Favorite Lines Friday

As I said in my post on Grave Peril by Jim Butcher, the book's hero, Harry Dresden has a working partner, Michael, in this particular story who is a morally unambiguous soldier of God.  I think this particular musing by Harry sums up Harry's character, especially in contrast to Michael:

But I don't understand God.  I don't understand how he could see the way people treat one another, and not chalk up the whole human race as a bad idea.
    I guess He's just bigger about it than I would be.

...Right behind you Harry!


Coming next: My thoughts on Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John Le Carre

Grave Peril by Jim Butcher

Book 3 of The Dresden Files


The Dresden Files by Jim Butcher is an entire series (currently at 13 volumes) of Books I Should Have Read by Now. Grave Peril is the third book, and I’ve been thoroughly enjoying the ride so far.

Harry Dresden, in case you have yet to meet him, is a wizard. His services are for hire in modern-day Chicago and he is a special consultant for the police force there. He is very skilled at his chosen profession, though he rarely looks the part, opting for sweatpants instead of flowing robes and carrying magic potions around in sports bottles. Skeptical? So, apparently, is just about everybody else, because Harry is perpetually broke.

Harry isn’t short of difficult supernatural situations in which to be embroiled, however, and in Grave Peril, he goes up against ghosts, vampires and his own faerie godmother. This time he’s got a working partner named Michael, a positively paladin-esque soldier of God, who is a wonderful compare-and-contrast tool for Harry. While Our Harry is occasionally morally confused and/or ambiguous (especially compared to Michael), he’s never a jerk to anyone who doesn’t deserve it and we can always trust him to do The Right Thing. In fact, even his bitter enemies count on him doing The Right Thing.

Grave Peril is wholly enjoyable to read, although I recommend reading the books of this series in order. (They’re relatively quick reads, so you could easily catch up.) Along with the usual action and adventure you might expect from an urban fantasy story, Butcher provides a great deal of humor, largely straight from the mind or mouth of Harry Dresden himself. I like his treatment of ghosts and vampires in this particular volume (a treatment that’s not the least bit sparkly, if you know what I mean), and I’m looking forward to finding out what happens with some of the unresolved situations left on the final page.


A Year of Books I Should Have Read by Now

The Physics of Christmas by Roger Highfield

From the Aerodynamics of Reindeer to the Thermodynamics of Turkey

This is a fun book for Christmas-time reading. Highfield addresses, scientifically, just about every aspect of the holiday season that you can think of, from why Rudolph's nose is red (probably a parasitic infection) to how alcohol contributes to the holiday spirit. He digs into traditions and speculates on the technical and biological requirements of many of our Christmas myths and beliefs.

The fun part (aside from all the science if you're into that kind of thing), is that Highfield doesn't use the limitations of physics, genetics and history as we know them to prove that myths and traditions like Santa Claus and his ultra-famous midnight ride are a lot of hooey. Instead, he makes the effort to cheerfully describe the ways in which all the seemingly impossible "magic" of the season could be real.

This is a great book to read if you like the holiday season, but could use a break from drippy sentimentality. It's also a good resource for convincing the skeptic in your life to give Santa, reindeer, the star of Bethlehem, or genetically modified and cloned Christmas trees and turkeys another chance.

A Year of Books I Should Have Read by Now

Favorite Lines Friday

As I mentioned in my post on The Prague Cemetery, the shady main character, Simone Simonini is in the midst of some pretty wicked situations. Here is what he thinks of a couple of them:

On murder:

I realized that the most irritating aspect of a murder is hiding the body, and it must be for this reason that priests tell us not to kill, except of course in battle, where the bodies are left for the vultures.

And on conspiracies:

This led me to think, even then, that if I wanted to sell the story of a conspiracy, I didn't have to offer the buyer anything original, but simply something he already knew or could have found out more easily in other ways.  People believe only what they already know, and this is the beauty of the Universal Form of Conspiracy.

The Prague Cemetery by Umberto Eco

Translated from the Italian by Richard Dixon.

I am a huge fan of Umberto Eco, but the world always appears a little weirder after I read something by him. My experience with The Prague Cemetery, Eco’s newest novel, was no different. It follows Simone Simonini, a forger, as he writes a diary of his strange life in an attempt to regain lost memories.

Simonini is a wholly odious character full of epic levels of hatred and deceit. “Not that he felt any particular love for himself, but his dislike of others induced him to make the best of his own company.” At the beginning of the book is a series of rants by Simonini about his various hatreds of various races and peoples. In the hands of a less skilled author, I don’t think Simonini’s story could have captured my imagination, and, more than once, I marveled that I somehow wasn’t being induced to throw the book across the room.

