Friday Five is Alive!

There's a rumor going around that they will remake the Short Circuit movie. Quake with fear!

Now for the Friday Five.

- R.A. Lafferty's Nine Hundred Grandmothers. It is well-known that the best golden and silver age science fiction came in the form of short stories. Lafferty is one of the masters, his strange, tripy, and humorous stories make for excellent reading.

- Colette's The Vagabond. If you haven't read any Colette, go fix that right now. The Vagabond is about a woman's struggle between control of her life, and romantic attachment. There are some things the French just do better, and existential struggles certainly seem to be among them.

- Gustav Meyrink's The Golem. This book has everything, creepiness, a gem cutter, Prague! Seriously, if there were a better surreal story of a Jewish gem cutter in the ghettos of Old Prague who becomes deeply involved with mysterious cursed imagery and the legend of the golem, then I don't know what it is.

- Saul Bellow's Dangling Man. This is the book that launched my abiding fondness for Saul Bellow (can you call it that when you've only read two of someone's oeuvre? I know, I know, I need to read more of them). The strange beast that is one man's life during the year that he waits to be drafted to fight in World War II.

- Anne Fadiman's Ex Libris. Surprised I haven't done this one yet? Me too. She's got a new book out that I need to read also. These are essays about being a reader and lover of books. It's a good cozy collection for anyone who likes books.

Friday Five: Sick-as-a-Dog edition

I haven't been posting with the same frequency as I usually do, and that is because I've spent the latter half of this week with some kind of hell-plague.

Anyway, here's your friday five, made up of the books that I can reach on my shelf without moving too much.

-Lenny Bruce's How to Talk Dirty and Influence People. Lenny Bruce is a very funny man, who also became very paranoid. There's the old joke, "is it still paranoia if they are all out to get you?" Sadly, the answer is yes, because paranoia involves a break from the rational, and if he kept it together he might have won. This isn't a judgment on him though. He kept it together longer than I think most people could.

-David Eddings' Belgariad. Ok, This isn't a book, it's a series of five books, but really the five books make up one story. This was my favorite series when I was about 12, and it has stuck with me and everyone else I know who read it around then. If you're an adult you might not want to read it right now, I still enjoyed it when I reread it a couple of years ago, but the flaws in his writing were much more clear. However, if you have a younger person in your life, you should definitely get them this series. Also great fun to read aloud.

-Brian Jacques' Redwall. On the subject of great fun to read aloud, it's hard to top Brian Jacques, he writes many vivid characters with distinctive accents, and there lots of fun to read aloud. Another great book to give the young person in your life.

-Adam Zagajewski's Without End. So far, I have yet to come across a Polish poet that I didn't like. Zagajewski is part of the 'younger' generation of Polish poets, which means he's not currently deceased or in his 90's. Excellent poetry.

-Alan Alda's Never Have Your Dog Stuffed. I'm not typically one to recommend celebrity autobiographies, most of them are only 'as told to' anyway. Alda clearly wrote this though, and it's done well enough that he's got a second coming. He's led a very interesting life. Even though I loved MASH, I love that he spends almost no time talking about the show in this. It's kind of an intentional swipe at the celebrity autobiography market. There's a lot that's very personal, a lot about his father and the burlesque world he grew up in.

Friday Five

It's time once again for the Friday Five.

- Ha Jin's War Trash - This is a fictional memoir of the Korean War, told by an old Chinese man as he prepares to go to the USA for the first time to visit his family. It's an amazing work. You get a very different perspective on the Korean War than the American one. Particularly as our main source of perspective is M*A*S*H, both the movie and the show. I read this in 2006 and since then Ha Jin has become one of my favorite authors.

- Orson Scott Card's The Worthing Saga - So, like most Americans, you probably read Ender's Game sometime in your teens, then you picked up some of the Ender books, and the drop off in quality from one to the next knocked your socks off. That's ok, it happens to everyone. There used to be a time when he wrote in worlds other than that of Ender's Game, and he didn't go and rehash the same story over and over again, each time damaging the credibility of the more successful book he wrote before. It's hard to believe, but it's true. This is one of the prime examples, halfway between a collection of short stories on a single theme and a novel, this book is about world building, and attempts to understand what would happen to humanity if we really did have colonies on other planets.

- Dashiell Hammett's The Thin Man - Dashiell Hammett wrote some of the best American detective fiction, in my opinion even better than Raymond Chandler, and this is one of his best. It's not quite as grim as some of the others, like The Maltese Falcon, which is also superb, but it's a lot of fun. It also resulted in some of the best movies ever, the William Powell and Myrna Loy Thin Man movies, though the first movie borrows the plot from the book, they are otherwise quite different in feel from the book. Still both are good. Read the book, then watch the movies and come back and tell me I'm wrong (or that I'm right, which would be preferable).

- Russell Shorto's The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony that Shaped America - First, Shorto is an excellent choice to have written this, history, even history as fascinating as that of my beloved New York City, can be very dry, and Shorto does an excellent job keeping the reader interested. Also, New York City is a fascinating place, and Shorto's thesis that the culture of the city is connected to it's early Dutch roots is very interesting. It's filled with engaging descriptions of New Amsterdam, tiny frontier settlement, frustrated democracy, and haven to pirates.

