Category: Books

Book Review: The Wager – by David Grann

On By Norbert HauptIn Books, Three StarsLeave a comment

The Wager is about a shipwreck in 1741, and the desperate conditions the castaways found themselves in on a desolate island in Patagonia. It is about what happens to humans when they are deprived of everything, comfort, security, purpose, water, food and most of all, hope.

An Armada of British ships sails for the Pacific around the southern tip of South America during the war with Spain, hunting for a treasure-filled Spanish galleon. All but one of the ships perish. The Wager is one of them. This book tells the story of the castaways and their quest for survival.

The life of a sailor was rough. If they reached their objective and conquered a ship, the rewards could be huge. A sailor’s share could be worth as much as 20 years of wages, and the captain would be set for life with a fortune to retire. However, it was hard to get men to sign up for the terrible risks, and for being away from wives, children, family and home for several years at a time. To solve the problem, the navy employed “press gangs” which were militarized units that simply captured hapless men who were at the wrong place at the wrong time, bound them, and hauled them onto ships. Drunken men might wake up miles from shore, never to return. Their families would simply know that they never came home one night. Those men, if they then stood up for themselves, were mutineers, and would be hanged for the offense. And thus was the glorious life of a sailor in His Majesty’s Navy.

The Wager is a non-fiction account of the journey, through the eyes of several of the key participants, mostly recovered from their journals. It is entertaining, captivating and shocking at the same time. In a world, where we can fly from Chile to London in 14 hours, it is difficult to imagine that in 1740, it took a year – if you succeeded to get around Cape Horn – and that was a big IF.

 

 

While talking about shipwrecks and sailing, I have read several books about sailing and shipwrecks over the years and reviewed them here:

Endurance – by Alfred Lansing – I read and reviewed this book in 2016; it tells the story of the Shackleton expedition to Antarctica in 1914.

Caliban’s Shore – by Stephen Taylor – Read in 2009, this is about a shipwreck in the 1780 timeframe on the east coast of South Africa.

More about sailing: Two Years Before the Mast – by Richard Henry Dana – Read in 2017, this tells the story of a two-year journey in the 1830s to California around Cape Horn from the point of view of a sailor.

And while we’re at it, you might be interested in Empire of Blue Water – by Stephan Talty – which I reviewed in 2008. It’s a book all about pirates.

Book Review: The Object – by Joshua T. Calvert

On By Norbert HauptIn Books, One and a Half Stars, Science FictionLeave a comment

Melody Adams works for NASA as a physicist and astronomer. One night, in Hawaii, she discovers an odd object near Pluto with attributes that don’t make any sense. She and her associate quickly come to the conclusion that the object must be coming from outside the solar system. Furthermore, it does not behave like a natural object. When she goes public with her discovery, she quickly loses credibility with the scientific community and NASA, and gets fired.

Fast forward a few years, when the object is observed again near Saturn, slowing down. All doubts are erased. Melody quickly gets back in good graces with NASA, and she eventually gets the commander post as an astronaut on a mission to rendezvous with the object. Once on the journey, things quickly go wrong, and a rift develops between the crew on the ship and Earth and its petty politics.

The book, even on its cover, is portrayed as hard science fiction. It plays in the near future, and the characters all use today’s technology. But I don’t think this is hard science fiction, like Andy Weir’s The Martian. Actually, I found it kind of hokey. Melody Adams, the protagonist, is one of those female astronaut superheroes. She is smarter than everyone else, she has a Ph.D. in physics, she is at the top of her astronaut class, and – as you would not suspect – she sleeps with Jim, the NASA administrator. That whole side plot of being in love with Jim makes no sense, does not contribute to the plot, and I could not quite figure out why it was there.

Without spoiling the book for you, I just have to add that it’s always baffling when there is a space mission where Earth selects its best and brightest to go to meet an alien vessel, and those brilliant super astronauts do really, really stupid things once they are out there on their own. Perhaps that makes for an exciting plot, but for me it’s just distracting. These people are idiots out there, and when I read the story, it does not draw me in. It loses me and I want it to just move on and be done.

