Arukiyomi

0417 | Mastering Arabic Script | Wightwick & Gaafar

Arukiyomi — Mon, 25 Mar 2013 20:33:00 +0000

Context: Was at our house up north with the new development over the road as I finished this.

In preparation for heading out to Saudi to work, I started to teach myself Arabic. First thing to master is the beautiful script. My local library had a copy of this book which I think is a very good, succint way to start learning not only how to read but also how to write Arabic.

The strengths of this book like in the fact that they teach you not just the standard printed text but also help you master reading and writing handwriting. I probably won’t have much cause to read handwriting in Arabic but I do know that the best way to learn a script for me is to write it over and over again. Having done that, I usually remember it. This book helped me do just that.

The one thing I think I’d add is more examples for the learner to read. There are some supplementary chapters at the end which do contain examples of signs and notices and so on. But I’d rather have more of these as the book develops so that you get more of a feel that your understanding of Arabic script is actually growing.

This is a book primarily aimed at those who want to write the script though and there are plenty of good examples of reading in the companion book by the same authors which I’m currently working through: Mastering Arabic. Both this little book and the main coursebook are excellent resources for the student of Arabic. Highly recommended.

RATING

0416 | Novel with Cocaine | M. Ageyev

Arukiyomi — Sat, 23 Mar 2013 10:31:00 +0000

Context: We had a freak weekend of snow in early April while I was reading this.

Very quick read this one and it’s been a while since I dipped my feet in Russian lit. This novel brought it all back to me and would be a great intro to anyone wanting to find out what this genre’s all about.

The novel is written under a pseudonym. There are still debates about who actually wrote it. But it contains all you want in a Russian novel: brooding self-absorption, moral decay, the hated or absent conscience of the individual, and the gradual plunge into doom and despair. Lovely!

The eponymous cocaine appeared much later than I thought in this brief book. But early on you get the feeling that the protagonist is heading for disaster. From almost the very first page, he treats his mother abominably. And his pursuit of pleasure is what leads, eventually, to his undoing in an orgy of snorting.

But while he descends into the dreamlike world of addiction, the writing seems to maintain its clarity. This I thought a weakness of the novel. Surely, if someone is writing their own account of drug abuse, you’d expect something a little less lucid, something more like this, in fact.

And it’s a very modernist novel in that there’s no real comment on drug abuse and its effect on society. You are left to assume that from the prose and come to your own conclusions for the most part, although here and there, Ageyev gives hints such as

The neophyte does indeed believe that the main property of cocaine is its ability to make him feel happy, much as the mouse, before it is caught, believes that the main property of mousetraps is to provide him with lard.

Subtle and deadly. Very good book. Deserves second reading.

OPENING LINE	Early one morning I, Vadim Maslennikov, set off for school (I was going on seventeen at the time) having forgotten the envelope with the first semester fees Mother had left for me in the dining room the day before.
99TH PAGE QUOTE	This far into the book, some of the plot might be revealed. If you want to see the quote, click show Next morning, on my way to have a wash, I ran into Mother in the hall. Feeling pity for her, yet uncertain of what to say about what had happened, I stopped and ran my hand over her flaccid cheek. To my surprise she neither smiled nor showed any sign of joy; instead, her face turned into a pitiful mass of wrinkles, and tears, boiling hot (or so it seemed to me at the time), began flowing down her cheeks. She seemed to be trying to say something and might very well have succeeded had I not decided that everything had now been smoothed over and, not wishing to be late, quickly moved on.
QUOTES	…true Christians… men who deliberately sacrifice the comforts in their lives so as to better the lives of others, and who derive pleasure and joy from doing so. The Spaniard always sings about tormented passion, the Russian about passionate torment. My experience in matters of love seemed to have convinced me that no one could talk eloquently of love unless his love was only a memory, that no one could talk persuasively of love unless his sensuality was aroused, and no one whose heart was actually in the throes of love could say a word. …female charms, the kind that inflame the senses, are no more than kitchen smells: they tease you when you’re hungry and disgust you when you’ve had your fill. Suddenly I saw how strange it all was: I saw that if a man does what he does he is a man, and if a woman does what he does she is a harlot. In other words, I saw that the split between spirituality and sensuality in the male is a sign of virility while the same split in the female is a sign of harlotry. I was terrified as only grown men and women can be when they wake in the middle of the night and begin to realize, in the absolute silence and solitude all around them, that it is not their dream that has woken them, that is is their whole way of life.
CLOSING LINE	This might give the game away. If you want to see the last line, click show The following were found in the inner breast pocket of his jacket: 1) a small calico pouch with ten silver five-kopeck pieces sewn into it, and 2) a manuscript with two words scribbled in large, jittery letters on the front page: Burkewitz refuses.

