Dead Souls

Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol, translated by Richard Pevear

Dead Souls pokes fun of Russian culture and bureaucracy. The protagonist goes about the country attempting to purchase "dead souls" from landowners. These are people that have died, yet are still on the tax roles. He believes that owing a great number can help him to get loans and be rich. He also has a scheme to create a fake will to inherit the lands of a rich lady. Alas, that scheme falls apart because he forgot to cancel previous wills. This second part is a bit fragmentary, with sections missing and the end cutting off in mid-sentence. The tone is much less serious than other historic Russian novels.

Wag the Dog: A Novel

Wag the Dog: A Novel by Larry Beinhart

This was originally called American Hero and later reissued as Wag the Dog after the name of the movie based on the book. This is something about politicians staging a "fake war" to help get re-elected. However, this part barely appears. Instead, it is mostly about a detective and a movie star. It rambled on and tried to blur the line between fact and fiction. 

Knickerbocker's History of New York

Knickerbocker's History of New York by Washington Irving

This history of New York City is humorous "history" of New York City that alternates between pure commentary and biting social commentary. Manhattan was named after  "Man Hat On". The land was claimed as unoccupied. What about the people that already lived there? Well, they stood on two feet, but their sounds were not distinguished. They also didn't have the negative foibles of the Europeans so they couldn't claim it. That part even breaks out to a discussion of the what would happen if aliens would try to claim it from the current inhabitants. The commentary seems remarkably current for something written over two centuries ago.

The second half of the book focuses primarily on New Amsterdam. There are many bits of biting commentary and jokes in with what is a straightforward history. Wampum currency has some matter of fact implications. A dutch leader ends up going by "Pig" as an honor. The book also provides details of the story of Santa Claus and St. Nicholas. This seems to be one of the first documented sources of many of the Christmas traditions. This all makes for a great early "history" of New York.

A Voyage to Cacklogallinia

A Voyage to Cacklogallinia by Samuel Brunt

After an encounter with runaway slaves, a man finds himself in a land ruled by chickens. The chickens treat the man as an inferior species. The man is able to learn their system of governance and culture, which he describes in detail. This satirizes the western culture and the positions that people find themselves in. It is well written, but the biggest fault is that it is too extreme, making the "chickens" feel just like men.

A Voyage to the Moon

A Voyage to the Moon by Cyrano de Bergerac, translated by Archibald Lovell

This is alternatively titled Comical History of the States and Empires of the Moon. A Frenchman travels to the moon and has interesting experiences there. Similar to other "voyage" books, he identifies differences between their world and his world. They find it odd he treats their world as a "moon" of earth. The translation is somewhat difficult to follow. It was an early forerunner to modern science books.

The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today

The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner

This book gave birth to the term "gilded age" to cover the last part of the 19th century. It was co-written by two authors and thus has a few distinct threads. At this time, everyone is out to get rich by whatever means possible. Speculation is the name of the game. The government was more a way of dispensing pork than actual governing. Washington D.C. gets especially pillared in the book. Who would dare think anything could be achieved by merrit? One girl tries to go to Washington to help get the government to invest in a plot of land she has. She lobbies hard and even murders a senator. She is later acquitted based on insanity, and then allowed to live her life. Another thread is about a man trying to make a fortune on a coal mine. Everyone likes him, but they just can't find it. Finally they give up and he works without pay with a loyalist before finally striking it rich.  While the plot gets a bit confusing, the satire is heavy hitting. Greed and corruption seem to hidden around every corner.

The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson

The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson by Mark Twain

In the afterward, Twain mentions that this evolved as two stories. His initial focus was on two Italian twins. They later became minor characters as the book focuses on Pudd'nhead and Tom Driscoll. 

The book begins with Pudd'nhead. He went to a small town attempting to practice law. However, the people thought a joke he told made him sound stupid, so they declared him a Pudd'nhead and he could never get a law practice.

The story then pivots to Roxy and Tom Driscoll. Roxy is a slave that is 1/16th black. She has a child that is 1/32nd black that is born at the same time as her master's son. They look similar and she raises them together. One day she switches them. Her son ends up being raised as Tom Driscoll, while the master's son is raised as a slave. She is granted her freedom, but loses her savings in a bank failure. Her becomes an entitled man with a gambling problem who has little respect for her. She tries to ask for money from him, but resorts to blackmail to get it. Tom has lost most of his money and has resorted to stealing from townspeople. He often dressed as a woman to carry out the crimes.

Two Italian twins come to room in the town. They become famous in the town. However, they end up in conflict with Tom and his rich Uncle. Later Tom kills his uncle and frames the Italians. It seems a slam dunk case.

