Krapenina

Hey All,

I have a gripe with Leo Tolstoy.

What the hell do I care about the farming problems faced by 19th century Russian landowners?  Tolstoy goes on for pages and pages about this in Anna Karenina.  I'll grant that, to a point, it develops some of the character of Levin, in brief flashes giving us his insight and thoughts about farming.  But really, all his pinko babble is a universe away from my life today.  I really could not care less about the subject.  My point is, when I read a book, I want, or expect, to be able to relate to it in some way.  I get the love aspect in Anna Karenina fine enough.  But this farming?  Come on!  Sure, there is much value in being able to see the world from another's perspective, but Tolstoy, for me, takes it too far.

Perhaps I say what I'm about to because the view I take of history is a product of a movement in the latter half (more like the last four decades) of the twentieth century called Social History. Social historians, in some ways, seek to uncover the history of the more common, majority of people.  Many historians before this era in academic history (pretty much all history written or created before the 1960s, in fact) was about the big people, the leaders in history. A good example of this kind of history that might resonate with people today, though not exactly academically rigorous in it's historical detail, is a film that got a lot of Oscar hype, attention, and awards this year: The King's Speech.  It is also, to my great delight to point out, a piece of public history (that is, geared towards a mass, popular audience, as opposed to merely the academic community).  It's about England's King George VI, and his attempts to overcome his speech impediment.  It's quite a good film (though not my favourite film of the past year), and, if you get my drift, it's about the elite, the king, in fact, not the common people.  I'm not deriding this type of history, because it certainly has it's place.  But if I'm looking for History, not history, I want to know about more than just the big names of the era (I'll make a little aside here, and say that I realize that Tolstoy wrote a piece of fiction, regarded by some as the very first of it's kind, and not history, so in that regard, I'm being a little harsh on him.  But, given that I'm reading it about 140 years after it was written, it's hard not to look at it, to some degree, also as a work of history).

So, even if we take Anna Karenina simply for the historical framework it presents, and the picture it paints of the period in Russian history that it depicts, I dislike and disparage it.  The book barely gives light to the common man, but focuses instead on the few, very wealthy, aristocrats living in that time.  It certainly gives lip service to the peasantry, but I think that is mostly because of Tolstoy's own misgivings about having been born so privileged when he saw that so many around him suffered so much (Levin, the character in the novel who is most sympathetic to the peasants, who has inner conflict over whether he wants to live, is widely held to be the closest Tolstoy ever came to making one of his characters autobiographical).

Thankfully, I'm past the section on the farming, now, and we're back on track with the love and drama and gossip and blahblahblahblahblahblahblahblahblahblahblahblah.

To be honest, I'm tired of reading this book, and I'm tired of doing this writing.

Don't get me wrong!  I like both, but I feel like I've shackled myself to this project, and I'm passing up the opportunity to read other books that I really want to read.  I will not, however, give up.  I am committed, and that is part of the reason why I started this blog: to stick to something over the long haul, and see it through to it's end.  It's not something I'm very good at doing, and I need to improve that part of me.  So here I am, in all my glory.

Don't judge.

-Bryan

Oh Leo-oh

Hey All,

I really like Anna Karenina.  I know, right?  After all of my quibbling and complaints about it before I had even started reading it, I turn around and say I like it?  What gives?  Well, Leo Tolstoy gives.  History gives.  The weight of time gives.  Quite simply, a book doesn't last this long as a classic without due merit.  I kinda knew this all along, but was daunted by the weight of the book.  But Curtis, my dear friend Curtis Maloley, that cunning, handsome devil with the rapist's wit (points if you get the reference), knew what he was doing when he recommended this book.

It was written in the 1870s, and concerns the upper classes in Russian society.  Clearly, I have absolutely no connection with the lifestyle and mindset of Tolstoy's characters, but that really does not seem to matter.  Love is a large theme throughout the book, and, perhaps because of the age in which it was written, romance, and romantic notions of love, appear on many pages.  Silly things about romantic love, like men falling in love at the sight of a woman who passes them in a carriage.  As if that really happens.  I now blame Tolstoy for the existence of Cosmo and other such inane things (Rom-coms, diet pills, and nuclear war, to name a few).

