Category: Reading

I can’t take credit for this. A friend has described the Books Blog as a “blook.” This made sense to me, because if a Web log can be a “blog” then a Blog on books can be a “blook.” Then I did some research and found that “blook” has been used for a few years now to describe books based on blogs or books published on blogs. But I don’t see why the word can’t have a third definition for blogs about books. Anyone care to back me up on this? Click “more” to read my research on the word.
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Imagine a 14-year-old British boy, orphaned soon after birth, and raised by an uncle who travels the world.

Imagine this boy being tapped by MI6 to be a spy for Her Majesty’s government.

Think James Bond for the Harry Potter set and you got Alex Rider, the her of a series of novels by Anthony Horowitz that top the reading list for my seventh-grade stepson and his friends.

There have been six Alex Rider novels so far:

Stormbreaker
Point Blanc
Skeleton Key
Eagle Strike
Scorpia
Ark Angel

A seventh is set to be published in November, which is a long way to wait for younger readers. An eighth book is also said to be likely.

The seventh-grade critic I know says these books are interesting and are better than Carl Hiaasen’s Hoot and Flush.

Union College political science professor Lori Marso, and director director of Women’s and Gender Studies, weighs in with her favorite reads of the last year:

2006 was the year I reread most of the work of political thinker, Hannah Arendt. October 14th would have been Arendt’s 100th birthday, had she not died in 1975 at the age of 69. Her work was celebrated, remembered, debated, and updated around the world this past year at conferences and seminars devoted to studying why Arendt’s work is still, and maybe even more, relevant than it was in the century when she wrote.

Arendt was a Jewish intellectual, an émigré to New York from Nazi Germany who subsequently published her best known work, the 600+ page Origins of Totalitarianism, in 1951. Arendt is one of the most unconventional and controversial political thinkers of the twentieth century. Known as an “outsider” and sometimes even a “pariah” in philosophical circles, she valued “thinking without banisters” (i.e. without foundational principles or moral precepts) resulting in anti-systematic and highly original work. Her book, Eichmann in Jerusalem, which was first prepared as a series of New Yorker articles, sparked considerable controversy and criticism in the Jewish community in the United States. I also recommend the biographical Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of A Jewess, one of the first books Arendt wrote (finished in 1933, but not published until 1954), for its depiction of 19th century European anti-semitism and the difficulties and travails of assimilation for the Jewish woman.

Analyzing the horrors of the 20th century—the holocaust, potential nuclear destruction, the specificities of totalitarian societies, and the “banality of evil”—Arendt’s work is indispensable for an age facing environmental destruction, the ongoing war on terror, and the disintegration of civil liberties and spaces for political action. Arendt is indeed a writer for “dark times.”

Lori Marso is Professor of Political Science and Director of Women’s and Gender Studies at Union College. Her most recent book is Feminist Thinkers and the Demands of Femininity: The Live and Work of Intellectual Women(Routledge, 2006).

Novelist Roger King lives in nearby Leverett, Mass., and recently spent some time working on a memoir at Yaddo in Saratoga Springs before traveling to London. I caught via e-mail long enough for him to weigh in on his top reads of the last year:

“2006 was the year I rediscovered Marguerite Duras. I picked up an old copy of The Ravishing of Lol Stein in a Rockland Maine bookshop cafe. I only remembered having read The Lover, the best known of her books (later a Renais films), and the screenplay for her intricate and brilliant Hiroshima Mon Amour. I rowed Ravishing back to the sailboat I was sleeping on, and that evening had my heart and mind lifted and intoxicated by the sheer nerve of her writing. She explains nothing, yet you experience everything as deep and true. There is no trimming to court morality, nor any padding to court intellect, and the reader is flattered by this. Every sentence packs a punch. Nearly every sentence breaks the rules. It should not be possible to write like this, but she does. I went on to read Four Novels with similar entrancement, and also two of the shortest books I’ve ever read, The Malady of Death, and The Man Sitting in the Corridor. The latter must be among the sexiest, and most lacerating three thousand words ever written. I have a secret ambition to write books this short with content this full. It’s also true that while I feel entirely alive when reading Duras, I also often forget the detail of what I’ve read; she does not offer the lifeline of a simple storytelling logic. I notice the last New Yorker fiction issue included an old Duras piece (she died in 1996) – not her best – so perhaps I am not alone in my rediscovery.”

Born in London, Roger King is the author of three previous novels, Horizontal Hotel, Written on a Stranger’s Map, and Sea Level. He has worked throughout Asia and Africa as a socio-economist for various United Nations agencies and charities. In 1990 he moved to the United States to teach and concentrate on writing fiction. Since 1997 he has lived Western Massachusetts, writing and recuperating from M.E.Disease. Recently he has advised UN agencies on reconstruction aid for Afghanistan, and is executive producer of a documentary(with Mira Nair) about indigenous peoples, being filmed in 2003in Northeastern India. “A Girl From Zanzibar” was finally published in November 2002, by Helen Marx Books/ Books and Co., after facing extended delays and controversies with other publishers.

HVCC READS is a community reading program designed to encourage students, faculty and staff to read and discuss the same book — William Kennedy’s Ironweed. Meanwhile, at UAlbany, the campus will be reading Field Notes from a Catastrophe by Elizabeth Kolbert.
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Saratoga Springs author M.E. Kemp weighs in with her favorite:

THE RIVALRY: Bill Russell, Wilt Chamberlain and the Golden Age of Basketball by John Taylor

You don’t have to be a sports nut to enjoy reading THE RIVALRY because it’s not about basketball, it’s about the men who play it. Wilt Chamberlain and Bill Russell were Titans in a personal clash that raised the level of play to Heroic. Chamberlain was the first ego-driven Superstar — fast cars, faster women, a gigantic appetite for the good things and the talent to command them. The only one who could control him on the court was Celtics’ Bill Russell, a proud, complicated and intelligent man with a family life and a cause.

Russell fought racism all his life. Chamberlain had fun playing off-season with the Harlem Globetrotters. Russell would never demean himself playing for a bunch of clowns. Mercurial Walt would up and quite when he felt like it. Russell never quit; he was driven to win, and always as a team. Wilt was a showboat most of his career.

Russell had the one thing Chamberlain really envied — a coach who would fight for his players. Any book with Red Auerbach in it has to be a fun read. The legendary Celtics coach had a mouth worth two points to the team with his browbeating of officials.

The book starts off with his finagling to acquire Russell in the first place — a deal about the Ice Capades for Russell as a draft pick. This is a fun read except for the ending, when one of the Titan’s dies. The reaction from the other is surprisingly touching. Read it and weep.

M. E. Kemp is the author of DEATH OF A DUTCH UNCLE (coming March ’07) and MURDER, MATHER AND MAYHEM.

http://www.mekemp.com/author.asp

The tireless book reviewer and editor Bob Hoover at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette tries to make the word “interesting” interesting again with this short list of books:

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