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Tuesday, June 30, 2009

Books for June. NO I AM TOTALLY NOT KIDDING. With bonus extra-long Atlas Shrugged blathery section.

Atlas Shrugged was a major project during May and June. I finished it before these other few books I'm going to review, but I'll put its review last because it's so long.

Also, in the spirit of full disclosure, I will admit that I am pretty much reusing reviews for these first few books; I wrote them originally for Visual Bookshelf at Facebook so if you follow me there, they'll be pretty familiar to you (although I edited some of them a bit). (Ask me about the time I wrote a paper about a French author in French for French class and then just translated the paper into English and turned it in for English class. Not plagiarism, just... labor-saving. Right?)

1. Johnny Tremain -- Esther Forbes -- 5
   
   • I read this in late elementary school, and then I think once as an adult years ago. I knew I loved it, but it's even better than I remembered. Our family is on an American Revolution kick right now so my kids and I just listened to an unabridged audio version of this; T will be listening to it once he's done with Atlas Shrugged. The title character is fictional but the setting and many of the events depicted are real; the story is engaging for people of any age from say third grade on up, with enough grit to avoid glossing over the fact that war is unpleasant, but nothing graphic enough to turn off or frighten younger readers. Forbes is a skilled writer, and her vivid (but not in the least highfalutin') descriptions transport you to 1770's Boston, and to the turning point of one nation's history.
     
     The reader of the audiobook (it says Grace Conlin on the cover and at blackstoneaudio.com, but she's identified as somebody Cassidy by the reader herself at the end -- hmm) is awesome. If you like audiobooks and/or historical fiction, I heartily recommend this one.

     
     

2. Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day -- Winifred Watson -- 3.25
   
   • This story of a dowdy spinster whose life is changed for a day when she shows up to interview for a job at the house of a society woman is arch, humorous, and overall much naughtier than you'd expect for something written in the 1930's. (Still quite chaste by today's standards, though.) Overall, a lightweight but pleasant enough read.
3. The Boy in the Striped Pajamas -- John Boyne -- 5
   
   • This book is beyond excellent. Its fable-like quality doesn't detract one whit from its gut-wrenching realism, and the Holocaust is brought home to young adult readers in a way I don't think it ever has been in any other novel. The ending is shocking and highly effective. This will be required reading for my eighth grader this upcoming school year.
     
   
   
4. White Crosses -- Larry Watson -- .5
   
   • Must confess that I didn't like this at all. The entire story is told from inside the head of the sheriff of a small town in Montana; he is an utterly unlikable character and simply spending that much time with his irrational and frequently despicable thought processes was annoying. Then there's the fact that the story is told in a meandering, stream-of-consciousness way that was absolutely maddening to endure; the narrator can't light a cigarette without going off on a two-page aside about why he smokes or some memory that is only tangentially connected to the matter at hand. Yes, people's minds DO work this way, but thought is quick - and pages of tiresome reminiscences and speculation definitely are *not*. The story could have been told in a fifty-page novella, and instead it's dragged out into a 400-page novel by means of one annoying mental rabbit trail after another.
     
     Initially I kept going because I wanted to see what happened; I began to think of skipping to the end but reviews mentioned some shocking surprise ending so I tried to hold off and see if I could guess what it was. On page 200 I gave up and skipped to the last fifteen pages. All of my guesses were *much* more interesting than what actually happened.
     
     There are probably people for whom this is just the right kind of novel, but for myself, I prefer my crime stories to crackle a bit more, and my thoughtful literary rambles to be in the company of someone I can enjoy more than this wretched arse of a sheriff.

And now on to Atlas.

I am coming to terms with the possibility that I may never sit and write out the long, articulate, scholarly assessment of Atlas Shrugged that I've been planning to write and even halfheartedly started last night. And rather than let that failure keep me from doing my Books for June post, I'll go ahead and do a quick paragraph or two about the book and give myself permission to move on.

Atlas Shrugged is a lot of things. It's a novel, yes, but I think Ayn Rand's primary goal was not so much to write a story as it was to create a novelization of a philosophy. It's a rite of passage of sorts, for conservative/libertarian types like myself. It's on a lot of people's "Books that Changed My Life" lists. It's 1200 pages of tiny print, or sixty-three hours of audio if you prefer. It's an icon, a product of its time, a warning for all times, especially (it sometimes seems) for ours. It's sometimes so engaging that you can't put it down, and occasionally so boring that you feel you absolutely must stab your eyes out with forks if you can't skim just a weee little bit.

