The Hobbit Week 7

"It is an ill wind, all the same, that blows no one any good."

I am participating in the "The Hobbit" Read-a-Long instigated by Unputdownables.  As I previously mentioned, this is my first time reading The Hobbit! Some of my observations may seem like no-brainers, but I hope you can forgive my naive perspective.

This week we read chapters 13-15.  Full disclosure, I am writing this post ahead of time, because I went ahead and finished the book a while ago.  The pace was too slow for me, plus I wanted to see the movie the weekend it came out.  Towards the end I'll probably review the movie as well!

This section is the action the entire book is building up to - acquiring the treasure alongside an unexpected multifaceted struggle with elves, eagles, goblins, wolves, and even more dwarves.  Townspeople and Gandalf also figure into the story again.  I admit to skimming parts of this section.  I will feel the same way in the movie(s), I'm sure, since battle scenes are always in the category of yawnworthy for me.  There is also a lot of posturing between Incredibly Stubborn Thorin, the Elvenking, Bard, and Gandalf.  Nothing is fully resolved, and we leave the story with Bilbo grumbling about food again, tired of the mountain, tired of cram, and I think he's going to do something drastic!
 
There are a lot of little peppy quotes in this section, and I was the annoying reader who kept turning to her husband and reading them out loud.

"While there's life there's hope!"
"Third time pays for all."
"It is an ill wind, all the same, that blows no one any good."

Review of The Rapture of the Nerds

The Rapture of the Nerds: A tale of the singularity, posthumanity, and awkward social situations by Cory Doctorow
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I'm not sure I'd recommend this book to most people. It would take a great deal of patience, delight in details relating to posthumanism and the singularity, and maybe some experience in virtual living. I enjoyed it because I'm just a big nerd, I guess.

Here's an example of the density of writing:
"Huw last saw her parents at their disembodiment; they'd already had avatars running around in the cloud for years, dipping into meatspace every now and again for a resynch with their slowcode bioinstances dirtside. When they were finally deconstituted into a fine powder of component molecules, it'd been a technicality, really, a final flourish in their transhumanifaction."

Really, if you're familiar with Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross, both in their fiction but also in knowing what they themselves geek out about, this is probably the book for you. I've read more Doctorow than Stross, but follow both of them in Twitter, so I suppose I qualify!

My favorite bit of this book is the second chapterish section, where Huw is taken to South Carolina to serve as an ambassador of sorts. Only Charleston, SC, is known as Glory City, and is only filled with people who think they should have been taken in the rapture and weren't. Not exactly the friendliest place for an atheist to have to go. Because of the environmental catastrophe (he refers to the people living there as radioactive), Glory City is in a dome surrounded by chemical showers to keep out the ants. Ants live in continental supercolonies, and are the dominant species, at least in North America.

Along the way, Huw changes genders, and then gets taken into the singularity by his/her mother, or at least a version of her. I love her take on her qualms about living in the cloud:
"Her primary beef against the singularity has never been existential - it's aesthetic. The power to be a being of pure thought, the unlimited, unonstrained world of imagination, and we build a world of animated gifs, stupid sight gags, lame van-art avatars, stupid 'playful' environments, and brain-dead flame wars augmented by animated emoticons that allowed participants to express their hackneyed ad hominems, concern-trollery, and Godwin's law violations through the media of cartoon animals and oversized animated genitals."

To that, I say... word.

Books on Book - The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction

I like lists - making them, reading them, borrowing items from other people's lists - you name it, I love lists! From time to time I'll pick up a book that talks about books, and most of the time they are talking about books that were significant to the author, or maybe a recommendation engine to lead to a list that others "should" read, before they die, before they go to college, to be a true hipster, etc. I thought that is what this book would be when I picked it up. I turned out to be wrong!

Before I share the review, I thought I'd let you peruse my growing "Books on Books" shelf in GoodReads. Some of these I've read and some I have yet to read. I would love someday to write a book on books on books, but sometimes it feels like that has already been done.

Books on Books

Jenny's favorite books »

The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction by Alan Jacobs
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I'm not really sure I needed to read this. First of all because Professor Alan Jacobs is preaching to the choir. I love to read, and read on whims all the time, as he recommends. Second of all, he quotes heavily from 3-4 texts, two of which I've read recently (The Shallows by Nicholas Carr and the commencement address to Kenyon by DFW). However it is a short read (150 pages of text, many many big blocks of quotations, 12 pages of endnotes) and offers a perspective on why we should not read from lists, or to read classics just to cross them off the list. Unlike many traditionalist reading snobs, he isn't anti-eBook either, in fact reading eBooks may have given him back the love of reading.

Most of what I like the best, Jacobs is quoting from someone else.

"If a man is keen on reading, I think he ought to open his mind to some older man who knows him and his life, and to take his advice in the matter, and above all, to discuss with him the first books that interest him." - Rudyard Kipling

I'd like to rewrite it as:

"If a [woman] is keen on reading... [she] ought to open [her] mind to some older [person] who knows [her] and [her] life, and to take his advice in the matter... and to discuss with him... books that interest [her.]" and that's pretty much my reading journey. Hooray.

