The booklog games
Jan. 8th, 2010 08:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
trinityofoneBuckle your seatbelts: this one gets ranty.
161. The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins — I generally hate 'it's x meets y!' type summaries—it's 1984 meets To Kill a Mockingbird! The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy meets Thomas Paine's The Rights of Man!—but the first volume of Suzanne Collins' breakout YA series really IS The Long Walk meets Battle Royale. Only it's better than both of them. Collins brings together thrilling action and complex characters—my favorite combination—in a book that, to utilize another appropriate cliche, you really will not want to put down. I can't wait to read the next one.
162. The Five Fists of Science, Matt Fraction — Steampunky adventures with Mark Twain and Nikola Tesla! This was fun, if not very complex or deep. Poor awkward, nervous, brilliant, neurotic Tesla—my favorite parts were anytime he was on stage. Since we seem to have everyone from Jane Austen to Abraham Lincoln to Oscar Wilde to Queen Victoria fighting crime/vampires/zombies these days, can't we get Tesla in on more of that action?
163. Hush, Hush, Becca Fitzpatrick — A few weeks ago, a woman came into the store and we started chatting about YA fiction. She expressed a dislike of Twilight and boredom with the heaps of vampire books currently on the shelves. When I hesitantly agreed (as a bookseller, I am supposed to love all the books), she smiled and shook her head and told me not to worry. "This vampire thing is winding down," she said. "Angels are the new vampires."
I was intrigued (angels being somewhat Relevant to My Interests at the moment), but I didn't really believe her. However, almost immediately thereafter, the angel books started pouring in. You are a clever one, anonymous lady!
Sadly, this book—the most hyped of the new winged bunch—is not. In fact, it pretty much IS Twilight with angels, and I just...if I headdesk enough, do you think I'll be able to forget both Twilight and Hush, Hush in their entirety?
All right, since that seems unlikely to work, let's see if I can heal my pain by getting my rant on. (With a numbered list, even—always a good sign that I'm too annoyed to even assemble my thoughts coherently.)
1. Really, this is Twilight. But with angels. The plot shares a number of similarities: instead of taking place somewhere rainy and vaguely ominous on the west coast (Washington State, right?), it takes place somewhere rainy and vaguely ominous on the east coast (Maine—please wave hello to Stephen King). Supernatural male and vulnerable human female meet when they're assigned as lab partners. Supernatural male rescues vulnerable human female from some shit. Nothing much happens for most of the book, and then there's a showdown in a gym. Blah blah blah.
2. After a 3rd person prologue that had me hopeful, we're right back in insipid 1st person POV land. I have to say: Nora, this book's protagonist, is much less annoying than Bella. However, this seems to be accomplished mostly by her having no personality whatsoever. Seriously, none. Her quirky boy-crazy (andfat 20 pounds heavier than the main character voluptuous! that sounds PC!) best friend has one, but all Nora's got is some minor angst because her dad died and her mom works a lot. I have throw pillows that seem more dynamic.
3. Seriously, having the main character and romantic heroine constantly reference how "voluptuous" her friend is and constantly make fun of said friend's failed attempts to diet does not earn you points. Quite the opposite, actually.
4. Oh, and while we're getting into angry feminist territory: guess what's seriously not romantic? Guys who "flirt" with women by being really, really mean to them. This is a book written for teenage girls in 2009, but reading it, I felt like I'd accidentally picked up a Barbara Cartland romance from the '70s—one of the ones with a really alpha, rapey "hero." HOW ARE WE STILL NOT PAST THIS? Seriously, it makes me want to cry. Or punch someone in the neck.
5. The hero's name is Patch, by the way. YEAH. That also totally says romance: picturing Robin Williams in a clown nose every time the hero comes on stage to insult/seduce our dull little heroine.
