Books and whatnot

War and Peace, Pevear translation (Tolstoy)
Best new translation, supposedly very close to the original flow / wording of the Tolstoy text.  I thought it was much better than the old translation I read a few years ago, but I'm sure that was published before people really regarded translating an art form and not just an attempt to get the plot across.   If you haven't read War and Peace, its about the way war affects a few different families and russian society during the Napoleonic wars.    It is incredibly long, but is really not bad to read since it keeps you interested the entire time.  My only complaint is the intense amount of military strategy that he goes off about, but this is all necessary to show how people act under pressure and how history moves forward as a force that cannot really be shaped by individual actions or people.

The Moon is Down - Stienbeck
About the reactions to the Nazi invasion in a small town in Norway.  Very short but good book I thought.  Its very typically Stienbeck, and I love his writing style so I kind of knew I would enjoy the book before I started.  It is kind of a Cannery Row in another country, just a tiny snapshot of a town by briefly following tiny bits of the town peoples' lives.

The Once and Future King - T. H. White
Retelling of the Arthurian saga.  I knew nothing really about this legend other than that Guinevere had somehow managed to screw everyone over, so I really enjoyed reading this.   It was very well written, and despite being a long book it was never a struggle to get through it.  All the characters are very well developed for a book about a legend, I feel like a lesser author would have made them very one dimensional because they are not completely invented from imagination.

Outliers - Tipping point guy
A short read a la Freakenomics, Hidden Order, etc.  Tries to disprove the "naturally gifted" idea by analyzing the circumstances surrounding the rise to prominence of many "outliers".  For clarification, an outlier is not just someone who is good at something, it is people like Bill Gates and the Beatles.  Good fast read.  Probably not completely accurate all the time, but gives you a few good things to think about.

Cousin Bette - Balzac
About mean people and the revenge that a marginalized old spinster has on her rich relatives.   I liked the book, but thought that the ending was not the best it could have been.   One of the most interesting/shocking features of the book is that it treats as completely normal 50 year old men offering patronage for girls as young as 13, which other books of the time period also mention but they never throw out specific ages like this one did, which make it sooooo much more wrong and shocking.

Boring Nerdy Post

ok this one is for my parents to reassure them that I am not rotting my brain with Tanduay, reggae music, etc...

The Red and The Black - Stendhal

LOVED this book. Recommended by dad, so good job. One of the early french psychological writers. About an ambitions young man making his fortune in some reprehensible but perfectly socially permitting ways for the time. Twisted plot where no one is happy... awesomeness.

Faust - Goethe
Yeah, I read about three chapters and just didn't care. I really am not much of a fan of novels in verse, Eugene Onegin and the Oddessy were the only ones I could deal with. And I didn't really feel any sort of sympathy with the characters who all seemed too crazy and convoluted and had no bearing on my life.

Love - Stendhal
Tried to read this as well since I liked The Red and The Black, but this is not really a novel, but just Stendhal rambling about love for 300 pages. I do not recommend unless you are a huge sap and want to read about love for that long- It bored me to death after 10 pages.

Les Miserables - Hugo

I loved the Hunchback so I decided to read this monolith of a novel. Very good, with Hugo's style, but there were a bit too many digressions for my taste, many of which it seemed irrelevant for the text development in any way. As I already knew the story the impact of the novel was also lessened for me, but it still was an epic book.

My complaint was that all of the characters seemed to be archetypes - Cosette was perfectly pure, Jean val Jean was always good, etc. No one deviated at all from their character as real humans do. That is why I love War and Peace so much, all of the characters are anti-heroes, but because of that you can relate with them much more personally because they have the foibles that ordinary people have. I liked Les Mis, but enjoyed The Hunchback of Notre Dame much better, mainly because of the characters and the writing.

"They made the problem of calling the Bourgeoisie a class, they are not a class simply the satisfied segment of the population"

"She loved him the most because she saw him the least, it is very easy to bestow perfection upon those you rarely see"

The Unbearable Lightness of Being - Kundera

Also loved this book, Perriface put me up to reading it so thank you. The story is told from the perspective of each of the characters in turn, and is powerful because many of the traits of the characters you see as shocking or socially wrong, but it is also very easy to find traces of those same things inside of yourself they are just much less embraced and open. So which is better to come out and declare to people that you are shocking and openly womanize in front of your wife as Thomas does, or do it behind society? Great book.