Rand hung her philosophy on a frame consisting of a ripping good story; the basic plot is as follows. It's sometime in the near future -- that is, the near future to people in 1958, which is when the novel was published, although I think it took over a decade to write -- and for several years, industrialists and other major movers and shakers have been mysteriously vanishing. Meanwhile, Dagny Taggart, the only major female industrialist in the US, has been building her family's railroad empire to ever-greater heights, while her brother Jim, the titular head of the organization, is a whiny jerk who is in tight with a bunch of Washington bureaucrats whose aim is to place serious regulations on industry for various reasons of their own. The regulations are crippling major industries and continue to do so in increasing degree throughout the novel. We learn about Dagny's early love affair with a young man, a childhood friend who was also destined to be a great industrialist but who has, for reasons no one understands, become a notorious playboy and run his family's company into the ground, and we watch her have an affair with a married steel tycoon who is also a major industrial player. Dagny is perplexed and angered by what she sees as the defection of her fellow industrialists, as more and more of them (and more and more important ones) continue to vanish; she is determined to get to the bottom of that situation, while she is also determined to keep her own company going against all odds. There's so much going on in the novel on so many levels that it's difficult to write a brief summary of it, especially without giving away key plot points that are best discovered in context, so I'll leave it at that, but just trust me that it's a better and more interesting story than I'm making it sound.

Rand's writing has that mid-20th-century utilitarian feel to it -- not trash-novelish, but not high literary style either. She uses words to tell a story and get across ideas, and she does a good job of that. This book being what it is, there's an extremely high level of infodump -- that is, stuff the author knows or believes, and that she wants you the reader to know or believe, so she puts it in the mouths of her characters. The most extreme example of this is the entire 55-page chapter (and remember, this is tiny, close print, probably over 400 words to a page) consisting of one man's speech over the radio. It's about three hours long in the audio version, and it's a barefaced, unashamed, obvious plot device used by Rand to include an explicit handbook of her philosophy within the pages of her novel. I honestly wish she hadn't; I think a discerning reader will have already gleaned nearly everything included in that speech from the story itself, and that for the purposes of plot (the radio incident in and of itself is an important plot point), the address could have been much, much shorter and still had the same effect. Still, that's my only major gripe with the story; otherwise I think it's highly worth reading.

Now for the philosophy itself. You can find a great deal of information about Rand's ideas - she called her philosophy Objectivism - on the Internet, so I won't give a detailed exposition of it here; I'll just say that its primary tenets are that man exists for his own sake, and that the individual is paramount. Much of what she says I agree with, vehemently, to the point of cheering aloud while reading from time to time. Others of her points, not so much. Just a few examples:

I agree with Rand about the evil of punishing achievement, drive, and ability. Perhaps the strongest theme in Atlas Shrugged, being set, as it is, against a backdrop of industry, is the idea that achievers should not be penalized by being enslaved by the government (or their own guilt) for the benefit of those who do not achieve. Her novel lays out in relentless detail what can happen when great minds -- people who can and do make things happen -- become the property of a mass of parasitic humanity who want to 'mooch' (Rand's word) off them. Some of these passages look like they come from this morning's paper.

I also agree with Rand about the value of the individual and of individual rights. Individual rights, individual liberties, individual responsibilities, individual freedoms: any government interfering with these is a dangerous government.

I don't so much agree with her when it comes to the one-on-one, human-relational aspects of her philosophy, though. Rand promoted the idea that altruism is not just something that can't and shouldn't be legislated (in this I agree), but that altruism -- self-sacrifice for the sake of others -- is actually wrong whether you do it by your own choice or not, and that true morality can only mean living for your own best interests. It's not as bad as that sounds, or as simple; in the various relationships within the novel, this idea plays out in many ways: A man is no longer obligated to be faithful to his wife if she is not holding up her end of their marriage contract. A man is not obligated to do anything for anyone if he does not get an equal value in return. Personal pleasure is the highest law of human relationships. Adherents of Objectivism put a fine point on these ideas, I've found, by pointing out that if giving love makes you happy, then that is your return on your investment, so giving love is OK. But that's not enough for me, because there are always going to be situations where (in my opinion) good morality, whether based on religion or personal ethics, holds that self-sacrifice is important even if the sacrificer gains nothing, not even pleasure. I found it interesting that in all 1200 pages of this novel, there is not one mention of how a mother should behave toward her children. There are virtually no children in the story at all, except for one family (presented positively but very briefly) who dropped out of society so as to avoid having their children indoctrinated in state-controlled collectivist-socialist schools. (You can just imagine what I thought of that. ;-) ) My idea of love is different from Rand's, it appears. I would be interested to see if she addressed the subject of parental love in particular in any of her other writings. To my knowledge, she did not have any children herself.

Also, I obviously don't agree with Rand's idea that religion is a crutch for the weak and it's bad bad bad to believe in anything supernatural ever at all ever. Fortunately, while this was mentioned a few times and in a few ways in the novel, it's not pervasive enough to have ruined my pleasure in reading it.

