So Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis is indeed a short book--I believe "novella" is the correct term. It's so short, in fact, that the copy I have contains more pages of critical essays than of the actual manuscript.

Needless to say I finished it on the busride to work and had nothing for the trip home. So I slept.

brett at 08:25 PM on August 04, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Just finished two more books this week. D. H. Lawrence's Women in Love is without a doubt one of the greatest novels of the 20th century. That he was able to capture such a range of human thought and emotion in just 500-some pages is absolutely astounding. I adore this book.

As for The Plague, well, I've always enjoyed Camus, but I'm not sure that its his best work.

brett at 08:31 PM on August 03, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)

I've had a lot of time to read lately. Sometimes it feels a little self-indulgent, but what else am I going to do in Los Angeles without further pulverizing my bank account?

Well, Megan and I did check out the LACMA today (the current Japanese art exhibit is absolutely exquisite--like nothing I've ever seen). We also went to the nearby La Brea tar pits and then drove to the dirtiest park on earth. But between the museum and the litter lies my books. Good thing I live just two short blocks from the Wilshire Branch Library.

Summer is waning and I'm staring down a load of academic texts. Hopefully I can squeeze in some more fiction before the start of the semester.

brett at 01:11 AM on July 27, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)

This week I managed to finish two books, one of them so captivating that I was unable to put it down. I read when walking to and from the bus stop. I read on the bus. I snuck a few pages in at work. During a recent meeting at the Metropolitan Water District, I spent the catered luncheon off in a corner, completely engrossed.

Though Franny & Zooey was brilliant in its own right, I owe apologies to Salinger for it was Steinbeck's East of Eden from which I couldn't release my grip. Ostensibly a modern retelling of Genesis (both the Fall of Adam and Eve and the story of Cain and Abel), East of Eden is also a book about the Salinas Valley, a part of California that has grown near-and-dear to me not only through living in the area, but through Steinbeck's phenomenal writing. The book is an exercise in grand storytelling, moving through generation after generation almost imperceptibly, as a river softens a stone. East of Eden is more than a great story. With this book, Steinbeck does the impossible, capturing the vast bulk of human emotion in his characters, and imparting a generous amount of wisdom along the way.

Note: I've turned comments back on, hopefully we won't get anymore major spamming.

brett at 11:59 AM on July 25, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)

So it seems that one week of bus riding will net me an average of 400 to 450 pages of reading. Not bad, considering that is about the perfect size for a novel.

This week I managed to read Haruki Murakami's Hard-Boiled Wonderland at the End of the World. The book was phenomenal, mostly because Murakami's imagination is like nothing of this world. I can't believe some of the stuff he comes up with--this is one of those books that must be read to be believed.

brett at 11:37 AM on July 11, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Not much to this one. It only took a trip down and back on the 720 to get through John Steinbeck's The Pearl.

Unlike a lot of people in the United States, I never read The Pearl in high school. After reading it a decade later, I'm impressed, but I like Steinbeck's other stuff better. I think.

brett at 11:25 AM on July 07, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)

It's almost shocking that I'm the only one who reads on the bus. Though I've been riding the 720 between Koreatown and Santa Monica for almost two weeks now, I have yet to run into anyone else with their nose stuck in a book. Despite this evidence to the contrary, I contend that the bus is indeed for readers.

Take Kazuo Ishiguro's A Pale View of Hills. I demolished this book in only two days riding the Los Angeles Metro. Here's to a summer full of fiction! This will be a nice departure from the reading that dominated my spring semester (namely gloomy environmental stuff).

brett at 05:13 PM on July 02, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)

My friend Allison, who is now in Amman, Jordan loaned me Magic For Beginners, a collection of short stories by Kelly Link.

I was a little lukewarm on this at first, but as it turns out, Magic For Beginners has been the perfect escape from LA. This is truly a book of fantastic, reality-bending tales--there's something unexpected on every page, and Link's writing drips with color and, well, magic. I absolutely adore this book and can't wait to explore more of Link's stuff.

brett at 10:13 PM on June 28, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)

So I've been doing a bit more reading lately, but nothing all that heavy. It's strange: when I'm in school I can handle dense academic texts well, but when break hits my motivation barely extends to the frontier of pleasure reading.

