Just finished reading The Year of Living Biblically. It’s a mildly amusing, superficial look at the difficulties inherent in actually following all the biblical commandments. Can’t really recommend it, but here’s the Amazon link.

Just finished reading Ceasar: Life of a Colussus by Adrian Goldsworthy. It’s a good summary of Caesar’s life, although it concentrates on military events more than political. The worst thing I can say about it is that it doesn’t really give you a good idea of why the Roman Republic fell. Here’s the Amazon link.

Finished reading Sgt. Piggy’s last night while stuck on the train. His introduction on how he got into writing a comic strip is worth reading.

Finished reading a Handful of Dust. Very Uneven

Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves by Adam Hochschild is a brief, readable account of the movement that ended slavery in the British Empire. It’s worthwhile, because it makes two points that are too often forgotten. First, that all the tactics of organized social movements (boycotts, pamphlets, petitions, etc.) that we take for granted were pioneered by the anti-slavery movement. Secondly, that when the movement started in the 1780s, the vast majority of the world’s inhabitants were slaves by any meaningful definition. Too many things are still wrong in the world, but at least that is no longer true.

I have been on a Philip K. Dick jag lately, triggered by the release of the new movie A Scanner Darkly (I will write a review of it later). Anyway, mixed in with a serial re-reading of his novels, I took the time to read the excellent Dick biography I am alive and you are dead. Although it does an excellent job of explaining the source of Dick’s obsessions with alternate realities and surface deceptions, the real value of the book is the numerous, often amusing, anecdotes that illustrate Dick’s character. A visiting French intellectual insists Ubik is one of the five best novels ever written, Dick assumes he must mean, at most, one the five best sci-fi novels ever. When the visitor insists that he really means one of the five best novels ever, the humble Dick is left baffled. Dick is convinced that Stanislaw Lem is part of an elaborate Soviet plot to lure him to Poland to brainwash him, and prevent him from revealing God’s ultimate truth to the world. Dick cannot understand his wife’s anger at his modeling of the controlling, insensitive, domineering wife in Confessions of a Crap Artist on her: “It’s just a book,” he keeps saying. Unfortunately, for Dick, it never was.

I just finished re-reading Damage by Josephine Hart. This is easily Hart's best book, mostly because all of her other books are weak re-workings of the same theme. Ironically, I think my opinion of Damage has gone down over the years, because of how disappointing I found the rest of her work. Or, it may just be that as I age I understand the feelings of the middle-aged protagonist a bit better. Now, I just need to see the movie version, something I have been meaning to do ever since I first read the book.

I just finished reading Drive by James Sallis. Midway through the book, a character asks, “Where’s Marlowe’s apartment?” That about sums up the book. Although Sallis dedicates the book to McBain, Westlake and Block, it is an extended play on the work of Raymond Chandler. Unfortunately, it evokes Chandler’s later confused work, when he was writing while drunk, rather than his best work like “The Long Goodbye.” If you admire Chandler, avoid this book, and instead pick up Gun, With Occasional Music by Johathan Lethem. Lethem’s book can be read profitably more than once. Sallis’s is merely good to occupy a couple of hours.

Read A Long Way Down this weekend. It’s typical Nick Hornby: easy to read, and determined to make the point that the only thing that makes life bearable is the small, human connections we make. Not as good as High Fidelity, marginally less depressing than How to be Good, better than About a Boy.

One of the most frustrating experiences as a parent is suggesting a book that you loved as a child to your own children, and finding they are completely uninterested. That’s what happened to me when I gave Wind in the Willows to my daughters. So, I just re-read it myself. It’s still wonderful.