Book Review: Goyhood – by Reuven Fenton

On By Norbert HauptIn Books, Two and a Half StarsLeave a comment

I would never have picked up Goyhood to read. I would never have come across it, had it not been for the author contacting me directly with a request to review the pre-release of the book. The one paragraph synopsis he provided sounded entertaining, so I committed to giving it a try.

Mayer and David Belkin are fraternal twins who grow up in a very small town in rural Georgia raised by a single mom, or perhaps not raised by her. She is definitely in over her head and the boys are pretty much raising each other. What could go wrong?

One day they come home to find a rabbi at their front door talking to their mother. The conversation and introduction to the boys ends up changing the life of Mayer fundamentally. Eventually he leaves the small town to go the Brooklyn, New York, study in a Jewish college and become a Talmud scholar. Through a sequence of sheer luck and being at the right place at the right time, he is invited to marry into a prominent Jewish family. Eventually he is a super-orthodox Jew and completely estranged from his twin brother and his mother.

When their mother dies unexpectedly, Mayer travels back to Georgia and meets up with his brother David. Together they find out family secrets that totally upend both of their lives. To recover, the brothers decide to go on a road trip through the south, from Georgia to New Orleans and back, performing a series of antics and adventures. For both of them, the trip reveals who they really are and what they really want to do with their lives.

This is a road trip story, a little bit like Thelma and Louise, a little bit like On the Road, and a lot like The Lincoln Highway. A group of strange characters get thrown together in a car to work out the mysteries of their lives.

The story is entertaining, but I think you need to be a Jew, or at least interested in Judaism, to really appreciate it. The complications that arose in Mayer’s life that he and his brother had to work through are all based on Jewish doctrine, which has no meaning to a non-religious person like me. I actually felt glad that I wasn’t Jewish and didn’t have what I consider contrived complications in my life.

Most religions seem to try to convert non-believers into their fold. Some have it as their central mission to proselytize and get others drawn in. I have always admired the Jewish for seemingly being the opposite. You don’t get in, and it seems like you’re never really accepted unless you’re born into it, and – as I learned in this book – unless your mother was a Jew. I respect the Jewish religion not for its teachings or its tradition, but simply because it appears to value education as one of its highest goals.

I learned a lot about the lives of orthodox Jews by reading this book, more than I ever thought I would, but I must admit that I skimmed over many sections that went too much into scripture and God just to get the story moving forward.

Book Review: The Songs of Distant Earth – by Arthur C. Clarke

On By Norbert HauptIn Books, Science Fiction, Two StarsLeave a comment

Arthur C. Clarke first published The Songs of Distant Earth in 1986. It was based on a 1956 short story of the same title, and Clark had supposedly stated that it was his favorite of all his novels. I remember reading it decades ago, probably right around when it was published, but I had forgotten all about it.

It plays in a world about 2000 years in the future where Earth and the entire solar system was destroyed when the sun went nova. Humanity had almost a millennium notice of the event occurring, but as is usual with humanity, it does not always act rationally when obvious doom looms. We have seen this with what Al Gore called global warming in the last century.

The story plays on the planet Thalassa, a human outpost started by a seed ship, a robotic vessel that carried frozen human embryos and the technology and automation necessary to establish a colony on an alien planet. Thalassa is a water world with just an archipelago of three islands, similar to Hawai’i on Earth, and with no other continents. Humans have lived there in a relative paradise and stability for centuries.

When a starship arrives with millions of refugees from Earth, the balance of culture and society on Thalassa may be upset.

Clarke explores the logistics of a world where travel at relativistic speeds between stars is possible. In such a world, ships may arrive at any given populated planet only every few hundred years and the event would be marked with historical significance. The story also illustrates the cultural implications of inter-planet communications when a starship leaves one planet, scheduled to arrive at another three-hundred years later. All friends, lovers and children left behind would be centuries dead by the time the travelers arrive at their destination and are able to ship messages back.