6. And then even when you wade through all of that, the angel stuff is fucking boring. Most of the book's near-400-page length is wasted on Nora trying to figure out what's up with Patch, which is extremely dull for the reader, as—from the cover, the blurb, and the damn prologue—we already know. When Nora, admittedly lacking these clues, finally does figure it out, it's through the most ridiculous, Mulderesque leap of logic ever. And then, after all that, there's still next to nothing at stake. (Damn, if this were another vampire novel, I could have made a dumb pun there.) Since Patch has already decided for no discernible reason that he's in love with Nora, there's not really any tension in the "will he turn on her?" corner, and someone else threatening her life isn't terribly suspenseful, either. Especially not when compared to the kind of plotlines angels and fallen angels open up to a writer: Heaven and Hell, people! An epic struggle between good and evil! You're just going to ignore all that and go with Revenge Plot No. 3 instead? Oy.
I like the idea of angels being the new vampires, I really do. I see so much potential. But if all writers do is rehash the same tired, borderline offensive plots, only with wings instead of fangs, who cares? My store's shelves will still sag with titles that make me sigh internally as I force a smile and try to subtly direct customers to the works of E. Lockhart, John Green, Suzanne Collins, M.T. Anderson, and Cory Doctorow instead. Hint, hint.
164. One Night at the Call Center, Chetah Bhagat — Like a Douglas Coupland book set in India, this novel follows a group of six people working the night shift at a failing call center on Thanksgiving Day. They have to deal with Americans who don’t know how to work their appliances, but they also have their own personal problems—families, romances, career woes—to grapple with.
I liked Bhagat’s characters a lot; I enjoyed their somewhat meandering conversations and their relationships with each other. I also, for the most part, like the marriage of whimsy and realism in the text. The book’s tone is light, never uproarious but occasionally amusing—with a bitter undercurrent running throughout. I never stopped being intrigued as to how the night would play out.
However, Bhagat’s characters hatred for Americans really bothered me. I mean, hate on American policy all you want—especially Bush-era policy—but the characters in this book hate Americans, average people, and they go on about it at length. Americans are stupid and lazy! They have it so easy! They are dumber than Indian 9-year-olds! And these aren’t just the characters’ opinions; there’s authorial agreement, too, to the point where the novel’s resolution depends on Americans being the stupidest people in the world.
If an American wrote a novel that expressed these opinions about the people of India, it would be immediately identified as racist and vile. So why is the opposite mostly considered okay?
By me, too, almost. While I was reading the novel, the anti-Americanism mostly just made me feel mildly uncomfortable. When I questioned this, I thought to myself: Well, I guess we deserve it. And, okay: there are a lot of things about this country’s policies toward the rest of the world that suck. There are without a doubt a lot of individual Americans’ attitudes toward the rest of the world that are appalling, also. But accepting and endorsing the idea that it’s okay—and in fact, good for fun and profit!—to hate Americans is just as icky and wrong as it is for people from the U,S. to promote the idea that the rest of the world is backward and scary or whatever. We all need to be better toward each other. It’s a two-way street.
This feels far weighter and more complicated than something I can adequately address here. But rather than just swallow my discomfort (liberal guilt is actually pretty useless), I thought I’d try to talk about it. We’ll see how that goes.
166. Asylum, Christopher Payne — Beautiful and eerie collection of photographs of (mostly) abandoned state mental hospitals. There are two informative essays by the photographer, Christopher Payne, and one by neurologist and author Oliver Sacks, but in many ways the images speak for themselves. Payne highlights the grand, imposing edifices of these decaying institutions, their grandeur making it possible to understand how a mental asylum was once considered a great coup for a community. But it’s impossible not to also see the dashed dreams hidden away behind these crumbling walls. The fact that the noble ideals with which these places were built disintegrated over time manifests itself with a stunning literalness in swirls of peeling paint, moldering ceilings, and leaf-strewn breezeways. Similarly, the people society has left behind are evoked with the simple image of an abandoned rack of multicolored patient toothbrushes.
