Tess of the D'Urbervilles (Thomas Hardy, 1891)

Once again, in the glow of completing another "classic", I must reflect back on my high school English curriculum. I went to a super-high-achieving public school, but I think all of the emphasis was on math and science. At least that would explain the disparity in my SAT scores. I don't remember a whole lot about my English classes. The last year I can recall doing grammar and vocabulary work was ninth grade, and the literature assigned was all over the map. I believe it was at the tender age of fourteen that Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles was dropped in my lap with little context, so it is no wonder I hated it and ignored it (except for the movie) for the next 26 years.

What I really needed to appreciate it, assuming there was any hope for me at that age, was an historical and a literary context. We didn't learn a thing about the Victorian era in Britain or anything about the role of Wessex in the course of British history. Maybe they were expecting another class to field that one. Secondly, there should have been a more cohesive order to the selection of books to be read. For me, it wasn't until much later that I thought of putting authors like Austen, Dickens, and Hardy on a chronology. What trends were they establishing or working against? How did they approach the writing process?

With Tess 2.0, I had a better sense of these things, plus no problem reading the endnotes and supplements when I needed a little extra understanding. For this, I came out of the experience much better. Even though it was well over a hundred years ago, and in a foreign country, many of the themes of life's experiences shone through. Hardy was a bit of a rebel for being so frank about talking about the kind of things everyone knew was happening, but just didn't write about. Of course without this context, Hardy seems pretty darn prudish. So it's no wonder while so many students choose to revile the book. But all these years later, now I'm wondering if they have tours of the area. I guess that makes me a boring adult now.

On a housekeeping note, I'm tallying up my stats and it has been an embarrassingly bad reading year for me. I'm going to be mature and blame the marathon training, plus much of my reading energy being devoted to studying philosophy. There's a lot of good books on the horizon, so I'm looking forward to stepping up my game in 2017.

The Shining (Stephen King, 1977)

Partly because of marathon training and partly because I've been enrolled in another course this semester, the free reading (and by association this blog) has been on the light side. The post on The Shining can be found on my other blog project, Under the Tome. Go check it out!

What Is Ancient Philosophy? (Pierre Hadot, 1995)

Pierre Hadot's thesis is fairly simple. Ancient philosophy was not just a discourse, but a way of life. While the discourse aspect has stayed with philosophy, the way of life aspect has fallen away and only returns intermittently through history. One could say (as Hadot does) that Christianity, poised as another type of philosophy (a "revealed" one), absorbed the way of life part. This would in turn lead to some of the periodic estrangements between philosophy and religion.

This one was for class, but, as was the case with the other class, I'm glad for having read it. I'm a history person. Philosophy has always proved challenging for me to wrap my brain around. Even though the introduction was a bit daunting, I found the layout of the book to be straightforward and the direction was clear. It served well as our "textbook" for the first half of the course. In fact, I feel a little more lost with a secondary resource accompanying our further path into medieval philosophy. As for those primary resources, we covered them a little spottily, so I'll be going through and catching up on the missing bits and reporting back here soon.

Although I just called it a textbook, this is actually very accessible to readers of all interests, not just philosophy nuts. Therefore, it's a staple at most decent public libraries, not just academic ones, in spite of being published by Harvard University Press.

Driven to Distraction at Work (Edward M. Hallowell, 2014)

Maybe this is some kind of Harvard Business Review thing, but the e-book was published a couple months before the print version, so even though my book was published in 2015, the original publication date ends up being 2014. Details only a librarian could love!

Anyway, Driven to Distraction promises some big things, but, perhaps due to a serious oversell in the first chapter, I was left underwhelmed. In fact, I feel even more distracted than ever at work, but that probably isn't the direct fault of the book. Let's start with the book's problems. The structure of the book breaks distracted people down into six groups, with the sixth having confirmed Adult ADHD. As each (I presume) fictional/composite character is introduced, it is quickly shown that they have some kind of deep-seated family issues. So each vignette started off with me thinking "hey, I'm completely like that!" or "I know somebody just like that!" but then the backstory kicks in and broke those connections. Also, the folks portrayed all seemed very upper-crust and, even though they didn't say so directly, fairly white-washed. I could easily see this being a turn-off for more diverse readers. Also, the author is pretty strongly pro-medication. While I'm no anti-vaxxer nutjob (though I've been known to vote for them on rare occasion), it seems like drugs were the answer for Dr. Hallowell is almost all of the situations. The similarly-titled Driven to Distraction by the same author is a more general look at matter of Adult ADHD is many (not just work) aspects of life, so it's good to keep in mind he's coming from a more clinical rather than human resources perspective, which may be influencing his more open attitude toward medicating the problems.

On the other hand, it wasn't a totally useless reading experience. I think the matter of distraction at work is a very real thing. We can't just unplug the Internet, which is generally the beast in the room, even for the other types not called "screen suckers". Trust me, you do that and it just makes everyone slow and stupid. On the other hand the Age of Information has no filters and it's pretty easy to go from the programs you need to get your job done to TMZ, online games, and God knows what else. In the end I'll thank Dr. Hallowell for raising the issue, but I think much more work needs to be done and we need to think beyond pill popping to cope with the new reality.

The Restoration of Rome (Peter Heather, 2013)

I had no idea what a cut-up Peter Heather could be. The last time I read a book with such a wry tone, it was James O'Donnell's Ruin of the Roman Empire, which covered a part of the same time period this book did. Maybe there is just something inherently funny about the Ostrogothic kingdom? This book takes a more expansive view than O'Donnell's, not only considering Theoderic's kingdom, but also Justinian's Byzantine East Roman Empire, Charlemagne's "Holy" "Roman" "Empire", and the papacy as attempts to "restore" the Roman Empire.

Theoderic, being the most local, had the first stab at achieving this. Although we think of the Goths as hardcore barbarians (or kids who wear black clothes and heavy makeup) they weren't totally uncouth, and just as it wasn't built in a day, Rome (and the Romans) didn't wink out of existence in 476. Therefore, the Goths, particularly the Ostrogoths (or "eastern" Goths) who settled in Italy, absorbed a good deal of Roman culture simply by virtue of geography. O'Donnell, in particular, asserts that Theoderic had a good thing going (while Heather is less certain), until Justinian came out of the East and effectively squashed the Ostrogothic Kingdom in the sixth century. However, the Byzantines were spreading themselves awfully thin trying to tamp down the Vandals and Ostrogoths, leaving their eastern front vulnerable. Ultimately, as Heather puts it so well, Justinian's grand plans to restore the Roman Empire transformed the Byzantine Empire from a world power to a regional power, losing well over half its territory within a century of the initial Italian conquests. In the aftermath of these two failed attempts, the Franks, whose stock continued to rise, finally rose to the notion of playing the role of restorers. Unfortunately, the Franks' success probably wasn't destiny, but rather the good fortune of successive uncontested heirs, from Pippin through Louis the Pious. Unfortunately the return of big royal families and health children turned the whole project into a bit of a mess, rendering the Holy Roman Empire rather inert just a century after Charlemange's coronation. So what is left but the papacy, to be the heroic restorer of the Roman Empire?

Perhaps because I'm still fresh off a church history course, but I'm not sure I completely buy into Heather's claims that the papacy (by the 12th century) represented a restored Roman Empire. Sure, there were some good times, especially around the time of Innocent III, but let us not forget that in the time period following this book would include famous low points like the near-execution of Pope Boniface VIII at the hands of the king of France and the Avignon papacy that followed. This doesn't exactly scream Roman Empire except at perhaps its lowest points. So, perhaps Rome was "restored", but that moment didn't last. However, as the Ostrogoths, the Byzantines, and the Holy Roman Empire have all since faded away, while the papacy now maintains a global presence, perhaps it isn't entirely incorrect to speak of a restoration of a sort.

My copy of this book was a gift, and it was the British edition, no less. As Heather is British and it isn't written for children, I don't think the American edition is much more different than its cover. As it targets a general readership, the book is readily available at most public libraries, and since it does have a good measure of academic value, some college libraries have wisely acquired it as well.

Pope Francis: Life and Revolution (Elisabetta Piqué, 2014)

We're about three and a half years into the Pope Francis era and there is no shortage of literature on His Holiness. I recall back in March 2013 clearing off the Benedict XVI display, heavily laden with the voluminous Ratzinger bibliography, and replacing it with the single book I could find by the former Jorge Bergoglio, and trying to beef it up with whatever magazine covers I could track down. Nowadays the display is about as heavy as it was in 2012 and I don't even need the magazines anymore.

This particular book came out about two years ago, and it's already starting to show its age. When it was recommended to me, it was considerably more fresh, but have a gigantic prioritized reading list doesn't exactly help with keeping up with current events. So that's on me. However, the writing style, perhaps due to the author being a journalist, is a little crazy for narrating historical events. The chronology is quite jumpy, with the first half shifting between Francis's earlier career and the 2013 conclave. Furthermore, almost everything is told in present tense, which is a pet peeve of mine.

