Pick:
I don't understand how Wall Street collapsed, nor what, if anything, has been done about it since. I wanted to.
Review:
A friend of mine is currently reading "The Grapes of Wrath," John Steinbeck's classic novel about the Great Depression. She just reached a place in the book where she started to feel thankful that her life is not like the Joads'; that she has not had to come "acrost in a jalopy," as she put it, having lost everything she owned and all of her family's roots, having watched members of her family die of loss and heartache, having been treated like dirt by everyone she meets as though her circumstances were her own fault, rather than caused by the caprice of the weather and the callous disregard of wealthy men. And then she realized: while her life differs in degree from that of the Okies in the 1930's, it does not differ in essence. It's depressing to realize that the depressing book you're reading is not any bleaker than the life you face when you put the book down.
That's exactly how I felt after reading "Capital Offense" by Michael Hirsh.
This is not a hatchet job; Hirsh is a reporter of long standing, who has covered the Venn diagram of economics and politics for decades. Fully three-quarters of the major players in the book, everyone from senators and cabinet members to Nobel laureate economists, are subjects of personal interviews by the author, who is able to refer to what the person told him directly. This book does not have a political agenda; the Republicans are not blamed unduly, the Democrats are not excused of their culpability -- if anything, the most desperate criticism in the book comes at the end, in reference to Barack Obama's administration and how it has handled Wall Street and the financial markets. While there is certainly blame to be parceled out, it is not done with a purple face and raised neck tendons; there is a genuine attempt to try to understand the choices people made, to give them their due -- or at least the benefit of the doubt -- in recognizing that they were not evil, they were not trying to ruin our economy and thus much of our strength as a political entity and as a nation of people, they made choices that often seemed right, even if they only seemed right when one is wearing the blinders.
The most culpable and responsible party in this fiasco that continues to stretch out like some malignant taffy (or maybe it is the rack and we are the ones stretching) is the zeitgeist. Though Hirsh identifies people who helped to generate it, going back thirty and forty years, it is the aura of invulnerability itself, the idea that permeated Washington throughout the 1980's and 1990's that nothing could go wrong, that any problems were temporary and would fix themselves, that we were living in the Golden Age that would never, ever end: that is why we are where we are. The upsetting part for me, and what should be upsetting for all of us (but, even more heart-wrenchingly and tooth-grindingly, isn't,) is the fact that the problems were not fixed, that they remain. Wall Street is still not fully regulated, and many of the regulations, while important, miss the mark. We had a chance to have the scales torn from our eyes -- but we clung to them, for fear that we would find the abyss staring back at us. Well, it is, and we seem to be walking right off the brink while still floating in the air, buoyed by ignorance, like an entire economic system purchased by a coyote and stamped Acme.
Forgive me for waxing poetic without giving substance. All I've really got is outrage and frustration, and a keyboard to pound upon. The substance is complicated, and well beyond my purview; I'm just an English teacher who reads a lot. To explain it in greater depth is Hirsh's task, and this book does an admirable job of it, though it does at times remain above my own layman's understanding of economics. It's understandable that the thirty-year veteran of economic reporting would not feel the need to explain just what commerical paper is, but I still sort of wish he had. Otherwise I would recommend the book to anyone trying to understand what happened, and why we are still not on solid ground -- and why the bottom seems to be moving farther and farther away, so many miles below us. I'm glad I read the book, even if I am very afraid of what I suspect is the coming fall.
82. Tros by Talbot Mundy 11/23
Pick:
I picked this because of the names. Talbot Mundy, first of all, which was almost worth the price of admission all by itself; and the the hero, whose full title is Tros! of! Samothrace! (Emphasis added. Duh.) Plus he's all piratey and heroic in the pulp Conan vein (Apparently Mundy was a source of inspiration for Robert Howard, among others), and it's set during Caesar's conquest of Britain, which is sweet.
Thoughts:
Unfortunately, the book was not as good as the names. Very purple and overwrought, so much so that at times I couldn't even follow what was happening, and the action didn't follow the most exciting threads. There was a whole lot of buildup and not very much climax. It wasn't terrible, there were some absolutely beautiful descriptions of the natural world around them, and some of the swashbuckling was first rate -- particularly in the scene when Tros, at the helm of his stolen Roman ship, clips through the anchor lines of Caesar's invasion fleet during a storm at night off the shores of England, laughing his mad titan's laugh all the time -- but I have an actual Robert E. Howard book still to read, along with Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs, and I bet both of them will put this one to shame.