Aspects of this book are creepy—it brought to mind several horror movies (notably Session 9) that I instantly wanted to rewatch once I finished reading. But it’s surprisingly poignant, too. In his closing essay, Payne talks about witnessing the destruction of Danvers State Hospital in Massachusetts, the exterior of which was a familiar sight throughout his childhood. It was closed in the early ’90s and recently demolished to build condominiums. It’s easy to see why Payne views this as a tragedy against architecture and history, and his photos of Danvers being gutted are some of the most wrenching in the book. There was something here—something that mattered once—and now it’s gone forever.
166. Cat’s Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut — Is this the most depressing Vonnegut I’ve ever read, or just the Vonnegut I’ve read most recently? Either way, I am going to be afraid of Ice-9 forever now. Gah.
167. Green River, Running Red, Ann Rule — What is it about Washington State that attracts serial killers? Last year I read Ann Rule's The Stranger Beside Me, which is a fascinating book in large part because Rule, even then a crime writer, was actually friends with its subject: Ted Bundy. That's a bizarre and disturbing piece of kismet right there. And it lead to a true crime story that was psychologically complex because Rule was clearly trying so hard to understand how the man who was her friend could also be such a monster.
Rule, sadly, does not bring the same level of analysis to the story of fellow Washington State resident Gary Leon Ridgway, a.k.a.The Green River Killer, a.k.a. The Most Prolific Serial Killer in North American History (Possibly). Though she tries to stress her involvement in the case, it was comparatively minimal, so the personal connection present in the Stranger is absent here. Still, it would be interesting to see the psychological motivations of a guy like Ridgway, who—unusually for a serial killer—is not very bright, and—again highly unusual—managed multiple marriages and long-term relationships at the same time had a busy second career soliciting and murdering prostitutes. Instead of going into that, though, Rule just summarily concludes that it was somehow all his controlling mother's fault. Uh-huh.
The text of this very, very long book is therefore mostly taken up by the victims' stories--which are tragic, and do deserve to be told, but I didn't particularly care for Rule's method of cherry-picking the "juicy" ones and leaving other girls—equally deserving—with just a sentence or two. I really wish this book had had more focus—the story of the investigation gets kind of buried under so much other stuff, and the narrative doesn't seem to be organized terribly well. I read this book because I became fascinated with the portrait of the Green River Killings Neko Case paints in her song Deep Red Bells; it's four minutes long and I think it achieves something more vivid and poignant and terrible than this book does in over 500 pages.
168. Zombies, Don Roff & Chris Lane — The story here is nothing much—Roff basically follows the rules of Max Brooks’ zombieverse, with the (admittedly creepy) addition of the infection initially arising from chemically enhanced food. The ending is annoyingly abrupt, especially as it denies the reader any information about how the rest of society survived, despite it being clear from the introduction that it did. The story is like a small zombie aperitif (brains on a cracker?) without any main course.
The art, however, is fantastic. It’s evocative and spooky, with a great use of color; it somehow manages to frequently achieve beauty and grossness with the same image. No small feat! If you are capable of seeing printed text without reading it—I personally lack this skill—I would recommend just flipping through this book and enjoying the pictures. They are by far the best part.
I must brag and admit to getting extra bonus enjoyment from the artwork, however: several of my coworkers are friends with the illustrator, and thus I get to see them grace these pages as zombie hunters or, in one case, zombified. How awesome is that?
