Review of The Last Policeman

The Story

An asteroid is set to hit earth in six months, and society is falling apart. People are disappearing from their jobs to go off and do the things they’ve always wanted, congregating in the streets to try to pray the asteroid off course, and committing suicide en masse. Henry Palace was just promoted to detective in the Concord, MA police department, and assigned the case of a man who apparently hanged himself in a McDonald’s bathroom. People hang themselves all the time, but Palace notices a few things that lead him to investigate the case a little further. Mocked by his colleagues and the incredulous people he talks to for the case, the reader is left to wonder – is this a legitimate case, or is Henry taking things just a little too far?

The Writing

This novel does what Zone One failed to do – create a literary fiction genre novel (in this case, a detective novel) – in that is has a genre story that is rich and complex, with many layers of observation and nuance. It’s extremely well-crafted, as the story of the asteroid coming informs the detective story, and the detective story helps us discover the story behind the asteroid. There are a few times throughout the book where the author gives us a lot of exposition (telling the story instead of letting it unfold naturally), and that sort of takes you out of the whole thing. The asteroid story works best when it is allowed to relate tangentially to what is going on. It is literally hanging over every character’s head, so there is plenty of opportunity for the story to explore it naturally, which it does.

The asteroid plot has the potential to be gimmicky, but luckily does not get that far. Gimmicky because there are so many directions an author could go with it – talking about geopolitics, talking about governmental structure, talking about societal breakdowns, talking about rationing, etc. Thankfully, Winters manages to keep it relevant to the characters, and keep everything within the area of suspension of disbelief for the reader. He touches briefly on the above, but only when they are relevant to the story. There are a few times when he completely takes you out of the story to tell you about the asteroid, and those are the exposition parts I was talking about above.

Before I move on, I have to say that upon reflection, the main mystery of the novel turned out to be a real run-of-the-mill detective story. It wasn’t anything incredible, and that’s not a bad thing. I was engrossed the whole time, and I believe it was due to the skillful weaving of the asteroid plot. The asteroid added dimensions to the detective case, and the crime novel aspect brought the asteroid plot down to earth – pun definitely intended.

Themes

Work v. goals

It's coming for ya. (photo by Blyzz)

Many people in the world of the novel just up and leave their jobs, from people who maintain internet and phone lines, to physicians, many people are “bucket listing” – doing those things they’ve always wanted to do. It’s odd, then, that Henry, the detective, chooses to stay at his job, working a relatively mundane case. Multiple times throughout the story, the reader is forced to stop and consider what s/he would do in that situation. In addition, readers have to consider what they are currently doing and whether that’s what they’ve always wanted to do. Henry asks the state medical examiner why she hasn’t, like many of her colleagues, quit her job, move up the coast, and do what she’s always wanted to do. She responds with, “this is what I’ve always wanted to do.” How many of us could say the same thing? I imagine, if I learned the earth had a 100% probability of being destroyed in six months, the last thing I would want to do is go to work.

Adversity bringing out the best/worst

The novel has an interesting comment on the nature of our response to something cataclysmic in our lives. For characters like Henry and the medical examiner mentioned above, their continued dedication to something they love shines even brighter. So much so that the veteran detectives remark that Henry is “keeping them honest” – his police work that would be standard in our world is inspiring his coworkers.

On the other side of that are people who are walking away from their responsibilities, using others to get what they want, and being just terrible. Henry remarks,

“It’s exhausting, people hiding behind the asteroid, like it’s an excuse for poor conduct, for miserable and selfish and desperate behavior, everybody ducking in its comet-tail like children in mommy’s skirts.”

The novel seems to indicate that, in extreme situations, whatever habits, values, strengths, and weaknesses we have will be amplified. A good cop will be a great cop, an addict will relapse, an actuary will begin assessing the risk with his life, a father who just wants to protect his child will go to an extreme, those that are already in a bad place will be pushed just a little farther, and those that are a little lazy and longing for something different will shirk their responsibilities, go to the beach, and take an art class.

The continuum of dedication and obsession

For the majority of the novel, you aren’t sure if the crime at the beginning is a suicide or murder. In fact, the evidence points overwhelmingly to suicide. Literally the only person who thinks it could be a murder is Henry, and he pursues it as such despite having almost no evidence. Because this is a detective novel, we are supposed to be looking for more, so I think we sympathize with Henry a little more than we should. I think we should question a little more whether his persistence to investigate this case is a desire for truth, or an obsession to keep him distracted from the asteroid, as he mentions at one point that he has a recurring dream to have a normal life beyond when the asteroid is supposed to come down.

Characters

Henry came off a little cold at first, but once you got used to him, how he narrated, and learned his history, you do really appreciate his rational, normal voice. He’s also a bit nerdy without being a stereotype, which I liked a lot. I don’t know what the target audience is for this book, but the main character is a youngish man who loves to read, has played Dungeons and Dragons, whose favorite novel is Watchmen , and who enjoys Bob Dylan. As someone who can also claim all of those interests, I’m glad he didn’t come off as a stereotype. This also speaks to how well-rounded and realistic this character is. He doesn’t have any (nor does he need) distinctive quirks, snark, or overwhelming cleverness, he is just a normal guy in an extremely abnormal situation.

Every other character wasn’t incredibly notable, but neither did they stand out as overdone. I rolled my eyes a few times at Naomi, who sometimes bordered on manic pixie dream girl, with her shaved head, love of poetry, and pithy rejoinders, but ultimately ended up being a sympathetic character.

Overall

This was an excellent short book. It weaves deeper, complex questions inherent in literary fiction into an engaging detective story. I would give this a 95%, and recommend it to anyone who is interested in crime or apocalyptic novels.

 Edit: Just learned this was book one of a trilogy. Huh… I like it as a standalone book, and I am curious what the next book could add…

If you’ve read this book and either loved it or hated it, let me know in the comments!

Reader Response Criticism

Reader response criticism is a huge departure from New Criticism, and it’s probably something you already do for fun. It’s essentially just looking at a text closely and determining your response to it, and then listening to others’ theories and coming to a general consensus.

History

Don’t be so cold

Reader Response (RR) is generally considered to be in response to New Criticism for three reasons:

1. New Critics are basically saying the same thing about every text – “it has warring tensions that eventually unify.” You can say it in different ways about different texts, but it’s essentially the same thing.
2. New Criticism is too scientific, in a time when even science was beginning to question the assumption that you can subject the world around you to vigorous objective observation. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, the theory of relativity, and other advances were causing us to question what is “knowable.” I personally think this point is a bit of a stretch, but wanted to convey it.
3. New Criticism ignores the reader’s role in the process. The text is just words on a page until someone reads it and filters it through his/her paradigms and memories and imparts meaning through his/her interpretation, so isn’t this worth considering? In addition, though it can sometimes be confusing, isn’t it worth considering overwhelming outside (non-textual) evidence?

What is Reader Response criticism

Theoretically, RR criticism assumes that the text has no objective meaning apart from what the reader interprets. Someone oridignally wanted to call it “subjective criticism” before RR criticism won out, and for good reason. In addition, it assumes that literature is not words on a page – those are just markings, after all, until you interpret them – but rather your own interaction and interpretation of what is going on. Literature is a form of performance art to RR critics, and can’t exist without the reader.

RR is someone doing a “close reading” of the text – considering it piece by piece – and mapping out how you respond to it. Your responses can take any form. For example, you might jot down memories about your significant other when reading a love poem, how you feel when a character dies, or how nice the sweet release of death would be while reading Twilight. Nothing is off limits, and every response you have toward the work is valid.

You are, however, seeking to find your own personal meaning in the work, whatever that is. That being said, should be able to support it from the text. No matter what it makes you think of, you can’t say, for example, that the Sherlock Holmes story “A Scandal in Bohemia” is a perfect metaphor for the execution of the Rosenbergs in the 1950s. That would be an impossibility, and you need to reign it in a little bit and find an interpretation the text supports. You can’t just write anything.

Also, in the spirit of RR criticism, you can’t assume your interpretation is the interpretation. You were able to look at the text, experience it based on your memories, values, and assumptions, and come up with a theory on the meaning, and others have that right as well. No matter how well-supported your interpretation is, it is not correct, because there is no “correct” interpretation. Welcome to the 21st century, baby.

This might sound bad – if there’s no right interpretation, what is the point? The point, my straw man friend, is that in the same way that we come to our own interpretations based on our own values, and other on theirs, we also can adjust how we think about a work based on others’ interpretations and theories. Part of RR criticism, after you’ve looked closely at a work and have come up with a personal idea of what it means, is that you need to participate in community discussion. You’ll try to convince people of your interpretation, sure, but you should also listen and try to understand where they are coming from, if they are right, and how that affects what you think about the work. Participation in RR is participation in a community of ideas, where everyone’s interpretation is valid and warrants a listen, provided it is supported by the text.

Don't worry about that guy who disappeared here or the horrible smell. It's probably nothing (photo by blmiers)

An example Lynn gives is when he had a student provide an interpretation of “A Rose for Emily” by William Faulkner. If you don’t know this story, (I’m going to spoil it, and it’s really great, so read it first if you have time), it’s about a woman who isn’t allowed to marry by her old-fashioned father, but after he dies, she takes up with a man who, after a while, disappears from town. In the end, you learn that she poisoned him and had been laying next to his decomposed corpse every night. The general consensus is that Emily, the woman, is a sad, deeply disturbed old murderer. One of Lynn’s students, though, talked about how Emily reminded her of her grandmother – kind, loving, and strong. On its face, this seems ridiculous, but Lynn talks about how he began to see this story in a new light. He was capable of seeing how Emily bucked conventions of her town and went against her father in taking up with this man, going against gender and cultural restrictions. She also truly loved the man, but that was obviously poorly expressed. The point is that the sharing of ideas in RR criticism can open us up to interpretations we might not have ever considered.

Know Thyself

Finally, one of the most valuable benefits I see with RR criticism is not even involved with literature, but how learning more about yourself via your interaction with what you read. If something makes you mad, why does it make you mad? If something makes you cry unexpectedly, well, it’s just you and the book, so you can look deeper into why it makes you feel that way and let that inform how you interpret what the book is saying. In RR criticism, that is not only a valid approach, but encouraged.

How to do Reader Response criticism

Well, you read and respond. Section completed.

Just kidding. You want to go through with a fine tooth comb on the first read, going by chapter for a long novel, by paragraph/sentence depending on the short story, and by word/sound for poems. You want to just get your first impressions on what everything means.

To illustrate this, I’m going to look at the poem “The Second Coming” by William Butler Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? (1919)

To start working through this text, you’ll want to look at everything in order, bit by bit. No doubt you’ll have an idea of what the poem means, sort of a vague gestalt, but you’ll really want to work through it to define what you think. The reason is because the poet sets up certain things that unfold over the course of the poem, and if you read it in reverse – the second stanza first – you’d end up with a completely different outcome. I’ll go through and list some of my observations as I was reading it.

