read

spring 02

• how to lie with statistics.
• women on love by evelyne sullerot.
• chem by zanyatsa by dina rubina, in russian. you'd have to be on a major israeli patriotism wave to be able to stand even a paragraph of this. i managed to deal with it on the day my hebrew professor handed out chocolate bars to the entire class to celebrate the anniversary of the reconquest of jerusalem. style 3, content 3.
• stories by sergei antonov, in russian. communist propaganda, spread thick. style 5, content 1.
• stories by konstantin paustovskii, in russian. it's sad to know that he can write subtly sharp emotions, like "telegram", but instead spends pages praising the landscape or recounting war situations. usually i like war stories, but none of these seemed catchy. style 4, content 5.
• stories by yurii olyesha, in russian. "love" was even trippier than "liompa". plenty of writers have commented on how love is a state of illusion, and some invoke the cliche of feeling like you can fly, but how often does isaac newton slap a person in love for ignoring the laws of gravity? the other stories were sometimes a bit too apologetic or biographical, though. style 8, content 7.
• stories by yurii nagibin, in russian. mostly about how one person can hold a completely wrong opinion of another, and what happens when they find out they're wrong. more sad or hopeful than preachy. style 6, content 7.
• stories by vera inber, in russian. many of these stories rely on including a cutesy childhood moment, but are redeemed by a random vivid image thrown in, like the flattened sparrow in "death of the moon". style 7, content 5.
• trece relatos hispanicos (thirteen hispanic stories), in spanish.
• high infidelity - adultery stories by the "good" 20th century american authors, updike-level. ugh. yes, there's probably lots of motivations and tensions and character growth, but it's all so boring and slow that by the time i get to the end of one page, i've forgotten what happened on the last one. style 2, content 2.
• stories about god - also by the "good" 20th century american authors. with the exception of flannery o'connor, these people don't know anything about god, and nothing they say is informative, much less spiritual. style 2, content 1.
• fantasmas - ghost love stories by mexican american authors, in english. warm without being too fuzzy. with some explicit descriptions, but of food rather than love. style 6, content 7.
• smoke and mirrors by neil gaiman. look, i admit they're good. the atmosphere and the ideas, too. but retelling the same tale from a different point of view - that gets old, even if the point of view is original. perhaps these are just too subtle for me. see, my favorite aspect of a fable or fairy tale is the moral, and that is precisely the part that seems to be left out, or diluted and veiled to make it seem deeper. well, i'm too lazy to dig down to wherever that deeper is. content 6, style 7.
• without a hero by t. coraghessan boyle. 'carnal knowledge' which i encountered in a textbook was still the best one of these stories. but all of them, if less profound, were still - for lack of a better word - carnal. something very thick and meaty about the characters, the situations, the not-so-intriguing twist at the end. content 4, style 5.
• uvidet' derevo (to see a tree) by marina vishnevetskaya, in russian. oy. her lighthearted sketches of personified animals are nothing like her immersive, stream-of-consciousness serious work. and what a nasty stream it is. i guess she gets credit for so convincingly evoking a state of mind, and it's not her fault if the average state of mind in russia is so unappealing. content 4, style 5.
• collected short stories, by robert louis stevenson. well, the one that got me hooked was "the bottle imp", which turned out to be very different in style from most of his work. only a few tales towards the end were as fablish as the one about the imp, but many of them were crisp and colorful. somehow, the out-of-date ethics didn't get in the way of the character development at all. content 6, style 8.
• zhuzhukiny deti, ili pritcha o nedostoinom sosede (zhuzhukin's children, or the tale of the indecent neighbor) in russian. wow, hundreds of trippy stories by dozens of alert authors. most stories no longer than a page, just right for my attention span. and quite a few of them are tellable on stage. content 9, style 9.

summer 01

• griffin and sabine, by nick bantock. colorful (literally) and original, though the plot didn't grab me. enormous coffee table gift potential. style 8, content 3.
• our bodies, ourselves, by the boston women health collective. a little piece of history, painfully earnest. a frigthening amount of it still applies today. notably, dykes may be important, but a well-balanced diet is equally important. style 9, content 8.
• cuento negro para una negra noche (a dark tale for a dark night) by clayton bess, in spanish. telling right from wrong when family loyalty and village survival conflict with kindness to needy strangers, kindness inspired by a bible reading overdose. with a very convincing storyteller tone. style 7. content 7.
• cronica de una muerte anunciada by gabriel garcia marquez, in spanish. ok, i've had just about enough. academically, his going nowhere plots are masterpieces of tension, chock full of symbolism on many levels. but i'd prefer some plot and convincing character development. style 6, content 3.

spring 01

• collections of new stuff by dina rubina, in russian. perhaps after visiting israel i should now be able to appreciate her more. but in fact, she's getting less universal and more whiny with every word. style 7, content 5.

