Joseph Anton: A Memoir

Joseph Anton: A Memoir
(Salman Rushdie, 27 hours)
I can't imagine that a Rushdie fan could come away from reading this without a sensible diminution of their admiration for the author. The flaws that he discloses are not fatal, but the tone and petulance with which he skirts responsibility is off-putting. I was luridly drawn into staring at the disclosures he offers, but found his personality quite irritating. As one of a number of examples, he mentions a spat with Martin Amis, where Amis argued that Dostoevsky could not be considered a good writer (an argument I myself have made, contaminated as I've been by Nabokov's Lectures on Literature.) At some point, Rushdie told Amis' wife to "Fuck off." Amis insisted he apologize, and Rushdie assented, on the condition that Amis never speak to him again. Pretty squalid, and for all that, SR dispatches the whole mess as due largely to stress (from the fatwa) and excessive wine. His first wife is cast as a pathological liar; the second wife he admits to having cheated on. As for Ms. Padma Lakshmi, she appears appallingly shallow, most interested in using Rushdie to advance her own fame, and resentful of his own star eclipsing hers. So, if you've ever succumbed to envy over the talents of a writer who won the Booker of Bookers (for the phenomenal Midnight's Children), this book is your antidote. Even the core of the book, rather than the gossippy fringes that I've mentioned, is not terribly attractive: Rushdie discusses living with constant security, but fails to show any growth in his depth of understanding, either with the world that's held hostage by Islamic fanatics, nor the security team assigned to protect him, nor to the others who come into tangential contact with his protection. As much as I champion his fight for freedom of expression, I can't recommend this book to anyone but haters who crave more concrete evidence of his flaws.

Mr Penumbra's 24 hour book store

Mr Penumbra's 24 hour book store
(Robin Sloan, 7:46)
An immensely rewarding intellectual bon-bon, wrapped around a broner for building 43 (Google's HQ), all of which is driven by a love for reading, and particularly, for the old fashioned books on paper. The book is a lot of fun, with many tangents that show savvy insight into Silivalley culture. One strand of the book is a paen to Dungeons & Dragons (and within that, part of the story explicitly shouts out to audible books on tape as a secret locale for extra information, notwithstanding the actuality that spoken books are almost always lossy compressions of books on paper.) One part of the story had not quite made sense to me, namely, that although the typeface Garamond is given an alternate name, "Gerritszoon." Since Google was not encrypted under some pseudonym, I was curious why "Gerritszoon" was. Sloan answered my question by tweeting that "I came up with "Gerritszoon" fairly early on and liked the sound of it." Highly recommended.

Ready Player One

Ready Player One
(Ernest Cline, stopped after 2 CDs)
Interesting premise: a multi-zillionaire, builder of the alternate reality game Oasis in which most people spend their lives and make their livelihoods in 2044, dies without an heir. He announces a quest, delivered in the form of an arty movie, exhorting all comers to uncover the ultimate Easter egg, and lay claim to his fortune. Because he grew up in the late '80s, his worldview is baked with the fluorescent orange cheese that characterized Kraft macaroni at that time. More particularly, his favorite TV programs, music, and video games all gets escalated to near-Talmudic levels of study. I was thinking the book was implausible in ignoring the possibility that guilds would crowd-source their way to an answer, but at the beginning of disc 2, just such collectives were given a nodding acknowledgement. I couldn't listen to this fast enough to ignore the infelicities and cliches, the imprecisions and loopholes. Still, I admire the fact that someone went to the effort to build a big bazaar around pop culture.

Arcadia

Arcadia
(Tom Stoppard, 2:46)
I'm an idea guy, but I often find that Tom Stoppard's work leaves me cold. I don't really need to have someone spoon feed me an approximation of chaos theory by mixing jam into cream. This was not very engaging, although I did esteem some of the cooler phrasings exchanged between characters. But on the whole, this is not my cup of tea.

Suddenly, a Knock on the Door: Stories

Suddenly, a Knock on the Door: Stories
(Etgar Keret, read by a host of hipsters, 5:02)

Delightful, astonishing, inventively written stories that pull at the threads of fantasy (a world exists where our lies are instantiated), while sustaining a vivid connection to reality. Early stories made me think of the films of Charlie Kauffman, but I could also say that Keret gives me as much pleasure as I recall experiencing with the most artful of Italo Calvino's tales. Readers include many of my favorite writers: Gary Shteyngart, Michael Chabon, David Eggers, Neal Stephenson, as well as Ira Glass, Willem Dafoe and more.

Pillars of the Earth

Pillars of the Earth
(Ken Follett, punted before finishing 1 CD)
I listened to the author foreward, and was slightly off-put by the earnest tone of Follett's account of devoting himself to this historical fiction. The language is dull, and when someone in the first chapter is referred to as being an old monk of 60 (in the 11th century CE), I realized that there was no likelihood that the author had built up anything like an accurate picture of the builders of monasteries.

People of the Book

People of the Book
(Geraldine Brooks, stopped after 1 CD)
Good topics, tedious and pedestrian execution

PALO ALTO REMEMBERED: STORIES FROM A CITY'S PAST

PALO ALTO REMEMBERED: STORIES FROM A CITY'S PAST 

(Matt Bowling, 208 pp)

Nice little local history. This book doesn't currently circulate from the Palo Alto library, but if you're willing to stand and page through it, there's quite a lot of ground covered. Definitely enjoyed seeing the Old Stick, or learning about the fights between the Maoist movement "Venceremos" and the 'pigs' in the early 1970s. One of the most surprising things I learned: Cubberly High School was closed in '79, because both Paly High & Gunn are on Stanford land, and would have reverted to Leland-land had either of those two been the one shuttered.

Life Itself: A Memoir

Life Itself: A Memoir
(Roger Ebert, 12 CDs)
Ebert's lived an enviable life, watching films, drinking hard, writing with vigor. His life, for the past 5 years, has been a harsh struggle with cancer that has caused him to lose his lower jaw. Yet, that occupies very little of the book, and instead, each discusses a theme or person (Robert Mitchum, John Wayne, Gene Siskel, et al). The chapters occasionally become a little repetitive, culled as they seem to have been from his blog. If I found my interest starting to wobble, I'd just jump a track. This book was the first I've read in a very long time at the speed of spoken sound, straight from the CD, rather than bothering to go through a process of ripping into Audiobook Builder so I could play it as an AAC at double speed. My new process: play music into my left ear from my ipod, and listen to an audible book with the remaining fragments of my attention.

Monkey Mind: A Memoir of Anxieties

Monkey Mind: A Memoir of Anxieties
(Daniel Smith, stopped before too long)
I just didn't click with this. There was a lot of memoir, long on unhappy sexual experiences, but not so insightful. I think the only thing I valued was learning that 30% of Americans suffer from anxiety. Count me in. Audible.com has a new program, that enables you to refund a book if you don't like it. I tried poking at this, but when I realized that audible had provided assurance that I could toss it back if it wasn't satisfactory, my anxiety evaporated. I breathed in, and gave their customer service a call.