Still. Talbot Mundy. Now that's got class.
83. Percy Jackson and the Olympians Book One: The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan 11/25
Pick:
I read this one now because I had a bit of a tough time getting through the prose in Tros, and because I wanted to try authors whose other work I might want to purchase when next we are Powells-bound. This seems like a good series, and Toni recommended it after reading, so here we go.
Thoughts:
She was right, as always. This is an excellent book. The biggest problem I had with it was my own burning envy, because oh, how I wish I had thought of this setup. The idea that the Greek gods actually follow the heart of Western civilization, that they represent the moral center of the age, is absolutely brilliant. Such an outstanding setup for taking these obsolete and almost kitschy archetypes and bringing them into the now without being silly. And look at the fantastic stories it makes possible: this one, as excellent as it is, is really only about parentage, about finding out that your real parents are not who you thought they were, and trying to deal with who they actually are. It runs on themes of being noticed, filial respect and paternal pride, and what makes real family, and what you owe people because of your ties to them, whether they are ties of blood or friendship or a debt owed. The plot itself is so simple; there was a theft in an attempt to foment a divine war. This is the same concept as half of the Greek myths I read. And of course, that means that the same concept can come up again and again through an entire series, because nothing is permanently resolved, here: the bad guys were not killed, the good guys were not fully triumphant.
I really liked it, even if it was a bit young and therefore predictable. Hey, they can't all be Harry Potter. I definitely want to buy Book Two.
84. Half Empty by David Rakoff 11/27
Pick:
A book of pessimistic essays? Sign me up!
Review:
Though I had never heard of David Rakoff (A distinction I share with the porn star Violet Blue, and probably the only one such), I loved the concept of the book: a collection of essays exploring and defending the positive aspects of negative thinking. When I got the book and saw the cover, I was overjoyed with schadenfreudey bliss; I particularly like the fisherman waving as he heads for the waterfall, and the shotgun pointed at the cartoon bunny's joy-swelled head.
But in reading the book, I was surprised. Not that the essays focused on negative views of life and the world, nor that they were well-wrought and sardonic and mordantly witty; I expected all of those things from the description and the blurbs. But because they were so sad. I don't think Mr. Rakoff is unique in his wit and ostensible outlook, viewing the world through angst-colored glasses; this has become almost a literary tradition, it seems to me (Though I am, quite proudly, entirely lacking in cache and really have no idea what is popular and trendy. As long as it isn't me, I'm happier not knowing.). It isn't surprising that this urbane and scintillatingly with-it cultural critic knows more about popular culture than I do. Nor is it surprising that he writes so very well; that is, after all, how he makes his living, and has for years. It was certainly not surprising that he had so much material to draw from in writing essays about negative thinking: whether or not you believe the world is going to hell in a handbasket, there is certainly ample evidence to support that view -- one has almost too many horrors to choose from in composing a nice triplet to end with a Wizard-of-Oz traditional "Oh my!" Al-Qaeda and jihad and war. Recession, depression and taxes. Korea and tyrants and nukes. Obesity, cancer and AIDS.
No: there is almost too much to choose from in selecting ten subjects for as many negative-thinking essays.
What was surprising was the progression of Rakoff's talents. Beginning with the fact that he knows more than I and writes better than I -- again, unsurprising and also welcome, because it makes the reading more entertaining and informative -- there was then an expansion, a stepping up of an order of magnitude, to the impressive clarity of Rakoff's perceptiveness. He knows more than I do; he sees ten times more than he knows -- and is humble enough to recognize that he doesn't understand everything he sees, even as smart as he is. Though he is also human enough to try, sometimes. And then, what makes this book unique in my eyes is this: yet another step up, yet another order of magnitude, is needed to describe the man's empathy. He knows more; he sees far more than he knows -- and he feels even more than he sees. It made the book sad, and that much more honest and interesting and, well, good.