169. Numbers, Rachel Ward — Unusual—this a good thing—YA novel about a 15-year-old girl who, whenever she looks into a person's eyes, sees the date of their death. Unsurprisingly, this fucks her up a bit, as does the death of her mother from an overdose. I really liked that Jem is an unconventional heroine—she's poor and genuinely troubled, not I'm-clumsy-and-my-parents-don't-pay-attention-to-me troubled—and her narrative voice is great. The hero, Spider, is also unconventional, and, warts (or in this case, B.O.) and all, about 1,000 times more appealing than the Edward Cullens of the world—precisely because of said warts. Both Jem and Spider seem like real, compelling people. Unfortunately, the plot in which they are entangled gets more and more ridiculous as the novel progresses, and as such my belief in the story started to wane and never really recovered. There are terrorists and a manhunt and a significantly absent condom, and I just raised my eyebrow and thought “Really?” a few too many times. Plus I hated the ending. It’s both defeatist and shamelessly setting up a sequel. Oh well. I appreciate all the ways in which this book is different than the usual YA crowd, but that’s not enough to make it really good.
170. Stop Me If You’ve Heard This, Jim Holt — Confession: I don’t find jokes funny. Not really. Witticisms, yes. Humorous stories, indeed. But jokes—setup: punchline jokes—not so much. Possibly there is something wrong with me.
I liked this book, though. It’s short—not much more than a glorified magazine article—but the history is fascinating and the philosophy digestible. I loved the examples of jokes from ancient times: they were hilarious, in the sense that they were hilariously bad. I especially enjoyed the discussion of Poggio Bracciolini, who with his 15th Century Liber Facetiarum, became the author of the first joke book published in Europe. This despite his, as Holt puts it, “regrettable tendency to preempt the punchline.” For example: “The abbot of Septimo, an extremely corpulent man, was traveling toward Florence one evening. On the road he asked a peasant, ‘Do you think I’ll be able to make it through the city gate?’ He was talking about whether he would be able to make it to the city before the gates were closed. The peasant, jesting on the abbot’s fatness, said, ‘Why, if a cart of hay can make it through, you can, too!’”
Correction: I seem to like jokes that are really badly told.
(All right, for the record, there was one joke in this book that did make me laugh in the traditional manner. From page 106:
A Jewish grandmother is watching her grandchild playing on the beach when a huge wave comes and takes him out to sea. She pleads, “Please, God, save my only grandson! Bring him back.” And a big wave comes and washes the boy back onto the beach, good as new. She looks up at heaven and says, “He had a hat!”
Yup, definitely something wrong with me.)
Total Reviews: 170/210
161. The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins — I generally hate 'it's x meets y!' type summaries—it's 1984 meets To Kill a Mockingbird! The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy meets Thomas Paine's The Rights of Man!—but the first volume of Suzanne Collins' breakout YA series really IS The Long Walk meets Battle Royale. Only it's better than both of them. Collins brings together thrilling action and complex characters—my favorite combination—in a book that, to utilize another appropriate cliche, you really will not want to put down. I can't wait to read the next one.
162. The Five Fists of Science, Matt Fraction — Steampunky adventures with Mark Twain and Nikola Tesla! This was fun, if not very complex or deep. Poor awkward, nervous, brilliant, neurotic Tesla—my favorite parts were anytime he was on stage. Since we seem to have everyone from Jane Austen to Abraham Lincoln to Oscar Wilde to Queen Victoria fighting crime/vampires/zombies these days, can't we get Tesla in on more of that action?
163. Hush, Hush, Becca Fitzpatrick — A few weeks ago, a woman came into the store and we started chatting about YA fiction. She expressed a dislike of Twilight and boredom with the heaps of vampire books currently on the shelves. When I hesitantly agreed (as a bookseller, I am supposed to love all the books), she smiled and shook her head and told me not to worry. "This vampire thing is winding down," she said. "Angels are the new vampires."
I was intrigued (angels being somewhat Relevant to My Interests at the moment), but I didn't really believe her. However, almost immediately thereafter, the angel books started pouring in. You are a clever one, anonymous lady!
Sadly, this book—the most hyped of the new winged bunch—is not. In fact, it pretty much IS Twilight with angels, and I just...if I headdesk enough, do you think I'll be able to forget both Twilight and Hush, Hush in their entirety?
All right, since that seems unlikely to work, let's see if I can heal my pain by getting my rant on. (With a numbered list, even—always a good sign that I'm too annoyed to even assemble my thoughts coherently.)