On the other hand, the author's credentials are impeccable (Argentinian and Italian - perfecto!). If you really want to dig into Pope Francis's first 18 months, you could do worse than this book. I will agree that it really capture's the character of Pope Francis and that an understanding of his pre-papal career makes his actions as Pope no surprise at all.

Perhaps due to the limited coverage of Francis's papacy and the somewhat minor publishing house (Loyola Press), this book may not be readily available from the nearest public library. It would make a good fit in a parish library (even a non-Catholic one), and I got my copy from my own library.

Happy Hour In Hell (Tad Williams, 2013)

Has it really been four years since I read the first book in the Bobby Dollar series, The Dirty Streets of Heaven? I really jumped on that one, but by the time I got around to the second, the whole series was finished.

The Bobby Dollar series is remarkable in a number of ways. First, it's not high fantasy like the awesome Memory Sorrow and Thorn books or the lackluster Shadowmarch series. And it isn't science fiction like Otherland. It's in that ill-defined genre probably best called "urban fantasy" where you find your Jim Butchers and Neil Gaimans. Second, the books (at least the first two) are not gigantic, each around 400 pages. Finally, from what I've seen, for the first time, Tad Williams managed to write a trilogy that stayed a trilogy! Sure, I've got the 1200+ page To Green Angel Tower, originally a concluding book 3, but now repackaged as a third and fourth book (Siege and Storm). Supposedly no paperback binding could hold it in one volume!

Last time I met the angel Doloriel (street name: Bobby Dollar), he was bouncing around the streets of the fictional San Judas. If you live anywhere between San Francisco and San Jose, you may be quick to notice that it is a parallel-universe conglomeration of pretty much everything between San Carlos and Mountain View, with Palo Alto, Los Altos, and Atherton being name-checked as "districts" and "downtown" is pretty much Redwood City. It was both cool (because I could relate), and distracting (because I kept trying to figure out if such-and-such bar was some place I actually knew). For about the first 100 pages or so, the San Judas action continues in this book. While, for the aforementioned reasons, I'm not too disappointed with San Judas, it felt like Tad Williams was punting a little in the world-building department, something he did very well (world building, not punting) in the Memory Sorrow and Thorn and Otherland books (Shadowmarch....let us not speak any more of this series). Well, things went straight to Hell right after that, and I mean that in the best possible way. Hell, which was the setting for almost the entire rest of the book, is a truly diabolical experience. Williams created a Hell that would make Hieronymus Bosch run for the exits and it has about a million more levels than Dante's Inferno. Even "high-class" Hell is horrific by Earth standards, and the lowest levels are beyond comprehension.

While Tad gets an A for world-building in this one, way improved over the first book, unfortunately it is a lot of fancy bunting for a meh love story. Maybe I'm not as passionate a person as Bobby Dollar, but it seemed like the whole trip to Hell, as wild a ride for the reader as it was, may not have been wholly necessary. I won't even tread near "the twist" -- and there is always one of those -- but once I was allowed to come back up for air in San Judas near the end of the novel, I had to suppress a shrug. You did all of that just to get that? Oh well, there is always book 3, Sleeping Late on Judgement Day. Be sure to look for my review of this final book of the series in 2019!

This book is pretty easy to find at public libraries. A lot of people I know are big on collecting (as in actually buying) the books, because they have pretty artwork, and you can meet the author and get them autographed, and so forth, but I kind of felt burned by Shadowmarch and demoted Tad to library-only and so far I've been fine with the decision. If you mostly know Tad from his other series, be advised that this one likes to toss in more robust sex and language in addition to the violence, so I would think before buying these as presents for your under-15 family member, especially if they've never watched an R-rated movie.

Slaughterhouse-Five (Kurt Vonnegut, 1969)

Slaughterhouse-Five neatly falls into the Venn diagram middle of "books that are classics" and "books I genuinely want to read"...and maybe throw in another circle of "books I really should have read in high school."

I discovered Vonnegut through the science fiction path. His early works up through Cat's Cradle easily qualify, putting him alongside unlikely folks like John Updike (and Jonathan Lethem I suppose) as authors who committed acts of science fiction in their career that are not regarded as science fiction authors. Before now I've read the aforementioned Cat's Cradle, Player Piano, and the perhaps not-so-SF God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater. More importantly, I also have read the story collection Welcome to the Monkey House, which holds a tone closest to this book, and also includes the important libertarian-SF classic "Harrison Bergeron".

If anything this may be a step back toward SF from God Bless, although if you want scientific explanations for things like time travel, you will be disappointed. It's just a fact here that Billy Pilgrim jumps randomly through time, everywhere from his childhood to his deathbed, and, critically, his war experience, which includes the fire-bombing of Dresden.

The book owes a fair bit to its predecessors, with characters like Kilgore Trout and Eliot Rosewater making appearances. Also, in an almost Michener-esque way, the book doesn't even begin properly until the second chapter, as the first is devoted the conception of the novel by Vonnegut's alter ego...his non-Trout one, to be clear.

Finally, I'm not one for trigger-warnings, but if you are unable to process a horrorific scene of animal cruelty, you may wish to proceed with caution with this book. Make no mistake, the reward of reading a classic outweighs this single scene, but it remains burned into my mind's eye and still makes me shudder to imagine. Also, it was around this time that books other than Catcher in the Rye could use salty language (and quite frequently), so bear this is mind as well if you were thinking of suggesting this for younger readers. Any mature adult shouldn't have a problem with this, though.

I picked up a mangled old copy of this book from the public library that, while probably isn't a first edition, has pretty much the same layout and pagination. Since this is a pretty regularly assigned required reading book (accepting the aforementioned caution), it isn't hard to locate paperback copies on the cheap.

'Salem's Lot (Stephen King, 1975)

This is a repost from Under the Tome, my insane noble Stephen King reading project. Please feel free to follow along and I work my way from Carrie to End of Watch (or whatever the last thing King has published when I get there).

Over the past two weeks I heartily enjoyed sinking my teeth into Stephen King's second novel, 'Salem's Lot. Unlike Carrie, the subject matter cuts much closer to King's interests as a developing writer. While the first book pivoted between publication and the circular file before finally leaning to the former, this book had been brewing for quite some time.

This book is about vampires. I'm not sure if that was supposed to be a huge surprise for the first readers. On the other hand I have the advantage of forty years of hindsight, as the book (and most of King's early books) is firmly entrenched in the zeitgeist of American fiction, so it is hard to escape the easy labeling of the book as his "vampire novel". Also, this is the first book that feeds into the Stephen King Megaverse, anchored by the Dark Tower series, so it's a generally-known fact through this connection that there is going to be a supernatural angle.

That is something I've had to get used to with this project. Stephen King isn't (primarily) a mystery author, he does horror and suspense. This means there isn't a reason for the destruction of Jerusalem's Lot that is grounded in reality. It's the same kind of adjustment that needs to be made if watching a later episode of Scooby-Doo and learning that the monster is not just some crank wearing a mask, but a real monster. This makes the more obvious explanation ("Barlow is a vampire") the correct one, rather than something surprising ("Barlow really is just a kindly antiques vendor and somebody innocent-looking is actually infecting the town with flu because he's mad about something"). The fun, therefore is not in the discovery of the truth, but in what the protagonists plan to do about it, and if they will survive.

Given where I work, I found the religious aspects of the novel to be interesting. Although I mentioned a little bit of flawed theology in the "progress report" post, I was surprised by how much religion played into the battle against the vampires. Father Callahan is a tortured guy, living in the decade immediately following Vatican II and clearly struggling to accept the modernization of Catholicism. Yet he has more than enough personal demons to battle, all of which fall in line when confronted by the vampire threat. More than any classic vampire weapons, crosses and holy water were the most fundamental and effective tools against Barlow, so much so they even glowed with power (bestowed on them through prayer and absolution, no less). There is also considerable discussion about faith among the characters, as well as the differences of spiritual experience among the denominations present in the town (Catholic, Lutheran, Mormon, and maybe another I'm missing).

As I was reading I thought of some of the other famous works of vampire fiction and how much (or little) they owe to each other. In his 1999 introduction to 'Salem's Lot, included in my version, King credits Bram Stoker's Dracula as an early inspiration, it did not serve as the template. Rather, his vampires come from the comic book type, the ones that are a lot nastier and commonplace than the one-off Count Dracula. The weapons and weaknesses are fairly standard: wooden stakes, crosses and holy water (definitely), sunlight, silver (maybe), and garlic (not really, more of an allergic reaction). Vampire victims typically become vampires themselves, but more zombie-like with only limited cunning and confined to the town. Unlike Stoker's world, they are not charming, except if you are dumb enough to stare into their eyes. I had to remind myself that Anne Rice only jumped into the genre the following year, so if anything, she owes King, not the other way around, for any similarities. More likely, though, they were both drawing from the same inspiration and also trying to differentiate from Stoker. Although Barlow alludes to being far older than the Church, King doesn't delve into "vampires spanning time" the way that Rice does. Her vampires are also better looking, if you take the movie into account anyway. About 25 years later, Charlaine Harris would get in on the act with the Sookie Stackhouse/Southern Vampire series, and when her novels were adapted by HBO as True Blood, it seemed like another wave of vampire mania was upon us. Harris plays far more off of Rice's innovations (sexy vampires spanning time), and both are guilty of cranking out endless books in their respective series, both of diminishing quality.

