Unmarked Grave

There is only a week remaining before this blog winds down to a close. Oh, I'm not abandoning it. But it was meant to run six months. Here we are at the end of the sixth; I no longer have the obligation to make a textual accounting of every book that passes through my hands. Entries are no longer mandatory! I can read all kinds of secret books which none of you will ever know about . . . Presumably there is nothing hindering me from continuing to make entries, but let us be honest, my friends: I was always better at chewing through the books than I was at reporting on them.

In a way, Booked Under shut down weeks ago. See the title up there? Just above the first paragraph? (For those of you too unstimulated to bother moving your eyes back up, it says "Unmarked Grave".) This post is so named because there have been many books these past few weeks. I've lost count of them, but they were all novels. You could ask me to tell you what they were but my memory would not support your request. It's all a damp haze. There was that trilogy about the farm girl foot ball player, a weird one about a kid with flaps of skin running from his arms to his rib cage, another trilogy by Sanderson (brilliant brilliant brilliant, each installment more so than the last) and some other books not coming to mind. A bevy of novels came to me, were read swiftly and covertly, and were then buried quietly in a dark, out of the way place. A minute of silence, please, for the nameless paperbacks and forgotten hours that were my life for the month of June.




That wasn't a minute. Maintain your silence, if you please.




Okay. Thanks. I think we are permitted to move on.

Well, move along there. The whole point of the silence was to give us time to clear our minds and wash away all the meaningless fiction. Get out of here! Go read something wonderful!

Mass burial

We're not caught up. Instead the backlog has mushroomed and festered, nursing itself into mammoth proportions. So it seems to me as I contemplate making ten distinct entries. The prospect of gnawing through the content of all those books before pouncing on the next great read inspires me to wilt and pine away. I liked most of them, but thoughtfully representing what I made of them and took from them in several paragraphs each would take a week or two, and I want to live life. I want to breathe in sunshine. In a nod to summer (and a pity gift to myself) let's put them all away here. List 'em off, give them some cursory comment and move on. Deal? Alright then.


Extraordinary Evil: A Brief History of Genocide (Coloroso)
Grim in subject, softened by the hopeful voice of Barbara Coloroso. She wrote the book believing that an ability to recognize genocide and appreciate its nature is the key to preventing future genocides. In essence, she claims that genocide is the graduated form of bullying, an exaggerated expression of contempt. It is not war. It uses war as a mask, an excuse, and a distraction. The book wasn't fun, but well worth the time.

How to Win Friends and Influence People (Carnegie)
A book on the art of friendly manipulation. There's some good stuff in there. Dale Carnegie explains why criticism doesn't work so well, why a soft touch and a sweet word will punch a hole through most defences, and how to go about explaining what you need. Deservedly a classic.

Blink: The power of thinking without thinking (Gladwell)
Written by Gladwell and therefore fabulous. However, not my favourite among his books. Outliers still holds my full allegiance. If you read only one Gladwell, go for Outliers. If you are sensible about your reading, you will consume all of them.

Till We Have Faces: A myth retold (Lewis)
My second time through. It was as mesmerizing and meaningful as ever. As a novel, this is the book I think of when I want to show someone expert character development. As a work of philosophical magnificence, it is one of the foundations to my conception of love and a measuring stick when I'm questioning what I mean when I say I love someone.

The Five Love Languages (Chapman)
Borrowed from a canny friend who assured me of its great worth. I read it and quickly thereafter purchased it to give to someone I love. The next book I buy will be my own copy of Chapman's explication on love and its expression. It would be awesome if you were to read it too. Tell me, what's your language?

Strange News from Another Star (Hesse)
Don't know if I get along nicely with Mr. Hesse. He's thinking hard and reaching high, but I don't know if I like where he's going or how he's getting there. He is an idealist. That puts us in some accord. But what ideals I can extract from his hints and allegories are either not ones I share or similar but altered enough to force strange pursuits down dour paths. If colours can be put to feeling, then his work gives me a dingy grey that dreams in white.