RATING

0415 | Henry VIII: King and Court | Alison Weir

Arukiyomi — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 16:22:00 +0000

Context: Walked by the Catholic cathedral in Cambridge while reading this… in the end, a building Henry would happily have seen never built.

There, in a charity shop, completely unblemished as in a proper bookshop, lay Weir’s encylopaedic description of one of the most magnificent courts of English royalty. And it was mine for only 95p.

I’ve not read any of Weir’s books before. She’s written about pretty much every Tudor monarch or individual connected with Tudor monarchy you can think of. I used to read books like this all the time but the 1001 list has my heart set on novels. Because this was immaculate and a tenth of the price it was supposed to be, I snapped it up though. It sat well with my reading of Mantel’s Wolf Hall and Bring up the Bodies.

There are plenty of reviews out there which complain that this book isn’t actually about Henry VIII at all. They complain that it’s hard to find the king, buried as he is under the detailed descriptions of the world he inhabited. Having read the book, I agree. This book should really be entitled The Court of Henry VIII.

But that didn’t bother me too much. I wasn’t after a blow by blow description of his life. I was after a description of the times, and although the book was mis-named, I tried not to let this distract me from what is after all a good history.

There’s not much narrative thread though, and readers should be forgiven for thinking that because the opening line starts with the death of Henry VII they’re going to get a chronicle of the next 40 years. They’re not. What they do get are just over 500 pages split into 63 chapters. This works out at just under 8 pages a chapter. While this seems quite short, the book is printed in something like 5pt font. And each of these chapters deals with a different facet of the court. I’ll admit, I found it slow going.

But it wasn’t slow going in the way a plate of broad beans is slow going. This was slow going in the way treacle pudding with custard is slow going. You want to take your time. You want to gaze on the awesome jewel-encrusted splendour before you, to soak yourself in the sumptuous riches of cloth of gold, velvet and syphilis.

Wait, no! He didn’t have syphilis! This is a common myth and one of many that Weir debunks in her attempt to get at the truth behind a man who was very much larger than life. In the end, he appears as one who ruled according to the beliefs of his day. Let’s not forget that these shifted like the sands of the Thames estuary and doomed many who attempted the passage.

Henry was a magnificent statesman, of that there is no doubt. He may well have even been the preeminent one of his day. But he was a product of his time and Weir shows this very well. It is a flattering portrayal.

However, like the wardrobes of the day, Weir’s writing is weighed down by almost ludicrous attention to detail. There are more characters in here than a Russian epic and it’s hard to keep track sometimes of who is central to the events described. There are long lists of things, clothes, purchases, buildings, gifts, animals, etc., etc. It’s all a bit too much sometimes.

If you are a fan of the Tudors and not too much of a fan of Henry, you’re going to love this. If you are after a more traditional biography of Henry himself, be warned that this might be a frustrating read.

OPENING LINE	On 21 April 1509, the corpse of Henry VII, ravaged by tuberculosis, was laid in state in the chapel at Richmond Palace, whence it would shortly be taken to Westminster Abbey for burial.
99TH PAGE QUOTE	Sir Thomas Boleyn, an Esquire of the Body, had been at court since 1501 and was made a Knight of the Bath at Henry’s coronation; he would soon be appointed a Knight of the Body, Keeper of the Exchange at Calais, joint Constable of Norwich Castle and Sheriff of Kent. The Boleyns were rising, socially aspiring family. Thomas’s grandfather, Sir Geoffrey Boleyn, had been a mercer who had prospered sufficiently to become Lord Mayor of London in 1457 and had later purchased two fine properties for himself, Blickling in Norfolk and Hever in Kent. His son, Sir William Boleyn, had made a brilliant marriage with Margaret Butler, daughter of the Anglo-Irish Earl of Ormonde, and Thomas himself had made another illustrious match with the Earl of Surrey’s daughter, Elizabeth Howard.
CLOSING LINE	After more than four hundred and fifty years his charisma still has the power to intrigue us, and whatever judgement we may make of him, we may well agree with Francesco Chieregato that he excelled all who ever wore a crown.

