Sometimes you find hidden treasures in used book stores and good libraries. Today, in our local library, I found Gandhi’s Satyagraha (non-violent resistance), published in 1958 by Navjivan Publishing House in Ahmedabad, original price four rupees. Which is less than $0.10 today but probably closer to a dollar back then.
Archive for the ‘Reading’ Category
I had not planned it this way, but these past couple of weeks I was listening to the good president Obama narrate Dreams From My Father during my commute, and reading Sudhir Venkatesh’s Gangleader For a Day as I fell asleep.
I recommend both books—especially Dreams to understand the incredibleness of what we’ve wrought here by electing Barack Obama president. Talk about the audacity of hope. And hearing him narrate it is quite a pleasure, doing voices, Kenyan accents, f’words and all.
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If you’ve read Freakonomics, you’ve read Sudhir Venkatesh’s work. The chapter about why drug dealers live with their mothers was based on his research. This guy is a son of Indian immigrants, raised in protected suburbs of California, studying sociology in the worst neighborhoods of Chicago the only way that seems logical to him. By hanging out with the drug dealers, the hustlers, the prostitutes and average folk in the Robert Taylor Homes, projects in the south side of Chicago. By hanging out with them for more than half a decade.
It is quite a story, and it smashes all kinds of stereotypes about people who live in these circumstances.
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And it was chance that I was reading both of these books at the same time, but they have a common thread. Poor black communities in Chicago, their communities, community leadership, the futility and the hopefulness.
Obama was there in the mid-80s (in this book, obviously he comes back to Chicago later in life), working as a community organizer to help people. Venkatesh was there in the early ‘90s, seeing things from the other side, among the poor, the hustled, the hustlers. Where Obama is hopeful, Venkatesh starts out naive and ends up cynical. To be fair, in the time-frames that these books cover, Venkatesh has actually spent more time among the poor black community than Obama.
But I wonder if their paths ever crossed? Venkatesh was a graduate student in the University of Chicago while he was hanging out in Robert Taylor. Obama was a professor there at the same time. There are only two references I can find. The first is that Obama is in Venkatesh’s documentary Transformation. And this Forbes article:
(Venkatesh) heartily approves of the proposal by Barack Obama—a fellow pickup basketball player at the University of Chicago when Venkatesh studied there—to expand the Earned Income Tax Credit to give a bigger break to low-income parents.
So did they play basketball with each other, or did they both happen to play basketball in the same university around the same time? It’s like saying I played basketball in Chicago when Jordan played for the Bulls. I did. In a suburban driveway.
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The governor of my state, Deval Patrick, lived in the Robert Taylor Homes. So did Mr. T. I wonder if their paths ever crossed?
Yes, it’s still Neil Gaiman week.
Neil Gaiman’s latest book, loosely based on The Jungle Book, is a wonderful thing. Where Kipling’s Jungle Book had a human child raised by animals in a jungle, Gaiman’s Graveyard Book has him raised by ghosts in a graveyard. There are a few other parallels, in characters and in passages, but this book is its own beast.
This was my third audiobook (I’m going to stop keeping count now), and Gaiman himself reads. He does an excellent job, doing the voices of all types of creatures, keeping it just as spooky and mysterious as it needs to be.
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There might be a Graveyard Book movie. Can we have Henry Selick animation again? No, it seems like we’ll be getting Neil Jordan and live action.
Christopher Lydon’s Radio Open Source, channeling Suketu Mehta (author of Maximum City, highly recommended), mentions something that I’ve been thinking about for a while now:
a deep ping-pong game of ideas runs long and strong under the US-India connection: from Thoreau’s ecstatic reading of the Bhagavad Gita to Gandhi’s reading of Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience, from Martin Luther King Jr.’s reading of Gandhi to Barack Obama’s reading of Gandhi through King and his White House embrace of Prime Minister Singh last week.
I’ve lived all but one year of my life in three states: Obama’s, Gandhi’s and Thoreau’s. Though Hawai’i, Kansas, Indonesia, and Kenya claim Obama as their own. Which says a lot.
This is Neil Gaiman week for me. I’m audiobook-ing his The Graveyard Book (excellent so far) and we just watched Coraline, based on his book.
First, Coraline. This is a Henry Selick movie, so if you’ve seen The Nightmare Before Christmas or James and the Giant Peach, you know the look/feel. It’s a movie that doesn’t reveal all the secrets of its world. A world that could house a million other stories, of which our story tellers have chosen the one about Coraline. Pan’s Labyrinth or PJ Hogan’s Peter Pan come to mind.
It’s a story of the neglected little girl Coraline, who finds her other mother in an alternate other world behind a small locked door in her house. Her other mother, and her other father, seem perfect—they give her almost too much of all the things she craves from her real parents. Of course, they are not as they seem. For one, they have buttons instead of eyes.