It's a great book to be reading in the middle of winter, too.  Russia is cold.  Canada is colder (Of course; we're better at everything).  I don't want to put it down, and I don't have anything else worthwhile to write about it at the moment, so I'll end this post here, and get back to reading.

-Bryan

Lime(y)s for Everyone

Hey All,

The Englishman's Boy is, in my opinion, a good book.  Not great, but good.  For a while there, while reading it, I thought it was great.  And parts of it - most of it, actually - is great.  I told Chaz (Sullivan, who recommended it to me) that I loved it, when I was about half way through.  That wasn't a lie, Chaz, I was loving it.  But then it ended.  And the end just isn't for me.

The book is about two things, really: the struggle for one character, Harry Vincent to make his way in Hollywood during the 1920s.   The real story, however, revolves around Shorty McAdoo, and his involvement in the Cypress Hills Massacre (I won't testify to the veracity of that link, but offer it merely as a synopsis of what some people offer up as the history of that event).  Guy Vanderhaeghe is a glorious storyteller, and he weaves those two stories together in amazing fashion.  As one of my friends put it earlier this week, it's as if you aren't even reading, the words, paragraphs, and sections of the book flow together so seamlessly.  I did not ever want to put the book down and, magically, it is one of those books that has great depth of meaning, and great length to it; it never seemed to end.

Ah, the end.  My problem with the book lies in it's beginning, really, but I didn't know it until the end.  I don't want to spoil anything for anyone who might end up reading the book.  For those who have, I'll say this: while the beginning and end are tied, and while they anchor the entire story, I feel that they are too disparate from the rest of the novel to really work.  Throughout the entire time I was reading the book, I expected to the plot to eventually come back to those two Assiniboine, to relate that beginning part of the story to the overall narrative.  Vanderhaege does, but not until the very end, and not very well.  I hate myself for saying this, but if he had woven the beginning of the book back into Shorty McAdoo's tale, I would be much happier.  Instead, I feel as though I am being told a fable, one that I really don't get, and one that has nothing at all to do with the other nearly 300 pages I read.


If you've read this blog all along, you might know that I cherish an ending.  I was sad that this novel ended the way it did.  I really did enjoy it otherwise.  The characters are rich, the plot compelling.  Vanderhaege's writing is exactly the style that I tend to enjoy right now (great recommendation, Chaz).  Which brings me to one of my next two novels, The Cave, by Jose Saramago.


One of my favourite books ever is Blindness, by Saramago.  My friend, Ines Ortiz, recommended The Cave to me, knowing this.  I've started it, but already I am bothered by his writing style.  He does not use quotations when his characters speak, and paragraphs can go on for pages at a time.  This technique really worked in Blindness, as I think it helped put the reader in the mindset of the characters.  In The Cave, however, I just find it irritating.  I'll push through it, though, Ines.

I'm doing something new for this project again: reading two books at a time.  I said that I was going to start Anna Karenina after The Englishman's Boy, and I have.  I just don't want to carry it on the subway with me.  So my plan right now is to read The Cave throughout the day, and Anna Karenina in the evenings.  Obviously, this latter book will likely take me some time to read, and will carry over into other books besides The Cave.  Which is fine with me.  Curtis Maloley is a jerk for recommending it, anyway.  I know he had malicious intentions when he did.  But I'm also thankful for the recommendation, as it's a book that I really ought to read and, had I not put myself in this situation (and he not recommended it), there is no chance I would ever have read it on my own.

That's it for now.  Happy New Year.  Nine more months of this to go!

