The Bridge of San Luis Rey is about a monk who, upon witnessing the collapse of a bridge in Peru, sets about investigating the lives of the people who died. The goal of such an investigation is to determine whether it was chance or divine intervention (i.e. the hand of God). I could have told him straight away and saved him the time but that’s besides the point I would suspect.
I tried to like this book. I tried to get past the first 30 pages. I just couldn’t do it. It bored me to tears. I just didn’t care. It was too confusing – there were too many names that were too similar. After reading for 20 pages about a mother and a daughter I still couldn’t figure out which was the mother and which was the daughter.
After 30 pages I looked at my bookshelf and saw what I still had unread and decided that life is too short.
A Million Little Pieces is a memoir by James Frey recounting his time in rehab for drug addiction. It’s a fascinating book and it’s also one of the most emotionally gripping books I’ve read in a long time.
Frey wakes up on an aeroplane with a broken nose, teeth missing and a hole through his cheek. He has no idea how he got there. He is met at the airport by his parents and soon checks into rehab.
His battle to get sober is intense and graphically accounted for. And I mean really really graphic. I’ve sat through my fair share of violent films and TV shows but even this book made me go ‘yuck’ at points.
Frey is constantly fighting. Fighting against the law, the 12 Step program that his clinic want him to go through – even other patients. What he fights the most though, is against himself. The battle for control is one that Frey places wholly with himself. His over-active sense of cynicism and mistrust of the system and of other people gradually drops, especially when he falls in love with a fellow addict at the clinic (but men and women aren’t allowed to fraternise – it’s never easy, is it?). Still, he is never really happy with the 12 Step program, especially seeing as he doesn’t believe in God. The picture from inside the clinic can be bleak at times – especially the 15% success rate. In the book when people leave the clinic there is always some hope that they can make it on the outside, but you do get the sense that deep down they know that it’s just another case of rolling the dice to see how long they’ll survive.
Most people will recognise the name of this book for the Oprah controversy and not for the book itself. Firstly, a primer if you’re not familiar. At least some of this book is made up or embellished. Maybe a lot of this book is made up or embellished. The Smoking Gun did an investigation of some of the criminal claims Frey makes and found his truthfulness to be somewhat lacking. I would strongly suggest that you don’t read that link until you’ve finished the book. That’s what I did and I’m glad.
I’ve come to the conclusion that even if all of it was made up it would still be a good book. Coming into it I knew that at least some of it was untrue (from my memory of what happened at the time) but it didn’t bother me. All the emotion still seems real. And the romantic thread will tear your heart out, I guarantee.
Go into this book without second-guessing what is and isn’t true and you’ll enjoy it.
Stephen Colbert (the last ‘t’ is silent) is a opinion-based comedy character created by Stephen Colbert (the last ‘t’ is not silent). He has his own show, The Colbert Report (the last two t’s are silent). He started on The Daily Show but soon gained his own show and I actually enjoy it more than The Daily Show now.
Colbert is modelled on a conservatively-opinionated host who goes into every story with pre-conceived opinions that never change. He isn’t too impressed by new ideas his guests may come up with, either. It should come as no surprise that Colbert often refers to Fox News host Bill O’Reilly as “papa-bear”. The comical aspects of O’Reilly’s performances are often highlighted in Colbert’s show. Here is the interview that Colbert (in character) did on O’Reilly’s own show. You can hear the crew laughing in the background.
So then, we come to this book. It is basically Colbert’s thoughts on a range of topics from animals to religion to sex to science and everything in between (but not sex with animals…I don’t think so, anyway). This book is great for a 5 minute read every now and then because the stream of thoughts are cut up into nice bit-sized pieces (probably catering to the younger generation that watch his show on Comedy Central). There are humorous footnotes everywhere and stuff in the margins also. This works in a similar way to his “The Word” segment, shown below talking about the Beijing Olympics.
