Jean-Paul’s Review: 3/5 stars

“The Sirens of Titan” is Kurt Vonnegut’s second novel and you can really feel him just starting to get his unique voice in it.  It is kind of a hybrid standard novel/typical Vonnegut prose mix.  There are none of the one word paragraphs yet, but the paragraphs sizes are noticeably smaller than your standard novel.

Many of the standard Vonnegut subjects are already present in this novel.  You have Tralfamadore and allusions to “Harrison Bergeron”.  Much of the book deals with finding your place in the world and fate’s part in it.  The humor is dark, even more so than his usual fare.  I suspect that my three star rating has more to do with the fact that almost everything contained in the book has been done better by him later in his career and I read all of those first.

The book starts with the chrono-synclastical infundibulated (think unstuck in time-ish) Winston Niles Rumfoord paying one of his cyclical visits to his wife, Beatrice, and special guest, playboy billionalre Malachai Constant.  Rumfoord tells them both their future and how they will go to Mars and get married and have a kid together before heading to the Saturnian moon of Titan, with Constant making a side trip to Mercury beforehand.  Finding each other mostly repulsive, they attempt to avoid that fate by any means necessary only to have it all come true.

It all comes true in horrible Vonnegutesque fashion.  When I said this novel was dark, I meant it.  No one in this novel is a good person, except for maybe Salo the Tralfamadorian and he’s a machine.  So it goes.  I had no idea where anything in this novel was going until it went there.  None of it was out of left field either.  It was all, “Oh, that makes beautifully horrible sense.”, which is quite an accomplishment.

Kurt Vonnegut is one of my favorite authors and it’s really interesting to read his second novel and see his growth as an author.  If you’ve read most of his later stuff, you should totally pick up this book, but if you’re a Vonnegut virgin, there’s better to be had in “Slaughterhouse-Five”, “Cat’s Cradle” and, well, most of his other works.  That doesn’t make this book bad, it just makes it not as good.

Jean-Paul’s Rating: 5/5 stars

I subconsciously started reading “Treasure Island” shortly before my planned trip to Grand Cayman.  I have a long backlist of old books that I want to read and it amuses me that my brain chose this book without my being aware as to why I chose it.  It wasn’t until shortly before I left for Grand Cayman before I realized, “Oh, that’s why I chose this book!”

Ahoy matey!  If you know anything about pirates, chances are what you know came from “Treasure Island”.  Almost every pirate stereotype is a stereotype because of this book.  Parrot?  Check.  Peg leg?  Check.  Drunken revelry?  Check.  Buried treasure?  Check.  X marks the spot?  Check.  You would be hard pressed to find another example of a piece of literature that so thoroughly defines a genre so completely.  That, my friends, is art.  I would go even farther and say that “Treasure Island” also inspired, consciously or unconsciously, many of the top young adult novels of our time.  Can you think of other wildly successful novels as old as “Treasure Island” whose main character is a young boy on an adventure?

“Treasure Island” has so infused our culture that even if you haven’t read the book or seen the movie, you know the story.  Pirate Billy Bones comes to an inn run by young Jim Hawkins’ family.  He is hiding from some of his former pirates and he has a treasure map.  He is eventually found and dies after a confrontation with one of his brethren but not before Jim finds the map.  Jim confides in Dr. Livesey and Squire Trewlaney and soon an adventure is set up to find the hidden treasure!  The crew they hire, of course, turn out to be pirates and the rest of the book tells how the good guys survive the pirates and gather the treasure.

“Treasure Island” is an incredibly fun escapist read.  Jim Hawkins and Long John Silver are as memorable characters as you will find in literature.  Reading the book, you can not help but want to be there with Jim on his adventure.  Well, maybe without the pirates trying to kill you, but you get the idea.  Sailing a ship through the ocean in search of buried treasure, drinking rum, and singing sea shanties is awfully appealing.

If you have not read this book, you should.  I can see myself reading this book again and again.  If you have kids, you should read it to them.  There’s some material that is age inappropriate, mostly murder and mayhem, so be ye warned if you are of the opinion that children should be hidden from such realities as long as possible.

Jean-Paul’s rating : 2/5 stars

I have a work friend who occasionally recommends a book to me.  These books are invariably bad.  Many times I just ignore his recommendations, but this time the book was on Project Gutenberg so I figured what the heck.  I am happy to report his 100% crappy book recommendation streak is still going strong.  After talking to him, he claimed to like it because it was a difficult read, which it was, and because it had an ending that he wasn’t able to predict.  I pointed out that there wasn’t really anything to predict and his inferences into what occurred were only inferences and never explicitly stated in the book.

