The volume also included Beckett’s Act Without Words, which indeed has no dialogue. The whole pantomime seems rather like a post-existentialist satire of Camus’ assertion that the only philosophical question of any importance is the question of suicide. The lone actor, in confronting the futility of his actions, tries to commit suicide but even this option is denied him. Camus at least gives us the will to choose suicide if we so wished, but Beckett seems to be saying that we aren’t even permitted that escape. The actor ends up on the floor, paralyzed and unresponsive. What I would dub the modern nightmare.

The Immortal Game: A History of Chess, by David Shenk: The book calls itself a history of chess, but it doesn’t simply relate the development of the board game alone but frames it in the context of why people have obsessed over this game for centuries. Chess as metaphor, chess as cultural phenomenon, chess as a mirror of sociopolitical and intellectual history (e.g. the rise of “courtly love” under Eleanor of Aquitaine, the French Enlightenment and subsequent revolutions), chess as rational system. The book describes myths and legends associated with chess (the caliph who did not evacuate his burning palace because he was engrossed in a game of chess), as well as famous games (the “Immortal Game” of the title describes a match between Anderssen and Kieseritzky in the nineteenth century) and grandmasters (the personal history of Bobby Fischer). It also talks about the evolution of game rules and strategy over time–I was fascinated by the four historical “stages” in chess style–and the appearance of chess in literature and computer science. All in all, an excellently written book. Shenk likes to dwell on the implications of chess as a game representing the power of free will (versus games of chance, like backgammon) and by extension, the triumph of civilization and rational thought, which he freely admits carries a personal meaning for him in the wake of 9/11. I’m not sure if the more memoirist parts of the book strengthen or weaken it (after all, he also talks about how the obsession with chess can be all-consuming and how chess geniuses lose their sanity), but I did like reading about his own attempts to improve his chess game.

Vita Brevis: A Letter to Saint Augustine, by Jostein Gaarder (trans. Anne Born): In the introduction, Gaarder purports to have found and translated a letter written to Augustine from the “concubine” whom he mentions in his Confessions. I actually took him at his word at first, but if you read the book, it becomes clear that the letter is a fictional vehicle in which Gaarder can criticize Augustine and his influence on Christian theology. Despite Gaarder’s conceit of including “footnotes” citing the original Latin phrases, it’s clear that Floria, the supposed letter writer, sounds like Gaarder (or at least like Gaarder’s usual English translator) and has surprisingly modern ideas that coincide nicely with Western liberal opinions largely held today. I’m no classics expert, but I doubt that a letter originally written in Latin would ever “translate” into the style that Floria adopts. I suppose I’m annoyed because if Gaarder was going to make the pretense of having found a letter to Augustine as some sort of metafictional device, he could have done a much better job of it. It would have been brilliant if he executed the writing well enough to really make the reader believe his framing story of buying the manuscript at a book fair in Argentina. (Choice of country a nod to Borges?) As it is, all it becomes is a tiresome rant on Augustine’s extreme Platonism. Floria basically says (over and over again, while quoting extensively from Confessions) that believing in a Creator God who loved his creation means not denying the physical world and the facts of our physical existence; in fact, it is as much a sin to hate the world as it is to love it too well. Chesterton made the same point in his biography of Aquinas much more eloquently and with much more subtlety. Also, like most poor arguments, the whole book started making me sympathize with Augustine. I mean, I think Augustine’s conception of religion as divorcing oneself completely from the material world as much as possible is a little ridiculous, but I also think that he was genuinely trying, in his own fashion, to devote himself completely to God. And honestly, do we really need to blame all the excesses and mistakes of the Church on Augustine? As Chesterton points out, there are historical reasons for why Augustine’s brand of Platonic Christianity had such great appeal. Then again, I suppose we don’t like to accept that theology can have relativity without being untrue. (Oh, the poststructuralist paradox.)

The Jesus Sutras: Rediscovering the Lost Scrolls of Taoist Christianity, by Martin Palmer: The subject matter of the book is quite fascinating since it traces the history of early Christianity in China centuries before any Jesuit missions. It describes a Christian tradition that developed separately in the Middle East, India and central Asia and is hence not continuous with the history of Catholic church (and subsequent Protestant denominations) in the West. It’s unfortunate though that the writing wasn’t very compelling and used phrases like “the Church of the East”, which implied an orientalist attitude that grated on my nerves. I think the book was also extremely disorganized: Palmer kept jumping from his personal account of discovering the ruins of an indigenous Christian monastery in Western China, to recounting the history of how Christianity entered China and merged with Taoist and Buddhist doctrines, to summarizing and translating the “Jesus Sutras” (Chinese texts that refer to Christian scripture and liturgy) without providing an overarching flow to his argument. I wish he had chosen a more academic tone and stripped the personal commentary from his book. I also wish he didn’t analyze the Sutras prior to providing the translated text; it seems to be dodgy academic practice to try to bias the mind of your reader with a particular interpretation of a text (given that he can’t exactly assume that his reader is already familiar with the texts in question). Mostly, what I found most irritating was that he built up my expectations with his claims that the Sutras were an important contribution to spiritual literature. Granted, I have no idea how the original Chinese reads, but the English translation sounded awkward and uninspiring to me. Also, I didn’t find the blending of Christian theology with Buddhist and Taoist (more Buddhist than Taoist, in my opinion, despite the title) philosophy to be all that radical. It’s easy to find common points among all religious doctrines; the question is at which point do you end up generalizing so much that you end up becoming nondenominational. If Palmer had seriously addressed whether or not this “adulteration” of Christian theology can still be called Christian, I would have liked the book a lot more. (Are you still Christian if you diminish the historical existence of Christ and turn him into an abstract Savior? Conversely, are you still Christian if you emphasize the humanity of Christ and overlook his divinity? I don’t know the answer. To be honest, I don’t think I’m capable of grasping the dual nature of Christ; instead I slip into the fallacy of believing in two different Christs, one human and one divine.)

I should add that of course, one could say that Catholicism (and the Protestant sects which it spawned) is the adulterated form–and I think to a certain extent, that is Palmer’s contention. The Christian message has become distorted and politicized in “the West”, and hence we ought to look to “the East” to revive Christian spirituality and return to a more original form. But I find that whole attitude aggravating: Buddhism and Taoism have been equally subject to distortion, and I would presume a “Taoist Christianity” would be no different. No matter where you go, religion has been a tool for power.

Mike at Wrykyn, by P.G. Wodehouse: The prequel to Mike and Psmith, although I don’t know if it can rightly be called a prequel since I believe the two books were originally published together as Mike. The book talks about Mike’s first year at Wrykyn as he makes his mark through his superlative cricket skills, while juggling relations with his brother, an overbearing head of house, his roommate (an upperclassman known for getting into trouble) and the Wrykyn cricket captain. Schoolboy pranks included, although not as many as I expected, since the book is in fact mostly about cricket. I wish I knew more about cricket but the book is still enjoyable without any knowledge of the sport.