Turning and turning…widening gyre: This gives me the feeling that things are out of control, that we have not drowned yet, but are turning in the gyre, about to be consumed by the ocean.

"NO.. I SAI..NO I CAN'T HEAR YOU. I THINK WE HAVE A BAD CONNECTION i'M GOING TO CALL YOU BACK" (photo by Ian Blacker)

Falcon cannot hear: The voices of authority are drowned out in the din, and the falcon, a bird of prey is loose. It is not helpless, it is a hunter. But it is also domesticated, so its freedom could also bring its death.

Mere anarchy: anarchy and nothing more – it feels almost neutral here.

Blood-dimmed tide: This poem was written in 1919, close to the Bolsheviek revolution in Russia – could the “red” here paired with “anarchy” be in reference to that?

Ceremony of innocence: Innocence itself is not drowned, but the show of it. Perhaps whatever is happening doesn’t even have the pretense of legitimacy.

Best lack all conviction, worst full of passionate intensity: Kind of bad, I suppose, but I think of terrorists when I hear this line. I would rather someone lack conviction than be full of intensity.

Revelation/Second Coming: Biblical imagery. Things are getting so bad that the world needs a savior.  Questions arise about whether or not this is the end of the world.

Spiritus Mundi: I guess spirit world? I don’t know what this term means and Google is not a huge help.

Sands of the desert: I see images of John the Baptist heralding Jesus. Also Egypt and ideas of people coming out of bondage.

lion body/head man: An Egyptian sphinx, which unlike the Grecian one is considered to be benevolent and an emblem of Egypt. Also a beast.

Gaze blank and pitiless as the sun: makes me think of this line from the show Mad Men: “Well, I hate to break it to you, but there is no big lie. There is no system. The universe is indifferent.”

Moving slow thighs: A hulking brute, but powerful.

Twenty centuries: a two-thousand year old beast

Vexed to nightmare: it viewed things as bad and was troubled, probably by the events in the first stanza, so it woke.

Beast/Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born: I see this in two ways – a teenager slouching out of reluctance, and a monster or ugly thing slouching because it is built that way. I think the poem supports the latter. Bethlehem fits with the Biblical imagery and the second coming, though I’m surprised that it is not a second coming in the way prophesied in the Bible, but rather by being born again.

In addition, the fact that it is a poem written in the early 20th century should in some way frame how you look at it. This is true of every time you engage in RR criticism – the context of the work matters and should inform how you interact with it. You have different expectations when looking at an episode of Star Trek vs. How I Met Your Mother, or Shakespeare vs. Keeping Up with the Kardashians. Even this meta-information about the work will play in to how you respond.

Bringing it all together

The next step is to bring all of these disparate observations together into a coherent understanding of the poem. Remember, there is no right answer here, but everything must work together. If you opinion of something changed later on, feel free to go back and revise what you thought.

Here’s my interpretation of the poem:

“I think this poem is about how the world is slowly slipping out of control, and the unappealing nature of what it will take to save it. We are about to be sucked down into the ocean, and people can’t hear those in control, so they are going to go on the hunt. The issue is, their freedom might be their downfall, since they are domesticated animals and not used to self-government. Anarchy in the form of revolution (particularly the Russian revolution) is resulting in chaos, and people are revolting without legitimacy, fervently believing in their causes.

This is answered in the second stanza when the poet talks about the second coming. We need a savior for the world, but what will that savior look like? What do we need to counter this freedom that destroys? We need the symbol of Egypt, a male Sphinx. The Biblical imagery leads us to understand him in the context of the Old Testament – a ruler. The Sphinx’s benevolent nature can’t be forgotten, though. So the thing that will combat the evils of this new world – the freedom that destroys – is a ruler that will come from the old one, quite possibly with a form of oppression to stamp out the anarchy. It will be benevolent, but not peaceful, pretty, or kind. It is not an attractive solution, but it was one set in motion by the birth of these revolutions.“

Sharing is caring

The next step in this process is to share your ideas with others, as well as listen to what others have to say. By nature, your subjective interpretation of the work is just one possible interpretation, and you are not “right” because there is no “right” in this situation. So go out there, share what you think, and hear what others have to say. No doubt, this will color how you think of the poem.

Another interpretation of Yeats

I did a quick Google search for interpretations of this poem, and one that came back was an analysis from Sparknotes. In this analysis, the writer goes into depth regarding Yeats’s philosophical musings on the nature of societies and periods of history. Basically, Yeats talked about two different trends of society, science and mysticism, and described them as gyres that interact with each other. The writer uses this to justify a reading of the poem where Yeats is talking about the end of the scientific age and the coming of an age of mysticism. This is the revelation and second coming.

This is not an interpretation I would have guessed, but on a re-read, I can see how it fits in to the poem. Having knowledge of Yeats’s other writings, and this different reading of the poem, modifies how I think of it, and on subsequent readings it will shape my response to it.

Click to view on Amazon

Conclusions

 Reader Response criticism is something you’ve probably been doing all your life without even knowing it. It mainly consists of doing a close read of a text, formulating your opinions based on what you read, and then sharing it with others and modifying it based on new evidence. Regardless, it’s good to know how it works and how it relates to other criticism methods.

Once again, I’m going from Steven Lynn’s book Texts and Contexts. There’s even more there than I was able to go into for this post, so check it out!

Book Review

The Story

Where to start? It’s a massive story taking place from the 1800s, circling the globe in space and time, arriving in the distant, post-apocalyptic future in Hawaii. The stories are, briefly, as follows:

1. The journal of a lawyer traveling in the South Pacific (1800s)
2. The letters of a young composer as he is trying to con (study under?) a musical great in belgium (1930s)
3. A detective novel, of sorts, starring a woman trying to take down a government/corporate conspiracy (1970s – America)
4. The autobiography of an aging English publisher who gets himself trapped in a nursing home (present day)
5. The interviews of a clone about to be put to death for mysterious reasons (South Korea – the future)
6. The verbal narrative of a man living on Hawaii trying to escape hostile tribes (The distant, post-apocalyptic future)

The Characters/Themes

Also kind of too massive to delve into. Each story has its own distinct cast of characters, with one exception (one character is referenced in the second story, but you meet him in the third).

The reason I combine charaters and themes together is that though each of the characters are fleshed out and complete characters, they are also stand-ins for grand themes. For example, and I don’t think I’m giving anything away with all the movie promotion going on, 5/6 of the narrators/main characters are essentially the same character reincarnated over and over. We are given hints are this throughout the book (the birthmark they all share, experiences they have from earlier selves, etc), but it never smacks us in the face (except when Sonmi sees the Buddha and remarks that it reminds her of the previous narrator), which I thought was a nice touch.

Corruption and the role it plays in society

There is so much to Cloud Atlas that I will hardly do it justice trying to parse out the main themes in a blog post, but oh well. Here I go.

Each incarnation strikes a balance in relation to the forces of evil and corruption. The first, Adam Ewing, is almost completely naive. Quite racist, he’s a colonist, but a passive one. He is ultimately a good man, but his chief sin is allowing evil, evil he recognizes and secretly dislikes, go on around him. He allows this ultimately due to fear, but wraps it up in a way that he’s just acting like this because that’s what society dictates – because it is proper. Society is wrong, but he is hiding behind it. His downfall/redemption comes at the hands of someone he trusts in society betraying him, forcing him to reconsider who he is and what he believes. Most of the corruption, it seems, is on the personal level.

The next character tries to strike a balance with society, and with evil, participating in his own brands of corruption (conning, petty theft, adultery) to small degrees. It is interesting that in this story, there isn’t a “bad guy,” just an old composer with syphillis and his unfaithful wife. The narrator, though, learns that he will never fit in with that society, and thus kills himself. Not willing to be the nasty, corrupt old man, he dies young and clings to what virtue he has. In this story, the corruption and evil has worked itself into the culture and society, but not much farther than that.

Luisa Rey decides to fly in the face of very obvious signs of corruption – an evil corporation putting the lives of millions at risk with a (possibly) defective power plant. Almost melodramatic, it is a clear good-vs-evil story with protagonists and antagonists, and the main character is determined to fight it at all costs. Corruption, though working in relationship with the government, isn’t completely institutionalized.

In a slight step backwards, we see the morally gray story to Timothy Cavendish – an aging publisher who publishes a gangster’s poorly-written autobiography, and subsequently benefits from him throwing a critic off a balcony. Long story short, he’s trapped in a nursing home by the “evil” nurse Noakes. In this story, we see the start of institutionalized corruption. Cavendish, though neither the best or the worst of people, is trapped by this system. It is no longer going against the Luisa Rey’s (the people actively trying to fight evil), the Frobishers (geniuses on the fringe of society), or the Ewings (easy marks for con men), it’s trapping and exploiting normal, flawed people. There’s a brief victory in this story, but it’s not to last.

The next story is set in a dystopian Korea, far in the future. Corruption has completely taken over, to the point that there are entire sub-classes of people, created for service and destroyed when they are finished. Sonmi~451 is one such person, but she has been genetically engineered to learn quickly, and manipulates the government into publishing an account of her life, ultimately leading to its downfall.

The final story deals with Zachry, a man living in one of the last human civilizations on earth on the Big Island of Hawaii. In a reversal of the first story, he is a humble man with a poor vocabulary whose civilization is being constantly raided and hunted by the island’s equivalent of the Maori. The rest of the world has undergone an apocalyptic event known as “The Fall” and most of the remaining humans are primitive. They are studied sometimes by the Prescients, a nation-less people who travel in fancy ships and identify Sonmi as their god. They are also wary of interfering with any of the Big Island affairs and view them with a mix of admiration and responsibility. This story is a reversal of the first – the Prescients are a society trying to do better than society has in the past, and though they almost don’t help when “innocent” people are faced with violence and barbarism, they ultimately do.

The story says a lot about corruption and society. In many ways it seems to imply corruption is inherent, but it also seems to suggest that repeated, purposeful fighting against the evil in our natures can win out. We might have to start over after destroying most of the world, but hopefully we can improve, if only incrementally.

There are many more themes to this book. More than I could hope to cover in my increasingly less brief book review. I’d love to hear in the comments of some other themes you found while reading the book.

Writing

Zounds. This book is a gold mine of different writing styles. Mitchell really flexes his literary muscles, and it absolutely works. The first chapter is extremely anti-immersive and difficult, and it really reads like a diary from the 1800s, if you’ve ever read one of those. Moving on, each chapter’s writing reflects the content and the characters. Frobisher’s complex and cheeky writing reflects his genius. The simple, clear writing of Luisa Rey’s chapter reflects the pulpy mystery novel nature of the melodramatic story. The well-told, ridiculous story reflects the Cavendish chapter, and the same is true of Sonmi’s cold interview and Zachry’s personal, almost private dialect.