Oliver Twist - Dickens

Well, I have mixed feelings. I have never been a huge dickens fan since I find his writing and characters a bit laborious to read. I picked this up and immediately in the intro it says that it is an early and therefore not very developed work, so I cant judge it too hard. I do love Dickens' sarcasm though, most of the text is dripping with it as long as you read closely enough. My problem with the book was that Oliver annoyed me. He seemed so weak throughout the novel, although I guess he was only 8 or 9 so I should forgive him. Everything also worked out way too well in the end. I liked the characters of Nancy and Sikes, and the Artful Doger, but thought that Oliver was a weak main character which I am sure was not what Dickens was trying to represent as Oliver is supposed to embodied the force of goodness, and that would mean that goodness is weak and sniveling against evil, only really winning out by accident.

Coming soon.....

Just got back from Vietnam and had an awesome time..

I got a little overexcited about my new 4 gig memory card and so I took over 500 pictures.. which I now regret as I painfully sort through a myriad of rocks, water, and buildings, all of which are completely identical an equally boring. Tonight I am just wading through that task, and then tomorrow I will begin to write about my trip, which is going to be broken up into 4 sections at the least. Halong Bay (1), Hanoi (2), Hoi Anh (3), and Saigon (4)

Just to get this part out of the way for my parents so they can comfort themselves with the thought that I am not just completely rotting my brain drinking with aussies (and americans) that I meet in hostels: Books I have read over the trip: The Scarlet Pimpernel, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Part of Volume II of Les Miserables which I bough instead of Vol I, and The Quiet American.

1 ) The Scarlet Pimpernel by ?? (some Baroness - I can't remember since I exchanged it for another book since I wasn't altogether crazy about it). It was good but a very superficial read with not much character development or believable characters. Other than the interesting historical side of it (set during the French Revolution) I would not recommend it.

2) The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo, set in Medieval Paris (1482). I have no fucking idea how disney possibly managed to turn this into a happy ending. They did the exact same thing that they did with The Little Mermaid - managed to turn an amazing but twisted story into a sickly sweet happy ending movie stripping it of any meaning of beauty that hte original had. Back to the book though since I have become sidetracked by my rant- It was amazingly good, so good that I went out and bought Les Miserables (also by Hugo) the next day. I would recommend it to anyone as long as you are not expecting the sanitized PG version.

3) Les Miserables - Victor Hugo, primarily set during the Student Uprising of 1832

In my hurry to buy this in Hue I managed to only buy the second volume so I started on page 500 instead of page 1. So far it seems good, but seeing as I missed the first half and have no idea what is going on I am not really qualified to make this claim. Les Mis is my favorite musical so once I do get my hands on the first volume I will be very excited to see the difference between the Play and reality - one I have already found in the second volume, where Eponine makes her appearance. In the musical she is a pretty young girl, in the book she is old beyond her years, missing teach and with a voice destroyed by smoke and debauchery. Not exactly my romantic image of her.

4) The Quiet American - Grahm Greene. Set in Vietnam during the turnover from French colonial control to American involvement. Amazing book. It was probably made better by the fact that I was in Vietnam while I read it, but even aside from the historical component this book has characters that are disturbing because despite their jaded mindset there is a huge amount of truth behind their message.

Ok there, got that over with in one go so that the people who don't give a shit about lit or have no hope of having enough free time to read a book because of their job from hell don't have to wade through it to get to the good part about vietnam, because in all honesty, Vietnam is the shit and I hope everyone reads this and then goes there, preferably taking me with them.

Bed Time.

Ciao

Gossip Girl is Back!!

The best show on the planet is back and now I can download it because the chinese government has decided itunes is no longer subversive!!!! I'm trying to get Adam and Shobhit to watch it with me, but they are resisting my amazingly well crafted arguments. Shobhit says he will only watch it if the narrator, Kristen Bell, becomes a cast member that he can actually see, instead of just listening to her voice. I also just learned from his google search that she became a veggie at 11, how admirable of her.

The first episode was decent, the usual: adultery, sex, expensive clothes, and of course, Chuck Bass. I'm looking forward to episode 2 which I am currently downloading. It says it is going to take 4 more hours.... hopefully I will not be so excited that I stay up until it is done..... but that may happen, and I feel like being tired from watching gossip girl is an even worse excuse than being tired from being out too late drinking.

Now after disclosing that I watch one of the most worthless and indulgent shows on the planed I feel the need to immediate counteract this with a pretentious literary discussion.

