ReadingBlog

24 March 2008

Funny thing about philosophy

Last fall I noticed a little ad for a book in The New Yorker. The title caught my eye: Plato and a Platypus Walk Into a Bar... The subtitle, Understanding Philosophy Through Jokes, convinced me to buy it for David for Christmas. The book is by Thomas Cathcart and Daniel Klein [below].

David and I have enjoyed listening to Garrison Keillor's joke shows, reading political humor, and reading and talking about philosophy. (Sophie's World was one of his favorite books a few years ago.) So, I bought the book.

David read it in the days after Christmas. When he went back to Beloit, I asked him if I could read it.

There are some good jokes, but the title is just about the best thing about the book. The punchline is at the end of the book.

The jokes are illustrative of the topics in chapters on metaphysics, logic, epistemology, ethics, existentialism, et al. But I was really lazy when I read the book. I often wanted more explanation for the connections between topics and jokes. In other words, I didn't always get the philosophy.

If I were still teaching philosophy, I would probably "borrow" some of these jokes to use in class. Well, maybe. I'm not one of those people who readily remembers jokes and tells them spontaneously. The jokes would have to be in the lesson plans and I'd have to rehearse them.

Well, what, you ask, are some of the jokes?

Here's an epistemological joke: "A scientist and his wife are out for a drive in the country. The wife says, 'Oh, look! Those sheep have been shorn.'

"'Yes,' says the scientist. 'On this side.'"

How about an existential joke?

"Norman began to hyperventilate when he saw the doctor. 'I'm sure I've got liver disease.'

"'That's ridiculous,' said the doctor. 'You'd never know if you had liver disease. There's no discomfort of any kind.'

"'Exactly!' said Norman. 'Those are my precise symptoms.'"

There's this from the chapter on the philosophy of language: "As the poet Gertrude Stein lay on her deathbed, her partner, Alice B. Toklas, leaned over and whispered, 'What is the answer, Gertrude?'

"Replied Stein, 'What's the question?'"

Finally, there's a meta-philosophy joke: "A blind man, a lesbian, and a frog walk into a bar. The barkeep looks up at them and says, 'What is this — a joke?'"

Okay, my reaction is definitely mine. Your reactions will vary. If you're curious check it out.

Plato and Platypus official website
A YouTube video of an authors' reading
A review from BuzzFlash

04 March 2008

Characters and island suspense

Here's another set of comments I wrote about a Laurie R. King book. It's dated February 2004, but that can't be right. I wouldn't have been at Sidetrack in February and Kris wouldn't have been bringing guests at that time of year. Reading the entry carefully, I find I wrote this in July '03 and only got around to posting it at ReadingOnTheWeb in February.

Here's another of my favorite King books.

I was at Sidetrack for the purpose of cleaning and preparing the place for Kris and her friends from Madison who would arrive the next week. I was also dealing with the death of a cell phone thanks to the misfeasance of somebody at Amery's Radio Shack store. Oh, and there was a free range cat that kept hanging out on the deck between hunting trips. I thought it was the neighbor's cat. But the neighbor hadn't been around for two days.

I didn't get as much cleaning done as I'd intended. I was trapped by a book: Folly by Laurie R. King.

King first came to my attention as the author of a series of books about Mary Russell, a young woman who becomes a partner of Sherlock Holmes. Those were quite enjoyable. King also wrote four mystery novels about Kate Martinelli, a San Francisco detective. She's also written a couple other novels about interesting characters.

None of them prepared me for Folly. There are portrayals here of depression and post-traumatic stress syndrome that set my teeth on edge. There's also the story of the brave and intelligent woman at the center of the book who struggles mightily with her feelings and her madness. There are enough real threats to add to the imagined ones to make the suspense palpable. Rae Newborn, the woman at the center of the stories, is living alone on one of the San Juan islands (i.e. no other island residents). The suspense in the story telling was enough to keep me from reading it after dark while I was alone at Sidetrack, even when there were neighbors here.

But it wasn't just the very well-told story that kept me reading that July afternoon when I should have been washing and vacuuming. It was the characters. King has always populated her novels with interesting people: the young woman at Oxford who seeks out a retired beekeeper as a mentor, a "retired" adventurous detective who keeps accepting commissions from highly-placed friends, a cop whose life away from the office is more important to her than the professional dedication she gives to law enforcement, and the quiet deprogrammer who infiltrated a dangerous sect for example.