Overall

This is an amazing book with something for everyone. If you want to read it for six separate, interesting stories, you can, but if you want to dig deeper, there’s a near inexhaustible mine of deeper themes and concepts. The writing styles are not going to appeal to everyone, but if you are up to the task (and can make it past the first chapter) it is an incredibly rewarding story with a lot to offer.

Adaptation

I haven’t seen the movie starring Tom Hanks, but I can’t imagine the themes or complexity carries over real well. And Hugo Weaving as a Korean man? Really? Have you seen the movie? Did you like it? Let me know in the comments.

This is the second part in our six-part series on understanding different methods of literary criticism. In this one, we will discuss New Criticism – a method that assumes all great works have warring tensions, and it is only by the resolution of those tensions that we can get to the deeper meaning of the text.

Introduction: meet the New Criticism, same as the old criticism

If you have grown up in American and been in school in the last 40 years or so, New Criticism won’t be all that new to you. It’s probably what you’ve been doing the whole time; you just haven’t known the name to it.
New Criticism started around the 1920s and peaked in universities around the 1950s-60s. Its main tenets are the consideration of a text by itself, with “outside” information (such as the author’s life, or how the text made you feel) being less important than what the text says and how it says it. According to the critical theory, all great works of literature are unified and complex, and every part of them works towards a central theme. There may be many seemingly-paradoxical points in a work, but even these, in truly great literature, will work with each other to bring out a deeper theme.

Throughout this post, I’ll attempt a New Criticism reading of The Lord of the Rings (LotR) by J.R.R. Tolkien, so I’ll try to reference all examples back to this well-known story.

What not to do when using New Criticism (NC)

First, we’ll begin by saying what NC is not, and what we should avoid.

The Intentional Fallacy

First, in a NC reading, we should avoid all attempts of trying to understand what an author intended to say. This concept is called “The Intentional Fallacy.” NC critics argue that the author’s intention is essentially unknowable for us as a reader, and it only matters what s/he put down on the page. They would argue that if it isn’t in the text, it shouldn’t really be worth discussing since, at that point, you aren’t discussing the book but unknowable conjectures.

Example of The Intentional Fallacy in LotR: “Well, Tolkien wrote the books during World War Two, so he obviously means for us to understand the ring as a metaphor for a nuclear bomb.”

The Affective Fallacy

The other thing someone using NC should not do is talk about how the text makes them feel, or their own experiences. This idea is called “The Affective Fallacy,” and NC critics argue that this isn’t something having to do with the text itself, but the results the text produces on the reader. It has the potential to cloud our judgement as critics.

Example of The Affective Fallacy: “I felt really sad and depressed as Sam and Frodo were slogging their way across Mordor. This obviously demonstrates the crushing effect of prolonged resistance to temptation on someone’s state of mind.”

A book divided against itself cannot stand

So now that we’ve talked about what not to do, I’ll talk about how a NC criticism is understood. Since we are only looking at the text, we need to pull out some broad themes. NC critics argue that a great text is constructed on competing concepts, so something like, good vs. evil or freedom vs. slavery. Since the work is complex, these ideas can sometimes seem to come out as paradoxes. In a good work of literature, the NC critics argue, these paradoxes are resolved in a unified theme.

An example of a New Criticism reading of Lord of the Rings

Finding the tensions

To start to do a NC reading, you first must identify the tensions in the work. For example, in LotR, we can identify several

• Good v. Evil
• Strong v. Weak
• Peace v. War
• Closed society v. Open society
• Order v. Chaos
• Freedom v. Slavery
• Fascism v. Free society

Let’s look at the concept of freedom. It’s great, right? Sauron hates it, the kingdom’s love it, and it’s great for everyone. Except that, while we don’t know how Sauron feels, we can’t say the other two reasons are particularly strong.

The issue of the kingdoms lead us to talking about government. At least the alternative to Sauron is a strong democracy where the rulers exercise power with the consent of the governed. Oh, wait, it’s a monarchy based on archaic traditions where one ruler long ago seized power and dictated how everything is supposed to go? And that same monarchy left an extremely weak steward in place who almost cost everyone in Minas Tirith their lives, and the sole reason for this was the unquestioned word of an (extremely) long-dead king? So, except for intention, there isn’t much of a “free society” so much as a different form of autocracy.

Oh, but the king is different, he wouldn’t leave an entire population of people as slaves until they follow his will, right? (For an example of Aragorn and his descendants doing just that, see the cursed men under the mountain)

Even the Shire, sadly, is kind of a mirror of Mordor. It’s on the other side of the map and not as violent, but the people there are just as xenophobic  – even among their fellow hobbits (Bucklanders). Give the wrong hobbit enough power, and you might have a situation where an army of xenophobic hobbits are marching across the land, imposing what they think is proper.

In addition, the more-free societies outside the kingdom’s control demonstrate a high level of chaos, and it’s very bad to be someone who’s not big and strong. Two weeks outside of the Shire, and Frodo has a friend eaten by a willow tree, is kidnapped (and naked, for some reason) by wrights, and is stabbed. Chaos prevails outside the autocratic rule, and maybe things might be a little better if they were orderly?

Bringing it all together

So now that we see that the dichotomies aren’t as neat as they first seem, how can we resolve them? The central assumption of NC is that, in good works of literature, the tensions exist and they are resolvable. Deconstructionism assumes that these tensions are irresolvable and texts ultimate collapse against one another. New Criticism, on the other hand, assumes everything is intentional, and we can resolve them by looking deeper.

They resolved the tension between them and things are much better.

Ok, so we need to resolve these problems, or else this seminal fantasy series is just a mess of inconsistencies. To do this, we need to look a little deeper into these dichotomies and reason our way through the initial assumptions, seeing how the work unifies itself.

For example, in LotR both of the “good” and “bad,” free and un-free sides of the dichotomies have autocratic governments with some degree of chaos (orcs etc. with Sauron and balrogs/bandits/oak trees in the kingdoms). Even on the good side, you see people suffering under the likes of Theoden (when under Wormtongue) and Denethor, the steward. These competing tensions are not resolved until Aragorn takes the throne after the defeat of Sauron, and true prosperity reigns. What is different? His character and strength. Aragorn spent years patrolling the world, learning about and fighting the enemy. He demonstrates his humility by sleeping in the dirt with hobbits, and his self-sacrifice when he was willing to walk up to the gates of Mordor to give Frodo precious (pun intended) time to destroy the ring. In short, it is not the conventions, the structure, the traditions, or the openness of a society that gives it strength and goodness in the LotR (or possibly in any society, but remember, outside references are fobidden in New Criticism), but the strength, goodness, and character of its leader. Those conventions/traditions/etc. are to blame for the fall (Isildur), poor maintenance (Denethor), and flourishing (Aragorn) of Gondor, so they are somewhat neutral, but the tension that both the good and bad sides of the fight are ultimately operating under the same systems of government with the same problems are ultimately resolved in the character of Aragorn.*

Limitations of New Criticism

New Criticism, though helpful, has some limitations.

1. It assumes the work is complex: You can’t really dissect a terrible work with no nuance, so the work has to be up to a certain standard in terms of writing before you can hope to use NC to understand it. On “polished” works such as The Lord of the Rings it works, but you need to understand the nature of the work when using NC. That being said, you can make some terrible books/poems say some fun things by employing NC
2. It works better on shorter, clearer works: NC works the best when dissecting a poem or, at longest, a short story. You can map out, sometimes down to the word, all the times a particular theme (and its opposite – remember, you need to keep track of the tensions) comes up. Things can get a bit muddy with longer works. I’m sure you were able to spot inconsistencies with my NC reading of the LotR above. I’m sure it would be theoretically possible to track down every instance of the competing tensions in the trilogy, but it would be a big task. You can definitely still use NC on longer works, but be aware that you are leaving yourself open if someone should take an extremely close look and formulate a counter argument regarding something you missed.

Conclusion

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New Criticism is a fun way of seeing “below the surface” of a text, to understand what it is saying beyond what it initially presented – how tensions inherent in any great work can be resolved without resorting to outside sources. Look at the book you’re currently reading in this light, or even movies and TV shows, and you’ll see a whole lot more than you thought was there.

*I absolutely understand that this is not an airtight argument. It was only to illustrate how tensions in a work could be reconciled by an understanding of that work, which is the central tenet to New Criticism.

Brace yourselves, criticism of Game of Thrones is coming.

Thoughts on the “A Song of Ice and Fire” series

I posted my first review of Game of Thrones some time back, and since then I have read through book four, A Feast for Crows. I planned on posting them all individually, but since they are a series it is good to see them in the context of the series. It’ll also allow me to be nicer to the even-numbered books. For reasons I’ll go into, I haven’t yet finished the fifth book, but this should give you some idea on the series as a whole.

The Books:

Book 1: A Game of Thrones (GoT)

You know how I feel about this book already, since I posted a relatively lengthy review of it. As someone whose whole knowledge of the fantasy genre begins and ends with The Lord of the Rings, GoT really worked for me. It didn’t use the same cliched characters and plots, and really showed a willingness to tell a strong story, even if that meant the head of the main character. Martin (the author) really made the world of GoT seem real. That served to work against a lot of the cliches of traditional fantasy writing. The king was a lout, knights, like anyone else, could be terrible people, and honor could often be a liability. The plot, too, was tight and focused. You had an idea of where everything was going (enough that, when Eddard Stark was beheaded for example, you could be shocked). The politics, while not simple, were understandable. They included a few of the major houses (Stark, Lannister, Baratheon), and and interesting history. On the whole, I loved the first book

Book 2: A Clash of Kings (CoK)

When I first read it, I did not care for CoK. I felt it was slow, overstocked with characters, and understocked with meaningful plot advances. In contrast to the fourth book, CoK is amazing. I don’t think that’s good for the series as a whole, but it is good for the second book, as I’m sort of retconning my liking of it. At the beginning, there are five kings vying for the iron throne and Winterfell is standing. At the end, there are four kings and it is not. That basically sums up CoK. You go wider into the politics of the seven kingdoms in this book, and that has been one of the major hinderances of the series as a whole. I feel like Martin is very interested in this world he built, with its complex and nuanced political interactions, but I personally couldn’t get into it. I don’t care for the Ironborn, anyone from Highgarden or Dorne, and the Boltons are only interesting because they are terrible people. If everyone was as compelling as the Starks, Lannisters, and Baratheons, then the in-depth politics would be the best part about this series.

But yes, nothing really happens in this book. Some battles are fought, Winterfell is razed, and Dany goes in circles in the desert. Even Jon Snow’s fake defection ends up being basically pointless. In the context of the series, this serves as a bridge to the amazing third book, but I personally think it should be able to stand on its own. My brother watched the second season of the HBO series and picked up the third book afterward, without reading the second. He loved the show, while I thought the book was just barely ok. If I were you, I’d do what he did. It is in this book that you get the first glimpse of Martin’s bloated writing that becomes an epidemic in later books.

