literature

Company: A Novel
by Max Barry
Amazon Description: “With broad strokes, Barry once again satirizes corporate America in his third caustic novel (after Jennifer Government). This time, he takes aim at the perennial corporate crime of turning people into cogs in a machine. Recent b-school grad Stephen Jones, a fresh-faced new hire at a Seattle-based holding company called Zephyr, jumps on the fast track to success when he’s immediately promoted from sales assistant to sales rep in Zephyr’s training sales department. “Don’t try to understand the company. Just go with it,” a colleague advises when Jones is flummoxed to learn his team sells training packages to other internal Zephyr departments. But unlike his co-workers, he won’t accept ignorance of his employer’s business, and his unusual display of initiative catapults him into the ranks of senior management, where he discovers the “customer-free” company’s true, sinister raison d’être.”
We read this for book club, and although it was a quick read and funny, we ultimately didn’t have a huge amount of discussion about it. I’m not sure if that’s because we all work for a big corporation and the subject is a bit too familiar, or if we really don’t think working for big companies as as bad as portrayed in this novel. Although the book was funny, I had to admit that it was pretty depressing. Logically, though, the company portrayed here couldn’t function in real life, and part of the conceit of the novel — removing the customers from the equation — is both the reason why it wouldn’t, and what keeps companies from spiraling out of control in this fashion.
Adventures from the Technology Underground: Catapults, Pulsejets, Rail Guns, Flamethrowers, Tesla Coils, Air Cannons, and the Garage Warriors Who Love Them
by William Gurstelle
Amazon Description: “What is the technology underground? According to engineer and technology consultant Gurstelle, it’s a community of like-minded amateurs–inventors, mostly, although some of them might more accurately be characterized as daredevils. Men and women who have devoted their lives to the things that conventional science has dismissed as unworkable, impractical, or just plain pointless. Flying cars, for example, or newfangled catapults, air guns, and flamethrowers. Or fighting robots and, of course, LDRS (large and dangerous rocket ships).”
This is Gurstelle’s second book – his other — Backyard Ballistics: Build Potato Cannons, Paper Match Rockets, Cincinnati Fire Kites, Tennis Ball Mortars, and More Dynamite Devices — is an older favorite of mine. Both are an entertaining read about technology and the people who, in the spirit of at least one of our founding fathers (Benjamin Franklin), enjoy experimenting with science for the sheer love of learning. These are folks who take science out of the realm of the academic and bring it to the masses, where it becomes a hands-on experience and a subject that everyone can learn and respect.
Hornswoggled (An Alafair Tucker Mystery)
by Donis Casey
Amazon Description: “Set in the prairie town of Boynton, Okla., in the spring of 1913, Casey’s nostalgic, folksy second novel to feature Alafair Tucker finds the full-time mother of 11 and part-time sleuth worried about one of her grown daughters, Alice. Alice is sweet on barber Walter Kelley, an attractive widower whom the determined and discerning Alafair mistrusts; Walter is just too popular with the ladies. Since Alice is set on having Walter, Alafair seeks distraction by investigating the unsolved murder of Louise Kelley, Walter’s late wife, whose stabbed body surfaced in a creek bordering the Tucker farm eight months earlier.”
This was really light reading, but fun, and it held together pretty well — no huge plot holes that make you put the book down in disgust. The author spent a lot of time on the pioneer homelife of the main character, which was a bit overkill for me, and the mystery sort of solves itself towards the end, but it was a nice relaxing book.
And then there’s the book that I picked up several times, but just couldn’t read at all:
My Dirty Little Book of Stolen Time
by Liz Jensen
I love the book title, I love the cover (I even took a picture of it when I spotted it in the bookstore in Chicago) and I loved the book’s premise, but I just couldn’t get further than a few chapters into it. For some reason, I just couldn’t identify with the main character. Here’s the description, if you want to give it a shot, though:
“When 25-year-old Charlotte Schleswig begins telling her madcap tale in 1897, she’s a successful prostitute roaming the suburban streets near Denmark’s capital. A random meeting in a bakery leads her to begin working as a domestic for Fru Krak, an anxious woman whose husband has recently disappeared under mysterious circumstances and who may now be haunting the very streets Charlotte walks. Charlotte soon sets out to find the missing Professor Krak, and in the course of her investigations discovers 21st-century London, a whole new world of mobile phones, microwaves, flavored condoms, suicide machines and a handsome archeologist named Fergus.”

How Nancy Jackson Married Kate Wilson
and Other Tales of Rebellious Girls and Daring Young Women
by Mark Twain and John R. Cooley

Library Journal: “A dozen minor Twain pieces to show how Twain used some of his slight fictions to idealize his daughters Clara and Suzy Clemens as romantic, rebellious, and daring adolescents in the decades that glorified the sassy Gibson Girl. Twain probably considered his stories of transvestites, lesbian relationships, and sexual oddities almost scandalous, and he must have viewed “Little Bessie,” in which a child questions her mother about God, as dangerously blasphemous.”

