Tag Archives: book

Wanderlust, perchance?




My husband and I share one Amazon.com account, registered to my email, and therefore every time he buys something, I know. Most of the time, I simply ignore it like the time when he ordered a bug zapper out of nowhere. Or the book, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, presumably for our oldest child, who by the way, is 11 years old and has not read Pride and Prejudice

His purchase from Amazon today did make my eyebrows raise:

The Bird Man and the Lap Dancer: Close Encounters with Strangers by Eric Hansen

The Sex Lives of Cannibals: Adrift in the Equatorial Pacific by J. Maarten Troost

Together with the book he just received:

Lost on Planet China: One Man’s Attempt to Understand the World’s Most Mystifying Nation, also by J. Maarten Troost

I am thinking, WHAT IS GOING ON?

Wanderlust?

Or is this a cry for something more exotic in his life, more than say, rice?

I am more curious than anything. Not really worried about him running off to some exotic land and never to be heard from again since, thank goodness, he is a finicky eater.

p.s. I am pretty sure my husband would be quite annoyed if I blog about all his purchases from now on… LOL

“Congratulation, Neil Gaiman!”

Came upon this blog entry on Geed Dad (part of the Wired blogosphere). Was surprised to see that Neil Gaiman’s book won the Newberry Medal. Well, not really surprised. Actually was surprised that Gaiman was surprised.

My 5th grader couldn’t put this book down. True to Gaiman’s fashion, the book is dark (judging by the cover of the book… yeah…): it starts out with a little boy’s family being murdered and with the little boy being abandoned in a graveyard (hence the title) and raised by ghosts… Kids nowadays are so much more mature than when we were growing up so I was not concerned that my son was reading about the subject of death and murder at the age of 10. Glad to know that the judges (and many teachers and parents) feel the same way. We should never talk down to our children as if they live in a cocoon. I believe that’s a main reason why Gaiman is so popular with kids with a good head on their shoulder – he treats them like adults and speak to them truthfully about unpleasant subjects.

“On Monday Neil Gaiman was awarded the most prestigious award in children’s literature, a Newbery Medal, for his new book, The Graveyard Book. The news rocked the world of kid’s literature and was a surprise to Gaiman himself. Neil Gaiman is a beloved author for many GeekDads for his children’s literature. The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish and The Wolves in the Walls have been bedtime storybooks for my daughter since she was tiny. But Gaiman is also famous among GeekDads for his more adult literature, such as Sandman and American Gods; his movie adaptations, such as Stardust and the upcoming Coraline; and he is also a GeekDad in his own right, often relinquishing his blog to his daughter Maddy.” (Jan. 31, 2009)

Joe the Plumber’s Book is out… Out of Stock already?

A friend of mine recently paid more than a month of her salary for a plumber’s visit. I commented on her Facebook page, jokingly: Is it Joe the Plumber?

This reminds me that, well, Joe is probably not doing house calls any more, since he is supposed to be living off the sales of his book, right? I completely forgot about it and decided to Google “Joe Plumber Book”. I could not find a single result with an announcement with the book being published, rather I got tons of blog entries about the announcement of the book “deal” last November. Fear not. Amazon.com came to the rescue after I wised up and added “Amazon” to my search keywords. For sure, it showed up on the top of the results:

JOE THE PLUMBER: FIGHTING FOR THE AMERICAN DREAM

Is anybody surprised by “American Dream” being in the book title?

And the publishing date is listed as February 6, 2009, but the book is listed as Out of Stock already. Lots of people apparently want to know what Joe has learned from his 15-minute of fame. (Or, has he?)

Granted, I have not read the book. Free, maybe. Definitely do not plan to shell out any dough for this book. Sorry, Joe. Please don’t take it personal. It’s just that all my hard-earned money apparently is going to pay for the bonuses for the Wallstreet Hotshots!

Judging from the reviews though, it is a pretty one-sided book. As a matter of fact, folks expect it to be one-sided, so that Liberals/Democrats will rate the book 1 or less star, and Conservatives/Republicans will give the man some credits for “telling it like it is,” no matter whether the reviewer has actually read the book or not. My prediction? Reviews and ensuing verbal fights on Amazon.com will be more entertaining than the book itself. (Don’t forget to read the comments on the reviews too! Got to love the Internet!)