Book 3: A Storm of Swords (SoS)

So many feelings. You know all those characters you loved, and loved to hate? Yeah, almost all of them are dead by the end of the third book. Martin kind of goes all in and burns through several plot points. He ends the war of five kings, ends the Stark role in politics, ends Tyrion’s awesome role in running the kingdom, ends our favorite sadistic little king, and completely changes the story. And it really pays off… in this book. You are jerked from one chapter to the next, mourning for characters you lost, and wary of the ones that are still alive, even up until the last page (and even the epilogue contains some really important stuff!). Oh yeah, and Martin flexes his character building muscles again by making you like the incestuous, attempted child murdering, actual king murdering Jaime. Yes. He is a protagonist and, apparently, not that bad of a guy (even though he threw a ten year old out of a window).

So much happens in this book, so much is explained and so much resolved (you learn the reason why Jon Arryn was killed, sparking the purpose for the first book and series as a whole), that I feel like Martin could have ended the series here and, in my eyes, it would have been satisfactory. This book shows the good things about going all in, having actual things happen, and actual characters die – you have an amazingly compelling book. Unfortunately, the next book demonstrates the downside to that strategy.

Oh, and even Dany does something interesting that somewhat furthers her plot in becoming queen. Granted, it actually is a net loss in progress because she decides to stay on the eastern side of the map running a city no one cares about, but one step forward two steps back, I suppose.

Book 4: A Feast for Crows (FfC)

Alright, the war is over, and everyone is dead, how about we take a breather before we get back to anything plot related? How about instead of a breather, we end up in a 900-page hibernation and never get back to anything plot related. Oh yeah! Also, all those characters you love – Jon Snow, Tyrion, Jaime (I mean, you love him now), Bran, and even Dany? Yeah…they aren’t in this book. Don’t worry though! You have Brienne! Of course, she does nothing in her search for a girl that we as readers already know is safe, but that’s beside the point. Also, you have Cersei, which should have been great. Really – the evil queen is a narrator, and you can finally get inside the head of the woman who killed both King Robert and Ned Stark. It was, possibly, the best part of the book, but it was severely lacking. She turned out to be this paranoid woman (fits with her character) who makes terrible decisions throughout the novel (does not fit with her character), all motivated by a never-before-mentioned prophecy from an old crone.

Seemingly just to fill space there are several no-name characters that have one-off narration chapters. The burden of the main storytelling shifts to previously minor characters, and this is where Martin demonstrates the danger of killing off and exiling several compelling characters – what if you can’t make more? The mind that invented Ned, Rob, and Catelyn Stark, Robert and Joffrey Baratheon, and Tywin Lannister should be able to make up different but equally compelling characters to take their place, right? Unfortunately, I didn’t see that happening in FfC. Brienne, Samwell Tarly, the iron born (their kingsmoot was so slow it felt like an entmoot, AMIRITE? Ok, that was legitimately terrible.), and a whole mess of people in the Dornish royal family weren’t up to the task of shouldering the burden of the story.

I’m worried for this series. I finished FfC because I loved the third book and hoped the writer of that book could pull out a surprise at the end and turn it around, but he didn’t, and it just went on. And on. And on. I was skimming pages (Brienne chapters) at one point. I was hoping book five would get things back on track with interesting characters and a semblance of a plot. Martin is a great writer, but he is in desperate need of an editor. The sum total of nothing that happens in this book could have been merged with the next, instead of bloating them and breaking them off into two separate books.

Book 5: A Dance with Dragons (DoD)

(Check out the aggregated review here) This is quite the tome. I think I’m about 15% of the way into it, but for now I’m going to hold off. I’ve read reviews, and apparently this book is better than the last, but not by much. Martin succumbs to bloat once again, and not much happens to advance the plot. I’m officially waiting until the next book comes out to finish this one. I realize it could be a long wait, but I’m ok with that. I need some time to recover from this world after the slog that was the fourth book, especially since this book appears like it is in that same vein. I’m going to wait to hear about the next one before committing myself to this one.

Would I recommend it?

Tough question. The first three, yes. One and three were amazing, and two (though it wasn’t that great) because you need it to understand what is going on in the third. After that, you’re on your own. It takes a nose dive from which I’m not sure it will recover. The first three, though, are really great, so definitely check those out. I would give the first three books a B+ and the series so far a C.

Thoughts?

People love these books, so if I was wrong about books two, four, and beyond, let me know in the comments.

Who coooould it be?

A Scientific Way of Thought

Sherlock Holmes kind of seems like a Marty Stu (male version of a “Mary Sue” – an idealized version of the author for wish fulfillment). He’s a genius, self-employed detective who is an expert in multiple scientific disciplines, boxing, and martial arts. He routinely makes a physician, and basically everyone, look like a close-minded idiot. He is nearly perfect.

That being said, who hasn’t wanted to walk into a room, look at someone, and immediately deduce (really abduce but for the purposes of this post I’m just going to use the two synonymous) critical details about their life, impressing them with by seemingly reading their mind? Or who doesn’t want to be always on-the-ball, thinking up correct solutions to complex problems?

Author Maria Konnikova takes on the task of trying to explain how the Sherlock Holmes thought process works. At first I thought the concept laughable, and had a hard time explaining the book to friends because, really, he is a fictional character. You can see how I could be both attracted and turned away by the idea – they are awesome skills, but are they real? Holmes often seems too good to be true. Konnikova won me over. The book, it turns out, while being primarily about thinking like Sherlock Holmes, is also about thinking through problems scientifically. You can shift the direction of the reasoning from fictional crimes to any number of things and it really holds up . At this point in history, when many students, even at the college level, don’t have basic critical thinking skills, the methods in this book are extremely helpful.

I’ll go through and lay out, briefly, what Konnikova detailed in her book. She recommends four different steps to Holmesian thinking: Observing the evidence, using your imagination to construct possible outcomes, using reasoning to try to deterimine the most likely outcome, and learning from your successes and your mistakes. I’ll go through them one-by-one.

How to Think like Sherlock Holmes

Observe

1. Be selective

Make a plan for how you are going to conduct your observations. After all, you can collect an infinite amount of data from the world around you, so you need to be mindful about how you are going to do so. One example she used was two ways to look for planes on top of a skyscraper. The “Watson” way is to take to the sky immediately, looking for planes. It’s possible that by luck he could find something, but he’d be absolutely flooded with data. The “Holmes” way would be to try to figure out the direction of the nearest airport, listen for the planes, and look into flight patterns over the building. Once you have one or two places to watch, zero in on those and actively look for the planes.

Conversely, you also shouldn’t let selectivity make you blind to other possibilities out there. If something isn’t working, definitely broaden your scope.

2. Be objective

3. Be inclusive

4. Be engaged

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Stay motivated to avoid becoming sloppy. Don’t slip into mindlessness and habit, but always question your assumptions and the observations you have made. She cites several studies showing that those who are motivated are less prone to making mistakes.

Imagine

Ok, so you’ve collected your data, what do you do now? I was surprised to find the role creativity played in all of this. You need to use the data you have to construct possible scenarios. You need to give yourself possibilities in which to test in the deduction part of the experiment.

How do we foster creativity? Konnikova goes into many ways, and explains it in a good way, but I’ll attempt to paraphrase. We shouldn’t fall into the trap of believing that because something is presented in a certain way, that it’s the only way it can function. For instance, she spoke of a study where they gave people matches, a candle, and a box of thumb tacks, and told them to attach the candle to the wall. I’ll give you a minute to think of a few ways.

The way the researchers envisioned (and I would imagine it’s not the only “correct” way, but I’m not creative enough to think of another) is that the participant should take the tacks out of the box, tack the box to the wall, light the candle, drip wax in the bottom of the box to keep the candle in and upright, and light the candle.

I didn’t guess this, and the reason was that I was stuck in the trap of functional fixedness. I saw the box as only having one function – to hold the tacks. Apparently when you present the person with a box and tacks separately, they are able to complete the task a lot faster.

In addition to the above, we also need to step back and give our minds some room to work, and in order to do this, we need to step back and see the whole picture. Konnikova recommends either physically distancing yourself by moving locations, or, more importantly, mentally distancing yourself via techniques such as mindfulness meditation.

Deduce

Don't make a Reichenbach fall into bad reasoning. Wocka wocka.

Now the fun part, right? Where you put your critical thinking to work against the theories you came up with during the “imagination” phase.

You still need to watch out for all those lovely cognitive biases we all have to deal with all the time. Our brain is lazy, like Watson. If you’ve read Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, you’ll recognize the systems she talks about. The fast, inaccurate system one is the “Watson” system. It takes all the shortcuts it can, and ends up with a quick but inaccurate conclusion. The slower, more deliberate system two is “Holmes” system. It takes a lot of effort, but you take your time and work through problems, recognizing and correcting biases along the way.

Some tips/stray observations for deduction:

You should also prioritize facts on the basis of which are crucial to your understanding of the situation and which are incidental.

I honestly thought this was the weakest of the chapters, and that was a bit of a disappointment, because it was the one I was most excited for.

Education

Always keep challenging yourself. Even as you create good habits of objectively observing the world around you, thinking up creative solutions, and rationally testing those solutions, you must remember that by definition, a habit is mindless. You need to watch out for mindlessness, because that is the area of system 1/the Watson system.

Reflect back on what you are doing in order to improve, and watch out for complacency and overconfidence. Always keep investigating, keep learning, and keep refining your investigative processes.

Neural plasticity is a major component of our continued education. Basically, as you learn and experience new things your brain adapts to that. Making an effort to observe the world around you, learning new vocab words, and solving complex puzzles daily? Your brain is going to trim your synapses in order to make those things more efficient well into old age. Do a mindless task everyday and go home to watch hours of Real Housewives and Honey Boo Boo? Your brain is going to focus on whatever pathways help that, and let the other ones fall to disuse. The good news is that the brain is extremely adaptive, and you can change how it operates, even at an old age. The bad news is that the brain is extremely adaptive, and with bad habits you can lose whatever gains you have made, your sharp insight becoming blunt almost as quickly as you sharpened it.

Conclusions

Personally

Book review

This is the second review in a row where I will discuss modernist themes (the first review being Rules of Civility last week). It might behoove me to let you know what I’m talking about a little bit, since The Sense of an Ending is a book that puts itself in the modernist tradition to an even greater extent than the last book.

Intro to modernism

When talking about modernism, I’m talking about the literary movement that took place in the early 20^th century, mainly in Europe and the US. Main modernist writers were people such as James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, and William Faulkner, to name a few.