RATING

0414 | A Season in Mecca: Narrative of a Pilgrimage | Abdellah Hammoudi

Arukiyomi — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 14:53:00 +0000

Context: Finished this off as I travelled back from visiting my mum’s place in Portugal.

Right, I think it’s time to share the news with the faithful few who follow this blog: I’m off to Saudi Arabia in a few weeks to work teaching English for an oil company. So, in preparation for that, I went a-browsing in Waterstone’s a few weeks ago. This was one of a handful of books that dealt with Saudi. In fact, this was the only book explicitly about Saudi that I could find.

Hammoudi is an anthropologist, a Moroccan by birth and a professor at Princeton. By his own admission a nominal Muslim, he undertakes the complex and confusing process of making the pilgrimage to Mecca both to assess it from an anthropological point of view and to see what impact it has on his faith. I was interested in both.

If you are hoping for a travelogue of a journey to Mecca and back, you’d be disappointed. If you are hoping for an anthropological treatise, you’ll also be frustrated. This kind of falls somewhere in the middle and, perhaps because of that, like a chocolate bar for breakfast, it leaves you ultimately unsatisfied.

The descriptions of the bureaucratic nightmare that going on the hajj requires are excellent. The suffocating, strenuous whirlwind that is the pilgrim’s experience once they reach Medina and Mecca is also a real mind-bender and, if you’re a non-Muslim, will make you grateful you don’t have to do it.

At times, Hammoudi reflects on his own response to the journey, to Islam, to Saudi, to humanity. The hajj is just another example of humanity’s attempt to build a ladder to heaven. No matter how zealous we get in our religious affairs, the very stuff we’re made of will always rise to the surface:

…even a dozen meters from the Prophet’s tomb. Each time goods or services were distributed, each time a goal had to be reached, the religion of Me, Me first, Me before everyone else pushed Islam to the edge.

When you consider that Islam means submission, I think he’s being generous here.

The stipulations about how the pilgrimage is to be performed are as demanding as walking a tightrope: one slip and the entire event is a waste of time. This is scary stuff. It made me thankful yet again that I follow a guy who talked of grace.

Had the book been a combination of the above, it would have been an excellent piece of travel writing.

But what let the whole thing down is that, being a professor at Princeton, Hammoudi seems to feel obligated to pad large sections of the book with the kind of stuff only the intelligentsia would claim to understand. It made me wonder whether this was required by some funding he might have got or an overzealous publisher. Either way, it reduces what would have been an excellent book into a bit of a confused mess.

Take this passage for example:

At provincial headquarters [in Morocco], the passport department was dealing with hajj matters. “You’re late professor!” shot a mustachioed civil servant in dark suit and red tie. He was seated, I was standing.

Nonplussed, I didn’t know how to reply.

At this point, you’re quite engaged. You feel for him as he stands at the mercy of some petty official in some windowless, numberless room somewhere. But having given him your undivided attention, look where he takes you:

Yet my memory told me I had some capacity to endure this – not enough, though, since memories of past facts are not the facts themselves. When the facts return, we are no longer in them; we’ve already been through them, and their unfolding and consequences are no longer unpredictable. Of course, they haunt us nonetheless, but at that point they are part of what we’re living through in the present. So my previous dealings with bureaucrats did little to protect me, especially since I had tried to ensure I never habituated myself to them.