Leave It to Psmith, by P.G. Wodehouse: Switched from reading about Jeeves and Wooster to reading about Psmith, who is absurdly and delightfully verbose. He is able to get away with anything by simply never losing his composure; in the stickiest situation, he always makes everyone else feel that he has the upper hand. That’s the charm of a thoroughly arrogant character, of course. I suppose the trick is that he never irritates the reader with his arrogance, although other characters certainly find it infuriating. I liked that Wodehouse also finally created a strong female character, who is assertive and independent, without including any criticisms that come off as subtly sexist. (Female characters that are as spunky as Eve in the Jeeves and Wooster books come off as irresponsibly mischievous or domineering or scheming to entrap Bertie in marriage. Along the same lines, the weepy poetic female character in this story turned out to be a thief, whereas in a Jeeves and Wooster book, she would simply have remained soppy all the way through.) I also hadn’t realized that Freddie Threepwood was such an idiot; I read a later Blandings short story where he becomes much more competent.

Faces Under Water, by Tanith Lee: I was bemused once I started reading Faces Under Water, which is the first book in the quartet, to find that the book was riddled with grammatical mistakes and ungainly prose. The lush, almost gothic descriptions that I remembered from Lee’s other writing were there, but I also saw missing periods, misuse of parentheses, half-finished sentences, and a fondness for repeating sentence fragments, all of which occurred too often to be excused as a writer’s liberty to break the occasional rule. On the other hand, A Bed of Earth, which was written four years after Faces Under Water, doesn’t show such egregious errors, so I’m inclined to chalk them up to a bad editor.

As for the story itself, the book focuses on the more sordid side of Venus, with descriptions of orgies, alchemist-magicians, and corpses. Even the beautiful is also slightly horrific, like the paralyzed face of Eurydiche, whom the protagonist falls in love with. I didn’t enjoy the book as much as I’d hoped; some of more grotesque moments were just grotesque enough to make the book fall short of being the indulgence that I expected it to be. My impatience with Furian, the main character, didn’t help: in Siddharta-like fashion, he abandons the life of wealth and ease to which he was born and chooses to live in the gutters of Venus instead. I imagine Tanith Lee wanted to evoke the usual dualities inherent in the element of water (each book is based on an element): beauty and corruption, life and death, purity and filth, etc. But mostly I just felt irritated at Furian’s lack of personality and Eurydiche’s passiveness.

Hangman’s Holiday, by Dorothy L. Sayers: I seem to be reading a lot of short story collections these days. Although the choice was inadvertent; I thought Hangman’s Holiday was a full novel. The first four stories feature Wimsey, two of which I’d already read before from Lord Peter; six focus on Montague Egg, another amateur detective whose profession is traveling salesman to a wine and spirits firm; and the last two are not properly mysteries at all and describe instead the crime as it takes place. Of the latter category, “The Man Who Knew How” came off as darkly ironic, but the very last story, “The Fountain Plays”, sent a shiver up my spine. As for Monty Egg, he’s a very different character from Peter Wimsey, and his stories seem to have a much more lighthearted quality although the crimes are no less severe. It’s surprising how much social class makes a difference in the character. Both Wimsey and Egg seem comical on first impression—Wimsey with his flippancy, Egg with his earnest devotion to selling his product—but have keen, observant minds and good insight into human character. Both are also always ready with an apt quotation, although where Wimsey cites a classic or a poem, Egg has his Salesman’s Handbook memorized by heart instead. In the end, I find Wimsey the more thoroughly developed character, which is only natural given that Sayers gave him several novels’ worth of development, while Egg (as far as I know) only gets a handful of short stories. The Montague Egg mysteries are self-contained “drawing-room murders”; the solutions are deft and clever but the setting is still everyday. Wimsey, even in short story form, seems to encounter more bizarre and more complex crimes.

World of Jeeves, by P.G. Wodehouse: I think I started reading this omnibus before because I recognized the first half of the stories compiled in this volume. They’re organized in more or less chronological order too, providing a nice survey of Jeeves and Wooster’s literary lives. Wodehouse never fails to make me laugh. Each story also has a predictable pattern: Bertie has a falling-out with Jeeves, usually over a matter of fashion or proposal of vacation; he then ends up pledging to help a friend out of a (often romantic) predicament; Jeeves eventually saves the day and by the end, Bertie gives in, no matter how strongly he made up his mind to not be managed by his valet. It really is amazing how manipulative Jeeves can be: several times, he actually engineers an unsuccessful outcome but convinces Bertie that it was for the best.

What an artificial life Bertie leads! In an artificial time and artificial society. But it’s comforting to look at this rarefied bubble of time: when “going to school together” meant one could rely on the obligations of friendship, when young bachelors of a certain class had nothing better to do than to dress well and enjoy themselves (at least until their allowance was cut off by an irate relative) and fall in love every other week, when the most terrifying prospect that one could imagine is the visit of a tyrannical aunt. I’m certain that even in Wodehouse’s time, the world was nowhere near so simple. But isn’t it pleasant to imagine that it was, for just one short moment?

Yet if these stories demonstrate nothing else it is the appalling unpreparedness of the average nineteenth-century gentleman when he accidentally stumbled into Faerie. The Duke of Wellington is a case in point. Women do seem to have fared somewhat better in these perplexing circumstances; the heroine of “Mrs. Mabb”, Venetia Moore, consistently demonstrates an ability to intuit the rules of Faerie, which the older and more experienced Duke is quite without.

What really charmed me about the book was how authentic all the stories sound, as if they were really taken from actual folklore passed by mouth to mouth in the countryside until recorded into writing by an eager amateur researcher. They’re all slightly different too: you can see the direct fairy tale inspiration for “On Lickerish Hill”, which draws on “Rumpelstiltskin”, but “The Ladies of Grace Adieu” sounds vaguely Gothic, while “Mr Simonelli or The Fairy Widower” is in the form of diary entries. It’s mindboggling to think how much Clarke must have read, from all periods of English history, to carry off such different voices so effortlessly. But her talent for imitation doesn’t mask her style: each story exhibits that unique touch of whimsy mixed with a slightly sinister twist, much like the fairies themselves. Like a prism in the window, casting a shadow next to the insubstantial rainbow: an imperceptible shiver down one’s spine to accompany each charming phrase.

Empire of Ivory, by Naomi Novik: I read this book without having read The Black Powder War, which breaks my usual rule of reading series in chronological order whenever possible. I still enjoyed the book though. Where Throne of Jade reimagined imperial China in Novik’s alternate world history with dragons, Empire of Ivory takes us to Africa, where certain tribes consider dragons to be reincarnations of heroic ancestors. Isn’t that such an interesting idea? Of course, Laurence is held prisoner by the African dragon-king so I suppose he didn’t exactly share my fascination with the culture, but nonetheless, it’s funny to think that the Europeans, and the English in particular, seem to be in the minority in their insistence on treating dragons as “beasts”. The ending is, alas, another cliffhanger, but I’m glad to see Laurence doing what he believes is right, even though he has to betray his country to do so. For someone like Laurence, it must have been one of the most difficult decisions of his life: choosing between honor and loyalty.

Making Money, by Terry Pratchett: The return of Moist von Lipwig! Who turns from the Post Office to the Royal Mint. I didn’t like this novel quite as much as I liked Going Postal—the book was, to put it simply, not as funny—but it was still clever and entertaining. Dropping the gold standard, printing paper bills, fighting off the machinations of the Lavish family who owns the Bank…Moist manages to juggle it all with his natural instincts for charlatanry. I was a little surprised at the ending (the subplot with the golems felt a little like deus ex machina), and I’m still not sure what Pratchett intended with Mr. Bent. But I was very amused by Hubert (whose model of the Ankh-Morpork economy uses water to represent money and not only predicts but causes economic change), and if I understood economics or finance better, I’m sure I’d find even more amusing references to laugh at. Probably not going on my list of most memorable Discworld novels but still a good sequel, which makes me look forward to Moist von Lipwig’s next change of career. (I’m still waiting for Ankh-Morpork to build its subway system!)