Case in point, Michael Pollan's The Botany of Desire. I generally despise Pollan because he is an apologist for carnists everywhere; he explains the problem with meat-eating quite succinctly but offers paltry few solutions, instead opting to massage the guilty omnivore's conscience by advocating for happy meat. Don't worry, he says to the affluent gourmet, we know that industrial farming is an anathema to the planet, so buy free range and organic when you can! It's the same old bullshit--salvation in consumption--peddled as critical commentary and available at a Barnes & Noble near you.

Forgetting for a second that Pollan is a major distraction in the fight to fix impeding global agricultural meltdown, The Botany of Desire is an excellent study in the co-evolution of humans and the plants we have domesticated for subsistence. It's good, and pretty light. Next week I have 600 pages to read--I'm hoping to dominate them on the flight back to NE, but we all know how that story usually goes.

brett at 10:23 PM on May 24, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)

My personal reading slowed down quite a bit during finals, but now that classes are over I can devote plenty of time to my number one passion: devouring books.

Blue Covenant by Maude Barlow

Ishmael by Daniel Quinn

Ishmael is an old favorite that I just had to read again. I happened to have a copy sitting around and I found that returning to it really opened my eyes: I realize now how much I've grown as a person since first reading it. Zach recommended it to me years ago, and though I read it then, I think that I was too young to fully grasp a lot of what Quinn was getting at. Now, its themes stand out as nearly identical to my own personal philosophies. Maude Barlow's book is non-fiction and packs an enormous amount of facts into 175 pages. A great read for those unfamiliar with the current global battle between corporations and people seeking water.

brett at 07:12 PM on May 13, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)

I plowed through more than a few books in the past few weeks. Here are the three biggest (and best) that I've gotten to:

That's Endgame Volume 2: Resistance by Derrick Jensen, Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner and The Party's Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrialized Societies by Richard Heinburg. It's heavy subject matter, but it's probably what we should all be reading right now. If you want to know what's on my mind, pick these up.

brett at 06:26 PM on April 18, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)

It all depends on how you look at it. I've been doing a lot of reading, which can be quite a dangerous thing. Recent words digested include:

This is Endgame, by Derrick Jensen. Don't read it if you value your own sanity and complacency. It's a book I like to call the "contentment destroyer."

Why mess with Peter Singer when there's people like Tom Regan? This is a good book, but a bit dense for getting your feet wet in the animal lib movement. If you're in the struggle, then you know Regan's name and should have read his work by now.

brett at 11:35 AM on March 19, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)

I just finished a little graphic novel titled As the World Burns: 50 Things You Can Do to to Stay in Denial. It succinctly sums up my feelings on the current environmental movement, which is to say that we aren't going far enough and still cling to the impotent notion that the planet's salvation lies in sustainability. Somehow environmentalists have forgotten that the systems our world culture is built on are entirely unsustainable.

By Derrick Jensen, author of the two Endgame books. Check out the Seven Stories Press site for more info on the book. If you're living in NE, I just sent my copy back home to a friend, so if you don't feel like heading to a library or bookstore you can get your hands on it by talking to Rhino.

brett at 04:08 PM on February 24, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)

I've gotten a lot of reading done this week. There's a common theme here, can you identify it?

I highly recommend each book, particularly "The China Study," which opened even my eyes to the health risks embodied in animal flesh.

brett at 10:27 PM on January 27, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)

For the past few weeks, starting in November (I think), Eric and I have been doing a little bit of a book club. Man, was it ever rewarding. Unfortunately for us, the timing of my Monterey-move as well as the holiday season have brought it grinding to a halt. To be continued...

Last week I finished reading the new Don DeLillo novel, "Falling Man," a book ostensibly about September 11th, but so much more deep than the events of the day; "Falling Man" looks at many of the issues (from Alzheimer's to divorce) that affect modern Americans, and frames them within the collapse of the two towers.

It's an incredibly fast read (2 days for me) and it offers a lot of perspective on the way we relate to one another during a tragedy. Not the way we cope, but the way our lives continue onward, seemingly affected and yet not affected by events completely outside of our control. The book doesn't pander to the reader, and doesn't dwell on the sweet spots that most of the audience is salivating for--there is little rhetoric, few still-frames of firefighters saving the day, and the plot churns slowly forward with a realism almost palpable enough to touch and internalize as one's own personal experience.