Folly focuses on four generations of a family and the representatives of these generations are wonderfully drawn. The resilient main character is most complete, but the others appear as real people as well. It's not that I'd like to spend a lot of time with these people, but before I was very far into the book, I cared about them. Even the characters around the edges of the story are bright and clear.

So what makes this a wonderfully excellent book are the characterizations, the portrayals of imperfect people finding ways of coping, the carefully-told suspenseful tale, and the way it drew me into the world created by Laurie R. King. But that's just my opinion.

I finished the book only an hour ago, and I can already pick out some gimmicks and plot devices that I might criticize. But this book doesn't deserve nit picking. It deserves to be read and enjoyed.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, the Pulitizer-winning book I wrote about in the last issue was not, to my mind, a great American novel. This may not be either, but it's better. And the tensions between sanity and insanity, struggle and acceptance, and love and resentment are as profound and universal as the themes of Chabon's book. If he can win a Pulitzer, Laurie R. King deserves one too.

What do you think?

Improbable upstart

In my continuing effort to bring reviews from the old ReadingOnTheWeb site to the new-fangled blog, I'm concentrating on my favorites.

Laurie R. King is one of my favorites. I wrote this after reading The Beekeeper's Apprentice back in August 2001.

When I read a review recently of a new mystery featuring Sherlock Holmes set in St. Paul, Minnesota and involving railroad magnate (Empire Builder) James J. Hill, I figured this Holmes stuff must be a trend. I had just finished a new post-Conan Doyle Holmes mystery myself and enjoyed it very much, thank you.

It's been a long time since I've read any Sherlock Holmes -- about 40 years.

When I was about 12 years old, I stayed at my great-uncle Clarence's home for a couple days. (He was a World War I veteran who belonged to the Fraternal Order of the Cooties, Minneapolis Pup Tent, in memory of those awful months in France.) He'd finished off an attic room and decorated it with books. One of them was Sherlock Holmes Detective Stories, which I devoured while a quiet guest. Uncle Clarence gave it to me when I went home. It's on my shelf right now.

The new Holmes mystery I read seemed to very much in the spirit of Conan Doyle's work. Maybe. Because all my Holmesian memories seem to come from Basil Rathbone movies, and the book is dead-on accurate to those images, phrases and accents. The book is one Nancy recommended, The Beekeeper's Apprentice by Laurie R. King [at left].

If you've ever wished that Holmes would get a gentle comeuppance, here's the book for you. And who better to chastise that old know-it-all than Miss Mary Russell, a 15-year-old American orphan "whose mental acuity is equaled only by her audacity, tenacity, and penchant for trousers and cloth caps." (quoting the book jacket flack)

The plot revolves around the kidnapping of the daughter of a US Senator who was visiting London. Holmes is lured out of retirement and persuaded to take on a teen-aged, female assistant to help Scotland Yard solve the case. Of course, the kidnapping was only a ruse to get Holmes out of retirement and into the world, so he could be killed.

It's a fine story of Mary Russell's discoveries about her new life as a ward in England and Holmes' world of treachery and detection. By the end of the book, Mary Russell is a student at Oxford and ready to take a term off to help Holmes solve another case. That must be what King's next book featuring Russell and Holmes, A Monstrous Regiment of Women, is about.

The Beekeeper's Apprentice is great fun -- just keep imagining Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes sputtering in the face of a brilliant young woman. And then imagine what Dr. Watson is doing!

02 March 2008

Good people, bad cops

Okay, I "know" I don't like violent, bloody, conflict-filled mysteries. I avoid reading them and I stop reading them when I start.

So, why did I like C. J. Box's latest violent, bloody, conflict-filled mystery? It's titled Blue Heaven. And I really liked this book.

In the opening scene, two kids witness a cold-blooded murder and become prey in a deadly chase. Those kids witness more murder and mayhem later, and nearly every character in the story is threatened by the bad guys.

There are lots of bad guys and lots of good guys (almost every character is a guy). There are few if any hints about how things are going to be resolved. Deadly threats hang over nearly every event in the story.

Box [left] does a masterful job of laying out the story. The action is nearly non-stop, but there's enough explanation for things to make sense. And nearly everything does make sense. I'm put off by unbelievable actions by characters in these stories, but incredulity only hit me once. I would have welcomed a little more explanation in the climax, but I'm a pretty literal reader.