It makes it a bit tougher to envy the man his gifts and his talents. My life is so much easier to live; if this is what it took to write this book, I don't really want it. Though I definitely enjoyed reading it.
Unfinished: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers
Well, you can't say I didn't try. The last time I opened this book I never made it past the acknowledgements (In my defense, those acknowledgements go on for thirty or more pages). This time I made it about halfway through before I decided that I just wasn't enjoying it. It wasn't as impossible for me to read as several other books of the same oh-so-literary genre have been, but it was just distasteful. The opening chapter had a frightening level of specificity in describing the author's mother dying of cancer, and I thought it was well done, if horrific; but then after that, he just got on my nerves over and over and over again. Honestly, if I believed he would come to an epiphany at some point, I might have gone ahead and finished the book, but he just seemed too warped, too damaged, and was reveling in it a bit too much. So, pass.
85. The Last King by Michael Curtis Ford 12/5
Pick:
Honestly, I'm not sure why I went to this one after reading depressing essays and then a depressing memoir; I wanted to read something all the way through before I turned to the second Percy Jackson, which I'm quite excited about. And this one's been on the shelf for a long time. And holy Christ, am I glad for Undo: I just highlighted and erased this entire list. I'm going to stop now.
Thoughts:
This was a good book, which taught me quite a bit about the Roman empire pre-Caesar. Mithridates, the Last King, was the king of a country called Pontus, somewhere around the Black Sea/Tigris and Euphrates region, like where Turkey or Iran is now. And it was interesting because he was the perfect epitome of a barbarian king, even though he was highly educated and spoke some ungodly number of languages. But he was the perfect barbarian king anyway, because he was enormous and hugely strong and absolutely god-like in his perfection, very much like Conan, and he liked to eat a lot and laugh loud, and he loved to charge into battle and conquer his enemies, and he fell for an incredibly gorgeous woman who turned into a terribly spoiled and scheming wife, and all of this stuff read a lot like a Conan novel.
It was definitely more historical than a Conan novel, though, because Mithridates, even though he was the one person all of Rome feared, and they play that up quite a bit, still he got his ass kicked. A lot. By almost every Roman he encountered. It was funny, almost, because I kept recognizing the names of the Roman generals he went out to do battle with, and every time he did so, even when the odds were hugely in his favor, the Roman won. It started to seem like a coming-of-age requirement for a Roman general was to kick Mithridates's ass in battle; that's when you know you've arrived.
That would have been fine if I was reading from Rome's perspective, but I wasn't. Rome was the bad guy here, and the bad guy won, over and over and over again. Add in the times when Mithridates's own allies, and even his family members, turned on him, and the suffering that comes down on his own people because of his life-long war with Rome, and the book turned depressing.
Though it did make me want to go read Conan.
86. Percy Jackson and the Olympians, Book Two: The Sea of Monsters by Rick Riordan 12/9
Pick:
I wanted something fast and fun. Boom.
Thoughts:
This was great: I loved the Olympian magical elements, the sea of monsters, the search for Pan and the Cyclops of Odysseian fame. The use of chain stores as nests and breeding grounds for monsters was absolutely brilliant. Tantalus, Hermes and his magical cellphone, the incredibly creepy idea of Kronos in his golden coffin -- outstanding stuff. Great ending, too. Loved this book.
87. Looking Backward by Edward Bellamy 12/16
Pick:
I'm not sure what made me go for this one, either when I bought it or when I decided to read it. I mean, I read it now because I felt I could read something more serious after the Percy Jackson book, and I bought it because the back said that it was one of the original science fiction books and had inspired a number of "the greatest thinkers of our age," like John Dewey. But why this book instead of one of the other inspirational texts I've got laying around ready to hand. Idunno.
Thoughts:
It was damned interesting, although a wee bit hard to follow: it's written like what it is, a 19th century treatise on government and society thinly disguised as a novel. I mean, this is no more a novel than Plato's Republic, which this greatly resembles. The only novelistic element was the slow budding romance, which was sweet and all, but not the point, and it took too bloody long, what with those Victorian sensibilities.