Book Review: Clowns – by Peter Cawdron

On By Norbert HauptIn Books, One Star, Science FictionLeave a comment

This book caught my attention because it was a “first contact” (with aliens) book. After further research I learned that Cawdron has written many independent first contact books. This one was pretty bad, so I am not sure I will bother with any of the others.

Breezy is a Secret Service agent with a fast trigger finger. Olivia is a call girl who just made a deep fake sex movie to frame an important person. Then there is Buster, a clown and a mysterious “good guy” all around who seems to have a lot of power, influence and abilities. Oh, and there are aliens, too, who have a strong interest in human psychology and the welfare of the human race.

It’s an oddly action-packed story, told in the present tense, which give it a fast pace. You get into the thinking of the protagonists, and there lies the problem. The author is basically lecturing about his political views all throughout the story, and he is in the process forgetting to tell us a story. Most of the action is short, interleaved with endless exposition about various political views. He obviously has a problem with capitalism, is worried about climate change, corruption in the highest levels of government, the America military machine, abuse of women throughout the world, and so on.

He projects an aura of moral superiority which will turn many readers off. I don’t disagree with him on many of those views, but of course half of his readers will. By being so much in our face with politics, the story gets buried, and all those opposing his views will feel insulted. I only felt lectured to.

After the book ends, there is an Epilogue, which basically tells you all you need to know. It’s a cheap way out. He seems to have realized that the book’s story is weak, so he has to button it all up in a tell-all epilogue. There is also an Afterword, where he discusses all the major concepts as well as his various political views and statements.

As a result, you don’t really need to read the book. Just read the Afterword. You’ll get everything out of the book that there is, and you don’t have to read a bad book all the way through. In a way, the author provides the Cliff Notes right in the book.

Book Review: Great Expectations – by Charles Dickens

On By Norbert HauptIn Books, Two and a Half StarsLeave a comment

Pip is a young orphan living in mid-Victorian England in a village in the country. He is being raised by his older sister and her husband. His sister is impatient and has a brutal temper. Joe is the village blacksmith. He is a gentle giant, simple minded, but he loves and protects young Pip like a son.

One evening Pip is passing by the local graveyard where he is assaulted by an escaped convict who forces him to steal some food for him, and a file so he can cut his leg irons. This traumatic experience haunts Pip for the rest of his childhood.

One day, as an adolescent, he is surprised by an unexpected and anonymous benefactor who leaves him money and sets him up to get educated in London to become a gentleman. Suddenly he finds himself in possession of means and “great expectations.” He spend many years trying to solve the puzzle of his fortunes when eventually it all comes together in a most unexpected fashion.

Great Expectations is my first Dickens novel. It was the last one he wrote, and it is generally praised as his best. Reading it pulls you right into the life of Victorian England. My copy was an illustrated one and I enjoyed the many ink drawings of some of the key scenes. The environment and the clothing of the characters came to life for me.

The plot is crafted masterfully. Great Expectations could easily be a play. The book is 544 pages long. One might think you’d get lost in all the characters. But people who appear in the early chapters seemingly in peripheral roles tend to come back as pivotal characters later. Every character has a deep role in the overall plot. Great Expectations would make a great textbook in a class in writing fiction – and  it probably is. (You can tell I am not a scholar of English).

I learned a lot about life in Victorian England and London in particular,  a world I only know from a distance, from movies and from books. The gulf between the classes is vast. Workers and peasants have no options and no “expectations.” It does not seem possible to work your way out of poverty and “low” birth. People with money, gentlemen, don’t seem to need to work, they just spend, even get into debt, but there seems to be no general stress. Everyone treats a “gentleman” differently. And the common folk all dream of “coming into means” by some miraculous way, through inheritance or some benefactor. I am sure I am oversimplifying matters here but this is the world of the London of Charles Dickens. ‘

If you haven’t read Dickens, like I, and you want to pick up one of his books, this is a good one.