Stephen King, unlike Anne Rice and Charlaine Harris, never wrote a proper sequel to 'Salem's Lot, although some plot elements would be worked into his later novels. Though not actually novels, this book has a prequel ("Jerusalem's Lot") and a sequel ("One For the Road") which were both published in King's first story collection, Night Shift. More about those when I get there!

'Salem's Lot has never enjoyed a theatrical release, but it has had two two-part miniseries adaptations, from 1979 and 2004. This probably has something to do with the "slow boil" plot that, if rushed into a 100-minute format, would make the climax all the weaker. However, this didn't stop an ill-advised sequel, A Return to 'Salem's Lot, from reaching the big screen in limited release in 1987. Just like with The Rage: Carrie 2, I think I've got more important things to watch!

Built to Last (James C. Collins & Jerry I. Porras, 1994)

For those not familiar with the towering epics of business literature by Jim Collins, here's a quick overview. Built to Last came out in 1994 and made a moderate splash. In 2001, he wrote a sequel of sorts called Good to Great, which completely overshadowed its counterpart, so much so that even the author himself suggests reading the "sequel" first. Although the definitions and methodology are all around in Built to Last, he articulates the distinction between the "great" companies (the profiled ones) and the merely "good" ones (the comparison companies) in Good to Great.

Part of the popularity (or detraction) of the book is the anecdotal format. Methodology is largely held to the front matter and the appendix. It is solid methodology, very scientific and quantitative, but the meat of the book is the stories about the different companies, both the enduring companies and their comparisons. It is interesting to read about how Philip Morris started as a London smoke shop, and Marriott was a root beer cart at its beginning. Although the book firmly disavows CEO personality as a factor in the endurance of a company, there is a lot of wisdom spooned out from the leaders of these companies. I recall when reading this interrupting my wife from whatever she was reading to say "did you know...?" about some company and/or its leaders and founders.

Where the detractors may get some credit is that the anecdotes, while fun to read, sort of mar the practical aspects of the book. I can't really think of the anything I read in the book that made me think "a-ha! I will use this at work!". Perhaps the very notion of the enduring company is hard to "implement", even though the authors stress that one need not own a company, let alone a famous one, to learn from the book. So, if anything, I walked away from this book learning more about these companies from their birth to the present day and those factoids are now in my toolbox and may prove useful at unexpected times in the future.

My copy (cover pictured here) was the old hardcover edition, so there was no whisper of Good to Great here. I think later editions, only mildly different, may suggest practical connections for readers between the two books.

Hadrian and the Triumph of Rome (Anthony Everitt, 2009)

It's conventional wisdom to think that the further along through history we go, the more we know about the times. Alas, not quite true. The case in point here is the third in the Everitt trio (Cicero, Augustus, Hadrian), for which the information available is the scantiest. This results in quite a bit of speculation of Everitt's part about why Hadrian or one of his contemporaries would do what they did.

Otherwise, this book does a real service of giving Hadrian his first proper biography since the early/mid 20th century. It is actually surprising he hasn't gotten more attention, giving the particular fascination in Britain, perhaps due to a certain wall up north. Also, in general, Hadrian is consider one of the "good" emperors, meaning he wasn't overtly crazy or cruel. He was born and raised firmly in imperial times, so he had no sense of life under the old Roman Republic, but he learned early in his reign to temper so of the more megalomaniacal impulses. Therefore, following his adopted father's expansionist impulses, Hadrian was an emperor of limits and restraint, a new thing for a Rome that previous knew no limits.

Hadrian was also a Lincoln type figure in that he inspired many of his successors to sport beards. In Hadrian's case, it may have been just as much to cover up spots as to honor Greek culture.

Finally, Everitt doesn't make Hadrian out to be angelic. His obsession with the young Antinous was so over-the-top as to just be weird, even for those who understand and accept that homosexuality in the ancient world was treated differently than in modern times. Also, his treatment of the Jews and Jerusalem was downright barbaric and quite possibly the inspiration for all acts of ethnic cleansing for the rest of time. Therefore it is hard for me to unreservedly call Hadrian "good", but I suppose compared to what lay behind (Nero, Caligula) and what lay ahead (Commodus and just about everyone after that), Rome had done and would do far worse.

Although I found my copy here where I work, this book is easy to find at most public libraries, as it targets a general readership.

Personal Writings (St. Ignatius of Loyola, 1522-1556)

Much like Journal of a Soul, the completion of this book was a "mop-up" operation. For class, most of our attention was on the short biographical sketch, spiritual diary (lots of crying at Mass), and the Spiritual Exercises. The forty or so letters that make up the bulk of the middle of this book, assembled in 1996 for Penguin Classics, were left for individual study and a paper. Therefore, during class I focused heavily on the seventh letter (more on that below) and heard the thoughts of the other students on a few of the other letters. It was interesting to go back, with one finger on the timeline of St. Ignatius's life, and read through the letters and reconstruct early Jesuit history, so I'm glad I spent the time doing so.

My "focus letter" was the seventh ("Blueprint for a New Order") in which Ignatius criticizes some of the failings of the new Theatine order, founded by future antagonist Pope Paul IV, to whom the letter is addressed. You can see Ignatius resolving not to follow the same path with the Jesuits, although their reforming goals are quite similar. Although there were many other insightful letters to choose from, I'm glad I picked this one.

As far as a reading this book cover to cover, it was a little challenging in spots. The quasi-contemporary biographical essay was fairly interesting, but the "spiritual diary" was a little strange, with Ignatius usually recording whether or not he cried at Mass and not a whole not more. The letters need to be read with some space in between each one, otherwise it ends up being a blur and not doing justice to each individual work. The final section, the Spiritual Exercises, are no doubt historically important, but at times feel like reading an instruction manual. I mean, it sort of is an instruction manual, and a very important one at that for the historical record, but it can be easy to glaze over the finer points if speed reading and trying to meet deadlines!

The Christian Tradition 2: The Spirit of Eastern Christendom 600-1700 (Jaroslav Pelikan, 1974)

Either I'm getting better at reading theological works, or Pelikan threw me a softball on this one. I'm hoping it is more of the former, but trying to cover 1100 years of history in one volume in roughly the same number of words as his masterful first volume (which covered "only" 500 years) would be a challenge for anyone, even a super-genius like Pelikan.

For a lot of us Western Christians (Catholics and Protestants alike), the Eastern Orthodox churches are mystical and mysterious. There is certainly elements of that, particularly later in the book when mysticism really took off. But Christianity in the East was primarily about arguing over the exact nature of Christ, the Trinity, the Holy Spirit, etc. using the expansive and excruciatingly detailed Greek language to make the distinctions those crude Latin-based tongues in the West were so woefully inadequate at doing. Never mind repeated invasions and the eventual destruction of the primary political vessel of Orthodoxy (the posthumously-named Byzantine Empire) during this time from both (further) East and West.

Pelikan spends a good deal of time discussing the Nestorians and Jacobite/Monophysite churches, heretical but enduring sects of Christianity with their own theological and philosophical constructs. Thanks to his even-handed treatment, one can understand why these churches were moderately successful, hanging out at the fringes of empire (and ultimately the first absorbed by a nascent Islam). That's not an easy task, considering almost all we know about these groups comes from their enemies' citations of their own work to be used against them.

Ultimately, the Slavs and Russians are poised at the end of this volume to inherit the theological mantle of the Byzantines. They don't get a whole lot of exposure in this book, even though the last 250 years of the coverage period are post-Byzantine, but Pelikan promises us a return to the East in the fifth and final volume of the series, something I'll probably tackle in 2017!

Journal of a Soul (Pope St. John XXIII, 1964)

I'm wrapping up some loose ends from my recently completed Church History course. Only selections from this book were read in class, so I read through the remaining gaps last month.

If you don't know anything about Pope John XXIII, a straight biography may be in order before reading this. However, the documents presented here (mostly journal entries from retreats, plus some letters and short published pieces) will certainly get readers into the mind of the Pope, who was 80 years old when elected and not expected to do much more than get from Pius XII to whoever would succeed him. Reading even the earliest entries, it is no surprise that he would instead take on an ambitious agenda, crowned by the convening of the Second Vatican Council. Also remarkable was that this book was the first book of a pope's personal writings published with the active consent and support of the author.