In terms of what Bellamy had to say about society, this is a danged nice Utopia, and almost certainly as unreachable as any of them. (This makes me want to read the Utopia Hunter series.) It's a Socialist paradise, where nobody has any money, everyone works according to their desire and ability, and everyone is rewarded according to their need, rather than their ability to work the system -- and yes, it did make me waver back towards thinking capitalism is a terrible way to run a society, since it encourages competition, which encourages cheating. I'm writing this book up over a month after I read it (It's been a bad month, all around), and I have since read Glenn Beck's book on capitalism and the American economy, and it says quite a lot to me that the only way to make capitalism work in a civilized society is to insist on the imposition of a religious moral code. Not that I think morality can only come from religion, or even can come wholly from religion, but the fact is that capitalism is untenable without chivalry -- and you know what they say about that stuff. I think I may have to turn this into a blog.
So: this was an interesting read, fairly well written and only a little ridiculous in its proposition; it loses something because Bellamy obviously couldn't have predicted our access to media, nor its effects on us (See Fahrenheit 451 -- and notice that Bradbury didn't get it right either, because his media-saturated dystopia has no computers, no internet, no video games, and no Facebook, though all of those fit right into his groove.), and his scheme of distribution seems a bit unlikely to me (Everyone goes to central stores and picks out what they need, and variety is supplied according to demand -- but that implies that demand can perfectly inform supply, and while I'm no economist, I was under the impression that quite a lot of successful business is in planning for what people will demand in the future, and the key to all advertising is building demand for a supply you already have; and in all cases, success hinges largely on being lucky enough to have your predictions pan out, on not having the public move away from demand for your product, like Betamax or HD-DVD [though let's be honest, that one was doomed by its' acronym], so it's a bit hard to swallow that the socialist paradise could solve the issue. Seems more likely that people will not always get what they want, and you have to rely on them being mature enough to handle disappointment and be satisfied with what they do have. And maybe they would. Maybe.), but I like his central message: a man's right to receive the fruits of society's labor is not determined by his ability to contribute to it, but rather his existence as a fellow member of the society. I like the way Bellamy puts it:
"We require of each that he shall make the same effort; that is, we demand of him the best service it is in his power to give."
"And supposing all do the best they can," I answered, "the amount of the product resulting is twice greater from one man than from another."
"Very true," replied Doctor Leete, "but the amount of the resulting product has nothing whatever to do with the question, which is one of desert [That is, "deserving something." Isn't that a nice word for something we don't have a word to name? What would we use, deservingness? Deservitude? Pah.]. Desert is a moral question, and the amount of the product a material quantity. It would be an extraordinary sort of logic which should try to determine a moral question by a material standard. The amount of the effort alone is pertinent to the question of desert. All men who do their best, do the same. A man's endowments, however godlike, merely fix the measure of his duty. The man of great endowments who does not do all he might, though he may do more than a man of small endowments who does his best, is deemed a less deserving worker than the latter, and dies a debtor to his fellows. The Creator set's men's tasks for them by the faculties he gives them; we simply exact their fulfillment."
The objection, of course, is that it's hard to believe that this logic would really inspire someone to do their best when they could shirk; but you see, the whole concept of wanting to shirk and be lazy is one that comes from competition and capitalism. Our society teaches us to seek out the means of getting the most reward for the least effort: some people focus on the reward and become Bill Gates; most people focus on the least effort and become -- my students. But there is no reason to assume that all men are inherently hardwired to be lazy, nor that the material rewards are the best or only means to inspire someone to put out effort. In fact, thinking so is pretty danged insulting.
Yes. Definitely have to make this into a blog. Oh, and no: it wasn't lost on me that the character who explains the perfect future to the time-traveling narrator is named Doctor 1337. Heh. Just goes to show how awesome the idea is.
88. The Stepsister Scheme by Jim C. Hines 12/20
Pick:
Bellamy was good, but a bit hard to read, and so I went for something that would be simpler, I hoped. I also knew we would be heading to Powell's before Christmas, and I wanted to know if this was a series worth pursuing.
Thoughts:
It is. It's a lot like the goblin books that Hines wrote, but a little less funny and a little darker -- which is interesting, considering the lightness of the inspiration, here, the fairy tale theme. Of course, Hines, naturally, goes back to the original fairy tales, when Cinderella's stepsisters tried to cut off parts of their feet to make them fit in the glass slipper, and Cinderella sent her birdy friends back to peck out the eyes of her wicked stepmother at the end of the story.
