Reading Roundup, November 2009

November proved an eclectic and productive reading period for me — even if I didn’t get much else done. I started things off with Italian fabulist Italo Calvino’s excellently mesmerizing Invisible Cities, a series of imaginative prose-poem meditations on memory and semiotics wrapped up in a spiraling chapter structure. It’s the sort of thing that has you reading passages twice in varying order — in fact that’s almost required. This is the first Calvino I’ve read and, such was its impact, I now have about five of his books sitting in my ‘to be read’ pile. Highly recommended.

I made the transition from cities to wilderness with Jane Goodall’s In the Shadow of Man, her popular memoir detailing the founding of her ground-breaking observational studies of chimpanzees. Whether Goodall talks about the issues of setting up a research camp at Tanzania’s Gombe Reservation or the detailed life-cycle of the chimpanzee, the book is consistently fascinating. Social behavior, emotions, child-rearing, tool-using, aggression, hunting, mating, hierarchy, death — the whole gamut of chimp behavior is unveiled as it becomes known to Goodall herself through observation. A classic work of zoology, one accessible to anyone.

The Death of Ivan Ilyich took me from the man’s shadow to man’s end with its examination of mortality and fatal illness. Tolstoy’s short novel tells the story promised by its title — the death of one Ivan Ilyich, a satisfied middle class professional whose comfortable existence is destroyed by his own terminal illness. From the discomfort or disbelief of his friends, to the sterile theories of his doctor, Ivan Ilyich receives no sympathy or acknowledgment of his condition from anyone — save a simple peasant lad of his household. A powerful and moving account of both how we experience the awareness of our own demise, and how very few of us can accept the inevitability of death even as it stares us in the face. An essential book; doubly so if you’ve ever watched a loved one succumb to a terminal condition.

For lighter fare, I turned to the poet laureate of all things noir, Raymond Chandler. The Little Sister, with its overcomplicated and somewhat strained plotline, is not one of Chandler’s best, though even his lesser efforts show flashes of genius not seen in more conventional practitioners of crime. The Little Sister is at times sinister, humorous, satirical, and bleak — but it is the rapid-fire cynicism of one passage in particular that has a fed-up Philip Marlowe skewering all the sham and pretension of 1940s LA — punctuated with a rhetorical “Easy Marlowe, you’re not human tonight”– that comes across as most memorable. This novel would be followed by arguably Chandler’s greatest, The Long Goodbye.

From classic crime I transitioned to classic science fiction, and Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris. Translated from Polish into French into English, the prose in my edition had a bit of a sterile quality that didn’t win any points with me. But it was the meat of the book, and the strange quirks of narration, that made it a worthwhile read. As anyone who has seen either of the movies based on the novel knows, it is essentially a story of a researcher who is sent to study a planet, only to have the planet end up studying him. Lem’s book has a very different feel than much of that of his contemporaries, a difference of perspective I’m looking forward to revisiting in my Five Book Challenge when I tackle The Cyberiad.

Finally, I finished the month with a new(ish) fantasy: Scott Lynch’s The Lies of Locke Lamora. Fast-paced, stylish, and as clever as a bucketful of ferrets, Lies’ 700 plus pages whipped past like a novel half its length. I won’t say much more about it as I plan on reviewing this one — look for it, and the resumption of a more regular review schedule, in 2010.