In praise of the book, “American Born Chinese”

For Chinese people or people in the know, American Born Chinese are known as ABC, and different from Chinese immigrants (be their parents or their distant cousins), they have to cope with a different set of tribulations, and many of these are psychological. This book, or rather, graphic novel, follows the tradition of Frank Chin's angry plays ("The Year of the Dragon" and especially, "The Chickencoop Chinaman") and Maxine Hong Kingston's Americanization (or rather, Asian-Americanization) of Chinese folklore in "Tripmaster Monkey", and provides a 21-century spin on growing-up Asian/American in the USA. In fact, I have to wonder whether the young brilliant author Gene Luen Yang has read Chin's and Kingston's works — he must have since these are part of the "canon" now. 
 
All the above probably makes the book sound rather dry, it would be my fault. The book is a wonderful combination of humor, irony, insightful reflections, and great story-telling. It is a wonderful and short read: my husband, my 10-year-old, and I passed the book along and finished reading it in one night. You obviously do not have to be an ABC, or an Asian American, or an Asian for that matter, to appreciate the underlying theme of this book: you have to learn who you really are and appreciate who you are to begin to reach your full potential, and to truly feel that you belong wherever you go.  The theme of "trying to fit in" will resonate with any young person (and not so young) trying to find a place in the world for themselves. 
 
The book has won several awards, including the National Book Award for Young People. 

Here is a Christmas present idea: Joe the Plumber book!

I am never one to abandon people when they are down in their luck. I do genuinely worry about people who enjoyed their 15-minute of fan and then never to be heard/seen again. I want the follow-up news, the updates. I want to make sure that they were not thrown over the wall like a piece of used tissue. I want to know how they are doing, and I wish them well.

William Hung of the American Idol fan: did he go back to school? Did he graduate and get a job? Did he finally land a girlfriend?? Look at him! He’s all grown up and spruced up and look quite dashing now!

Bill and Jim, the twin brothers from the Biggest Loser: have they been able to keep the weight down, and are they still liking each other? How about their wives?

So, naturally, I thought about Joe the Plumber amidst the widespread euphoria over the election of Barack Obama. What happened to him? Anything exciting going on? Last I heard he was going into the studio to make a country music album. As luck would have it, I checked and there it is, updated merely 12 hours ago, the news that his book would be out on December 1!

See? He has not been forgotten. And I do hope that Republicans rally to buy Joe’s books since they sort of used him for their political purposes, and now it is payback time!

I also hope that Joe sells more copies of his book than the one that’s reportedly coming out by Sarah Palin. (Oh, truly, this has got to be the greatest week of 2008 for the American publishing industry!) At least Joe seems to need the extra income more than Miss Thing here. But I guess it really does not matter since they both received (or would) advanced payments at any rate.

And if I have to choose between Sarah’s book (May I call you Sarah?) and W’s book, I would have to say Sarah. After all that’s said about her, she is after all a working mom of five who is a Governor. No mean feat by any measure. I am sure she would have something to say and something to teach us about juggling demanding work and crazy family life. On the other hand, come to think of it, I am curious, and afraid, to find out what W has to say about himself for the past eight years!

Long live Kilgore Trout!

I have not mourned the death of Kurt Vonnegut, and now it is one and half year late(r)… By not thinking about it, I thought unthinkingly that it would be as if he had not left this world, to me at least. The way the world is going to hell in a hand basket, perhaps, one could argue, it is better that Kurt is not here to witness this mess. He was one of the few satirists who truly loved this world and the people in it. He was in love with humanity and hence his frustration with it showed often in between the lines. He couldn’t seem to be cynical. Even in all his satirical moments, he read sincere. Perhaps that’s the point of all his writing: we cannot afford to be cynical towards our fellow human beings. Unfortunately, cynicism seems to be the only way to stay sane nowadays, esp. since they (Congress and the news media) overnight changed the name of the bill from “Bailout” to “Rescue Plan”…

NOTE: I DID NOT WRITE THE FOLLOWING, arguably one of the finest eulogy that I have come across for the greatest mind in the 20th century. I copied the entire fine article 15 Things Kurt Vonnegut Said Better Than Anyone Else Ever Has Or Will by Scott Gordon, Josh Modell, Noel Murray, Sean O’Neal, Tasha Robinson, Kyle Ryan (April 24, 2007). I printed the whole thing out and read it often, to keep me grounded, to stay away from the big blinking sign that says “What do I care? As long as the lawn is mowed every week…”

1. “I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, ‘If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.'”

The actual advice here is technically a quote from Kurt Vonnegut’s “good uncle” Alex, but Vonnegut was nice enough to pass it on at speeches and in A Man Without A Country. Though he was sometimes derided as too gloomy and cynical, Vonnegut’s most resonant messages have always been hopeful in the face of almost-certain doom. And his best advice seems almost ridiculously simple: Give your own happiness a bit of brainspace.