List of the "Best Books in the World" ( *for my sister)

Cannery Row - Steinbeck
On the Road - Karouac
Endurance - Lansing
1984 - Orwell
Collected Short Stories of Pushkin - Pushkin
Freakenomics - Levit
War & Peace - Tolstoy
Madame Bovary - Flaubert
THe Count of Monte Cristo - Dumas
and of course... Head First Java

*I compiled a list of books for my sister to read since she and I have different taste and both want to branch out. I'll post her list below mine since I have the utmost confidence in her taste in books as she is a librarian and likes to read. I left some of my favorite books off of this since she had already read them, but to supplement the list, the "Best Books in the World" also include: Hamlet, The Drifters, The Far Pavilions, Anna K, Brothers K, and Animal Farm.

My sister's List (that you should also read:

1. Animal Dreams - Barbara Kingsolver
2. The House of the Spirits - Isabel Allende
3. Obasan - Joy Kogawa
4. Savage Inequalities - Jonathan Kozol
5. Desert Solitaire - Edward Abbey
6. The Edge of the Sea - Rachel Carson
7. Prisoners Without Trial - Roger Daniels
8. Wild Swans - Jung Chang (ok, this should wait till you're somewhere where it's not banned)
9. People's History of the United States - Howard Zinn
10. In the Time of the Butterflies - Julia Alvarez

Friday has come..woot

Watch This: Daily Show - Palin (if you watch the daily show you have already seen it. John Stewart is indeed a national treasure.

Just finished reading The Long Walk by Slavomir Rawicz. It was an amazing story. I would definitely recommend it; their journey was of the same caliber as Endurance, (Ernest Shakleton) - the epic journey their crew made from the antarctic to South Georgia Island.. think Eight Below but the dogs become food....

I Survived my first entire week back in the office after working from home for three weeks. It might almost be better not to work from home because i'm so much more excited for the weekend now, and waking up at 7 every day definitely curtailed my expenditure on alcohol.. which is a good thing because I spend far too much money on that. I am keeping a spreadsheet of my accounts, so I know. I think the need to put everything in spreadsheet form and analyze it with in-sheet equations may be the mark of a CMC student. I also learned other useful things too, like the economic effects of overdeterrence for cannibalism etc..

Speaking of cannibalism, I watched an awesome episode of the IT crowd a few days ago where Moss thinks he is signing up for a german cooking class but really he has answered some german dude's add looking for someone to eat. Great show, I highly reccomend it... but I think you can only get it in the UK or off of youtube.

I was supposed to leave for the beach today, but I have way to much work this weekend, so I had to cancel. Hopefully I can go next weekend. Im going to go to the pool with Alicia sometime this weekend though hopefully to tan.

September!

Just finished reading: The Three Musketeers by Dumas. This book is great as long as you love action movies or are a guy. I think the Count of Monte Cristo by Dumas is better though.

Starting to read: The Long Walk, true story about two Polish men who escaped from a Soviet labor camp in Siberia and walked all the way to India across the Himalayas. So far so good, but last night it made me dream that I was a French POW in WWII.

Anyway, back to life;

I'm going to Vietnam in 3 weeks!!!

The weather has been spectacular here for the past three days...I had forgotten what the sun looked like when it was not obscured by a layer of smog. Although to be fair, I have had it pretty easy the past month because of the Olympics: In August this year there were 16 days of "excellent" air quality, last year there was 1.

I finally made it to the llama temple on Sunday, but only lasted there an hour or so because it was so hot outside. Llama temple is a fully functional Buddhist temple, so it was packed with chinese people praying and burning incense. It was really cool to see them pray because it was much more interesting that watching catholics sit in their pews, but I felt very awkward being there since it was so obvious I did not fit in. Since I am atheist I am a tourist to all religions, but I felt much more like a disrespectful foreigner here than in the cathedrals in europe.

It was such a nice day out that I asked Alicia, who grew up in Beijing, where a good swimming pool was. I guess I probably should have specified a good tanning pool. She gave me the name of one and I set off on the subway to find it. I had no idea where I was when I got off the subway so I asked a woman on the street, and luckily enough she was going there with her daughter, so I just waled with them. I payed my 30 kuai, changed, and then armed with my tanning oil, sunglasses and a book went to to what I thought was an outdoor pool. I was sadly mistaken... It was a indoor, lap swim pool. I must have looked so funny standing there dejectedly in my sunglasses and bikini while everyone else was in swim caps and goggles.

Came back to the apt very hot, sweaty and not tan, and crashed on my bed for a while until Adam came home and I could grill him about his third date with the chinese girl he's been seeing (I am living vicariously through him since there are no men in beijing). Apparently he agreed to work at her school teaching english on the weekends.... its really ridiculous the things guys will do for girls, like one time when someone created an entire pool party just because he wanted to hang out with a girl..... it was an awesome pool party though.

Anyyyyway... i'm already getting excited to eat in-n-out over xmas break.... its going to be a long three months of anticipation.

Caio