Fans of Pope Francis will likely find Pope John to be an early inspiration. It isn't surprising that the book is available across academic and public libraries, though not necessarily every single one. If you are Catholic (or pointy-high Episcopalian!), the easiest thing to do may be to consult your parish library, if you have one. Editions vary (mine was from 1999), but they should all read the same, more or less.

Year Zero (Rob Reid, 2012)

I needed this book. It wasn't the greatest book I've ever read, let's be clear about that, but in a reading list where the science fiction has to share an increasingly crowded stage, and a general lack of humor through most of the titles, this was welcome.

The premise of Year Zero is completely ridiculous. It turns out that humans, while woefully under-civilized among the myriad races of the galaxy, do one thing really well, and that is make music. Unfortunately, they also have the most expensive legal system of copyright, resulting in a galactic bill in royalties, permission, and (mostly) fines totaling in excess of a dollar figure higher than all of the economies of the galaxy combined over the entire course of history. Needless to say, the more sinister elements of the galaxy have decided that if Earth were to mysteriously explode, then the whole matter would fix itself.

Enter the hero, music copyright lawyer Nick Carter (no relation to the singer or the Carter name in the firm he works for). Through some horrible mistake related to the parenthetical phrase in the previous sentence, ridiculously-dressed alien visitors with weird names approach him to figure out a solution to this colossal problem. Along the way, we learn about the infectious nature of reality television, and why Windows was a necessary invention to keep humanity in its place in the galactic order. You will also get an ample dose of Reid's thoughts of various types of popular music, much of which I found myself agreeing with, although I still haven't come around on Simply Red.

Leave any and all disbelief at the door with this one, or you will just be frustrated. This is primarily a work of satire targeting the music industry, which Reid (as one on the inside of the industry) does very well. If you are hoping for scientifically accurate depictions of alien culture, look elsewhere. This is more Douglas Adams than Arthur C. Clarke.

According to Worldcat, the book is fairly common at libraries, but as far as being a core title it is probably still too new to tell. I wouldn't be surprised if the e-book over time becomes a more common way of reading this title. Incidentally, the Korean translation popped up second in my search, which, if you read the book, you will find strangely appropriate, although the language gags may fall flat. Do not confuse this book with Year One, a nonfiction book about Harvard Business School by the same author.

A Passage To India (E. M. Forster, 1924)

To begin in an indirect way, I watched the first series of Indian Summers on PBS last fall. It was clear that Channel Four (and PBS) were hot to push it as a Downton Abbey successor and it felt pretty exciting to get in on the ground floor of the next big thing, even if it wasn't quite as good. Well, I can toss all that out since I just read it was canceled after the airing of the second series in the UK, so who knows if I'll see any more of it. Even if it ended up being a truncated epic, it made me realize just how little I knew about British India.

Therefore, the timing of A Passage to India wasn't bad. While I still lack a basic textbook knowledge of the period, at least I came in with a general sense of the look and feel of the times, which are nearly the same as the TV show counterpart. Of course, the plots are not at all the time, plus the writers of the TV show had the gift of hindsight. I had to keep this in mind when reading that Forster, who, in 1924, did not have a crystal ball or ESP.

Forster has a pretty keen sense of the fractures among the Indian people, between Hindu and Muslim, and well as the tension between English and Indian. He is not shamelessly for one side or the other, and I was changing my mind throughout the book as to who the "good guys" were in the book. I suppose Mrs. Moore could be seen as the most sympathetic, but her character was also quite passive as well as absent from about the halfway point onward. Dr. Aziz was the most convoluted character, a generally good man, but with a lot of dark thoughts and horribly framed for a crime he clearly didn't commit. Mr. Fielding is nice enough, but comes off as rather hapless. Then of course there are the definitely-bad English (Turton, Callendar) and definitely-bad Indians (Lal). Needless to say it's a complicated book.

Admittedly the first half was pretty dull, focused mainly on character development. However, that early focus paid off in the second half, following the Crime in the Caves, and thrusting the reader into an Anglo-Indian version of To Kill a Mockingbird. While there aren't any great big car chase sequences, there's enough tension to keep things moving along at a surprising clip during the novel's second half.

As you can see by the beat up old-timey cover above, I read a very old hardcover library version of the book. Since it is still required reading in many schools, probably at the more advanced levels of high school, you shouldn't have any problem finding a copy at the public library. However, if a banged-up threadbare book would embarrass your nightstand, a sparkly new paperback copy is easy enough to find, either at Amazon or a regular bricks-and-mortar bookstore.

Bernd and Hilla Becher: Life and Work (Susanne Lange, 2006)

Years ago I would leaf through Choice cards for ideas of what books to buy for my library. It was an old-timey library as you might have guessed from seeing me use the term "Choice cards". Anyway, that's what I did at the reference desk between helping patrons until my boss thought I was secretly undermining her authority and asked me to leave, but that's another story (but I will say that she quit the library world altogether a few years back, and there was much rejoicing - may she never return!). Ahem, so these cards guided what books would be good for the library, but I kept notes on books that seemed interesting to me, but would serve no good purpose for the library. These would be tracked down later and enjoyed on my own time. Time passed and the selections worked their way up my reading queue, and the next thing you know I needed to find a copy of Bernd and Hilla Becher: Life and Work...stat! Thankfully it was the Berkeley Public Library to the rescue, but this title, in the few places it is held, more often than not does not circulate.

Now what in the world possessed me to want to read this book? Needless to say, art/photography titles are pretty rare on my to-read list. I think the last one was Art For All, a collection of posters and essays about the London Underground. As for this book specifically, I think it's because I've had a weird relationship with industrial architecture. I remember being terrified of big factories as a kid. I have no idea why. Maybe they seemed dirty, or perhaps they made me feel insignificant. It didn't help that I had books like The Lorax and The Wump World telling me they were destroying our environment (and yet automobiles did not have this effect?). So perhaps it was a "fear your fears" moment, to sit down with a book filled with images of blast furnaces, gasometers, and other beastly contraptions. I didn't know a thing about the Bechers, so the essays were insightful, though complicated, as to what motivated one to take pictures of buildings most people find ugly. It turns out that if nothing else, I felt kind of sad about these buildings. Many of them no longer exist, and in some cases they were demolished immediate after (or even before!) the Bechers went to document them. The buildings are considered "anonymous architecture", meaning nobody really seemed to know or care who designed or built them. In fact, many people, especially in the United States, had no idea why the Bechers would want to take pictures of these god-awful things, and were more invested in keeping an eye of them like they were masters of industrial espionage.

All in all, the book was fine. However, if you just want to look at pictures of water towers and mine shafts, you may not find the essays all that interesting. While I'm glad I spent the time learning about two German photographers and their methodology, it is relatively academic-slanted writing which at times may only make sense to hardcore photographers. A lot of it deals with old-school film-based photography, so I would be curious about what the Bechers thought of digital photography, which has all but rebuilt the landscape of professional photography. While both were probably aware of these changes (Bernd died in 2007 and Hilla in 2015), you won't learn anything about that here.

Here's a pro-tip for locating a hard-to-find book: Unleash the power of interlibrary loan! Many public libraries will acquire out-of-print and hard-to-find books for you to borrow, typically for free or just a small fee to cover shipping. If you are not fixated on ownership, this is a great way to read deeper into authors and subjects. Keep in mind if you are prone to returning books late or losing them, the fees for your misbehavior can be staggering, but otherwise, give it a shot! As was my case, many California libraries use Link Plus to handle these loans, and it worked like a champ for me both times. If it's not available through Link Plus, I usually exploit my own library's interlibrary loan system, but that is fairly rare (and generally the privilege of being a librarian!).

Carrie (Stephen King, 1974)

This is a repost from Under the Tome, my insane noble Stephen King reading project. Please feel free to follow along and I work my way from Carrie to End of Watch (or whatever the last thing King has published when I get there).


Appropriately enough I finished the first book of this insane project just a few minutes before midnight.

The moral of Carrie is that should not be a bully because you can never be sure if the kid you're picking on has insane telekinetic powers capable of killing you, most of your friends, and burning your school to the ground. And effectively sucking the life from your hometown. In Maine. Although it's a relatively short book, it demonstrates Stephen King pouring on the fear factor right out the gates. Although King would explore other genres of popular fiction, his success with Carrie established horror as his wheelhouse, the genre he would quickly become the "master" of within a few years.

First books (and albums, too, but not so much movies) can be tricky. Often a lot of work to "get noticed", not to mention the inevitable rejects that came before, impact the delivery of a debut work. This results in the debut being substantially different than the rest of the author's oeuvre. Especially in music this can end up being a disastrous trap where no future album can ever live up to the debut, usually resulting in a very short lifespan for the band or artist's career. In other cases, usually more common with books, the debut is strong but uncharacteristic of anything else the author will write. The second book may be weaker, but it establishes the tone for most or all future works. In this particular case I think of popular mystery authors who usually write in series, like Michael Connelly, Robert Crais, and so forth.

