delightful, clear production of a witty, fun play

 

This fully dramatized production of Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing is delightful. Shakespeare's wit comes through in full force (especially in the Beatrice-Benedick storyline): I love that the words from hundreds of years ago can evoke my laughter today. This play is immensely fun and the performance is excellent.

The enunciation of the lines is clear and the voices of the different characters are distinct, but - not being a Shakespeare expert - I found it invaluable to read over the synopsis included in the liner notes, since the audio performance does not include any stage directions or character identification (as in "Beatrice:" and "Claudio:").* With that small help, however, my enjoyment was unhampered.

I highly recommend this dramatization!

* Indulgent tangent: The occasional confusion resulting from a lack of character identification reminded me of a wonderfully clever passage in Jasper Fforde's Lost in a Good Book (the sequel to The Eyre Affair) in which a fictional character hiding out in the real world is revealed due to his inability to follow "undedicated" dialogue (i.e., dialogue without explicit attribution as to who is speaking). Fforde's books are wonderful, silly fun for the Shakespeare and other literature lover; the passage I refer to is on page 360-361 of the paperback edition.

1. A histogram of how many reviews have 5, 4, 3, 2, and 1 star.
2. An excerpt from the most helpful favorable review (4 or 5 stars)
3. An excerpt from the most helpful critical review (1, 2, oe 3 stars)

I just read A Thousand Splendid Suns, by Khaled Hosseini, author of the wildly popular The Kite Runner from a few years back. I wrote the 802nd Amazon review of the book, so I'm clearly the pivotal opinion. Still, I keep telling myself that I write these reviews mostly to help me process them (and for you, if you read this blog). This book wasn't always easy to read, but Hosseini is all about redemption, so you can count on him for a feel-good ending (unlike Kiran Desai and her Inheritance of Loss or Rohinton Mistry and his Fine Balance: I guess people in Afghanistan have happy endings but people in India don't: if that were true, I'd expect more India-Afghanistan migration than we currently observe...).

intensely engaging story of women’s struggles in Afghanistan

 

This is the story of two women in Afghanistan and their intersecting lives. It seeks to capture a glimpse of what life for women was like there from the 1960s to the present. The glimpse isn’t pretty. One reviewer expressed it this way: “Hosseini's depiction of Mariam and Laila's plight would seem cartoonishly crude if it were not, by all accounts, a sadly accurate version of what many Afghan women have experienced” [1].

 

As in The Kite Runner, Hosseini knows how to tell a compelling story. I couldn’t put the book down and read it in about two days. I missed my subway stop on the way to work as I read, I read it while I walked down the street, it’s a true page-turner. Also like The Kite Runner (but even more obviously so here), Hosseini brings the story full circle and ties up every loose end, leaving something of a contrived feeling.

 

That said, as the New York Times review put it, “Mr. Hosseini’s instinctive storytelling skills…[mow] down the reader’s objections through sheer momentum and will. He succeeds in making the emotional reality of Mariam and Laila’s lives tangible to us, and by conjuring their day-to-day routines, he is able to give us a sense of what daily life was like in Kabul — both before and during the harsh reign of the Taliban…. In the end it is these glimpses of daily life in Afghanistan — a country known to most Americans only through news accounts of war and terrorism — that make this novel, like ‘The Kite Runner,’ so stirring, and that distract attention from its myriad flaws” [2].

 

I found the story to be just as compelling as The Kite Runner but the subject matter here was of even greater interest. Hosseini successfully gives a window on a place few Americans know much about and does so in the context of a compulsively engaging tale.

 

(For an interesting but in no way as engaging non-fiction account of family life in Afghanistan, read The Bookseller of Kabul.)

 

[1] Jennifer Reese, “Book Review: A Thousand Splendid Suns,” Entertainment Weekly, 15 May 2007.

 

[2] Michiko Kakutani, “A Woman’s Lot in Kabul, Lower Than a House Cat’s,” New York Times, 29 May 2007.

 

Note on content: the book has some war and domestic violence and a couple of sexual scenes. None of these are fun, but each plays an important role in demonstrating relationships in this society. I did not find them excessive (just real).

Another awfully good British author, the late Douglas Adams of the successful Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy series, confronted a comparable question a few years back. One of his fans asked about the kind of computer one of his characters used. He replied, in part:

 

"The book is a work of fiction. It's a sequence of words arranged to unfold a story in a reader's mind. There is no such actual, real person as Arthur Dent. He has no existence outside the sequence of words designed to create an idea of this imaginary person in people's minds. There is no objective real world I am describing, or which I can enter, and pick up his computer, look at it and tell you what model it is, or turn it over and read off its serial number for you. It doesn't exist."