-Bryan

Chicago, Chicago

Hey All,

Whoa.  It's been too long.  No excuses.  I just haven't been into blogging.  I'm still reading, but couldn't get myself into writing.  In the interest of full disclosure, I have finished The Devil in the White City, and am now nearly finished The Englishman's Boy.  I'll write this post about the book I've already read, then move on to the one I'm reading in my next post.

I don't know if it's the book (The Devil in the White City), or the stupid Canadian weather.  I was pretty engrossed in the book while reading it, but I was grossed out by the weather (in early December).  This is the first book that I haven't blogged about while reading it.  I won't go into the reasons, but it's not because I don't like it.

There's certainly no shortage of things to write about with The Devil in the White City.  It's the most well-written piece of history I have ever read, and that's a lot of history.  As I mentioned in my last post, I majored in History while at university.  In my last undergraduate year, I wrote a thesis on a particular author's body of work, analyzing it from a critical historical viewpoint.  That author is Thomas Raddall, a Nova Scotian who wrote stories about that province in the first half of the twentieth century.  His books were not works of history in the academic sense, as his audience was more populist.  He didn't footnote, or cite references in his books, but he was very popular, and his body of work influenced the modern view of Nova Scotia and it's history, for better or worse.  Erik Larson, the author of The Devil in the White City, while not as popular as Raddall was in his time, is a much better historian.  In this case, I judge it from the academic viewpoint, and not necessarily from the sellable viewpoint.  What I mean by "sellable" is a work's value to the reading, and therefore buying, public.  I guess I could call it a work's marketability.  

My Masters degree is in Public History, which is exactly what Erik Larson has created in this book.  It is also what Thomas Raddall wrote when he wrote most of his works, but, I would argue, with a different scale and value to them.  Any book (or movie, or television show, for that matter) that purports to depict a part of history, with at least an attempt to be accurate to history, is a work of public history ("Public history" is a difficult term, in and of itself.  While in graduate school, we debated it, and many historians still can't come to a consensus).

What I like about The Devil in the White City is that Larson is both very accurate (I have no reason to doubt the veracity of his historical claims) and a really good writer.  I was drawn into the multiple plots that took place over the course of the book (one, about the Chicago World's Fair of 1893, another about a serial killer, and still another about a man in Chicago at the same time who was delusional).  Knowing how difficult it is to weave a story out of the bits and pieces of history, I marvel, too, at Larson's research and ability to spin those bits and pieces into such a cohesive tale.

That's not to say the book is faultless.  As a writer, he used the same writing tricks over and over (too complicated to explain.  Errrr, maybe I'm just too lazy.  Either way, you don't get an example this time), and, rather than flowing paragraphs, he broke up sections where he wants to change topics with paragraph dividers.  Weak.  Plus, the book went on a little too long for my liking, which happens a lot when you get into history. For one, with history, academically speaking, to be accurate, one needs to be thorough.  Thoroughness can lead to length, for sure, which, for many of us nowadays, can be tedious.  I count myself among the group of people who has a short attention span.  

I like history, but I'm not a history buff; I recognized a long time ago that what I like about history is the second part of the work, "story".  I have always loved being told, listening to, reading, and watching stories.  I am happy to go along on a ride, if that ride adds to the thrill of the story.  Often, however, there's lots of prattling on in history books (and other kinds, too) that doesn't add to the overall effectiveness of the story.  Larson did a good job of trimming much of the fat, in The Devil in the White City, but he didn't get all of it.  At over 400 pages, it's just too long for my taste.

Enough with that book.  Great recommendation, Keltie.  I'm glad I read it, and sorry I didn't blog about it more.  It gave me an opportunity to talk about my specialty, though, which was a nice change.  On to The Englishman's Boy, but not until my next post.

I have just two quick side notes about my blogging: first, I still, happily, have my bookmark.  Secondly, I'm way behind schedule now.  WAY.  And once I'm done The Englishman's Boy, I'm taking on Anna Karenina, which won't help.  But I should have a lot more time on my hands in the new year, at least the first few months, so hopefully I can catch up a little bit.

-Bryan