To apply this to Stephen King is a little dicey in that this is not the first book in the adventures of Carrie White. I don't think anybody finished the book thinking "when's the sequel coming out?" On the other hand, from the little I know that lies ahead, I'm pretty sure King wasn't planning on using the structure or tone of Carrie in his future books. Carrie had a unique challenge in that King had no fan base or name recognition at this point in his career. If he had written a lame book, assuming it even made it past the publisher, this probably would have been it for his writing career. Thankfully, this was not the case, and the book opened the door for King to go more in-depth. Just for comparison, 'Salem's Lot is twice the length, and It is something like five times longer.

The book isn't perfect. In most lists attempting to rank all of Stephen King's books it usually lands in the upper part of the middle, and rarely/never makes a top 10 or 20 list. The length makes the book feel a bit lightweight, but again this goes back to "first book" issues. A lot of publishers aren't going to clear cut a forest to produce a book written by an unknown. Also, toward the end the suspension of disbelief gets harder to maintain. People somehow seem to just "know" about Carrie, even those that have never met her before. It feels like a punt, but who knows what the reasons were for some of the shortcuts. We'll explore this further with the screen adaptations yet to come, but the inclusion of fake book segments and articles may not be to everybody's taste. I thought it was particularly interesting that King would effectively insert spoilers into these bits. Anyone genuinely shocked by Carrie's rampage at the prom obviously did not read these.

Overall, I was pleased with the book and I can see why a movie would be released so quickly as well as understand how this essentially made the rest of Stephen King's career possible. I am looking forward to reading the novels ahead, many of which, unlike this one, rank very highly with the diehard fans.

Work Rules! (Laszlo Bock, 2015)

It was more than a little surreal to read a book called Work Rules! at the same time as "Leisure the Basis of Culture" by Josef Pieper. Needless to say, these guys don't roll in the same circles, never mind the fact one died just before the professional life of the other began. It was hard not to see these books as opposed to one another, but with a little discipline I was able to put each one in its place. Nevertheless, the two books have such wildly different assumptions of what constitutes a culture that they are never going to dovetail.

Whereas Pieper fears the culture of "total work", Bock lives it. He isn't writing a book about work/life balance, so it's not as if the message of the book is to "shut up and work", but rather to make your work enjoyable, which is assumed by Bock (and most members of Western culture) to define ourselves and give us meaning. Pieper would disagree here, but I'm going to have to set my favorite German philosopher aside at this point and examine Bock's work directly.

In case it isn't clear from the subtitle, Laszlo Bock is a Google guy. Google fascinates just about everyone, so it is only natural that a book about Google's "people operations" (don't you dare say "human resources", you cro magnon) is going to garner a lot of interest. While the cover and title are radiant and designed to attract from the bookshelf, I discovered the book through a reference from How Google Works, which was citing this book a year before its publication. Each chapter discusses different aspects of working environments, with ample examples of how Google does it. Then you get a set of "rules" at the end of the chapter that summarize the key points. The tone is encouraging, but it can also be overwhelming. For example, I'm just a middle manager type in a very small division of a small operation. I can't do what Google does. To his credit, Bock acknowledges that most readers aren't going to have the same resources, but he scales his suggestions to fit a variety of settings.

Finally, read all the footnotes. Oddly enough, the thing about this book that stuck with me the most was a pancake recipe in the footnotes. I can't resist a good stack of flapjacks, so I intend to try it soon. There are also endnotes, but most of these are just references, so you aren't depriving yourself of the full Google experience if you skip them.

Leisure the Basis of Culture, Including The Philosophical Act (Josef Pieper, 1948)

First off, NO, I did not omit the colon or comma from the title. It all runs together, just like you see above. Second, "The Philosophical Act" is almost always bound together with the "main" essay. In fact, it is actually slightly longer, but I think "Leisure" is a more provocative essay. However, both should be read together, which is what I did.

As many reviews of this book say, this is a small book with big ideas. I know one post here (nor a 5-page paper) will do it justice. Pieper was a German Catholic philosopher and a big fan of Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas, and more likely to quote from them than the Bible in his work. The "Leisure" essay was written in scenic postwar Germany and can be seen as his attempt to address the victorious Allies in what kind of society they were to impose on their vanquished foe. Pieper saw the rise of a "total work" culture in the twentieth century, devoid of leisure, and ultimately reducing the individual human being to a cog in a machine. Now leisure, in Pieper's thought, was not the same as idle time or a break from work. That kind of stuff was more the result of work, sort of the "space between", and not genuine leisure. Actual leisure was the time spent in contemplating one's place and role in the world. For Pieper, the most readily found way of doing this was through divine worship. The other essay, "The Philosophical Act", goes more in depth on this.

I'm reading the above and shaking my head. It just isn't easy to encapsulate it all in a paragraph. I think this was about the slowest 150 pages I've ever read, but that's not meant as a bad thing. It's just that the concepts are quite dense, and Pieper has struck a particular rich vein of thought. Ironically, the effort required to read it (and Pieper does not dismiss all work - for example the effort to learn a skill contributes to the joy of acquiring it), may mean those who could learn so much from this aren't going to invest in what is required to comprehend it.

Yes, this was "required reading" for my class and the final book of the year. However, I'm glad for the opportunity to have read it and I think about it frequently in what I do in my life. As you will see in the next post, fate had it that my required reading and free reading put mixed messages into my brain. More on that in just a tic...

Go check out my new blog!

It's been a little quiet here since I've been putting most of my creative writing energy into my new blog Under The Tome. Here you can follow my mad quest to read the entire Stephen King bibliography, as well as watch all of the associated movies. As of this writing, I've read only the first book, Carrie, and seen the first movie, Carrie. So go over there and get in on the ground floor! Read along, comment, lurk, or whatever you like!

Don't worry, Under The Tome does not replace this blog. For the books that apply to both blogs, I will post in both places. Because you care. And so do I.

Augustus: First Emperor of Rome (Adrian Goldsworthy, 2014)

It's hard to believe it's been over five years since my last Goldsworthy, that being How Rome Fell, also known by its British (?) title, Fall of the West. I remember that book fondly because it was the first one I read after moving back to the Bay Area, and it also put in place the reading programs I've been following ever since. Meanwhile, Goldsworthy has been keeping busy, with beefy biographies of Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, and now Augustus, a.k.a. Gaius Octavius, a.k.a. Gaius Julius Caesar, a.k.a. Octavian (frowned upon by the author), a.k.a. Little Caesar (kidding), plus a heap of honorifics like Pater Patrae and all that jazz.

The biggest challenge in writing about Augustus, other than managing his multitude of names, is how to stand out and offer something fresh for one of the most documented portions of Graeco-Roman history, both in terms of primary and secondary material. One big help is that Goldsworthy had been working up to this through his last two books, and it was probably hard not to turn to Augustus after writing about his (adoptive) father and his fellow triumvir-turned-archrival. He is good about being clear about what sources say what about Augustus and how reliable they are. Although I didn't learn anything particularly shocking, his synthesizes his research well and the narrative flows easily. He manages to be accessible to the ancient history newbie as well as the wizened scholar, although the latter may be thirsting for something more niche and in-depth.

To return to the names, Goldsworthy does not use the name "Octavian" in his narrative, although it occasionally appears in the sources he quotes. In fact, if I had to point to what distinguishes this book from other other works on Augustus, it would probably be the careful attention to names. Now, the downside to saying "young Caesar" in lieu of "Octavian" is that it can be a little jarring for readers that are used to the Octavian-Augustus dichotomy. He does impose a few ground rules on himself, though. For example, his adoptive father is always "Julius Caesar", and if readers keep that in mind it helps with the Caesar or Caesar question. Names are also important in other ways. Most obviously, Goldsworthy divides up his narrative into parts named after what name Augustus was using at that time of his life, swinging from Gaius Octavius to Imperator Caesar Augustus Divi Filius Pater Patrae (basically, Emperor Caesar Augustus son of the divine Julius, Father of his Country, nothing fancy). He is good about noting when a source is far enough in the future to "mangle" the titles a bit; although we retrospectively see Augustus as the first Roman emperor, he never classed himself as one (there is a subtle distinction in the office of Emperor which developed much later, and the title of Imperator). Goldsworthy correctly assesses the programs of Augustus as those of a man who attempted to both "restore" the Republic and develop a new structure of governance. How Roman history turned out in the future clearly was not as Augustus envisioned it.

It looks like I'm going to have to get back to the original Caesar and Mark Antony and everyone's favorite Egyptian queen to make the trilogy complete. If they are as absorbing and comprehensive as this book, it should make for a good time. As for this book, all I had to do was walk downstairs to the stacks and pick it up from my own library. If you are not as fortunate to run your own library, fear not. These books are widely held and readily available from most every public and academic library with a slightly-above the poverty line budget. Check out Worldcat to find a library close to you.