Then Pudd'nhead comes back into play and it turns into a crime book. He has collected fingerprints from his time in town. He is able to use this to match the fingerprint of Tom to the murder weapon. Furthermore, he identifies Tom's fingerprint as changing from his birth prints. He reveals that Tom is really the son of a slave.

The two boys switched as infants can now be returned to their true rolls. Alas, it doesn't work out well. Tom had spent his life as a slave and is illiterate. He cannot manage in white society. Meanwhile, black society shuns him since he is white. The slave boy was sentenced to prison. However, he was later restored to the estate as "property" and is sold down river.

The book shows the ludicrousness of long-term decisions based on short-term events. Wilson is forever a "Pudd'nhead" from one comment. "Single drop" race identification is fairly nonsense. With significant intermarriage it does not make sense to focus on single "races". Slavery based on race was destined to fail.

Where the Sidewalk Ends

Where the Sidewalk Ends Special Edition with 12 Extra Poems: Poems and Drawings by Shel Silverstein (Author, Illustrator)

Shel Silverstein has a keen wit that he shows with both words and illustrations. The poems have a variety of structures. Some are just a few lines. Others extend for multiple pages. The rhythm and rhyme differ from poem to poem. Some are almost unstructured, while others have a strict rhythm and rhyme that just begs to be sung. The poems are geared towards children and often have a subversive twist. There are some that rely on simple wordplay. (In one, the kid ate a drumstick, much to the chagrin of the drummer.) There is a long one about peanut butter and a short song about sucking your thumb and many others.

The Theory of the Leisure Class

The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen

I bought this book a few decades ago, but didn't get around to reading it. I had missed out. Veblen has a great critique of the "leisure class" and their conspicuous consumption. He tells things with flat out seriousness, yet lays it on hard. Was he trying to be truly serious or was this meant as a satire? It hits it well either way. The points seem so true today, it is hard to believe it is over a century old. 

The Leisure Class does not busy themselves with manual endeavors. They have servants to take care of that. Instead, the work on intellectual and "charitable" pursuits. Much of their consumption is "conspicuous". They consume to be noticed. They may flavor their food with substances precisely because they are expensive, not because they impart any particular taste.

Veblen calls out colleges and sports. These sports are how the leisure class unites and carries out violence. Sports like football are seen as emblematic of the leisure class. Why are they connected to institutions of higher learning? It is because these are made to be class differentiators. I can only imagine what he would think about college sports today. 

I Am Charlotte Simmons

I Am Charlotte Simmons by Tom Wolfe

A bright girl (Charlotte Simmons) from rural North Carolina goes off to fictional DuPont college, one of the top schools in the United States. There she encounters the prep-school elite that are more concerned with sex and sports than academics. She discovers that her French literature class is conducted in English - and is a popular one for jocks. In the class, she notices a student starts to give a smart answer, then plays dumb jock. The student later hits on her. She resists, but encourages him to not be dumb. (She didn't realize he was a basketball star.)  She switches out of that class and succeeds academically, but becomes disillusioned with the social life. There is plenty of underage drinking and her roommate boots her out in the middle of the night to have sex. She falls to peer pressure with some other girls and attends a frat party. A frat boy comes on to her. She spends time with him, but resists when he tries to get her alone in a room. One more boy, "a dork", comes onto her after running into her at the library and gym.

Despite not trying hard, she has a frat boy, a jock and a nerd all wanting her. They also have some connections to each other. The "dork" is on the newspaper and doing a story related to the frat boy and some bad behavior from the California governor. The dork works as an academic tutor and wrote a paper for the jock. At a tailgate, some boys get in a fight over her. The frat boy ends up stepping him to defend her. She later goes back to thank him. He invites her to an out of town frat formal. There, she ends up getting drunk and having sex with the frat boy. Gossip spreads after that and she feels horrible and loses her friends.

When she goes home for Christmas, she finds that is not home anymore. Her life with the rich kids at school is in a different universe than her rural home life. Her depression is also hitting her, resulting in her being even more distant from her family.

When she returns, her depression hits high gear. She doesn't want to be in her room with the other girls. She can't do much of anything. The dork boy helps save her. She moves in to his apartment (in a non-sexual way). He helps her to improve enough to go to her finals and eventually get mostly out of her depression. Then things flip. The dork tries to spill all beans to a professor regarding the paper he wrote for the jock. However, the professor uses that as an admission of guilt to press charges. Now he is depressed and needs her help. She helps for a bit, but is not as patient as he was. She eventually gets him to read his email and finds that his story about the governor's misdeeds is blowing up and the professor is now willing to drop his charges. As part of this, the frat boy has also become popular in school - but also lost his near-six-figure job.

