perpetual memory loss

I finished Haruki Murakami’s new novel 1Q84 a few weeks ago and I have been letting it settle in my brain for a while before I wrote about it. Clocking in at over 950 pages, 1Q84 will take time to read. Luckily, it is time well spent and it is a thoroughly enjoyable story. 1Q84 takes place is a Tokyo in 1984 and follows the lives of the two protagonists, Aomame and Tengo. Murakami alternates the chapters between Aomame and Tengo. Their stories are intertwined although the reader is unsure how or even why. Like Murakami’s other books, this book could be categorized as magical realism. (If you are not acquainted with that term think about books/stories like The Metamorphosis, Beloved, The Master and Margarita, and The Alchemist. These are story’s that take place in the real world, our world, but yet are intruded upon by the supernatural (Beloved and The Master and Margarita), unexplained events (The Metamorphosis), or with the bending, merging of realities (1Q84).) For some people this isn’t their cup of tea, but I find that books of this ilk can be both incredibly entertaining and packed with meaning.

Tengo is a typical Murakami male character and almost a stereotype of a Japanese male: introspective, honorable, and taciturn. (In some ways he is very similar to Toru Okada from The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.) Tengo, like Toru, is a lackluster 30 year old who has enormous potential (he’s a brilliant mathematician, martial artist, writer, and pretty much anything he puts his mind to) but yet hasn’t quite found his niche in the world. He teaches math part-time and in the other time he is an aspiring novelist. At both he excels but not too much, and he seems content to just slog along in his life. Aomame, on the other hand, has her life mostly figured out. She’s a physical trainer at a high-class Tokyo gym and in her spare time assassinates men who have repeatedly and harshly beaten their wives. For the most part she likes her life and she is very good at her chosen professions.

For the first few hundred pages Murakami is content to let the reader get to know the various characters, and slowly but surely set up the story. Very early on the reality between 1984 and 1Q84 become inter-meshed and you spend large swaths of time, like the characters, not sure which reality is which. The story lines come crashing together, however, around the end of the second book, about 600 pages in, and before that you are left to wonder how these people are connected. But by the end of the second book many questions are answered (although there are still a lot of loose ends, more on that later). In the third book Murakami adds another character to the book, the tenacious and vile Ushikawa. Alternating between the three, the book alters slightly is style from the previous two, as Ushikawa is investigating Tengo and Aomame trying to find out what we already know. All while Aomame and Tengo are trying to find resolution for their prior actions before Ushikawa can find them.

That’s about as much into the plot I can get without giving out any significant spoilers. Throughout the book though Murakami touches on a number of themes, but for me the major themes were: the negative effects of religion on people (I take it as religion as a whole while others think just he’s only speaking about cults, but in reality the only difference between cults and religions is popularity and societal acceptance), relationships (father-son and family-friends), and love.  It took me about a month to read this book (around two hours a day on my commute to and from work) and that it was a very enjoyable time. I loved the story line, the characters, and being immersed in this world. Then again I like long books. Especially, if the authors are good about keeping the story going and not dragging it along. This book is a prime example of how to do that. I was never bored or skipped forward and I actually missed my stop on the train a few times because I was so immersed. As I mentioned above the story ends with some loose ends, which I think is fine because the major questions are resolved, but if you like every little story line explained in full and wrapped up with a little bow, then well you might get agitated at the end.

Lastly, I checked this book out on my kindle but there was no way I’d finish it in 3 weeks so I turned off my WiFi and was able to make it to the end. So if you have a kindle and ever check out a book on it just turn off your WiFi and you won’t have to worry about the book disappearing before you’re done.

Ever since HBO’s The Pacific came out last year I’ve wanted to read the memoirs that the show was based on. I started with E.B. Sledge’s With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa. If you know anything about the Pacific Theater or you’ve seen the show then you know that Peleliu and Okinawa, along with Iwo Jima, were some of the most brutal battles of WWII. To make things worse Peleliu was never really used during the war for any purpose during the war so it was a battle that was unnecessary.

Sledge begins the book as he is in college preparing to become a Marine officer. Early on, however, he decides that he does not want to finish college and then become an officer. So he and some others in the program quit and join up as enlisted Marines. He then goes on to describe his boot camp experiences and his training to become a mortar man. Throughout his narrative Sledge sprinkles in his personal insights as an older man looking back on the experience. These insights help foreshadow events setting up the reader for what is to come. More often than not though the insights tend to be a bit contradictory. He definitely sees war differently than he did as a fresh faced young kid. These contradictions are a good thing as it allows him to speak frankly about his experience but to also comment on his actions, other Marines actions, or the war in general from the perspective of time.

