I read a lot of books. I am also a fairly timid book reviewer. It is rare for me to give a book a resounding 5/5 because I save that honor for the precious few that I love. On the other end of the spectrum there is rarely a book that I flat out dislike. Every book that I’ve come across has some redeeming feature, otherwise I just don’t finish it (I’m looking at you Rum Diaries). But for the first time on this blog, and for the first time in a long while, I’m going to openly come out and say that I did not enjoy a book. Ready? I did not at all enjoy Seven Types of Ambiguity. At all. Maybe if you really liked books like Foucault’s Pendulum or The Discovery of Heaven where the author creates characters who talk about philosophy as an excuse to show off how much they know, you’d like this book. But it was not for me.
This book is exactly what it sounds like. So to begin with, I love the title. I saw this book in a bookshop in Melbourne about a year ago and I immediately recognized it as a book I thought I would enjoy. Having read it now, it turns out I was not wrong. A History of the World in Twelve Maps is a fantastic book! That being said, I don’t think I would recommend it to everyone. This book activated pretty much all of my nerd senses – the history nerd, the cartography nerd, the geography nerd, the science nerd, and the intellectual argument nerd (who doesn’t like hilarious scientific rivalries?). But the book was long and dense. I learned something new on every page, but it was a very long read. If you’re interested in all those things I just mentioned, absolutely read this book, you will love it as much as I did.
Happy (almost) New Year everybody! Since this is a blog about books I figured I would share the books that I read this year and give some recommendations. I set out to read 50 books this year and I have done just that! Below is the list of books I read in 2013 with a ranking system I am borrowing from my lovely friend Amanda’s blog post about the 52 (!!!) books that she read this year. You can find her original post, and the books she’s been reading and loving here.
An asterisk for books I recommend, and a double asterisk for books that you should probably just pick up and start reading now. Italics are for books I read in the original French, so my recommendation may be skewed. Here we go.
1. Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore
2. The Dog Stars*
3. The Swerve**
4. The Wind-up Bird Chronicles
5. Bossypants
6. Is Everybody Hanging Out Without Me?
7. The Da Vinci Code (don’t judge me)
8. Les Miserables
9. The Better Angels of Our Nature*
10. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
11. The Yellow Birds*
12. The Sisters Brothers
13. Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking*
14. A Visit From The Goon Squad
15. Germinal
16. Perfume: The Story of a Murderer*
17. Behind The Beautiful Forevers*
18. The Orphan Master’s Son**
19. Postwar**
20. The Age of Miracles
21. The Black Count
22. What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank
23. Thinking Fast and Slow
24. The Song of Achilles
25. The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean
26. Blundering To Glory: Napoleon’s Military Campaigns (I would recommend this, but you have to love Napoleon)
27. And the Mountains Echoed*
28. Sister Mother Husband Dog
29. Le Morte D’Arthur Vol. I
30. Shogun*
31. Catch Me If You Can*
32. Lean In
33. The Garlic Ballads
34. Everything Beautiful Began After
35. Night
36. The Bell Jar
37. The Optimism Bias
38. The Fellowship of the Ring
39. The Two Towers
40. The Return of the King
41. Monuments Men**
42. Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat*
43. Room
44. Swamplandia!
45. All Quiet on the Western Front
46. Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk
47. L’Étranger (The Stranger)*
48. The War of Art
49. Siddartha
50. The Prince*
I also re-read all the Harry Potter books this year but they don’t count since I’d read them before. I recommend them nonetheless.
There are quite a few books from my list from this year that I would recommend. I was lucky to be almost constantly entertained by my reading material over the past 12 months, and most any book from this list is worth a read.
The year isn’t over and I’m still working my way through another book (The Paradox of Choice), but chances are I will not finish it in the 4 days left to me this year and it will kick off next year’s list. Hopefully I’ll make it to 50 again! If you’ve got recommendations for me, let me know and I’ll add them to the list!
Hopefully I’ll get around to writing about many more of these books in the coming months. Check back here for more later!
