BOOK ALERT!

My friend Boo Davis is publishing a rockin' new book about quilting today. Yay Boo! Check it out here. Boo was interviewed by the New York Freaking Times!! Check it.

Books

I started reading The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, by T.E. Lawrence on my flight to Kuwait. This autobiography by the infamous Lawrence of Arabia was an excellent introduction to the world I was entering. He perfectly captures the dusty dry scenery, the vastness of the land. I was impressed with his insights to the politics of the region (rebellion against Turkey and independence for Arab peoples) and his support for their cause. While he was a British soldier, and his support of independence had ulterior motives (Turkey was a German ally during WWI) ,he also clearly cared about the locals on a personal level. He was not too proud to write about his weakness during initial camel rides, which were often days long with little food or water. On his first major trip, he described explicitly his suffering of dysentery. His appreciation for the culture as a whole and his deep love of his Arab bretheren are clear on every page.

That said. This book is very long. There is a lot of military and political minutia that caused my eyes to glaze over and my brain to turn off as I gave up keeping track of who or what or where the story was taking us. I finished, but only because I had so much free time in Kuwait that I could buckle down and put in the long hours required for this book. I'll have to rent the movie.

Next up was the New York Times war corespondent Dexter Filkin's The Forever War. Filkins book begins with an prologue that takes place during the battle of Falluja, when he was embedded with a marine company. Running across the street amid flying bullets, watching marines die in front of him, you are immediately caugt up. The first chapter of the book takes place on a soccer field in Afghanistan in the 90's. The author and a crowd of locals are watching an exhibition of Sharia law. The Taliban chop the hands off thieves and finally they execute a convicted murderer. The story never really slows down, it takes you through 15 years of middle east correspondance from Afghanistan to Iraq. His writing is excellent- exciting and thought provoking and at times heart-wrenchingly beautiful. Depressing though. When a member of the Taliban laments that they just want to be taken seriously and treated as equals by the world leaders, you realize that we are truly living in different worlds.

Finally, The Great War For Civilisation, by Robert Fisk. While Filkins has been a war reporter in Iraq and Afghanistan for over a decade, Fisk has been living in and reporting from the Middle East for over 30 years, and this book shows it. He covers the first and second Afghan wars, the two Iraq wars, the Algerian civil war, the Iran-Iraq conflict, the Armenian genocide, and of course, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. He carefully details the history of each conflict not shying away from politically unpopular views or his own errors of judgement. This author met Osama bin Laden no less than three times.

While Lawrence's book was interesting from an historical perspective, the writing is rather dated, and the picayune details of political squabbling were at times sleep inducing. Fisk's writing is detailed enough to be educational but exciting enough to be a quick read. Not an easy read- unless you think reading about the horror of war first hand is easy- but a quick one. Fisk is the book I should have read first. It has everything I wanted when I came here, looking for a historical yet contemperary perspective on the conflicts of the middle east. Unfortunately, because I left it for last, I burnt out before I was halfway through. I've set it aside for now and am knee deep in The Wilderness Warrior- a wonderful book about my favorite president (T.R) and his campaign to save America's wilderness.

Old school Environmenalism

I've been re-re (and in some cases re-re-re-) reading some of my favorite environmental authors. Authors who I first read 15, 20 years ago and who instilled in me my initial concepts of ecology, sustainability and conservation. Edward Abbey, Annie Dillard, Aldo Leopold, John Muir. People who nudged the movement a little more towards the mainstream, a direction it continues to move today.

As with so many "classic" writings (Jane Austin, Emerson, Shakespeare), it's easy to read them once in school, put them on a shelf and avoid them for the rest of your life. Then, years later you pull them down again, on a whim or when you've read everything else in your library. You discover to your shock that the sick and twisted Lady Macbeth actually gives you nightmares. That the love affair between Elizabeth and Mr Darcy is strikingly similar to how you behaved when you were in love at 20. These books are classics not because teachers force them on their literature class, but because they speak to people, they address emotions and circumstances that have not changed in 500 years and will not change for 5000 more.