Idoru, by William Gibson: I suppose I should simply resign myself to being perpetually confused by the ending of Gibson’s novels. I think Idoru was more coherent than Neuromancer, but it still ended abruptly for me: I still don’t quite understand what Rez and Rei were aiming to accomplish. What is the Project? What is the island that the idoru owns? I like the atmosphere of Gibson’s cyberpunk novels—the creatively imagined technology, the densely urban settings, even the eccentric characters he creates—but I’m always left with a feeling of dissatisfaction at the end. Did I not read carefully enough? Am I missing something important? In any case, I kind of wish I had Laney’s talent for intuiting “data nodes”—we could certainly use that sort of talent in genomics research, what with all the eye-glazing massive datasets we have to deal with and essentially no good method for determining signal from noise—but of course without the traumatic past as an involunatry experimental subject in an ethically dubious orphanage.

The Birthday of the World, by Ursula K. Le Guin: Almost all of the short stories in this collection focus on the worlds of the Ekumen, the loose universe in which The Left Hand of Darkness, Rocannon’s World and many of Le Guin’s other stories are set. It includes one of my favorite short stories by Le Guin, “Solitude”, which is as compelling on rereading as it was the first time I read it. For several days afterwards, I kept thinking of the end, when the narrator goes back to the planet as an adult and how she lived there, how she could go back to being alone again.

The rest of the short stories were new to me. A few were set in worlds that I had already read about, e.g. “Coming of Age in Karhide”, which was set several years after The Left Hand of Darkness. (Interesting to read about the helplessness and rage that the young Gethenians feel about the onset of kemmer; how like our own puberty despite all the biological differences Le Guin posited.) There was also a short story about Werel, which Le Guin had explored previously in Four Ways to Forgiveness, although I thought it was a little unfocused. “The Matter of Seggri” was much more interesting, containing multiple “primary source” excerpts concerning a world where there is a large gender imbalance, and women run most of the civilization, while men are kept in castles where they engage in violent games to show their physical strength while women choose the ones they like to father their children. The boys are treasured and pampered as children then sent off to the castles when they reach puberty. An interesting inversion of gender prejudices: men are not educated, they are not expected to know about technology or art, they do not form families. Le Guin writes about the effect that contact with the Ekumen has on the society as well; there are rebellions, both physical and intellectual. I was struck by the short story, purportedly written by an avant-garde author on the planet, where a man, who becomes the favorite of a particular woman, falls in love with her and is devastated when she finds his attachment unnatural and ultimately rejects him. Also by the first-hand account of a boy who escapes the castle and goes to the university for education: when asked what he wants most, he says he wants to be a wife, to be able to love another person and create a family, rather than be the breeding tool that his society expects him to be. Another interesting set of stories is set on a world where marriage occurs between four people, two couples of opposite gender and different moiety. I’ve been informed that the moieties actually do exist among Australian aborigines and certain tribes in South America, which is unsurprising given Le Guin’s extensive anthropological background. The difficulty in meeting a single person suitable for marriage…imagine how much more complicated it would be to meet three!

The best story in the collection though wasn’t part of the Hainish universe at all. “Paradises Lost” is set on a spaceship that has been traveling to colonize a new planet. It’s been several generations since the spaceship left Earth, so that all the inhabitants have only known the world of the ship. They have no knowledge of what it’s like to live on Earth and are not expected to live long enough to see the new planet. A new religion denies that the destination even exists; only the Journey is important. They have slowly started to erase records of the old Earth and alter curricula so that the younger generations are receiving less and less education about how to live on ground. Thus, the ship is caught unprepared when an unexpected acceleration schedules their arrival several decades ahead of the expected date. Life on the ship: sterile, peaceful, without danger. Everything is provided and recycled in a near perfect closed system. You never really think about how different it would be for people who were born and lived and died on that ship, and how strange, even frightening, the natural world of a planet would be.

The story traces the lives of two friends, Hsing and Luis, in excerpts over the span of their lives: it’s as much a wonderful portrait of their relationship as it is a commentary on religion and community. I loved the last line, when they have landed on the new planet and grown old together:

Swaying, she lifted her bare feet from the dirt and set them down again while he stood still, holding her hands. They danced together that way.

Thud!, by Terry Pratchett: Another Sam Vimes book in the Discworld series. Pratchett has that rare gift where he manages to satirize serious social issues in our world (ethnic conflicts, religious extremism, prejudices in all its forms, etc.) but also creates a uniquely Discworld flavor. Both the dwarfs and the trolls do remind me of various immigrant groups here, but what’s also striking is that Pratchett’s dwarfs and trolls are never made to map exactly to real-life counterparts. The dwarf culture has a specific Discworld context—how everything revolves around their original occupation of mining—and likewise for the trolls. It is those details of worldbuilding that really defines for me Pratchett’s strengths as a writer. Ironic isn’t it that I appreciate Pratchett most for writing good fantasy rather than good satire? Anyway, I particularly liked the concept behind Thud. The most crucial moment in the book would have to be when the dwarf Helmclever, who works for the grags but secretly is a master at the game, breaks down:

“It was the club the troll Mr Shine gave me for winning five games in a row,” he wailed. “He was my friend! He said I was as good as a troll so I should have a club! I told Ardent it was a war trophy! But he took it and bashed that poor dead body!”

Actually, the more and more I think about it, the more and more complex this novel becomes. It touches on so many issues: second-generation dwarfs wanting to go back to their roots to be more “authentic”, Brick’s drug problem, Vimes finally forced to employ a Black Ribboner in the Watch, the way history is changed and rewritten…One of these days, I’ll reread it again, even if it wouldn’t quite make it as one of my top favorites in the series. I’m so excited about the last scene though; I’m convinced that Ankh-Morpork will have a new subway system by the next book.

Anansi Boys, by Neil Gaiman: The general consensus seems to be that Anansi Boys is the most mainstream out of all of Gaiman’s novels so far, or at least the one most likely to have mainstream appeal. Same universe as American Gods, by which I mean that it works by the same rules and assumptions; otherwise the characters and tone of writing are all very different. I think what’s most notable is that Gaiman doesn’t seem half as dark as he usually is: not even Tiger really creeps you out the way his creations do in other books. I still liked the book though. I thought there was a playfulness to the story that was in keeping with Anansi himself.