What will ultimately hamstring Colbert in his audience appeal is that he requires the viewer to know who a lot of the political, social and media heavyweights in America are. For an Aussie like me, this can be difficult at times. For example, not many people would know that Nancy Pelosi, featured in the above clip, is the Democratic speaker of the US Congress (and third in line to the Presidency). Not knowing that means you wouldn’t get that aspect of the gay yak joke. Having said that though, Colbert does act as an educator and if you stick it out (or just whip out Wikipedia) you should get most of the jokes eventually.
For the above reason, I would be very hesitant to recommend this book to someone who doesn’t enjoy Colbert’s politically and socially-charged show because this book is merely an extension in a paper form. Not that that’s a bad thing but if you don’t like the show you’re not going to like the book.
(You can watch The Colbert Report online legally and for free)
I’ve always had a romanticised view of cops. NYC cops in particular. Maybe it’s the uniform, I dunno. I certainly enjoyed (the vanilla version of) Law & Order for a good stretch when I had the time to watch it.
Blue Blood is an autobiography of New York City cop Edward Conlon. He charts his rise from rookie to Gold Shield Detective. What makes this book special is Conlon himself. A graduate of Harvard (which he often wrote illegibly on forms so people wouldn’t make a deal of it), Conlon displays an amazing eloquence in his writing as well as a fastidious attention to detail. Not only does he take us through his career but also pieces together what he can of his father’s career as an FBI agent, as well as several relatives who were also cops.
We see that just like many careers, bureaucracy and politics often has far more bearing on career progression than performance and merit. Conlon spends most of the book trying to get out of a unit that, although once enjoyable, has turned sour. He also disperses a very thorough history of the NYPD and of the city itself. What I found disappointing was that he did not include more than a passing analysis of the dramatic decline in crime (75% fall in violent crime over 12 years) in New York and offer opinions as to why he thought it came about.
He also confirms (second hand) that the photocopier lie detector was actually successfully used which is one of my favourite clips from The Wire.
Blue Blood, at upwards of 550 pages, can be a little heavy to go through, particularly if (like me) you’re not very familiar with New York. The meticulous recording of precinct numbers, street names and the like can get tedious after a while, as can the constant lists of names of people he worked with (especially when they are not involved directly in the story and serve more as a shout out to people he knows). Still, the amount of detail surrounding warrants, drug busts and informants is where the book shines and if that piques your interest then you’ll probably enjoy this book as much as I did.
This book really does disappoint. Maybe it’s the fact that it’s a good 50 years old now but seeing as I actually liked On the Beach and Animal Farm which are similar in age I’m starting to think that maybe age is not the barrier here.
But I’m probably too far ahead of myself already.
The Bridge over the River Kwai is about the building of…well…a bridge over the River Kwai during the Second World War by British prisoners-of-war. A second thread in the book covers a British mission to destroy the very same bridge that their compatriots are building. Sounds promising, right? Well I thought so, but it doesn’t deliver – not by a long shot.
The first problem is the, for want of a better word, ‘Britishness’ of it (which is slightly strange considering it was written by a Frenchie) the strong, silent stiff upper lip kind of Britishness engulfs every character. The cold and calculating figures that fill the book mean that its hard to develop sympathy for anyone (maybe with an exception in Clipton, the doctor, but his part is minimal towards the latter stages of the book and I never really got a sense as to what he was feeling).
The 1967 edition I read promised me “Pierre Boulle’s best-seller about the horrors of life in a Japanese P.O.W. camp”. The horrors (of which I’m sure there were plenty in the real P.O.W. camps) are glossed over throughout the book. After some initial hardship the construction of the bridge proceeds smoothly without Boulle even batting an eyelid. This requires a suspension of disbelief that I just couldn’t muster.
