Kategori: Aardwolf – one hit wonders

Picked from the shelf because of its lightness and it’s potential for being left behind when leaving Copenhagen, Home Truths is pleasant enough read, raising a couple of interesting (though, it must be admitted, by now somewhat over-hashed) points about media and fame and privacy and so on. The novella is basically the playtext of Lodge’s play by the same name with a couple of extra bits stuck in and «disguised» to read like a novel rather than a play (i.e. it says «Adrian said, (…), (…) Eleanor replied.» rather than «Adrian: (…) (line break) Eleanor: (…)»), which is fair enough, I suppose, except it still reads rather a lot like a play (being mostly dialogue) and since I’m the sort of person who enjoys reading play texts I would have preferred to read it as such. Never mind. Stuck a bookcrossing note in it and left it in The Bloomsday Bar.

The Art of Travel is a pleasant little book. I’m not sure I got a lot wiser on the questions of how, why and where concerning travel, but I was entertained, reminded of a few books I’ve been meaning to read and became thoroughly travel-sick. Good thing we’re off to Copenhagen next week.

Well, what a bl***y waste of time. Whatever. In spite of the little voice that said «perhaps not? You know, really?» in the back of my head I thought I’d give the Snicket books a try. I have sort of been planning to since they first appeared, actually, just never quite managed to persuade myself that the tiny snippets laughingly called «books» were worth the pricetag. My better judgement must have been asleep when I finally forked out for A Series of Unfortunate Events: The Bad Beginning. It’s not so much not good as simply completely uninteresting. It’s a bit like Harry Potter at the Dursleys’. Except there’s no magic and that’s all there is. I mean, what makes the Harry at the Dursleys’ episodes interesting is the contrast with the rest of the book – here there is no «the rest». That’s all there is. Perhaps «the rest» turns up in later books? I have no idea. And I won’t be finding out, either, The Bad Beginning did not tempt me to continue reading.

And another thing, the narrator keeps explaining «difficult» words throughout. Not necessarily a bad thing, a few of the explanations brought me the closest to smiling that the text managed, but the «difficulty» wasn’t very consistent. At one point he explains «faked» with «feigned» – now it may be that native english speakers are more familiar with the latter than the former, but I doubt it – «fake» is, after all, a reasonably basic term. «Feign» seemd to me to be the term needing explanation (if any of them need it). At other points he fails to explain terms that I would have thought were beyond what you’d expect the core audience to understand readily. But it may just be me. English isn’t my native language, after all, and I expect words that seem obscure to me may be obvious to your average ten-year-old from Swindon.

En bok jeg plukket opp på bibliotekets utsalgsvogn fordi tittelen inneholdt ordet «bokorm». Jeg vet. Jeg er en enkel sjel. Av bokormens liv er en ganske fornøyelig samling barndomsminner fra et noe uvanlig hjem. Det var mindre snakk om bøker enn jeg hadde ventet, derfor var jeg vel en smule skuffet, men alt i alt en ganske behagelig leseropplevelse.

So, I finally finished Atlas Shrugged. Phew.

What to say? Well, it’s an interesting read for many reasons, though waaaaaaaay too long. For instance, I basically skipped the climactic speech towards the very end – 20 or so pages at least – since if you’ve actually read and understood the previous 950 pages, the speech is pretty much redundant. As are the majority of the longer soliloquies earlier in the book. Someone ought to give Rand a lesson in «show, don’t tell». Are all «philosophers» this wordy? Actually, I know the answer to that, and it’s «Many, but no, not all».

While the plot of the book is soundly structured and can make for an engaging read if you ignore all the waffle (and there is a lot of waffle) it’s hard to accept Rand’s philosophy, even at face value the «every man (or woman) for himself» is off-putting.

One thing I will say, which is not something I’ve seen mentioned in other critiques of the book, is that a major stumbling block for Rand’s attempt at converting me is the feeling one gets that though she seems to find few enough men worthy of any attention, she finds even fewer women. Dagny Taggart is the only woman who really makes herself felt in the novel. With the exception of two peripheral characters (one of which comes to grief before she has a chance of proper «redemption»), all the other «worthy» persons are men. And naturally quite a few of these «worthy» men are in love with Dagny. Fair enough, but as the writer is a woman herself and the novel an acknowledged explanation of a personal philosophy one can’t help feel that Dagny is meant to be at least partly a self-portrait and the hopeless devotion of all these super-humans leaves one with an unpleasant taste in one’s mouth. It’s all a bit too self-applauding.

Jeg vant en signert utgave av Presten på Bok i Sentrum i høst og tenkte at det vel ville være høflig å lese den. Så nå har jeg fått en påminnelse om hvorfor jeg så sjelden leser ny norsk litteratur. Hanne Ørstavik fikk Brageprisen for denne boka, så man må anta at dette er noe av det beste som kom ut i Norge i fjor, og dersom det er tilfelle må jeg bare si at jeg synes tilstanden er heller laber. Det er ikke det at Presten er noen spesiellt dårlig bok, den er bare ikke spesiellt bra heller, og det synes jeg faktisk at vinneren av Brageprisen burde være.

