Books

What’s on the Bookshelf? Vol. 5

What's On the Bookshelf?

I finally finished Patrick O’Brian’s Hussein. I liked it. It was no Master and Commander, but the book was still good.

O’Brian wrote this story, which takes place in India during the English occupation, when he was my age–about twenty.

It follows the life of Hussein, a young mahout (elephant trainer), and his many, many misadventures. He gets cholera (and survives!), encounters into bad luck, comes into good fortune, falls in love, and stumbles out of luck once more.

The book, which O’Brian termed An Entertainment, is just that. It’s light and entertaining. The characters aren’t too deep, but you still care about them. Reading this book, you can easily see the seeds of brilliance beginning to sprout.

Now I need to reread the epic Aubrey/Maturin series. I’ve only managed to get through the entire thing once…but at 20.5 volumes (he died while writing the 21st), it’s entirely understandable.

What’s On the Bookshelf? Vol. 4

What's On the Bookshelf?

Between yesterday and today, I managed to down Alexander McCall Smith’s The World According to Bertie, the fourth book in his 44 Scotland Street series. Previously, I reviewed Espresso Tales, the second book in the series. And no, I haven’t read the third.

That’s part of the charm of the series. You don’t have to read them in order. If you wanted to, you could even start with the fourth book.

My favorite story line follows Bertie, the perpetual six year old forced to go to saxophone lessons, yoga, and a psychotherapist. In this book, he has a new baby brother named Ulysses. His parents always lose their red Volvo, but this time, they manage to outdo the leaving-it-in-Glasgow situation from Espresso Tales.

Bertie is so charming and fun to read about because of his youth, and he’s precocious without being obnoxious as hell. The poor kid just wants to be like everyone else. He wants to wear jeans, have a white bedroom and play with trains rather than wearing “crushed-strawberry dungarees,” live in a pink room (his mother wants to desensitize him to color prejudices) and being forced to play house with the obnoxious Olive. There’s a little bit of Bertie in us all, I think, and that’s what makes him so endearing.

My summer reading list

What's On the Bookshelf?

It’s only the beginning of April, but I’m already thinking of what I’m going to read this summer. So, in no particular order:

Dracula by Bram Stoker

The Shining by Stephen King

Proust was a Neuroscientist by Jonah Lehrer

Moon by Tony Fletcher (reread)

Love Over Scotland by Alexander McCall Smith

Let the Right One In by John Lindqvist

On the Road by Jack Kerouac

And a bunch of other things that catch my fancy, I’m sure.

Any suggestions?

On new books and saving money

What's On the Bookshelf?

Today I made the trip to my local library to go to the book sale. I like to go a couple of times a year to get inexpensive used books and support the library (my numerous fines and late fees notwithstanding).

I bought The Shining, On Writing and Captains Courageous for $1.50, total.

I’ll be set for about a week.

On mistakes and poor characters

The Twirl and Swirl of Letters

The mistake was one out of my control–I went to view a movie for class, and Netflix shipped the wrong one. Instead of viewing L’Ultimo Bacio, I had to watch The Last Kiss.

My assessment of the movie was that the characters were poorly created. It seemed like they all had two emotions: angry and angrier.

Perhaps this movie presents the emotional crisis of turning thirty accurately. The main male characters all strive for freedom from their various relationships, but they lack enough redeeming qualities to make them likeable. The female characters are even less dimensional. There’s the exhausted mother. The mother-to-be who is an emotional wreck.

Out of this rather bland and all-together easy to forget movie (even though I watched this mere hours ago, all I can think of was, “my God, I hate Zack Braff even more now” and “At least Casey Affleck was entertaining enough”), I got one little bit of insight:

To have a watchable/readable story, you need a decent enough conflict. To have a very entertaining story, you need well developed characters.

On reading recommendations

General Geekiness

Earlier this week, I attended a lecture given by the actress Kate Burton, otherwise known as Dr. Ellis Grey (from Grey’s Anatomy) and Hedda Gabler.

After the lecture, I spoke with her briefly about working on a play by Martin McDonagh. She performed in his play The Beauty Queen of Leenane a few years ago. I mentioned that I had performed the opening scene of The Pillowman for my acting final.

To make a short story even shorter, it ended with Ms. Burton recommending the rest of McDonagh’s works to me.