2011 Book #46: Midnight’s Children

22. December 2011 · Write a comment · Categories: Books 2011 · Tags: , ,

MidnightsChildren.jpgI’m not quite sure what to say about Midnight’s Children except that it’s fantastic. Really. If you haven’t read it, head over to your local library and pick it up right now. Disregard your Christmas planning, ignore the hurt faces of your family, and hole yourself up for a week, book in one hand, cup of coffee in the other. You won’t regret it. Children are resilient: a few years of therapy, and they’ll learn that some things are more important than having parents at Christmas.

I’m kidding, of course. Kind of.

At this point, I’m trying to figure out why I haven’t read this before. I’ve ranted several times about colleges not assigning long books anymore, so I won’t rehash that here. But everyone should read this novel. It’s about everything: history, family, love, good, evil, etc, etc. Just like One Hundred Years of Solitude, which, I’m sure, is why I liked it so very, very much.

That’s not to say it’s easy reading: Rushdie isn’t easy. I had a helluva time with Satanic Verses, but that one was worth it, too. Midnight’s Children, though, is my favorite of Rushdie‘s so far. I picked up a couple of his other novels when I was in Houston, and I’ll read them soon. After the Christmas Crunch is over. But I’ll talk about that later.

Midnight’s Children is about the children born at midnight on India’s first day of independence from the British and how they, specifically Saleem Sinai, fit into and affect that history. It’s an autobiography from Saleem’s point of view, beginning before he was born with an account of his grandfather’s life, and then his parents’, and then his own.

I had a hard time reading it at the beginning: as I’ve said, Rushdie isn’t easy, and his syntax takes a bit of getting used to. But you read and you read, and then you can’t stop reading. A year or two ago, a friend of mine was reading it, and he excitedly told me that it’s a challenge until you hit a certain page (which I will not divulge as he refused to remind me), and then BAM. You’re in it for the ride, and you can’t give up on it because you know it’ll be worth it in the end.

The closest analog that I’ve read is One Hundred Years of Solitude, which gives you a sense of a sweeping history, like all things are encapsulated somewhere in the novel. There’s also the magical realism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Haruki Murakami. Rushdie creates a whole world around you, and you can’t help but be a part of it, swept up in the chaos of Indian independence and what follows. And the end! The end! But I won’t go there.

Seriously. If you’ve never tried Rushdie and you hadn’t planned to because of what you’d heard about his books (So many rumors! He’s not at all what I expected!) or the man himself. I remember hearing about what happened after he published The Satanic Verses when I was too little to understand what was going on, and now I can see how both of these novels are incredibly controversial – but that’s all the more reason to read them. He knew there’d be a scandal (seems like a petty word to use in that case), and he did it anyway. The result is incredibly moving – and, quite often, funny. I had no idea until I puffed up my chest and said, “Hey. Today, I’m gonna tackle Rushdie.” I haven’t looked back.

2011 Book #12: Catching Fire

18. February 2011 · Write a comment · Categories: Books 2011 · Tags: ,

cf.jpegOkay, I was wrong. I said I probably wouldn’t bother reading Catching Fire, the sequel to The Hunger Games. In my defense, Borges made my brain hurt, and I needed some serious leisure reading. This one certainly qualifies.

If you haven’t read these books and think you might like to, you should probably stop here. My guess is that if you’re reading this blog, this series probably isn’t on your list.

So. In The Hunger Games, Katniss won, but the dictator interpreted the way she did it as an act of rebellion, and so did the twelve districts, so uprisings began. (To catch up on the first book, read this post or check out the Wikipedia summary, which, I’m sure, is better than my halfhearted attempt.) The dictator and the Capitol start treating the residents of the districts even worse, and Katniss has become a symbol of the rebellion. The next Hunger Games are coming up, and they’re the seventy-fifth. Every twenty-fifth Hunger Games is called the Quarter Quell and is especially nasty. This time the districts are forced to choose their tributes among previous victors, and Katniss and Peeta, the tributes from The Hunger Games, are thrust into the arena again. And we get to read about another year of Hunger Games. Then, things happen, and Katniss is rescued (the Capitol got Peeta, but I’m assuming he’s probably not dead), and she learns about the rebellion that’s been going on during the Games. The End.

Catching Fire is basically a repeat of The Hunger Games. It has the same general structure, the same general characters, and basically the same ending. The style didn’t bother me as much this time, but I’m not sure if it’s because it got better or because I realized I’m reading for the plot, so the style is good enough if I can stand it.

I think that Collins‘s choice of writing these novels in the first person is a misstep. Sure, it adds immediacy (they’re also in present tense), but we know, from the outset, especially since there are sequels, that Katniss has to win or, at least, survive. That idea bothered me more in Catching Fire because it’s so repetitious.