Book Review: Guardian – by Joe Haldeman

On By Norbert HauptIn Books, Two Stars2 Comments

As a young girl during the Civil War, Rosa was sent to Philadelphia, where she studied mathematics and astronomy. By chance, she was introduced to Edward, a wealthy lawyer. They were married and had a son, Daniel. The marriage was very unhappy for Rosa and she knew right away it was a mistake. But this was in the late 19th century and there were not many options for a woman. When Edward committed serious sexual abuse on her then teenage son, she saw no more options but escape.

Guardian tells of their travels and adventures to get away from the abusive husband and father while staying ahead of the private investigators he sent to catch them. Their journey took them first to Missouri, but soon on to San Francisco, Seattle and the Alaska wilderness during the gold rush.

Seemingly guiding her is a guardian which appears to her as a raven that speaks.

Guardian reads like a journal for most of the story, until the raven takes on a mystical persona that results in some time travel by Rosa which allows her to “do it over again” and change a bit of history along the way.

I enjoy Haldeman’s writing very much and I have read and reviewed a number of his books. You can find the reviews in my Book Reviews list. Haldeman is a science fiction writer, of course, with the classic The Forever War being one of my favorites. In this book he veers off into an entirely different direction and I found the alternate history portion of the story distracting.

In my real life, in late August, we were just in Alaska, and we visited Juneau and Skagway, two of the places that play a major role in the story of Guardian. Seeing how those exotic places came into existence through the Alaskan gold rush, and what they were like before modern cruise ships deposited thousands of tourists into them on an ongoing basis was fascinating to me. I enjoyed the descriptions of their ship working its way through some of the narrows between the islands that I was watching more than a hundred years later from the balcony of our cabin during our voyage. Sometimes old books and modern life connect in mysterious ways.

Book Review: The Armor of Light – by Ken Follett

On By Norbert HauptIn Books, History, Three StarsLeave a comment

The Armor of Light is the 5th book in the Pillars of the Earth series.

The story plays in England, centered around Kingsbridge, in the 1770ies and goes through the Napoleonic Wars all the way to Waterloo in 1815. That was a period in western history when a new era of manufacturing disrupted the status quo. The wool industry in England was upset first by spinning machines, then automated looms. Workers who were used to making a living spinning and weaving now found themselves displaced. The entire establishment, the legal system, and the class system of common men and aristocracy by birth was rigged against the worker.

Follett tells the story through the eyes of a handful of people who lived through that era. One of the young boys whose father died through the negligence and arrogance of the son of their landlord grows up to be a brilliant engineer. He eventually joins the army and goes to war on the continent, as an aide to the Duke of Wellington, who is most famous for defeating Napoleon in Waterloo. Right after I had finished reading The Armor of Light I went to see the movie Napoleon, and I enjoyed the scenery and graphical images of war in Waterloo that I had just read about in this book. The book and the movie complemented each other for me.

Through the experiences of the various protagonists we learn about the plight of the working class and the immense injustices inflicted upon the hapless and unfortunate during that period of history.

As with the previous books of the series, the Kingsbridge Cathedral with the pillars of the earth is still there, many centuries after is was built by John the Builder. But the people who live in Kingsbridge are all new. There really isn’t any continuity other than it’s the same town.

I don’t know why the book is called The Armor of Light. I can’t seem to remember the title and I kept having to look it up when someone asked me what book I was reading at the time. The obscure and hard to remember title notwithstanding, I loved reading every page, and as it is always with Follett books, I learned an immense amount of history of the time that I would otherwise not have known about. When I put a Follett book down I always think to myself: So much to learn, so little time.

If you have read the Pillars series, you will like The Armor of Light. If you have not read the series, I recommend you start with Pillars of the Earth and work your way through the five books.

Going to the Bookstore to Go

On By Norbert HauptIn Books, Crack-Ups1 Comment

A long, long time ago when bookstores were still a thing, when we had B. Dalton at the malls, Waldenbooks, Book Star, Borders, Crown Books and many mom and pop stores, I used to spend a lot of time (and eventually money) at bookstores. I noticed a curious phenomenon: Whenever I was at the bookstore I got the urge to go poop. I knew where the bathrooms were. It never seemed to fail. Bookstore visits led to bowel movements.