As someone who loves art, and Europe, and World War II history, it is going to be impossible for me to write about Monuments Men without saying I loved it about a thousand times. I absolutely loved it! I would rate it as one of my favorite books of the year and I think everyone should give it a read. I’ll tell you why.
Did you know that most of the famous pieces of art in Europe – paintings, sculptures, stained glass windows, ancient manuscripts, and tapestries – that we admire today are only here today because of intense preservation efforts made during the second World War? When it was clear that the Third Reich would invade France, the Louvre and other iconic French museums were evacuated not just of their staff, but of their valuables. In England, France, Holland, and Germany, safe store houses fitted specifically for art were created to protect pieces of cultural heritage that mattered most. All the while, Germany was looting their conquered territories for valuable art works from public and private collections.
I guess this post should start with a small disclaimer. This was not the last book that I read, nor was it the book that I read immediately after the book I wrote about in my last post (Shogun, which you should also read). But I wanted to write about this book first as I come out of my writing break because it’s the one that sticks out really clearly in my mind, and it’s one that should be talked about. Lean In by Sheryl Sandberg has been getting lots of attention in the media and on the internet, and many people now considering the dynamics in the workplace are giving it a lot of lip service. The praise this book has been given isn’t undeserved, but it can be a little bit over the top.
If you’re not familiar with this book already, I’ll just describe it briefly. Sandberg writes about the particular challenges women face as they climb the corporate ladder and the types of obstacles they must overcome. She backs up most of the statements she makes with facts, scientific studies, and often amusing personal anecdotes. Because of all these aspects I found it to be a fun and interesting read. But it didn’t change my world or make me jump up in disbelief or rage. These more powerful reactions seem to be seizing some percent of readers, and this book is getting an interesting, albeit unwarranted, reputation. Let me explain.
Well, after about a month and a half hiatus I am back! For reasons involving doing a PhD and also traveling and getting lots of telescope time, I have been away from this blog, but not away from books. I have quite a backlog to get around to writing up, so I hope to get most of these posts written within the next few weeks and be updating again more regularly. Apologies for the delay!
Some books to look forward to that I’ve read in the past month and a half:
- Catch Me If You Can by Frank Abagnale
- Lean In: Women Work and the Will to Lead by Sheryl Sandberg
- The Garlic Ballads by Mo Yan
- Everything Beautiful Began After by Simon van Booy
- Night by Elie Wiesel
- The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
- The Optimism Bias: A Tour of the Irrationally Positive Brain by Tali Sharot
They were all really great and I’m looking forward to writing about them. Check back for more updates soon!
I’m going to start this post by apologizing for the lapse in time between my last review and this one. Life got in the way, as it sometimes does, and I also spent a good deal of time reading a fantastic book called Le Morte d’Arthur Vol. 1 but as the name would suggest, it was only the first volume. It doesn’t feel right to write any sort of review until I’ve finished Volume 2, so look for more on that in the coming months. With that out of the way I want to tell everyone about my latest read, and definitely one of the most wonderful books I’ve ever read – Shogun by James Clavell.
This particular choice came as a recommendation from a friend and the praise was so high I felt I had to pick it up immediately (that’s why I only got through Volume 1 of the Arthurian lore). It did not disappoint. Everything about this book was spectacular and breathtaking. It’s going to be hard to put it all into words, since the book itself is 1152 pages, paperback, but I will try. The best thing you can do is pick up this book and read it for yourself. I hope to have fully convinced you of this by the end of my post.
One of the best things about this book for me was the time period in which it was set. The novel begins with the crash landing of a Dutch ship on the Japanese coast around the year 1600. This was an extremely interesting time in terms of European colonization in the New World (meaning North and South America), and the political scene in Europe itself. Countries, kings, and religions were all at war on the continent, which translated to open hostility and violence anywhere Protestants and Catholics found themselves together, like the colonies, at sea, or even Japan.