 

I'd disagree with that a bit. It does exist – in the minds of any reader who wants it to exist. And that's what you're interfering with.

dry wit and real world examples make this a mostly enjoyable introductory course in economics

 

Harford offers us an introductory course in economics with a dry wit and lots of interesting, real-world examples. There are a few dry stretches (such as the extensive treatment of agricultural land prices), but the book is mostly engaging and some parts are very entertaining. For example, Harford's treatment of price targeting and how supermarkets and Amazon have used technology to target customers is intriguing and fun. I also found the treatment of stock valuations insightful. In explaining the reasons that poor countries stay poor, he tells quirky (albeit disheartening) tales of his time in Cameroon. It isn't quite as fun a read as Freakonomics, but it does a better job of teaching fundamental economic principles. (Freakonomics shows that economics can be interesting and can answer questions you wouldn't expect it to; The Undercover Economist shows that economics can be pretty interesting and answer fundamental questions that you would expect it to!)

Harford is refreshingly aware of the weaknesses of the free market but does a solid job of characterizing its strengths. Sometimes the analysis is simple (the history of China's recent development, for example) and may miss important points. The key to remember is that Harford is teaching basic principles with a great deal of explanatory power but not with _all_ explanatory power. Take away the principles from your reading, but don't treat the analysis of a given application as definitive.

Relative to a similar volume, Landsberg's Armchair Economist, this is more enjoyable: Harford relies more on real-world examples and empirical research (not entirely, but more) than does Landsberg with his hypothetical scenarios, although I also enjoyed Landsberg. (I guess this isn't surprising: would you rather shadow an Armchair Economist or an Undercover Economist? The answer is clear!) I have yet to read some of the others, such as Naked Economics (I'd rather _not_ shadow a Naked Economist, given most economists I know) or Discover Your Inner Economist.

Robert Ian MacKenzie does a good job reading the unabridged audiobook, which consists of nine compact discs.

entertaining, educating analysis of snap judgments (but it's no The Tipping Point)

 

A few years ago, Malcolm Gladwell wrote a very entertaining book, The Tipping Point. He had a central thesis, and while it was plausible, I wasn't particularly convinced. BUT Gladwell is one of the best writers around at making psychology experiments and other social science studies fascinating and accessible, so the book was interesting and fun to read.

That brings us to Blink, in which Gladwell seeks to demonstrate that our split-second first impressions can be incredibly insightful but that sometimes they are not, and how we can train ourselves to move toward the insightful side. The book is not particularly convincing (even less than Tipping) on the final aspect of the thesis that we can train ourselves to do better. But along the way, he presents fascinating cases of how these snap judgments can be right on (and why they're wrong when they are). The research isn't quite as interesting as in The Tipping Point, but I was still engrossed, entertained, and instructed.

For an example of a psychology writer who also makes research fascinating and accessible (and funny) but is much more convincing on his hypothesis, read the excellent Stumbling on Happiness, by Harvard psychology professor Dan Gilbert. He also reads the audiobook himself and does a fantastic job.

Despite my critiques, this was still good enough that I'll read whatever Gladwell gives us next.

She walked by several churches: Jehova's Witnesses, Adventists, Latter-day Saints, Baptists, Mormons, Pentecostals. ... and if you joined in a little harmless chat of language lessons (all the better to translate the Bible, my dear...), that was it -- they were as hard to shake off as an amoeba. [p254]

He was a minister of indeterminate denomination, a truth Headmaster Havermeyer forbade him to disclose or even indirectly allude to during his Friday morning service, in order to avoid offending the one kid whose parents were Latter-Day Saints. [p385]

Then the anesthesiologist drops by for a visit, peddling his wares with all the soft-spoken earnestness of a Mormon missionary.

a powerful telling of one refugee's story and how it fits into a broader disaster

 

Over several years, a refugee (named Achak) from Sudan who has resettled in the United States (one of the "lost boys of Sudan") told his story to Dave Eggers. Eggers wrote a novel based on the story, and the result is excellent. Leaping back and forth through time, the fictional Achak tells of how he is forced from his village by the Sudanese civil war, travels hundreds (thousands?) of miles on foot from country to country and refugee camp to camp, and then how he arrives in the United States and adjust to life there.

Several times early in the reading I wondered, Why didn't Eggers just write the story of this guy's life rather than a novel "based" on it? Eventually I could see that the novel allowed Eggers to bring in characters, sub-stories, and dialogue to teach us not only Achak's story but also about the broader conflict, the other Sudanese conflict in Darfur, and the problems encountered by a broader net of re-settled refugees. Eggers seeks to (and I believe manages to) give enthrall us with Achak and convey an impressive amount of information at the same time.