Er… what? Facts “haunt us”? Facts return and we’re “no longer in them”? Despite re-reading such passages, I come away none the wiser. And I particularly detest authors waxing intelligent and introducing their thoughts with “of course” when there seems to be nothing “of course” about it. Drivel. Here’s another piece of tangential piffle:

All these [Islamic] prohibitions, which seemed to bear on things outside the self, in fact touched equally, if not more so, on the uses and representations of the body. Since I eat and drink and, in normal time, have a sex life, I secrete matter. These secretions cross the surface of my skin, their channels starting and ending mostly on my face. But because something has to reach the mouth, nose, ear, eye, skin, starting point for excitation, the very ideas of arrival and departure prove to be relative. In any case, the usage of the world is the usage of the body, and nothing escapes its coordinates. Thus by this progression, the entire universe gets mapped out, returning to the body the matters and forms appropriate to its usages.

Come again?

With the major problem of the book being waves of incromphensibility, the fact that it’s not edited well just adds to the frustration. On one page I came across a lengthy paragraph repeated twice. Now, I’ve seen this in books before. What made this particularly noticeable though was that it was in fact two drafts of the same passage. Classic. Maybe it’s the start of a new A/B literary genre where the readership get to choose which version is finalised.

And that the entire experience was, for Hammoudi, confusing and contradictory is evident everywhere. He admits as much several times. There are conflicts between his nominal religious beliefs and the zealous forms of Wahhabi Islam he encounters in Saudi, conflicts between his ideas and that of his travelling companions and physical conflicts between pilgrims on several notable occasions.

There were further contradictions in the points Hammoudi was making as he went along. Early in the pilgrimage, he talks about how the western world has made a mistake in conceiving Islam as a militant religion. Then, later, he says “the others talked on and militated in favor of “bringing Islam back into our societies.”” A slip of the pen perhaps? Hmmm. Later, his statement that

There is no doubt that it was Islam that first called for communal solidarity in its acts of worship, and indeed explicitly enjoins believers to engage in it.

strikes me as a man who must be profoundly ignorant of both Christian and Hebrew traditions. You can barely read a chapter of the Torah without coming across a divine mandate to meet together in a corporate act of worship. And these writings predate Islam by thousands of years. I expect better from a professor, I really do. Even one at a US university.

Whether Hammoudi actually completes the pilgrimage seems uncertain. When it comes to sacrificing a lamb, the event, despite its build up, is glanced over very quickly. It turns out that he paid someone to make the sacrifice for him. Might as well pay someone to do the entire hajj for you, surely. And, amazingly I thought, instead of enduring the long return to Morocco with his fellow pilgrims, he makes a bolt for the airport in a taxi! This did leave me though with one important anthropological insight: you can take the Moroccan out of the US but you’ll have a hard time getting the US out of the Moroccan.

OPENING LINE	My departure for Islam’s holy sites was no easy matter.
99TH PAGE QUOTE	Everything was on the move: masses of human beings, currents of thought, merchandise, images, profound and superficial wisdom, doctrine, prejudices, and stereotypes. The diversity of nations and languages was making nation and language relative. Arabic, being the sacred language related to worship, was for non-Arabs identified with that particular domain in their lives. With Indonesians, Pakistanis and other pilgrims from Southeast Asia, I spoke English. At the mosque, we chanted the official Saudi version of the Qur’an. We already knew what we had come to tell each other in this holy place, and we communicated by means other than ordinary voices. But what were we saying? “God,” “message”, “unity,” “faith,” “Islam” – these words were plucked from theological and philosophical exchanges and commentaries on the life and histories of Muslims. But ritual put and end to this gleaning, because in it we moved without discussion toward certainty, toward God, faith, Islam. We could meet without mingling, concur without agreeing. We did not pretend otherwise, and the career path of the words followed.
QUOTES	Being ruled means being prepared to wait, knowing how to wait, agreeing to wait, right there, without moving, or to wait between coming and going. The coming and going were also part of the waiting, going around in circles like a mule at an oil press. For those who did not show enough submissiveness, the common rebuke was :”Let him wait, and he’ll see.” One waited for everything, all the time: for the administrator, the doctor, the nurse, the clerk, the department head, the announcements, the decisions, the end of the month, Ramadan, the Feast of the Sacrifice, rain, the harvest season, the Feast of the Throne, Youth Day – the list was endless. The point was to await the waiting: I finally began to understand this.
CLOSING LINE	And it is possible that one day a new Hajar story may arise, which would continue her migration and the migration of her name (itself a derivation from an Arabic root for migration); one in which the divisions established between the will to live and the masculine guardianship that watches over the law recast themselves in unprecedented plots and come to unexpected endings. Hajar… the story continues.