Initially, the narrative focuses on the Dutch ship’s pilot, an Englishman named John Blackthorne. As a pilot he is trained to be a shrewd observer and maintain an expansive memory of details. This makes him the perfect character through which to tell the story. The language barriers between Westerners and Japanese permeate the story and the subtle differences in meaning and understanding in even ordinary interactions are described in fantastic detail. Added to the already difficult cultural clashes are the presence of the Portuguese Jesuit clergy in the country attempting to convert an unwilling populace, and a brewing war in the complex folds of Japanese politics. All of these elements interact, disagree, scheme, and collude, both with and against each other. The plot is rich and complicated. It’s really no mystery how this story takes up over 1100 pages!
Sister Mother Husband Dog: Etc. is the newest book from author and screenwriter Delia Ephron. I got a galley copy of this book through the Penguin Books First to Read program. I signed up to read and review upcoming books and was given this one in the first round (I only signed up about a month ago). It’s a great program and I really like the idea, plus… free books! I also think it’s a great program because this isn’t the type of book I would have picked out for myself to read since it falls into a few categories that I rarely select from – collections of essays and books written for women, to name two. I really liked parts of this book and others not as much, but the format made it an enjoyable and quick read.
Delia Ephron is a published author of novels and plays but has also worked on several films, including Sleepless in Seattle and You’ve Got Mail in collaboration with her sister, Nora Ephron. In this book the author reflects on a number of experiences from her work as a screenwriter and as a writer, as well as emotional events in her life such as the descent of her parents into alcoholism, and the recent death of her beloved sister Nora from cancer. The individual essays are only loosely linked and might all only be described by the subject “what is on my mind as I sit down to write.” The range of subject matter covered is enormous, but she managed to transition quite smoothly between tones, even within a single essay. I think what I liked best about this book is how clearly you can hear the voice of the author. Her personality comes through loud and clear and I found it easy to connect with the words on the page.
If I had to describe this book in two words they would probably be these: tragically beautiful. And the Mountains Echoed is the newest work from the Afghan-American author Khaled Hosseini of Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns fame. Similar to his previous works, this novel tells the story about family, love, loss, and life in Afghanistan. More deeply, the novel deals with the relationships between parents and children, especially as families come to grips with the effects of old age. It starts as the story of a brother and sister living in a small village and evolves into a nearly 70-year epic weaving through their very different paths, and the lives of those who come and go through Afghanistan in the 20th century.
When Hosseini writes about Afghanistan he shows the reader a place that is exceptionally beautiful, and full of vivid and interesting people, but also a place that is flawed, and has been scarred and damaged by its difficult recent history. I like the way he, and his characters, accept and acknowledge the violence and hardship that bring Afghanistan into world news, but the focus is really on the lives of the people and feelings that have nothing to do with war or politics. Family is something that people, regardless of culture, understand and participate in and by centering his stories on family, readers from around the world are easily transported into the many times and places in this novel – from Kabul, to Paris, to Greece, to California.
Recently, Napoleon Bonaparte has been showing up in almost every book I have read. His effect on Europe was described briefly in Postwar, his treatment of his generals and his personal relationship with Alexandre Dumas’ father was included in The Black Count, there is no way he could be left out of The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean, and he’s popped up in books I read before I started this blog like Les Miserables, and The Better Angels of Our Nature. I started to get more than a little intrigued about the man and what made him great. Some internet searching led me to this book: Blundering to Glory – Napoleon’s Military Campaigns since I wasn’t ready to read a giant tome of military theory and the perspective seemed to be an interesting one. I was not disappointed.
Napoleon was great for many reasons. Many people have argued he was the greatest military strategist to ever live and his war tactics were copied and implemented in later armies across Europe. Connelly has similar feelings about Napoleon’s greatness, but argues that his military victories were the result of more than just strategy. Napoleon was a great improviser and had a keen ability to sense the weaknesses of his opponent and change tactics mid-battle. He also made many mistakes, many of them worked in his own favor helping to build his legend as a general that never lost (a legend he carefully cultivated with propaganda). In this book Connelly explains some of his most famous “blunders” and how they led to his rise to the throne as Emperor of France and ultimate fall to distant exile. The focus is on the military activity of the French during the Napoleonic Wars, but the incredibly interesting personality of the man himself is well-viewed through the lens of his work as General Bonaparte.
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