After over six weeks of no school, I returned to class for the spring semester just as January was ending (i.e., 2:30 on the 31st). Immediately after leaving class, I walked across campus to the school book store and allowed my wallet to be mugged (i.e., I left with the six books required for the class). Here’s a picture of what I’ll be reading between now and May 19th:
Perhaps, in a few months, I’ll have something to say about these books – in fact, I will have something to say, since participation is 20% of the grade and I aim to spout my thoughts on these books like an OCD over-achiever – but, in the meantime, I thought I’d offer brief reviews on the books I read while on college hiatus…
The 2013 St. Paul Almanac (compilation)
My primary reason for reading this is, as I’ve said before, my writings are in it. So, naturally, this book is awesome. No, really: it was a lot of fun to read. I learned a lot about my hometown, enjoyed the references to landmarks in my neighborhood I have heretofore been ignorant of, and loved the variety of writing styles. Some of the poems were great, and nearly every short story held my attention. The weird thing though, was the end of the book (the “December” section). It ends with half a dozen essays; I didn’t like any of them. I couldn’t follow some of them, and others weren’t written very well. I thought it was odd that so many mediocre essays were piled next to each other, and all right at the end. Oh well.
An Artist View (Arthur Videen)
After reading a portion of one of my essays to a UU congregation back in October, a churchgoer handed me a copy of a book – his book. He asked me to read it and tell him what I thought about it. I finally got to it during the Xmas/New Year’s break. I emailed Arthur, but he never responded. While it’s always interesting to discover why people rejected the religion of their upbringing, this book was very difficult to read. I couldn’t always follow the story, and I couldn’t find a unifying theme. Arthur is a sculpturist, and the best part of the book was the images of his sculptures; many pieces of his work grace the Twin Cities’ landscape, including a piece at the intersection of Grand and Summit in St. Paul, a place I’ve driven through dozens of times.
As a Man Thinketh (James Allen)
If you click on the link I provided for this book, you’ll see a silly, melodramatic cover image. In fact, if you search for cover images of the book, you’ll see that this book has no shortages of reprints. But the copy I read looks like none of these. That’s because, during the Great Hallway Haul of 2011, I made off with an old printing of the book. The book, originally printed in 1902, is short and contains tidbits for how a man can live his life without being an asshole. Good advice, if a bit pedestrian for today’s crowd. It took me about 50 minutes to read this slender work.
A Brief Guide to Understanding Islam (I. A. Ibrahim)
I got this cheaply-made snoozefest for free at a bookfair I attended last fall. Like so much Witness literature I read, it’s replete with with apologetics, partial facts, and lazy leaps of logic that most humanity should find laughable, but that the devout probably find faith-stengthening. It also has a comic book, cartoonish look to it. Here’s a sample page:
I plan to write more about this book sometime later – a full review might be nice – so I’ll just leave you with this brief paragraph for now.
Damned Good Company (Luis Granados)
The publisher sent me a free copy of this book with the understanding I write a review. So I did.
Inventory (compilation)
I thought this would be a book I wouldn’t be able to put down: Written by the Onion, and featuring lists about movies, TV shows, and music. Wow! This should have been something I would voraciously read until I had devoured it entirely.
Yeah…that didn’t happen. The lists are often too trite, overwrought, and – unless you know every TV show, song, and movie from the past 75 years – unintelligible. Sorry, Onion, I normally love your stuff, but I couldn’t even make it to page 50 this time.
The Leaders We Deserved (And a Few We Didn’t) (Alvin Felzenberg)
I didn’t finish this book, either. Alvin purports to “rethink the Presidential Ratings Game.” And, to some extent, he does. He divides the Presidents up by catergory: foreign policy, vision, competence, likeability, and so on. The book has five or six really long chapters, each detailing one catergory of his rating system and then discussing five or six presidents who best and worst exemplified this aspect. The problem is, once we get to his final scorecard, we don’t know why he rated each president the way he did. Oh sure, we know why he rated some of the presidents as he did, but not enough. In fact, since he gives Lincoln a perfect score in every category, we get to know Lincoln quite well, and others not at all. Despite claiming to rethink things, Alvin still lumps a President’s entire time in office all together (I, for one, think it’s very unfair to compare, say, FDR’s 12+ years in office with JFK’s two-and-a-half years) and concludes with no surprises (Washington, Lincoln, and the Roosevelts are awesome; Nixon and Buchanan suck). But my main reason for tossing this one aside before completion was the stupid mistakes.
Alvin: why don’t you let me fact-check your book for you before you publish the next edition?
Maphead (Ken Jennings)
Fun, but kind of lame. I wrote about this book when I was about halfway done with it AT THIS BLOG POST. So just read about it there.
Robinson Crusoe (Daniel Defoe)
Here’s a book I’ve meaning to read for years. I check out an audio-book version from the library a couple weeks ago. I listened to about 10% of it, then shut it off. After having just finished Treasure Island (see below), I just couldn’t handle all this high-falutin’ gobbledygook.
Treasure Island (Robert Louis Stevenson)
Unlike Defoe’s novel, I did listen to this book all the way through.
Normally I love 19th century fiction. I’ve read lots of it. I’ve even read Stevenson’s other famous novel (the one with Jekyll and Hyde) and liked that one. But this was not to my liking. I couldn’t follow most of the story lines. The ones I could follow, I didn’t care about. Characters kept popping in and out of the story and I just had no interest in them. By about the 30% mark, I was contemplating cutting my losses, but I decided to give it a little more of a chance. By 50%, I figured I didn’t like the book, but I was too far in to quit. By 90%, I was just praying for it to be done, and was elated to discover most of the final disk was taken up by the reading of a critical essay. Needless to say, I didn’t bother listening to that.
Voice-of-the-Customer Marketing (Ernan Roman)
What can I say? I read this book for work. It provided some good insights for what I do for my employer. I even photocopied one page and hung it up in my cube. But it’s too boring to talk about here.
…I also read four books to my kids during this winter break (including the latest Captain Underpants novel), but I think this is enough for now. I gotta get to reading my schoolbooks…