I should point out that the actual title of the book is actually “The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner: Written by Himself:  With a Detail of Curious Traditionary Facts and Other Evidence by the Author”.  This is certainly the longest title for a book I’ve ever read but it’s also fairly appropriate.  The book is split up into three parts.

The first part of the book is a relation of facts as seen by the editor surrounding the life of brothers George and Robert Cowlan.  It quickly relates events from their parents’ marriage and divorce, through their younger years growing up, George with the carefree father and Robert with the strictly Calvinist mother and Reverend who may or may not be Robert’s actual father.  It then describes their young adult years in which Robert torments George by following him around and being a complete douche.  It ends with the apparent murder of George by Robert and his inheritance of all of Roberts lands and his eventual flight from justice.  This part is somewhat interesting, but there are no establishing points to go from.  A lot of the motivations from the first part are fleshed out in the second part, but it doesn’t exactly make for an exciting read when split apart like this.  What you get out of it is that George is the good brother and Robert is the bad brother.

Part two is the actual memoir referred to in the title which belongs to Robert and was found after his death.  It tells the exact same story as part one only from Robert’s point of view and in excruciating detail.  We get more into George’s strict Calvinist upbringing and his attempts to prove his predestination into heaven, the Reverend’s acceptance of Robert’s predestination, Robert’s falling in with a person (who is obviously the devil) that convinces Robert to help him purge humanity of unworthy souls, and Robert’s real or imagined descent into madness as he is haunted by demons wherever he goes.  So yeah, Robert actually thinks he’s doing good and George is the evil one.  Perceptions of good versus evil, the wackiness of Calvinism and religion in general, blah, blah, blah.  So see, there are actual themes in this book, but you have long past even pretended to care about them because it took hundreds of pages to tie them together.

Part three is fairly useless, but does leave a lot of parts one and two open to interpretation which is kind of cool.  The editor of part one is back and he’s talking about how they found the manuscript on the body of a person who hanged himself.  So Robert actually killed himself.  This is kind of cool only because you end up having to question everything Robert did.  Was the devil even real or was this all in his imagination?  It’s very Fight Clubby.  Only without any satisfying resolution.

Another weird thing about the book that really bothered me was the Scottish brogue.  Your upper-class Scots speak proper English while the servant class speaks like a much more unintelligible version of a bad Mike Myers Scottish character.  This makes it very difficult to read, which is fine; reading accents can be quite interesting.  What bothers me is how Hogg goes in and out of it sometimes for the same character.  Maybe this is on purpose and was meant as a hint into the madness of Robert.  It is very disconcerting, though, to be reading this pages and pages long soliloquy by one of Robert’s servants written all in brogue that magically transforms into standard English.

Yep, this book can be skipped.  What little entertainment there is is not nearly worth the effort of sloughing through the rest of the book.  Although it is on Project Gutenberg so at least you can get it for free.

Jean-Paul’s Rating: 2/5 stars

Wherever your life’s travels take you, never share a vehicle with anyone named Gulliver for doom is sure to visit you.  I am pretty sure this advise will serve you well.

Earth: the final frontier.  These are the voyages of Lemuel Gulliver.  His on and off again mission: to satire English life in the 18th century, to use imaginary beings to point out the faults of mankind, to baldly criticise those in power except for royalty which either Jonathan Swift was totally fine with or they were too prickly of a target for his barbs.

As you can probably tell, reading “Gulliver’s Travels” reminded me of “Star Trek”.  And, as you can probably tell from my rating, we’re talking season one of TNG.  Ugh.  Through a series of voyages, Gulliver finds himself on a variety of uncharted islands inhabited by previously undiscovered intelligent species.  The only thing missing is him making funtime with the native women.

My guess would be that the biggest problem with this book is time.  While some of the material covered is timeless, the time Gulliver spends with the Liliputians and the Brobdingnags comes across as very stale because of the temporality of the topics.  Add to that the fact that writing about really short humans (the Liliputians) and really tall humans (the Brobdingnags) is no longer terribly original and you find yourself with some tedious reading to get through.  This part is not all bad though.  Swift’s description of the Brobdingnags especially really makes you reflect on the concepts of beauty as he attempts to convey the hideousness of massive pores and freckles or the repulsive nature of a 72 foot tall woman’s breast.