Simonini’s “I hate therefore I am,” attitude merely lays the groundwork, however, for a twisted tale (with many twisted characters) of conspiracies and counter-conspiracies, hoaxes and fabrications, multiple personalities and murder. It’s all very strange, but not at all improbable. In fact, the whole story is based on real history, and is merely a fictionalized suggestion of how the seeds of actual significant events could have been planted. Of course, not being an adequate student of history, I didn’t know any of this, and had to rely on the author’s notes at the end of the book.

The Prague Cemetery has left me feeling the way I usually do after reading one of Eco’s novels. I feel kind of mind-freaked, and just a teeny bit paranoid, now that I’ve been introduced to a strange, unfamiliar underbelly of the world. I feel wholly entertained, often by a kind of black humor that I’m not sure is really supposed to be amusing. I’m a tiny bit confused, largely because the historical nature of the story is beyond my feeble knowledge. Most of all, however, I feel complete and total awe for the author, who can put together something of this magnitude and scope, unique style (I love and am bewildered at the same time by the long lists that often appear in Eco’s work), absolute brilliance, and historical and societal relevance. Someday, I hope I am good enough to be able to even write about Eco’s work in a way that does it justice.

…and the world just got a little weirder.


A Year of Books I Should Have Read By Now

Favorite Lines Friday

The Library at Night by Alberto Manguel is loaded with great and wonderfully written lines.  Here are a few of my favorites

This is what Manguel has to say about the World Wide Web:

Its virtue (or virtuality) entails a constant present - which for medieval scholars was one of the definitions of hell.

All I can say is "!!!!"


This one amused me greatly:

Books lend a room a particular identity that can, in some cases, usurp that of their owner - a peculiarity well known to oafish personalities who demand to be portrayed against the background of a book-lined wall, in the hope that it will grant them scholarly lustre.


Here's one that I hope applies to me more than does the one above:

What makes a library a reflection of its owner is not merely the choice of the titles themselves, but the mesh of associations implied in the choice.


And here are two that seem to have been written just for me to ponder:

In a library, no empty shelf remains empty for long.  Like nature, libraries abhor a vacuum, and the problem of space is inherent in the very nature of any collection of books.

I have no feeling of guilt regarding the books I have not read and perhaps will never read; I know that my books have unlimited patience.  They will wait for me until the end of my days.

The Library at Night by Alberto Manguel

Every once in a while, I find a book that inspires me by making me wish I was as intelligent, well-read, knowledgeable and wise as the author. The Library at Night is one of those books. It is a history of and a tribute to public and private libraries and an exploration of the philosophies and practices of collecting, organizing, storing and reading books.

Since I’ve created this Web journal to help myself organize and get the most out of my own library as well as books outside my home that I “should have read by now,” it probably comes as no surprise that I was particularly enamored with this book. It is organized into chapters with titles like “The Library as Order,” “The Library as Space,” “The Library as Identity,” and so on, with each theme having histories, anecdotes and explanations of its own. It is so well and wisely written, that I wish I could memorize the whole thing, so I could quote it at will. (Since I can no longer even memorize my mobile phone number, this is not going to happen.)

There are stories here about Manguel’s own private library (in which he likes to linger at night) as well as the ancient library of Alexandria and other large and important repositories of books and writing. The Library at Night, however, is not just about libraries as buildings or rooms with books in them, but also about how they reflect their readers, how readers imagine them, how readers persist in preserving them, or in some cases destroying them, an how the hopeless cause of collecting and organizing all that has ever been put into words has been pursued throughout all of human history. This process has been exhausting, frustrating, brilliant, and a little bit mad. If you’re a book lover, however, it’s a whole lot delightful.

Anyone who loves books cannot read The Library at Night and avoid coming away with a new and even greater appreciation for libraries, books and reading. Compared to the scholars at Alexandria, who Manguel says, “never mistook the true nature of the past; they knew it to be a source of an ever-shifting present in which new readers engaged with old books which became new in the reading process,” or the counsellors at the Birkenau Concentration Camp who had learned children’s books by heart and would recite them to help give the children some hope, I do not seem like a very noble collector of books. If, however, I am so bold as to call my dusty, half-neglected jumble of books and my growing collection of e-books a “library,” and treat it with the respect I believe it deserves, perhaps I can be humbly counted among my betters.


Coming soon: The Prague Cemetery by Umberto Eco

A Year of Books I Should Have Read By Now

Favorite Lines Friday

I'm not quite finished reading The Library at Night by Alberto Manguel and I already have scribbled down and bookmarked enough favorite lines for many Fridays. Today, I thought I'd share one about quoting itself.

[T]o quote is to continue a conversation from the past in order to give context to the present...to quote is to reflect on what has been said before, and unless we do that, we speak in a vacuum where no human voice can hear a sound.

And here I just thought I was collecting lines that were amusing to me, stated something more elegantly than I ever could, or sounded cool. Who would have thought my purpose was so noble? Of course, there's plenty of irresponsible quoting that is unfortunately not spoken in a vacuum.  I'll endeavor to avoid being like that!