I found one of his narrative devices mildly distracting: Achak narrates from the present-day, resettled in the USA, and most of flashbacks are in the form of his mentally telling people around him his story. For example, he meets someone at his work and imagines telling them about the time his buddy got eaten by a lion. But that's a quibble.

The audiobook reading by Dion Graham (published by BBC Audiobooks America) is very well done.

Note on content: Much of this book takes place in a war zone, so we see violence and intense human suffering. And in the USA, there is a mugging that involves lots of strong language (all in the book's first 50 pages).

 

No fruit dies so vile and offensive a death as the banana.

The success McCall Smith has achieved in the No.1 Ladies Detective Agency with the character of Mma Ramotswe has been compared with other great detectives of English literature, Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple, the creations of Agatha Christie.

 

Agatha Chrisitie was not shy of having the victims in her books dying in macabre and imaginative ways whereas death seldom, if ever, sullies the pages of McCall Smith’s books: except of course for the many characters whose friends and relatives are late due to natural causes. So if the great English fictional detectives are not a suitable comparison for the traditionally built Motswana, who is?

 

The ideal comparison, which helps to explain Mma Ramotswe’s place at the top of the best-seller lists in the UK and USA, comes not from the world of detective fiction but from the world of children’s literature.

Like [Winnie the Pooh], Mma Ramotswe stumbles upon adventures and solves them with equal measures of luck, homely advice and help from friends. Consider Pooh setting off on an ‘expotition’ to discover the North Pole or his quest with Piglet to catch a heffalump in a big pit with a pot of honey. Pooh does not so much seek out challenges as much as stumble across them in the course of not doing anything in particular, apart from searching for honey. Similarly Mma Ramotswe’s greatest challenges in In the Company of Cheerful Ladies, as in the other books, come from co-incidences, which turn into matters of importance and must be addressed; such as the pumpkin which is anonymously placed at Mma Ramotswe’s front door, or the apprentice Charlie’s decision to give up work after finding a rich older woman to look after him. The matter of real detective work, an errant Zambian businessman, flitters around the edges of the story, much as the real world flitters around the edge of the 100 Acre Wood.

But she teaches us about Botswana, I hear you say. Perhaps she does, but just as you wouldn’t read Winnie-the-Pooh to learn about life in rural England, so too do not read In the Company of Cheerful Ladies to learn about Botswana. Read it simply because it brings a smile to your face and warmth to the heart. Just like a certain bear.

That is the great power of the artist, the power to make people hear and understand, through music and literature, or to paint something which we ordinary people feel but cannot reveal.

wildly entertaining prose in a fun, engaging story

 

I loved the prose in this book! The story is a mix of bildungsroman and whodunit. At the start, Blue van Meer is a college student who sits down to write the story of her last year of high school, in which Blue grows up and someone named Hannah dies (that much is revealed in the first few pages).

The characters are fun and the story is engaging (until the end, when it's completely addictive). But, as USA Today put it, "the real star of the doorstop-weighty tome is the nimble prose. Pessl's talent for verbal acrobatics keeps the pages flipping with minimal effort." Completely true! My wife and I read the first two thirds aloud, which only heightened the pleasure of the prose. Here are a couple of passages I enjoyed:

"Unfortunately, my instinctive response to overhearing campus-wide chitchat of the aforementioned kind was not The Pacino (godfather-styled vengeance), The Pesci (urges to stick a ballpoint pen in someone's throat), The Costner (flat, frontierlike amusement), The Spacey (scathing verbal retaliation accompanied by a blank facial expression) nor The Penn (blue-collared bellows and moans)" [p. 364].

"She asked where we were from (`Ohio,' seethed Dad), what year I was (`Senior,' fumed Dad), how we liked our new house (`It's fun,' frothed Dad) and explained that she had moved here three years ago from San Francisco (`Astonishing,' fizzed Dad)" [p58].

Pessl also crams the book with quotes from and allusions to loads of films and books, fiction and non-fiction. I found this extremely entertaining (as I also find it entertaining to identify the links between my own reading and viewing and life). (I was disappointed to learn, upon looking up several of the books on the Library of Congress website, that most of them are Pessl's inventions. But the allusions are still fun.)

Entertainment Weekly's review sums up the book well: "A 514-page escapist extravaganza packed with literary and pop culture allusions, mischievous characterizations, erotic intrigue, murders, and unstoppable (occasionally unruly) narrative energy." Metacritic (a website that aggregates professional reviews) lists 10 outstanding reviews, 9 favorable, and 7 mixed.

