A Language Older Than Words, by Derrick Jensen. I have a hard time figuring out what to say about this book. If I’d read it when I was 20, I would have been all about the same things as Jensen, not because his message is immature or because I’ve “outgrown” some of the things he claims and believes, but simply because my particular experiences and beliefs suggest that some of his rage is misdirected, some of his conclusions are mistaken, and some of his indictments are too sweeping. The main thesis he offers is that Western Civilization is insane. If …

No humor intended. Well, not good humor anyway. I have two more books to review for my Lunar New Year of reading, both of them very famous: Art Spiegelman’s Maus: A Survivor’s Tale and Edward Said’s Orientalism. Both of these books have been regarded as revolutionary, and both were fascinating. But I’m not sure what I can say about each that will add anything to what’s already been said, which in both cases in voluminous. Still, I’ll take a stab and presenting my take of them: Book #12: Orientalism by Edward Said, with an Afterword dated 1992. This book, especially, …

I finished this text a week ago, but I’ve been too busy and also too stunned by it to find anything to say about it until today. Here it is… book #11 of my Lunar New Year readings: Tomorrow Now: Envisioning The Next 50 Years by Bruce Sterling. This is a work of futurism. Any resemblance to the future, real or imagined, is not wholly accidental, but of course any and all correspondences will come as surprise. Futurism, after all, is a strange and dicey game. Envisioning it is even harder than talking about it, but envisioning it is what …

A week ago I finished book #10 of the fifty (minimum) I have planned to review this Lunar Year. Books #8 and #9 have been waiting a while, so I’m going to post a short review of all three here and get back to my reading. Book #8: Houston, Houston, Do You Read? (by James Tiptree, Jr.)/Souls (by Joanna Russ). Book #9: Science Fiction: The Best of 2002 edited by Robert Silverberg and Karen Haber. Book #10: The Clash of Civilizations And The Remaking of World Order by Samuel Huntington. Since these books are pretty much unrelated, I’ll examine each …

(As some of you know, I’m pursuing my goal of reading and blogging about 50 books this Lunar New Year, which means before next February. I have a feeling I’ll be beating that, of course, at this rate, but nonetheless, I will continue to number books all the way along.) Book #7: Søren Kierkegaard’s Attack on “Christendom” (Translated, with an Introduction and Notes by Walter Lowrie, and a New Introduction by Howard A. Johnson) I think I shall let Kierkegaard sum up the book, since he does it so much better than I can: Think of a hospital. The patients …

Book #6: A Mind So Rare: The Evolution of Human Consciousness by Merlin Donald. I started reading this book a long time ago, when it was sent to me in a box of books by my good friends in Austin. I started, and stopped, and then started again, and then stopped again. I think the last time I was working my way through it was last spring, because I found, between two stray pages, a four-leafed clover that Lime picked and gave to me one afternoon at that time. How I wished I’d not set the book aside, but instead …

Book #5: North Korea: Through The Looking Glass (by Kongdan Oh and Ralph Hassig) is only slightly dated, having been published in 2000. I really valued this book for the glimpse it gave me into North Korea. Unlike a lot of texts that seem to focus on the political-economic history—the kind of “master narrative” that doesn’t much describe daily life for the majority of real people except in very abstract terms—this book excavates a lot of things from the testimonies of North Korean defectors (I think of them more as refugees from a hellish unreality) as well as piles of …

As I posted recently, I have decided that, this lunar year, I will take up the 50-book challenge, but I am taking it up as of Seolnal, the Korean New Year (which is the same as the more famous Chinese-New-Year). I was just too busy writing when the western New Year rolled around to start in on this, but Seolnal’s a good enough marker in time for such a challenge. So here I am, starting with 4 books. Book #1: Graham Greene’s The Comedians. This novel is a brilliant work of art. It’s a story set in Haiti in the …