The Anglican Spiritual Tradition (John R. H. Moorman, 1983)

It seemed only fair to give my own denomination some air time in light of all of the Catholic history and Catholic-leaning writings I've read over the past year or so. Given we are outnumbered 70 million to 3 million, it can be a little hard to find equivalent Anglican resources. Therefore, while this was very informative, it wasn't the most gripping book I've read. England was a very complex society religiously, and post-Reformation a clear split in the new order soon took shape with the upper classes sticking with an all-but-the-Pope high Anglicanism and Protestant-leaning "low" church catching fire among the common people. It is interesting how sometimes even more extreme results came out of both sides, with some returning to the Catholic Church and others breaking away to new forms of Protestantism, such as Methodism.

Anglicanism differs from its fellow Protestant denominations (even the mainline ones) in that it is apostolic, so, particularly among the high-church types, is the belief that the Church of England is the real continuation of the "one, holy, catholic and apostolic church", not the Roman Catholic Church. Other Protestants tend to observe the "get back to Jesus" idea and throw out the whole Catholic Church back to the beginning. As Luther and Calvin seeped into the lower classes of England, this was an appealing notion.

Also, Anglicanism, by its nature as a fused church-state entity, was strongly influenced by whoever happened to be sitting on the throne. Even though the conventional wisdom was that it emerged fully developed from Henry VIII's reign, most the more differing characteristics from Catholicism came during the reigns of Edward VI and Elizabeth I. Intervening monarchs would prove to be more Catholic, particularly Mary I and James II, but from Elizabeth onward it was its own church, Oxford Movement sentiments or not.

It was interesting to read about all of the changes over time (some of which early on were very violent and aptly illustrated by a fictional account of a very confused priest), as well as the varying strains of thought that exist in Anglicanism (and we aren't even talking about the Anglican Communion here). Again it's fairly dry reading, so a little historical background in English history and the Reformation would be useful before approaching it.

My copy, strangely enough, came from my church's library. Most library copies are usually only available in academic libraries, so it may be worth tracking down second-hand on the cheap if you aren't familiar or comfortable with interlibrary loan. Of course if you are Episcopalian or feel comfortable visiting one and it is not too "low church" I bet you will find a copy there. Consult Worldcat for a library near you that carries a copy.

The Catholic Church Through the Ages, 2nd ed. (Fr. John Vidmar, OP, 2014)

Astute readers of this blog will know right away this one was for class. I read it, so it counts! I actually read it over the course of about eight months. Sure, I could have torn through it back in 2015 and added it to my last year book count, but that wouldn't have served me well in class. So, consider this, in terms of the book count, an exercise in delayed gratification.

Although the book served as our textbook in the class, Fr. Vidmar wrote this book for a general audience. In the introduction, he explains the work is in part a way to make church history more accessible to the average parishioner and address criticism over history-based homilies that "the sheep were not fed." As far as being a classroom text, it has good and bad points related to this intent. On one hand, it is a very friendly volume and reads quickly. Although there are some holes and some parts are overemphasized, it generally managed the two-thousand year sweep in a reasonable number of pages. Also, unlike other church history books, Vidmar is relatively agenda-free, though he does presume most of his readers are Catholic. The danger with the book, however, is that he sometimes slips into a "golly gee" tone with lots of exclamation marks. Also, as stated in the introduction, he is targeting the parish, not the classroom. Therefore he readily anticipates what a priest may have to reckon with when he gets hard questions in church history: the Inquisition, the Crusades, "Hitler's Pope", and Luther, Calvin, Zwingli and company all trigger a more defensive writing style. All of these are understandable in providing the reader with tools to answer those tough questions, but in the classroom they can suck all of the oxygen out of all the other topics.

All in all, it's not a bad book to pick up if you are curious about the long history of the Catholic Church, and it certainly won't hurt if you are Catholic, though I didn't find myself being frozen out. Hitchcock's history (read a couple years back) is much more academic and opinionated, but also more thorough. It all depends on how in-depth you are ready to go.

I read my copy through my place of employment, liberally borrowing the reserve copy. Even though it is a general history, it is published by Paulist Press, which means public libraries probably don't have it on their active watch lists to acquire. The 2005 edition is more widely held than this edition, and you probably won't suffer too badly if that's what you can find, unless Popes Benedict XVI and Francis are the end-all be-all of your interests in the Church, or plan to rely on Vidmar's bibliographies for future reading. Check out Worldcat to find a holding library near you, or shell out $20 to Paulist or, of course, there's always "Earth's largest store" for the unimaginative.

Obasan (Joy Kogawa, 1981)

It's a national pastime to announce your are moving to Canada in protest of some political thing or person you don't like. A lot of times the person who says this clearly didn't do the research since whatever it was they hated about the United States so much was even more present in the Great White North. While I don't know anybody planning on leaving for Canada over the treatment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, if there were such a person, they would find nothing in Canada to make them feel better.

That's what brings us to the thrust of the featured book, Obasan. The book's title means "aunt" in Japanese, although, especially with the counterpart word for "uncle", it can also be a term of respect to an elder member of the community. Although the book advertises itself as a tale of one family's dealings with Canada's traumatic Japanese relocation policy from the eyes of a child, it is actually framed around that child in her adult years putting together the pieces through memories and the collected evidence of her activist aunt. However she is not the "Obasan" the gives the book its title. Rather it is her great-aunt, the ancient, strong, silent type, who is both a pillar of strength and frustration for the protagonist.

Farewell to Manzanar is fairly standard-issue reading in high schools around here. There are a lot of parallels between the two books, and where they diverge is in the post-war period. It took a lot longer for Canada to come around on their internment policy, whereas the United States declared the camps illegal in 1944. Sure, there was extensive aftermath in both countries, but Manzanar takes a more personal approach, detailed the family's struggles after leaving the camp, overcoming prejudices, and so forth. Obasan, on the other hand, features a family that is not only booted from their British Columbia home, but also kicked out of their adopted wartime home in the mountains after the war ended and forced even further into the interior into truly wretched living conditions. Canada's anti-Japanese laws were so entrenched that Japanese-Canadians weren't allow back to the West Coast even after the war was over, which had a permanent impact on moving Japanese-Canadian culture well into the Canadian heartland.

On a style note, Obasan can be a little confusing. If you like to read stories that maintain a consistent tense, you are going to be a little frustrated by this book. The present tense is employed both in the novel's "present" (1972) and "past" (around 1940 onward) and it isn't always immediately clear when the action changes back. Just to really mess with the inattentive reader, the past tense sometimes slips in when there is a direct memory that doesn't fall in the primary "past" setting.

Like many of the books I've been reading this year, I got my copy of Obasan from the public library. It must have been one of those "core" books that falls pretty darn close to the original publication date and will probably remain in the library collection until it falls apart. It was Godine hardcover with zillions of checkout stamps, but it still seemed pretty sturdy after 35 years of library use. As a core title, copies exist at nearly every public library in the United States, but you can check Worldcat and locate one for yourself!

Story of a Soul: The Autobiography of St. Thérèse of Lisieux (1898)

This is the first of a few books you will see posted here relating to the course I'm taking in Church History. Although this isn't the first book we read, it's the first one I completed all the way through. After the semester ends, I'll "mop up" the remainders of a couple books we only read part of, just because I'm a suffering completionista.

Carmelite spirituality is very effusive! You are best friends with Jesus and use a lot of exclamation points to convey your faith! I'm not sure I could even channel a tenth of Thérèse's enthusiasm, which is saying a lot (for her), because her health was pretty awful through most of her 24 year lifespan. However, even without the bubbly prose, Therese had a lot to teach the world. As featured in the thesis statement of my paper, the late nineteenth century, the backdrop of the First Vatican Council, was one where the "regular human" was getting reduced to a speck in the sea of huge systems of industrial capitalism and nascent Marxist models of society. While Pope Leo XIII address these big concepts in his encyclical Rerum novarum, Thérèse, just a few years later, looked to the smallest things in her search for God. That is what makes her important: she makes the small things significant in a time where small things might as well have been invisible.

I read my copy from my own library, but you needn't go on an epic quest to a theological library to find your own copy. Not only is this ICS Publications's bestselling title (in fact their whole publishing house was founded on it), but it is also available from numerous public and academic libraries.

The Impeachment of Abraham Lincoln (Stephen L. Carter, 2012)

Well, this seems like a nice little historical novel about....wait a second. Impeachment? Don't you mean "assassination"? What's going on here? This is the same Stephen Carter that brought the world well-regarded historical novels such as The Emperor of Ocean Park, no?

In all fairness, if you knew nothing about American history, you might think this actually is an historical novel. Unlike other works of alternative history, Dr. Carter feels no need to introduce time travel, alien invaders, or even overt humor. He subscribes to the very "soft" side of the genre, where even big events ultimately do not rupture the timeline. In fact, aside from perhaps a couple big differences from our own history, it is likely this could have served as the history of our present reality.