This book picks up at that point: Cinderella has been the crown princess for a few months now, and suddenly there is a problem: her stepsister shows up one day and tries to kill her. She is saved by the timely intervention of her birdy friends, again, but also by the assistance of two other women, who turn out to be Sleeping Beauty and Snow White. Unfortunately, the assassination attempt was not the whole problem, nor is the stepsister the only one trying to kill the princess, nor is her death actually the ultimate goal. It turns out there are wheels within wheels here, and the quest to solve the problem leads the three princesses into the land of the Fae, which was extremely interesting. I think my favorite part of this book was how Hines was able to turn fairy tales into real life stories, with real life people; Sleeping Beauty, for instance, has ninja combat skills: perfect balance and agility and strength and reflexes, because she was granted the ability to dance with perfect grace at her birth (Remember the story? Sleeping Beauty was given all kinds of gifts by the fairies who were invited to her baby shower; it was the jealous ones who weren't invited who cursed her to fall asleep before her 16th birthday.), and what is combat but another kind of dance? That was great.
Good story, good characters, one of the best re-imaginings of the old stories that I have read. Certainly a good series to keep up with.
Unfinished: The Ancient Solitary Reign by Martin Hocke
I wanted this book to be about owls. I wanted it to show me something of how they thought, how they acted; I don't know anything about owls, and I think they're cool. And on some level it probably was about owls -- but the owls acted a whole hell of a lot like people. Taken as a story about people who resemble owls, it was indescribably dull: kid grows up and goes to school, learns to question what his parents taught him, learns that THOSE kinds of people that he's been warned about are not so bad, after all. Hoorah. The races of owl were even described to resemble British social classes: the main character, a barn owl, was a well-educated but non-pragmatic type, so maybe an Oxford student; the tawny owl was a toff, with a high-class accent and "Cheerio, old boy" social manners; the little owl was an immigrant, probably a Gypsy or some such --he talked about how immigrants breed rapidly and steal land from the good old families. That story, I've read before.
89. The Mysterious Benedict Society by Trenton Lee Stewart 12/25
Pick:
Same as the Hines book: I have been very interested in checking out the series, and I wanted to try it before we went to Powell's. Of course, since I didn't get to finish it before we went to Powell's, I didn't buy the next book of the series, but hey -- at least I got to read a good book, and finish it on Christmas Day so I could read my Christmas presents.
Thoughts:
This was a fantastic book. Because smart kids save the world. By being smart. They get drafted into an effort to stop a world domination scheme -- one that was actually fairly realistic, which was also very cool -- by a man who spends all of his time reading, and so because of that is a wonderfully brilliant and kind-hearted man who is willing to do whatever he can to save the world from darkness and despair. He gets these kids involved, all of whom have their own particular genius (which was also very cleverly done, and not something you see very often in these yay-for-smart-people kind of stories -- there was a girl who was a practical genius, who could fix things and build things and was athletic. That was cool.), and together they go to an evil school, which in many ways resembled the school where I work, after they were trained briefly in the school where I would like to work -- the place with all the books, and without the stupid competitive drive and segregation into cliques that the school system encourages, or at least does nothing to prevent.
You know, there's probably another blog there, somewhere. Because we do: we encourage cliques and competition and friction between them, and then we make no serious effort to break down the barriers that the divisions create. Think how much better the lives of our students, not to mention their actual social skills rather than the ones we like to pretend that they are learning, would be if we could teach them to break those lines of acceptance and ostracism, and all the rampant stereotyping that bleeds into everything they do.
So there: one of the nice things about this book was the use they made of the other genius girl, the one whose genius was in refusing to simply accept anything she was told, ever. Because the central theme of this book? What makes someone a genius is the love of truth. That is what really sets these kids, and the adults who train and assist them, apart from the general public. It's what protects them from the evil genius's plot (though even that doesn't work perfectly, of course, because danger is real even for geniuses), and it's what ends up saving the day -- and it's how you know the day is saved. Because the truth wins out, in the end.
