Some books are like orange vegetables

Oh, don't worry - the dinosaurs were a one-time gush of hindsight. Don't we all think "What if...?" and imagine we are world-renowned doctors or engineers... or archaeologists? Since world-renowned archaeologists are rare, perhaps (wait for it) extinct(!), I would have my pick of endorsements: concentrated sugary drinks aspiring to be fruit juice, outdoors wear, watches or casinos. I imagine I would be famous for uncovering the metal skeleton of a robotic dinosaur, somewhere with a temperate climate, hot water and fuzzy duvets. ('Imagine' being key when considering my mental health. I don't really believe my car could transform into a laser canon-wielding Autobot and my best friend. Unfortunately.)

Ok, ok, I'm done. But remember this when next your inner child pipes up because you confiscated her toys.

For cutting me short (you), here is a list (even the word sounds ominous, as if a vowel has been snatched from between the 's' and 't', and so the book lists (har!) to one side). A listing list of books I hate. Truly hate. We say things like "I love your blend of wit, sarcasm and cynicism" or "I loved reading Night Film" when really (as someone pointed out to me) 'love' is an emotion belonging to relationships that is best wielded with caution (you may lose something, like a vital organ). With animate beings. Not made of metal.

But 'hate' is more versatile. It covers everything: "I hate orange vegetables" or "I hated reading Atlas Shrugged" (not really. Because I haven't read it yet). Listing the things you hate is easier and more productive than listing the things you love. Unless you are one of those unblemished souls who have yet to encounter the pains of hindsight. "I am soooo happy for you," I mumble through clenched teeth. Also, 'love' and 'hate' are not exact opposites: I hate orange vegetables, but that doesn't mean I like yellow ones (actually, they fall in the same class, like poisonous caterpillars).

While I could do this all night (I am a font of positivity tonight because I only had two cups of coffee today, followed by a chocolate muffin), you no doubt have many Important Things To Do today, after this Very First Important Thing (reading my blog, you!). But first a quiz to see whether you have been listening, or are just a good guesser: rank these books from Hate to Tolerate to... Love.

A   Something Happened by Joseph Heller
B   Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A Heinlein
C   Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami
D   The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen

You know me too well: D is a red herring. If you have been studying my blog (I am offering a course on Coursera next semester), then you know I am still reading The Corrections and have not formed a clear opinion although I can predict bouts of boredom and character bashing. The other three you can figure out yourself (you need to earn your credits) by looking left and then all the way down to the bottom, to the cloud of gnat-like tags.

My point is that the bit about love does not apply here because I love all books, even the ones I love to hate. Books stand apart from all reason. In towers that by the laws of physics should topple over but by the laws of knowledge and 70 gsm paper and PUR binding don't. And way in the distance is a stack of 10 books, like children being disciplined, but children who deserve to be in juvenile detention. From weathered top to sand-encrusted bottom, they are:

1. Atomised by Michel Houellebecq. This is hands down the most gratuitous collection of violence and sex called a plot I have ever. Ever. Read. Although the conclusion (only worth two pages or so) is enlightening, it will never clean those blackened charred nerves in my prudish brain. The copy sits on my bookshelf and I do not know what to with it. Read only if you can read American Psycho in one go.
2. Boyhood by JM Coetzee. The writings of my favourite 'refugee' have in the last decade experimented with memoir (ah, how post-modern) and how memory is at least partly fictionalised and vice versa. This memoir about Coetzee's childhood is enlightening - most children become less egoist as they grow up and encounter a more selfish world. Not him! No! He is the character from Disgrace, which is deeply disturbing. There is a second, sequel, apparently. Read the Wikipaedia page instead. 
3. Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A Heinlein. See above. You know where to look.
4. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. We studied this book in my first or second year, as part of a course in post-colonialism (they picked topics for which they had lecturers, methinks). A man travels to the swamps of Africa where he meets mute, lazy Africans and decisive colonialists and catches some illness, from the swamps, but doesn't die. I agree with Chinua Achebe (he says Conrad was racist (which I think is a no-brainer) and other people say he was a product of his times (which were racist)), but partly because the prose is exhausting, like listening to a person on the brink of death breath for days and days. And days. And days. Read Achebe's criticism instead.
5. Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift. Confession: I have never read the adult novel, but we did study it and that was enough to remind me why I didn't like the children's version. I don't know why I don't like the children's version, actually, except that it is creepy. This man lives among pygmies and giants, whose communities he will never be part of. The pygmies and giants have a beef with each other, but why they would bother to fight each other when neither has anything the other wants is beyond me. Then there are some other societies with unpronounceable names (except Japan) and with minute political subtexts that, frankly, I don't care about. Read the picture book.
6. Mao's Last Dancer by Li Cunxin. I was sick when I read this weighty book (weighty because it was printed on paper that 'bulks' well i.e. looks thicker). Desparately sick. My sinuses were attacking my brain again and then relying on my lungs for cover and my throat had been lacerated in the war and my stomach was marching in protest. And I was alone over a long weekend with not even a cat to comfort me. I thought I felt bad. Then I read this book. And realised that I was living a dream life because life in China is apparently unbearably bad. All the time. But the real dream life is in America with apartments and fast food and Oprah. Read only when you are the kind of calm that can stare down a refugee camp during a civil war.
7. Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by David Eggers. Another varsity setwork, but part of our third-year Post-modern course (we worked our way along the eras). This book is so consciously self-conscious and reflexive and self-deprecating and full of the apathy of the children of the last 25 years and oh so smart and oh it knows it's oh so smart and all the rest of these things. Describing it and why I hate it is like a rabbit hole. What upset me (and was supposed to) was that he was so glib about serious issues. I think that there are some topics that should only be played with under extreme circumstances and then sparingly. Cancer is one of those. Considering what a great writer he is, this could be overlooked, except he sews up all his writing with his smartness, and very little truth. Read and add snarky comments in the margins.
8. Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier. Oi, this one... I read this the year between advertising college and my first year of my BA. It almost put me right off studying literature (actually my intention was to study Applied English but then they moved the course to the education faculty and I hoped no one would notice the 'literature' bit). This novel is as long as the winter spent on that mountain. Which is very cold and is cold in other ways, because this is literature and literature uses metaphors. I did not have the energy to watch the movie but I hear it is shorter than the book. Watch the movie.
9. She's Come Undone or The Hour I First Believed by Wally Lamb. Contemporary American authors have the Suburb Disease. This disease is an ill-defined malais suffered by people who have enough of everything but have a nagging feeling that this is somehow not enough. The first book is about an obese women and the second about 9/11. That is all I remember. There is a third novel, which is excluded here because I enjoyed the ending (and no, not just because it ended!). Read only if you have lots of time to squander.
10. The People's Act of Love by James Meek. Because I did not and will never write this book. Read and read and read...

Disclaimer: These comments became far more sarcastic and perhaps nasty than originally intended, and all are meant to be taken with a pinch of salt (from the sandy seashore as you reach to pluck no. 10 from its unruly peers) and your own opinion, except Boyhood, because I mean that and could be nastier. I can think of at least one person who will disagree with my opinion of every book, except Atomised, because I do not fraternise with such people. And look, not once did I write: I hate this book with the voltage of the lights in Wanderers Stadium. I didn't write it, but I thought it.

I also thought: "I love Kafka on the Shore" and "I would love my car to transform into a laser canon-wielding Autobot and my best friend." 

Stranger and Stranger: Post 2 of 2

"Stranger and stranger," cried Camilla (she was so much surprised that for the moment she forgot to think up a better title).'

I didn't write this - I typed it. Har! Ok, it isn't original nor is it a decent appropriation of Alice's surprise in Wonderland. In the original (and funny) version, this prim little miss is so surprised she has forgotten 'her grammar', saying 'curiouser and curiouser' when the correct superlative is 'more curious'. (I have just unfunnied it. But wait, there is more funny to come.) She is surprised because her neck is growing longer - nothing else, just her neck - and all she can think about are her shoes and who will tie them. Granted, she is 10 years old or something and has probably just learnt to tie her shoes.

Now my title is not grammatically incorrect or funny. I am not surprised and my neck is still the same length as this morning, I think (I don't measure it regularly or at all so if I really wanted to be sure I'd have to compare photos, but I'm pretty sure it's still the same length). My title should tell you I am confuzzled. Again, this is not a word I am coining. It is a type of confusion, I suppose (I have never had to define it before), where you understand all the factors and reasoning, but that doesn't help you grasp it any better.

Like (sorry, folks), smoking. I don't understand it. I mean, I understand that it's addictive and that people often start out as teenagers due to peer pressure or because they think they look cool (update: not even James Dean in a leather biker jacket leaning on a fast car looks cool smoking) or because it reduces stress or because it smothers food cravings. But come on, we're a smart generation. We know better. You know better.

What confuzzles me is why someone would voluntarily imbibe tar, knowing they are imbibing tar (and bleach and rat poison), which a) is tested on animals (look that one up, you; I have nightmares about that rat) and b) destroys entire forests when factories are built (nevermind the oceans and lakes when the stuff spills). To look like James Dean on a bad day. Voluntarily. There is a link I am missing.