That is to say, this book isn't about September 11th so much as it is about us, our lives and our thoughts. This is a beautiful book, as far as 9/11 can be beautiful, and DeLillo's writing is on par with "Underworld" in it's emotional depth.

brett at 09:13 AM on June 11, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Since I've been cooped up inside (due to a sprained ankle as well as nonstop thundershowers), I've had plenty of time to start on my massive summer reading list in international politics. I started with this dandy, Hans J. Morgenthau's classic "Politics Among Nations," considered the defining work on international relations since World War II.

Not brilliant prose by any means--dry and dense--this is truly a scholarly text with little room for flowery language, despite that, it manages to guide the reader through a concise description of the inner workings behind the international relations puppet-show we see playing out daily in the news. Morgenthau uses examples rooted in philosophy, politics and world history to make his point, and the book provides lessons in many fields beyond that of simply international relations.

The information in this is priceless, though I think that perhaps I'll need to read it a few more times to truly digest all of what Morgenthau was getting at in this 600 page monster.

brett at 01:10 PM on May 07, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (1)

Though I really have always been underwhelmed by Victorian novels, I found Jane Eyre to be not only well written and thought out, but something that--despite being over a century old--I could distinctly relate to.

This is Maggie's favorite book, so I thought I would tackle it, to see what Bronte was all about, and I wasn't disappointed. A nice, quick read, that is actually free to download online, if you're into that sort of thing. I think that though this book was a romance, it could easily be adapted to film in the form of horror or suspense, with only a few minor changes.

Anyway. I suppose I should probably say more about the book, but I guess I'm not really wanting to write a post analyzing a book that is required reading for most college and high-school students around the country. Now, Don DeLillo's Underworld, on the other hand...

brett at 10:38 AM on January 31, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (1)

I'm in the middle of about 20 books right now, and was given another one last night by Maggie about the media in Japan, which isn't all that well written but addresses a subject I haven't seen covered at all in Asian-studies literature: the increasing sensationalizing taking place in Japan's news weeklies, and the way this affects the country's psyche.

But now--yet again--I've added another book to the list.

This one is definitely something that a lot of us should pay attention to. From Slate's media critic Jack Shafer comes a nice review on Steven Poole's book Unspeak:

We're drawn to the "semantically promiscuous" word, Poole writes, because it allows us to simultaneously express our tolerance for a group and our discomfort. For example: the homosexual community and the black community. People rarely refer to the heterosexual community, the white community, or even the Christian community, because in the United States and Britain, they are the "default" positions and carry the "privilege of not having to be defined by a limiting 'identity.' " Likewise, a group defined by the majority as transgressive, say, the Ku Klux Klan, would never qualify as a "community" even though it organizes itself with the same conscious effort as the "anti-war community."

This book is about words--not only the way that we use them, but the way in which they affect us subconsciously. As I've said for years, it is impossible to write a story without bias, despite having principles about "remaining objective at all times" rammed into our heads during four or five years of J-school. Words are simply too powerful, and carry too much weight. Their context and presentation are important, yes, but the sublime meanings and relationships going on just below the surface of a news story are what make them so unintentionally influential.

Unspeak, writer Steven Poole's term for a phrase or word that contains a whole unspoken political argument, deserves a place in every journalist's daily vocabulary. Such gems of unspeak, such as pro-choice and pro-life, writes Poole in the opening pages in his book Unspeak: How Words Become Weapons, How Weapons Become a Message, and How That Message Becomes Reality, represent an attempt to say something without saying it, without getting into an argument and so having to justify itself. At the same time, it tries to unspeak—in the sense of erasing, or silencing—any possible opposing point of view, by laying a claim right at the start to only one choice of looking at a problem.

I'll be picking this up later tonight, and I'll let you know how it goes.

brett at 10:01 AM on January 23, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (2)

It's true. Even Newton realized it. (which means that you all, meat-eating friends, should abandon your carnivorous ways in favor of something much better... vegetables!) The stink and flatulence, the bad breath and sweating, all byproducts of a diet rich in meat. We certainly are what we eat. Ain't it grand?