I loved the book. I want to be the kid -- I'm most like Reynie Muldoon, the boy whose genius is in problem solving and logic, and leadership. Though there's something to be said for my stubborn insistence on questioning everything, and my ability to annoy others, so maybe I'm really like Constance. That's cool, too.) -- and I want to save the world. Though I guess I'll just read the next book, and write me a few blogs. Like I said: what really matters is love of the truth.
90. Side Jobs by Jim Butcher 12/29
Pick: I got this for Christmas. I had to read it.
Thoughts:
I knew there was a reason why I didn't buy all those compilations and collections, even when they had the name of my favorite paranormal author, Jim Butcher, prominently displayed on the cover. Partly it was because I know those compilations generally include one story I love (usually the shortest), two that are all right, and one that I hate (usually the longest), and therefore are rarely worth the time and effort and money. But it turns out the main reason was so that I could read this book, and enjoy every second of it.
Since I had never read these stories before, this was just a collection of new Harry Dresden material for me, and as such it was a gem. I love the Dresden Files with a passion, and these stories were fantastic little vignettes, giving me a whole novel's worth of the element of the Dresden story that has been missing from the last few novels as the magical war has heated up: the detective stories. As much as I enjoy the magical war -- and I do, because Butcher is one of the best action writers I have ever read, and his mystical world is complex and fascinating and unique -- I missed the detective stories, the little things that Harry does to help people, to find things and right the small wrongs that make up large parts of the average person's life. So this book was great: I got to read about Harry getting hit by love spells and stopping magical riots; defending Mac's wonderful beer, and his bar; beating up on lowlifes both human and monstrous, and even protecting LARPers (to which group I proudly once belonged -- and I even played the vampire game Butcher hints at in the story) from an actual Black Court vampire. In a mall.
Though I was a bit saddened by the last story, which was the original novelette written from Karrin Murphy's point of view, and is set after Changes, the most recent full Dresden novel. This story, while it was as good as anything Butcher has written -- and impressive thereby, because this was the first time I've read Butcher writing a female lead character in the first person, and I think he nailed it, capturing not only Murphy's persona but also that of a strong woman. Well, says a male reader, so maybe a grain of salt there. But it still seemed right. -- it was hard to read because it comes on the heels of the terrible event that ended that last book in a vicious cliffhanger, with Harry himself maybe hanging onto the edge of a cliff, and maybe fallen off (not literally). So the characters are worried, and it seems likely that Harry is dead, and there is no resolution of that because we all have to wait for the novel to come out in the spring and continue the Dresden Files. And all I can say is I am sure the writing will be just as fantastic as has been everything I have read by Mr. Butcher, which now includes short fiction along with paranormal fantasy and epic fantasy (Of course I've read the Codex Alera. Haven't you?) novels, and it bloody well better start with Harry being okay. Because I want to read more Dresden. I'm glad I got to read this.
91. The History of Earth: An Illustrated Chronicle of an Evolving Planet by William K. Hartmann and Ron Miller. January 2011.
Pick:
Even though I finished this in January, I had to put it on the 2010 list, since that's when I read the bulk of it. Not to put too fine a point on it, but this was my bathroom reading. I actually got this book at UCSC (It still has the Baytree Bookstore sticker on it) when I took my one science course there; this book was recommended but not required, so I got it, and always meant to read it. I've carted this thing through five moves, over something like 2000 miles, and I finally read it.
Thoughts:
This was great. It was perfectly understandable, nicely illustrated -- though it took me a couple of chapters to start paying attention to the illustrations, because at first I didn't realize that the authors had done all of the painting and most of the photography involved, and there's a lot in this book -- and it gives the entire history of Earth, from the formation of the solar system to the present day, and a few possibilities of what is still to come. I thought it was a tad idealistic, as their solutions for our modern problems (Which was interesting to me because the book was written almost twenty years ago, and yet it lists global warming, nuclear war, overuse of natural resources, and slow death by apathy as three of the great problems we must face, so, y'know, these guys know their shit.) were largely focused on the space program helping us colonize other worlds and start farming asteroids. I agree that this would be a wonderful solution, but I don't know if it will ever happen now. We've got holy wars to fight, and I'm not sure that our culture will survive and still be advancing afterwards. Man, that's a scary thought. Not that I think the East-West culture wars will wipe out humanity, but I think it highly likely we will end up in something like a Dark Age. I suppose I should take heart in the idea that the Dark Age was not dark for every culture. And also in the perspective this book endorses, which points out that the Earth is more than four billion years old, so what's a few centuries, give or take? Maybe the second Renaissance will be even better than the first.