Box's other books have been limited by some stock characters and some geography. This one is not, and I think it helped.

Joe Hartlaub, in his review at Book Reporter (see below), calls the book a "visual feast." I agree. Box does such a good job of painting word pictures of the people, events, and settings that it was almost like looking at story boards for a movie while someone described what was going on.

If any of you read this or any of Box's books, write and tell a little bit of the world what you think.

14 February 2008

Old mystery, new novel

I just finished Margaret Coel's latest mystery, The Girl with Braided Hair. (Thanks, Mary.)

I really like this one. Then you'll ask, "Why?" And I'll have to figure out why.

The characters are either better creations now or I've gotten used to them.

The plot is better put together than many of Coel's earlier books. But the liklihood of either a lawyer or a priest devoting much time to identifying a murder victim who's been dead for 30 years, seems really, really tiny.

(Coel could get around my incredulity if her characters, like Hillerman's, were tribal police officers or investigators.)

The relationships still don't work for me. An Arapaho lawyer (Vicky Holden), her Lakota legal partner and lover (Adam Lone Eagle), and a reservation Jesuit priest (Father John) make a lousy triangle.

Father John's connections with the people at the mission and the kids on his baseball team seem realistic. But, the Father John-Vicky Holden tension doesn't. The priest staves off the temptations of the woman in the same way he, as a recovering alcoholic, staves off the temptations of Irish whiskey. I guess I'd expect more prayers from the priest. And maybe more confessions to his priestly colleague at the mission or to his superior.

And Vicky Holden seems not to think much about the temptation of the man who is the priest and is really, really ambivalent about her romance/conjugal relationship with tall, handsome, logical, and successful Adam Lone Eagle. (If her ambivalence is connected to her attraction to the priest, she's more messed up than she otherwise appears.)

The backstory is set on the Wind River Reservation in the 1970s when the American Indian Movement was fighting and campaigning for civil rights. After the Trail of Broken Treaties protest that occupied the Bureau of Indian Affairs office in Washington, DC and the Wounded Knee takeover, AIM leaders and members were being pursued by the FBI and local law enforcement. According to Coel, many people associated with AIM moved to remote western reservations to avoid arrrest. The late 1970s were, according to Coel, a difficult time for many people on the Wind River reservation, both those who sympathized with and supported AIM, those who were opposed to the outside agitators, and those who just wanted to be left in peace. That was the context for a murder and coverup that became the plot of The Girl with Braided Hair.

Now, I look forward to other reactions to this book. Maybe Jana will have time to read this one and let us know what she thinks of Coel's new book.

But, please, write and tell a little bit of the world what you think.

13 February 2008

Jana Eaton on Margaret Coel

Well, I did send the books to my friend Jana back in 2002. They arrived at a time when she wanted some respite from thinking about her thesis and her defense. She read The Eagle Catcher and wrote us about it before going on to successfully defend her thesis and earn her doctorate. (Congratulations, Dr. Jana.) Here's what she wrote:

"Ken thoughtfully mailed me three of the Margaret Coel paperbacks.

"While the reading is a bit different from that I'm doing for my dissertation (curricular decentralization and sociopolitical stability in Dagestan, Sakha, Tatarsan and Bashkortostan), I thoroughly enjoyed The Eagle Catcher and am grateful to Ken for putting me on to Coel. While I'm not overly impressed with the character development or logic of the plot trajectory at times, Coel accurately depicts the Arapaho customs as I remember them.

"Having grown up on the Reservation as an Arapaho, the book really resonated with me. I've never felt more nostalgic for life on the Res., a place from which I couldn't wait to escape years ago.

"Coel did do her homework. In fact, I recognized a lot of the names in the acknowledgments, including a close friend, Scotty Ratliff. Scotty is a Shoshone (both the Shoshones and Arapahos reside on the Wind River Reservation).

"He introduced Coel to various people on the Res. and said in an email that he took her to the sweat lodge.

"The big change that I notice is the congruence of Catholicism with Native religious customs and practices. This was not so much the case when I was growing up. In fact, the Church backed the banning of the Sun Dance, as I recall. It is heartening to hear that the Church is now "Nativizing" its services and practices. Likewise, sweating was not widely practiced when I was growing up, but it is very popular today -- and very spiritual.

