Month: February 2009

The Kite Runner is a kind of coming of age (and then some) story by Afghan-cum-American author Khaled Hosseini. It tells the life’s story of Amir, a native of Afghanistan’s capital city of Kabul. The novel starts with Amir’s childhood, predating much of the country’s civil and international strife with which more modern readers may be familiar. It was actually a pretty nice childhood, most of which Amir spent with another boy named Hassan, who despite being from a lower caste and being the son of Amir’s household servant, is a good friend.

Things fall apart, though, after Hassan experiences a brutal attack that Amir might have been able to stop if he had been more brave and able to reciprocate half the loyalty Hassan has for him. This failure and the crushing guilt that comes with it haunt Amir and changes not only his relationship with Hassan but his entire life. To say more would spoil things a bit, but suffice to say that along with exploring some severe daddy issues, the rest of the book is spent seeing Amir’s life go around the globe and coming full circle to redress his wrongdoings.

I enjoyed The Kite Runner well enough, and Housseini is a competent author with a good sense of pacing. It’s very readable and things zip along quickly enough outside of a few bits where there’s too much tromping around Northern Californian flea markets. And Amir is certainly a complex character who swings through a number of development arcs. Most of the book’s energy comes from exploring his nature and seeing him pursue dreams and wrestle with the guilt that he can only bury, not shed. And there’s some interesting stuff going on with his relationships –with his dad, with Hassan, and with others.

I also enjoyed learning about Afghanistan, its culture, history, and people. It was a new setting for me, and one that the author did a pretty good job of describing. One complaint that I have in this area, though, is that Housseini went WAY overboard with injecting phrases from the Afghani language into the narrative. I can see why he does this: it adds color and authenticity. And it’s fine when referring to nicknames, cuisine, places, or anything else idiosyncratic to the culture. But when he injects Afghani words for common words like “souveneir” or “street” then it just gets distracting kludgy. It actually reminded me in that way of how bad fantasy novels will lamely inject phrases from dwarven or elven or whatever made-up language in an attempt at local color. What’s worse is that Houssini doesn’t really need to do this; he paints the culture vividly enough with other brushes so that he didn’t have to over rely on this old trope.

Still, The Kite Runner is on balance pretty entertaining and different enough from stuff I normally read to be interesting.

In The Invention of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America, author Steven Johnson calls forth a number of players, but if we had to pick out one main protagonist it would probably be Joseph Priestly. You may (or may not) remember Priestly as an 18th century contemporary of folks like Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, to whom credit is often given for isolating gaseous oxygen. Interestingly, he was also the first person on the planet to realize that the oxygen that makes air breathable to us isn’t something that is de facto just there; rather, it’s produced by plants. In this way, Priestly isn’t just the father of modern chemistry, but the whole science of ecology –the study of how organisms and environments interact with each other.

But let’s back up a little bit. Much like he did in The Ghost Map, Johnson uses The Invention of Air to examine a wider set of interrelated subjects through events that seem unrelated at first. We get information about British coffee house culture, natural philosophers, coal mining in northern England, photosynthesis, burgeoning American revolution, riots over Unitarianism, the blending of religious faith and science, giant ferns from Carboniferous Era, Thomas Kuhn’s codification of the scientific method, and the aforementioned founding fathers. Priestly is at the center of most of this, with the unifying theme that all these things interconnect and affect each other –a concept parallel to Priestly’s own discoveries about the ecosystem involving oxygen, animals, bacteria, carbon dioxide, and plants.

So far, this sounds a lot like a history of science that you’d think I would enjoy if you were familiar with my reading list. Unfortunately while it’s an interesting topic and approach, The Invention of Air falls kind of flat for me. It’s just that Priestly either isn’t that interesting a person when you get down to it, or Johnson fails in his job at storytelling and keeping things interesting enough. I found the big ideas here to be full of promise, but the execution just left me with my mind wandering off time after time. To continue the Ghost Map comparison, it didn’t have a strong hook like a cholera epidemic to really pull you in and keep you there. It really needed something like that to make it both educational and entertaining at the same time.

The full title here is Losing It: And Gaining My Life Back One Pound at a Time by Valerie Bertinelli. Yes, that’s right. I read an autobiography by Valerie Bertinelli, she of One Day at a Time fame, countless made-for-TV movies, and a marriage to a certain Van Halen member. Let’s chalk it up to expanding my horizons and stepping outside my usual reading comfort zone.

