perpetual memory loss

I have consistently been a late adopter of technology.  The last time I jumped on the techno band wagon from the get go was when I bought an mp3 player back before there was such a thing as an iPod (it was the equivalent of the Zack Morris cell phone).  Needless to say I got burned and I learned my lesson.  Since that time I have always waited and waited for new technology to go through a few iterations before I buy it.  Last Friday I decided to finally jump on the iPhone band wagon, and although I wish I would have done it sooner I am glad that I waited for them to work out some of the bugs.

Anyways I have been trolling the app store looking for good apps and wanted to promote one of my favorite apps so far.  The app is from BeamItDown Software and it is a collection of 150 Great Books (and counting).  Usually I feel the same way about digital books as I do about new technology, I really don’t like it.   There’s really nothing that can beat reading a real book, as opposed to the digital incarnation, but the price was right so I figured what the hell I’ll give it a try.  Up until this point I have only really read research papers and the like in digital form, and those usually don’t exceed fifty pages or so, but even those few pages are taxing on my eyes.  Now with all my complaining and griping about digital books you might be asking “well I thought you liked this app?”  I do but I just had to get some minor complaints out of the way first.

Lately I have been packing–in preparation for my imminent move to somewhere, don’t know where just yet–and I filled up two twenty gallon plastic storage containers with my books.  And when I went to move them into the other room I almost gave myself a hernia.  Seriously books are fucking heavy and annoying to move.  I had forgotten about that.  So until the time comes where I settle down and have a room dedicated as my library I think I am going to calm down on buying books.  Secondly, I went to do my laundry the other day and usually along with my colossal bag of dirty laundry, detergent, softener, and bounce sheets, I usually take my phone, iPod, and a book to read.  Now instead I just grabbed my bag of laundry and my iPhone and I was off listening to my music during the long trek to the laundromat, and once there I dove into A Tale of Two Cities, which is a book I have been meaning to read for years.  Despite my aversion to digital books I really enjoyed it and so far I haven’t really felt that I am missing that much by reading it off of my phone.  Actually it’s pretty damn great, and bonus because there are so many choices of books to read I will never be without a book.  And besides it’s much better than carrying my satchel (it’s not a man purse it’s a satchel) into the city filled with books and what not.

By the way the app is now 50% off and is only $4.99–which when added to the price of a new iPhone is cheaper than the Kindle, and the Kindle doesn’t play music or make phone calls (suck on that amazon). That $4.99 price tag is also  cheaper than buying even one of the books on the list.  Speaking of the list here are some of the highlights of what books are included on the app: a collection of Dickens, Twain, Doyle, Dumas, Hardy, London, Poe, and Wells.  Oh but wait there’s more it also includes political tracts from Hamilton, Locke, Marx, Milton, Paine, and Plato.  And there is a ton of other stuff including Epic Poetry, regular poetry, and fables.  There is really a grip of worthwhile books on the list just begging to be read, and hey did I mention it’s really a phenomenal deal.  The app itself works smoothly and saves where you left off in every book that you are reading.  Instead of simulating a book and page turns this app works like a “teleprompter” which makes it easier to read.  You can set it to move automatically so that you don’t have to touch the screen and can just keep reading.  Personally I hate the mode because I either feel that I am being rushed or that it’s moving too slow–I haven’t found the “just right” speed yet–and besides I like to read well written passages over and over again so I can fully appreciate them.  So I’d rather move the script on my own, but the option is there which is nice.

However, there are a couple add-ons I would like to see.  One is a way to highlight, mark, or dog-ear certain passages.  I have the tendency to write notes and bracket particularly good passages, but the ability to write notes is probably asking for a bit much so I would settle for a way to just highlight passages for reference later on.  Secondly, I would like some kind of page reference that lets me know the approximate page number that I am currently reading.  One of the benefits of reading books is noting the progress you make each time you sit down and read for a few hours, and that is really lost on this format.  Other than those minor gripes the app is the tops and well worth the money.  I don’t think I’ll ever go completely digital but being able to have so many good books on hand at all times is priceless (cliche I know, but also true).

Thanks to crunchgear for the pic.