One aspect of modernism I’ll be talking about here is mainly its insistence on the subjectivity of reality. Omniscient (all-knowing) narrators give a false idea of what we know to be true, because what happens outside our own head is always filtered through our experience. Modernism holds that since all reality is ultimately subjective, we can never know what’s completely true in any situation. Modernist writers, therefore, use impressionistic ways to represent an unknowable reality. For instance, instead of saying

Stephen was hungry. It had been two days since he had last eaten, and his poverty was apparent from his growling stomach to his unwashed shirt,

a modernist writer might say,

’Eeeuuuuuow’

The sound. Two days. The paper in his friend’s pocket reflected in the sun and it reminded him of the seams of his own pocket. Two days. The smell of his clothes, like meat left in the sun, was even starting to remind him.

Of course, I’m no writer, but you can see the difference. One tells you all you need to know, and the other shows you through the character’s thoughts, giving you the same experience he had and letting you piece it together like he would.

The Story

Tony has had a pretty typical life. Reasonably intelligent, he tells us all about his teens and twenties – his friends, a girlfriend, and a suicide that ties them both together. Half of the book passes, and we are introduced to adult Tony, now in middle age and reflecting on the life he lived and the people in it, and forced to see how he might have even deceived himself regarding the events in his college years.

The Characters

Basically no characters in The Sense of an Ending are exceedingly likable, though that’s not really the point of the story.

Tony

The narrator, Tony is forced to consider the truthiness (as Stephen Colbert would say, and oddly, the spell check did not highlight that word…) of the story he recounts at the beginning. He is reasonably intelligent, though very self-conscious. He seems to idolize his friend Adrian. He is constantly justifying his life to himself, saying how reasonably happy he is and how it’s been pretty OK. That got pretty annoying, as he gives off the impression of a man at odds with himself. That wouldn’t be inconsistent with how he is presented throughout the rest of the book, so I think it’s a good assessment. He reminds me of the main character in the The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford, but I’ll go more into detail with that later.

Adrian

The best friend who is living the life the main character wants to lead but doesn’t. He reminded me of Sebastian Flyte in Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh (also referenced in last week’s post), where the main character adores him, even after his downfall. Adrian, while not nearly as self-conscious, was honest with himself to a fault. His raw, open intellectual honesty was what led to his suicide. That being said, we don’t see the suicide truthfully until the end of the novel, when it is revealed to be the result of Adrian being a scared child.

Veronica

She mainly came across as a device to reveal things about the characters and keep the plot moving. She brings to light much of the narrator’s (Tony’s) self-consciousness, and just acts as a person the mystery of Adrian’s suicide revolves around in the second half of the story. She was pretty annoying, but I think she was supposed to come off that way, to be a sort of red herring for Adrian’s suicide.

Writing/Themes

Once again, these are so entwined that I have to consider them together. Technically, the writing was great. It was engaging, witty, and breezy. Barnes is obviously an excellent writer.

Unreliable narrators, self-conception, and the nature of truth

Like I mentioned above, the book is written in such a way where the first half is Tony talking about his experiences with Adrian and Veronica up to the point of Adrian’s suicide, and the second half is his re-understanding of that story as a much older adult.

Unlike some books, the concept of an unreliable narrator is brought up very early on and hammered into the reader’s awareness with little subtlety. Only a few pages in, for instance, is this quote:

“History is the certainty produced at the point where the impefections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation”

This is followed up by a discussion about a classmate who committed suicide, speculations on why, and how they don’t have all the facts for this story. There are other instances, little quips here and there, about how we can never know the nature of truth, how inadequate memory is, and so on.

Fast-forward to the present day, and Tony is forced to confront the self of his past and the nice, comfortable narrative he’s made. Part of the fun of an unreliable narrator is that we never know if we are getting the whole story. The issue is, we figure out the whole story. Every. Last. Detail. And Tony learns all of this, how self-serving his memory is, and moves on with his life a changed man. This is great, right?

I…actually don’t think so. It doesn’t seem to align with the character as we know him – it doesn’t seem to work with the true-to-life nature of memory, or the author’s emulation of modernist form.

I’ll tackle Tony’s change first. A man who has lived his whole life crafting narratives to suit his own self-conception will suddenly let the truth change him? Remember, this is the narrator that misrepresented a whole letter he wrote to his friends berating them as a nice live-and-let-live goodbye. I personally don’t think the character that Barnes built up would have such a profound and moving experience. I think a much more satisfying ending would have been for him to see all of the facts, have it be clear to the reader what happened, and have him continue on in his slimy, self-delusional ways.

The fact that this is a very unrealistic ending is another reason I disliked it. Remember, a feature of modernism is that reality is filtered through the self, and therefore truth is more subjective than objective. To have this character go through his life deceiving himself, then come to the end and say “yes, this is the truth, I am going to change who I am” causes the toying the novel does with concepts of memory and truth to fall flat. Instead, it just ends up being sort of a short, low-stakes detective novel.

If you are interested in thick-headed unreliable narrators (and suicide and love affairs to boot), check out The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford. An older book, but much in The Sense of an Ending seems to be a poor imitation of it.

Plot

This will be short, since I’ve already covered it somewhat above. The main plot is the mystery of why Adrian committed suicide. As I mentioned, it seems like the issue of the unreliable narrator is ultimately resolved, leaving the entire weight of the ending of the story resting on the plot, not the writing or the concepts that have been discussed throughout the book.

I thought the resolution to the plot was ultimately unsatisfying. It fell flat, and though it changed my conception of Adrian and Veronica, and changed Tony’s conception of himself, it didn’t strike me as any more than the resolution to a 40-year-long mystery that everyone stopped caring about.

With the introduction to modernism at the beginning and my ranting about the themes in the book, I’m not going to include a critical theory part this week.

Overall

I would give this book a 63%.

Though promising an interesting play on the concepts of memory and truth, this book falls flat, resolving things in an unlikely (in the impact it has on the main character) and unsatisfying conclusion.

Footnote: According to the reviewer at the Spectator, Barnes actually wrote an introduction to an edition of The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford.

Picture by the8rgrl

Books in the Public Domain

This is part two in a series on the best public domain e-books. Here is the first one, on fiction from 1800-1923! Today we are going to look at classical poetry, and I point out five books that I think are reasonably accessible for a modern audience, and what else to read if you like those.

My Top 5 Public Domain Poetry E-books (Classical to Early Modern periods)

1. The Odyssey by Homer

One(two)-sentence summary: A man leaves a 10-year-long war for a 10-year-long voyage home through several crazy situations. Also many guys are trying to marry his wife in his absence.

Why it’s here: It’s hard to think of public domain poetry and not think of Homer. Of course, there is The Iliad as well. It’s the book Alexander the Great took with him when he, you know, conquered the known world. Call me uncultured, but I’ve always enjoyed The Odyssey more. It’s the world’s first adventure tale. I think James Joyce would back me up on that preference.

If you like this, you may also like: The Iliad, obviously. It’s the first book, and it’s an extremely important book for western literature. Also The Aeneid, the story of the founding of Rome. Both are extremely important books for western culture.

Where you can find it: Epub/Nook, Kindle, and web browser

2. Hamlet by William Shakespeare

One(two)-sentence summary: A prince’s father is killed by his uncle who married his mother, so this obviously calls for revenge. Also there are pirates and sword fighting.

Why it’s here: Well, this seems to be the most accessible Shakespeare play, but they are all pretty great. It is engaging, and it doesn’t let up at all. Everything that you think might happen ends up happening, plus pirates and several other things that just kind of come out of nowhere. There are incredibly famous quotes throughout, and it just won’t let you down if you are looking to try out poetry.

If you like this, you may also like: Already read it? Try Macbeth, already read that? Try A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Already read both of those? Try The Tempest. Already read those three? Well, you should just read whatever you want, then, big shot.

Where you can find it: Epub/Nook, Kindle, and browser

3. Agamemnon by Aeschylus

One-sentence summary: What happens to the famous king when he gets home from the Trojan War – an excellent tale of how we can’t escape fate, even when a prophetess is screaming in your face.

Why it’s here: I was about to pick Oedipus Rex because that’s a great place to start, but it seems like everyone has read that one. Also, I didn’t want to just go down the canon list with this post, so here’s something similar that you might enjoy. This one deals with the same themes, but without all the incest and eye-gouging. Just nice clean murder and adultery. That being said, if you haven’t read Oedipus Rex, read that too.

If you like this, you may also like: Sophocles, Aeschylus, and Euripides are the three big names in ancient Greek plays. All of their plays are pretty short and ultimately worth a read. I will say, though, that you can find more modern translations of these plays on the cheap at your local book store. I was perusing these, and the “thees” and “thous” I was coming across were starting to get to me. I suppose that’s what you get with pre-1920s poetry, though…

Where you can find it: Epub/Nook, Kindle, and browser

4. The Inferno by Dante Alighieri

One-sentence summary: A guy goes to hell, purgatory, and heaven to see some cool, progressively less cool, and very boring (respectively) things.

Why it’s here: Everyone’s favorite hellish story, often talked about, hardly read. Most people leave behind the politics of the time, the poetry references, and the giant metaphors and just focus on the cool ways all of the sins are punished. And they are right to do so, it’s very creative and entertaining in an oddly pseudo-sadistic way. That being said, move on to a different author after Inferno. The Divine Comedy gets subsequently more boring as the books progress, until you are in heaven and it’s just a long explanation of medieval philosophy.

If you like this, you may also like: I honestly don’t know what to recommend. Probably Paradise Lost, by John Milton. It follows a semi-Biblical narrative in the epic poetry form.

Where you can find it: Epub, Kindle, Nook, and browser

5. The Prose Edda by Snorri Sturluson

One-sentence summary: The book on Norse Mythology (and why you should seriously just kill Loki. You know the end of the world is coming, and you know he will be the one to start it, but no, just tie him up and leave him somewhere. I’m sure that will all work out just fine).

Why it’s here: I was pretty torn between this, Paradise Lost, and The Canterbury Tales for the final book. Also, I’m well aware this is not technically poetry. That being said, it is an awesome book. Its predecessor and reference book, The Poetic Edda, is the reason why this is on the list. I would have put that on there, but it is just way, way too convoluted, doubly so because there aren’t any good epub or mobi files that aren’t half garbage. Also, just ignore that this tries to shoehorn Norse mythology into both the Bible and Greco-Roman history. It seems like all the books in the middle ages tried to do this. It ends after the first few pages. Also, this is where Tolkien got the name “Gandalf,” so how could you not want to read it?

If you like this, you may also like: The Saga of the Volsungs, another ridiculous legendary Norse story that holds up surprisingly well.

Where you can find it: Epub/Nook, Kindle, and browser

This list was pretty easy, I know, and no one is going to say, “ZOMG, SHAKESPEARE? I had no idea about that guy! Thanks!” This started as a list for all-time poetry, but there was too much great stuff all over for me to just make a top five for all time. I’ll come back and do post-renaissance, but even that might take me two posts more. Really, just look at this as a reminder of the good classical poetry out there and a nice way to get started in the genre.