1. Really, this is Twilight. But with angels. The plot shares a number of similarities: instead of taking place somewhere rainy and vaguely ominous on the west coast (Washington State, right?), it takes place somewhere rainy and vaguely ominous on the east coast (Maine—please wave hello to Stephen King). Supernatural male and vulnerable human female meet when they're assigned as lab partners. Supernatural male rescues vulnerable human female from some shit. Nothing much happens for most of the book, and then there's a showdown in a gym. Blah blah blah.
2. After a 3rd person prologue that had me hopeful, we're right back in insipid 1st person POV land. I have to say: Nora, this book's protagonist, is much less annoying than Bella. However, this seems to be accomplished mostly by her having no personality whatsoever. Seriously, none. Her quirky boy-crazy (and
3. Seriously, having the main character and romantic heroine constantly reference how "voluptuous" her friend is and constantly make fun of said friend's failed attempts to diet does not earn you points. Quite the opposite, actually.
4. Oh, and while we're getting into angry feminist territory: guess what's seriously not romantic? Guys who "flirt" with women by being really, really mean to them. This is a book written for teenage girls in 2009, but reading it, I felt like I'd accidentally picked up a Barbara Cartland romance from the '70s—one of the ones with a really alpha, rapey "hero." HOW ARE WE STILL NOT PAST THIS? Seriously, it makes me want to cry. Or punch someone in the neck.
5. The hero's name is Patch, by the way. YEAH. That also totally says romance: picturing Robin Williams in a clown nose every time the hero comes on stage to insult/seduce our dull little heroine.
6. And then even when you wade through all of that, the angel stuff is fucking boring. Most of the book's near-400-page length is wasted on Nora trying to figure out what's up with Patch, which is extremely dull for the reader, as—from the cover, the blurb, and the damn prologue—we already know. When Nora, admittedly lacking these clues, finally does figure it out, it's through the most ridiculous, Mulderesque leap of logic ever. And then, after all that, there's still next to nothing at stake. (Damn, if this were another vampire novel, I could have made a dumb pun there.) Since Patch has already decided for no discernible reason that he's in love with Nora, there's not really any tension in the "will he turn on her?" corner, and someone else threatening her life isn't terribly suspenseful, either. Especially not when compared to the kind of plotlines angels and fallen angels open up to a writer: Heaven and Hell, people! An epic struggle between good and evil! You're just going to ignore all that and go with Revenge Plot No. 3 instead? Oy.
I like the idea of angels being the new vampires, I really do. I see so much potential. But if all writers do is rehash the same tired, borderline offensive plots, only with wings instead of fangs, who cares? My store's shelves will still sag with titles that make me sigh internally as I force a smile and try to subtly direct customers to the works of E. Lockhart, John Green, Suzanne Collins, M.T. Anderson, and Cory Doctorow instead. Hint, hint.
164. One Night at the Call Center, Chetah Bhagat — Like a Douglas Coupland book set in India, this novel follows a group of six people working the night shift at a failing call center on Thanksgiving Day. They have to deal with Americans who don’t know how to work their appliances, but they also have their own personal problems—families, romances, career woes—to grapple with.
I liked Bhagat’s characters a lot; I enjoyed their somewhat meandering conversations and their relationships with each other. I also, for the most part, like the marriage of whimsy and realism in the text. The book’s tone is light, never uproarious but occasionally amusing—with a bitter undercurrent running throughout. I never stopped being intrigued as to how the night would play out.
However, Bhagat’s characters hatred for Americans really bothered me. I mean, hate on American policy all you want—especially Bush-era policy—but the characters in this book hate Americans, average people, and they go on about it at length. Americans are stupid and lazy! They have it so easy! They are dumber than Indian 9-year-olds! And these aren’t just the characters’ opinions; there’s authorial agreement, too, to the point where the novel’s resolution depends on Americans being the stupidest people in the world.