Kafka on the Shore, by Haruki Murakami (trans. Philip Gabriel): All right, to be entirely honest, I didn’t like this book as much as I did the two Murakami novels I’ve read before. Actually, the disappointment mostly lies with the last third or so. The chapters alternate between two storylines, one from the perspective of Kafka Tamura (a first-person narrative) and one following an old man who can speak to cats, named Nakata (third-person). The two apparently divergent narratives do end up intersecting in various elusive connections until they collide—and while I can’t exactly explain the collision, I must say that the aftermath was what disappointed me. Usually, at the end of a Murakami novel or short story, I might feel that I couldn’t explain (not in rational terms anyway) everything that happened, but I always did feel as if I understood it on some nonverbal level, that at the very least the story had some sort of thematic coherence with no loose ends hanging out. Kafka on the Shore however ended before I was ready for it to be over. The ending unraveled, if that makes any sense. That isn’t to say that I didn’t like the entire book; for most of it, I was (as usual) enraptured by the writing and the characters. It’s so odd how matter-of-fact Murakami’s writing is (I would call it almost “bald” at times) and yet how precise—it renders his most fantastical ideas a psychological realism that bowls me over whenever I read his novels. I didn’t sympathize much with Kafka—he is the character I understood least in the entire novel, and I wonder if that may have to do with the first-person narration—but everyone else was vividly real, especially Oshima and Nakata, who are ironically enough the most unusual (if we were to talk in terms of people we are actually likely to meet).

Gaudy Night, by Dorothy L. Sayers: What I have to emphasize about Gaudy Night is that it’s not a mystery. Oh, to be sure, there is a crime, or rather a series of crimes, with an unknown perpetrator, as well as a detective, Harriet Vane, who looks for clues and questions witnesses or suspects to discover the criminal. But the book isn’t about the mystery at all nor its solution; the book is about women and how it is possible to be both an independent human being and to be specifically female, in every sense of the word. It is a difficult problem even now. I was startled to realize how much of Harriet’s own doubts and concerns applied to me in the here and now. The American lady who believed in the marriage of intelligent women to intelligent men (the influence of the American eugenics movement, no doubt), the dons of Shrewsbury who choose academia over marriage and motherhood (and hence are perceived to be unnatural women), the young college girls who preoccupy themselves with beaux, and most of all Harriet herself, who must come to terms with her relationship with Peter Wimsey. The resolution only comes when Harriet finally realizes that Peter will not force her to make a choice and that it is possible to be in love with a man without losing one’s own personal integrity in the process. As obvious as that sounds, it’s more difficult to realize than one would imagine. Love by itself involves loss of autonomy, and when women are forced, by external circumstances, to be socially and economically dependent on men, emotional dependence becomes all the more dangerous. It takes a lot for Harriet to realize that she can afford that risk. It’s not only a matter of whether Peter himself would or would not subsume her—clearly he is too much a gentleman to deliberately do that to her the way her former lover did—but a matter of whether she could trust herself.

Wimsey drops his frivolous facade almost for good here. I wonder if that’s due to Harriet or simply his evolution as a character. It’s interesting to see him from the perspective of the people who knew him, like his nephew St. George or his old college classmates. Gives him much more dignity too; like Harriet, we were too used to Peter to realize just how impressive he appears to others.

One final note: I really liked reading about Shrewsbury dynamics because so much of the college system in Oxford uses the same terminology as the system here. But the atmosphere is extremely different. Our Houses don’t have that sense of character, the shared community, the rarefied touch of academia. It’s true that my university exists in a bubble, but I can’t say that it really has the ivory tower atmosphere. People are focused on studying for exams, but so much of our mindset is oriented towards a professional future; while I do believe that students at heart do enjoy knowledge for its own sake, this mentality remains personal rather than social.

Sethra Lavode, by Steven Brust: All I can say is, I felt like crying at the end of this book. Poor Khaavren! I must admit that most of the storyline with the Jenoine and the Duke of Kana didn’t really interest me all that much, and I was even starting to get a little tired of Paarfi’s neverending exposition and circuitous dialogue, but the ending reminded me why the books hooked me in the first place. Ultimately, it was Khaavren’s story we were reading—how he lived and changed—and while there is a happy ending, there’s also irreversible loss.

His Grace of Osmonde, by Frances Hodgson Burnett: I must say, I never knew that Burnett wrote any books for adults, and it’s kind of odd reading a very characteristic Burnett novel with typical Burnett characters, except that there’s an actual love story involved. His Grace of Osmonde seems like a cross between Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Burnett’s Little Lord Fauntleroy. I didn’t quite like Osmonde with his impeccable chivalry, and I think Burnett is a little too fond of children upon whom “Fortune seems to smile from birth” (Cedric from Little Lord Fauntleroy, Sara from A Little Princess) but are forced to endure hardships that the cruel world inflicts on them. I mean, I enjoyed both those Burnett books, but they don’t hold as dear a place in my heart as The Secret Garden, where bitter, sullen Mary and sickly, paranoid Colin actually seem like real children, full of imperfections. They are not wholly likeable, which perversely makes me like them better. In any case, I also didn’t quite like the foreordained quality of the romance here—wherein Clorinda is the only possible woman worthy of the shining perfection that is Osmonde—although I suppose the arbitrary circumstances that keep them apart make it truly tragic. I really did like the ending; a nice change from Burnett’s usual instinct to moralize. Good people are sometimes forced to do bad things. I never would have expected her to put in such a twist.

Sputnik Sweetheart, by Haruki Murakami (trans. Philip Gabriel): Oh, what to say about Sputnik Sweetheart. The writing literally overwhelmed me from the very first paragraph. More so than Norwegian Wood, which may be due to the different translators (I read Philip Gabriel’s translation of Sputnik Sweetheart and Jay Rubin’s translation of Norwegian Wood). The book seems relatively normal until about halfway through the book, when Sumire disappears, and Murakami becomes progressively more and more surreal until you don’t know what’s metaphor and what’s literal anymore. But of course, that’s not the point. You aren’t supposed to ask, wait, what’s really going on, because that isn’t what’s important. It shocked me how comprehensible the book was. I mean, usually with avant-garde writing, there’s a certain leap of thought required before it makes sense, that is to say, it takes a little time for it all to sink in, but not so here. Sumire disappearing, Miu’s hair turning white, the strange music on the hilltop: it all made sense. Although now that I try to articulate what it meant to me, it comes out sounding rather flat and banal. I was a bit disconcerted by the sharp transition when the narrator returns to Japan, and in fact, a part of me wondered at first if those final chapters were even necessary. And then I realized that the break in the narration, almost like a snap, is exactly like the narrator’s own transition. This kind of writing awes me to no end. Murakami’s style (at least from what I can tell in English translation) is deceptively simple, open, even dryly humorous (I forgot to mention that he’s really funny, which is not exactly what one would expect from the summaries of his novels), and yet this sensation of something powerful. I wrote in my LJ that it’s hard for me to say that I “like” Sputnik Sweetheart because the experience can’t be classified in those categories of liking or disliking. The analogy used: “when you glimpse yourself in the mirror and see yourself as a stranger, not-self, and yet the person you see is intimately familiar.” (Oh dear, to think that I would resort to the conceit of quoting myself.)

The Five Red Herrings, by Dorothy L. Sayers: To be entirely honest, I found this mystery to be rather tiresome and not one of Sayers’ best. Too many suspects, too many details, too many detectives. We didn’t even have much opportunity to at least enjoy Wimsey’s conversation, which used to be a delight when the mystery itself fell short of expectation. Also, I do like attempting to solve the crime along with the characters, but not when I’m forced to juggle timetables in my head. I daresay real detectives have to deal with these kinds of messy mysteries all the time, but that doesn’t mean that they necessarily make good narratives. Oh well, I managed to finish it in the end though. The solution to the crime was equally disappointing.

Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson: Snow Crash is one of those books that when you look at it piece by piece, you wonder how the story ever managed plausibility in the first place, but when you look at it as a whole, you find it absolutely cool anyway. Hackers! Mesopotamian mythology! Linguistics! Viruses! Seriously, Stephenson comes up with the most awesome (if far-fetched) ideas. The first chapter, by the way, is a brilliant piece of writing: if you read it out loud, you notice the rhythm he’s built into the narration. The puns are…kind of obvious and bad, but I forgave him anyway. I also forgave him for equating glossolalia with fanaticism and mob mentality (not that I can exactly blame him, but “speaking in tongues” does not send you off into a mindless euphoria). Oh yes, and Stephenson’s definition of agglutinative language is incorrect as well. But quibbles aside, the whole Asherah idea—the impulse to conformity, and not just conformity but irrationality being transmitted as a virus to which human brains are particularly vulnerable—reminded me of Dawkin’s original concept of the “meme”. Also, the Babel phenomenon being responsible for inspiring human diversity was pretty interesting too, especially considering that I’m taking a course on language acquisition taught by a Chomskyite professor. The Metaverse was well designed although I wish Stephenson had included some more notes on how the user interface worked. I mean, how exactly does Hiro get his avatar to fight in the Metaverse? Is it tied into his actual physical movements? Wouldn’t that be kind of limiting? I mean, imagine if he had to stand still but his avatar had to walk? Or is it connected directly to his brain? Eye movements? Hand movements? Yes, I do obsess over worldbuilding details like these. Juanita is awesome although the way Hiro perceives her is definitely different from the person she really is, I bet. Also, why on earth does Hiro keep changing from washed-out delivery boy to hacker legend to kenjutsu master to some sort of secret agent to way too many personas for one individual? He can’t be that talented. I would call him a Gary Stu except it occurred to me that Hiro Protagonist reflects how men (or at least many males of my acquaintance) see themselves: a mix of both unrecognized genius and insecure failure. Anyway, the reinterpretation of religious history in terms of Enki’s nam-shub might require gross generalizations but what a brilliant idea nonetheless.

Have His Carcase, by Dorothy L. Sayers: A much better mystery than Five Red Herrings even though again there was much agonizing over alibis and timetables. At least the solution was quite clever this time, and it all fit together pretty well, even if the cryptography seemed a little excessive. I mean, are murders, even premeditated ones, ever that elaborate? Of course, that’s beside the point because no matter how interesting the sleuthing, what this book really is about is Harriet and Peter, and Harriet’s inability to reconcile her need for independence with her very genuine affection for Peter. The author makes it more than obvious that she loves him back, but nonetheless, we must watch the painful dance. Oh the difficulties of being a Modern Woman! I must say that this book is the first where Lord Peter’s been so consistently wrong in his theories, even if he comes up with the right answer in the end.

The Deer and the Cauldron, vol. 1, by Louis Cha (trans. John Minford): Louis Cha is the English pseudonym of the popular wu xia novelist Jin Yong. The Deer and the Cauldron is one of his works that is available in English. The translation is most definitely for people who don’t know anything about the Chinese language, and considering this audience, I’d have to say that the translator did a good job. Of course, one might be annoyed by the fact that several characters’ names are translated literally (for example, Xiaobao becomes Trinket) but I think that it does convey a nuance that English readers might otherwise miss. Also, the translator takes pains to explain every possible reference, even at the cost of interrupting the story, and there’s a very comprehensive glossary at the beginning that explains nearly everything else. The story itself is very humorous, detailing the adventures of Trinket, a young rascal who was born in a brothel and (at the moment) ends up masquerading as a eunuch in the palace. The setting is early Qing dynasty, when the Han Chinese, especially in the South, were still feeling resentful and rebellious toward their Manchu conquerors. (Trinket hails from such a Southern province.) In the Brotherhood of River and Lake, the underworld in which so many wu xia stories take place, the Triad Society (or more accurately the Society of Heaven and Earth) are among many who conspire to overthrow the Manchus and restore the Ming. Trinket makes for an unexpected hero, although well within the Chinese storytelling tradition (I suppose one could compare him to the monkey king in Journey to the West?), and he’s hilariously foulmouthed, tactless and yet somehow compelling. I hesitate to draw any larger conclusions at the moment, since there are two more volumes to the work, but it’s definitely a lot of fun to read.

Saint Thomas Aquinas: The Dumb Ox, by G.K. Chesterton: In a sense, this book is not simply a hagiography of Thomas Aquinas, but rather Chesterton’s reaction to “modernism”: his explanation of why he turns to Catholicism to find answers that modern philosophy cannot provide. Very gently done of course because Chesterton never quite preaches at the reader; instead he presents his opinions in a delightfully subversive way, overturning the usual stereotypes about Christian religion and Catholicism in particular. One of his points, which struck me as particularly important, is that Christianity is essentially a religion that celebrates life. It is easy to forget this fact considering tendencies within the Church to emphasize asceticism and original sin, but Chesterton argues that asceticism is in many ways a natural emotional impulse, which the structure and dogma of the Church holds in check. He writes that the Church’s traditionalism is what prevents it from embracing extremes, that keeps it professing the innate goodness of all creation. Faith is complex and shifting, but religion provides a structure in which it can remain healthy instead of stagnant. Chesterton’s perspective is clearly far from conventional, but I felt that he articulated what it means to be Catholic.

Chesterton also does an excellent job, by the way, of putting Aquinas in a historical context: the renewal taking place within the Church, the rise of new monastic orders (the Dominican and Franciscan friars), the Manichaean heresy, Albertus Magnus, the revival of Greek classics via the Muslims in the East, Aristotelianism and Church theology. I appreciated the originality of his interpretations—he really has a way of turning one’s view of history topsy-turvy—although I will say that Chesterton has a tendency to generalize in order to fit things into a clear pattern (dialectic?—although he himself would deny that he poses any dialectics). He makes an interesting comparison between Buddhism and Christianity, saying that the two are similar precisely because their philosophies are exact complements: they describe the same contours so to speak but are nonoverlapping. In other words, where Buddhism ends with Self, Christianity posits a Creator, although that sounds a bit too glib. Not exactly a groundbreaking insight in itself, since the grandmothers at my church say essentially the same thing (our parish, being Korean-American, has a unique relationship with Buddhist tradition), but nonetheless meaningful. I don’t quite agree with the way Chesterton draws sweeping conclusions about the East—particularly since I’m Asian myself—but other than that, I must say that his conception of spirituality is very much my own. I really do recommend the book, if only to get a better understanding of theology. It’s very easy to read one or two books, or even worse, listen to one or two people, and believe you know what Christianity is about, but I find that everyone complicates the issue with their own personal psychologies (and no one less than Catholics themselves) and forgets the simplicity of the message underneath. Chesterton returns to that simplicity and explains the exterior complications with remarkable lucidity. His explanation of Augustine, or rather Augustinianism and its influence on Church theology, was eye-opening for me.

I find it very difficult to discuss religion directly—it is, after all, intensely personal, not to mention difficult to verbalize—but I think the following quote explains best my own reason for theism:

“Things change because they are not complete; but their reality can only be explained as part of something that is complete. It is God.”