The notion that had Lincoln survived the assassination attempt, he would have been impeached (and likely convicted) by the radical wing of the Republican party is not a new idea. However, it is still shocking to modern ears to think that one of the most well-regarded presidents in history could easily have ended up as one of the worst. It all hinges on how much one can believe that Andrew Johnson, Lincoln's successor who actually was impeached (and missed conviction by one vote), was just following Lincoln's Reconstruction plans for the South.

This is one of those books where it is important to read the afterword. The author goes through it exacting detail how he diverged his fictional world from the historical record. Even though I felt like I was on top of all the changes, he made many minute changes I wasn't aware of. Thankfully, this didn't distract from my enjoyment of the book in its own right. As I have noted in the past, I get easily annoyed with authors who change large events for the sake of making their books more interesting.

I picked up this copy from a branch of my local library system. It is readily available from numerous libraries. Find one near you by steering yourself over to Worldcat.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (Hunter S. Thompson, 1971)

Five years ago I decided to fill in all the gaps in the Terry Gilliam film series. For the most part his movies are not all that great. I admire him as an artist and person, but they can't all be zingers. You've got the classics, like Time Bandits, Brazil, 12 Monkeys, and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen on one hand, then stuff like Tideland and The Brothers Grimm on the other. Fear and Loathing (the film) falls a little more toward the latter, kind of around Fisher King and Jabberwocky territory. It was good enough that I put the book into my extensive to-read list and forgot about it for the next five years.

This is not a film blog, so I'm going to address the book here and only reference the film, of what I can remember, in relation to the book. I had actually read a little bit of Thompson (The Great Shark Hunt, a chapter or two) back in high school, so I remembered that he has a distinctly fast-clipped style of narration. I think this is where the film struggled, but that's just a natural challenge of adapting this work in any way, not a Gilliam thing. Surprisingly, it is quite lucid and engaging, so I didn't feel too confused at any point, even though Thompson ingested more illegal drugs in about one minute than I have in my entire lifetime.

There are huge debates about how much of Fear and Loathing is true. Google is full of debate about it and there is the whole question of the "gonzo journalism" subgenre, which Thompson pretty much owned all to himself. You cannot escape the Faulkner quote if you do this search: "The best fiction is far more true than any kind of journalism and the best journalists have always known this." While a lot of people are concerned about the actual identity of the attorney friend or if the Mint 400 was a real race, I don't let myself get bogged down in the minutiae. Vegas and vicinity, although they have aged 45 years since the book was written, are unmistakable. The musings on the American dream and existence of God could (and have been!) used as source material for homilies and sermons. Also, anyone who has been to Vegas knows exactly what Thompson is talking about.

In short, don't let a mediocre movie scare you away from what is a true modern American classic. It isn't without its faults, but it will give you plenty to think about and discuss with others for years after you finish it. Just don't make any more film adaptations. Please.

I checked this out from the public library. It isn't hard to find, but it enjoys wide appeal among a variety of age groups even after all these years. You may need to get on a waiting list, and be prepared to have any renewals denied, as there is a good chance somebody else will be waiting for it!

A History of Christian Thought Volume II: From Augustine to the Eve of the Reformation (Justo Gonzalez, 1979)

Gonzalez left us at the end of the Council of Chalcedon in 451 at the end of his first volume in this series, then consciously resumes the story around 100 years earlier with Augustine. Although Gonzalez continues to cover the Eastern Church in this volume, the focus here is more firmly on the West and the theology of Augustine is so central to this that putting it in the first volume would have caused an unwelcome break in these connections.

Since reading the first volume, it just so happens I've done a little reading on Augustine, so using him as a starting point for this volume was indeed welcome. He is really the theologian par excellence of the West, which by the fourth century was becoming considerably more grounded in its theological discourse than the East, where single words ended up being the focus of prolonged diatribes. Maybe it had something to do with barbarian hordes pushing down hard on your domain. The four great heresies Augustine grappled with (Manichaeism, Pelagianism, Donatism, and Arianism...oh my!) and his responses to them would set the tone of theological discourse in the West during this period.

Since Gonzalez is attempting to handle the whole of Christian thought, there is a couple "meanwhile" breaks to cover what is going on in the East. As the Byzantine Empire faded away in the later part of the period covered here, the coverage gets more scrappy. I'm depending on Pelikan, who devotes an entire volume of his series to all of Eastern theology (minus the very beginning and end), to get a clearer picture. More on that later...

As with other volumes in this series, I borrowed them from my church's library. The series is common in academic libraries, but not so much public libraries. If interlibrary loan is not a feasible option where you live, the volumes are relatively inexpensive to purchase.

Are You Fully Charged?: The 3 Keys to Energizing Your Work and Life (Tom Rath, 2015)

I've read enough business literature of late (aka "bizlit") that I've been finding titles through author associations and references made in previous works. This one comes from the former, although it was confirmed with a hearty recommendation at a conference last summer.

Tom Rath has been the darling of the bizlit world lately thanks to the popularity of the revived StrengthFinders (rechristened "StrengthsFinder 2.0", naturally), originally conceived by his grandfather, Donald Clifton. In spite of the similar covers this book doesn't deal much with those attributes. Instead, Rath is look at the things all of us need to be engaged in work.

Not being engaged at work sucks. The purpose of everything seems pointless and life degenerates into staring at a computer screen and doing nothing important until the clock strikes five. For Rath if you want to be engaged at work you need a full charge, and that means (1) meaning, (2) interactions, and (3) energy, which are the tenets around which the book is written. The first is pretty straightforward: know the meaning in each thing you are doing. I think this is a challenge to managers to assign work in a smart way. As I pointed out in the aforementioned conference, there's a big difference between tedious and meaningless work. While the first may sometimes be necessary, the second should be avoided at all costs. Interactions, the next principle, is a big challenge for us introverts, but it's so fundamental to what we do to work things out through how they benefit others, and not necessarily ourselves. Finally, there is energy. After reading this book I don't feel the least bad about taking naps. But more than that, it is important to know that rampant sitting is lethal and most of us eat crap. Address the former through exercise and get those 10,000 steps and for the second one, read labels and eat real food like fruits and nuts and not processed garbage (or as I think Michael Pollan says "food-like substances"). I must admit it is easier said than done and while I'm a big fan of movement, I don't get enough sleep (even with the naps) and don't eat right (though not atrociously, thanks be to God).

Speaking of references to other books for ideas of future reading, there were a number of good suggestions in the back of this book, so I'll probably check some of those out at a later time.

I read my copy through the public library, although it isn't as widely held as one might expect, given the connection to StrengthsFinder. In fact, I had to use our local interlibrary loan service to get it, but everything worked out fine. Look it up on Worldcat and see if there is a library near you that has it!

Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic (Tom Holland, 2003)

It's so great to begin a new year on March 1. At least that's when I started this. We'll see what date stamp actually ends up on here. Before we plunge into the 2016 Blog Experience, some points of housekeeping.

First, no weekly albums for now. I need a break and I don't relish starting eight weeks in the whole. God willing, I'll bring them back in 2017, hopefully with a bunch of exciting new stuff. Looking over what was reviewed - 365 of them in 2014 and 52 in 2015, I was amazed to see there are still plenty of great albums out there needing attention. And bad ones too. Those might actually be more fun to write about!

Second, while the books are holding down the fort this year, I'm starting a reading project that will live on a different blog site. Unlike this little vanity project, this would be a site I would like to promote in the best of completionista tradition. Essentially, I plan to read every Stephen King book written, from Carrie to whatever he most recently published by the time I finish. This will be a very long undertaking since I still want to read other things, but I'm hoping that the pacing is properly enough to give each work the proper amount of thought and consideration. When the site goes live (probably on the first post on Carrie since I don't want to be a tease) I will give out of the details, including a name and a link (neither of which I have thought of!).

That's that. Now let's travel back in time to late 2015. I am desperately hoping to complete a 43rd book for the year, but must settle for the crushing humiliation of falling ten books short of my goal and not getting a flashy badge on Goodreads. Book 43 of 2015 must therefore become Book 1 of 2016.

Rubicon is a darn fine way to start of the new year, earning a bona fide 5-star rating, something only about one in six books achieve and particularly rare in recent years either because I'm becoming jaded or picking worse-than-usual books. Tom Holland is an excellent writer and has managed the trick of writing books that educate the beginning learners, yet can still be enjoyed by folks with degrees in the field. I was a little worried about what I had gotten myself into when I was a little underwhelmed by his 2005 book Persian Fire, which chronicles the epic conflict between Greece and Persia. I was hoping for a more Persia-centric account, but Holland had a uphill battle in that most of the sources come from the Greeks. Therefore it ended up reading a bit more like a standard Persian War story than a fresh new angle. Rubicon, on the other hand, occurs during one of the most heavily-chronicled periods of world history, plus I think the subject matter lies somewhat closer to Holland's expertise, all of which made for a really enjoyable reading experience.

