Category: books

That didn’t take long: I finished all 759 pages of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows in barely five days.

It’s no spoiler to say that the book deals with some pretty heavy themes, as indeed the climax of a seven-part epic must. The action must rise and the emotional stakes must become almost too much to bear. The author, J.K. Rowling, does not disappoint. There is loss and sorrow and despair and other things too, both good and bad, and Rowling played me like a fiddle. All this week, my mood was good when Harry Potter was safe or happy, but miserable the majority of the time as the themes in the story had me dwelling on Alex, my mom, and various other well-loved things in my life that are ending, such as our sons’ attendance at the wonderfully offbeat preschool Little Arrows. Even finishing the audiobook of Moby-Dick, which I wasn’t particularly enjoying other than as an intellectual appreciation for its place in the annals of literature, was made more poignant by the feelings Rowling was making me have.

It is a further testament to Rowling’s mysteriously begotten powers that finally reaching the end of Harry’s story after spending most of a decade with him did not also fill me with a feeling of loss, but of fulfillment.

Now, back to my RSS feeds…

After finishing the free audiobook of Huck Finn recently (which was outstanding — better, I daresay, than trying to read Mark Twain’s written renditions of all those Southern dialects myself), I started on the Librivox audiobook of Moby-Dick. It’s no less dense than the first time I attempted it, but the reader, Stewart Wills, does a yeoman’s job of predigesting for me its turgid penetralia.

Here’s the weird part: as I’ve remarked previously, both Huck Finn and Slaughterhouse-Five, which I was reading contemporaneously, mention a French place name I’d never heard before: Tuileries. Today I heard it again in Moby-Dick! (Chapter 104, to be precise.) What are the odds?

Here’s another interesting connection: both Moby-Dick and Slaughterhouse-Five are hyphenated titles, and they both have subtitles (“The Whale” and “The Children’s Crusade,” respectively).

Well, it’s a little interesting.

Amazon will be delivering my copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows on Saturday. But leaked copies are already floating around the Internet, and according to today’s headlines, spoilers are proliferating online. Having recently run up against another big spoiler despite my best efforts to avoid it, I am going to make an even better effort this time: I’m going to stay off the Web until I’ve read book 7.

I don’t expect abstaining from the Web to be as easy as abstaining from cable TV has been, so when that book comes on Saturday I’m going to read my little heart out.

And when I’ve finished the book and I’m back online you may be sure I won’t spoil it for anyone else.

Now to aim my wand at my web browser… “Expelliarmus!”

These days my evening reading is Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut, and my daytime “reading” is a free audiobook of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (read superbly by one Marc Devine).

In last night’s reading, Vonnegut’s hero, Billy Pilgrim, was wandering behind enemy lines near Tuileries in France. And on this morning’s drive to work, Huck Finn’s narration mentioned the flight of Louis XVI from Tuileries Palace.

Never heard the name Tuileries before; now twice in twelve hours from two sources with no particular connection to each other and no particular reason for me to be reading them both now other than random chance. Crazy.

[Now moblogging from a layover in Baltimore on the way back to California. Maryland temporarily has two Bob Glicksteins.]

On the way to New York the other day, I finally finished The System of the World, the third and final volume in Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle. I was immediately sorry it was over and want nothing more now than to begin reading it again from volume 1 (Quicksilver).

Stephenson has a reputation for writing great stories with weak, hurried endings. His seminal novel Snow Crash (a personal favorite) was one such, as was Cryptonomicon, which didn’t quite rise to the challenge of tying together its two plotlines, interwoven but separated by a half century.

One lament among pilots is that you can fly for hours smoothly, swiftly, and safely, but if you get a little bounce on landing, your passengers will judge you unaccomplished. The same thing goes for writers, great stories, and endings. I love Snow Crash — I even once based the name of a startup company on a passage from it — but its pat and hasty wrapup has always nagged at me.

Perhaps Stephenson took this criticism to heart, or perhaps he simply took greater care with this, his masterwork, because I’m happy to say that The Baroque Cycle ties its numerous threads together neatly (but not too neatly!) and very satisfyingly. This goes even for the character of Daniel Waterhouse, whose biography for most of the cycle troubled me insofar as it was not very interesting — except, like Forrest Gump, for the company he keeps (e.g., Sir Isaac Newton) and the historical events at which he’s accidentally present. I detested Forrest Gump for this, but I stuck with Waterhouse on the faith that the author was laying a lot of groundwork for Waterhouse finally to become interesting in his own right, and I was not disappointed.

In all, this Entertainment Weekly review perfectly captures Stephenson’s achievement: “he might just have created the definitive historical-sci-fi-epic-pirate-comedy-punk love story.” Except I’d change “might just have” to “has.” Check it out.