If an American wrote a novel that expressed these opinions about the people of India, it would be immediately identified as racist and vile. So why is the opposite mostly considered okay?
By me, too, almost. While I was reading the novel, the anti-Americanism mostly just made me feel mildly uncomfortable. When I questioned this, I thought to myself: Well, I guess we deserve it. And, okay: there are a lot of things about this country’s policies toward the rest of the world that suck. There are without a doubt a lot of individual Americans’ attitudes toward the rest of the world that are appalling, also. But accepting and endorsing the idea that it’s okay—and in fact, good for fun and profit!—to hate Americans is just as icky and wrong as it is for people from the U,S. to promote the idea that the rest of the world is backward and scary or whatever. We all need to be better toward each other. It’s a two-way street.
This feels far weighter and more complicated than something I can adequately address here. But rather than just swallow my discomfort (liberal guilt is actually pretty useless), I thought I’d try to talk about it. We’ll see how that goes.
166. Asylum, Christopher Payne — Beautiful and eerie collection of photographs of (mostly) abandoned state mental hospitals. There are two informative essays by the photographer, Christopher Payne, and one by neurologist and author Oliver Sacks, but in many ways the images speak for themselves. Payne highlights the grand, imposing edifices of these decaying institutions, their grandeur making it possible to understand how a mental asylum was once considered a great coup for a community. But it’s impossible not to also see the dashed dreams hidden away behind these crumbling walls. The fact that the noble ideals with which these places were built disintegrated over time manifests itself with a stunning literalness in swirls of peeling paint, moldering ceilings, and leaf-strewn breezeways. Similarly, the people society has left behind are evoked with the simple image of an abandoned rack of multicolored patient toothbrushes.
Aspects of this book are creepy—it brought to mind several horror movies (notably Session 9) that I instantly wanted to rewatch once I finished reading. But it’s surprisingly poignant, too. In his closing essay, Payne talks about witnessing the destruction of Danvers State Hospital in Massachusetts, the exterior of which was a familiar sight throughout his childhood. It was closed in the early ’90s and recently demolished to build condominiums. It’s easy to see why Payne views this as a tragedy against architecture and history, and his photos of Danvers being gutted are some of the most wrenching in the book. There was something here—something that mattered once—and now it’s gone forever.
166. Cat’s Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut — Is this the most depressing Vonnegut I’ve ever read, or just the Vonnegut I’ve read most recently? Either way, I am going to be afraid of Ice-9 forever now. Gah.
167. Green River, Running Red, Ann Rule — What is it about Washington State that attracts serial killers? Last year I read Ann Rule's The Stranger Beside Me, which is a fascinating book in large part because Rule, even then a crime writer, was actually friends with its subject: Ted Bundy. That's a bizarre and disturbing piece of kismet right there. And it lead to a true crime story that was psychologically complex because Rule was clearly trying so hard to understand how the man who was her friend could also be such a monster.
Rule, sadly, does not bring the same level of analysis to the story of fellow Washington State resident Gary Leon Ridgway, a.k.a.The Green River Killer, a.k.a. The Most Prolific Serial Killer in North American History (Possibly). Though she tries to stress her involvement in the case, it was comparatively minimal, so the personal connection present in the Stranger is absent here. Still, it would be interesting to see the psychological motivations of a guy like Ridgway, who—unusually for a serial killer—is not very bright, and—again highly unusual—managed multiple marriages and long-term relationships at the same time had a busy second career soliciting and murdering prostitutes. Instead of going into that, though, Rule just summarily concludes that it was somehow all his controlling mother's fault. Uh-huh.