I recently finished Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book Team of Rivals and it is an incredibly good read.  The book begins on May 18, 1860, the day when the Republican Party was set to select their Presidential candidate, and shows the demeanor of the four potentials: William Seward, Salmon Chase, Edward Bates, and Abraham Lincoln.  After this chapter ends she begins a multiple biography detailing the lives of the the four main rivals.  For the next ten chapters she deftly details these men’s lives from their beginnings all the way until the election of Lincoln. Throughout she also sprinkles in the lives of other notable people:  Mary Todd, Stephen Douglas, Edwin Stanton et. al.  She does this by focusing each chapter on a period of time and then splitting the chapter into four pieces.  Although it may sound awkward it works well and the reader is carefully guided through with her strong narrative.  To further help the casual reader she has removed all footnotes and instead has opted for extensive end notes (while the historian in me misses the footnotes the end notes are extensive enough that most people won’t miss them but will probably be glad that they are gone).  Her prose is clear and concise and she deftly weaves multiple story lines together so that the reader can follow along easily.

She tries her best to get to the facts about who Lincoln was and what he believed, and she does this by using, not only his words and actions, but those of his rivals.  One of the main strengths of this book is that you can see how all of these men’s opinions about Lincoln changed as they got to know and appreciate his talents.  One person in particular, Edwin Stanton, dismisses Lincoln as a “long armed ape” upon his initial meeting with him; but years later, after working with Lincoln through the Civil War, he becomes so distraught at his assassination that he has trouble functioning.  This happens time and again throughout the book, and even more stunning than their changes of opinion is that Lincoln took all of these slights without bearing any animosity towards these people.  One of the worst characters was Salmon Chase (I really grew to dislike him) who was way too sanctimonious and kept working against Lincoln, even while he was on the cabinet.  However, Lincoln kept taking the high road because Chase’s talents were needed for the war.

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I finished A Farewell to Arms today–it was a really quick read–and this will be the last time I ever go from a Steinbeck novel to a Hemingway novel.  Their styles are so different that I think I don’t like A Farewell to Arms as much as I may have.  One reason for this is because, if you know anything about Hemingway, you know that his prose is short and succinct.  Where Steinbeck gives the reader an epic description of a sunset, the tilled earth, and a grasshopper Hemingway tells the reader that it is cold and muddy.  And it works it really does there is something about his sparse style that is really gripping and leaves you wanting more.  He gives you the bare essentials and then moves on; it’s almost like watching a chase movie where you have to watch it a few times before you catch everything.  Since this is one of Hemingway’s earlier novels, however, it is also not as strong or polished as his later works and it is easy to tell that he is still trying to perfect his style.  All that would be forgivable if it wasn’t for the fact that the I hated the characters.

A Farewell to Arms is a love story set in World War I betwixt Lieutenant Fredric Henry, an American serving with the Italian army, and Catherine Barkley–a British nurse.  There are a lot of good elements in this story and some very good scenes, but the crux of the story depends on the love affair between the two protagonists, and that element fails.  I never for a second believe in or care about these two characters.  Catherine Barkley seems like a precursor to the babbling bitches from The Hills that infect our airwaves on a daily basis.  The dialog between the two is mind-numbingly terrible and reminds me of the high school couple that would argue about who is going to hang up first.  Bleeetch.  Henry doesn’t fair much better.  He is developed a bit better than Catherine, and instead of being one-dimensional he is one and a half dimensional.  They basically become two characters who I don’t care much about and I tend to root against  instead of for.  Their first few meetings are cringe worthy and I totally don’t buy their summer love-affair, but that’s just me maybe I’m just a cynical Grinch.  Lucky for me it’s a Hemingway novel so you know that it isn’t going to have some crappy Disney fairy book ending.  For me the last thirty pages made up for the first 300.  If you have read For Whom the Bells Toll then you know what Hemingway is capable of.  The relationship between Robert Jordan and Maria is so much more compelling.  By that time Hemingway’s style was set, his dialogue was great, the story was amazing so I think that maybe I was expecting a bit too much out of this one.