The Eyre Affair, by Jasper Fforde: I read the sequel Lost in a Good Book first, so I had the disadvantage of already knowing, in a loose sense, what was going to happen in this book. This may have biased my reaction to it, of course. I think I enjoyed the sequel more, although I’m not sure if that’s because Fforde’s writing has improved since his first novel, because I dislike Jane Eyre more than Great Expectations or because Fforde’s cleverness can only last for the duration of a book and a half before growing tiresome. The uncharitable part of me would say it’s the last. I do appreciate the whole setup with all the details of this alternate world from the obsession with literature to the not-so-secret tyranny of the Goliath Corporation, and I didn’t even mind the worst of the puns, but at a certain point, I felt that Fforde was just throwing clever idea after idea at me without much substance to back it up. Frankly, his writing at its best is only average. There were a few moments when I was quite appalled at how awful the dialogue was and wondered what sort of editor would let him get away with that. Also, the characters are amusing as flat caricatures but there is absolutely no development whatsoever. One might ask, is there supposed to be, but when Acheron Hades utterly fails to come across as particularly evil other than Fforde’s insistence that he is, the story falls flat. I do acknowledge that Fforde is parodying certain literary stereotypes, but in Acheron’s case, he failed to make it amusing. Thursday also doesn’t work as a character for the simple reason that she isn’t one person, but ten. She keeps changing her personality to suit the situation—hardened veteran at one point, rejected lover at another—but she becomes completely amorphous as a result. Again, I suspect that this lack of effective character development is at least partly intentional, but I’m still left with the impression that Thursday is a badly executed Mary Sue that takes itself a little too seriously to be funny. Oh, I adore all of Fforde’s ideas, and I’ll freely admit that he’s clever beyond belief, but there’s still something missing. I can’t remember if Lost in a Good Book managed to acquire that something or not, but nonetheless I’ve lost all desire to track down the sequels.

Which is to say, it has a very healthy collection of the latest fantasy books, including The Paladin of Souls, which was just published this year. The drawback, and of course there is a drawback, is that Widener’s entire circulating collection is in neatly organized stacks, left abandoned in dimly lit corridors with motion sensitive lights. Hardly the ideal place for browsing—the classic Widener expedition begins with the knowledge of one’s destination, its route mapped out neatly in Hollis searches with little room for detours. The cataloguing system is insanely scrupulous: fiction and literature are organized by the author’s country and date of birth. British literature is on the first floor, American literature on the second (both in the East wing, so you don’t have to travel too far), the shelves organized first by century, then by name. If you think about it, the librarians must research the books they acquire pretty extensively. I’ve wondered what they would do with authors like Neil Gaiman who are British by birth but have immigrated to America. Or what about authors born at the turn of the century? Should investigate one day.

In any case, I’ve been rather lax in updating this blog, which means that the books in my log has accumulated to the point where I really can’t afford to spend paragraphs discussing them, as much as I might wish. So hopefully, I’ll be able to confine myself to a few sentences per book without going off on happy tangents. Wish me luck.

Little Black Book of Stories, by A.S. Byatt: In my moments of soul-searching honesty, I wonder if I only enjoy Byatt out of literary pretention. Frankly, I don’t think I actually comprehend her at any deep level (or even agree with her for that matter), and I tend to admire her inventiveness and clever structure and sheer erudition (admit it, the natural history of thrushes and snails in Babel Tower was impressive). But she does fall in the category of contemporary literary fiction writers that I do enjoy, so why bother second-guessing my motives? Anyway, the story I particularly remember from this anthology is the one about the writing class because I finished it on the uncomfortable thought that writing requires suffering. One, you only want to write about life when living it has become sufficiently miserable. Two, while the maxim says to write what you know, you can also only really write well if you are distanced from your subject—that is, living a tragic or even simply pathetic life will give you the proper perspective to write about ordinary life. Three, you can only write about something you desire, and if your life is dull and ordinary, you desire dull and ordinary things like action and adventure and semi-pornographic romance. Four, on a deeper level, to be a writer, you must feel the need to write. My final conclusion: this is why I have no vocation as a writer.

Oryx and Crake, by Margaret Atwood: Initially, I was reluctant to read this novel, but after repeated exhortations from ma meilleure amie, I caved in, bought it and read it. I still don’t know if I regret it or not—I have to admit that I didn’t really enjoy the book, although it didn’t commit the sin of boring me at all. On the contrary, that book is absolutely disturbing, and I had nightmares as I fell asleep after finishing the last page. It was scary. One, because I want to be a scientist, and prior to this, I thought my ethical position was pretty clear. Whole human cloning = bad, stem cells = relative to situation, transgenic organisms = good. I mean, I work with transgenic plants, and I plan to do research that involves genetically modified organisms! The book hit too close for comfort. Plus, the rampant commercialism, the…the cold godlessness of Atwood’s dystopia. Given Atwood’s axioms, my only choice is to give up and despair. I have no faith in human nature by itself, and it took me a few panicked moments before I remembered that I had a different framework in which I could think and look for hope. In any case, worth reading if only to creep yourself out. Thank goodness Atwood’s science is pretty unrealistic (people really should stop thinking of genes as the all-magical unit; they work in networks, you know, horribly complicated ones that places like the CGR are devoted to untangling). Oh, and don’t forget the priceless malapropism: “proteonome”.

Paladin of Souls, by Lois McMaster Bujold: The sequel to The Curse of Chalion. Not quite as good as the first, but still, really wonderfully written. Reading Bujold is so refreshing—just clean, wonderful storytelling without any weaknesses to distract me.

An Artist of the Floating World, by Kazuo Ishiguro: I’ve just realized that all of Ishiguro’s narrators speak with the same voice: modest in a subtly false way, convinced at once of their relative insignificance yet also secretly believing in their ultimate importance, deeply misguided in their perceptions of themselves and the people around them. Not that it stopped me from enjoying this—I felt it was subtler than The Remains of the Day (I wondered which was written first?) for some inscrutable reason. Self-absorbed teenagers should read Ishiguro, for the sake of their own maturity. Neither your achievements or sins are as great as you think; you are both important enough to be hated unconditionally and insignificant enough to be forgiven. Oh, and beautifully sad and evocative, as usual; in a way closer to The Remains of the Day in nostalgia for a more dignified past, than to When We Were Orphans which is…just odd and bewildering in so many ways. (Narrator’s voice is still the same though.)

Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, by Douglas Adams: I’m probably uttering heresy, but I prefer the two Dirk Gently books to the Hitchhiker series (well, the first three books were brilliant, but Mostly Harmless utterly confused me and sounded like it was written by a schizophrenic). Anyway, enjoyed it, although I’ve been vaguely wondering why an adamantly atheist Adams enjoys writing so much about coincidences and paradoxes. It’s quite possibly part of the deeper satiric commentary that I completely missed. Oh well, it was funny; we don’t always need to use our brains when reading for pleasure.

The Beekeeper’s Apprentice, by Laurie R. King: Read on the recommendation of one of my Greenough floormates. I think I would have fallen in love with the book only if Mary Russell wasn’t such an unforgivably annoying character. (Not to mention Mary Sue. Ew.) She’s too perfect: smart, sassy, rich, pretty, strong, talented, independent, etc., etc., etc. Plus, she doesn’t even convince me that she’s smart—all that stupid deductive nonsense was much less impressive than Conan Doyle’s version, and throughout the book, she never really actually shows any brilliant logic. We have only the author’s word that she was being unusually observant (hah!). Finding the senator’s daughter was more an athletic than mental exercise, and as for that “leap of intuition” for Henry VIII? Bogus, pure bogus. I hated her emotionalism after she claimed to be so tough-minded…I mean honestly, her adventures didn’t seem to be particularly dangerous or traumatizing. What a self-absorbed little creep. Sherlock Holmes, as the Love Interest, was suitably fascinating and wonderful, however. And I have to admit, I would have enjoyed the book, if Mary Russell’s personality didn’t drive fingernails up the chalkboard. It has proper respect and knowledge of the Holmes canon, I’d say that much.

