bookbrick and the growing backlog

Some weeks ago I began describing some of the books I have read and acquired lately, and the post ran a little long, so I decided to revisit again when time permitted. Most of that was an effort to clear the decks for the xmas lode.

You see, my sibling and I exchange scrip redeemable at a popular online retailer of books (and almost everything else) and we might both have gone a little overboard this year, because I had a hard time spending all that scrip on stuff I actually wanted, or, to be a little more precise: I had a hard time calling to mind all the objects that I want and on which I would have liked to spend said scrip at the moment when I was trying to redeem it. I had several books in mind, but after I added them to my cart, the scrip balance was still troublingly high.

Two things I browsed but did not buy: ProTools software (DJ Pebkac's still climbing the not-very-steep-or-high learning curve of Audacity, but, while harboring music-authoring ambitions, has little time to devote to learning such software), and traditional Afghan "pakol" hats - which did not seem to be available for a head so large as mine.

The bookbrick arrived some days later:


Pictured, from right to left: The Glass Bead Game, Herman Hesse; Thelonious Monk, The Life of an American Original, Robin D.G. Kelly; Buddha volumes 1-8, Osamu Tezuka (graphic novels); The System of the World, Neal Stephenson; Rule 34, Charles Stross.

Since The Shock Doctrine, I've read a bunch, and am immersed in more.

World War Z by Max Brooks was fun, even if you're not into zombies. Dear reader, you may feel, like I do, somewhat overwhelmed by the new zombieism ever since Zach Snyder remade Dawn of the Dead round about 2004. This is indeed a solid piece of the new zombieism. It is written in the style of a retrospective series of interviews of survivors of the worldwide zombie apocalypse, alternating between journalistic reports on the subjects and the subjects' (or their translators') natural speech. Subjects are distributed worldwide -- frequently hailing from pre-apocalypse military or political professions -- and their interviews presented in more-or-less chronological order of the events described. Sometimes a bit dry and disconnected (in consonance with its historical reporting format) and sometimes gripping, it presents an impressionistic sampling of snapshots representing perspectives in a thoroughly-imagined, richly-textured and utterly horrifying world. [I have just learned that a movie based on the book is in production.]

I read The Shock Doctrine and World War Z as .pdf files on a mobile-device -- an entirely different reading behavior than that of books that are simultaneously tangible objects -- as I did Reamde: my first (and hopefully last) ebook/iBook purchase ever! Now, on the device, I am reading The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Or Gustavus Vassa, The African, a 1789 memoir, on the recommendation of a friend.

I am also reading Equiano out of curiosity because there is a character, Dappa, in the third Baroque Cycle book, The System of the World, who exhibits the same modus operandi -- viz., publishing his account of his lifetime of slavery as an indictment of that institution -- as Equiano seems to be portrayed as having done. Reading it myself should eliminate the need for all that clumsy, conditional "seems to be portrayed as" verbiage.

Did I mention that I'm in the middle of The System of the World now? Probably won't have a lot more to say about it, interesting though it is. But I do have a choice passage:

[M]ost places did not have newspapers, and so, if Mrs. Arlanc had not brought him any, he would never have known that they were wanting. But London had eighteen of them. 'Twas as if the combination in one city of too many printing presses; a bloody and perpetual atmosphere of Party Malice; and an infinite supply of coffee; had combined, in some alchemical sense, to engender a monstrous prodigy, an unstaunchable wound that bled Ink and would never heal. Daniel, who had grown to maturity in a London where printing presses had to be hidden in hay-wagons to preserve them from the sledgehammers of the Censor, could not quite believe this at first; but they kept coming, every day. Mrs. Arlanc brought these to him as if it were perfectly normal for a man to read about all London's scandals, duels, catastrophes, and outrages every morning as he spooned up his porridge.

At first Daniel found them intolerable. It was as if the Fleet Ditch were being diverted into his lap for half an hour every day. But once he grew accustomed to them, he began to draw a kind of solace from their very vileness.

Buddha, by Osamu Tezuka, "the godfather of japanese manga comics," presented sociopoliical aspects of the Buddha's environment -- Brahmanism and the caste system in action, and their interrelation with Siddhartha's development and the Buddha's instruction -- much more viscerally that I've encountered it in other sources. On the other hand, much of the doctrine and the precise and ever-so-patient categorizations of phenomena, that we know and love from our time amongst the Pali Canon, are not really depicted. It is much more biographical than theological, it features plenty of adventure and other familiar comic tropes.

Rule 34, by Charles Stross, is sort of a sequel to his Halting State, insofar as it shares characters and setting with, but little of its plot depends on, the prior novel. It is, broadly, a technothriller about the investigation in the not-too-distant future of a spate of coincidental and apparently-accidental deaths caused by appliance malfunction. As always, Stross delivers a torrent of spicy and tantalizing bleeding-edge ideas and leaves you to either keep up, roll with it, or wallow through without perhaps the most robust understanding of events of the plot. I'm not entirely sure where I fall on that spectrum, but enjoy it so much each time, I imagine I'm somewhere in the keep-up-wards half of roll with it.

I haven't read the others yet. Actually, I did read and love Hesse's The Glass Bead Game (or Magister Ludi) some years ago, and recently had occasion to give it to a friend who likes Hesse, but hadn't read that one. And then I wanted to read it myself. (It, too, is written as a retrospective historical account of events to occur in a fictional future). So, these go into the backlog with the rest of the scheduled readings. I think that Graeber's Debt, The First 5,000 Years is next in nonfiction, but the Monk biography seems to call to me.

This completes the earlier-intended exposition of recently-read works. Peace.