Gulliver’s travels do get slightly more interesting from there.  His next stop is the flying island of Laputa which is inhabited by people who pursue science purely for science sake and the preposterousness that can come from that.  It isn’t exactly good satire, but it’s at least entertaining to read Gulliver describing all the ridiculous experiments that Laputans dedicate themselves to the detriment of their daily responsibilities to society.  The only other interesting part in this adventure is Gulliver’s reflections on immortality as he meets the immortals of Glubbdrubdrib who live forever but still age normally.

Gulliver’s final travels find him on the island inhabited by Yahoos (primitive men) and Houyhnhnms (intelligent horses).  This adventure was actually enjoyable to read.  The Houyhnhnmns are the only non-human in appearance race and he uses them to portray Swift’s ideal lifestyle for humanity.  That he uses a non-human race reflects Swift’s belief of the unlikelihood of humans to ever reach that idea.

Oh, I should also mention my love of the paragraph.  Paragraphs break up stories nicely and provide bite sized chunks of information to digest.  Swift hates paragraphs.  They go on for pages in this book.  This may or may not be on purpose.  There is a fake foreword from the editor who spends some length describing how Gulliver uses meticulous detail in describing even the most non-interesting events and how he had to force Gulliver to pare down his descriptions of things.  At the onset of the book, I found the caveat that Gulliver is a horrible storyteller amusing.  After finishing the book, I think Swift may just have been an asshole.

Jean-Paul’s Rating: 2/5 stars

It is the near future and copyright laws have gone from insanely restrictive to ludicrously restrictive.  It is a world where the Internet is not a luxury but a necessity.  Family’s lives are ruined because their children illegally download copyrighted materials which causes them to lose their Internet connectivity.  Teenager Trent McCauley’s obsession with remixing the works of a famous writer/director/actor into new art gets his family kicked off the Internet for a year.  Guilt-ridden for destroying his family’s livelihood, Trent runs away to London where he meets like-minded kids as he learns to survive on the mean streets of the city.

It is an interesting premise for a book and about the first half or so is lots of fun as we follow Trent’s adventures in London, learning the science of begging and finding the best dumpster food in the city and navigating the finer points of squatting in abandoned buildings.  That’s all pretext for the main story which is, unfortunately, Trent and company’s attempts to overturn the egregious copyright law which caused Trent’s family to lose their Internet in the first place.

Copyright law and a free and open Internet are topics that are often covered by Cory Doctorow and what he has to say about the topics is well worth reading.  They should not be the subject of a young adult fiction book, however.  The thing is, all the copyright stuff is incredibly boring.  You can try to hide your copyright talk in the various misadventures of teenagers all you want, it doesn’t make it any more interesting to read about.

Aside from the copyright stuff, there are some interesting topics covered from what art is to what ownership means to living on the streets of London to the hosting of pirate cinemas in the sewers to the prevalence of the surveillance state.  The problem is the rest of it is just kind of thrown in there and nothing really ties together.  Even the ending seems kind of just thrown together.  When your bright idea is showing a pirate remix on the side of Parliament to help sway the vote of a law meant to make copyright law less egregious, you may not have thought your ending through enough.

Jean-Paul’s Rating: 5/5 stars

A quick note on translation.  Obviously, “Faust” is not originally an English text.  This means that someone has to take the German original and translate it into English for those of us too lazy to learn another language.  This version of “Faust” was translated by Bayard Taylor who did an outstanding job.  You can get it off of Project Gutenberg for free.  How in the world one takes a text written in verse in a different language and translates it into English while being able to keep the rhyme and the cadence AND hold true to the original meaning is beyond me.  I stand in awe.  Of course, I don’t have much to compare it to considering I’ve not read “Faust” before.  Maybe all are equally as good.

“Faust” is more a beautiful work of art than it is a good story.  In fact, the story is pretty crappy.  Man has almost everything.  Man wants more.  Man makes pact with devil.  Man wants girl.  Devil helps get girl.  Man destroys girl and her family.  Man lives happily ever after.  Poor Margaret.  A feminist book this is not.

Everything around the story is just phenomenal, though.  There is scene after scene of fascinating characters with entertaining dialogue.  Most of the time, it is quite easy to follow the unfolding of the story despite the verse.  Some of the free verse stuff can get a little thick and difficult to follow at times, but poetry’s not meant to be easy.  Those times were trying, but they were minimal.

It is clear why “Faust” is one of those books that has lasted 200 years.  It is a timeless tale woven into an artistic tapestry.  While reading, I couldn’t help but think how much more beautiful the original German version is.  I am sure that countless people were drawn to the German language just by the power of reading a translation of “Faust” alone.