Wyrms, by Orson Scott Card: Wow, another book that creeped me out, but in a delicious way. Whatever happened to Orson Scott Card’s ingenuity and subtlety? Oh all right, the religious parallels and partly-disguised didactic lectures are hardly subtle, but the idea of organisms that hybridize with alien genomes in order to imitate and out-compete—pure biological bogus, but genius bogus, nonetheless. And it’s not entirely baseless—especially in the case of plants, where hybrids are common, and there’s also convergent evolution. I have to admit that while I disagree with a lot of OSC’s opinions, especially his politics and his whole anti-intellectualism crusade, I do agree with many of his more fundamental ones, and so the lectures in this book didn’t chafe me at all. And seriously, this is such brilliant, original thinking, exactly why I enjoy reading science fiction.

A Clash of Kings, by George R.R. Martin: I’m starting to grow tired of this trilogy already. The second book isn’t as absorbing as the first, mostly because it drags on too long. I know people say they get bored of Lord of the Rings, but at least the plot developments move forward instead of repeating themselves in tiresome circles. Still, I’m interested enough to want to know what happens (have put the third book on reserve), unlike the Wheel of Time series (I still say that being unable to finish a story after eight 700+ page volumes is a sign of poor writing). Martin is also growing increasingly darker, more and more reminiscent of the author of Sandkings, an anthology of short stories that managed to scare me to the point where I actually just threw the book out to avoid having nightmares. (All right, so I’m overly sensitive! But it was a used book and bought for a $1, so it wasn’t heresy.) I really do like all the Starks, even Sansa in her own way, and I wish that the Others or the wildlings will hurry up and invade. I don’t have much fondness for anyone not from Winterfell though. Summer knights indeed, frivolous and doomed to rot. Who wants a king who throws tournaments on his way to war? Isn’t that sort of redundant? And ugh, Daenerys, who won my sympathy when Khal Drogo was alive but lost it as soon as he died. (So utterly naive. Incredible.) I think I have a bit of a soft spot for Varys, but that’s about it, on my list of characters I like.

Swordspoint is written like a fairy tale, but it’s so much more than that—I think of finely embroidered lace and whole ivory scenes carved in nutshells, and still the analogies are inadequate to describe the sheer beauty of her writing. It is refined and poised and elegant, but so very passionate. That description of Alec and Richard in bed was more erotic than anything I’ve ever read, and it wasn’t even explicit. (Far from it, really.) And of course, that strange dynamic between the two lovers forms the hidden heart of the story, which in itself was as intricate as the writing. (On a entirely superficial note, I do love fantasy based on court intrigues, and the politics in this novel was as convoluted as I could have wished.) Oh…I keep trying to describe, to pin down in a glib phrase exactly why this book fascinated me so much, but I can’t, really. I can talk about the imagery (the drop of blood on snow that begins the novel), the characters (St Vier and Alec and Duchess Tremontaine), the setting (Riverside where the prostitutes and swordsmen inhabit the abandoned houses of the nobility), but it feels vaguely sacrilegious somehow.

One thing I did want to note was that Riverside does not seem medieval at all. For one, the setting is clearly urban, although the rule by aristocrats and lack of monarchs does suggest a feudal social structure. But then again, you have the Italian city-states—and seriously, if Riverside evokes any historical period for me, it’s definitely Renaissance Italy. Never mind the vaguely French and English names, Riverside is Italian through and through. The duels, the noble houses, the vague murmurs of trade and mercantilism in the background, the intrigues, the backstabbing, the decadence (one would ask why I’m associating decadence with rebirth, and even possibly accuse me of making the fatal mistake of substituting decadence for cultural fertility, but Italy in my mind is always just a little decadent—think of Venice, after all). I can imagine da Vinci living in this city, the unnamed capital. (Not to mention Machiavelli.) I suppose there’s also a lingering sense of the Roman Empire as well—the habit of hiring swordsmen to fight your duels reminded me of the gladiators. (And now, on second thought, one could even say France under Louis XIII and XIV. The musketeers, the glitter of Versailles—the description of the Duchess’ morning dress definitely made me think Marie Antoinette.)

Monstrous Regiment, by Terry Pratchett: I think I’m pretty much all caught up on the Discworld series now, unless Going Postal has already been released. (One of the disadvantages of not checking my LJ anymore…the Discworld community was so useful with information like that.) I liked Monstrous Regiment, but I don’t know if I enjoyed it in quite the same way as I enjoyed the other Discworld books. Pratchett is turning more and more to satire as opposed to humor and parody. There’s a distinction of course. I didn’t laugh at all during Monstrous Regiment—there’s a sober tone to it that has been developing slowly over his last few books. Not that it isn’t worth reading. I just felt that I was reading a very different series than the one I began. Of course, Discworld has modernised considerably since Rincewind in The Colour of Magic, “kicking and screaming into the Century of the Fruitbat”. I still adore Pratchett’s writing of course, blunt yet completely clever. Although a part of me wishes he’d return to the old days of the Watch, when Vimes was more occupied with straightforward criminals than international politics. (I’m sure Vimes will agree heartily with me on that one.)

Whose Body?, by Dorothy L. Sayers: Yes, I’ve succumbed to Lord Peter fanaticism. Whose Body? is the first Lord Peter Wimsey mystery, and I plan to read its sequels in chronological order. I don’t normally consider mystery to be one of my favorite genres—when it comes to genre fiction, I consider myself nearly exclusively SF/F—but I have to admit that I really adore 19th century detective fiction. Anything contemporary bores me (I have tried some, you know), and I only get about as far as Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple mysteries, before I give up. But I swallowed both volumes of The Complete Sherlock Holmes (Bantam anthology) in fifth grade, before I discovered Lord of the Rings. Plus, I adore Chesterton’s Father Brown mysteries. I like Miss Marple, but I don’t particularly enjoy Poirot—my love of detective fiction is so very narrow and requires a properly Victorian setting, with a thoroughly British detective. (The one exception being Dupin, although Dupin is rather Gothic at times.) A LJ friend of mine once equated reading detective fiction with the art of solving crossword puzzles, and the image has stuck in my mind ever since—the delight of a good mystery novel for me is tied up in the delight I would get in sipping tea in a cup set on lace tablecloth with a neatly folded newspaper and a sharpened pencil next to the saucer. It is a game, a mental challenge, an exercise strictly delineated by certain conventions and formalisms not so different from filling in the right letter in the right space and not slurping when you sip Earl Grey (two sugars, no cream).