Also, with all of these, there isn’t any shame in reading the Sparknotes alongside the text. These are dense, and sometime understanding relies on cultural and literary references that we just may not know. Unless you are a gentleman and were educated in a 19th century English boarding school and know Greek and Latin.

Stay tuned next time for non-fiction (for real this time)!

Which public domain books would you include on the list? Disagree with any of the above? Let me know in the comments!

Picture at the top by Adafruit

Wait, so you mean to tell me "the tiger's wife" is just an abstract description and this isn't a cat love story? Huh... that's, uh, a little misleading...

Why I couldn’t finish

I was a little dubious beginning this. I knew little about the plot or what I was getting myself into. All the descriptions I’ve read have made the story seem a little ambling; it has seemed to be just a loose series of themes connected by a few characters. The writing seemed strong right away, so I decided to give it a shot. I gave it over 100 pages before calling it quits. Here’s why.

Descriptions

Obreht is an excellent writer. Really descriptive, bordering on poetic at times. Done well, this kind of writing leads to an immersive, experiential reading. Done even slightly less well, it can lead to a wordy, seemingly padded book where you are just trying to get through pages of (albeit great) description to where something happens. Take the following quote, for example:

Somebody had fastened a bent hose onto the faucet, and it hung, nozzle down, from the boiler pipes, coughing thin streams of water onto the floor. It must have been going for hours: water was everywhere, flooding the tile grooves and pooling around the rims of the squat toilets, dripping over the doorstep and into the dried-up garden behind the shack. None of this fazed the bathroom attendant, a middle-aged woman with an orange scarf tied around her hair, whom I had found dozing in a corner chair and dismissed from the room with a handful of bills, afraid of what those seven missed beeper pages from my grandma meant before I even picked up the receiver.

Are you in a run-down bathroom in an eastern European country? Isn’t it great how much you know about all of this? Well, it has almost nothing to do with the plot. Now let me just say that not everything in a book has to be related to a central story. There can be ancillary decriptions and details, even entire characters and events, that don’t necessarily build directly into the main story. That being said, they should do something, and while I was reading The Tiger’s Wife, the plot-focused parts shared about equal time with actual events in the novel, and that just got to be a bit too much.

It’s an incredibly fine line, but when I got to be scanning the pages coming up and not only seeing no dialogue, but no real narrative events whatsoever, well, I knew it was time to write another one of these posts.

For me, it was similar to reading Charles Dickens. Love him or hate him, you can’t argue that his writing contains high levels of realism and description. This is Obreht’s first book, and I can sort of agree with some of the reviewers that her writing came off a bit too polished.

What’s there to like?

Well, the whole idea of the tiger’s wife and the deathless man were pretty interesting, and the characterizations of the grandfather and the deathless man stood out to me as well-rounded and almost humorous

The whole book takes place in a fictional country in the Balkans. It is a pretty different sort of world, and if you enjoy experiencing that through a lot of description, you might enjoy this book more than I did.

Distance: 30% on Kindle (100+ pages)

Picture by Hey Christine

The Story

The story starts with an older woman at an art show in the 1960s with her husband, and she sees some pictures of a man she used to know, one of him rich and well-dressed, and the other of him in rags. She explains it as a riches to rags story, and starts talking about 1938.

Katey Kontent and her friend Evey are young and poor in New York, secretaries working living in a boardinghouse, they want to move up in the city. They meet Tinker in a bar, and their lives change, for better or for worse, in ways they never could have imagined.

The Characters

Katey Kontent

A down-to-earth girl that whose progression takes her from naivity to a wordliness. Straying dangerously close to being a bit of an annoying diva like Evey, her evolution (and Tinker’s and Eve’s devolution) are the closest things we get to a plot. I found her to be easy to understand throughout most of the novel, and she seems relatively realistic. She’s the normal person when cast against Eve and Tinker’s madness.

Eve

The free-wheeling best friend of Katey who sees her life not really come out according to her plan. I found her to be a bit over-the-top, especially in speech, though I suspect she was supposed to be. Her plot is surprisingly short-lived, though realistic in its ending.

Tinker

The enigmatic rich guy with a past who is simultaneous more and less than he appears. This trope is played straight throughout the book, and he’s strongly reminiscent of Jay Gatsby.

Writing/Themes/Plot

Usually I separate these sections, but they are all so interwoven in Rules of Civility that I really don’t know where to make the distinction. I’ll talk about how it’s written, and what that means for the themes.

Framing, Modernism, and Nostalgia

Like many modernist novels, this is framed withing the story of an older person reminiscing on an important time in his/her life. In fact, nostalgia is a strong theme throughout the novel. Katey remembers her father saying,

Old times, as my father used to say: If you’re not careful, they’ll gut you like a fish

and this book is like a love story to a type of novel that doesn’t really exist very much anymore. There’s nostalgia in Katey for the 1930s, to be sure, but there’s also nostalgia in the writer, it seems, for the time of Hemingway and Fitzgerald.

There are so many references to early 20th century literature that I am sure I’m missing some.

• The parties and New York are reminiscent of F. Scott Fitzgerald, and as I mentioned above, Tinker reminded me of Gatsby.
• I found Katey and Eve’s relationship similar to that of Charles Ryder and Sebastian Flyte in Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh.
• The framing narrative of telling a story about your early life reminds me of Brideshead, the modern modernist novel The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes, and, to a lesser degree, The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford.
• Overt references to Hemingway are peppered throughout the novel, but what reminded me of him was mainly the horse races (Farewell to Arms, various short stories, and Movable Feast) and the Spanish Civil War and its consequences for one character (For Whom the Bell Tolls).
• The substitution of dashes for quotation marks reminded me of James Joyce
• Various mentions of Cezanne and other modernist artists and the foundation they established for modern art
• I’ve read that the book is reminiscent of Edith Wharton, though I haven’t read anything by her…

Becoming Sophisticated

The main plot of the novel is also one of the main themes. There seems to be a movement by both Katey and Tinker to and from sophistication, respectively. Katey moves more and more into the upper class as the novel progresses, while Tinker moves away from it, though it’s a little difficult to pin down exactly what the novel seems to think about this. While high-class characters such as (to an extent) Eve and others are portrayed as either ridiculous of detached from reality, the book seems to favor Katey’s ascent.

To contrast, it also seems to favor Tinker’s willing descent into poverty as semi-romantic and praiseworthy, that he is giving up this false life as a rich man to live as a humble dockworker. Granted, his riches were gained by him essentially prostituting himself, so he really was living a false life. Perhaps the book is speaking on how wealth is either good or bad, depending on the purpose and the person behind it.

I personally felt this plot point was handled a little unevenly and came out unclear. In addition, as the main thread holding the novel together, since apart from that its just a story of a year in someone’s life, with all the experiences – connected or disconnected as they may be – that accompany that. The framing of the story from the 1960s sure sets it up as the story of Tinker and Katey’s changes, but with only a few mentions every 30-50 pages or so, I’m not sure the story came off as that compelling.

Critical Method: Gender

I’m going to start using some of the critical methods listed in the previous post to look at modern novels, and this one seemed appropriate.

The mere fact that this book is set in the 1930s and contains an upwardly-mobile woman is interesting, if only because it plays against most of our perceptions of the era. Even by the 1960s, it’s not incredibly difficult to imagine the upwardly-mobile Katey at a good position in life, but it did seem a little strange that she dealt with virtually no discrimination either for her independence, upward-mobility, or her dating choices.

Perhaps the author didn’t want to make it a part of the novel, but rather wanted 1930s New York to exist in a modern context. Maybe he was just making a gender-blind novel, where people were people and it didn’t matter what culture or time period they were in. Or maybe he just overlooked it. Regardless, it’s interesting to think about.

Overall

I give this book at 84%. It’s an interesting book for the time period it’s set in and the writing styles it uses, though it comes off a little uneven in terms of plot and its portrayal of gender issues.

Picture by Jeanne-Erin

Intro to Literary Criticism

Have you ever read something and just hated it, but then, looking back, couldn’t think of a single reason why you didn’t like it? Are you in a book club or talking to your friends about a book, and having a hard time coming up with a better thought than, “well, the book was pretty good because the main character wasn’t boring.” You have insights into stories that are valuable and uniquely your own, and an understanding of literary criticism is a great way to understand and develop what you think.

Why Criticize?

Literary criticism can give us the structure by which we can understand all sorts of narratives. From Ulysses to a 19th century poem about a giant block of cheese, the better a framework we have for viewing literature, the more capable we are of understanding it and writing about it. This isn’t just true for stodgy old books, but can carry over to every aspect of your life. Our lives are defined by narratives and stories of all sorts, and being about to understand and communicate about them is a very worthwhile talent to develop.

What about the Magic?

I’ve heard many people say something to the effect of “if I learn how to think about books in a critical way, it will take all the magic and fun of reading out of it for me.” If ignorance equals magic, then yeah, you will lose some of that. Before we understood electrons, lightning was Zeus’s archery practice, but I think we can all agree that we are better off. In a different sense, literature is more powerful the more you know. The story is still there, and you can still be caught up by it, but being able to see all the other building blocks can make for a much more meaningful experience. In addition, you already have a way you understand stories – however well or poorly defined that may be – so these are just a few of the more established ways of looking at them.

The Use of Different Critical Methods

I’m going to be going off of Steven Lynn’s Texts and Contexts for this series, a great intro book that I recommend to anyone who wants to know more about this subject. In it he describes the different literary theories as travel agencies. When going to London, you can take a tour of Shakespeare’s London, you can view royal London, or you can go on the “pubs of London” tour and have a fun experience you might not remember. The point is that, for all of them, you are in the same city but getting vastly different perspectives.

For books, let’s use The Hunger Games as an example. You can look at the book from the perspective of its use of Roman history and the subjugation of the districts, you can look at it for its attitudes on social change and gender, or, for the really ambitious, you might even be able to turn it around and describe how the president is the protagonist (“good guy”). These are all discussing the same book, but they are all very different ways of looking at it.

Some Critical Methods

The following are some of the critical methods I will be talking about over the following weeks:

1. New Criticism: The idea that all texts have an basic unity and how every feature can contribute to the understanding of it. Understanding of the author and any intent s/he may have is taken out of the equation for this one.
2. Reader-response Criticism: What the reader thinks and how s/he responds is the most important factor in this type of criticism. Without the reader, the text would be meaningless, and how the reader thinks about the text from moment-to-moment is often a big part of this type of criticism
3. Structuralist and Deconstructive Criticism: Dichotomies (good/evil, woman/man, black/white) are explored, many times being reversed. This is what I had in mind above when talking about the Capitol in the Hunger Games being good. This theory holds that all meaning is essentially unstable (and we are all going to die sad and alone).
4. Historical/Post-colonial/Cultural studies criticism: Using ideas of history and the author’s place in it to understand the text. It also talks about how real life can shape and inform stories. In some sense, this is what I was talking about about with the Roman history/subjugation interpretation.
5. Gender and sexual orientation criticism: It is exactly how it sounds, and it uses the reader’s personal perspective as well as his/her and the book’s place in history to understand the text. It is often concerned with social change.

