I just found about a site that is great for book readers. It lets you keep track of, rate, and find new books to read. You can see my profile here. It’s kind of like something you might find on Facebook, but for those of us who don’t use Facebook it’s nice. There is also a way to add a plugin to Wordpress, but I haven’t quite gotten that set up yet.
Yes, there are 1243 pages in the Penguin paperback, unabridged edition. About a strong week of reading for me. I’m a bit slower at reading than Grace is, so maybe it would be 5 days for her.
I have to say, I was delighted with the entire read; it is much, much more interesting than the movie (which was decent), and obviously the book follows the story better than the movie 
I was glad to see the last 50 pages go – I had been letting other things go so I could finish the book, and now that I’m finished I can move on and read some Dawkins, as Tony suggested.
In conclusion, I highly recommend this book (unabridged edition only!), and I suggest you try it over vacation sometime.
I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids–and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me [...] That invisibility to which I refer occurs because of a peculiar disposition of the eyes of those with whom I come in contact. A matter of the construction of their inner eyes, those eyes with which they look throught their physical eyes upon reality [...] you’re constantly being bumped against by those of poor vision. Or again, you doubt if you really exist. You wonder whether you aren’t simply a phantom in other people’s minds [...] out of resentment, you begin to bump people back.
That’s the abridged version of the first few paragraphs of Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison. Those first few paragraphs hooked me on the book. Sometimes when I’m making my way across campus so many people almost bump into me that it really seems that I am invisible. I try walking straight and not changing my path, but then there’s always a collision. I don’t know if I just look like the sort of person that should have to move out of other peoples’ way or whether I am invisible. Anyway, I was interested to find out what Ellison says about this invisibility stuff, so I started reading. I’m about a fourth of the way through the book right now. The book is not a light-hearted fun read. It is set in the South two generations after the end of slavery. It takes a hard look at identity, descrimination, and human dignity. Parts of the book are pretty unpleasant and down-right disturbing. It isn’t the type of tale that a white, middle-class American is usually exposed to, and it forces one to think about the unpleasant things that we usually skim over and block out in order to preserve the personal bubble of serenity we live in. I give it two thumbs up.
The Periodic Table by Primo Levi is by far the best book that I have read in recent months. I learned about Levi in my Genocide, The Holocaust, and Human Rights class last semester. Primo Levi was Italian chemist and a Jew who grew up in Mussolini’s Italy. He joined the Italian resistance during WWII and was captured and deported to Auschwitz. There he was put to work in the chemistry lab at Buna. After the war, he dedicated much of his time to bearing witness to the horror of The Holocaust in order to prevent its happening again. He committed suicide in 1987.
I thought that The Periodic Table would be all about chemistry. It wasn’t. The book is a memoir of Levi’s extraodinary life written through chemical metaphors. Several chemical compounds had a great affect on Levi’s life. For example, Levi attributed his survival of Auschwitz to his job in the chemistry lab and especially to the element, cerium, which he stole from the lab and made into lighter flints to trade for food.
One needn’t be a chemist to enjoy this book. It is more philosophical than anything else. If you do happen to be a chemist, the book has all the more meaning.
A snipit from the chapter on Argon and the noble gases-
“The little that I know about my ancestors presents many similarities to these gases. Not all of them were materially inert, for that was not granted to them. On the contrary, they were—or had to be—quite active, in order to earn a living and because of a reigning morality that held that “he who does not work shall not eat.” But there is no doubt that they were inert in their inner spirits, inclined to disinterested speculation, witty discourses, elegant, sophisticated, and gratuitous discussion. It can hardly be by chance that all the deeds attributed to them, though quite various, have in common a touch of the static, an attitude of dignified abstention, of voluntary (or accepted) relegations to the margins of the great river of life.”
I recently read the book Nathaniel’s Nutmeg by Giles Milton. It was given to me by my father as a gift. I think he intended it to be somewhat humorous, given the name of the book. However, as soon as I read the first couple pages I was interested, and I read the whole book in about a month.
A month may seem like a long time to read a book, but that is just from reading a few pages each night before bed.
The book is mainly about the spice trade between Europe and the Spice Islands of the East Indies. It is generally told from the perspective of the English, but it is not obviously biased at all. The author tells the struggles of the East India Trading Company, and how they fought for a share of the trade in spices (mainly they fought with the Portuguese and the Dutch). In the end it all came down to one island called Run, and one man called Nathaniel Courthope. I won’t tell the ending of the story; I’ll let you read it to find out what happens.
You should read the book if you like history, especially a history that contains a lot of quotes from the people involved. Apparently the captains and crew kept pretty good diaries, and a good portion of them have survived. The author quotes these and other sources frequently, keeping it in the old English dialect, which makes it quite amusing. There are lots of fun words and phrases that we would never use today! Here are a couple good ones:
Never before had the English crew seen such a primitive and barbarous people and they watched the savages with a mixture of awe and disgust. ‘They wear only a short cloake of sheepe or seale skinnes to their middle, the hairie side inward, and a kind of rat’s skinne about their privities.’ – Speaking of a landing by Sir James Lancaster at a port called Table Bay (just around the Cape of Good Hope) about the year 1591.
At last he [John Clarke] was taken down and, ‘being thus wearied and overcome by the torment, he answered yea to whatsoever they asked.’ With the confession down on paper and, ‘having martyred this poor man, they sent him out by foure blacks who carried him between them to a dungeon, where he lay five or six daies without any surgeon to dress him until (his flesh being putrified) great maggots dropped and crept from him in a most loathsome and noisesome manner.’ With the torturers now exhausted after their ordeal, ‘they thus finished their Sabbath day’s work.’ - This by a Dutch eyewitness to the Massacre of Amboyna in 1623.
Umberto Eco is a master of wit and wisdom. In his book Foucault’s Pendulum, he craftily tells a story about how the New Testament could have been written. I found it quite amusing. Here, the main character Casaubon is talking to his girlfriend Amparo:
“Now that you mention it, let’s see. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John are a bunch of practical jokers who meet somewhere and decide to have a contest. They invent a character, agree on a few basic facts, and then each one’s free to take it and run with it. At the end, they’ll see who’s done the best job. The four stories are picked up by some friends who act as critics: Matthew is fairly realistic, but inists on that Messiah business too much; Mark isn’t bad, just a little sloppy; Luke is elegant, no denying that; and John takes the philosophy a little too far. Actually though, the books have an appeal, they circulate, and when the four realize what’s happening it’s too late. Paul has already met Jesus on the road to Damascus, Pliny begins his investigation ordered by the worried emperor, and a legion of apocryphal writers pretends also to know plenty…. Toi, apocryphe lecteur, mon semblable, mon frere. It all goes to Peter’s head; he takes himself seriously. John threatens to tell the truth, Peter and Paul have him chained up on the island of Patmos. Soon the poor man is seeing things: Help, there are locusts all over my bed, make those trumpets stop, where’s all this blood coming from? The others say he’s drunk, or maybe it’s arteriosclerosis…. Who knows, maybe it all really happened that way.”
Now that’s just classy! Sometimes I wish I could be a writer…