Soooo. Not so much with the "a quick paragraph or two", I guess, but there's a WHOLE lot more that I'm not covering here and that I simply don't have time or energy to go into at this point. I would love to discuss this novel with other friends who have read it. T's reading it right now, or rather listening to it, and we'll be able to have good talks about it soon without my having to worry about spoiling something for him inadevertently. (We were supposed to be keeping more or less together in the story, but I was a BAD GIRL who couldn't put the book down while I was camping this month, and finished. TOTALLY on accident, of COURSE.) If you've read it and want to discuss/debate/enthuse/whatever with me about it, please contact me and we'll have a go at it.

Sunday, June 28, 2009

silence: broken. More's the pity.

Summer at our house means being careful about running the sprinkler for too long, because the water level in our well drops off enough that the pump ends up gasping for water and only coming up with air. This hadn't been tested yet this year... until now. (I am always handy when laws of physics or things like this need to be tested. Everybody has a special skill. This is mine.) I turned the sprinkler on the lawn well after sunset but before dark, sternly reminding myself that I needed to shut it off in half an hour, and then I completely forgot we even had a sprinkler until I flushed the toilet at 3 AM and it did that funny "hey, there's no water to fill me back up in here" kind of panicked sort of choking sound, at which point I instantly remembered the sprinkler and the well and dashed out in my bare feet to turn off the faucet.

And T's not here -- he is coming home in about six hours from a two-week work trip to Hawaii -- so I had to handle this all on my own like a big girl, by calling him in the middle of the night on his cell phone, which he had graciously left on as he slept in a hotel room in San Francisco. I'm sure he is glad that his wife can hold down the fort while he's gone like Ma did when Pa took off for town 40 miles away. I'm sure he's contemplating this *exact* parallel as he lies in a hotel bed trying desperately to fall back asleep for 45 minutes before he has to get up anyway.

And the pump recovered so quickly that I have a sneaking suspicion that it hadn't actually gone into full-bore RED ALERT mode and was still thinking more along the lines of, "Hey. People? People? Did you forget about me? ...hey... hello?" Three in the morning is not a time for subtlety in problem assessment, though. Not for me, anyway.

Oh my goodness. I just opened the door to let in the cat and Venus was rising so beautifully next to a tree that stands in our yard that I went straight past an Anne-ish thrill to an Emily-like "flash". I did have time to notice, while I scurried around outside checking to make sure that I hadn't also left water on in the garden or elsewhere, that the stars looked amazing. Everyone should live at least for a while in a place where going outside in the middle of a clear night and looking up means having your breath taken clean away.

Anyway. Back to the STORY. The crisis was past by 3:30 and I came in the house all hyped up on adrenaline and decided that I would get a head start on dinner by setting up the crock-pot now, instead of trying to do it between getting up at 6 and leaving at 7. And then I couldn't go to bed, because I had to cook the giblets for the cats. It is against my household rules to a) give raw meat to pets b) throw away usable food or c) have chicken innards just sitting there in a bowl in my refrigerator, so what else could I do? And while my hands were performing the rather unpleasant tasks involved in getting a chicken ready to be cooked, my brain was thinking, "Hey. I should write a blog post. Maybe while the giblets cook."

So there it is. A month of blog silence broken by a water emergency-or-not and chicken liver.

I know I say this every time but I really have been thinking how I need to post more. For one thing, if you don't see me on Facebook you have NO IDEA how my garden is doing right now, none at ALL, and that's all my fault and I'm sorry. I know it's hard on you, the wondering. And you don't know that I've been sick or what I thought of Atlas Shrugged (well, nobody knows that; I'm not even sure I know yet) or how the summer reading program is going for the kids or what our chickens look like now or how C did at State Presentation Day or how tall LT is or anything important.

But also, I'm discovering a major flaw in my "I'll put off blogging and just use twitter or Facebook or both to express myself about this thought that's in my head" plan, and that is that the archiving at twitter and Facebook simply stinks. You can't call something up by date or topic and search is pretty much useless or nonexistent; you have to sit there and click "more" 300 times to get to something you wrote six months ago and for some reason now want to remember. So one of the pleasant byproducts I've enjoyed since I began communicating with people via the Internet, first via email and then through archivable chats and then through this blog and then finally through social networking sites, is eliminated: I can't easily use my own writings as a diary. I can't go back and find that link to a knitting pattern, or laugh at my own jokes or at people's comments, or even remember what I'd done on a certain day.

(Also, T can't access Facebook -- not that he'd want to; he wants a T-shirt he saw that proclaims REAL MEN DON'T FACEBOOK -- or Twitter, or even read the little Twitter snippets in my blog sidebar, from his work computer, due to network regulations meant to keep government employees from spending all day socializing instead of working. [This would be the web 2.0 version of "the entire workforce of the state of Virginia had to have Solitaire removed from their computers because they hadn't done any work in six weeks.… You know what this is, you know what we're seeing here? We're seeing the end of Western civilization as we know it.." Name that quote!] But he can read my blog, and we both used to like it, that he could peek in on our day at home while he was away.)

So I'm going to try to make a conscious effort to document stuff here again. Don't bother thanking me. I know you're all grateful.