Neil Gaiman and Henry Selick are made for each other—I would love to see Gaiman’s Sandman or The Graveyard Book animated in a similar fashion. The background music, by Bruno Coulais, is especially good: listen to the track Exploration here.
I’ll review his The Graveyard Book when I’m done—it’s a riff on Kipling’s Jungle Book, substituting ghosts and other spooky types for animals. But it’s a lot more than that. I’m more than halfway through, and I’m having a lot of fun.
Oh, and Gaiman’s an excellent audiobook reader. He’s perfect for his material.
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I am a huge Neil Gaiman fan. The Sandman series is probably my favorite series of graphic novels. Good Omens and American Gods are great. But more recently, I’ve discovered that he has a really fan-friendly online presence. He answers reader questions on his blog, quite regularly. And he’s a avid twitterer. And he looks like Sandman.
These two commercials by Levis’ Jeans, set to Walt Whitman poetry, don’t make me feel like buying jeans, but they do make me want to run down hills, over brooks and creeks, down valleys, across hay fields, through corn fields with abandon. In jeans.
Second one after the jump: Continue reading ‘Oh Walt Whitman, What Will You Sell Me Next’ »
I’ve been meaning to read Phillip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly for a long, long time. It is my second PKD book, the first being Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (adapted as Blade Runner). With that book, I felt burnt by the ending (I prefer the director’s cut movie ending). I’ve read both books after having seen the movie.
Of course, I say read when I mean heard. A Scanner Darkly was also my second audiobook, the first being Choke. This was a far better experience. It benefits from being a far superior book, but also a far superior audio book. A Scanner Darkly is read by Paul Giamatti. Need I say more? He does different voices for each of the characters, and is a joy to listen to.
This is a great book, about the science of the brain and addiction, about addicts, about the relationship between the user and the narc, the pusher and the pushed, often in the same person. It has a science fiction facade—in that it is set in the “future” (written in ‘77 about the 1990s) and people have scramble suits that preserve their anonymity. Otherwise, it’s a story about any post-60s time.
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This book was adapted for the screen by Richard Linklater in 2006. It is a good movie, with especially great casting (Woody Harrelson, Robert Downey Jr., Keanu Reeves, Winona Ryder, each perfect for their part). The movie was done with rotoscoped animation, like Linklater’s earlier Waking Life (2001), and it is the correct technique for this movie, where everything is either hyper-real or only slightly real, but never obvious.
The movie is quite faithful to the original material—in fact, more than it could have been if it was not rotoscoped.
I’ve started to collect data in order to put together lists of my favorite music, movies and books of the decade. And this is the first decade where I have data.
I’ve been a Netflix member for close to 8 years and religiously rate everything I watch. Now thanks to a script I wrote (and has been improved since by others), I can pull the data out of Netflix and analyze. For example, filter the data on all movies where year>1999 and stars=5. There’s my best of the decade, or at least a place for me to start.
I’ve been managing my music in iTunes since 2005, and have been pretty religious about accurate tags and rating tracks. At this point, I can slice up the data with Smart Playlists and scripts in any fashion I like. I have more than 2000 songs from this decade of which about 300 are rated 5-stars. Yeah, I’m liberal with ratings. Also, I like my own collection. So those 300 are where I would start for my list of favorites. Everything from The Marshall Mathers LP to The Hazards of Love. Or from Dhadkan to Delhi-6, for you Bollywood types. In addition to my iTunes playcounts, I have my Last.fm play counts. The Last.fm data is not a complete representation, but it is public.
Here’s a song which will definitely figure in my top 10:
Books are tougher. I haven’t rated or cataloged everything I have read, not even close. And I’ve read many from the library, a few borrowed, a fewer still online. And none of those places have my reading history. The library would keep history if I asked it to, but I asked it not to. And most of the books I read were probably written before 2000, so they wouldn’t be the best of this decade. So I may not have a list of my favorites, but a general non-definitive whatever-I-think-of.
UPDATE: Of course, I haven’t actually put my list together yet. Coming soon, to a blog near you…
Choke was my first audiobook. I finished it last week (now I’m on to A Scanner Darkly).
The book is good—not great—but you can decide if you want to read it or not based on this: it’s a book about a sex addict who fakes choking in restaurants by the author of Fight Club. It’s deliberately subversive, like other Palahniuk stuff, and it’s fun. It’s better than his Lullaby, but not as good as Fight Club.
Choke was made in to a movie last year with Sam Rockwell, but I haven’t seen that yet.
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Listening to a book as opposed to reading it was a new experience, but not as different as I had imagined. You’re forced to pay more attention to nuance, and even now I can hear Palahniuk’s voice in my head when I think about the book. I’ll write my thoughts about that in the future. I wonder if my impression of the book would have been better, worse or different if I had actually read it—words on page or words on Kindle screen.
Yeah, the Kindle-like devices are worth a lot of thought too. Doubly so, if I actually owned one. Continue reading ‘Choke by Chuck Palahniuk’ »