Stay tuned (or whatever the internet equivalent of “tuned” is)

The Public Domain and Why You Can Read For Free

Copyright law is very confusing. Not patent-law confusing, but still. All you need to know for this post is that (basically) anything published before 1923 is considered to be in the public domain. What this means for books is that the vast majority of written works are absolutely free for you to do whatever you want with. This has always been the case, but, up until the last decade, if you wanted to read any of these works you had to sit and stare at your laptop for hours on end or own a printing press. With the proliferation of e-readers, tablets, and smart phones, free public domain works are finally accessible.

There are a lot of free books out there, though, and sometimes it’s hard to know what’s good and what’s not. That’s why I’m starting this series to talk about which classic e-books I enjoy the most* and that might appeal to a modern audience.

My Top 5 Public Domain Fiction E-books (1800-1923)

1. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas, père (unabridged)

One-sentence summary: A man is wrongly imprisoned, though escapes to become the heir of an immense fortune, and he uses that fortune in a calculated revenge against those who betrayed him.

Why it’s here: Not only is this my favorite free e-book, it cracks the top five of my all-time favorite books. A story of revenge and redemption that holds up surprisingly well, it has everything – adventure, intrigue, romance, etc. You can read it for its face-value revenge story or delve into it for deeper themes, regardless, it doesn’t disappoint. One reservation I have recommending it is because it is extremely long (which is why the e-book version is nice), clocking in at around 1,200 pages. That being said, if you are willing to invest the time to read it, it is a very satisfying book. I only recommend this book if you are going to read the unabridged version.

If you like this, you may also like: The Three Musketeers by Dumas. It almost made this list, but I didn’t want to have two books by the same author. More of a swashbuckling adventure than “Count”, and some people might see that as a good thing.

Where you can find it: Epub/Nook, Kindle, and web browser

2. Dubliners by James Joyce

One-sentence summary: A collection of short stories regarding the lives of people living in Dublin, Ireland – from early childhood to death – in the early 20th century.

Why it’s here: Joyce’s much more accessible predecessor to, well, all of his other novels, these stories are a joy to read, and they a great way to get your feet wet with modernism and 20th century literature in general. Some of the stories are easier than others, but they are all rewarding. My personal favorites are Araby, A Little Cloud, Clay, and The Dead, though it was pretty hard for me to choose. If you only read one, be sure to read The Dead.

If you like this, you may also like: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by Joyce. The next step up in terms of difficulty, this is a novel written by Joyce about his semi-autobiographical character Stephen Dedalus. If you really like Portrait, take a crack at Ulysses, though do so with plenty of help from Sparknotes (there’s no shame in that), because that book is incredibly dense.

Where you can find it: Epub/Nook, Kindle, and browser

3. The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy

One-sentence summary: Ivan is dying – slowly – and is forced to come to terms with the purposelessness of his life and the legacy he will leave behind.

Why it’s here: A profound and moving novella about the purpose of life and death. A book that will force you to take a look at your own life and what it means to you and those around you, though written (or translated) in such a way that it makes for a an easy read. Yes, there are better Russian works, but this is a nice introduction and a thought provoking story to boot. Beware the long, often confusing Russian names, though.

If you like this, you may also like: Notes from the Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, to get you more into Russian literature (which has held up surprisingly well), then possibly move on to the denser, longer works such as Crime and Punishment by Dostoyevsky, and The Brothers Karamazov and The Idiot by Tolstoy.

Where you can find it: All formats (click the drop down menu under “download” to the right)

4. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

One-sentence summary: Everyone’s favorite master detective who uses his genius and deductive (really inductive) logic to solve cases.

Why it’s here: Really any Sherlock Holmes book will do, but this is the one with which I started. I can’t really add anything to what you already know about Holmes. They are fun stories (much lighter than the first three books I’ve chosen), and there’s a reason they’ve not only been redone hundreds of times but he’s become a trope that’s worked its way into Western culture for year and years. The books have held up exceptionally well, and they are still very entertaining.

If you like this, you may also like: The massive amount of Sherlock Holmes stories out there. Really, you can read and read until you are absolutely tired of him. I’ve also heard The House of Silk by Anthony Horowitz is a good continuation of the Holmes stories. (It’s really well-reviewed)

Where you can find it: Epub, Kindle, Nook, and browser

5. The Time Machine by H.G. Wells

One-sentence summary: A mysterious time traveler builds a machine that takes him into the distant future where he sees the far-reaching consequences of his societal structure.

Why it’s here: The book that coined the term “time machine” can’t really be overlooked if you haven’t read it already. Once again, a fun adventure story or a good book to look at the deeper themes (apparently Wells was a socialist). Don’t let the terrible movie with Guy Pearce scare you away, it’s actually a pretty good book, though much lighter on plot than the movie. I would almost as strongly recommend  The War of the Worlds, but I enjoyed The Time Machine just a little more.

If you like this, you may also like: The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells. Note, this is the story where the man is literally invisible, not the Robert Ellison story about racial identity. The guy in Wells’s book is a huge jerk, but it’s ultimately worth a read.

Where you can find it: Epub/Nook, Kindle, and browser

There are my top five free e-books. Of course, these are not the five absolute best fiction books ever written (such a list would be ridiculous) but five of the e-books I found fun/meaningful and which I think would be engaging to a modern audience.

I plan on making this into a series, so stay tuned next time for non-fiction!

Which public domain books would you include on the list? Disagree with any of the above? Let me know in the comments!

*Obviously these recommendations are based on my opinion and personal interests.

Picture at the top by Adafruit

“Square and stackable braaaaaaains”

The story:

Zombies have taken over the world, and people are starting to take it back. We follow Mark Spitz (the narrator’s nickname, not the swimmer) as he goes across New York waxing philosophical and shooting zombies in the face in an orderly effort to take back civilization.

Why I couldn’t finish

The Plot

Or lack thereof. I get it, literary fiction is purposefully not strong on plot, relying more on character development, concepts, and strength of writing. This is supposed to be a hybrid between a genre novel and literary novel, and that comes through. I, however, couldn’t see any reason for me to keep reading. The zombie apocalypse portion of the story was one we have heard time and again, and it is better told elsewhere. The only reason to keep reading this book, then, would be the main character and the strength of the writing.

The Characters

I’m learning more and more that the tone of the narrator is a very important part of the work. It’s what killed “Ready Player One” for me, and it was a nail in the coffin of “Zone One”. Unlike “Ready Player One”, though, this narrator was far too dry and reserved. He made pithy, clever observations here and there, but the distance between him and the reader was too much for me. Perhaps we were supposed to grow with the narrator over time, and maybe he would leave the safe, emotionless shell he created for himself and we’d all be richer for the experience, or whatever. I just didn’t want to take that dour, plot-bare journey.

What’s To Like?

Certain aspects of the main character are likeable. His musings, for example, are interesting.

Whitehead is a talented writer, too, and I’ll probably go on to read other things by him. He’s a really exceptional writer who can take everyday observations and re-frame them in such a way that you see an object and think about the things with which it’s associated differently. Unfortunately, everything else seemed to be working against him in “Zone One”.

Distance into book: 15% (reading on a Kindle – probably 45 pages in print)

Recommend instead: “World War Z” by Max Brooks. It’s much lighter on the literary side of things, but a solid zombie apocalypse and recovery story with many interesting narrators.

Of course, once again, I would love to be wrong about this book. I enjoy zombie stories as well as literary fiction, so this seemed like another safe bet. Did I need to give it more than 45 pages? Did you appreciate the dry main character and (somewhat-rehashed) plot? Let me know in the comments!

Top image by Debbie Ramone

A change in focus

I began this late last year as a way to fill a gap – I had finally exhausted my backlog of classics I wanted to read and was forced, for the first time in a long time, to look at current fiction if I wanted to keep reading. There didn’t seem to be much of a way to tell what was good and what wasn’t. There are Amazon reviews, but those are too easily corruptible, and the more reviews a book gets, the more it trends toward ~4 stars, anyway. I tried looking at various newspapers, but they were mainly concerned with flexing their literary muscles and not really telling me if the book was worth my time, except in maybe 1-2 sentences per review. Then an idea came to me – why not make up a Rotten Tomatoes-style website for books? There was nothing really out there at the time, and so I took the plunge. On December 5, 2011, I started up the site.

Why we’re not doing that anymore

The short:

It’s extremely tedious and time consuming and no one reads them, anyway.

The long:

I don’t think it’s a reliable metric for determining the quality of a book. You see, I had the wrong ideas about book reviewers. I thought they were the gatekeepers of the literary realm, where a few worthy books would shine through while the rest would be articulately torn apart. In reality, they seem far nicer than I thought. Nearly every review, to some extent, either focused too much on summarizing the books or spent way too much time flexing their literary muscles. I wanted to know if this book is worth mine (and everyone else’s) time, not just a deep read on certain aspects of one character.

Remember Omnivore.co.uk’s prize this year talking about the most ruthless reviews? Well, anecdotally, I almost never came across scathing reviews, and a book had to be truly terrible for me to find more than one critic who absolutely hated the book. From a data perspective, I expected there to be a bell curve centered on 50-65, then taping off in either direction (this is after I had been compiling reviews for 6 months and knew they would be more on the positive site). Oddly enough, here is what came out when I made a graph with the data.

As you can see from these data, the bell sits nicely at around 85%. It’s almost funny how good these reviews are. There are almost more reviews in the 90-100% range than there are from 0-50%. When the majority of reviewers love the majority of books, can you really call that criticism? The other book review aggregators have this problem as well. A quick glance at any of their sites, and they either recommend the majority of books they review, or their metric is so high so as to exclude books that really should be considered “good” (I mean really, should a book with as high as a 59% approval be dismissed outright?). I understand that this is a limited sample – they are only books that 1) have been published, 2) are big enough to have 10+ professional reviews, and 3) are only from 2011-2012 (though I don’t think that was necessarily a landmark time in literature when all the books that came out were amazing, do you?). That being said, I think these data reflect poorly on the state of professional book criticism today.

There’s also the issue of quantity when coming up with an aggregated review. I have been able to find around 15 professional (newspapers, review sites, basically anything except blogs) reviews per book, maybe more, maybe fewer. Without delving into the world of blogs, this is around the maximum I could hope to achieve, especially with new fiction.

For anyone hoping to easily look up professional book reviews, I’ve made a custom Google search. Feel free to use it to your heart’s content. It searches 100+ news and review sites. It’s probably good for news and any other sorts of reviews as well.