The novel then jumps to a brief epilogue. The jock has had a career renaissance. He is one of the top players on the team. He is also challenging himself academically. He went against the coach's desires and took an advanced philosophy class. The next semester he challenged himself with even more academically challenging classes. Charlotte is now his girlfriend and has been helping push him to his academic success.

The book is a fairly easy read, but it is long and vulgar. The language is a bizarre combination of profanity and anatomical terms. The characters are mostly caricatures. The only character that experiences real growth is the basketball player who realizes that academics and discipline are valuable - and can improve his on-court performance. The main character spends time stepping out of her zone, but realizes it just made her feel worse. Keeping true to herself is what lead to a better experience. 

The author was a half-century removed from college when he wrote this book. He tried to get some details through research. This was written at a point in time that doesn't exist anymore. Cell phone were just coming into use - but only as phones. Social media was not yet a thing. College athletes still had the mirage of being students and were not yet fully professionalized. The view in the book is already dated. There were also some key details that were just missed. The school had finals after Christmas break. While high schools may do that, almost every college finishes before break. It also stretches credulity that all the "important" guys would be hitting on the same country girl. And would she be so cruel to just ditch the dork (even after telling her family that he was her boyfriend.)  What is the point of a not-quite accurate portrayal of college life with stock characters? Perhaps it is just an exercise in how 70-year old men see college students.

The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida

The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka

This book is about Sri Lanka. That part is clear. Beyond that, things get weird. There is narrative about the atrocities and the culture of the country. There is plenty of cruelty going on. There are also positive things with the life there. The "story" somewhat gets lost in all the description.

Breakfast of Champions

Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut

This book takes a few moments to acknowledge that Breakfast of Champions is a trademark of the cereal company. It them spends a lot of time on the ruminations of a dirty old mind. Kilgore Trout appears as do aliens. The idiosyncrasies of what people think is important or offensive all come in to play as Vonnegut tries to push people's buttons. There is a plot here about a car dealer that believes Trout's science fiction is true. However, it feels like the plot is just a vehicle for different bits of satire and observations. 

Player Piano: A Novel

Player Piano: A Novel by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

This is a "futuristic" story written 70 years ago. Machines have taken over much of society. People have many creature comforts, but life is fairly regulated. 

I got pretty lost in the plot, but found many of the random bits to be amusing. In one discussion, we learn that authors have to get their works adopted by the appropriate book clubs with their many members. An author that didn't do what he was supposed to failed to achieve the appropriate position and thus left his family on the lurch. Seems prescient as to mass media today.

In another bit, the Cornel football team is discussed in depth. The team has been providing huge amounts of revenue for the school and wants to have more money to invest in itself.  As for football players going to school? Well, there just isn't time for that anymore. Maybe in past days it would be possible. Vonnegut would not be surprised at all with what college football has become today.

Armageddon in Retrospect

Armageddon in Retrospect by Kurt Vonnegut

This is a collection of short writings by Vonnegut. There are speeches he gave, short essays and a few works of fiction. There are bits about Germany, including activities done by the soldiers there. In one story, there is a soldier that always seems to get more than others. He goes and tries to take the dog tags of the narrator to not be charged as a collaborator. Eventually, it becomes clear that he is likely to shoot the narrator. Next thing you know it, he ends up dead. And then we learn that he was likely a spy after all. There titular story is the longest. The entire world gets caught up in an exercise to capture the devil. Then some countries start blaming others, leading to the dissolution of the effort. The scientist behind it is the one "caught" in an area separated from the devil. All the writings show his characteristic wit and are easily accessible and well narrated.

Motel of the Mysteries

Motel of the Mysteries by David Macaulay

I read this after hearing Eric Cline refer to it in his lectures on archeology. In this book, an area of the contemporary United States has had a cataclysmic event occur. A few millennia later archeologists discover a pristine motel. They make all sorts of inferences about it. They assume it is a burial chamber for the elite. Things like TVs, remote controls and toilets all have religious aspects. A toilet seat is seen as a fine piece of jewelry.  It makes us wonder how many wrong inferences we are drawing when excavating sites. Are we over assuming religious purposes? How do we know what is valuable or important?

The Very Nice Box

The "very nice box" is just that. It is a box that has all the details that make it useful. The protagonist works for a big design company and his spent almost all of her time engineering the box. She obsesses over the details and has her specific order of doing things.

We learn that she had come back from tragedy. She was a passenger in a car with her parents and her soon-to-be-fiance girlfriend. They crashed in a hit and run and she was the only one to survive. She sometimes has flashbacks and has trouble moving on.

One day, her boss retires and a super positive buzz-wordy Wharton graduate comes in to take his place. While she has her own obsessions with millennial tech startup life, she cringes at all his corporate positivism. However, she eventually falls in love with him. There relationship is an open secret and he ends up getting pushed to another office in Ohio. Meanwhile, people are protesting the new tower that the company is building.