Hva har jeg så i mot Presten? Vel, hovedproblemet mitt er vel at jeg synes Ørstavik mislykkes kraftig i å røre ved noe «viktig». Jeg prøvde så godt jeg kunne å føle noe mens jeg leste, men det var liksom ikke noe der å føle. Og det er ikke som om hun ikke prøver, hovedpersonen gjentar stadig viktigheten av det sanne og riktige, og poengterer at det sanne ofte ikke er særlig behagelig. Men det eneste ubehaget jeg følte mens jeg leste var kjedsomhet, dette til tross for både selvmord og usmakelige episoder fra Norsk-Samisk historie.

Så, nei, ikke helt fornøyd.

I found Francis Wheen’s How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World heavy going at first, but once I warmed to it I practically flew through. For some reason I had expected more of a language discussion and less of a political discussion – probably because we purchased the book at the same time as Melvyn Bragg’s The Adventure of English. However, the political stuff is pretty informative and entertaining – occasionally laugh-out-loud funny – too. A few favourite quotes:

‘Keep an open mind!’ broadcasters pleaded when they screeened the bogus Roswell video. The Daily Telegraph, one of the few newspapers which spotted the film as a fake from the outset, had the best riposte: ‘If you open your mind too much, your brain may fall out.’

And Wheen seems to feel about the «England’s Rose» version of Candle in the Wind much in the same way I do myself:

According to Elton John, singing his heart out in Westminister Abbey while mixing metaphors with glorious abandon, she was England’s rose, a candle that never faded with the sunset when the rain set in (as candles so often do) but strode off across England’s greenest hills, its footprints preserved for eternity.

The one thing that’s wrong with the book – and which really got my goat – is that Wheen makes a point of the importance of source-checking regarding David Irving on pages 98/99 (Harper Perennial, 2004, 4th printing), but is himself amiss in this regard. I’m the sort of reader who actually wants super-whatsit numbers next to every quote and a foot- or endnote saying Ibid. the fiftieth time a source is quoted (giving the page number, naturally). On page 85 Wheen quotes Eagleton, but there are no notes for page 85. On page 86 there is a long quote from Eagleton’s essay ‘Where Do Post-Modernists Come From?’ duly noted in the back, but there is no real indication whether the quote on page 85 is from the same source or not – Eagleton not being the least prolific of writers, if it’s not, how do I set about finding it? So while this endnotes-with-page-references may make the text easier to read for people not used to academic papers, I’d have appreciated a properly source-checkable text myself.*

But, it’s worth reading, definitely.

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* The observant reader will have noticed that I have myself omitted page numbers for the two quotes above. I am acutely aware of this and will remedy it asap – it’s just that Martin’s run away with the book.

Brad Newsham’s Take Me With You has been on the shelves for a few years now, so I have no idea why I’d never heard of it before. I picked it up because it was on a «buy one get one half price» sale at W.H.Smith when I already had The Sunday Philosophy Club in my hands from the same promotion. With the sub-title «A round-the-world journey to invite a stranger home», Take Me With You was, at the very least, intriguing. It reads – as a review quoted on Newsham’s webpage says – like a page-turner. Well, unless you happen to have heard of it before, since the reason it reads as a page-turner is that you have no idea who of the various people Newsham meets on his travels will be the person to receive an invitation in the mail.

I enjoyed it for another reason, too, a fortunate side-product of the main purpose: There are more conversations with strangers and portraits of characters in this book than your average travel journal. This is a good thing. I have no doubt the scenery Newsham travelled though was spectacular at times (and he mentions it, too, at times, in case you wondered), but when you travel – at least when I travel – it’s the company you keep and the people you meet who set the mood, and I always miss that when for one reason or another a writer does not provide this.

Jeg har hatt lyst til å lese Vilde Bjerkes biografi om hennes far en stund, men har liksom ikke kommet så langt som til å kjøpe den. Her om dagen var jeg på biblioteket for å låne Bjerkes samlede dikt og fant fram Du visste om et land i samme slengen, jeg tenkte at det jo ikke er nødvendig å kjøpe alle bøker man skal lese heller.

Desverre stemte det litt for godt. Boka var litt skuffende, selv om jeg ikke helt kan sette fingeren på hvorfor, og jeg kommer derfor neppe til å ha lyst til å lese den igjen og vil gladelig levere eksemplaret tilbake til Deichmanske. Jeg visste lite om Bjerkes liv på forhånd, så sånn sett lærte jeg en del nytt, men var allikevel altså noe skuffet. Det er mulig jeg hadde helt feil forhåpninger, blandt annet var jeg lite imponert over Vilde Bjerkes språkføring, men det er vel egentlig urimelig å vente at hun skal skrive eksepsjonellt godt bare fordi hennes far gjorde det.

I went to the library to borrow André Bjerke’s collected poems Monday, and picked up a few new (well, new to me) comic books at the same time. Castle Waiting was one of them, and a very good read it was, too. I’ve made a reservation on volume two, there only seem to be two, actually, which is a pity, but can’t be helped.