There is still a lot to like about this book despite the fact that it’s never going to be, for me, one of those epic books.  Even in this early stage Hemingway’s sentence construction is fascinating, and there is really no one else that does it like him.  He will go from a regular sentence, to a long sentence, to a three or four word sentence that concludes his point succinctly.  Most of his sentences though are brief.  He also has this habit where he will overuse ‘and’ in one sentence and then not use it in the next sentence in an obvious situation.  Like I mentioned above his descriptive prose left a lot to be desired but the more I read of it the more I liked the sparse descriptions.  It works especially well when the characters are in life or death scenarios and instead of plodding through these he briskly describes them and then moves on quickly giving the reader a sense of immediacy that would not come as easily with long plodding prose.  If I want pointers on how to write a brief concise sentence Hemingway is the man.  It’s not as easy as it sounds especially for people who like to write and who like to be as thorough as possible in all of their sentences.  Sometimes it is easy to forget how much can be said with just a few words.  If this book was a movie I would say wait for the DVD.  It’s worth reading if you’re a fan of Hemingway, but don’t buy it just check it out from the public library.  I will refrain from leaving an excerpt this time too as the only part I would like to excerpt might spoil it for those of you who haven’t read it and want to read it.  Tomorrow I will start Team of Rivals and hopefully I can finish that before school starts.

After reading this book I can now say that I finally get this song.  I really don’t know why it took me so long to get around and read this book.  Unfortunately, I think I let some idiot’s opinion–dry, long, boring–influence me waaay back in high school.  The sad thing is that if I would have read this in high school I would have enjoyed it, but I don’t think I would have appreciated it as much as I do now.

So what’s the book about, you’re saying, what are these grapes and why are they so wrathful.  First, however, I’d like to say that I think that this book and Oil! should be companion pieces as they are two sides of the same coin.  One dealing with the greed and corruption of corporations and the other deal with the consequences, for the normal have-nots, of said greed and corruption.  What make it even more compelling is that even though it is a work of fiction it is describing real events and could easily be used in a history class to give events a more personal feeling without losing sense of the scope of what was happening during this period.

Steinbeck accomplishes this duality by splitting up the book into alternating chapters that shift from a macro to a micro perspective.  One part deals with the nameless, faceless everyman who is moving west in an attempt to scratch out an existence.  These chapters are short (5-6 pages) and they serve a couple purpose.  One is to remind the reader that there are literally hundreds of thousands of people in the same situation as the Joads.  It also serves to help progress the story as he uses these chapters to introduce the next stage in their journey and heighten the conflict in the story.  These chapters although short are masterfully done, and are some of the best chapters in the entire book.  It’s in these chapters where Steinbeck’s descriptive prose is nothing short of amazing.  There are a lot of great writers and a lot of great books, but then there are those–books and authors–that are just on a higher echelon than the others.  This is one of those books and is easily the best Steinbeck novel I’ve read.  Steinbeck really knows how to transport you into the story.  His descriptions of the land is so earthy and real that it gets into your pores, you can almost feel the dust and the dirt on you.  In his descriptions of these nameless people you can see the worry in their eyes and feel the pain and desperation in their hearts.  It is in these chapters where I realized just how good Steinbeck is.

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Today I went to Barnes & Noble to buy some books to read over the break.  Fortunately I received a gift card from the history department for my exemplary work this semester, so I was able to buy more books than I was planning on.  So here is what I am going to be attempt to read over the break:

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway

Oil! by Upton Sinclair

Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin

I almost got Dostoevsky’s House of the Dead, but instead decided on Oil!.  If I somehow manage to finish all of these I will probably pick it up or I may re-read Don Quixote.  Anyways look out for reviews for these books as I finish them, and feel free to recommend other books that you think I may like (not Twilight though).  Now I just have to figure out which book I am going to start with.

I am finally done with this semester and not a moment too soon.  I barely made it, but luckily I only have one more left, which is going to make this break even more hectic. So here is my list of things that I need/want to accomplish before the break is over:

First things first I have to start looking for a job so that hopefully I can slide right into something once I graduate.  Unfortunately, that means that I have to fix my resume, write a cover letter, and all that trash.  All the stuff that I hate doing.  Preferably I would like to stay in New York so hopefully I find something good, despite the state of the economy.  So if anyone out there has the scoop on a job in history, libraries, or publishing let me know.

I also have to start looking for a new apartment, hopefully something closer to the city, because my roommates and I all graduate at the same time and we are all moving.  Hopefully I will be able to find something closer to the city and at a price where I don’t need a roommate.  I’m tired of living with roommates.