Another good gem comes from the poet L. E. Sissman:
"A list of books that you reread is like a clearing in the forest: a level, clean, well-lighted place where you set down your burdens and set up your home, your identity, your concerns, your continuity in a world that is at best indifferent, at worst malign. Since you, the reader, are that hero of modern literature, the existential loner, the smallest denominator of moral force, it behooves you to take counsel, sustenance, and solace from the writers who have been writing about you these hundred or five hundred years, to sequester yourself with their books and read and reread them...."

I liked the thoughts on rereading. I am always struggling to balance all the new books I want to read with the feeling of wanting to revisit some books... Gravity's Rainbow, Ulysses (already, yes, I know), Dickens, etc., etc.

The author quotes most extensively from the poet W. H. Auden; surely this must be one of his specialties or something. Regardless, I love this little bit about the five reactions to something a reader encounters:
"I can see this is good and I like it; I can see this is good but I don't like it; I can see this is good, and, though at present I don't like it, I believe with perseverance I shall come to like it; I can see that this is trash but I like it; I can see that this is trash and I don't like it."

Perhaps I'll renumber my rating system this way, although there isn't really room for ambivalence here.

Jacobs talks about the desire to read MORE, to read FASTER, and why this might not be such a good thing. I'm not sure I agree. Probably because I get criticized for reading too much all of the time. And, after all, I'm always feeling like there is not going to be enough time for all the reading I want to do!

More than anything, I'm going to use the annotated bibliography for this book, to add to my list of books to read. Okay, it is possible that I did not exactly take his message to heart, which might be decidedly anti-list.

View all my reviews

Review of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

I don't normally review movies here; I don't really see many movies.  I thought it would make sense to review The Hobbit in the middle of posting about reading it, so I copied my thoughts that I posted to the Sword and Laser forum.  This will contain spoilers. 

Things I loved:
-How Smaug was portrayed in the back story at the beginning. A horrific presence too large too fit on the screen. Not a copout since you see the eye at the end and know he's coming, but a great exercise in scale.

-The landscapes. The inside of the Lonely Mountain, the high rock where the eagles left them, Rivendell. Just gorgeous.

-Perfect casting for Bilbo and Thorin. I hadn't paid attention to who had been cast, so it was a perfect surprise.

-The songs. Lighthearted in some instances, mournful in others. I wish they'd included more.

-Riddling scene, yeah, that was great.

Things I feel confused about, wonder if I missed in the novel or if they were changed/added and want to check on:
-Everything at Rivendell. I know Tolkien glosses over scenes by saying people have a conversation but it isn't central, but I don't remember it at all. And oh hey, that's the Cloud Atlas guy!

-The other wizards... I suspected they'd add more Necromancer bits in, and I'm curious about these other story lines.

-Stone giants. Was this in the book? How did I miss it?

-I remember thinking the dwarves in the trees bit was funny in the book, not scary, and to part of a personal revenge story. Maybe I missed it.

Things I wasn't partial to:
- The length of time at Rivendell... Although I suspect this has to do with setting up for the Necromancer/Gandalf storyline that they've clearly decided to tell

-The battle scenes. I never like them, and that is what stops me from rewatch img LotR too. It also is the pacing that is effected, without one overall battle climax it starts to feel tedious. That's the issue with spreading it out over multiple movies.

-You only really know Bilbo misses home from what the dwarves say. I wish we could have seen more of his internal conflict, but this was more of an action movie. He is heroic but not very tortured.

Reading Goals for End of 2012

I think I might be able to make 200 books by the end of the year, even if they're short ones.  It would be a lovely round large number that I can wrap my envious brain around!

According to GoodReads, I would only need to read 14 more books to make this happen.  That's roughly one a day, and I'm officially on vacation, which would hopefully translate into more reading time!

Here is what I'm thinking, and might go with a different set entirely:

