Well, it’s that time again. In the past two weeks, I’ve read over 3,000 pages (vacations are wonderful, aren’t they?) and I need to try to catch up with the reviews that I post on here. As of this update, I will be into books I read in this calendar year. I’ll still be a page and a half behind on the list, but it’ll still be better. Anyway, here goes:
Over The Top — Empey
Sundiver — Brin
The Way Of A Pilgrim — Fedotov
Rogue Warrior II: Red Cell — Marcinko
God Knows — Heller
Green Team — Marcinko
Empty World — Christopher
Our Marvelous Native Tongue — Claiborne
Animal Farm — Orwell
Big Lies — Meir-Levi
Over The Top is an excellent contemporary account of life in the trenches during World War I. The author (an American) joined the British Army to fight the Germans after the sinking of the Lusitania. In the book, he relates a number of his experiences ‘over there,’ some of them scary, some of them funny. He attempts to paint the war as vividly as possible, while accenting the positives (the book was largely written to encourage enlistment in the American Army after America entered the war in 1917). It is perhaps most fascinating for its careful analysis of the average British soldier, and even includes a dictionary at the back of common British military slang. This is definitely not an unbiased book, but is excellent to get a feel for the American attitudes toward the war and the British. It seems a silent movie was made about the experiences in the book (and starring the author himself) in 1918. I haven’t seen anywhere where the movie is available, even for download online. (The book is freely available for download from Project Gutenberg, but I’m too lazy to give you a direct link to it. Besides, you should be buying books from these links and helping support my site!)
Sundiver is the first novel of Brin’s Uplift Series. There’s an entire system of aliens and humans interacting in these books, and I have read a number of the books in the series, and enjoyed all of them. This one is about a trip to the sun to meet the creatures that seem to be living there. Halfway through, it turns into a murder mystery. In space. With aliens. What’s not to like?
The Way Of A Pilgrim is a collection of Russian mystical works (Christian mysticism, in this case). These stories help immensely in understanding the Russian spiritual/mystical mindset, as well as providing glimpses at Russian history and culture, as well as the lives of the religious individuals that the individual works are about. Some of the stories are naturally better than others, but on the whole the book is impressive.
Rogue Warrior II: Red Cell is a fictional account of the author (Richard Marcinko) and his escapades with his Navy SEAL buddies as they go around the country trying to find out who is behind various threats to national security. Not only does Marcinko have to worry about the bad guys, but his own government is out to get him as well. The book is a thrilling adventure story. The plot and characters are good, the action seems realistic, and the storytelling is done with a gritty, dirty flair. Marcinko can be quite foul-mouthed at times, and does his best to come across as a mindless, murdering brute, but underneath is a brilliant, calculating mind. Definitely a book that would thrill teenage guys, and those wishing to relive the adventuresomeness of youth.
God Knows is the story of King David. Yes, that’s right, the one in the Bible. But this isn’t the way the Bible tells the story — not by any means. All of the characters have their own personalities that come out at you in a way that the Bible doesn’t really do, and the storytelling weaving them together is very… well, Jewish. It has the loving cynicism that has come to be associated with Jews in America, and David (while acting as narrator) even sprinkles his story freely with Yiddish. This is an anachronism, yes, but it isn’t alone. As the book progresses, more and more things show up that David could not possibly have known about. By the time you get to the last page, you feel a sort of dissociation — David is at once the King of Israel, kvetching about getting old, and a wholly modern man. He sounds like an elderly neighbor discussing his medical problems and his life story with anyone who will ask. On the whole, it’s quite an impressive book, and gives you an entirely new insight into just what all can be read into a Bible story.
Green Team is the third in the series of Rogue Warrior books by Richard Marcinko. In this one, he and the guys are at it again — new problems to solve. The book is quite similar to Red Cell in everything but the story.
Empty World was probably one of the first apocalyptic novels I ever read. Technically, this is a book for children or adolescents, but it still makes engrossing reading for an adult. The premise of the story is that a virus wipes out almost the entire population of Earth. The small percentage that are left are all children or in their early teens. The book follows one of them, a boy from Britain, and his journey through this empty world. The story is incredibly dark, and suprisingly psychological for a book indended for younger readers. It deals directly with death, grief, and many other things that children are often shielded from, and handles them in a way that communicates directly with the audience. This is still one of my favorite apocalyptic books, and probably the one that I remember the most strongly from my middle school years.
Our Marvelous Native Tongue is a story of the English language. It discusses a lot of the history of the language, and many of its quirks. On the whole, a very informative book (I remember many of the random facts from it, although I don’t really remember much about the book as a whole. Hey, it was seven months ago, cut me some slack.)
Animal Farm is an absolute classic. Orwell used the guise of a children’s story to deliver important facts about the world as he saw it — freedom endangered by totalitarianism. Definitely one you should read. It isn’t very long, either — I read the entire thing in my spare time (study halls, lunch break, planning period, etc.) during one day at work.
Finally, Big Lies. This isn’t a book, really, so much as a pamphlet. I’m not sure where my dad got it, but I suspect that it was mailed out as a sample by the people at some political commentary magazine that wanted him to subscribe. Anyway, it attempts to tell the true story of the formation of the state of Israel, and how misleading some of the ‘facts’ put forward by those who support the Palestinians are. This is obviously tilted towards Israel, but I think it is definitely something that should be read if you are trying to educate yourself about the historical aspect of the political situation. Take some of it with a grain of salt, if you must, but take a serious look at it nonetheless.
Anyway, that’s all for now. Five more updates, and I’ll be caught up. Maybe.