Here’s an interesting “Faust” fact that I got from Wikipedia.  In the original version of “Faust”, while Margaret is rotting away in jail after accidentally killing her mom and drowning her baby, a chorus of angels cries out that Margaret is condemned – “Sie ist gerichtet!”.  Goethe quickly changed it to Margaret being saved – “Sie ist gerettet” – which makes much less sense to me, but was apparently a crowd pleaser.  What amazes me is how similar “gerichtet” and “gerrettet” are to each other.  You could probably easily mistake one for the other if not pronounced clearly.  Maybe for Germans being saved and being condemned are pretty much the same thing.

Jean-Paul’s Rating: 3/5 stars

This book gets Jean-Paul’s Gold Star Seal of Approval for Having a Strong Female Lead™.  It’s totally a thing.

This is my first foray into Agatha Christie books.  I was both pleased and a bit disappointed with the book.  This is the second book written by Christie and introduces us to characters that she will use again in future novels.  Tommy Beresford and Prudence “Tuppence” Cowley are lifelong friends who are looking to make some money.  They overhear a conversation at a restaurant that leads them into a fairly immoral blackmail plot.  The blackmail plot leads them into a world of international intrigue putting them in the position to foil an attempt by the mysterious Mr. Brown to throw England into chaos.

The plot is kind of convoluted.  Tommy and Tuppence are looking for a girl and a document that she may be in possession of.  The document is of utmost importance because if it gets out, it could lead to another war.  It is never quite clear how or why this would happen, which I guess is not exactly necessary, but it is a hole that bothered my brain while I was reading.

The Tommy and Tuppence characters are absolutely delightful.  Tuppence is smart, strong-willed and reactionary while Tommy is more of a wait and think kind of person.  I found myself wishing that the whole world would talk like those two talk to each other.  They are playful and witty and exchange mocking barbs with each other.  The times they are together make for wonderful reading.  But then Agatha Christie makes the mistake of separating them for a good portion of the middle of the book.  And apart, the story drifts into a bunch of larger than life characters that are only somewhat interesting.  Each kind of flits from scene to scene but the magic of their interactions are gone.  This is more noticeable with Tommy than it is with Tuppence, but it applies to both.

“The Secret Adversary” is a decent book with some things going for it.  It was only Agatha Christie’s second novel so she may still be finding her voice.  I am sold on the Tommy and Tuppence combination, though, so I will definitely be reading more of them.

Jean-Paul’s Rating: 4/5 stars

Imagine if you were responsible for hundreds of medical breakthroughs and you never even knew about it.  Imagine if you were responsible for hundreds of medical breakthroughs and no one else knew about it either.  So was the life of Henrietta Lacks.  Henrietta was killed by a particularly vicious form of cervical cancer that consumed her body in a matter of months.  Early in her treatment, doctors took a biopsy of her cancerous cells and found something remarkable.  They did not die.  Cells, when taken out of a host, tend to be very difficult to keep alive and could only divide a certain amount of times before they stopped dividing.  Henrietta’s cells not only stayed alive, they thrived and kept dividing forever.  Scientists finally had a source of cells to perform research on that bypassed many of the troubles they had with other cell lines.  Thus the HeLa cell line was born.

The book can really be divided into three distinct but intertwining stories; Henrietta’s story, her cells’ story, and her family’s story.

Henrietta’s story is interesting.  Skloot does a very effective job of humanizing a woman whom nobody knows but everyone should.  Until quite recently, every medical professional had heard of HeLa cells but few knew of the person from which they came.  She didn’t deserve the death she had, but her death led to the saving of, likely, millions of lives.  It is only fair that her actual life be immortalized in the same way her cells continue to live past her death.

HeLa’s story is absolutely fascinating.  Scientists have since figured how to make other cell lines immortal, but no others have ever come directly from a human being save HeLa.  There are more HeLa cells spread around the world than made up Henrietta Lacks’ body.  We are talking measuring in tons.  The amount of breakthroughs that were a direct result of being able to test with HeLa cells is remarkable.

The Lacks family story is a bit, er, lacking.  When the story is on point and directly tied to their attempts to cope with the knowledge that their mother has the status that she does and the moral implications of people using her cells, it is both riveting and sad.  There were so many people who tried to help and as many people who tried to take advantage of the Lacks family that they ended up not knowing who to trust.  Their distrust was so great that it is remarkable that Rebecca Skloot was able to write the book in the first place.  The Lacks family story revolves around one question; who owns your cells and who gets to profit from them?  The answer remains to this day unanswered under law.

“The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” is a book that should be read by all.  Henrietta Lacks is a woman who should be known by all.  It is mind-blowing that so much good can come from the death of one woman.