1. The Black Flower by Howard Bahr - I'm reading this already with the "On the Southern Literary Trail" group in GoodReads.
2. The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim by Jonathan Coe - Already reading, and this will count for my Around the World challenge.  I borrowed this from a friend and really need to give it back!
3. Improving Your Storytelling by Doug Lipman - This is due back to the library on December 20, and can't be renewed since it is interlibrary loan.  I'm teaching a storytelling class in May and need to see if this might be useful as a text.
4. Music Research: A Handbook by Laurie Sampsel - Now that the book is in its second edition, I need to get acquainted with it before the spring semester starts.  I'll need to update my syllabus if any changes were made.
5. Birds of a Lesser Paradise: Stories by Megan Mayhew Bergman - I have a review copy of the audiobook, which will be a good one to listen to as I gallivant around in the next week or so.
6. Rock Crystal by Adalbart Stifter - One of the briefer books I have on my shelf intended for the Around the World challenge.  I saved it for Christmas week, some relation to the plot.
7. 100 Great Fantasy Short Short Stories - I snagged a copy of this from Paperbackswap.com for one of the SFF Audio hosts (he lives in Canada and can't use the site) but I think I'm going to read it before sending it. Shhhhh. Most of the stories are 1-2 pages, so it should go very quickly!
8. Ophelia and the Great Idea by Deborah Levy - After reading her Booker-nominated book, I snagged this from paperbackswap.  I thought reading more of her seemed like a good idea, maybe even a great one, har har.
9. Infidel by Kameron Hurley - This is #2 of the Bel Dame Apocrypha series (trilogy may be a better word).  Loved God's War, and her publisher gave away books 1-2 when #3 came out in November.  Now I just need to figure out where I downloaded it.
10. Deception by Philip Roth - I bet this will be a quick read. I got on a kick of acquiring Philip Roth books from paperbackswap.com but I can't remember what prompted me to do it! I guess I should find out and stop the madness.
11. The Portable Virgin by Anne Enright - Another instance of getting more of an author after reading a book nominated for an award. The cover is fun and the stories don't look too intense.
12. Little Tales of Misogyny by Patricia Highsmith - I may not have made it through the second Ripley book (er... yet....) but I've loved the short stories I've read by her so far.  The title of this collection is too compelling to resist!
13. The Dervish by Frances Kazan - I need to read this before it expires in NetGalley, but it sounds like a compelling story of romance and political intrigue during the "dying days of the Ottoman Empire."  I'll count it for my Around the World challenge too!
14. I'm leaving this open.  I have SO MANY BOOKS I could read, and I have a few I've been considering as 'rewards' for the around the world reading, but now that it will extend into another year at least, it is less at an end.

What is your goal by December 31? Share in the comments so I can salivate over what you are reading!

The Hobbit Week Six

"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations."

I am participating in the "The Hobbit" Read-a-Long instigated by Unputdownables.  As I previously mentioned, this is my first time reading The Hobbit! Some of my observations may seem like no-brainers, but I hope you can forgive my naive perspective.

This week we read chapters XI-XII.  Chapter XI details the dwarves and Bilbo finding their way into the mountain where the treasure they have been journeying towards is said to lie.  Chapter XII shows Bilbo venturing into the mountain to seek out the treasure and the dragon.

Place names mentioned in this section: Long Lake, River Running, Lonely Mountain, Ravenhill

Now that all the dwarves are back in their community because of the wine barrel escape orchestrated by Bilbo, he is an outsider once again.  At the same time, he is still in somewhat of a leadership role.  While the dwarves seem content to forget about the treasure and the mountain, he is eager to move forward:

"[Mr. Baggins] would often borrow Thorin's map and gaze at it, pondering over the runes and the message of the moon-letters Elrond had read. It was he that made the dwarves begin the dangerous search on the western slopes for the secret door."

 And still they complain. What is the burglar for? Why isn't he spying?

Bilbo's poor-me response: "It is always poor me that has to get them out of their difficulties, at least since the wizard left. Whatever am I going to do? I might have known that something dreadful would happen to me in the end."

Later on there is a funny scene after Thorin declares it is time for Bilbo to earn his reward. He protests that he has already saved them twice, which is above and beyond his charge. I liked how he talked himself around into helping them, and talking himself down from being afraid.  He has pretty well-developed emotional intelligence, for a hobbit.
 

The Hobbit Read-a-Long Week 5

"A pretty fine burglar you make, it seems, when the time comes."

I am participating in the "The Hobbit" Read-a-Long instigated by Unputdownables.  (I know the two the's seem redundant, but the title has one!)  As I previously mentioned, this is my first time reading The Hobbit! Some of my observations may seem like no-brainers, but I hope you can forgive my naive perspective.

This week we read chapters 9 and 10, from where the spiders leave off, to the wood-elves taking the dwarves hostage.  This is where Bilbo learns to be the leader.  I didn't expect this to happen.  When Thorin disappears, the dwarves look to him, and he is the one to figure out how to escape and what to do.  Not too shabby for a breakfast-loving hobbit from the shire!

I feel a little nervous for Bilbo though.  I'm taking mental note of how much he has been wearing the ring, and knowing the effect it had on Frodo, I'm practically holding my breath for something negative to happen.  After all, in chapter 9 he wears it the entire time the dwarves are imprisoned, sometimes not even sleeping in order to keep his location a secret.

However being invisible allows him to be the voice at the keyhole, carrying messages from Thorin to the other dwarves and lifting everyone's spirits.

After the wine barrels reach the mountain, they come into view of the Long Lake.  You may remember my fascination with the fairytale place names in this book, and this description does not disappoint:

"Only from the map did Bilbo know that away up there, where the stars of the Wain were already twinkling, the Running River came down into the lake from Dale and with the Forest River filled with deep waters what must once have been a great deep rocky valley. At the southern end the doubled waters poured out again over high waterfalls and ran away hurriedly to unknown lands."

Once the dwarves clear the barrels, we discover that Thorin is "Thorin son of Thrain son of Thror King under the Mountain."  It took me a while to figure out that he actually was this legendary creature, and wasn't just telling a story to get some food to eat. The dwarves are cared for in the Lake-Town by the Master, who isn't sure if he believes their story but indulges them (to his loss).  By the time chapter 10 ends, the dwarves are healthy and energetic and ready to return to their adventure.  Tolkien ends with this sentence: "The only person thoroughly unhappy was Bilbo."

Poor Bilbo.