"Still, the problems on the Res. are daunting and pretty much the same -- rampant alcoholism, abject poverty, high unemployment, etc.

"By the way, there is no St. Francis Mission; it is really St. Stephen's Mission. Why Coel changed that name but retained the other place names eludes me. Also, she says all of the characters are fictional, but I recognized several "fictional" names that are the real names of Arapahos living there -- Oldmans, for example.

"Anyway, thanks so much, Ken (even if I haven't been this homesick in years!)."

Hillerman Imitator

Here's another import from ReadingOnTheWeb. It's from an entry I made in November 2002. I'm adding it because I just read the newest mystery by Margaret Coel and I'll be writing about it shortly. That and the other reactions to Coel's books I've written here gives a lie to my 2002 resolution not to read any more of her books.

Here's what I wrote in 2002:
While browsing in The Book Peddler in West Yellowstone, MT, I ran across a book that looked interesting: The Eagle Catcher by Margaret Coel.

If Tony Hillerman made a career of writing mysteries located on New Mexico's Navajo reservation, Margaret Coel seems to be making her career writing mysteries set on Wyoming's Wind River reservation. (In an interview she said that Hillerman was her inspiration.)

Coel was a reporter who wrote about Wyoming and Native history before turning to fiction. Her stories have been published in several magazines dedicated to mystery writing, but she's also been a "Career Achievement Nominee" in the Romantic Times Book Club.

Instead of centering her stories on a couple of Navajo policemen as Hillerman does, Coel's primary actors are a Jesuit missionary priest and an Arapaho woman lawyer who is conflicted about working for her people on the reservation or working on "big" issues in a large firm in Denver or Los Angeles.

The Eagle Catcher, published in 1995, was her first mystery novel. It's sold well, I guess. My copy was the 10th printing and there are four more Margaret Coel books advertised in the back.

Coel is a pretty good storyteller and offers some attractive characters who, like Jance's Sheriff Brady, have more going on in their lives than finding killers.

In the end, though, the people in her stories are unconvincing. A priest at a poor rural mission ought to be spending more time fund raising and less interfering with police work. And the hot shot lawyer whose legal brief is going to convince the Federal Appeals Court to set a precedent important to tribes all over the country really doesn't have time to pursue murder investigations in her spare time. The implausibility of "Murder She Wrote" rears its ugly head.

Coel does her best to make the dry grasslands of the Wind River reservation attractive, but she can't compete with Hillerman's rhapsodizing about the beauties of New Mexico's deserts. (Or perhaps I've had enough experience driving across the dry prairies of Wyoming, the Dakotas, and Montana not to romanticize them they way I can sometimes imagine the high desert.)

I finished reading The Eagle Catcher while sitting alongside the Firehole River on a gorgeous September afternoon in Yellowstone National Park. I liked it right up to the end despite its shortcomings. When the bad guy (a politician) gets zapped by Mother Nature's lightning instead of meeting secular justice, I'm disappointed. (If things worked that way, there would be few politicians left inside the beltway.) I couldn't have been that disappointed. On my way back through West Yellowstone, I bought two more Margaret Coel mysteries.

The additional books were The Spirit Woman and The Thunder Keeper. If The Eagle Catcher suggested that Coel's characters were not quite believable (in comparison to Jance's or Hillerman's); these books convinced me that Coel needs to work on plotting.

The stories are well told, but the stories left me really disappointed. I'm reminded of Dan Conrad's initial enthusiasm for Paula Cohen's Gramercy Park that cooled on further reading. Margaret Coel's stories are better read without thinking about them too much.

In these second and third books I read, the incredibility factor kept rising. Coel kept taking the shortcut of having her characters do things for very questionable reasons in order to move the story along. By the end of the third book, I wasn't sure I liked either of her main characters very much. I'm glad I read them, but I don't think I'll read any more of Coel's books. I'll send these off to Jana Eaton, who grew up in central Wyoming. If she has time while writing her thesis and teaching school, maybe she can escape to them. Then she can tell us what she thinks.

04 February 2008

Keeping murder within the family

My sister-in-law Mary, one of my primary suppliers, gave me some books for Christmas. I finally got around to reading one of them: Three Sisters, A Charlie Moon Mystery by James D. Doss. [That's him below at a book signing for an earlier Charlie Moon mystery.]