2. “Peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God.”

In Cat’s Cradle, the narrator haplessly stumbles across the cynical, cultish figure Bokonon, who populates his religious writings with moronic, twee aphorisms. The great joke of Bokononism is that it forces meaning on what’s essentially chaos, and Bokonon himself admits that his writings are lies. If the protagonist’s trip to the island nation of San Lorenzo has any cosmic purpose, it’s to catalyze a massive tragedy, but the experience makes him a devout Bokononist. It’s a religion for people who believe religions are absurd, and an ideal one for Vonnegut-style humanists.

3. “Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly; Man got to sit and wonder, ‘Why, why, why?’ Tiger got to sleep, bird got to land; Man got to tell himself he understand.”

Another koan of sorts from Cat’s Cradle and the Bokononist religion (which phrases many of its teachings as calypsos, as part of its absurdist bent), this piece of doggerel is simple and catchy, but it unpacks into a resonant, meaningful philosophy that reads as sympathetic to humanity, albeit from a removed, humoring, alien viewpoint. Man’s just another animal, it implies, with his own peculiar instincts, and his own way of shutting them down. This is horrifically cynical when considered closely: If people deciding they understand the world is just another instinct, then enlightenment is little more than a pit-stop between insoluble questions, a necessary but ultimately meaningless way of taking a sanity break. At the same time, there’s a kindness to Bokonon’s belief that this is all inevitable and just part of being a person. Life is frustrating and full of pitfalls and dead ends, but everybody’s gotta do it.

4. “There’s only one rule that I know of, babies—God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.”

This line from God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater comes as part of a baptismal speech the protagonist says he’s planning for his neighbors’ twins: “Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies—God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.” It’s an odd speech to make over a couple of infants, but it’s playful, sweet, yet keenly precise in its summation of everything a new addition to the planet should need to know. By narrowing down all his advice for the future down to a few simple words, Vonnegut emphasizes what’s most important in life. At the same time, he lets his frustration with all the people who obviously don’t get it leak through just a little.

5. “She was a fool, and so am I, and so is anyone who thinks he sees what God is doing.”

A couple of pages into Cat’s Cradle, protagonist Jonah/John recalls being hired to design and build a doghouse for a lady in Newport, R.I., who “claimed to understand God and His Ways of Working perfectly.” With such knowledge, “she could not understand why anyone should be puzzled about what had been or about what was going to be.” When Jonah shows her the doghouse’s blueprint, she says she can’t read it. He suggests taking it to her minister to pass along to God, who, when he finds a minute, will explain it “in a way that even you can understand.” She fires him. Jonah recalls her with a bemused fondness, ending the anecdote with this Bokonon quote. It’s a typical Vonnegut zinger that perfectly summarizes the inherent flaw of religious fundamentalism: No one really knows God’s ways.

6. “Many people need desperately to receive this message: ‘I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people do not care about them. You are not alone.'”

In this response to his own question—”Why bother?”—in Timequake, his last novel, Vonnegut doesn’t give a tired response about the urge to create; instead, he offers a pointed answer about how writing (and reading) make a lonesome world a little less so. The idea of connectedness—familial and otherwise—ran through much of his work, and it’s nice to see that toward the end of his career, he hadn’t lost the feeling that words can have an intimate, powerful impact.

7. “There are plenty of good reasons for fighting, but no good reason ever to hate without reservation, to imagine that God Almighty Himself hates with you, too.”

Though this quote comes from the World War II-centered Mother Night (published in 1961), its wisdom and ugly truth still ring. Vonnegut (who often said “The only difference between Bush and Hitler is that Hitler was elected”) was righteously skeptical about war, having famously survived the only one worth fighting in his lifetime. And it’s never been more true: Left or right, Christian or Muslim, those convinced they’re doing violence in service of a higher power and against an irretrievably inhuman enemy are the most dangerous creatures of all.

8. “Since Alice had never received any religious instruction, and since she had led a blameless life, she never thought of her awful luck as being anything but accidents in a very busy place. Good for her.”

Vonnegut’s excellent-but-underrated Slapstick (he himself graded it a “D”) was inspired by his sister Alice, who died of cancer just days after her husband was killed in an accident. Vonnegut’s assessment of Alice’s character—both in this introduction and in her fictional stand-in, Eliza Mellon Swain—is glowing and remarkable, and in this quote from the book’s introduction, he manages to swipe at a favorite enemy (organized religion) and quietly, humbly embrace someone he clearly still missed a lot.

9. “That is my principal objection to life, I think: It’s too easy, when alive, to make perfectly horrible mistakes.”

