bibliobonobo

The personal story of Mark Tewksbury, Canadian Olympic gold medalist. While his story of being a gay athlete in conservative Alberta is interesting, his tales of the politics in the International Olympic Committee are even more interesting to me, and a bit sad, because I have always kind of liked the Olympics. The book also brings up an interesting issue of identity, in that many of Tewksbury's colleagues did not have a problem with him being gay, but still insisted that he never make a point of it in any business setting...
Also enlightening to learn how difficult it is to be a openly gay athlete, still to this day.

A quirky but good little read. I am just going to quote the publisher's blurb from back of the book to give a sense of what it is about: 
             The highly original satire about Oedipa Maas, a woman who finds herself enmeshed in a worldwide conspiracy, meets 
             some extremely interesting characters, and attains a not inconsiderable amount of self-knowledge.

A quick read of the article on Thomas Pynchon on Wikipedia also shows he has a most interesting story as an author... maybe as quirky and unbelievable as this book...

I think it is university textbook week, because the last two works I have read both fall into the category of books that are potentially used as textbooks. This work is about the effects of printing in the culture of early Modern Europe. This book is actually an abridgement of a two volume work called The Printing Press as an Agent of Change. 

I really enjoyed the first part of the book, which discussed the initial changes that took place after printing shops are established in the fifteenth century. The second half of the book, which looks at the effect of the printing press on the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the rise of modern science, should have been interesting, but was not particularly stimulating. I confess I stopped reading the book for about a week and the last part was a slog to complete. The second part was too ambling and Eisenstein spends much of it providing copious examples to prove her points, but I just found that she was actually not making any coherant arguments that I could clearly follow. Oh well. Go printing press, I guess.

 My undergraduate degree is in anthropology, so this book was immediately interesting to me because it is a type of "ethnography" about Dettwyler's -- who is a biocultural anthropologist -- fieldwork experiences in Mali. Actually I am loathe to call this book an ethnography, because I don't really think it is. I would certainly welcome the author's response to how her book should be categorized. 

At any rate, I digress, since this is a fabulous anthopological work. In my studies of anthropology I had to read several books about fieldwork experiences, and they were dry, overbearingly superior, and overall, not that meaningful. As a student, I couldn't really believe wholeheartedly in the completely relativistic participant-observer anthropologist doing this amazing fieldwork while still being able to analyze a culture other than his or her own.

So this book is refreshing because the author is quite honest about her emotions and her own cultural biases and is not ashamed to write about them, which is a good lesson to any student of anthropology. I discussed this work with the person who recommended to me, who had to read it for an anthropology class, and I believe we both ended up agreeing that this was a better way to practise anthropology than the more distant, uninvolved anthropological work students often end up studying. We also discussed whether or not there was a point to doing fieldwork at all, since often the result seems to indicate that very little can be done to change how other people live their lives. I suppose that's not the point either. I guess I will be naive enough to hope that anthropologists like Dettwyler can and should make a difference in the lives of the people they conduct research with.

 Ahhh... Kurt Vonnegut. His work is bizaare but also refreshing and often quite barbed in its social commentary. This work is a tale of the world after a major apocalypse of disease. I don't know what much else I can say except that reading this reminds me that I need to read more Vonnegut in the future.

 A compelling novel that provides the possible background behind an incident briefly mentioned about in Genesis. The novel is written from the point-of-view of Dinah, who is the only daughter of Jacob and sister to all those sons that sing so gleefully in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. 

It is a fascinating novel because it provides such rich detail about the lives of these Biblical characters, especially the women.
If only all of the Bible were like this, I might actually want to read it.

 I'm posting two today because this one is a play! And plays are much easier to read than 400+ pages novels! And they take less time, too. Why can't all the works on my list be this short. I have less than a month left to finish the list. Sigh.

I didn't know that Machiavelli wrote plays. This one is an amusing comedy demonstrating a clever way to get into a married woman's bed with the compliance of her husband and the Church.

 It's reputed (by the subtitle) to be 85% true. Spin journalist Chuck Klosterman embarks on a cross-country journey to places where musicians (mostly of the rock n' roll genre) have died, and seeks an answer to the question: "Does being a dead musician make you more important than if you are alive?" Or something like that. Along the way he makes wry commentary on pop culture. Quite funny. And then he talks to much about his relationships with three women. Quite annoying.

If you liked this book, a better read that has wry pop culture commentary is:
Polaroids from the Dead  Douglas Coupland (any of Coupland's non-fiction work is quite good, and any of the fiction from Generation X to Life After God is also fine, after that it is hit and miss).

 This book introduces the problem of how does one read a collected work of poetry? Do you buy a copy and keep it on your bookshelf and pull it out to read a random poem every once in awhile? Do you study the poems in-depth like you were taught to do in university? Do you read them out loud? Do you read the book from cover to cover, like a novel?

I don't have any answers for the question of how to read a collected work of poetry. I am going to read Philip Larkin's Collected Poems from cover to cover, probably a few poems a day, while reading something else.

I'm glad this book is on the list, and I am pleased with the person who recommended it. Because I have found that when soliciting for titles for my book list, I suspect that I sometimes get titles that people "think" I would like to read based on a presumption of my reading preferences. And so I'm glad someone recommended a title that many people would categorize as "popular," "beach/airplane reads," or even "trash." Sidney Sheldon is the kind of author university educated people are not supposed to admit to reading or, even worse, liking.

At this point I could go into a discussion of the validity of popular culture and literary popular culture, but I'm not going to. I took some interesting classes about the subject in university and I like to read Harlequin novels when I find the time. Let's leave it at that.

As for the book -- it's over the top and, quite simply, fabulous because of that fact. To give you an idea, in the first 70 or so pages of the book, our heroine, Tracy Whitney: 1) is pregnant and engaged to a fabulous wealthy man who appears to be amazing in all ways; 2) finds out her mother is forced to commit suicide because she was defrauded and the family company is bankrupt; 3) tries to take revenge on the man who defrauded her mother, only to find that he is part of a corrupt mob-run New Orleans; 
4) is wrongfully sentenced to prison by the above corrupted New Orleans court system; 5) is gang-raped and loses her child in prison; 5) becomes the beloved caretaker of the warden's young daughter; 6) hatches a plot to escape and take revenge on those who wrongfully imprisoned her...
And there are over 200 pages to go...
Amazing.