Eventually I had kids and from time to time when they would get constipated, I would, half jokingly, tell them that they just needed to go to the bookstore.

Fast forward 30 years, and now my daughter’s two-year-old son likes to “hold it in” for some reason. When toddlers do that they get cranky and miserable, which of course is utterly frustrating to the parents. Anyone who has had kids knows that. The other day she texted me and said that it was so bad, she had to choose the nuclear option and — you guessed it — take him to the bookstore.

IT WORKED! She sent me a video of him standing at a little table with games visibly “pushing.” I wrote back and said that it proves he’s definitely my grandson.

Then she looked it up and found the “Mariko Aoki phenomenon.” IT HAS A NAME!

The Mariko Aoki phenomenon (青木まりこ現象, Aoki Mariko genshō) is a Japanese expression referring to a sudden urge to defecate that is felt upon entering bookstores. The phenomenon is named after Mariko Aoki, a woman who described the effect in a magazine article published in 1985.

— Wikipedia

Good old Mariko discovered the phenomenon in 1985, which was many years after it was already a certain thing in my world.

Two days after the the first success with our grandson, she went back today and recorded success within two minutes of arriving at the bookstore.

Which makes me worried: Please, let’s keep Barnes & Noble in business! We need at least one bookstore chain left standing. While I am a bookstore mooch (see my post to this effect from 2013), I resolved that I need to go to the local Barnes & Noble regularly and BUY SOMETHING every time. Our digestive health depends on it.

I told my daughter that her son would be a reader, being introduced to frequent visits to bookstores at an early age.

Book Review: Remarkably Bright Creatures – by Shelby Van Pelt

On By Norbert HauptIn Books, Three Stars1 Comment

Remarkably Bright Creatures was the book my wife’s book club read a couple of months ago, and she kept saying that she thought I’d like it. “It’s about an octopus,” she said.

Indeed, one of the narrators in this book is an octopus named Marcellus. He is in captivity in an aquarium in Sowell Bay, a town in northern Washington, and he tells the story from his point of view inside a tank.

Tova Sullivan is the cleaning lady at the aquarium, a woman in her seventies whose husband recently died of cancer, and whose only son disappeared somewhat mysteriously at age 18 – thirty years ago. Tova is making arrangements for a somewhat lonely retirement.

Cameron Cassmore is a thirty-year-old misfit in Modesto, California who never knew his father, and who was raised by his aunt when his mother abandoned him as a nine-year-old.

Tova and Cameron, along with a number of other colorful characters, will eventually meet at the Sowell Bay Aquarium and learn about themselves. Each has surprises coming, all courtesy of Marcellus, the octopus.

Remarkably Bright Creatures is Van Pelt’s first novel, and it is a remarkable debut. She is a great story teller who had me turning the pages. After getting over the concept of a sentient octopus and how it interacts with humans, the rest fits together nicely and makes for an entertaining read.

Octopuses are indeed remarkably bright creatures. I am reminded of the movie My Octopus Teacher.  I also read another book about octopuses: Other Minds. I was amazed how much there was to learn. Scientists have not yet figured out how octopuses have evolved to have such incredible intelligence with a lifespan of only four years, at the high side.

If you want to learn about octopuses first in a non-fiction science book like Other Minds, or if you just want to go for an entertaining ride with Remarkably Bright Creatures, either approach is well worth your time.

 

3 stars

Book Review: The Trail – by Ethan Gallogly

On By Norbert HauptIn Books, Hikes, Two StarsLeave a comment

A few weeks ago, my son and I were spending the night at the Hampton Inn in Barstow, California on the way to the Grand Canyon. We were going to hike the Grand Canyon rim to rim, starting at the north rim. Here is the first post about that. Before going to sleep, I finished my last book, the Mapmaker’s Daughter, and I was looking for the next book to read.