Most of the second half of the book revolves around the planning of the attack on the bridge. Note that I say the planning because that’s pretty much what it is – planning. The tediousness of the planning of the attack will most probably put you to sleep. Most readers will be satisfied when the author describes how much of a perfection artist a certain character but Boulle decides to really ram it home by making the book tedious to read by taking us step by step through every single planning decision. The result of this is that the last 10 or 15 pages contain more action than the preceding 175. In these final 15 pages Boulle doesn’t even seize on the opportunity to deliver what he has built up over the whole book, instead deciding to tell the pivotal moment in the book after the fact.
Animal Farm (which, after 1984, is probably Orwell’s best know work) is an allegory critical of communism.
Ok, I lie.
Just a little?
Communism in its simplest form is both the classless and stateless ownership of the means of production. At the time Orwell was writing Animal Farm (1943-1944) Russia under Stalin was arguably far from what someone like Marx had envisioned. The fundamental problem with a classless system that I see is that someone has to make decisions about what needs to be done. That, and greed. Greed always creeps in. So if it’s not about communism then what is it critical of? Orwell was strongly critical of Stalinism led by (you guessed it) Stalin, the leader of Russia at the time. Orwell believed that Stalinism was a corruption of the socialist ideals that Marx originally had in mind. It’s not hard to imagine the kind of political embarrassment for the West when it was first published in 1945. At the time Russia was an ally of the West, having just defeated the Germans in Berlin a few months before.
Animal Farm is set on a farm with your typical range of animals and a farmer, the dreaded (by the animals) Mr Jones. One night one of the aging animals incites the animals to take action against their human suppressors. An uprising occurs not too soon after his death and soon the animals have the farm to themselves and free to live in the society they have always dreamed of.
At first, everything goes swimmingly. The power vacuum does start to prove to be too great however, and as I alluded to earlier, when you have a group of people trying to achieve something, someone always ends up leading. We see this familiar trend emerge soon enough and the ‘slippery slope‘ thoughts will start creeping in to most readers minds.
What is charming about this book as a criticism is the narrator is completely objective and doesn’t pass judgement about any of the occurrences on the farm. It would be way too easy to slant this way towards Orwell’s argument but he lets the reader take away from it only as much as they want to. If you had no idea that communism/Stalinism even existed then you may just see the unfolding events as sad or scary. I would like to think though that most people would have a vague idea about the circumstances surrounding the book (as if the references to “Comrade” wouldn’t be enough).
If you read this book make sure you have a look at Wikipedia to see the correlation between characters in the book and figures of the era. See how many you can fit together before you look. My opinion of the book sky-rocketed when I found out who all the characters were meant to represent (I had many “ohhhhhhhhhh………I get it now” moments).
“That’s so depressing,” my sister remarked when she saw I was reading this. Gee thanks, I thought. On the Beach is set in Melbourne in the 60s amongst a post-World War III environment of impending nuclear doom. Due to no fault of Australia, cobalt-based bombs have wiped out everywhere north of Australia and the cloud of destruction is slowly but surely drifting south.
We follow the lives of five people: the captain of an American nuclear submarine, an Australian navy officer posted to the submarine, his wife, their alcoholic friend and a CSIRO scientific officer also posted on the submarine. The seagoing members in the book are sent on journeys to work out how far the radiation is spreading and to look for signs of life up north.
What surprised me was the calm resignation that pretty much all the characters exhibit, despite knowing that all life is sure to end in just a few months time. They go on with planning for the future years down the track (planting gardens, ploughing fields, etc.) which at first I thought was crazy but then it dawned on me: even if you knew when you were going to die, keeping busy is the only thing that would prevent you from curling up in the corner in the foetal position.
The other linked concept here is the difference between knowing when you’re going to die and it being a surprise. All the characters have an approximate date for Melbourne’s demise and its interesting to see the way the community as a whole handles the situation.
So overall, I didn’t find it depressing (a little bit sad, yes). The dignity with which the characters face their inevitable doom was inspiring. A good classic Australian (I think Shute was British but we’ll claim it anyway) book.
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