winter 01

• samson nazorei, by zev jabotinsky. in russian. after seeing how many streets in israel got named in honor of this author, i got talked into buying his book in a "5 books for the price of 4" deal. but no regrets. colorful bible fan fiction, with a nationalist moral that's not obvious enough to annoy me. depicts obsessive love as accurately as stefan zweig, but far more concisely. and the book can be used as a straightedge for drawing graphs! style 7, content 8.

fall 00

• pokoleniye p (generation p) by pelevin. in russian. ok, the buddhism just got out of control, and the images didn't compensate for that. style 7, content 5.
• el colonel no tiene quien le escriba, by gabriel garcia marquez. in spanish. whoa, i need to go look up a whole lot of spanish words before i can judge the style. but the drawn out, painful description of the colonel waiting is as far from suspenseful action as possible. style ?, content 4

summer 00

• the awakening, by kate chopin. ok, it's not that i was too dense and immature to properly appreciate this the first time i read it in tenth grade. the fault lies with the book -- the insistent "marriage is hell" theme echoed in every sentence tries my patience. still, very good evocation of the resort atmosphere, with its warm, bland, watery laziness. style 7, content 5.
• life and death in shanghai, by niem chieng. i expected something along the lines of eugenia ginsburg's "krutoy marshrut" (steep path) -- a graphic firsthand account of suffering at the hands of a communist dictatorship. however, some of the worst things that happen to niem include: her exquisite paintings and pottery getting taken away and rude people not taking their hat off to her. she is a spoiled bourgeousie snob, and deserves whatever minor inconveniences the chinese government imposes upon her high-society lifestyle. style 3, content 3.
• autobiography, by benjamin franklin. what a wonderfully cool and admirable person! i want a chart to keep track of my sins and vices, just like he had. style 6, content 8.
• tortilla flat, by john steinbeck. i didn't like that the author made me sympathize with the shiftless and violent characters, but that must be a sign of how good he is. style 8, content 4.
• the accident, by elie weisel. oh, my -- the holocaust not only killed and tortured a lot of people, but it also made all the survivors depressed and incapable of enjoying relationships. surprise! on the plus side, this contains some convincing parallel thought/speech sequences. as in, "what i'd like to say to this dumb bitch that is my girlfriend" vs "the nice bullshit i say to keep her happy." style 5, content 6.
• of mice and men, by john steinbeck. wow, it's actually not annoying, as opposed to grapes of wrath. no feeling of depth, but warm and fuzzy. style 6, content 6.
• i sing the body electric, by ray bradbury. creepy and with definite sensory bits, just the way i like 'em. style 8, content 7.

spring 00

• memories of silk and straw, by saga kunichi. i never thought of pre-wwI japan as a particularly pleasant environment, but the economic hardships as recalled by the people of a small fishing village portray it as a living hell. my favorite part is when they killed their newborn babies so that they wouldn't have to spend food on them. style 6, content 9.

winter 00

• mashenka by vladimir nabokov. in russian. less plot than lolita, but equally accurate in conveying an inappropriate mental state. style 8, content 5.

fall 99

• peder victorious by rolvaag. earlier, i read giants in the earth, and i always wondered what happened after the mother went insane and the father froze to death. now i know. style 6, content 4.
• plays and movie scripts by david mamet, including sexual perversity in chicago, duck variations, frog prince, house of games, american buffalo, the cryptogram, cross patch. unbelievably realistic dialogue, in all its apparent pointlessness. is that a demon you just noticed in the character's mind, or only a shadow skimming across the page? style 10, content 7.

summer 99

spring 99

• the broken dice by ivar ekeland. informal, but accurate treatment of chaos, chance, risk, randomness, and probability, illustrated with quotes from norse mythology. style 7, content 10.
• foucault's pendulum, by umberto eco. the first and last scenes were beautiful, but the majority of the intervening material was disappointing. also, the rosecrucian conspiracy, and the world-outlook implied in either accepting or rejecting this conspiracy, just didn't intrigue me at all. style 6, content 4.
• chapayev and emptiness (chapayev i poostota) by pelevin. in russian. the buddhism got annoying, but the two intertwining frame stories -- mental hospital and russian revolution -- plus the four or five branching hallucinations were pleasantly dizzy. style 8, content 8.
• ladron de la mente, by someone or other. in spanish. a vampire that drains women's minds targets a software engineer who's about to get engaged. proof that trash writing exists in every language. style 2, content 1.

winter 99

• the white guards (byelaya gvardia) by mikhail bulgakov. in russian call me a freak, but bulgakov's work, with the exception of master and margarita, never did anything for me. style 6, content 3.
• red dwarf, by someone or other. why the heck do i keep giving science fiction another chance? style 2, content 6.
• lolita by vladimir nabokov. a delicious trip. better than the movie, even. style 9, content 7.

fall 98

• here comes the messiah (vot idyot meshiah) by dina rubina. in russian. i hadn't the background to appreciate many of the russian and israeli cultural allusions, but she is still the only writer who can make me laugh out loud. style 9, content 6.