The guy is part of "good guys" which is an organization that encourages men to be positive - but seems more like an excuse to justify bad behavior in positivity. She later learns that the guy has been dishing her all sorts of lies and that he is in fact the drunk driver that hit her. They end up in the factory where he conveniently gets locked away in a very nice box.

I found my loyalties shifting back and forth. There was sympathy for the corporate types. Then sympathy for the protestors. Then sympathy for the "millennial tech marketing bros" then sympathy for the engineers. In the end, everyone had their own good and bad. Nothing was absolute. Even in relationships, the lesbian main character ends up in an intense relationship with a guy. People were doing lots of evil to each other, and justifying it with some "higher rationale". The novel is almost grounded in plausibility, but clearly takes a step "out there" to be surreal. I really liked it at first, but was disappointed with the the rapid shifts at the ending.

Jurgen: A Comedy of Justice

It is rare to check out a book from the public library that was added in 1950. The titular character in Jurgen is a pawnbroker married to his ordinary wife. He goes on adventures to the land of King Arthur, Heaven and Hell. In the process he gets married a few times and is seduced by women of history (such as Helen). However, he ends up back home with his wife. He engages in a transaction with his temptress crush and now realizes she is no longer attractive to him.

The book reminds me of Bill and Ted or perhaps Forrest Gump meets Monty Python. Jurgen meanders through his adventures with a bleary-eyed innocence. When he ends up in hell, he marries a vampire and almost starts a rebellion when acknowledging the dictatorial powers that Satan has achieved in the "democracy". He later decides to meander up to heaven, finding Jacob's ladder and claiming to be a pope. He just goes about life and realizes what is best for him.

The Circle

The Circle is a Social Media company that has come to dominate the world. They have subsumed Facebook and other companies. It also does strict authentication ensuring that all users are real. The company coddles its employees even more than Facebook of today. They get comprehensive benefits and even have "dorms" on the "campus" where they can live.

The book centers around Mae Holland, a recent college grad who gets a job at The Circle. At first she struggles with the company. The work is straightforward. However, the "external demands" are challenging. She is expected to maintain an active online presence. Going to parties and social events is "optional", but really required so as not to hurt other people's feelings. 

Mae gradually overcomes her reluctance and dives headlong into the company. She starts documenting her social life in more detail. She also begins to appreciate the openness of tracking and cameras. The company starts encouraging politicians to be "open" and have their every action broadcast live. Those that don't do so are chased out of office. Privacy is considered "theft". Voting moves to the social media platform. The Circle can tell infinite facts about everyone.

The satire is moderately over the top. There is some growth, allowing you to become sympathetic with the characters. It does get over the top. Pretty soon it seems just a little too farcical to be "real". The book advocates for privacy, even though lack of privacy can reduce societal problems such as crime and racial profiling.

The Captain and the Glory

A ship allows anyone to become the Captain by the vote of everyone. To take this to the extreme, the ship votes the most incompetent and least qualified person to be captain. He shakes things up by getting rid of pretty much all others that are crew members and installing his daughter and personal friends in positions of responsibility. He listens to the "voice in the vent" and gets some crazy ideas. He always speaks his mind, throws people off the ship and disposes of any manuals or qualified people.

The book is an obvious satire of Trump. Alas, this obviousness is a little too strong. It is almost a point by point point narration of events of the Trump presidency. It also with strong mishaps. The satire would have been more strong if it differentiated and spent more time on the positive before going down to the great problems.

The School For Wives

This was the best performed play on the Moliere collection. The acting was lively and even the American accents fit the roles perfectly.

In the play, an older man returns from a long absence. He had been supporting a young lady that he had been sheltering in a nunnery. She took her out and brought her to one of his houses and was occupying it under a new name. She is naively innocent. However, through a chance encounter with a young man, she fell in love. The young man confesses this love to the older man (not knowing that he is also the overbearing governor of the lady.)

The old man plots to have the girl marry him. The young man was also in pursuit of her. However, he gives it up after learning that he has been promised to somebody else. The old man sees this as the opportunity he desired. However, it turns out that the lady to which he is promised is the same one he had fallen in love with. Everybody ends up happy - except for the old man.

Confusing, eh? Luckily, it is the characters that are important here.

This play has all the trademarked Moliere doubled-talk and double meanings. The older man is the buffoon here. Everybody is chasing their emotions. However, he is trying to manufacture the perfect girl for himself (with disastrous results.) His attempts to manipulate others end up resulting in himself being the one manipulated. He seems totally clueless as to what everyone else is saying and feeling. The girl is played with a perfect innocence. She has learned with the help of the older man what it is to be "good" and attempts to follow it - even if it ends up being different than what he intended.