The narrator delivering this line at the end of the first chapter of Deadeye Dick is alluding both to his father’s befriending of Hitler and his own accidental murder of his neighbor, but like so many of these quotes, it resonates well beyond its context. The underlying philosophy of Vonnegut’s work was always that existence is capricious and senseless, a difficult sentiment that he captured time and again with a bemused shake of the head. Indeed, the idea that life is just a series of small decisions that culminate into some sort of “destiny” is maddening, because you could easily ruin it all simply by making the wrong one. Ordering the fish, stepping onto a balcony, booking the wrong flight, getting married—a single misstep, and you’re done for. At least when you’re dead, you don’t have to make any more damn choices. Wherever Vonnegut is, he’s no doubt grateful for that.

10. “Literature should not disappear up its own asshole, so to speak.”

Vonnegut touchstones like life on Tralfamadore and the absurd Bokononist religion don’t help people escape the world so much as see it with clearer reason, which probably had a lot to do with Vonnegut’s education as a chemist and anthropologist. So it’s unsurprising that in a “self-interview” for The Paris Review, collected in his non-fiction anthology Palm Sunday, he said the literary world should really be looking for talent among scientists and doctors. Even when taking part in such a stultifying, masturbatory exercise for a prestigious journal, Vonnegut was perfectly readable, because he never forgot where his true audience was.

11. “All persons, living and dead, are purely coincidental.”

In Vonnegut’s final novel, 1997’s Timequake, he interacts freely with Kilgore Trout and other fictional characters after the end of a “timequake,” which forces humanity to re-enact an entire decade. (Trout winds up too worn out to exercise free will again.) Vonnegut writes his own fitting epigram for this fatalistic book: “All persons, living and dead, are purely coincidental,” which sounds more funny than grim. Vonnegut surrounds his characters—especially Trout—with meaninglessness and hopelessness, and gives them little reason for existing in the first place, but within that, they find liberty and courage.

12. “Why don’t you take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut? Why don’t you take a flying fuck at the mooooooooooooon?”

Even when Vonnegut dared to propose a utopian scheme, it was a happily dysfunctional one. In Slapstick, Wilbur Swain wins the presidency with a scheme to eliminate loneliness by issuing people complicated middle names (he becomes Wilbur Daffodil-11 Swain) which make them part of new extended families. He advises people to tell new relatives they hate, or members of other families asking for help: “Why don’t you take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut? Why don’t you take a flying fuck at the mooooooooooooon?” Of course, this fails to prevent plagues, the breakdown of his government, and civil wars later in the story.

13. “So it goes.”

Unlike many of these quotes, the repeated refrain from Vonnegut’s classic Slaughterhouse-Five isn’t notable for its unique wording so much as for how much emotion—and dismissal of emotion—it packs into three simple, world-weary words that simultaneously accept and dismiss everything. There’s a reason this quote graced practically every elegy written for Vonnegut over the past two weeks (yes, including ours): It neatly encompasses a whole way of life. More crudely put: “Shit happens, and it’s awful, but it’s also okay. We deal with it because we have to.”

14. “I have been a soreheaded occupant of a file drawer labeled ‘science fiction’ ever since, and I would like out, particularly since so many serious critics regularly mistake the drawer for a urinal.”

Vonnegut was as trenchant when talking about his life as when talking about life in general, and this quote from an essay in Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons is particularly apt; as he explains it, he wrote Player Piano while working for General Electric, “completely surrounded by machines and ideas for machines,” which led him to put some ideas about machines on paper. Then it was published, “and I learned from the reviewers that I was a science-fiction writer.” The entire essay is wry, hilarious, and biting, but this line stands out in particular as typifying the kind of snappishness that made Vonnegut’s works so memorable.

15. “We must be careful about what we pretend to be.”

In Mother Night, apolitical expatriate American playwright Howard W. Campbell, Jr. refashions himself as a Nazi propagandist in order to pass coded messages on to the U.S. generals and preserve his marriage to a German woman—their “nation of two,” as he calls it. But in serving multiple masters, Campbell ends up ruining his life and becoming an unwitting inspiration to bigots. In his 1966 introduction to the paperback edition, Vonnegut underlines Mother Night’s moral: “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” That lesson springs to mind every time a comedian whose shtick relies on hoaxes and audience-baiting—or a political pundit who traffics in shock and hyperbole—gets hauled in front of the court of public opinion for pushing the act too far. Why can’t people just say what they mean? It’s a question Don Imus and Michael Richards—and maybe someday Ann Coulter—must ask themselves on their many sleepless nights.

So it goes. SO IT GOES.