recommendations from both of my roommates. I have yet to run across as determined a set of personal advocates for the other classics of the fantasy genre, so I bowed in deference to their taste. If a similar fan of Lord of the Rings or Narnia argues for those series as convincingly, I will gladly go through them. I was particularly swayed by the fact that I will, in fact, cry upon finishing the trilogy. I am slightly atwitter about the prospect of having human emotions.

Any advocate of fantasy, however, must first leap through my own prejudices against the genre. I don’t know why, but for some reason the whole business has very, very little appeal for me. Usually, the very mention of goblin, orc, or dwarf will instantly repel me.

The Subtle Knife introduces a new protagonist to the story, and follows him for the first chapters, but does eventually continue the story from the first book. The opening chapters of The Subtle Knife are compelling, portraying a boy of twelve living in Oxford who cares for his mother who is, seemingly, schizophrenic. However, it becomes apparent that something really is after Will and his mother. The story of the Golden Compass was much more traditional children’s fantasy fair, full of heroic little girls, armored bears, and magical fortune telling compasses from the beginning. So, maybe that’s why it took me a year, despite the fact that I liked The Golden Compass, to get to the Subtle Knife.

Which is unfortunate, on my part, because The Subtle Knife is, in my opinion, a superior book to The Golden Compass. It seems like Pullman has given up any semblance of pandering to children. His language isn’t simplistic, and his concerns seem to be as adult as most fiction every strives for.

There is a certain level of enjoyment at how subversive Pullman will go. And as the story shifts into a possible plot to murder God, its tough not to take this back to the realm of its social context. But suppressing that, ignoring that this is a children’s book (or young reader, or whatever the fuck), we have a fantasy story where Pullman has upped the stakes by using very potent symbolic creatures to say something that directly relates to most people with any connection to Western religion. But ignoring the target-audience and potential massive disagreements with the author’s final thesis aren’t exactly small caveats to leap over.

Update: After I wrote this, I decided to do my basic research. Which is Wikipedia. And the article on Pullman kinda made me want to scream. He sounds like a douche. A gigantic douche, in fact. I think I’ll fully delve into the whole thing once I finish with the third book, so as not to shitstain my perception too much with his potentially being a gigantic a-hole.

I don’t know if I’d really call this a book, but Ken blogged it, so I will. Before reading this, I had no idea about the ideology of the unabomber. It turns out he’s an agrarian anarchist like me. Who knew? Ken’s earlier post explains most of the argument put forth.

He talks a lot about the human need for something he calls the “Power Process”, which basically involves the ability to set one’s own goals, expend significant effort on them, and achieve them. He says that our ability to engage in this process is very minimal today and that this is the source of psychological ills. He also talks about surrogate activities, such as getting a Phd in something completely unrelated to survival, and how they can not really provide the same happiness one gets from truly engaging in the Power Process in the kinds of more meaningful activities we evolved to engage in.

There are some difficult questions to which I don’t have the answer:

1. Should we accept becoming something qualitatively different from our present selves?

2. Does AI and the singularity result in happiness or infinite sadness for us?

I don’t really know. Perhaps it’s a brazen stance to take, but I’m rolling with technology and loving it. I think that we may be able to control events so that in answers to the questions above, our identity is still something recognizable and we have a valuable life well into the future. I also kind of don’t think Ted’s revolution is possible. By the way, I just posted this from Africa where I live in a mud hut with no electricity and I’m going to go smoke my ecig now.

Note: Ted really seems to understand some things about primitive peoples that I didn’t know until I lived with them. For example, he states that people are quite content to site for hours at a time in primitive society. It’s true. Five people can literally sit for three hours staring at the fire without saying a word or moving. It’s a bit hard to deal with coming from the red hot center of technico-industrial society.

Ken recently discovered the poet Rilke and has become much enamored of him. As I have come to respect Ken’s taste, I thought I would enjoy this volume. Unfortunately, I was unable to find anything that beautiful, and the few things that were, Ken had already sent me.

The editor of this volume seems to have the desire to show Rilke in an uncustomary light. I don’t exactly know what the customary light is, so I can’t say how well he achieved this objective. There’s a long essay which is in actuality snippings from a variety of Rilke which reads very nicely as if it were written at once. Then there are some poems on love, and some poems on other difficulties.

I will continue to read more Rilke to see if there’s anything I like. I’m starting to uncross my fingers though.

My friend Caleb showed me this book in May 2009. I started reading it after he’d finished, but was unable to finish before he needed it back. The book was so good, I had to buy my own copy when I was in the US for holiday.

This is the story of post-independence Africa starting around 1950 until the 2000s. Although not completely organized in this way, most of the chapters cover one or two countries during a particular period. You then usually meet the same country again 10 or 15 years later in 10 chapters or so. It’s a little jarring sometimes, but probably the best way to respect chronology and the sequence of movements and ideas, as well as staying focused on one place at a time.
The problems confronted by Africa, as well as many other places in the world, are unfortunately usually presented in a vacuum by the media. This makes it very hard to understand cause and effect, so this book really helped me to understand why people are fighting and starving in this place or that. For example, one must understand the revolution in 1974 in Portugal if one is to understand the happenings in Mozambique and Angola shortly thereafter. And one must understand the happenings in those countries to understand things that happened in other sub-Saharan African countries.