And actually, it’s not a particularly BAD book. Bertinelli tells her life’s story (so far), following what I can only assume is the typical celebrity autobiography template: she talks about her parents, her roots, her childhood, her coming of age, the train wreck her life becomes, and how she stepped up to pull things back together and be happy (and thin). All through the narrative is the theme of her obsession with her weight, and she sprinkles numbers throughout that serve as both measures of her weight and sign posts to various crises in her life. Personally, I’m surprised that she could remember with such precision how much she weighed 20 or 30 years ago, but apparently she was obsessed with that kind of thing.

The most interesting parts of the book were the early chapters where she talked about her childhood and how she broke into acting through a stumbling start with a few commercials and eventually landing her role as Barbara Cooper on One Day at a Time. The middle part of the book where she describes juggling a TV acting career with a doomed rock star marriage was actually pretty boring, and only served to make me realize that I’d actually rather be reading a biography about Van Halen. But Bertinnelli really only lived on the periphery of that story, so we got very little gossip or insight there. The last 20 pages are so are dedicated to her joining the Cult of Jenny and becoming a spokesperson for the Jenny Craig weight loss system.

The book isn’t helped by the fact that Bertinelli isn’t a particularly great writer, though I’ve certainly read worse. The theme of how her weight related to her self-esteem provided a common thread to all parts of the story, but personally I got pretty sick of hearing numbers tossed around and all the constant “BLECK! Jalapeno cheddar poppers! I WAS SO FAT! Jordan almonds! AAACK!” At times it felt less like a real story and more like the extended script for that Cathy comic strip I used to always think was not funny as a kid. She also breaks off into non-sequeter screeds against poparatzi and George Bush that seemed to come out of nowhere.

So, on balance the book wasn’t bad, but it’s the kind of itch that could probably be scratched by watching any random episode of E True Hollywood Story or possibly VH1 Behind the Music. If you’re there for some kind of personal insights or triumph, you’re going see them coming far before Bertinelli gets them, and get tired of them well before she’s through with you. But if you’re particularly interested in her as a person, go for it. She seems like a pretty nice person and I was left feeling glad that things seem to have worked out for her.

Ender’s Shadow by Orson Scott Card is a “companion” novel to one of Card’s other science fiction novels, Ender’s Game, in that they follow the same events but are told from different points of view with different protagonists. Ender’s Game tells things from the perspective of Ender Wiggins, a fantastically intelligent child and natural leader who is tapped by the International Fleet to receive the crash course training needed to protect humanity from an alien threat. Ender’s Shadow, published years later, tells the same story, but focuses on Ender’s fellow classmate Bean, a character that was ancillary to the first book.

To say that the diminutive Bean is smart would be a drastic understatement. He has a perfect memory and perfect, at-will recall of anything he’s seen or heard. He was talking before he was a year old, and by age six he was reading the works of history’s great military leaders and authoring scholarly articles with insights so piercing that they put Earth’s greatest adult thinkers to shame. Bean also has a great capacity for what’s known as “emotional intelligence” –he can immediately read people, intuit things about their motives, understand how they relate to each other in even the most complex social webs, manipulate them, and accurately predict how they will act and react.

Yet for all his mental prowess, Bean’s upward mobility in Battle School is hampered by the fact that he’s not only younger than any of his classmates, but he’s freakishly small for someone even his age. He also finds himself overshadowed and pulled into the gravity of Ender Wiggens, who while not up to par with Bean in terms of sheer intelligence, is much better at leadership, developing his subordinates, and coming up with creative battle tactics. In a lot of ways, this book is about how Bean grows up and defines himself while existing in the shadow of his gifted contemporaries and in the light of not only one word wide threat, but also the one that’s sure to follow it.

I liked both Ender’s Game and Ender’s Shadow because I’m always attracted to characters who are smarter than they are strong. I like to see characters use their mind, wits, and creativity to get out of problems, and Card has a real knack for writing that –especially in children. It’s hard to do, because in the end a character can’t be more intelligent, insightful, or clever than the writer who created him. But Card pulls it off, and it’s great to see Bean use a combination of intelligence, insight, self-control, and drive to persevere. He’s just a great character.

As far as how this book relates to Ender’s Game, I’d say they’re both worth reading. It doesn’t feel like a cash-in, and while it lacks that great twist ending that Ender’s Game had (Bean deduces the twist ahead of time and tells the reader about it), it still has enough other things going for it. I really didn’t like the other two follow-ups to Ender’s Game that Card wrote and I read, but that was because they were very different kinds of books. If you liked Ender’s Game I think you’ll like Ender’s Shadow.