Note on content: The book has some strong language and some macabre material (one or two characters are killed), and some sexual references.

a murky thriller: the less you know up front, the better

 

Lawrence Miller is an uptight British gender studies professor at an American university. Strange things start happening to him: a bookmark isn't exactly where he thought it was. A coin in his office seems to have been moved. Then much stranger things start happening.

The vision is murky throughout this slim, grabbing tome. In many thrillers, you don't know exactly who is responsible. In this one, you don't even really understand what's happening (at least a chunk of the time). Even at the end, Lasdun refuses to make the resolution completely clear (and even dips into the surreal): After finishing the book, I could see the general resolution but lay awake, tying up loose ends in my mind. [One of the quotes on the back of the book gave me an inkling as to how the book might end; I enjoyed the book a great deal, but I'd have enjoyed the book even more if I hadn't read that.]

The Financial Times called this a "terse and beautifully controlled Gothic thriller" [1]. Well put. It was also a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and an Economist Best Book of the Year for 2002.

[1] Jonathan Derbyshire, "Covert Action," Financial Times, 3 February 2006 [available free on-line as of 29 August 2007].

a pleasant journey with those who have now become old friends

 

When I read the previous book in the series (The Kalahari Typing School for Men), it was clearly the least mysterious of the books in this series to that point: it had the fewest detective cases, instead moving forward the personal lives of the major characters (especially Mma Kutsi). With this, the fifth installment, Smith lowers the mystery quotient even further. The book contains only one detective case (albeit a fun one: find out which of a rich woman's suitors will make the best husband!) and spends relatively little time even on it.

This time, the focus returns to Mma Ramotswe's and Mr JLB Matekoni's personal lives. Despite the lack of mystery, the book is a pleasant escape into one of Africa's best-governed and wealthiest countries, with characters you can enjoy and respect. And the book has a fine ending!

I made the mistake of reading this installment just a couple of months after the last one: it's better to leave a more time between books in this series, else Mma Ramotswe's musing on the marvels of Botswana (especially the OLD Botswana) can start to feel tired. But given a little rest, this is a relaxing ride back to Jaborone. I'll read the next book, just not right away.

If you're new to the series, don't start here: go back to The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency. This isn't Agatha Christie: the detective's history actually matters here. And I always listen to the audiobook version (published by Recorded Books), narrated by Lisette Lecat. She is a pleasure to listen to.

Unfortunately, my instinctive response to overhearing campus-wide chitchat of the aforementioned kind was not The Pacino (godfather-styled vengeance), The Pesci (urges to stick a ballpoint pen in someone's throat), The Costner (flat, frontierlike amusement), The Spacey (scathing verbal retaliation accompanied by a blank facial expression) nor The Penn (blue-collared bellows and moans). [p. 364]

 

It was a terrible thing that the outside world had done to Africa, bringing in the idea that slender ladies, some as thin as a sebokoldi, a millipede, should be considered desirable. That was not what men really wanted. Men wanted women whose shape reminded them of good things on the table. 

 an emotionally moving exploration of friendship, grief, and imagination

 

I read Bridge to Terabithia as a youth and still remember tearing up at the climactic scene. With the release of the recent film, I decided to revisit this children's classic. I unfortunately read it immediately after seeing the film, which stole a bit of the magic since the film was a generally faithful adaptation, leaving the book with few surprises.

Let me highlight a few of the book-movie distinctions. The mother in the movie is much more sympathetic than she is in the book. (The moviemakers probably realized that one gruff parent was enough.) And yet, towards the end of the book, we finally begin to understand why the mother is how she is, and we feel sympathy and perhaps even some empathy. The father also ultimately opens up emotionally more in the movie than in the book. And Leslie, the main female protagonist, is much prettier in the movie than she is characterized in the book. (Filmmakers did the same in Hoot: Let's sell a few more adolescent boy tickets!) Both media explore the magic of imagination, but the film does a particularly good job of visualizing that. Between the book and the movie, I was reminded of the power of make-believe and have - in the past few weeks - built much more make-believe into my play with my two-year-old son (to wonderfully fun effect).

I listened to the unabridged audiobook narrated by Tom Stechschulte (published by Recorded Books). This took some getting used to, as I recently listened to Stechschulte narrate Cormac McCarthy's excellent but deeply dark The Road. Bridge to Terabithia has some tragedy, but thankfully no apocalypse. The narration was very expressive and overall well done.