- William Logan's Macbeth in Venice. Read poetry! It tastes great and it's good for you! William Logan is somewhat better known as a viciously acerbic poetry critic. He also, in my opinion, writes poetry well enough to give him some pretty firm ground from which to be acerbic. I'm just going to repeat that word because I like it, acerbic. Not that the poetry is particularly harsh, it's just beautiful.

Friday Five

It's time once again for the Friday Five! As I stated last time, points of no actual value will be awarded to any who have actually read any of the books listed.

- Don Marquis' The Annotated Archie and Mehitabel. This was a well known part of Don Marquis' legendary newspaper column in the 20s. Archie who is a freeverse poet in the body of a cockroach, and Mehitabel the cat who was Cleopatra in a past life, find their way to Don Marquis' typewriter when he leaves the office at night, making strange and intriguing additions to his column. Archie the cockroach is one of the greats.

- Sara Bader's Strange Red Cow. This book managed to very effectively travel under the radar, and deserved more attention. Bader researched historical classified ads, and uses them to give an interesting view of early American life. More interesting than it sounds, and it sounds pretty darn interesting, at least to me. But then, I've also read a book devoted to the history of Obituaries.

- Upton Sinclair's Worlds End. That's right, it's not The Jungle! He wrote other books! It's even likely that, with the success of the movie There Will Be Blood, based on his novel Oil!, that publishers will start to release more of his back catalogue. World's End is the first book in Sinclair's epic series of historical novels following Lanville 'Lanny' Budd, and his travels through Europe. Lanny is the son of an American arms dealer, and he ends up closely connected with many of the major events leading up to and following the First Wold War. It's fascinating for both the detail of it's history and Sinclair's very complicated take on the war.

- Elaine Dundy's The Dud Avocado. I'm cheating here. I'm recommending a book that I haven't finished yet. I'm about half-way through. This is a phenomenal book, written in 1958, it has apparently been one of those books that gets forgotten and rediscovered with some frequency. It's the story of an American girl abroad in Paris, and it deals with the insular society of young American ex-pats living in France. Sally Gorce gets mixed up with many different strange characters, and they're all well-rounded and hilarious.

- Roger Zelazny's Lord of Light. This is one of my favorite SF books. A new planet is colonized with a world run by the people who held onto the technology, for a large population of people with no access to it. They have modeled their world's culture on the Hindo religion, which they have warped in order to maintain their control of the society. One of their number rebels and seeks to restore equality, he does so by creating a rebellious religion based on Buddhism. Cunning, thoughtful and really enjoyable, it also contains one of the most gratuitous puns of all time, set up over the course of about 10 pages, and with absolutely no warning at all that it is coming.

And that's the Friday Five! What books do you think I should read?

Have a great weekend!

Friday Five

It's time for part one of my weekly series, Friday Five!

That's where I will describe five books that I think are interesting. I'm not saying that you need to read them, but you should consider them.

And if you've read any of them already, you get points. Points can be redeemed for imaginary prizes of no worth.

In no particular order, here they are.

- Alfred Kazin's A Walker in the City. This is an autobiography. Kazin writes about growing up in a Jewish community in Brooklyn before the depression. As a New Yorker, and a lover of New York history, this stood out to me, but I think it really has universal appeal. Kazin is a fascinating man, and his struggles with issues like community and self-identity are easily identifiable.

- Sappho's If Not, Winter, translated by Anne Carson. Sappho is one of the greatest poets out of ancient Greece. Her poems are beautiful, personal, and well structured. They also come down to us largely in fragments. Anne Carson, a phenomenal poet in her own right, has used the fragmentary nature of Sappho's surviving oeuvre to create a translation that is a work of art in itself. Rather than covering the gaps, or marking them in the same tedious way that is often done with other translations of fragmented works, Carson makes the gaps an important part of each piece. This book is not just a good translation of Sappho's poems, it's also a monument to all of the works that we have lost. The organization of her translations provides the reader with a visceral sense of that loss. The title is one of the fragments, all we can do is wonder what the rest of the poem would have been like.

- Alaa Al Aswany's The Yacoubian Building. Curious about the Middle East? Why not read one of the best selling Arabic language books in recent years. This is a novel that forms itself around the lives of the inhabitants of a single old apartment building in Cairo. It deals with the struggles of religion and secularism, east and west, and generations.

- Flann O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds. One of the most brilliant and intricate novels out there. You've heard of James Joyce, but he's not the only great writer from Ireland. Flann O'Brien heads the list of under-appreciated Irish writers. A book about a man writing a book about a man who is writing a book, where the characters of that book begin to take their revenge by writing the life of their own author. If you think that sounds tangled, wait until you read it. It all makes sense in the end, but you'll have to focus. O'Brien had a small resurgence when the creator of Lost said in an interview that another O'Brien novel, The Third Policeman, is one of the biggest influences on the show.

- Connie Willis' Bellwether. Connie Willis is one of the finest living writers of SF. This book, about a social scientist researching trends, is a fascinating examination of how ideas travel through our society. As the title suggests, it also involves a look at the behavior of sheep.