But I'm not going to preach (too much), I'm just going to share a brand new book for vegetarians and carnivores alike: The Bloodless Revolution:A Cultural History of Vegetarianism from 1600 to Modern Times by Tristram Stuart. At 656 pages, this looks to be the first comprehensive tome on the history of vegetarians, and from what I've read of it so far, it sounds fantastic (and it's in your bookstore today, release date January 8th).

There's a nice synopsis of the book in the New Yorker, which doesn't comment too heavily on the book positively or negatively, but provides an excellent rundown of just what Stuart covers in Bloodless Revolution:

Europeans, having long believed that animal flesh was necessary to sustain vigorous life, were astonished at the existence of the pagan yet pious Brahmins, who ate no meat but evidently thrived. Stuart, a British historian who lived for some years in India, endeavors to show that the spread of vegetarian doctrines in the West during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was a result of growing familiarity with the customs of colonized India. Evidently on the side of history’s herbivores, he “outs” as vegetarians canonical thinkers who occasionally reduced their meat intake or advised others to do so; he judges the number of Enlightenment vegetarians to have been “incalculably large”; and he celebrates vegetarianism as the leading edge of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century thought.

So it sounds like we are in pretty good company. Not only can we vegetarians count among our ranks the RZA and Andre 3000, but now we have an "incalculably large" number of Enlightenment thinkers standing behind us, too.

Compassion-based vegetarianism soon assumed the tone of a moral crusade. The poet Shelley, a sometime vegetarian, was certain that Robespierre’s Terror would never have happened had the Paris population “satisfied their hunger at the ever-furnished table of vegetable nature” and that Napoleon would never have made himself emperor had he “descended from a race of vegetable feeders.” George Bernard Shaw is said to have asked, “While we ourselves are the living graves of murdered beasts, how can we expect any ideal conditions on this earth?”

I'm not sure I can get behind this completely, but I do tend to agree with the idea that our food choices influence not only the composition of our bodies, but of our minds as well. Wouldn't it follow that the things we put into our body--the things that affect our livers, hearts and tissues--would also affect our brains and behaviors? Maybe. The "living graves of murdered beasts" indeed.

And I know this has been said a thousand times, but I can never end a post about the merits of a vegetable-based diet without tossing around some of the hard facts that meat-eaters tend to ignore when evaluating the ethical and moral questions raised by their food choices:

A recent report by the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization reckons that at least eighteen per cent of the global-warming effect comes from livestock, more than is caused by all the world’s transportation systems. It has been estimated that forty per cent of global grain output is used to feed animals rather than people, and that half of this grain would be sufficient to eliminate world hunger if—and it’s not a small if—the political will could be found to insure equitable distribution.

It's somewhat crazy to think that I've been a vegetarian for more than a half of a decade, that Zach and Melissa are vegans because of me, and that they've influenced countless others. Of course, my choice wasn't made independently, I have Megan to thank for my conversion to sanity, health and compassion.

brett at 09:51 AM on January 17, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (1)

This week I finished reading Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, a fascinating, fast read that left me sort of wanting to cry by the time I had finished it.

It's an atmospheric trip into the lives of a tight group of children--apparently orphaned--all raised together at a "boarding school" in rural England. Through the eyes of Kathy, we look back at just what growing up meant to them, and the events that shaped who they were and how they would deal with their collectively bleak futures.

It's a desperate look at the small things, and a sad statement about innocence and the nature of humanity. Painfully beautiful.

brett at 10:41 AM on October 30, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (0)

It's been forever since I have read a non-fiction book that is actually imaginative and has something new to say. Finally, I have found one.

Though it's interesting and fresh, I'm pretty sure this book is slamming people like me. Oh well.

brett at 10:34 AM on October 18, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Last night Jess and I started reading Finnegans Wake, but not before cracking a few beers. We had been sort of shouting bits and pieces of it at one another for a few hours, but hadn't actually delved into the "novel" at length. Around midnight, however, we took the plunge.