Coolest thing about this book: it told me about the millions of years before the rise of DNA, when it is possible that RNA lifeforms could have existed. And they might have come from space, from asteroids crashing to Earth with organic molecules on them. And then there is the possibility that there were millions of years of evolution and growth of invertebrate organisms, which were apparently wiped out in an even larger extinction event than the one that killed the dinosaurs, or might have been out-evolved by vertebrates; but in either case, this took millions of years. No, I'm mixing this up: there might have been RNA life, or some other entirely different form of life, in the time before fossils that we can find existed -- the oldest we've found is something like 2.8 billion years old, which leaves almost 2 billion years before that. Then after the rise of DNA and vertebrate life, there was some massive extinction event called the Great Dying at the end of the Permian epoch (era? I dunno) 250 million years ago, which allowed the rise of the dinosaurs after that, until the extinction at 65 million years ago, which allowed the rise of mammals, and then of us. And remembering that first, we have only existed for four million years and look at what we've become and we've done to this planet in that time, and also that any fossil evidence from the earliest times of life would most likely have been destroyed by continental drift and asteroid impacts, if the animals were even solid enough (They might have had no bones, right? Jellyfish and such?) to leave fossils at all, you know what this means? It means there are two different eras when entire classes of creatures could have evolved, spread across the planet, done who knows what kinds of things, built anything up to and including a civilization more advanced than ours, and then died out. It could have happened twice before anything that we can find evidence of.
It means Cthulhu. Big sea-based organism, so alien it would drive us mad, had millions and millions of years to evolve and build who knows what kind of society, which might have been wiped out in some terrible cataclysm and would have left almost no evidence that we could still find and recognize except for perhaps some ruins under the sea somewhere . . . where he lies dreaming.
The End
The reading this year wasn't bad, but I had trouble keeping up with this list, especially once school started in the fall. I'm writing this wrap-up a full month into 2011, because it took me almost that long to review the last five or six books; I still have an unwritten 2011 book in front of me. A Vine book, too. I probably need to rethink the manner and means by which I keep track of my books, here. Maybe go back and re-read some of these.
One thing about this year was that it surprised me, quite often. I was surprised by Vine books, by Glenn Beck, by L.A. Meyer, by the ending of Changes, by the fact that I liked the book about me as a hamster -- it was a shocking year in books for me. Maybe that's why I had trouble writing them up; I'm still reeling. Well, maybe not. I should also note that this was a surprisingly great year for the series: between Jacky Faber and Harry Dresden, with installments from Temeraire and of course the Wheel of Time, this was a fine year for books with numbers on them. I can't say for sure which series I'm looking forward to continuing second most. (Come on. Most is easy: that would be the CONCLUSION OF THE WHEEL OF TIME!!!! That's the only time you'll see me use more than one exclamation point in earnest. Hope you enjoyed it.) At any rate, here are the overall winners.
Best Book of the Year:Once again, I can't turn away from the Wheel of Time. I loved Towers of Midnight; once again it made me tear up, though this one did it more strongly than The Gathering Storm. Once again I am amazed by Robert Jordan and thankful for Brandon Sanderson. And I have no doubt that the best book of 2011 will come out in the late fall/early winter, and it will be called A Memory of Light.
Best Pirate Book:
Black Bartlemy's Treasure, of course!
Worst Book I Finished:
Beat the Reaper
Worst Vine Book:
Blood Ninja
Best Vine Book:
Running the Books
Most Inspiring:
Michael Pollan's two books, In Defense of Food and The Omnivore's Dilemma
Least Inspiring:
Simplexity
Most Depressing:
The Road
Most Laugh-Inducing:
Either Bite Me or the Jeeves trio. Maybe Beat the Reaper just for its absurd awfulness.
Worst Letdown:The second half of The Vampire Diaries series. Oy.
Finished. At last.