The Reluctant Widow (Heyer)
Another Heyer-reading friend stocks this one on her personal shelf and tells me Reluctant Widow, and not Talisman Ring, is the best of Heyer. I cannot agree.

Death by Black Hole and other cosmic quandaries (Tyson)
A touch repetitive yet reliably delightful. Here, try this:

"Turns out that some celestial bodies give off more light in the invisible bands of the spectrum than in the visible. And the invisible light picked up by the new telesopes showed that mayhem abounds in the cosmos: monstrous gamma-ray bursts, deadly pulsars, matter-crushing gravitational fields, matter-hungry black holes that flay their bloated stellar neighbours, newborn stars igniting within pockets of collapsing gas. And as our ordinary, optical telescopes got bigger and better, more mayhem emerged: galaxies that collide and cannibalize each other, explosions of supermassive stars, chaotic stellar and planetary orbits. And as noted earlier our own cosmic neighbourhood - the inner solar system - turned out to be a shooting gallery, full of rogue asteroids and comets that collide with planets from time to time. Occasionally they've even wiped out stupendous masses of Earth's flora and fauna. The evidence all points to the fact that we occupy not a well-mannered clockwork universe, but a destructive, violent, and hostile zoo.

Of course, Earth can be bad for your health too. On land, grizzly bears want to maul you; in the oceans, sharks want to eat you. Snowdrifts can freeze you, deserts dehydrate you, earthquakes bury you, volcanoes incinerate you. Viruses can infect you, parsites suck your vital fluids, cancers take over your body, congenital diseases force an early death. And even if you have the good luck to be healthy, swarms of locusts could devour your crops, a tsunami could wash away your family, or a hurricane could blow apart your town.

So the universe wants to kill us all. But, as we have before, let's ignore that complication for the moment."

Is it not yummy?

The Blue Castle (Montgomery)
Gables have I hated, Castle have I loved. Odd, that.

Never Cry Wolf (Mowat)
Mowat is replete with deft description, delicate sarcasm, smooth irony, and delicious language. However, do not resort to him for happy feel good material. He is too much a realist to soften the edges for us. In me he achieved his objective, which was to inspire respect and affection for the wolf and bitter antagonism for those who set about to exterminate it.


Clean slates are lovely. Breathtaking. Why have I denied myself this pleasure for so long? Off we go, then. Next book: Not a novel! Full entry! A week or two from now!

The Name of This Book is Secret (Bosch)

Not much to say here. It's a novel. (By now my shame is well established so I'm not going to mention it.) The style and tone are very similar to the Series of Unfortunate Events - factual, a little spare, and with that grim glee. And, like the Unfortunate Events, Secret is totally lacking in character development. This is not to say it wasn't fun. The chatty narrative proceeds with a playful tone and tinkers with the standard format of narration. Near the end a couple of pages are lined and and without text so that you can write the chapter yourself. There's a false ending or two and chapters about the writing of the story instead of the story, and several mysteriously loose ends. (The narrator, for example, never explains who he is and how he knows about all this.)

However, the most distinctive component was the relentlessly efficient foreshadowing. Every plot turn was apparent two to three pages before I actually arrived there because of the precise planting of details. Sometimes I prefer a book that doesn't set it up so neatly. They don't have to tell me everything. Unexpected can be good. Revelations that I could not have foreseen are acceptable.

Alright. It looks like I have read nothing but novels for the last month. This is not so. There are four other books I have neglected to report, and only one of them was a novel, and it was meat not milk. I am not so reprobate as often appears. Patience please. There will be more entries to come over the next few days. By this time next week we'll be caught up. Pats on the back all around.

The Talisman Ring (Heyer)

Another novel. I blush. This specimen is, I am assured, the best of Georgette Heyer's work. The copyright information tells me it was first published in 1936, and the writing style fits nicely in that era. There was a time when novels were more measured, a little drier, and still possessed of restraint. Fictional characters had more respect. They were granted a portion of privacy through the right to retain some details behind a shield of decency and propriety. Georgette Heyer endows her characters with generous helpings of dignity.