RATING

0413 | Bring up the Bodies | Hilary Mantel

Arukiyomi — Sun, 24 Feb 2013 14:51:00 +0000

Context: Read this as I worked for EC language school in central Cambridge.

The second installment in Mantel’s chronicle of the life of Thomas Cromwell is as good, if not better, than the first. This trilogy is turning out to be a classic piece of historical fiction, the likes of which I’ve not read before.

It’s not just that the subject matter is excellent, with a panoply of stupendous characters who are captivating and complex in their own right. No. It’s that Mantel has created a style of fiction to suit them and their political intrigues down to the very vocabulary she uses. It’s one seamless package.

The novel picks up where the first in the trilogy leaves off. Wolf Hall brought us through the protracted process of having Henry’s first marriage to Katherine annulled and ushering in the short reign of Anne Boleyn. Bodies focusses on the period of Anne’s demise, one which also saw the death of Katherine.

Having also just finished Alison Weir’s Henry VIII: King and Court (which I shall review shortly), I had some historical insight into the events that Mantel embellishes with her intimate portrait of the involvement of Thomas Cromwell. It is highly likely that Cromwell was nothing less than Boleyn’s murderer despite never having raised a word against her.

As the Queen turned out to be less than useful to Henry (i.e. unable to bear a male heir), Cromwell seems to have seized on the opportunity for political gain. In this, he not only reinforced his royal reputation as a man who gets things done, he also rid himself of a number of rivals by implicating them in a plot of infidelity that saw heads roll at Tyburn, including Anne’s.

The steady scheming and ruthless plotting of Cromwell is carried out with masterful political precision. Mantel has created a character you both detest and admire. I’ve a feeling that, come book three, we might even find ourselves feeling sorry for this Machiavellian monster. This is great writing. It shows us how human we all are. How, dealt the same hand of cards, we might well have done a lot worse than Cromwell did with his lot.

So, I eagerly await what I very much hope will be a third Booker winner and the culmination of a trilogy that hasn’t gripped me so much since… well, since Lord of the Rings I don’t think.

OPENING LINE	His children are falling from the sky.
99TH PAGE QUOTE	In early December, he receives word from Katherine’s doctors that she is eating better, though praying no less. Death has moved, perhaps, from the head of the bed to its foot. Her recent pains have eased and she is lucid; she uses the time to make her bequests. She leaves her daughter Mary a gold collar she brought from Spain, and her furs. She asks for five hundred masses to be said for her soul, and for a pilgrimage to be made to Walsingham. Details of the depositions make their way back to Whitehall. ‘These furs,’ Henry says, ‘have you seen them Cromwell? Are they any good. If they are, I want them sent down to me.’ Teeter-totter.
CLOSING LINE	They are all beginnings. Here is one.

MAP
Check out the locations mentioned in the book with Arukiyomi’s Google Earth Map of Bring Up The Bodies.

RATING

The Spreadsheet Returns

Arukiyomi — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 00:47:22 +0000

It’s an historic day people: the spreadsheet is back after an 8 month absence.

What’s new? Well, the clean and simple new look includes…

all the changes since the new edition was published in October 2012
page numbers (to the nearest 50 pages) for every book
publication dates for every book
autofiltering on titles and authors’ surnames to make finding and filtering books a breeze
sort by title, author, date, edition and more
enter dates you finished books
see how long the remainder of the list will take in days, hours and minutes
an import tab so you can keep all your data from v4

Get your new version here.

FAQs also available here.

0412 | Excellent Women | Barbara Pym

Arukiyomi — Sun, 17 Feb 2013 17:05:00 +0000

Context: Signed a contract with the publishers of the 1001 series to re-release the spreadsheet and apps while reading this. Happy days!

