Reading

The lists of books I keep here are mostly for my own uses, just to keep track of what words have shaped my thoughts throughout the years. Or is it the other way around? Do I choose books that map to the contours of my personality? Probably both.

In either case, I believe that the books one chooses to read over time are a reflection of a person's mental development and personality. When I was young, I was sustained on a thin diet of the Bible, Childcraft, The World Book Encyclopedia, and the occasional sci-fi or fantasy novel. These early influences shaped my current tastes, which tend toward eastern philosophy, DIY & reference books, magical realism, graphic novels, and, of course, science/speculative fiction. With such an eclectic menu, I wonder what I'll be thinking and reading a decade or two from now...

Anyway, I've included some short reviews of some of the books I've read. Hopefully, I'll find the time to reflect on them all. Someday in the future, when I'm in the mood to revisit my bookshelves, those reviews may provide some insight — or embarrassment — on how I reacted to them. Should be good for something either way.

Books I've Read

(most recently finished first)

Reviews

A History of God

Title A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam
Author Karen Armstrong
ISBN 0345321383
Notes If you have ever wondered why the Bible is such an inconsistent document, why zealots kill heretics, what they are/were trying to suppress, why everyone hates each other, and what the true origins of these monotheistic religions are... read this book. I grew up in a fundamentalist Pentecostal church, and I constantly struggled with my faith due to a literalist interpretation of scripture. Although I left that religion behind many years ago, A History of God has given me some closure and a new perspective on what this concept of "God" really is -- and why it's such a powerful force in our society. I cannot say enough good things about this book. Beware, though. If you value your blind faith in the dogma of a particular sect, you may find yourself compelled to leave it behind after reading this book. For a less demanding read that covers much of the same subject matter, try The Da Vinci Code.

Fahrenheit 451

Title Fahrenheit 451
Author Ray Bradbury
ISBN 0345342968
Notes No library student's education would be complete without reading this novel. Although, on the surface, it seems to focus on the evils of censorship and oppression, there is an underlying current of commentary on the overwhelming power of technology and entertainment to affect the state of human culture and knowledge. Bradbury shows us the future through the eyes of a government-hired book-burner who begins to question the validity of his profession. A short but essential read, this novel has been shown to be frighteningly prophetic and continues to inspire librarians everywhere to stand vigilant in defense of free speech.

Chinese Calligraphy

Title Chinese Calligraphy: From Pictograph to Ideogram: The History of 214 essential Chinese/Japanese Characters
Author Edoardo Fazzioli
ISBN 0896597741
Notes Do not be fooled by the title of this book -- it's not really about calligraphy. Instead of covering the technique of brush writing, Fazzioli explores in depth the etymology of the 214 radicals (the characters which form the basic parts of all other Chinese words). I'm half Chinese, so I decided to explore my heritage a little and attempt to dissect the words in my Chinese name (and those of my family). Chinese Calligraphy, with its historical focus and copious illustrations, gave me insights I could never gain from a plain old dictionary.

The Art of Calligraphy

Title The Art of Calligraphy
Author David Harris
ISBN 1564588491
Notes A beautifully illustrated, colorful guide to the major writing forms of the Latin alphabet. Unlike most calligraphy books, The Art of Calligraphy covers the history of each style and presents example documents that typify each hand and its presentation. Especially helpful are the color photos of each stroke for each letter, made in semi-transparent ink to fully illuminate the complex structure of every letter. I've pored over almost every calligraphy book currently in print, and this is by far the best. Thanks to the Seattle Public Library for making me aware of this one!

The Universe in a Nutshell

Title The Universe in a Nutshell
Author Stephen Hawking
ISBN 055380202X
Notes Think of this book as a quick primer of theoretical physics, but take care -- you may need a few years of calculus, chemistry, and physics to grasp this dense little book. Hawking does a wonderful job of making this obscure field accessible to the moderately-educated layperson, using metaphors and illustrations you won't find in any academic treatise on black holes, superstrings, the Grand Unified Theory, p-branes, and a host of other wacky science crap. If you love watching Star Trek just so you can point out the inconsistencies in their rendering of a space ship traveling at Warp 6 and the space-time paradoxes it presents, this is the book for you!