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Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths is a manga comic written by Shigeru Mizuki. Mizuki is a veteran of World War II and this manga serves as the memoir of his experiences in World War II. He states that it is 90% true. I believe that this is the only one of his works that has been translated into English, which based off of my experience reading this, is a shame.

This manga follows one particular battalion that is stationed on Rabaul. As one of the earlier battles in the war the Japanese were not as proficient as they would become with their suicide attacks and the guerrilla warfare tactics that would make Peleliu, Okinawa, and Iwo Jima so bloody for both sides. (A quick aside on this. The Battle of Peleliu solidified what would become typical for Japanese fighting afterwards. Long battles of attrition with high numbers of casualties because the Japanese would fight to the death and refuse to surrender. When defeat was imminent the Japanese would go on Banzai charges or suicide attacks ensuring that almost all of them died. The casualties for the Japanese on Peleliu is estimated at 10,900 soldiers killed and 3o2 taken prisoner. Of those 302 only 7 were soldiers and 12 sailors, the rest were non-Japanese laborers. These types of casualty totals became standard for the Japanese. On Iwo Jima 21,844 soldiers were killed or committed suicide out of 22,060.) Mizuki confronts this directly in his memoir. He is a survivor of a suicide attack on Rabaul, along with around 80 soldiers.

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This is the first real history book I’ve read with my Kindle and it wasn’t a short one. Clocking in at around 860 pages this is a long, thorough study of the Civil War. How thorough? I didn’t get to Fort Sumter until around 250+ pages in. Despite its length it was a quick, breezy read on the Kindle. The book is totally worth reading even if you are only marginally interested in the Civil War. I took a graduate class on the Civil War and didn’t learn half of what I learned from this $10 book. It’s easy to see why this book was the Pulitzer Prize winning book in 1989, and I bet it wasn’t even close.

McPherson starts this book with the Mexican-American War and slowly works his way towards the Civil War. He weaves through the political, military, and social factors that confronted the country leading up to the war. He does a fine job weaving all the different themes together into a nice narrative that sweeps you up and makes it hard to put the book down. His prose smart and engaging whether he is describing a battle or the intricacies of the various political movements. He goes into so much detail without being overwhelming and he describes aspects of the war that I never knew about i.e. the river boat battles in the west. At it’s heart this book is a military history (as it should be it’s the Civil fucking War (if only some of my history teachers would remember that)), with a large portion of the book devoted to politics, and a smaller but substantial portion dedicated to social history.

There’s not much else to say except go pick it up and read it. It’s worth your time and it will help you, even if you know a good deal about the Civil War, gain a greater understanding of the times and how the effects of this war still echo through our society today. Plus if you think the war was about states rights you definitely need to pick it up, you know who you are.

Up next Washington’s Crossing the second Pulitzer Prize winning book of three on my list.

A couple days ago I finished Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad and over the last few days I have been letting it digest in my brain. I decided to read this book because while I’ve always wanted to watch Apocalypse Now I’ve just never been able to make it through the movie. I figured I’d read the book that inspired it instead. Heart of Darkness is a short, easy read that I found extremely enjoyable. The book is narrated by Charles Marlow, a sailor, as he recounts his journey down an African river into the Congo as a Captain of a steamboat. The entire book is basically Marlow describing this journey to some other men one night. There are only a handful of times where Marlow stops telling his story to make a comment or to interact with one of the listeners. Otherwise the book is basically one giant quote. Now I consider myself fairly well-read but I can’t remember another book that I have read that relies this much on straight narration by the main character. (Now you might say well any book that has a narrator is relying on the narrator. But HoD is different, I think, because almost the entirety of the book is a quote and it feels like listening to a ghost story next to a camp fire, which is much different than a book like The Great Gatsby. That’s just my opinion though.)

The symbolism in HoD is pretty straight up and hard to miss. The book centers on Marlow’s mission to go find Mr. Kurtz deep in the Congo. The further down the river he travels the darker it gets, much like Dante but in a more literal sense. Along the way Conrad alludes to the darkness of the continent, the Native Africans, the Colonial enterprise, and humanity in general. Throughout the book I kept waiting for some dramatic reveal about Mr. Kurtz or Africa or something but there isn’t anything like that. The journey down the river is the point. The end is incidental to tue journey-which makes sense when you finish the book.

The book is definitely worth picking up and reading, if only to get a sense at some of the practices and attitudes that were prevalent during the colonization of Africa. So if you’re looking for a good book to occupy your time for a day at the beach or a car ride you could do much worse than picking Heart of Darkness.

Next up Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era by James McPherson. I’m about 150 pages into and so far I’m extremely impressed with it.

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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