Anyway, that is confuzzlement. Perhaps this post is confuzzlement.

To recap, Stranger in a Strange Land is about Mike the Martian. He is physically human but a sociological 'stranger' and that 'strange land' is Earth. The Martians are a highly evolved civilisation who leave their young to survive or not before welcoming them back into the fold. (That way they weed out the weak ones.) They believe in ghosts. They also can 'discorporate' at will (die) (my favourite bit) and then their friends eat the body  (anyone catch that pun? Probably my best).

There doesn't seem to be a hint of irony in the judgement that human behaviour is largely an arbitrary set of rules designed to prevent human beings from achieving... I have no idea what noun to ascribe to the Martian ideal. Nirvana?

I'm being sarcastic here because I'm all riled up over the animal testing, so find some salt and throw it over your preferred shoulder.

Literature that was revolutionary at the time seems dated a few decades later. I have said this before, in defence of EM Foster (back off, you, that's sacred ground you're about to trample on, literally). Free love was revolutionary in the 60s (a bit like Google will seem in 50 years, after the second Silicon Valley crash). It was Mike's solution to human problems, not the Martians', because by all accounts they are as ugly as salmon and have the mating patterns of.

Mike doesn't have any of the cynicism that I and probably you (else you're in the wrong place, bud) have (I scoffed and rolled my eyes more the further I read). He can set up a telepathic and empathic link between his followers (yes, what happens next is exactly what you think happens next) so that they can access his superhero powers (lifting things and making policemen disappear and, well...) and his Martian bond between his body and let's-just-go-with mind. Ta da, emotions like jealousy discorporate.

I dunno. I can't imagine feeling less jealous because I'm in my partner's brain, and I really, really don't want him in mine.

Maybe my resistance to Mike's spirituality is only proof of how constrained I am by human mores. Well, of course! I yell. Followed by, no, I don't think so. Both. Because human beings need a framework, whether political, familial, social or religious. It's the details of the framework that can be awful and constraining, not the framework (unless your framework is cannibalism. Like Mike's).

Look, no one's stopping me from setting up a hovel... in a hovel, but then I must accept that no one's going to come to my aid when it falls down. I'm sure Mike could have constructed a lovely hovel in no time and without twitching a finger joint, and then rebuilt it, and filled it with followers. But he would just be replacing one framework with another (are you really asking me to choose between democracy and free love? The former has health care and builders to rebuild my hovel, and the latter has the power of the mind, and my mind is a scary place without entrusting my life to it).

Let us sidewind back onto the path. A path. I wrote in the last post that Stranger in a Strange Land can be divided into two distinct books, but that perhaps I was being unfair in judging the second when I hadn't finished. I have finished it, I have let a few days pass, and I stand by my judgement. (Always trust your instinct.) You may be out of salt by now, so you guessed this, I'm sure. No review can end well when it begins with smoking.

Now I think the second book is even worse than I first suspected, especially when compared with the first. Which had a plot. And character consistency. I am confuzzled about how one author can write both books - and in one book! - how it won a Hugo Award and how this book finds itself squished up with 1984, We and A Brave New World on 'best of' lists. I am confuzzled about the editor and publisher who let the book end like that (I won't spoil it - but I will warn you). I am confuzzled about why I read past that 46% (don't).

A common excuse for sci-fi writers is that they were tripping or psychotic at the time, maybe both. According to his Wikipaedia bio, he embraced that stereotype and wandered into Wonderland every once in a while. That might explain the monologues about how awful the modern world is. But Philip K Dick used to write a novel in two days while high on LSD and he wrote Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. Perhaps I am judging Heinlein harshly, based on one bad experience. But I don't think so because that's how I got into this post.

Now I am irritated and need a good book to read.

Stranger in a Strange Land: Part 1 of 2

Once again, I demand your patience. Yes, demand! A reviewer should never review a book when she has not finished said book. She should also never review a book straight after finishing. But a) rules only apply 75% of the time, b) rules bore me 75% of the time and c) Stranger in a Strange Land could be divided neatly into two Kindle singles, the second of which would be filed under a different category - some synonym for 'strange, even for science fiction'.

Despite my claims to unconventionality (literally), this is the 25% of the time when I seem to have introduced my topic in, um, the introduction. Don't worry, no doubt I will have meandered by the conclusion. But just where will I meander to, huh? The mind boggles.

The conundrum here is: What happened to the author, Robert A Heinlein, when he had completed 46% of the book? Here's a clue - or a red herring - he published the book in 1961, a few years after he had written it. Before that, he had written children's books (heavens!). Did he write it and then realise he could use dirty words and sex and indulge in aesthetic, political and humanist dialogues, under the guise of the free love espoused by people who didn't shower or wash their hair (I want to say something nasty here but shall refrain. Unlike Heinlein)?