The text of this very, very long book is therefore mostly taken up by the victims' stories--which are tragic, and do deserve to be told, but I didn't particularly care for Rule's method of cherry-picking the "juicy" ones and leaving other girls—equally deserving—with just a sentence or two. I really wish this book had had more focus—the story of the investigation gets kind of buried under so much other stuff, and the narrative doesn't seem to be organized terribly well. I read this book because I became fascinated with the portrait of the Green River Killings Neko Case paints in her song Deep Red Bells; it's four minutes long and I think it achieves something more vivid and poignant and terrible than this book does in over 500 pages.
168. Zombies, Don Roff & Chris Lane — The story here is nothing much—Roff basically follows the rules of Max Brooks’ zombieverse, with the (admittedly creepy) addition of the infection initially arising from chemically enhanced food. The ending is annoyingly abrupt, especially as it denies the reader any information about how the rest of society survived, despite it being clear from the introduction that it did. The story is like a small zombie aperitif (brains on a cracker?) without any main course.
The art, however, is fantastic. It’s evocative and spooky, with a great use of color; it somehow manages to frequently achieve beauty and grossness with the same image. No small feat! If you are capable of seeing printed text without reading it—I personally lack this skill—I would recommend just flipping through this book and enjoying the pictures. They are by far the best part.
I must brag and admit to getting extra bonus enjoyment from the artwork, however: several of my coworkers are friends with the illustrator, and thus I get to see them grace these pages as zombie hunters or, in one case, zombified. How awesome is that?
169. Numbers, Rachel Ward — Unusual—this a good thing—YA novel about a 15-year-old girl who, whenever she looks into a person's eyes, sees the date of their death. Unsurprisingly, this fucks her up a bit, as does the death of her mother from an overdose. I really liked that Jem is an unconventional heroine—she's poor and genuinely troubled, not I'm-clumsy-and-my-parents-don't-pay-attention-to-me troubled—and her narrative voice is great. The hero, Spider, is also unconventional, and, warts (or in this case, B.O.) and all, about 1,000 times more appealing than the Edward Cullens of the world—precisely because of said warts. Both Jem and Spider seem like real, compelling people. Unfortunately, the plot in which they are entangled gets more and more ridiculous as the novel progresses, and as such my belief in the story started to wane and never really recovered. There are terrorists and a manhunt and a significantly absent condom, and I just raised my eyebrow and thought “Really?” a few too many times. Plus I hated the ending. It’s both defeatist and shamelessly setting up a sequel. Oh well. I appreciate all the ways in which this book is different than the usual YA crowd, but that’s not enough to make it really good.
170. Stop Me If You’ve Heard This, Jim Holt — Confession: I don’t find jokes funny. Not really. Witticisms, yes. Humorous stories, indeed. But jokes—setup: punchline jokes—not so much. Possibly there is something wrong with me.
I liked this book, though. It’s short—not much more than a glorified magazine article—but the history is fascinating and the philosophy digestible. I loved the examples of jokes from ancient times: they were hilarious, in the sense that they were hilariously bad. I especially enjoyed the discussion of Poggio Bracciolini, who with his 15th Century Liber Facetiarum, became the author of the first joke book published in Europe. This despite his, as Holt puts it, “regrettable tendency to preempt the punchline.” For example: “The abbot of Septimo, an extremely corpulent man, was traveling toward Florence one evening. On the road he asked a peasant, ‘Do you think I’ll be able to make it through the city gate?’ He was talking about whether he would be able to make it to the city before the gates were closed. The peasant, jesting on the abbot’s fatness, said, ‘Why, if a cart of hay can make it through, you can, too!’”
Correction: I seem to like jokes that are really badly told.
(All right, for the record, there was one joke in this book that did make me laugh in the traditional manner. From page 106:
A Jewish grandmother is watching her grandchild playing on the beach when a huge wave comes and takes him out to sea. She pleads, “Please, God, save my only grandson! Bring him back.” And a big wave comes and washes the boy back onto the beach, good as new. She looks up at heaven and says, “He had a hat!”
Yup, definitely something wrong with me.)
Total Reviews: 170/210
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Date: 2010-01-10 11:00 pm (UTC)