The genius of Sayers however is that she acknowledges this precise framework, and then proceeds not to topple it but to somehow sidestep it. There are plenty of sly asides when the characters mention how in a detective novel there would be a convincing clue right about now but real life is not so accomodating, etc., but what I’m really speaking of though is a specific scene where Lord Peter walks into Freke’s waiting room, for the purposes of giving fair warning, and observes the patients there. He notes that the finances of five countries are in the hands of Freke (a neurologist and surgeon who specializes in nervous disorders; his patients include a man who, yes, controls the economies of five foreign nations), and speaks to a Russian emigrée and her daughter, the former of whom repeatedly calls Freke “un saint” in rapid French. I make it sound so banal, but when I read that scene, I was absolutely flabbergasted. It wasn’t about showing Freke’s humanity, or anything like that—Freke, cold, scientific and entirely amoral, is hardly an exemplary human being—but it was about wondering what happens when the crime is solved and the ends of the mystery are neatly tied up, what happens to the people irrelevant to the mystery but nevertheless indirectly connected, what are the true consequences of the decision to reveal the truth. Lord Peter, who seems so frivolous at times (intelligent yes, but frivolous, and even he admits it and wonders at the suitability of his playing detective), breaks down into a flashback to his time in the trenches during the First World War after he solves the mystery, and you realize that while Peter worries if he’s just playing a gentleman’s game, most detectives never have to ponder the question at all. Sayers is a crueler author in that respect, but a much more brilliant one, I should say.

Also noticed that Freke’s description of criminal psychology—and how the successful criminal ultimately gets caught—paralleled very closely Raskolnikov’s breakdown in Crime and Punishment. Would not be surprised if that was a partial inspiration for Sayers, who must have been an extremely, extremely well-read woman. (She cites a paper to support her point about vicious crimes having petty motives. Plus her discussion of psychology and physiology, as well as her description of the criminal investigation is so precise and so erudite that one must absolutely admire her sheer intelligence.) I did think that Freke was a bit of an obvious choice for a culprit—I suspected him right away after noticing that he was a doctor at the hospital near Thipps’ flat and that he had connections to Lady Levy. Of course, I had the reader’s advantage in knowing that there was high probability of the two cases being related (both being in the same book after all), but it was a little transparent. Of course, that’s not really the point—the highlight of the novel is not the ingenuity of the crime (although that was clever, I admit) or the criminal, but that moment in the doctor’s waiting room, when Wimsey shoulders true responsibility for his actions.

Despite the melodramatic writing, it’s also different from the self-absorbed adolescent angst that I tried my best to fend off during high school. I am detached from my loneliness—I observe it and feel it, but I am distanced from the emotion, as if there was a veil obscuring the intensity of the sensation. There is no pain, just a dull sort of emptiness, and I walk around Harvard Square every evening, half-noting this emptiness as I decide where to pick up dinner for the night. Still, emptiness is emptiness, and the sensation is hardly pleasant. Whenever I feel vaguely lost or stressed or upset, I immediately head for a high concentration of books, and since this is Cambridge, and I still haven’t found the public library yet, I head for the Coop instead. I’ve finished two books there so far (they so conveniently provide chairs for the browsers who won’t buy).

The Jane Austen Book Club, by Karen Jay Fowler: Currently on the NYT bestseller list and, for the most part, winning the praise and adulation of the critics, although there are a few who seem disenchanted with its cleverness. Perhaps I’m just a shallow/pretentious showoff/pedant but I appreciated the cleverness. Six characters, six books, six meetings—each character in some way parallels the Jane Austen book that she chooses. Also, stylistically, there’s an understated ironic tone in the Austenian tradition, and furthermore, the narrow scope of the setting and storyline does indeed capture the restrained, decorous (but very tongue-in-cheek) sense that I always get when reading Austen. I haven’t read all the Austen books of course (never had the incentive to read Sense and Sensibility and Persuasion; plus I never actually finished Mansfield Park, being too frustrated with Fanny), but I’ve read enough to catch some of the references (Fowler deliberately echoes Austen repeatedly throughout the book), and personally, I like that neatness of form. It gives me the same feeling of satisfaction I get when I, say, see a perfectly symmetric rose window (like the one in Annenberg). In other words, I’m anal, and I like to read fiction that shows the same sort of anal retention, although I would prefer to use the word “craft”.

What I like even better is the type of fiction where this sort of carefully wrought form and structure is embedded under a dizzying surface “messiness”—like David Foster Wallace’s work or Helen DeWitt’s The Last Samurai. One of the reasons why I adored Nine Stories—some people felt Ms. D’Amico was stretching it when she pointed out how they descends “nine stories” on the ship (in the last story) and also the more overall structure of the anthology (children to adult to children), but I think that’s the moment when I realized why literary analysis is so important. I have a very visual, or should I say geometric?, conception of writing structure, and when I perceive a particularly beautiful pattern, I feel as ecstatic as when I read a beautiful mathematical proof. That’s another thing…burying the structure in seeming incoherence that resolves in the end to be perfectly self-consistent is like uncovering the systemic laws that underly complexity. (Why I want to research biology.)

Anyway, I definitely enjoyed The Jane Austen Book Club—the transparency of the writing (I mean, “transparent” like “lucid” not “transparent” like “obvious”) was refreshing. The critics talk about how it’s a sort of meta-commentary on the social patterns of book clubs themselves, but I actually didn’t concentrate on that (never having been in a book club myself). I perceived it more as a book about reading (hah! Northanger Abbey!), and how reader and book reciprocally alter each other. I do feel, very much, that I’m in some ways the sum of the books I’ve read. My opinions, my behavior, my language, my likes and dislikes all can be traced back to a book of some sort—albeit with considerable evolution of course. And at the risk of waxing too long on a trite sentiment, I also feel that I’ve, in a limited way, changed the books: the books I’ve read have a different personality than the books my friends have read, even when they coincide in having the same author, title, text.

A Hat Full of Sky, by Terry Pratchett: What can I say? Terry Pratchett gets better and better. Ultimately, the substance of the message in his books are really simple—look past the surface, be self-reliant, don’t let other people define who you are, look for your inner strength—but it never, ever feels old or clichéd. Quite possibly because he’s such an unsentimental author. Because he’s so biting and witty, when he does bring out the empowering message of the day, it doesn’t feel like pop psychobabble, but a real fundamental truth. His children’s books don’t differ so much from his adult fiction. No actual swearing, of course, and a young girl as protagonist to appeal to the readers, but quite a lot of the parodic elements are rather sophisticated. I don’t know if the target audience would necessarily understand all the subtext. Of course, the pleasure of getting all the references and allusions is the preoccupation of Discworld fans or shallow/pretentious showoffs/pedants like myself, and I’m sure they would enjoy the book (and its prequel The Wee Free Men, which I read after my Korean final). But hopefully they’ll read the book again a few years later, to fully appreciate Pratchett’s writing.

But then again, I don’t know. Would I have understood the book when I was ten? Hm…maybe when I was twelve? I never know how to assess children’s intelligence: when I compare the average child to my own (admittedly faulty) memories of who I was at age [insert number < 18 here], I often grossly overestimate them. (Still can’t forget how bored my tutoring pupils were when I took them to the bird documentary—sure, it was a documentary and an Educational Film, oh the horror, but I watched the PBS broadcast of Nature with a passion when I was eight. How I collected my reservoir of pop science facts.) But when I talk with my friends, it seems that they were all either just as or even more intelligent/knowledgeable/precocious than I was, and then I feel guilty for underestimating people. I suppose it’s always best to err on the side of overestimation, but that often means I end up disappointed in people.

Perhaps the actual conclusion to draw from this is that I shouldn’t be trying to compare or assess people at all. Shame, shame. I should really squelch my arrogance, especially since I am more than ever unjustified in it.