Annie Dillard changed the face of the environmental movement. Edward Abbey, John Muir and Aldo Leopold founded or inspired the formation of environmental organizations that are still active and influential today (EarthFirst, The Sierra Club and The Wilderness Society, respectively). What is easy to forget, what I am thrilled to discover again, is that they were also gifted writers. Their clear-eyed vision of the natural world is inspiring. After reading A Pilgrim At Tinker's Creek in the evenings before bed, I walk around the next morning in a daze, looking at flowers by the side of the road or birds on telephone wires as if I had never seen them before. I read Abbey's travels through the Four Corners and my eyes water and my throat becomes dry with the red dust of the dessert.






It seems environmental writers today are so serious, so overwhelmed with the significance of The Crisis that they have forgotten what it was that they loved about Nature to begin with. They overwhelm the reader with statistics and numbers and policies and they leave out the wonder that can be found in a school of fingerlings or the sight of a clump of bear fur stuck on a broken branch.

I know there's a crisis. I know we have to make change happen or we will loose the fingerling, the bears and the trees. I just don't want to loose my own sense of wonder along the way.

A Time To Read

My schedule has changed and I find myself with more free time than I've had in recent memory. Having spent the last 15 years of my life without a television, I cannot seem to work up an interest in my new roommate's favorite programs so I tried turning my attention to books. I can't remember the last time I was able to keep up with contemporary fiction and I was excited to settle in to some stories that I've heard so much about lately.

At the airport bookstore I picked up two recent Pulitzer Prize winners- The Road and Middlesex- and the bestseller The Lovely Bones (the store had a buy 2, get 1 free sale going on at the time). I was utterly mystified. While Middlesex was at least entertaining, the other two were so bad that I could hardly get through them, I found myself skimming over long sections of prose, just to get the pain of reading over more quickly.

The Road was a typical dystopian post-apocalypse scenario with the catch here being- wait for it-- they don't specifically say that the conditions were caused by a nuclear explosion. Thus, we don't know for certain what caused the current situation- WWIII? A virulent disease? Space aliens? Do we care? Not really. Oh, and also, he doesn't use quotation marks. If you've seen Mad Max, you can guess not only the major plot elements but also probably a few of the more important scenes.

The Lovely Bones, while marketed as adult literature, is actually a novel written for teenaged girls. Complete with boys and acne and a parental divorce. Yes, the main character is dead, but once you get over that conceit the book is full of mawkish characters and tedious episodes of suburban life.

Is this the kind of tripe people want to read? At least Middlesex contains complicated characters and intricate plot twists. Personally, I thought the book dragged a bit in the last third, but perhaps I was just still reeling from the two previous episodes of literary bludgeoning that I'd just experienced.

Thankfully, I also came upon The Solitudes, by John Crowley. This is a re-release of a novel that was originally published in 1987 as the first of a four part cycle called Aegypt. This is not the first work by Crowley that I've read- his novel Little, Big is one of my favorites, and his collection of short novels called Otherwise has some real gems- but it does not disappoint. Crowley is a sci-fi fantasy writer- Little, Big won the prestigious World Fantasy Award for best novel- which is not a genre that I usually enjoy. Still, it's not the fantastic that draws me to him, but the purity of his writing. His novels are dense with history and I seem to spend an equal amount of time with Wikipedia as I do with the book itself. Little, Big takes place in present day upstate New York, but the 12th century German King Barbarossa plays a major role. Here in the solitudes we follow the young professor Pierce Moffet through the tumultuous 70's. Woven throughout this modern tale is the story of the 15th century featuring mathematician/astrologer John Dee, Italian monk and martyr Geordano Bruno, and a young struggling actor named Will Shakespeare.

Check out this exerpt. The character was unexpectedly waylaid (due to a mechanical failure on a greyhound bus) on a trip from NYC to a small college in upstate New York. He ended up spending the night in a small town, missing an interview but starting something more important:

"He would think of it often, in different ways and in different contexts; he had already begun to think of it in the frigid airless bus passing away. And- on city streets, still violent with summer, foul with loathsome summer; in his tower apartment, grown too large now as the suit of a wasted strveling; or when steeling himself for the task he now knew lay ahead- he would sometimes feel those scenes he had visted lying just behind him, a pool of golden light, so close that he was uncertain just how he had traveled from there to here: to here where he supposed he must now be for good, or as nearly for good as made no difference.

Unfortunately, The Solitudes is not really a stand-alone novel but truly the introduction of the series. Fortunately, the following three books are available, the final fourth novel having only been published in 2007. Unfortunately, I hear the rest of the story does not maintain the high standards set by this one. I'm betting they're better than The Lovely Bones, though.