Never heard of Barbara Pym, let alone read anything by her. But she turned out to be a sardonically witty writer with a lot to say about life, particularly relationships and British culture in the early 1950s. This was a particularly interesting time to understand if you want to understand 20th century Britain at all, in fact, because it was a tipping point between the stiff upper lip, make do austerity of the war years and the frivolous, fashionable idolatry that the 1960s spawned. You can only really understand anything about post 1950 Britain unless you understand 1950 Britain first.

And so I very much appreciated Pym’s pastiche of life as a single women in post-war urban Britain. The characters were strong, the setting was beautifully crafted and the humour was as dry as desert sand in a Dyson hand dryer.

Miss Mildred Lathbury is single and, lest she forget, is constantly reminded of that fact by the do-goody company she keeps. She and her companions are the eponymous excellent women who make middle class society run smoothly. You know the ones: They organise jumble sales and knit socks for starving Africans. In between, somehow, they manage to have their own life although Miss Lathbury feels almost guilty for doing so at times.

She’s a complex character who I think deserves a second reading. While you develop an understanding that her ignorance is hardly her own fault, what you initially take for naivety is in fact her questioning the very things that should be questioned about the value system she has inherited. As the novel progresses, you see her asking these questions more and more. At first, I thought her rather farcical. But when I’d finished, I realised that, with few exceptions, it was every other character that was farcical and they were only rendered so by being contrasted with her genuine integrity.

There is a bit of a storyline, but the strength of the novel is definitely in Pym’s subtle mockery of British culture. Take the quote about tea below as an example. It isn’t purely sarcasm, but obviously the product of long reflection. It’s no wonder that this is one of her best-loved novels and an indication that there’s more of her I would undoubtedly enjoy. Another winner from the 1001 list!

OPENING LINE	“Ah, you ladies! Always on the spot when there’s something happening!”
99TH PAGE QUOTE	We now followed them into a room adjoining the library where a number of people were already sitting. I noticed that the front rows were basket chairs and that one or two elderly men and women had settled themselves comfortably. One old man wore a purple muffler wound round his neck; an old woman took a piece of multicoloured knitting from a raffia bag and began to work on it. Rocky and I took our seats somewhere in the middle of the room on the harder chairs. The younger people sat here, girls with flowing hair and scarlet nails and youths with hair almost as flowing and corduroy trousers. I noticed one or two Americans, serious-looking young men with rimless glasses and open notebooks, and a group of Africans, talking in a strange language. There was a buzz of unintelligible conversation all around us.
QUOTES	Perhaps there an be too much making of cups of tea, I thought, as I watched Miss Statham filling the heavy teapot… Did we really need a cup of tea? I even said as much to Miss Statham and she looked at me with a hurt, almost angry look, “Do we need tea?” she echoed. “But Miss Lathbury…” She sounded puzzled and distressed and I began to realise that my question had struck at something deep and fundamental. It was the kind of question that starts a landslide in the mind.
CLOSING LINE	This might give the game away so click if you want to show So, what with my duty there and the work I was going to do for Everard, it seemed as if I might be going to have what Helena called ‘a full life’ after all.

RATING

0411 | JavaScript: The Missing Manual | David Sawyer McFarland

Arukiyomi — Fri, 08 Feb 2013 09:41:00 +0000

Context: Another book read on the bus into and out of Cambridge.

Long, long ago, in a country far away, I attempted to teach myself JavaScript. I wasn’t really sure why I was doing it and that’s probably why I never finished the book. It may also be because it was written the way most computer tutorial books are written: badly.

I’m a teacher and that means I thing or two about how to get people to learn new skills. Many’s the time I’ve wanted to grab an author of a computer book by the mouse balls and smash them in the face with a keyboard. I mean, these people are supposed to be good at logic, right? If so, why does their writing seem so completely illogical. Websites written to “help” you do technical stuff are pretty much the same. Usually, these begin something like this; “This book/website/blog post is written for absolute beginners…” That’s the point at which you should simply turn away and cry. I usually make it to, oooh, about the third paragraph. By that point, I can’t see any logical connection between the points the writer is making. I’m lost. I give up.

