books books books
Off to the library again today, so time for some reviews.
Odd and the Frost Giants, Neil Gaiman
A simple story with a surprising amount of moral depth and historical/cultural texture, and, as you’d expect from Gaiman, humor and whimsy. After the death of his father, teenaged Odd journeys into the woods to find out why winter is never ending, and gets caught up in adventures with the Norse gods and a clever Frost Giant. I enjoyed this more than The Graveyard Book; it hews a lot closer to the old myths.
My Life In France, Julia Child
tapas told me this was better than Julie & Julia, so I jumped in. Julia Child discusses her experiences in France that led her to create her cookbooks and cable show. She died while the book was being written, so a lot of it is taken from letters and journals, but the book does a good job of blending her distinctive tone and the drier textual history. I laughed quite a bit. I was also pleased that my French isn’t too hopeless after 10 years of barely using it.
I didn’t know that cooking was a relatively late-in-life obsession for Child; as she tells it, she barely knew her way around the kitchen took her first cooking class in her late 30s and then relatively quickly became the culinary juggernaut we know today. Given the Outliers theory of 10000 hours of work before you attain mastery of a topic, that’s ~5 years at a standard 40-hours-a-week/50 weeks a year pace, and she definitely started work on her cookbook less than 5 years after her first cooking class. Maybe there’s less of a learning curve for cooking than for other things?
Asterios Polyp, David Mazzuchelli
A narrative discussing the intellectual, sexual, and psychological adventures of an architecture prof, this is the most layered and thought-provoking graphic novel I’ve ever read, and one that repays close rereading, with many elements in the opening scene only becoming clear after reading the entire work. Besides its striking visual elements, it covers a lot of intellectual ground: as an Ivy-educated academic, the main character, Asterios, discusses dozens of important thinkers and ideas.
One of the back cover blurbs compares the storyline to Ulysses, and it’s actually not an absurd comparison. The heart of the book, metaphorically and literally, is a silent retelling of the story of Orpheus, and it’s a massively satisfying and emotional chapter. Even minor characters have a depth to them, a sense of mythic potential.
The main difficulty with the work is the general unlikeability of Asterios, who saunters through life with a sneer on his face; it can be hard to focus on the narrative when he is such a dick, both a cynical intellectual tyrant and a smug controlling bastard. Not any worse than your average Updike, Roth, or Bellow novel, but those are generally not my cup of tea.
It’s probably best to view Asterios, not as a modern man, but as a character from Greek myth, flawed and egotistical, but the book’s engagement with modern aesthetic theory and philosophy makes it a little harder to view him in a historical lens.
Anyway, I’ll be rereading this one and thinking about it for quite a while, I expect. Thoroughly recommended, my favorite book so far for this year.
In the Land of Invented Languages, Arika Okrent
A PhD linguist trawls libraries and email lists to learn about fictional languages and the people who create them. Starting with John Wilkins, the subject of a classic essay by Jorge Luis Borges, Okrent surveys hundreds of years of cranks, idealists, and poets who have all worked on creating their own languages. Along the way she attends PhilCon to hang out with Klingons, interacts with Esperanto-speaking hippies on multiple continents, and gets involved in a massive flamewar involving a schism on the “constructed languages” email group.
I would love this book if it were 200 pages longer. The creators of the early artificial languages were generally utopians who felt that their new language would usher in an era of pure scientific clarity, or international peace. Okrent delves into the stories of a few, like Wilkins, a polymath and organizer of early British scientific ventures, and ”Webster Edgerly, a.k.a. “Dr Ralston”, a prolific author of tracts on magnetism who was so popular that the Purina corporation took his name for its breakfast cereal. My former prof Sarah Higley merits a few brief mentions.
While the historical details are fun, what was more interesting to me was seeing the author try to learn to speak these languages. Some artificial languages are based on already-existing languages; Esperanto is a good example. If you’ve ever seen an Esperanto text, it’s pretty easy to get the gist if you know both English and a Romance language. So she picks up Esperanto pretty quickly and talks a little about Esperanto culture, which is full of hippies and anarchists and vegetarians and nudists. But her opinion is that those are the types of people who choose to speak Esperanto; it doesn’t turn you into a flower child overnight.
Wilkins’ language, and others like Klingon and loglan/lojban, were constructed from the ground up, however, and learning them means questioning assumptions. Klingon was built by a linguist to be harsh, unusual-sounding, and hard to pronounce; the result is difficult but not mind-bending. Wilkins built his language to serve scientific purposes, and loglan was constructed to allow a test of the Whorfian hypothesis by applying formal logical rules to language. Trying to work in those languages caused her a lot of stress, and she found herself having trouble speaking English afterwards.
My one experience with a Whorfian phenomenon was in a dream I had in college. I was dreaming in Spanish, which I have a good but not quite fluent grasp of. I ran into someone, and he asked me about what I was reading, and I could not think of the word. I just sat there, and my brain stopped working, everything stopped, and I woke up. Some of her experiences sound like that.
The problem with this book is that she doesn’t know where she’s going with it. The title, which is particularly unmellifluous from a linguist, shows that lack of direction. There’s a little bit for everyone, but it’s neither a thorough historical grounding, a full pop-cultural expedition, or a scholarly text. A good read, and a lot of fascinating details, but not a magnum opus.