Thanks, Mary.

My reactions to the book were mixed.

Since Mary is one of three sisters, I thought there might be some symbolism in the title. I hope there wasn't. I didn't get very far into the book to realize that I was lucky not to marry into that literary family.

I thought the basic plot was interesting, but getting through the story telling was difficult for me. Doss kept commenting in asides about the story, and he did it as the writer outside of the book. Douglas Adams did some of the same kind of commenting in the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy series, but it wasn't so obtrusive. And Adams was writing about really weird things that needed commenting on. Now murderous husbands and wives are rather weird, but not as weird as Vogon demolition fleets and two-headed Galactic Presidents.

Oh, but see, now I'm off the track of what I wanted to say about Doss' distracting asides. Ah, but that's the point, isn't it? And Adams was writing humorous science fiction, not a Serious murder mystery set in southern Colorado.

In the middle part of the book, there weren't as many asides and I liked reading it more than I had at the beginning. But, then, in the final fourth of the book, disclosures came more and more quickly; events were more and more quickly related. I had been reading leisurely through most of the book and suddenly revealing facts popped up and I had to pick up the pace of my reading to keep up with the rapidity of the story telling. I don't think that anyone gave Doss a limited number of pages in which to tell his story, but it seemed like he was in a rush to finish.

Some of the best parts of the book were the buddy scenes in which Charlie Moon and police chief Scott Parris hang out and be friends. I think I could read a plotless book about those two guys taking a road trip.

Oh, and I did enjoy reading about Moon's aunt, Daisy. She's an ancient character who is a hoot. I don't know if I'd like to spend much time with her, but I did like hearing Doss tell stories about her.

All in all, it was a pretty good book. If anyone else reads this and has a reaction, add it here by using the Comments link at the bottom.

A review of Three Sisters by tfedge at Review Stream
A review by Oline Cogdill from the South Florida Sun-Sentinel
List of Doss' books from Fantastic Fiction

02 February 2008

Protest Literature

In an attempt to raise the quality of literature mentioned here and transfer some of the best of the old ReadingOnTheWeb to this venue, I dug up this oldie. I wrote this in another lifetime (in June of 2001).

Back in the strange times of the 1960s, I had an inspiring teacher of Russian history. Russian politics were as mysterious then as they are now; the stakes don't seem quite so high these days (though they probably are). I got intrigued with Russian literature and then with Soviet literature and then with dissident literature. (I even tried teaching myself the Russian alphabet so I could hear the poetic words of Babi Yar.)

The protest literature was wonderful: full of allusions and analogies and insiders' jokes insults and attacks.

It was a window into a world of large and petty injustices, absurdities and tyrannies. And, in spite of being a creative sign of life and hope, the books seemed to express hopelessness--the hopelessness of the individual pitted against totalitarian government, true believers, and culture. (The Cancer Ward comes to mind just now.) Even the funny ones were depressing (The Fur Hat, for example.)

Well, I got back into that "world" when I read Zhang Jie's As Long As Nothing Happens Nothing Will.

The stories may be about China in the 1970s and '80s.
Zhang Jie (a 60-year-old writer who sacrificed literature for the country and Party by studying economics, and who was sacrificed by the Party and country during the Cultural Revolution and who didn't begin writing until the 1970s) may be a popular Chinese novelist.
She may have won "China's most prestigious literary award" [book jacket blurb].

But she's writing exactly the same kinds of stories the Russian dissidents did.

There's the peasant village artisan whose craftsmanship entrances a wealthy tourist from the Philippines. When she invites him to Manila for an exhibit of his work, he becomes the toast of the provincial town near his village--until the invitation falls through.
There's the story of the "free" cat and its "unfree' master.
Another about the struggling doctor whose invitation to a medical seminar to learn surgical techniques is transformed by the machinations of politics into a trip to England for the hospital's Party cadre.
And when an timid-but-critically-thinking professor does get to go abroad, his bladder infection makes it impossible for the Party chaperone to keep track of both him and the rest of the group.

The stories bring to mind Hannah Arendt's phrase "the banality of evil."

They suggest also something from Kathleen Norris: the smaller the community and the stakes, the more vicious the infighting.

The worst part was that the stories kept reminding me of school.