But McFarland’s intro to JavaScript, is exactly the kind of book that bucks this trend and that’s why I liked it… a lot.

Not only does he write in a simple and engaging style, his writing actually makes sense. There wasn’t a single point in this 500+ page book where I felt I’d lost the plot. I followed it the entire way through. That in itself would be enough, but there’s more. He doesn’t have you build some completely meaningless website or project as you go. This really irritates me because I have no desire to create an animated rock or a site that processes sales for a sports company. In case you thought I made those up, they were examples in other books I also looked at.

Instead, he takes you through simple examples and tutorials which are designed specifically for the task you are applying them to. What I really liked about the tutorials was that at each stage, he explains why you have to do what you’re being asked to do and reminds you of earlier sections in the book where these aspects were covered. In fact, the entire book is filled with cross-referencing which means that if on page 482 you have find yourself a victim of your own humanity and can’t remember what was discussed on page 145, he’ll remind you of it. This is just one example of the way McFarland shows that he has a good understanding of who he’s writing for.

And he’s comprehensive. There’s plenty of Ajax in here along with regular expressions, JSON and JQuery. In fact, there’s so much JQuery that the new edition is called JavaScript & JQuery. If you already know HTML and want to take it further, this is an excellent resource to do that with. I’d just recommend you pick up an edition more recent than the 2008 one I was working with.

OPENING LINE

By itself, HTML doesn’t have any smarts: it can’t do math, it can’t figure out if someone has correctly filled out a form, and it can’t make decisions based on how a Web visitor interacts with it.

99TH PAGE QUOTE

The function’s name is printToday. It has just two lines of JavaScript code that retrieve the current date, convert the date to a format we can understand (that’s the toDateString() part), and then print the results to the page using our old friend the document.write() command. Don’t worry about how all of the date stuff works – you’ll find out in the next chapter.

Programmers usually put their functions at the beginning of a script, which sets up the various functions that the rest of the script will use later. Remember that a function doesn’t run when it’s first created – it’s like telling your assistant how to get to the pizza place without actually sending him there. The JavaScript code is merely stored in the browser’s memory, waiting to be run later, when you need it.

RATING

0410 | The House of the Seven Gables | Nathaniel Hawthorne

Arukiyomi — Tue, 05 Feb 2013 20:25:00 +0000

Context: Listened to this from Librivox as I commuted back and forth to Cambridge teaching English there.

Only read The Scarlet Letter by Hawthorne before and I enjoyed that. This though, was another story. It started well enough with a Poe-like sense of mystery and doom foretold. But then it tailed off into meandering prose and finished fairly predictably.

Hawthorne is not my favourite writer, I have to say. I found it pretty hard to keep track of what was going on. Okay, I was listening to the audio book and your attention can drift when you do that, but if the book is a good one (as Scarlet was), the audio can hold your attention (as Scarlet did).

The opening passages made me think I was in for a tale of suspense. But when things settled down, I quickly lost interest. None of the characters really grabbed me and, although I knew that the inevitable curse was bound to come to pass, I couldn’t really be bothered either way by the time I’d got halfway through.

With Scarlet, I could understand very clearly what Hawthorne was trying to communicate. The characters were also very strong and memorable. But House is nothing like this. I wonder which my next Hawthorne will most closely resemble.

OPENING LINE

Halfway down a by-street of one of our New England towns stands a rusty wooden house, with seven acutely peaked gables, facing towards various points of the compass, and a huge, clustered chimney in the midst.

99TH PAGE QUOTE

Phoebe, after getting well acquainted with the old hen, was sometimes permitted to take the chicken in her hand, which was quite capable of grasping its cubic inch or two of body. While she curiously examined its hereditary marks,—the peculiar speckle of its plumage, the funny tuft on its head, and a knob on each of its legs,—the little biped, as she insisted, kept giving her a sagacious wink. The daguerreotypist once whispered her that these marks betokened the oddities of the Pyncheon family, and that the chicken itself was a symbol of the life of the old house, embodying its interpretation, likewise, although an unintelligible one, as such clews generally are. It was a feathered riddle; a mystery hatched out of an egg, and just as mysterious as if the egg had been addle!