Enough suspense. I am hungry and my leftovers from dinner are a-calling. From the fridge. I should probably get it checked it out then.

Space travel deposits and then 20-ish years later reclaims a human raised on Mars by, yes, Martians. Martians we now know to be either fossilised single-celled somethings or invisible. These somethings are an advanced civilisation who live for more than 100 years and once they die they become Old Ones who talk to and guide the living Martians. They can control pretty much everything: their minds, growth of their bodies, objects around them and so on. They can also die on command (!), called 'disorporation', and make things not be by reducing them to singularities. (This might also explain why they're invisible to dear Curiosity.)

The Man from Mars (nicknamed 'Mike') automatically becomes the richest and most powerful man ever, through some series of silly laws that are sillier than the ones the colonialists imposed. He finds refuge in the home of a philanthropist named Jubal, who is surrounded by lascivious women and two willing servants, who gets him out of his mess by handing power over to the Secretary General of the world. After Mike makes some policemen disappear (the official story is they got lost. Yes. In a suburb).

Aaaaaand this is where the bar at the bottom of the Kindle screen says '46%'. It should also say 'end of Book One - proceed to the book labelled 'strange, even for science fiction'?' In Martian, 'grok' means something apparently indescribable in human language but, to take some liberties, seems to be a verb for true understanding, where the objective truth and our subjective delusions meet. (Did I mention the Martians are highly advanced? Also in the way of the spirit. That's how they control things. (They sound like hippies to me.)) I don't grok Book Two.

Mike adapts quickly to human life, but he doesn't grok it. So he takes his show on the road, together with someone else's sweetheart. He begins to speak with all the idioms and double entendres of a fluent English speaker raised in America. He also delivers monologues on the philosophies of religion and human relationships, between orgies that to him symbolise having a glass of wine together, and trips to the zoo. And he still can't make or understand a joke.

Meanwhile, back at Jubal's ranch, amid pregnancy (implied to be the progeny of the Man from Mars) and a wedding with - wait - a celibate Muslim (shock, horror!), the ranch-owner delivers his own monologues on the philosophy of aesthetics, with so much passion that I am beginning to suspect the author is speaking through these characters. I fell asleep at this point.

At the end of Book One, I thought, this is unusual: to continue past what feels like the climax and resolution of the novel. Fun; it reminds me of Star Wars (that's a compliment). Sometimes it's best to stop while you're ahead (one valuable rule).

As I said, a reviewer should never pass comment before the end of the book. (Note this, my future reviewers. It's not polite.) Maybe there will be a plot development that says (from the author): "I know this has all been a bit much to stomach and I apologise for offending the sensibilities of sensible people. Here is why I did it and see, it works! Continue reading and praise my book in your blog post." Perhaps just an endnote. Even a footnote.

It won a pretty impressive prize, a Hugo Award (not a Booker or a Nobel though), if you're impressed by that sort of thing. Neuromancer won the same award in 1985 and I thought that was grand (seriously, no one has answered my question). (Also, did you know that they give out the award to films and that Jurassic Park won in 1992? Don't roll your eyes - deny you watch the repeats when they come on the movie channel, I dare you.)

Brontosaurus had been my favourite dinosaur since I was a child. Even though he may not exist. I like an underd-ino (har!)

Essentially (because this is the most conventional post I have written in a while, I will summarise My Point(s) - even though I am listening to Thom Yorke!) the characterisation reduces to the author's opinions (mostly negative) of the human race, thus losing the subtlety of Book One and makes it grand. These opinions are dated: diatribes on modern art, misanthropism, religion as akin to commercialism, how media distort reality and so on. We have heard them and read them ad nauseam. People waiting to cross the road talk about this!

Essentially (revised) in Book Two we're being preached to. By characters who think that orgies are a valid way to encourage social empathy. Granted, Mike is revealing (haha) social norms and mores for what they are: artificial. But that's a little ridiculous from a man who will choose the moment he will die - sorry, discorporate - and believes he is being educated by ghosts. Norms and mores are necessary for the existence of any life form with a brain. Watch your pets introduce themselves to other pets.

Having potentially stuck my foot in my mouth, I am going to finish the book and hopefully not have to retract this post (I won't delete it, that seems unethical somehow, like copying a picture of a model from a website and uploading it as your profile pic. Yeah, I'm talking to you). At the very least, I will grok the philosophies of aesthetics, economics and human relationships in the 60s. I always wanted to take that course at varsity, but it conflicted with the rest of my schedule.