Siddhartha

Title Siddhartha
Author Hermann Hesse
ISBN 1570627215
Notes I've only begun to plumb the vast depths of Buddhist philosophy, so I can't speak with authority on Hesse's treatment of the story of Siddhartha. From the way I understand it, Siddhartha Gautama became The Buddha, the progenitor of Buddhism, but Hesse creates a character named Siddhartha who meets The Buddha and eventually attains enlightenment by the end of his life. Regardless of such puzzles, Hesse explores with such passion the meaning and meaninglessness of life through all the stages of Siddhartha's path to enlightenment. I found this book to be a great introduction to Buddhism and extremely thought-provoking.

Brown Girl in the Ring

Title Brown Girl in the Ring
Author Nalo Hopkinson
ISBN 0446674338
Notes A perplexing blend of Carribean folklore, Voodoo mysticism, and Canadian cultural protest, this novel explores the ghettos of a post-apocalyptic Toronto, where the core of the city has become a festering pit of crime and injustice, while the rest of the world is just fine. The protagonist is a nursing mother and apprentice Voodoo medicine woman who battles the local Carribean mob to bring balance to the spirits of nature. Hopkinson wavers in and out of a calypso storytelling style for no apparent reason, and the plot is fairly heavy-handed in many places. This would make either (a) a wonderful kid's book (if it didn't have so much blood and profanity) or (b) an excellent sci-fi/magical realist book (if it weren't so corny and inconsistent). However, this was Hopkinson's first novel, and it shows great potential.

Midnight Robber

Title Midnight Robber
Author Nalo Hopkinson
ISBN 0446675601
Notes Mesmerizing and whimsical, this folksy sci-fi coming-of-age story follows, in Carribean vernacular, the trials and adventures of a young girl abducted from her techno-utopian Carribean-colonized homeland by her criminal father to a jungle prison planet in another dimension. I know, it sounds lame, but it's actually quite entertaining, full of interesting creatures and cultures battling for survival in an amazingly detailed ecosystem. Hopkinson gets into her groove with this novel, speaking with a much more confident and consistent voice than in Brown Girl in the Ring.

Bridge of Birds

Title Bridge of Birds
Author Barry Hughart
ISBN 0345321383
Notes An enchanting, fast-paced, impossibly epic, comical short novel that might be classified along with Gabriel García Márquez if it weren't so fantastical. Hughart blends history and myth into a seamless tapestry of fairy tales (Occidental and Oriental), mutated to fit the novel's setting in ancient China. Extremely enjoyable and entertaining. (Thanks, Sandy!)

Man Walks Into a Room

Title Man walks into a room
Author Nicole Krauss
ISBN 0385503997
Notes In Krauss's vivid and poetic first novel, she tells the sobering tale of a man who has lost all memory of his past due to a brain tumor and how he manages to stitch his life back together. The book does not fall clearly within any genre, but comes close to speculative fiction and a unique blend of Tom Robbins, Barbara Kingsolver, and Albert Camus. Through the protagonist, Krauss explores the paradoxes of memory, love, and the self. This is a beautifully written, inspiring, and bittersweet novel that I hope is followed by many more.

Perdido Street Station

Title Perdido Street Station
Author China Miéville
ISBN 0345443020
Notes I know what China Miéville's favorite word is. He uses it almost every chapter, as if it is a magic word that will make the already teeming, festering fictional city of New Crobuzon seem even more gritty and angst-ridden. The word is "desultory". He doesn't seem know what the word really means. He thinks it means "destitute" or "desolate" or "disenfranchised" or "desperate" or "disconsolate" or "dejected". The author has a PhD, taught English in Egypt, and he hasn't bothered to look up "desultory" in the dictionary. For shame.

How can I be so critical of this author's over(mis)use of a single word? Isn't that a little petty? Yes it is, because I could find little else wrong with this book. And, now that you know of its single flaw, I can safely recommend it.