I think we made it about ten pages, reading aloud. I'm not sure what to make of it, but I laughed a lot, and hopefully with a little dedication we can make it to one hundred pages, and then to six hundred. Then it will be done. It's pretty good.

As for the bad? Well, not much of a surprise here:

Diddy's new album, Press Play isn't much to brag about. He sort of went off in a new direction, trying to sing or whatever. It works on a few tracks, bombs on the rest, and sort of comes across as a conceptual mishmash. It's not that it was a bad idea, it's just that Diddy wasn't the guy to pull off this kind of album. Let J. Timberlake do the singing, and Diddy can stick to running marathons for charity and dissing 50 Cent in ghostwritten battle raps such as last month's "I'm Richer, Bitch!" which appears on the album under the title "I Am."

Pretty weak, Diddy. Now if only Chapelle were around to make some fun of the duet you and Jamie Foxx did at the end of the album, though I suppose the track speaks for itself.

Update: One last thought about Diddy. I'm no Photoshop expert, but aren't the little neon reflections in his sunglasses just a really poorly designed brush stroke? Someone fill me in here, because I swear I've seen that effect done before by a no-talent freshman in a vis lit class.

Update 2: This one is from the master, and sort of sums things up:

(13:43:07) quenluen: heh. before i even read what you wrote about it or anything, i thought "that's the worst photoshop job i've seen on a major album in a long time"

(13:45:12) quenluen: it looks like a bad late 80s cover, when they were first able to do stuff like that, so people went way overboard and fucked things up all the time.

C'mon Diddy. If you're so rich you should probably pay a professional to do your cover, not some kid from the local community college.

brett at 08:47 AM on October 16, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (1)

Read the following quote, and ask yourself just what it's referring to.

"In the beginning it was about a need to express ourselves on a greater plane," says K'wan. "But now it's such a money thing. It affects how the genre is perceived by the public, and it affects [others] coming in. They look at this like it's Hollywood. They don't understand that to endure this game, you have to love this game." But as he well knows, to play it, you've got to make the numbers.

So you'd probably say this has something to do with music. Rap music. Wrong. This quote is from K'wan, a so-called "street lit" author that Time Magazine interviewed in a piece they did about the burgeoning genre. K'wan is talking about selling books. He's a drug dealer turned author.

Pretty interesting stuff, actually. I've never read any "street lit" novels, and I'm not sure if they have any merit (many contemporary black writers have been blasting the genre), but I suppose it would be neat to pickup something like K'wan's "Gangsta" and flip through it.

Street lit profiles the black underworld in graphic detail. Like gangsta rap, street lit often has thieves, pushers and prostitutes as protagonists. And like gangsta rap in its heyday, street lit is hot business. In an industry that considers sales of 20,000 copies of a typical novel a success, gritty street-lit authors like K'wan are routinely doubling that number.

I mean, they appear to be selling quite well.

brett at 10:44 AM on October 10, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (3)

Philip K. Dick's book, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep is seriously a phenomenal literary achievement. Because it is so good I will honor him with a picture on my blog:

What a guy. When organic robots actually become a reality, this book will be looked back on and regarded even more highly than it is today. There's a scene where a human has sex with a robot. The implications are fascinating.

brett at 01:43 PM on September 20, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (0)

OK so there's something I badly want to do this Fall/Winter, and I want you to join me. I want to read Finnegan's Wake by James Joyce, a book that has been called "the work of a psychopath or a huge literary fraud" and "the most colossal leg pull in literature."

If you're not all that familiar with Finnegan's Wake, you may want to check the Wikipedia entry on it. Essentially, this book is incoherent and notoriously difficult to finish, and even more complex to understand.

So I want to read it, and from what I understand one way to finish the book is to read it while drinking, and the second way is to read it aloud. There is no other way to finish it.

I propose a reading group where a few people will drink and take turns reading this aloud to one another. I think it would be fantastic. Anyone with me? If you're on the fence about this one, let me give you a little taste (it's like crack, baby):

O here here how hoth sprowled met the duskt the father of fornicationists but, (O my shining stars and body!) how hath fanespanned most high heaven the skysign of soft advertisement! (page 4, lines 11–14)

The entire book is like that, and it's over 600 pages. Anyone in?

brett at 08:30 AM on September 01, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (4)