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.)