amid a crowd of stars

Good.

Ugh

Second only to Dune.

There is something about summer that frees the inner geek in me, and I have been wanting to read Ringworld for a long time. After trips to three bookstores, I finally stopped by the library and found a beaten up copy, with different cover art than depicted below. Frankly, the cover art on the edition I read was pretty weak. This is a piece of work by Dean Ellis whose work I love…

read some

Ever since I read Thomas Ricks’s Fiasco, I have followed the course of the war in Iraq, but whereas Ricks gives an account of the generals and politicos involved and how the entire campaign was mismanaged from the start, Filkins is operating from a different point of view. He is on the ground with the troops. As I read, the term embedded began to acquire new dimensions and shades of meaning.

Of all the aspects of this war that he covers, from the sound of bullets whizzing past, to soldier’s funerals, to the strange physics of suicide bombers and their severed-but-intact heads, that which I have found the most interesting is the nebulous and protean nature of the conflict. Iraqi civilians are at one moment celebrating the soldiers, but they can just as easily drift into the ranks of the insurgents, and insurgents can themselves drift from one side to another in the space of a day.

It begs the question, how is it possible to fight such an enemy? David Petraeus, the hero of Fiasco, was masterful in framing and executing a counter-insurgency policy, but even that doesn’t take into account, and perhaps can’t take into account, the sometimes subtle and at other times blatant pressures surrounding and buffeting the Iraqis from all sides. Do you support the Americans? Do you despise them as occupiers? Do you take their money? Do you hide weapons?

When these wars began, my first-born wasn’t yet two, and I was still in the new-parent fog, the one that resists writing events into long-term memories, but I can remember that day in March 2003 when the tanks rolled and America decided to start a war. I didn’t think I’d be writing about it a decade into the 21st century, but then again most people probably didn’t think so either.

It was AC/DC, the Australian heavy metal band, pouring out its unbridled sounds. I recognized the song immediately; “Hells Bells” the band’s celebration of satanic power, had come to us on the battlefield. Behind the strains of its guitars, a church bell chimed thirteen times.

Read from The Forever War

I’ve been a fan of Kenneth Branagh’s work since I sat in a theater 20 years ago to see Henry V, and last fall I was pleased to see that he was bringing to PBS a short series in the Mystery franchise titled, Wallander. I think I saw them all,  and wanted more when the series ended. I loved the grittiness of the crimes and the atmospheric Swedish countryside, but most of all I was taken with the character Kurt Wallander. His interest in opera reminds me a bit of P. D. James’s poetry-writing inspector Adam Dalgliesh (more excellent work on Mystery).

The writing is spare, unadorned, but capable and never awkward. For a police procedural, it rolls with just the right measure of plot, intrigue and character development, which, like Wallander’s life, gets put on hold while the dirty, difficult work of solving a double murder takes precedence, but it’s that development that provides a background and depth that keeps me reading.

Sample The Faceless Killers in Google Books.

I recently read Andrew Kean’s book, “The Cult of the Amateur,” and though I found it engaging and even possibly important inasmuch as it vigorously counters the notions of the digital utopians’ who gush that the web “changes everything,” I would say that his position is probably not all that defensible. But then, it may not need to be defended, because I would guess that if the army of amateurs, as he calls them, ever bothers to glance up from their machines to note the book, their appetite for the ever-new will soon draw them back to their online quests.

And so, as a group of school children might stop to investigate, torment and perhaps even kill an unfortunate bug, so it is with the cult as Kean describes them. They may stop, snuffle about, write a few incendiary blog posts, but
soon enough… they’ll move on.

… and perhaps that is as it should be.

Related : In praise of editing

Picked up Nomad’s Hotel at Carmichael’s in Louisville… along with a copy of the Best Fiction of 2010. I got into Nooteboom a couple of year’s ago when I stumbled on an podcast interview with him discussing his new work Lost Paradise.

Nomad’s Hotel is travel writing, not fiction, and I don’t usually read travel writing, but since we’re in DC this week, I thought it might make sense. Reading about Nooteboom’s adventures traveling up the Gambia increased my general sense of dislocation, but also piqued my interest in further adventure.

When I wake […] I hear […] a low crunching sound, as if someone is chewing on too-long nails. I fell behind me for the lamp, and kick off the sweaty sheets. On the rim of the grimy washbasin, a brown cockroach as big as a child’s thumb sits staring dreamily at me. “So, Moriarty, we meet at last.” I think, and consider what sort of sound it will make when I crush it. So I don’t.

The Count of Monte Cristo
A classic for a reason. As a result of a generally misspent youth, I’ve been trying to read some of the classic adventure novels that I should have read long ago. The Count of Monte Cristo sat unread on my shelves for too long until my wife brought it down, worked her way through 1300 pages, and exhorted me to follow suit.

I read Robinson Crusoe a year or so ago, and I loved it. Everyone knows the gist of the story, but what amazes me, about both of these works, is how modern they are. Every generation seems to think that they’ve invented the world, or that the world was invented for their pleasure, but it hasn’t, and that is a fact of which we need to be reminded. I’ve never watched the program Lost, bit it has its antecedents.

And I can’t imagine anything much more terrifying than after having spent years alone on an island, and resolved oneself to that fate, to find suddenly on the pristine beach a single footprint, revealing indelibly that you are not alone after all.

And the Wyeth illustrations are like a portal into the past.