Next I want to read a few books over the holiday season.  I’m not sure what to read though.  I have a few books lying around that I haven’t read yet: Paradiso, Purgatorio, The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, or Paradise Lost.  However, I would like to maybe read some more Hemingway, Steinbeck, Dostoyevsky, or Fitzgerald.  I’m thinking that maybe I should try and expand my horizons some so I am looking for some tips on new books to read.  The Liskid has already suggested Upton Sinclair’s Oil!, Balzac’s Pere Goriot, and Proust.  With that being said, my loyal readers, check out my goodreads page or some of my book reviews to see what type of books I have already read and am into, and then send me your suggestions that are either similar to what I like or might help me expand my horizons.

So there in long form is my to-do list for the break.  I have until Jan. 21 so any book, job, or apartment suggestions will be most appreciated.

Today is Veteran’s Day, but it also marks the 90th Anniversary of the the original impetus for this holiday.  Veterans day was not always known by this name, in the beginning it was called Armistice Day, and was meant to celebrate the war to end all wars (that’s WWI for you non-history people).  The Armistice took effect on November 11, 1918 at 11:00 A.M. or at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month.  That date quickly became a holiday in Allied nations to commemorate the many Allied troops that had died during the Great War.  Since then, however, we have been through World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf War, the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars, and countless other minor skirmishes throughout the world.

It was President Eisenhower, in 1954, who signed a bill into law proclaiming November 11th as Veteran’s Day, and as such, a day of remembrance for all veterans past and present.  Since then today has been the day (although for 10 years it was celebrated on the 4th Monday of October until it was changed back to November 11th because of the historical significance) that we all take to remember the sacrifices of those who came before us that helped to ensure that we would get to live in a free society.  So if you have the day off take some time to remember the sacrifices of other and then proceed with the drunken revelry.

In honor of the origins of Veteran’s Day I am posting a small selection from Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth, which detailed her life through World War I.  This is one of my favorite passages, and if you haven’t read this book yet, you should.  It’s rather long, but it is well worth the time.  This excerpt comes as Vera is working on the French front as a nurse.  It is 1917, and the war has taken a toll physically, mentally, and emotionally on the Allied troops, and the prospects of victory seem slim:

They looked larger than ordinary men;their tall, straight figures were in contrast to the under-sized armies of pale recruits to which we had grown accustomed. At first I thought their spruce, clean uniforms were those of officers, yet obviously they could not be officers, for their were too many of them; they seemed, as it were, as Tommies in heaven. Had yet another regiment been conjured out of our depleted Dominions? I wondered, watching them move with such rhythm, such dignity, such serene consciousness of self-respect. But I knew the colonial troops so well, and these were different; they were assured where the Australians were aggressive, self-possessed where the New Zealanders were turbulent.

Then I heard an excited exclamation from a group of Sisters behind me.

“Look! Look! Here are the Americans!”

I pressed forward with the others to watch the United States physically entering the War, so godlike, so magnificent, so splendidly unimpaired in comparison with the tired, nerve-racked men of the British Army. So these were our deliverers at last, marching up the road to Camiers in the spring sunshine! There seemed to be hundreds of them, and in the fearless swagger of their proud strength they looked a formidable bulwark against the peril looming from Amiens.

Somehow the necessity of packing up in a hurry, the ignominious flight to the coast so long imagined, seemed to move further away. An uncontrollable emotion seized us seized me- as such emotions often seized us in those days of insufficient sleep; my eyeballs pricked, my throat ached, and a mist swam over the confident Americans going to the front. The coming of relief made me realise all at once how long and how intolerable had been the tension, and with the knowledge that we were not, after all, defeated, I found myself beginning to cry.

So that’s it now go out and celebrate, and pour some suds out for those who didn’t make it.

After watching this superb mini-series on HBO I decided to pick up Generation Kill.  I took it with me to Houston, and I was able to pretty much read the whole book in the airport because of all the delays that came from Tropical Storm Eduardo.  As good as the mini-series is the book, for me, is even better.  Evan Wright goes step-by-step in his journey with First Recon, and events that get cut short in the show are more fully explained in the book.  The greatest strength of the book is the fact that Wright doesn’t try to turn the book into some treatise into why the war is bad, or good, or any other crap like that that usually gets in the way.  Instead he makes it unpolitical, and just tries to relay to the reader what life is like for the these Marines in a war zone.  He doesn’t hold back with the language or in any of the events that happen throughout the march to Baghdad.  I really found it to be a fair and impartial account of life in the Marines during the invasion.  This book is an incredibly smooth and easy read, and as long as you can handle reading a book with often times filthy language you should be able to cruise through it no problem.