Checking my reading list, I just happened to spot The Trail, a novel about hiking the John Muir Trail in the California Sierra. My son had hiked that trail twice already, and I had hiked in provisions to him once. It would be so fitting to be reading a book about hiking while doing an epic hike myself. I started reading The Trail in that hotel room, and then every night in that little tent in my sleeping bag. It got dark in the Grand Canyon at 7:00pm and remained dark until almost 7:00am the next morning. Since there was no way I could just sleep for twelve hours, there was not much to do but read.

The Trail was the perfect book for that.

The John Muir Trail is a 211-mile long trail from Yosemite Valley to the top of Mt. Whitney, traversing some of this country’s greatest wilderness area.

The story is about Gil, whose father had recently died, and who had lost his job in a law firm. He accompanied this father’s friend Syd, who was dying of cancer, and wanted to do one more epic hike before he passed.

If you have read Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods, you will get a sense of this story. The author is definitely an experienced hiker. He tells the main story of the two characters ruminating about the meaning of life, while in a back story, we learn the history of the John Muir Trail, and the early exploration of the Sierra Nevada mountain range, including all the early explorers, their adventures, and how the various mountains, streams and valleys got their names.

There are many maps beautifully illustrated by Jeremy Ashcroft, and the book is broken down into chapters for every day on the trail.

If you are a hiker, and particularly if you are even thinking about long distance hiking, you should definitely read The Trail and you’ll learn a lot, not just about this particular trail, but about the backpacking experience in general. I loved reading this book while backpacking – it does not get any better than that.

There was just one minor thing that I found annoying about the author’s style. For reasons I cannot grasp he kept using colloquial contractions, like wanna, gonna, coulda, etc. It’s one thing to use these expressions in quoted dialog, where it makes the dialog seem real. But he didn’t do that. He used them in exposition.

I was a champion swimmer. I coulda saved him. After that day, I could never get near deep water again.

…but I didn’t wanna press the point.

I probably shoulda spent more time shopping.

It was my fault. I shoulda been with him.

Weird, isn’t it? Not a big deal, but this happens a hundred times in the book, and every time I found it distracting. It seems completely unnecessary to me, and not doing this would not have hurt the book in any way.

I enjoyed reading The Trail. If you like to hike, you’ll enjoy it too.

Book Review: The Mapmaker’s Daughter – by Clare Marchant

On By Norbert HauptIn Books, History, One and a Half StarsLeave a comment

The Mapmaker’s Daughter is a book of historical fiction that plays in England and partly in Holland in the 1580 time period.

Frieda Ortelius as a young girl in Holland when her parents are brutally killed by the Spanish as part of the Inquisition. The Catholics (the Spanish) were killing Protestants during that time, and one of the havens for Protestants was England, ruled then by Queen Elizabeth I.

Frieda escapes and makes a life for herself with her seafaring husband in London. She comes from a family of mapmakers, and she learns the trade and excels so much that she catches the attention of the Queen. During a time of war with the Spanish, Francis Drake was a privateer working for the English crown. Queen Elizabeth eventually commissions Frieda to create a detailed map of the south of England to help Drake in the fight against the Spanish.

This is all good historical fiction, and I learned a lot about the period and how the people suffered from the Inquisition and the tyranny of the Spanish.

However, interwoven between the chapters about Frieda’s life and story is another story in the present day: Robin Willoughby is a thirty-six-year-old woman who works in her father’s antique map store when they find a blood-stained map they cannot identify. Robin goes on a quest to find out. However, along with Robin comes Robin’s husband Nate, who vanished seven years before during a solo around the world sailing race. The Vendée Globe is the greatest sailing race round the world, solo, non-stop and without assistance, and it is also by far the most dangerous of all sailing adventures.

Throughout the entire book, Robin pines after Nate and the pain she goes through even after seven years fills the chapters in this book. At first I thought there must be some plot twist that would explain the presence of Nate as a significant protagonist in this story, but sadly, there wasn’t any. While I am sure his death was tragic, and while I am sure his wife suffered, none of that had anything to do with this story and it simply resulted in more words on the pages that didn’t move anything along.

As a matter of my opinion, the author could have left Robin out of the book altogether without loss of impact. Of course, the book would have only been half as long.