I’m currently volunteering in Namibia. If you ask a Namibian, they portray their independence as a military victory won by a bloody struggle. In fact, independence for Namibia was part of a peace deal for Angola reached by the South Africans, Cubans, Russians, and Americans. So it is that in order to establish a sense of national unity and pride, Namibians and those living in other young nations have their own independence struggles grossly obscured and revised by central governments.

In the end, Meredith sort of ends in despair. He talks of all the times things have seemed extremely promising, and all the times we’ve been let down shortly thereafter. He identifies bad governance as the worst problem in Africa and doesn’t suggest how it can be repaired. He lists only South Africa and Botswana as nations that appear to be in good shape in terms of government at present and I agree with him, although both of those countries have huge problems with AIDS. I don’t really have answers either, but I do know that eliminating trade barriers would be worth much more money than all the aid we’re giving. I also think microfinance is a very much better way to handle the situation of aid. Empowering local people to solve their own problems, whilst still holding people accountable to repayment seems to me to be a much more sound policy for the future of Africa.

The Last of the Mohicans is the second in a series of five novels about a woodsman/scout/marksman/mythic figure named Natty Bumppo (aka Hawk-eye, aka Deerslayer, aka Leatherstocking), his Mohican “brother” Chingachgook, and Chingachgook’s son Uncas, who’s the titular “last of the Mohicans” (really, his father’s the last one, because Uncas dies in this book and Chingachgook lives another four decades, but whatever). It’s set during the French and Indian War, although it’s more about rescuing a pair of damsels in distress from the Indian that’s kidnapped them (a vile, violent, manipulative man who also happens to belong to a tribe allied to the French).

As an adventure story, it’s actually fairly entertaining - lots of suspense, chases, tracking, a few grisly murders, tight spots, improbable escapes, convenient coincidences, and feats of bravery and derring-do. The prose - well, it’s not what I consider elegant, though I wouldn’t go so far as to call it ponderous. Judge for yourself.

It’s an incredibly racist book, though its racism is that odd sort which would be offended if you called it racist. The Native Americans are constantly referred to as savages, though sometimes this means barbarian cannibals and sometimes it means “noble savages.” Hawk-eye constantly reminds whomever he’s talking to that his blood is “without a cross” of Indian blood, even though people might think otherwise because he’s such an awesome woodsman/scout/hunter/whatever. At times this anxiety about purity is ridiculous: the French Indians have named him “La Longue Carabine,” a name he takes issue with on the grounds that his gun is a rifle, and not a carbine.

The ending bothered me: the older of the two kidnapped (half-)sisters, Cora, who is “remotely descended” from an African, is the one who dies at the end (and in such an unceremonious way!), while the younger, fairer, blonde sister marries a strapping young major in His Majesty’s Royal something-or-other. I don’t think Cooper would say so if one could put the question to him, but it seems obvious (at least to me) that the novel’s internal logic requires that Cora die, because she’s a tiny bit not white.

I hate recommending books merely because they’re “classics,” so I won’t recommend this one; I’ll say, instead, that you should start with The Pioneers, and move on from there if the spirit so moves you.

I was sick of the RSS, all out of internets, desperate to find something new, and I did a Google search for a whole lot of things I’m interested in, hoping to find some blog or news article that dealt with them all. I searched for something like “Ron Paul Singularity Esperanto Star Trek Topo Chico.” It wasn’t exactly those words, but it was similar. I found Industrial Society and its Future, which is commonly referred to as “The Unabomber Manifesto”. I got a copy for my kindle, and read the thing in two bewildered days.

The book is amazing. Kaczynski says: (1) Man has been warped by civilization, and is generally less happy than his primitive forebearers (agreed), (2) most careers and modern obsessions are surrogates for the things that we were really made to do (agreed), (3) liberals and conservatives are both wrong, and we need to tear the whole system down (agreed), (4) there is a time coming, 40 to 100 years from now, when we will become something post-human (agreed), and (5) because a compromise between our technological civilization and human dignity and freedom cannot be reached, there must be a revolution, now, before it’s too late, and we must intentionally force another dark ages (disagreed).

This last belief (apparently) is what led Kaczynski to start murdering advertising and computer science people. I can’t help but think I could talk him out of it. I wonder if this he’d write me back if I wrote to him in prison.

What. The. Fuck.  As anyone who has heard his music can tell you, Cohen has a true gift for lyricism.  His words can be beautiful, but in this book he used his talents for evil.  It’s a sordid tale involving a crazy man, his dead wife, his dead best friend, and a fictional crazy ass Iroquois saint.  The man, wife, and best friend all slept with each other at some point, and the man wants to screw the crazy saint.  All laid out for you in stunning detail by a wonderfully talented song writer.  What a way to start the year.  I am truly disturbed.