The quality of an aggregated review is based on three factors: the number or reviews, the quality of reviews (though this is mitigated by the first), and the judgment of the one reading the reviews. Ideally these factors should balance each other out, but there does exist some room for bias on the part of the reviewer. I tried to be fair (if at times a little harsh on the books to try to combat the above graph), but just keep in mind that when you are reading an aggregated review, you are not necessarily reading hard science, but someone’s opinion about what certain reviewers say cloaked in math.

How should I know what books are good?

Well, try to read them, and talk to your friends. If you aren’t sure if you like it, give it 50 pages and if you aren’t itching to get back to it, pick up a new one. Books are far more nuanced and personal than movies, and so I think it’s harder to rely on what “everyone” else thinks. They are longer and require more time, and emotional, commitment.

That being said, if you really want to go to the internet for book advice, I’d read what the bloggers have to say. In all the aggregated reviews I did, the blogger roundups were the most critical and informative. They are people passionate about their niche and interests, and I would heed what they say more than the professionals.

In that light, I’m converting this site to a book review blog. I’ll be posting reviews of books that I enjoy (or don’t enjoy), and we’ll just go from there. If there are other things you’d like to see, let me know and I’ll see if I can include them. I don’t think the aggregated reviews will be missed, though – the traffic here didn’t really take off until I started doing my own reviews, and they are the most-read pages on the site.

I’ll keep the aggregated reviews up, but there won’t be any more of them from here on out.

If you want aggregated book reviews, here are some sites that do that, in my perceived order of worth:

1. The Bookscore
2. Dream
3. Critics and Writers
4. Omnivore

 Picture by Michael Dales

Before we begin: I want to apologize to all twelve of my readers for my absence. I got married and am applying to graduate school, so naturally some things had to fall into the background, and unfortunately this blog was one of them. I’m going to refocus this blog off aggregated reviews and onto normal book reviews since those are far and away the most read things on this site and they are much more enjoyable for me to write.

The Review:

Time travel (check). 1960s (check). Using vaguely-defined sci-fi to rewrite history and get to take a thoughtful look at an alternate timeline (check). Roads (nope, where they’re going they don’t need them, since the time machine is a wormhole in a diner’s storeroom).

I must mention that this is the first Stephen King book I’ve ever read, and I was pleasantly surprised.

The Story:

Everyman Jake lives in Maine. Jake’s friend the diner owner develops cancer seemingly overnight. Unlike most restaurant owners, Al has a “wormhole” in his diner’s freezer that transports him back to 1958 every time he steps into it, and when he comes back, no matter how long he spent in the past, only two minutes have passed in 2011. Jake takes a dry run with gruesome consequences. He decides to go back, not just to get really cheap food, but to try to stop the Kennedy assassination. The only catch? To do so, he has to live in the past for 5 years…

The Characters

Jacob Epping/George Amberson

Jake is an “everyman,” and we are meant to see him that way. He’s fleshed out to the extent that we can see him as a distinct character, but his reactions to things are so normal that they could be our reactions. He’s relatable, and compared to the relatively less relatable 1960s and some of the characters that inhabit it, he’s a welcome character. He develops as much as you think he would, and the emotional payoff in the end for him is worth the time you spend with him.

Sadie Dunhill

A surprisingly likable character. Unlike peanut butter and chocolate, I don’t like my time travel stories mixed up with a love story, but this actually wasn’t bad. The love story subplot that eventually becomes the plot of the novel, they were both relatable characters, and the story was convincing. It also added some tension to the main plot of the novel.

Lee Harvey Oswald

I thought Oswald was especially well done. You can’t make him relatable because, well, he murdered a president, but you also can’t have him as a purely evil character because, well, he wasn’t.  He has to talk and interact with characters, but how do you put words in the mouth of a historical figure? King handles it well because, while on some level you, yes, pity Oswald, you never get close enough to the character to fully understand him or what led to that book depository. He’s held just far enough away from us that we see what he’s doing, pity him based on his terrible (mostly self-inflicted) life, but never think he’s even remotely justified.

Plot/Content

Have you read “It”? Because if you haven’t, you’ll need to at least read the Wikipedia synopsis to understand some of the references in the first 100 pages of the book.

Who needs all of space and time when you can just keep going back to the same afternoon in 1958?

Pacing

The book did a good job of not getting too slow, though it got a bit fat in the middle in terms of side plots, e.g. the crazy ex-boyfriend and the high school musical. It can be forgiven, though, because when it got moving, it got moving. The last 100 pages or so are excellent, and King really put a lot of thought into what would have happened if Kennedy hadn’t died on 11/22/63.

The End

I was pleasantly surprised by the post-apocalyptic world to which Jake returns. The whole book I was concerned there wouldn’t be the payoff of seeing what would happen if Kennedy wasn’t killed, or maybe just getting some spare headlines or something, but the book really delivered. Having Harry “this-is-the-darkest-timeline” Dunning (can that guy ever catch a break) deliver the lengthy political exposition of what happened in the 50 years since Jake saved the president was a nice touch as well.

The Magic Gatekeepers (with their magic leathery sanity cards)

My one gripe is that I wish King had left the mechanism behind the magic freezer portal to the past semi-secret. Isn’t it enough that the world is falling apart politically? Did we really need some sort of consequence where, because Kennedy is alive, the world is being destroyed via earthquake? I don’t think so, but then again, I’m just the reader.

Themes

I thought the idea that somehow our current timeline is the one where something has gone horribly wrong was very interesting. We’ve lived with the Kennedy assassination and its effects for so long that it doesn’t seem like something gone horribly wrong (though it was horrible) leading to this world we live in, but something that has just happened. It was fun to imagine that this isn’t the best of all possible worlds, but instead there’s a possible world where the Vietnam war never happened…and all that.

I also appreciate how this concept was subverted, making it look like the Kennedy assassination was, in an extremely complicated sense, not the worst thing that could have happened. The hell Jake returns to makes us wonder what bad things happen every day that, while we may not see the purpose immediately or even judge them as bad, might ultimately still work out for the best.

Writing

Being previously unexposed to King’s Americana-esque style (plain English, relatively simple words, normal people), it was pretty fun. I picked up “Under the Dome” next, though, and only got about 20 pages into that one. After 900 pages of “11/22/63”, I realized I needed a break from King for a little while. My next book by King is either “Salem’s Lot” or “Needful Things”.

Overall

Excellent historical science fiction set in the 1960s, a bit slow in the middle and expository on the workings of the magic diner time wormhole, but those weren’t enough to weigh down the book’s many positive aspects.

Picture by Rooners

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‘I am Forbidden’ by Anouk Markovitz
A+ Excellent (97%)	Summary of the Reviews:
	Despite being about a closed-off community of Hassidic Jews, this is a sad and powerful story is surprisingly relatable for the world at large – many of the reviewers said they wept when they read it.
	ISBN: 978-0307984739, Pages: 320

Fiction | Literary Fiction | Historical Fiction | Judaism

THE BOOK JACKET: A family is torn apart by fierce belief and private longing in this unprecedented journey deep inside the most insular sect of Hasidic Jews, the Satmar. Opening in 1939 Transylvania, five-year-old Josef witnesses the murder of his family by the Romanian Iron Guard and is rescued by a Christian maid to be raised as her own son. Five years later, Josef rescues a young girl, Mila, after her parents are killed while running to meet the Rebbe they hoped would save them. Josef helps Mila reach Zalman Stern, a leader in the Satmar community, in whose home Mila is raised as a sister to Zalman’s daughter, Atara. With the rise of communism in central Europe, the family moves to Paris, to the Marais, where Zalman tries to raise his children apart from the city in which they live. Mila’s faith intensifies, while her beloved sister Atara discovers a world of books and learning that she cannot ignore. A beautifully crafted, emotionally gripping story of what happens when unwavering love, unyielding law, and centuries of tradition collide, I Am Forbidden announces the arrival of an extraordinarily gifted new voice and opens a startling window on a world closed to most of us. Read an excerpt View this book on Amazon

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‘Sacre Bleu’ by Christopher Moore
A Excellent (86%)	Summary of the Reviews:
	An irreverent, debauched historical comedy about impressionists, most of the reviewers found it brilliant, and the few issues found in it were a slightly lagging main story and juvenile humor.
	ISBN: 978-0061779749, Pages: 416

Fiction | Historical Fiction | Supernatural | 1800s

THE BOOK JACKET: A rollicking tale that features special printed map endpapers and more than two dozen masterpieces of art throughout the book, Sacre Bleu is better than a day at the museum! It is the color of the Virgin Mary’s cloak, a dazzling pigment desired by artists, an exquisite hue infused with danger, adventure, and perhaps even the supernatural. It is . . . Sacre Bleu In July 1890, Vincent van Gogh went into a cornfield and shot himself. Or did he? Why would an artist at the height of his creative powers attempt to take his own life . . . and then walk a mile to a doctor’s house for help? Who was the crooked little “color man” Vincent had claimed was stalking him across France? And why had the painter recently become deathly afraid of a certain shade of blue? These are just a few of the questions confronting Vincent’s friends—baker-turned-painter Lucien Lessard and bon vivant Henri Toulouse-Lautrec—who vow to discover the truth about van Gogh’s untimely death. Their quest will lead them on a surreal odyssey and brothel-crawl deep into the art world of late nineteenth-century Paris. Oh la la, quelle surprise, and zut alors! A delectable confection of intrigue, passion, and art history—with cancan girls, baguettes, and fine French cognac thrown in for good measure—Sacre Bleu is another masterpiece of wit and wonder from the one, the only, Christopher Moore. Read an excerpt View this book on Amazon

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‘They Eat Puppies, Don’t They?’ by Christopher Buckley
B Above Average (80%)	Summary of the Reviews:
	A satire concerned with avoiding war with China, most found the book pretty humorous, though a main issue was that the politics of the book already feel dated, as the story takes place in the Bush era and the political climate has already changed immensely.
	ISBN: 978-0446540971, Pages: 335

Fiction | Politics | China | Satire

THE BOOK JACKET: In an attempt to gain congressional approval for a top-secret weapons system, Washington lobbyist “Bird” McIntyre teams up with sexy, outspoken neocon Angel Templeton to pit the American public against the Chinese. When Bird fails to uncover an authentic reason to slander the nation, he and Angel put the Washington media machine to work, spreading a rumor that the Chinese secret service is working to assassinate the Dalai Lama. Meanwhile in China, mild-mannered President Fa Mengyao and his devoted aide Gang are maneuvering desperately against sinister party hard-liners Minister Lo and General Han. Now Fa and Gang must convince the world that the People’s Republic is not out to kill the Dalai Lama, while maintaining Fa’s small margin of power in the increasingly militaristic environment of the party. On the home front, Bird must contend with a high-strung wife who entertains Olympic equestrian ambition, and the qualifying competition happens to be taking place in China. As things unravel abroad, Bird and Angel’s lie comes dangerously close to reality. And as their relationship rises to a new level, so do mounting tensions between the United States and China Read an excerpt View this book on Amazon

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