CLOSING LINE

This might reveal the ending. If you want to see the quote, click show
And wise Uncle Venner, passing slowly from the ruinous porch, seemed to hear a strain of music, and fancied that sweet Alice Pyncheon—after witnessing these deeds, this bygone woe and this present happiness, of her kindred mortals—had given one farewell touch of a spirit’s joy upon her harpsichord, as she floated heavenward from the House of the Seven Gables!

RATING

0409 | Behind the Beautiful Forevers | Katherine Boo

Arukiyomi — Mon, 28 Jan 2013 12:28:00 +0000

Context: One of many books I’ve enjoyed finishing off as I became a Cambridge commuter on the bus.

Saw this reviewed in The Guardian and as it reminded me of Lapierre’s City of Joy kind of mixed in with A Fine Balance, I thought I couldn’t go wrong with it. It’s an account of the lives of various characters and families in one of Mumbai’s largest slums. Despite it being a good read, there was something not quite right about it.

Take those two books I’ve already mentioned. They are both excellent insights into the situation of the poor in India. City of Joy is loose reportage. Lapierre makes this clear. He’s writing a novel inspired by characters and situations he has experience of. Mistry’s Balance is a full-blown novel allowing you to grasp the plight of the poor under Indira Ghandi. Both are very moving and you find yourself lost in the writing, deeply immersed in the worlds the writers describe. I know to a certain extent that they’re effective books because I lived and worked in central Kolkata when I was 18 and that included stints in slums and Mother Theresa’s Home for the Destitute and Dying.

But Boo isn’t as good a writer as either Mistry or Lapierre. As a result, I was confused for a large part of her book. I kept having to go back and check that I was reading non-fiction because the book had too much of the realist novel in it for me. This weakened the impact of what would otherwise have been shockingly bad situations that these characters were involved in. Because of the tendency to fictionalise the real, I didn’t take the events as seriously as I might have.

And despite her descriptiveness, there was something flat about the whole thing. It just didn’t come to life and suck me in at any point. It wasn’t a hard read but it’s going to be one of those books that I’ll have forgotten I’ve read. In contrast, I’ll never forget I read City of Joy or A Fine Balance.

And, when I’d finished it, I was really unclear just what she expects me to do with the knowledge I now have of the poor of Mumbai. Reportage is usually written to motivate, but because this strayed from the genre I expected, I was sure how to respond. I’m not saying it was a bad book; the situations she describes are, for the most part, horrific and should be more widely known. Boo’s book contributes to that knowledge, but I’m not convinced it does more than that.

OPENING LINE	Let it keep, the moment when Officer Fish Lips meet Abdul in the police station.
99TH PAGE QUOTE	This far into the book, some of the plot might be revealed. If you want to see the quote, click show Fatima’s hair, what was left of it, had pulled free of the coil into which she’d put it before striking the match. Her face was now black and shiny, as if an artist commissioned to lacquer the eyes of a statue of Kali had gotten carried away and done the whole face. There was no mirror in Burn Ward Number 10, Cooper Hospital, the large hospital serving the poor of Mumbai’s western suburbs, but she didn’t need to see herself to know that she was bigger. The swelling was part of it, but there were other ways in which the fire had increased her. Leaving Annawadi, her spindly husband, carrying her on his back, she’s started to be treated as a mattering person. “What have I done to myself!” she had cried out to sympathetic bystanders near the Hyatt. “But it is done now, and I will make them pay!”
QUOTES	In the West, and among some in the Indian elite, this word corruption, had purely negative connotations; it was seen as blocking India’s modern, global ambitions. But for the poor of a country where corruption thieved a great deal of opportunity, corruption was one of the genuine opportunities that remained. Annawadi sat two hundred yards off the Sahar Airport Road, a stretch where new India and old India collided and made new India late.
CLOSING LINE	But for now, eleven cans, seven empty water bottles and a wad of aluminum foil rested on a long spit of concrete, awaiting the first child with the courage to claim them.

RATING