But as the Germans like to say: In der Kürze liegt die Würze.

All in all, an interesting historical novel with way, way, way too much fluff that did nothing but water it down and make it longer.

 

 

By the way, if you are interested in learning more about the Vendée Globe, there are several books that tell a riveting story:

Godforsaken Sea: The True Story of a Race Through the World’s Most Dangerous Waters

I read Godforsaken Sea many years ago before I had started doing my book reviews, so I can’t show you that. But it’s an amazing read about the 1996-97 race. Another book about the same race is Alone: The True Story of the Man Who Fought the Sharks, Waves, and Weather of the South Atlantic – by Michael Calvin. I have not yet read Alone.

Book Review: Trust – by Hernan Diaz

On By Norbert HauptIn Books, Books (not finished reading)Leave a comment

My wife’s book club has assigned themselves Trust to read as the current book. Sometimes I tag on and read their book – but I stay away from the book club. Let me take a wild guess: Nobody in her book club is going to finish reading this book. I got to 37% before I finally gave up.

Trust won the Pulitzer Prize – go figure.

This book is utterly unreadable. I have a hard time believing that anybody can possibly finish reading this book. It’s about nothing. It starts out with a story about a young financier named Benjamin Rask and his wife Helen, both socially inept but somehow financially brilliant. Benjamin inherits his father’s tobacco empire and when both of his parents die, he promptly sells it and builds his own financial empire. Then he marries Helen, a young woman without any social skills. Today they would both probably be on the autistic spectrum. It is not clear how the two are becoming tycoons and billionaires in the New York of the 1920s.

There is NO DIALOG in this book. The characters are never speaking. The entire book is exposition. There isn’t even much character description. It just tells you, on and on and on, what the characters are thinking and doing. As a result, they never become real. They have no personalities, no depth, you can’t picture them. And they never do anything. Nothing happens. Yes, the author tells you what is going on, but you have to believe him. Since nothing happens, there is no story, there is no suspense. You don’t want to turn the pages to find out what happens next.

The only reason I kept turning the pages was because I thought that sometime soon the story must start. And then, at about 34%, the first book about Benjamin and Helen just stopped almost mid-sentence. Another book started, and the author described the unbelievable life of another brat rich guy. More exposition, more of no action, no story, no suspense.

Please, let me out of this!

As always when I don’t finish reading a book, I refrain from rating it.

If you find yourself reading this book and finishing it, I’d like to hear about it. You should earn a prize.

Pulitzer anyone?

Book Review: A Farewell to Arms – by Ernest Hemingway

On By Norbert HauptIn Books, Two and a Half StarsLeave a comment

A Farewell to Arms is known as one of the best American novels about World War I. Hemingway wrote it when he was just thirty years old. He was in the war as an American ambulance driver on the Italian front.

The story is autobiographical. Lieutenant Frederic Henry, an American ambulance driver, falls in love with Catherine Barkley, a British nurse. Caught in the atrocities of war, the two eventually end up together in Switzerland.

A Farewell to Arms is a love story inside a war story. It depicts the brutality and senselessness of war and what it does to the people that are swept up in it.

The book was Hemingway’s first bestseller and catapulted him to the top of American literature. It is often called one of Hemingway’s best works.

As it is often the case with me and famous literary works, I don’t rank them as highly as one might expect. I like Hemingway’s terse style, his using omission as a literary device. For instance, there is no sex in the book, but it’s obvious that Frederic and Catherine have plenty of it, to the point where the book was banned from newsstands due to the presence of pornography.

I can assure you there is no pornography whatsoever in A Farewell to Arms. The sex is solely in the head and imagination of the reader.

I found Hemingway’s dialog stilted and silly, and based on their interactions, the love between the two protagonists contrived and superficial. Besides the depictions of war, most of the human interaction didn’t seem real to me. I was reading a book, or better yet, I was working my way through a book.