It’s also ridiculously predictable for other reasons. Besides the first-person POV, Collins is over-the-top with clues about what’s really going on, even for a book aimed at seventh graders (Wait. Why am I reading this again?).

Despite its flaws, though, I enjoyed it. It’s the kind of book I needed after Borges, and I know I’m kidding myself if I don’t think I’ll read the third one. I even have Mockingjay on my Kindle. The plot is good enough to hold my attention, and, hey, it only took me a couple days to read. I haven’t decided whether to read the next one immediately or to put a few books in between. I’m kind of in the mood for another crack at Garcia Marquez.

A note about The Grand Design

09. September 2010 · Write a comment · Categories: Older Books · Tags: ,

Over the past couple of days, I read Steven Hawking’s new “controversial” book, The Grand Design, in which he attempts to prove that God (or some sort of creator) is not necessary for an explanation of how the universe began or how it functions now. I’m generally a fan of Hawking: I read A Brief History of Time several years ago, and I was impressed, though I think it was so many years ago that I only understood a bit of it. I’d been seriously considering giving it another try when I heard all the hubbub about The Grand Design, in which Hawking has changed his mind about the possibility (probability?) of a creator as stated in his earlier book to a justification of his apparent atheism.

From what I gathered, Hawking’s argument boils down to this: Time functions kind of like space – it’s the fourth dimension (of eleven, according to the mysterious, super-theoretical M-theory that will supposedly unite the theory of gravity with quantum theory, which no one has been able to do yet), and when space was curled up into a tiny speck before the Big Bang, time and space could be governed by quantum theory rather than Newton’s classic theory, thus following a completely different set of rules. According to M-theory, time would bend to gravity like space bends to gravity, and since everything was so compacted with such density and strong gravity, time was bent to such a degree that it didn’t progress in the way we know it, meaning that the beginning of time we’ve all contemplated really didn’t exist in the first place, making a creator, who would start time and thus the universe, unnecessary.

Hawking’s morning talk show interviews seem to make “unnecessary” mean “impossible,” which is where my most significant problem lies. Granted, in the book, he makes no such claim. I’m not here to make an argument for or against theism; in fact, I refuse to do it. Hawking’s argument fails to convince me, or even sway me, in either direction, even assuming M-theory is correct.

Which brings me to another point: What, exactly, is M-theory? Hawking says it’s the long-sought-after unification theory of physics, that he thinks it will once and for all unite quantum theory and Newton’s gravity, that it’s not just a single theory but a combination of lots of diverse theories that overlap and make sense in a system. It requires eleven dimensions, one more than string theory’s ten (the extra seven are curled up so small we can’t see them) and claims there are billions of universes coexisting with this one that use the other dimensions and probably have different physical laws, et cetera, et cetera. I lose track when he gets to the part where time, when in the pre-Big Bang dense mass, bundles up with all the dimensions and is warped by gravity so much that it basically stops, though it doesn’t, supposedly proving that time has no beginning. I simply can’t follow the logic, though I can’t pretend to understand M-theory either.

Again, my biggest problem with this whole no-creator argument is that even if we assume M-theory is correct and that a creator isn’t necessary for the universe to exist, can we therefore claim that a creator does not exist, as Hawking has repeatedly said in interviews? I just don’t see it.

A side note: I really miss the philosophy nerds at UNO, with whom I could sit around and discuss things like this over coffee. I’ve yet to meet one philosophy nerd in Shreveport, probably because LSUS doesn’t even have a philosophy department. Which, of course, is entirely ridiculous.

Spring Break and Don Delillo

27. March 2010 · Write a comment · Categories: DeLillo, Older Books · Tags: ,

My favorite thing about Spring Break is that it’s a little glimpse of the more substantial vacation just four or five torturous weeks away. It gives me some much-needed time to lie on the sofa or sit at a coffee shop, my legs propped up, and read books I haven’t been told to read.

Yesterday, I picked up Don Delillo’s Point Omega, which I’d been wanting to read since I saw a fantastic review a month or two ago. It’s super-short, and I read it in only three or four hours. And I read slowly. This isn’t a book review (I don’t write book reviews), so all I’m going to say is that it’s fantastic. The whole thing is basically a slowing down of time:

It’s all embedded, the hours and minutes, words and numbers everywhere, he said, train stations, bus routes, taxi meters, surveillance cameras. It’s all about time, dimwit time, inferior time, people checking watches and other devices, other reminders. This is time draining out of our lives. Cities were built to measure time, to remove time from nature. There’s an endless counting down, he said. When you strip away all the surfaces, when you see into it, what’s left is terror. This is the thing that literature was meant to cure. The epic poem, the bedtime story.

I liked this novel in the same way I liked White Noise – it’s the same kind of cultural critique that makes you feel a bit empty at the end. Makes me want to go on a Delillo binge, though I have a feeling I’d somehow emerge disappointed.