What's left when you cordon off the visceral sensationalist element? Elegant wit, softly crackling conversation, good natured drollery, a dash of adventure, a tinge of romance, and a soundly trounced villain. And, naturally, the proposal of a marriage or two just as everything is winding down. The whole is draped in delicately figured language and tinted with the high tones of refined society. For once I was not brow beaten into emotionally engaging with the characters, and the book was all the more delightsome for affording this freedom. I may return to Heyer some day for frothy summer reading.

Princess Ben (Murdock)

What happened to avoiding novels? Um. Permit me to explain myself. As you might have noted, the previous post concerned itself with a novel also, the consumption of which was fully justified - I would like to emphasize this: fully justified - by the nature of the story. While the events therein were fictional it wasn't so much about plot as ideals, aspirations and the false face of failure. I would read it again. I would buy it and add it to my shelf. I would pass it around to people I love. It isn't novels I set out to avoid but the cheap, easy entertainment they so frequently embody.

The present post I make with sheepish expression and cringing. (Yes, I have ceased explaining myself and now move on to self accusation. Forgive me if I slightly grovel.) Princess Ben is without justification, being book candy of the most pleasant and unremarkable sort. There is a princess and her life sucks. She suffers, rebels, finds a new passion, wanders, is exiled, and returns in triumph. It's the kind of well worn fictional fare that I insatiably lap up, gorging myself on escapism and impossible fantasy. Princess Ben is an especially appealing example of its kind. It's charming, fun, adventuresome, and built around an imperfect and amiable character. She progresses nicely through the chapters and by the end I could not have been more on her side. This piece of confectionery was delectable. I didn't regret it while I read it. It is only now, with powdered sugar dusting my cheeks and my teeth dissolving in my head, that I remember this is precisely the edible from which I was endeavoring to abstain. Oops.

Fantasy lovers take note. For a light, breezy read check into Princess Ben. For nutritionally rich mind mulch, go elsewhere. (Try the nonfiction section. I hear they have books there too.)

The Journey to the East (Hesse)

Three of my exquisite associates read this obscure little novel recently. One of them described the plot and said the book made her think differently. How can you resist such a recommendation? By working hard, I suppose, but I am lazy so I borrowed the book. Having finished it ten minutes ago, I can say this:

I don't know what happened. I don't know what it all means. There are glimmerings of profound insight all throughout but it sways unsteadily through the fantastic and the metaphorical. In the end I can't say what did and did not happen. I couldn't tell you how it ended. Remember that book, The Giver? He goes blazing down the hill in his silly sled and has that vision of the village? Either he was saved by the most freakish happenstance or he is dead. More probably he is dead. But you can't know for sure because there isn't another chapter to tell you what the cabbage just happened. The book is over and you're going to have to accept the indecorous lack of resolution.

Would I corroborate my friend's recommendation? Absolutely. The solid portion of the book - the text on the pages, the descriptions and declarations - was opaque and muddled. But something fluttered behind the pages like a crimson silk trapped in a milk jug. I couldn't see it, but I knew it was vivid and clear. It insisted on a return to faith, conviction, and courage. It hinted at the richness of an inner life that seeps out of steady intervals of contemplation, prayer, and renewal of purpose. With such advantages, even the most impenetrable narrative merits a look.

A sample:

"Finally, he could no longer hide and contain himself. His suffering became too great, and you know that as soon as suffering becomes acute enough, one goes forward. Brother H. was led to despair in his test, and despair is the result of each earnest attempt to understand and vindicate human life. Despair is the result of each earnest attempt to go through life with virtue, justice and understanding and to fulfill their requirements. Children live on one side of despair, the awakened on the other side."

Tao Teh Ching (Lao Tzu)

I'm getting behind. I closed this book some weeks ago and no longer remember what I might have wanted to say about it. (The same holds for two other books. Agh. By now I'll have to reread them before I can offer any lucid commentary. Remember this: procrastination tortures before it kills.)

I am spared the effort in this case because like this blog, reading the Tao Teh Ching is a list item from "The Homeland" and so there's a post already in existence. Rather than wracking my memory for additional remarks or pasting the text straight over (loathsome redundancy) I have crafted for you a link. May you have joy of it.