Book Review: A Thousand Splendid Suns – by Khaled Hosseini

On By Norbert HauptIn Atrocities, Books, Four StarsLeave a comment

If you check my Ratings Key for 4-star books here is what you find:

  • Must read
  • Inspiring
  • Classic
  • Want to read again
  • I learned profound lessons
  • Just beautiful
  • I cried

A Thousand Splendid Suns checks all these boxes.

In addition, reading it now is extremely timely, given the recent departure of the United States from Afghanistan on August 30, 2021.

We hear the story from the perspective of two young women, girls at first, in alternating chapters.

Mariam was born in 1959 in Herat in western Afghanistan, the cradle of Persian culture. She is an illegitimate child of one of the richest men in the city, Jalil. He has three wives and nine legitimate children among them. They all live in one large mansion as a happy family. Mariam and her mother, however, live in a hovel he had built for them a couple of miles out of town, up a steep hill, away from the city, and away from his “respectable” life. But he apparently loves Mariam enough to come and visit her once a week and spend quality time with her. She grows up into her teenage years loving and adoring her father, not knowing any better that life could be different. One day she walks to the city without permission, arrives at her father’s house and quickly finds that there is indeed a difference between her and her other siblings. Within just a few days, at the age of fifteen, she is married off to a middle-aged man in Kabul, Rasheed. Despite per protests, Rasheed takes her with him and her life changes drastically. Rasheed is a brute of a man who thinks nothing of beating a wife with a belt until she bleeds.

A few houses down the street from Mariam and Rasheed lives a young family with a little girl named Laila. There are two older brothers. Laila’s father is somewhat of an outsider in the neighborhood. He is an intellectual, a teacher, who loves his books and cherishes education, even for a girl. Laila grows up in a loving, albeit poor, family. Her best friend is Tariq, a neighborhood boy who is two years older than she. Laila’s older brothers go to war against the Soviets and eventually both die for the cause. Laila’s mother is so shaken, she becomes morose and sickly. Eventually, a stray rocket hits their house. Laila is the only survivor but severely wounded.

Rasheed and Mariam rescue her, and promptly, Rasheed decides to take Laila as a second wife, against Mariam’s will. This stroke of fate puts the two women, a generation apart, into the same household under the boot of a severely abusive man.

A Thousand Splendid Suns is about the devastating abuse and systemic destruction of women in a regime and society where a few theocrats have absolute power over the lives of millions of people. It is also about the history of Afghanistan, starting in the 1960s and through about 2007. It describes the years before the Soviets invaded the country in the 1980s, their eventual defeat, the rise of the Mujahideens, their devolution into bands of warlords bent on destroying their own country for personal gain and power, and finally the rise of the Taliban, pre-Osama bin Laden. It illustrates in vivid detail what the Taliban, basically a bunch of uneducated goat-herders and religious fanatics, did to their own country and most importantly, to 50% of their population – all the women. We witness the hardships of women under that regime, and then, as we all know, the post 9/11-years as the American’s supposedly liberated the Afghans from the Taliban. Things started getting better again in the country and people’s lives started to improve.

That is where A Thousand Splendid Suns ends. There was hope. There was light again for girls and women.

The bitter, brutal irony is that I read this book not in 2007 when it came out, but fifteen years later, now in 2023. I know that the Americans left the country under very adverse conditions for the Afghan people. I know that the country fell into the hands of the Taliban again within days of America leaving, and I know, from reading A Thousand Splendid Suns what happened to the Afghans – again.

It’s easy for us to make decisions about how we feel about Afghanistan being a world away. Reading A Thousand Splendid Suns is crushing, challenging, and most of all thought-provoking. We didn’t do anything new to Afghanistan. We were just another invader in the revolving door of systematic subjugation of a nation and its people, a nation that could not be defeated by two superpowers in two generations, but a nation that also hasn’t figured out how to live and prosper on its own.

The Afghan people are not to be blamed. The sick interpretation of Islam and the fact that an entire nation is willing to subjugate itself to its dogma is at the root of the problem. And that is exactly why there should never be any connection between politics, government and church, any church at all.

Reading this book, I realize that through my entire lifetime on this planet, the people of Afghanistan have suffered, badly suffered, and there is no end in sight even now.