A not terribly captivating book, in all, probably of more interest to Twain scholars than to women interested in tales of daring and rebellious women. The best story in it is Little Bessie about a girl who vigorously tears apart her mother’s Christian mythology — a story that wasn’t ever published, probably because it’s the most true thing Twain wrote.

Geography Club
by Brent Hartinger
Geography Club is a gay teen novel about 16-year-old Russel Middlebrook who comes out to himself befriends other gay teens at his high school, while battling bullying and homophobia from other classmates. It’s number 2 Book Sense’s list of favorite banned books. It’s been challenged at some school libraries due to homophobia, although it’s quite chaste in subject matter.

It was a quick and pleasant read and is a nice counterpoint to popular teen lesbian novels like Annie on My Mind. It’s nice that books like this exist nowadays. When I was a teenager, I was stuck with reading all the cross-dressing plays of Shakespeare, and checking out Collette novels.

Emotions Revealed: Recognizing Faces and Feelings to Improve Communication and Emotional Life
by Paul Ekman
NON-FICTION – Paul Ekman is a scientist and psychologist who has studied human emotion for several decades, especially how emotion is expressed in the face and voice. Ekman provides insight into a number of questions — When do we become emotional and why? How do we reconize the emotions we’re feeling and can we changed them, or change how we react to them? How do we recognize what others are feeling, even when they may be hiding their emotions?
You start the book by taking a test in the appendix — a quiz on your ability to quickly recognize facial expressions. You may get a lot wrong, but by the end of the book when you retake the test, you’ll do much better.
In his early studies, Ekman sought to answer a controversy in emotional science – do all humans use the same facial expressions to indicated emotion, and are those expressions learned, or innate? To solve the question, he spent three months with a stone age culture of people in New Guinea that had virtually no contact with the outside world. After working with and photographing the people in a small village, he came to the conclusion that facial expressions are universal — all people make the same expressions for fear, anger, sadness, enjoyable emotions, etc.
Ekman walks through a number of different emotions and illustrates how they are expressed in the human face to help recognize subtle, partial or hidden expressions that will help you understand what emotions are being expressed by others.
One of the expressions I found really interesting is the “Duchenne” smile — a smile we express when we’re really happy, versus a “social smile” that we use to be polite or when we want to conceal unhappiness from others. I’ve always been able to reconize the difference between the two (I described them as a “real smile” versus a “fake smile”) — particularly in my girlfriend, but also in other people I know well, like my mom and some of my friends. A “Duchenne smile” — a smile of true happiness — involves not just the mouth but muscles around the eyes, and is impossible to fake because the eye muscles can’t be controlled voluntarily.
Ekman’s current studies are about how emotions are expressed by individuals — do some people have different levels of response to the same emotion than other people do? If so, how does that affect them, and can they learn to handle those emotions in ways that stimulate good communication with the people around them?
I sought out more about Paul Ekman after reading about him in Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, where Gladwell discusses Ekman’s ability to “thin slice” human expression because he’s spent so many years studying the human face. I checked the book out from the library, but it’s definitely one I’d consider adding to my personal collection, because I’d like refer back to it from time to time, especially the sections on becoming more emotionally attentive — aware of what I’m feeling so I can control how I react to improve my relationships with others.

So far this year, I’ve read 30 books, and many of them have been pretty light reading. I guess I’m quite a bit behind Bush. At this point, I’ve pretty much abandoned my New Years Reading List and gone off on wild tangents, which seems to be a commentary on my life in general somehow. And it’s probably a good thing.
Here’s the run-down so far:

The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists
by Gideon Defoe

Description from Amazon.com:

Not since Moby-Dick… No, not since Treasure Island… Actually, not since Jonah and the Whale has there been a sea saga to rival The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists, featuring the greatest sea-faring hero of all time, the immortal Pirate Captain, who, although he lives for months at a time at sea, somehow manages to keep his beard silky and in good condition.
Worried that his pirates are growing bored with a life of winking at pretty native ladies and trying to stick enough jellyfish together to make a bouncy castle, the Pirate Captain decides it’s high time to spearhead an adventure.
While searching for some major pirate booty, he mistakenly attacks the young Charles Darwin’s Beagle and then leads his ragtag crew from the exotic Galapagos Islands to the fog-filled streets of Victorian London. There they encounter grisly murder, vanishing ladies, radioactive elephants, and the Holy Ghost himself. And that’s not even the half of it.

Of course I loved this book — it’s about Pirates. And as a bonus — monkeys!