The eponymous train station of this book is the center of New Crobuzon, but the story revolves around a rogue scientist, his beetle-head artist girlfriend (of a race of beetle-headed people), a flightless birdman, and an underground journalist. Along the way, they encounter surly cactus-people, fantastic and horrible creatures, and freakish criminals with animal and machine parts grafted to their bodies. Magic and science and religion blend into a strange and captivating melange in New Crobuzon. It sounds bizarre, but Miéville adroitly weaves the tale so vividly that, by the end of the book, I felt I knew the city streets by heart.

By then, I didn't care what "desultory" meant.

Snow Crash

Title Snow Crash
Author Neal Stephenson
ISBN 0553380958
Notes How to describe this book? It's like watching a slow-motion action movie authored by computer programmers who all have PhDs in Archaeology, Theology, and Computational Linguistics. Basically, it's riveting AND educational! Stephenson, in this prophetic novel, explores networked virtual reality as vector for mind virii, corporations as nation-states, gated communities as political entities, 3D information retrieval, speaking in tongues as linguistic hacking, and Aleut vigilante justice using glass knives. Whew!

The Time Machine

Title The Time Machine
Author H.G. Wells
E-Book http://www.textlibrary.com/download/time-mac.txt
Notes If you saw the movie, you won't recognize the book. I doubt Wells meant this book to be about love or freedom or technology. The Time Machine is essentially a sociopolitical commentary on the dangers of classist society and promotes, through the protagonist's narrative, a socialist approach to progress. In this thought experiment, Wells takes the reader on a journey into the far future, where the upper class has devolved into a species of doe-eyed munchkins (called Eloi) with the intelligence of cattle, and the labor class has become a race of nocturnal, troglodite, industrialist ape creatures who feast on Eloi flesh. Whoops, I just gave the whole plot away. Anyway, it's an entertaining quick read, and Wells can't be beat for his effusive, florid descriptions of... everything. Oh yeah, and the gigantic sand crab sludge monsters that eventually take over the world are great, too.

When The Sleeper Wakes

Title When The Sleeper Wakes
Author H.G. Wells
E-Book http://www.gutenberg.net/etext/775
Notes Warning: spoilers ahead (although you won't really miss anything by not reading this book)

It's basically about a guy named Graham who falls into a coma and wakes up 200 years later. His meager assets have grown, thanks to compound interest and shrewd investment by a board of trustees, to encompass most of the world's property. Graham, the eponymous "Sleeper", finds out that he is basically the king of the world. Unfortunately, this is only a figurehead position, and the Council (the board of trustees) and an aristocratic union boss battle to control Graham and his vast wealth (ending over 150 years of peace, by the way). In the meantime, Graham becomes fascinated with all the new-fangled technology and social mores that make up the world of the future. In the end, he realizes that the proletariat is the only population worth fighting for and helps them overthrow the evil money-grubbing power-hungry bad guys. And dies in a kamikaze plane crash after releasing ownership of all his possessions to the people of world. There. Now you don't need to read the book.

The reason I just spoiled the book for you is that it was unexpectedly awful. I was enjoying H.G. Wells' quaint Victorian vision of the future, fascinated by his ideas of rapid transit via zip-lines and moving sidewalks, flying stages for whirlygigs made of fabric, and the personal movie projector, until his not-so-quaint Victorian racism began to shine through.

By the end of the book, I could no longer cheer for the protagonist — or any other character for that matter. If anything, I felt sympathy for the "villains" of the book: African mercenaries conscripted to keep the peace in the tumult of cities in the throes of proletarian revolt. Wells described these soldiers as if they were robots, lesser humans deserving of scorn whose souls were forfeit and whose violent deaths (at the hands of the Graham, no less) were celebrated by the poor, white working class. Graham even makes a speech at some point about the equality of all men and women — apparently he forgot that people of color are humans too. Ugh.

Wells was a radical thinker and an amazing storyteller with some quite progressive ideas, but I just couldn't stomach his white supremacist leanings. If you must read this book, read it for his fascinating predictions of what happens when:

  • everyone stops reading and watches the "Babble Machine" instead
  • a board of trustees controls the assets of an immortal entity (the corporation)
  • agriculture is automated and the city makes the countryside obsolete
  • instantaneous worldwide communication is possible
  • intercontinental air travel is commonplace

Currently Reading

To Read Next