Odd and the Frost Giants, Neil Gaiman
A simple story with a surprising amount of moral depth and historical/cultural texture, and, as you’d expect from Gaiman, humor and whimsy. After the death of his father, teenaged Odd journeys into the woods to find out why winter is never ending, and gets caught up in adventures with the Norse gods and a clever Frost Giant. I enjoyed this more than The Graveyard Book; it hews a lot closer to the old myths.
My Life In France, Julia Child
tapas told me this was better than Julie & Julia, so I jumped in. Julia Child discusses her experiences in France that led her to create her cookbooks and cable show. She died while the book was being written, so a lot of it is taken from letters and journals, but the book does a good job of blending her distinctive tone and the drier textual history. I laughed quite a bit. I was also pleased that my French isn’t too hopeless after 10 years of barely using it.I didn’t know that cooking was a relatively late-in-life obsession for Child; as she tells it, she barely knew her way around the kitchen took her first cooking class in her late 30s and then relatively quickly became the culinary juggernaut we know today. Given the Outliers theory of 10000 hours of work before you attain mastery of a topic, that’s ~5 years at a standard 40-hours-a-week/50 weeks a year pace, and she definitely started work on her cookbook less than 5 years after her first cooking class. Maybe there’s less of a learning curve for cooking than for other things?
Asterios Polyp, David Mazzuchelli
A narrative discussing the intellectual, sexual, and psychological adventures of an architecture prof, this is the most layered and thought-provoking graphic novel I’ve ever read, and one that repays close rereading, with many elements in the opening scene only becoming clear after reading the entire work. Besides its striking visual elements, it covers a lot of intellectual ground: as an Ivy-educated academic, the main character, Asterios, discusses dozens of important thinkers and ideas.
One of the back cover blurbs compares the storyline to Ulysses, and it’s actually not an absurd comparison. The heart of the book, metaphorically and literally, is a silent retelling of the story of Orpheus, and it’s a massively satisfying and emotional chapter. Even minor characters have a depth to them, a sense of mythic potential.
The main difficulty with the work is the general unlikeability of Asterios, who saunters through life with a sneer on his face; it can be hard to focus on the narrative when he is such a dick, both a cynical intellectual tyrant and a smug controlling bastard. Not any worse than your average Updike, Roth, or Bellow novel, but those are generally not my cup of tea.
It’s probably best to view Asterios, not as a modern man, but as a character from Greek myth, flawed and egotistical, but the book’s engagement with modern aesthetic theory and philosophy makes it a little harder to view him in a historical lens.
Anyway, I’ll be rereading this one and thinking about it for quite a while, I expect. Thoroughly recommended, my favorite book so far for this year.
In the Land of Invented Languages, Arika Okrent
A PhD linguist trawls libraries and email lists to learn about fictional languages and the people who create them. Starting with John Wilkins, the subject of a classic essay by Jorge Luis Borges, Okrent surveys hundreds of years of cranks, idealists, and poets who have all worked on creating their own languages. Along the way she attends PhilCon to hang out with Klingons, interacts with Esperanto-speaking hippies on multiple continents, and gets involved in a massive flamewar involving a schism on the “constructed languages” email group.
I would love this book if it were 200 pages longer. The creators of the early artificial languages were generally utopians who felt that their new language would usher in an era of pure scientific clarity, or international peace. Okrent delves into the stories of a few, like Wilkins, a polymath and organizer of early British scientific ventures, and ”Webster Edgerly, a.k.a. “Dr Ralston”, a prolific author of tracts on magnetism who was so popular that the Purina corporation took his name for its breakfast cereal. My former prof Sarah Higley merits a few brief mentions.
While the historical details are fun, what was more interesting to me was seeing the author try to learn to speak these languages. Some artificial languages are based on already-existing languages; Esperanto is a good example. If you’ve ever seen an Esperanto text, it’s pretty easy to get the gist if you know both English and a Romance language. So she picks up Esperanto pretty quickly and talks a little about Esperanto culture, which is full of hippies and anarchists and vegetarians and nudists. But her opinion is that those are the types of people who choose to speak Esperanto; it doesn’t turn you into a flower child overnight.
Wilkins’ language, and others like Klingon and loglan/lojban, were constructed from the ground up, however, and learning them means questioning assumptions. Klingon was built by a linguist to be harsh, unusual-sounding, and hard to pronounce; the result is difficult but not mind-bending. Wilkins built his language to serve scientific purposes, and loglan was constructed to allow a test of the Whorfian hypothesis by applying formal logical rules to language. Trying to work in those languages caused her a lot of stress, and she found herself having trouble speaking English afterwards.
My one experience with a Whorfian phenomenon was in a dream I had in college. I was dreaming in Spanish, which I have a good but not quite fluent grasp of. I ran into someone, and he asked me about what I was reading, and I could not think of the word. I just sat there, and my brain stopped working, everything stopped, and I woke up. Some of her experiences sound like that.
The problem with this book is that she doesn’t know where she’s going with it. The title, which is particularly unmellifluous from a linguist, shows that lack of direction. There’s a little bit for everyone, but it’s neither a thorough historical grounding, a full pop-cultural expedition, or a scholarly text. A good read, and a lot of fascinating details, but not a magnum opus.