Why this book, among the plethora of reading choices about the late Republic era? First off, it is a fresh account, which considers the vast amount of prior scholarship in its narrative. Holland moonlights as a novelist, so it doesn't hurt that it reads like fiction (in a good way) at times. More interesting, however, is the lens Holland uses to examine the period. His main interest here is the role of the Roman citizen during a time of great violence among two parties, the optimates and the populares. In fact, he indicates that he had hoped to call the book Citizens, but that title is already owned by a well-respected work on the French Revolution by Simon Schama. The Rubicon incident itself is not the entire focus of the book, but, all cliches aside, it remains perhaps the single most dramatic point in the turbulent flow of late Republic history, therefore Holland wasn't ashamed to use it as the title.

The copy I read was borrowed from the public library and the book is commonly held by most public libraries and many academic libraries. Look up the book on Worldcat to find a library near you that carries it and check it out for yourself!

(Note for a new year: all book cover images are linked to Goodreads data and are intended as fair use for this decidedly non-commercial endeavor.)

A Passion Play (Jethro Tull, 1973)

We bring 2015 to a belated close with the most perplexing of Jethro Tull albums. Just the prior year they had thrown their hat into the 1970's concept album phenomenon with Thick as a Brick. Musically it is top notch and the first full album to feature the "classic" Tull lineup of Ian Anderson, Martin Barre, John Evan, Jeffrey Hammond-Hammond, and "new" drummer Barriemore Barlow. It should be noted though that all of them except for Barre were in the proto-Tull band called the John Evan Smash, so it was more of a return than an entirely new lineup. However, scratch the surface of the album a bit and you will notice that the whole thing is a joke.

The problem with the following release is that it is most definitely not a joke. A Passion Play attempts to valiantly merge the serious messages of Aqualung with the structure of Thick as a Brick. The result is an album far more challenging than either of those. The cruel twist is that everybody seemed to want to funny Jethro Tull back again. The elaborate stage shows for A Passion Play were a bust and reviews of the album were scathing and sent the band reeling. They would temporarily leave the concept album club with their next album, Warchild, but then plunge back in to various degrees through the rest of the decade, but as a different-sounding type of band than they once were.

This album is still really difficult to fathom, as are many single-song albums. Other than the interlude ("The Story of the Hare Who Lost His Spectacles") the structure of the album is monolithic and hard to digest. Oddly enough, unlike Thick as a Brick, the band provided some guidance as to the four acts and sixteen parts (including the interlude), while the other album revealed nothing between the lines of the "St. Cleve Chronicle" and it was only in the age of iTunes that Ian Anderson decided to break it up into named parts. Also, the topic matter is deadly serious, no less than the nature of life and death itself. With apologies to Frank Zappa, between the complex musical structures and lyrics, there was no commercial potential here. Now, I'm not trying to say the album failed because it was not commercial enough, but rather there is no easy entry point to the album. Most other concept albums are album to find their sweet spot, some memorable hook, and belch out a single for the masses and lead them in to the entire work. Not so much here.

I had nervously avoided this album was quite a while, going with every other album by the band up through Warchild before considering this one. Undoubtedly there was a lot Jethro Tull had to share with the world and this is an important part of that, a magnum opus by the resurrected John Evan Smash featuring Martin Barre. However this is not the album anyone should start their Jethro Tull adventures with unless they are looking for an excuse to not bring them into their lives.

Becoming Steve Jobs (Brent Schlender & Rick Tetzeli, 2015)

If it's not obvious from the date stamps, I kinda...uh...to put it in PG terms, "soiled the bedsheets" in the last few months, both in terms of reading anywhere near my goal (I fell ten books short) and posting reviews in a timely manner. This was the last book I read for 2015 and I'm posting this closer to Easter than New Year's Day. Sigh.

I recently created a "bizlit" category for some of my more practical reading, but rather than stuff it with a bunch of dry advice-type books, I punctuated it with interesting business biographies. This one came to my attention thanks to an article built around an excerpt where now-CEO of Apple Tim Cook essentially offered up his liver to save the failing one inside Steve Jobs. If you don't have the patience to read the article, Jobs's reaction was an immediate and vehement refusal, which is many ways encapsulates the man presented in this book.

On the spectrum of Jobs-lit one can go from Hatred (0) to Gush (10). This one probably falls around a 6, a little more flattering of the subject than average, but with qualifications. It mostly hinges on the insights gleaned from journalist Brent Schlender (Rick Tetzeli is openly acknowledged as secondary and whenever the first person is used, it is Schlender playing the role of "I"). Schlender had a bit of a love-hate relationship with Jobs in their various encounters, though four years after Jobs's death Schlender is more inclined to refute the haters than tear into Jobs himself. There is a clear attempt to put some distance between this book and the Walter Isaacson tome.

Probably the most interesting part of the story is not Apple's early days or later renaissance, but Pixar. I came away from this book thinking that it may actually have been Pixar that re-framed Steve Jobs, transforming him from the petulant man-child of the first chapter (even Schlender won't dare sugar coat that time) to the sagely CEO-slash-genius we all know and love now. It really help to solidify his parallel work-family ethic, creating somebody who could be both a megalomaniac of a businessman and humble as a person, though the latter took some time to figure out. And even in the final days of his life Jobs and Schlender regrettably bumped heads one last time and it was never resolved. This is definitely not a handbook to understanding the psyche of Jobs. The man remains as complicated as ever, even beyond the grave.

Hot Wire (Trapeze, 1974)

Trapeze, mostly unknown to the casual rock fan these days, was the ultimate workhorse of a band during the 1970's. They defied the odds, boiling down to one original band member before finally disbanding, surviving losses that would have killed off much better-known groups. Hot Wire comes on the heels of one of these losses, a particularly painful one because by all indications the band seems to be on the verge of breaking out.

I noticed that of all the Trapeze reviews here, none are from the Glenn Hughes era (the first three albums), though he does lend his vocal talents to the 1976 second self-titled album. These three albums are probably the most highly regarded of the bunch, though none of them made a dent in the charts, and perhaps the love comes from fans of the band Glenn went on to join, Deep Purple. By the final album, he had taken such a dominant role, it was hard to imagine a Trapeze without Hughes. By his last days in the band he was handling all vocals, and even providing guitar accompaniment to regular guitarist Mel Galley, with a session bass player hired for live shows.

When Hughes joined Deep Purple, the original Trapeze, once a five-man band, was down to just two: Galley, and drummer Dave Holland. At first this appeared to kill the band, unless calling your first greatest hits package The Final Swing was some kind of inside joke. When the collection became the band's first appearance ever in the charts, Galley and Holland probably started thinking that news of the band's death was a bit premature, and suddenly the notion of a fourth album, minus Glenn, didn't seem entirely implausible.

The four-man lineup idea in those final live shows must have still appealed and even though it wasn't the same guy, Pete Wright was brought on board to handle bass, while the missing second guitarist, which Hughes briefly served as, went to Rob Kendrick. Neither one, as far as I know, could sing, so Galley pulled himself out of vocal retirement to fill that role. Going into the fourth album it looked like all of Glenn's old roles were filled as best could be hoped.

The result, Hot Wire, is a vastly different album than either of the first three. Of course, the first three among themselves didn't sound like each other (one gentle, one hard, one funky), but Hot Wire expanded on the jam-based songs contributed by Galley and his brother Tom for the previous album. None of the songs have the kind of depth that Hughes could pour into his own songwriting, but, as evidenced by live recordings from around 1975 onward, the songs would become staples of their performances, capable of being stretched out to crazy lengths and still sounding fresh. Even with Hughes gone, Galley could still show off some funky chops, with "Midnight Flyer" being, without question, the song of the album that probably made Glenn wish he hadn't left so hastily.

I think if I read my liner notes back in the day correctly, Hot Wire was the only "regular" album by the band to see any action in the charts, albeit the very low parts of the chart. I'm not sure if the slow build over the first three albums finally drove enough interest to convince buyers to invest disc-unheard. If so, it may have been a bit of a shock with all the changes. Or perhaps there was enough interest thanks to the bands new connections with more prominent rock outfits like Purple. However it was pretty much all downhill from this point and not in the good way. An abortive reunion with Hughes in 1976 left things awkward with the new guys and soon Kendrick was out, and, weirdly, assembled his own rival version of Trapeze based in Texas. Pete Goalby replaced him and brought a new voice for the 1979 album Hold On. When that album failed to reverse the slide, drummer Dave Holland jumped ship for Judas Priest and the band was further reduced to more session-grade players, and Galley's departure to Whitesnake ended things once and for all.

For awhile this album and the one to follow (the second self-titled album) were very hard to find thanks to a cut-rate distributor suddenly vanishing without warning. However, I'm happy to report both have made it to the world of digital music and at a very agreeable price.