One of the best parts of this book was that my old battalion got a little shout out, and I found out something that I have been wondering about for a long time.  This chapter was cut down a bit in the show, but in the book it goes more in depth.  The set-up is that a Marine is killed, and his body is taken into the town of Ash Shatrah and mutilated by the populace.  My company was called in, along with others, to look for his body.  The CIA was also called in, because supposedly Ali Hassan al-Majid or “Chemical Ali” was hiding out in the town.  Probably one of the most bittersweet moments of my life leading a patrol to find this Marine and getting complimented by the CIA, but yet not being able to find the Marine.  We didn’t not find him for lack of looking though.  We tore up the hospitals and other locations, and ended up finding intel on other terrorists, but not the missing Marine.  We were told by some of the elders that his body was taken out to the desert, and given a Christian burial.  However, we all knew this was bullshit.  Unfortunately we didn’t get Chemical Ali either, and after looking for him, and looking for the lost Marine again we had to leave for another mission.  I have often thought about the guy since then.  Who was he? was he ever found? does his family know how hard we looked for him?  Things like that, and then I read:

The body of this Marine is discovered a week later by other American forces.  They find him buried in Ash Shatrah’s trash dump.

Over six years later I finally find out what happened to the missing Marine.  That alone makes the book worth the read for me.  It feels good knowing that he was found, and that his body was brought back to the US to his family.  It’s just too bad that it took six years for me to find this out.

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Freedom is Slavery.

Via The Daily Dish, Orwell is now a blogger:

The Orwell Prize, Britain’s pre-eminent prize for political writing, is publishing George Orwell’s diaries as a blog. From 9th August 2008, Orwell’s domestic and political diaries (from 9th August 1938 until October 1942) will be posted in real-time, exactly 70 years after the entries were written.

1984 is the standard bearer for dystopian novels, and is one of my favorite books.  I never fail to learn something new upon subsequent readings, and no matter what, it continues to scare me with its vision and scope.  So I am going to be reading this blog regularly, and I’m sure that Orwell’s political writings will be particularly insightful.  So head on over to the Orwell Diaries, check out the first post, and check back often for what I’m sure will be all kinds of awesome.

Treasure Island is Robert Louis Stevenson’s iconic pirate adventure story.  Although Stevenson didn’t create the whole pirate genre he helped define it.  Treasure Island became the standard bearer in the adventure story genre becoming a best-seller, and staying a best-seller for over a hundred years.  The story is fairly straight forward.  There is a treasure map, where X marks the spot, and rivaling factions of buccaneers are battling for the map.  What makes this work is Stevenson brings plenty of realism to the characters and the story through his writing, and by filling the story all kinds of real world knowledge of pirates and sailing.  Unlike Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, however, Stevenson doesn’t allow these facts to hijack and become his story, otherwise we would have had a story filled mostly with pirates sailing around the ocean being piratey but never actually doing anything.

Instead Stevenson puts just enough of these facts and nautical jargon in to help immerse the reader into the story even further.  Otherwise Stevenson omits all the superfluous details.  For example there are long sea voyages in this book, but instead of telling the reader about tacking jib sails, or of the doldrums, or any other boring stuff, he just skips it and has the narrator fill in any important details.  What this does is it allows the action to stay center stage, and it keeps the novel moving at a furious pace.  Each chapter is like its own self-contained story, and every chapter is like an episode of a TV show.  It really reminded me of those old Saturday morning serials that were on TV back in the day.  This set-up keeps the reading moving along at a fast and easy pace.  This is one of the most readable books I have read in a long time, and plus it’s a lot of fun to read.  I had a ton of time to read this weekend, with all the trains and buses I had to take, but the time flew by while I was reading.  Then again how can you not enjoy reading about pirates and treasure?  This is a highly influential book, and in reading it I can see how many archetypes came from this book.  Like I said before much of the pirate lore and mythology was codified by this book

Jim Hawkins – is the narrator and hero of the story.  He is the one that initiates the adventure by getting his hands on the treasure map.  His ensuing story is not only one that appeals to young boys, but to anyone who has ever had dreams of sailing the open seas looking for adventure.  Jim Hawkins can be added to the short list of child narrators in literature that work.  For me the only other one that worked was Huck Finn.

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