March 2008 - Page 3 of 4

Meme: Negativity

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I read this meme on Dewey’s blog, The Hidden Side of a Leaf. It addresses some questions I’ve asked myself lately, so here goes:

1. When you dislike a book, do you say so in your blog? Why or why not?

Yes. Unfortunately reading is not always a positive experience, so my record of it isn’t going to be, either. I like to be honest about my reactions to the books.

2. Do you temper your feelings about books you didn’t like, so as not to completely slam them? Why or why not?

Usually. I’m not out to hurt anyone’s feelings. Most books/authors don’t deserve to be pummeled with unkind remarks! However, I might have made a few exceptions, where I felt there was something dishonest about the way in which a book was written. I have to mention that yesterday I found a site that is all about slamming books, Scathing Book Reviews. At first it was hilarious to read what horrendous things were said about classics like Hamlet and The Grapes of Wrath. Then I discovered that all the remarks came from Amazon reviewers, which weakened the validity of it somewhat.

3. What do you think is the best way to respond when you see a negative review about a book you enjoyed?

Let it be. Not everyone is going to share my opinion or taste in reading material. However, if I feel I can offer a remark that may encourage someone who is reading the negative review to still try the book, I might leave a comment.

4. What is your own most common reaction when you see a negative review of a book you loved or a positive review of a book you hated?

See the above response: we all like different things. Why get upset about it? Sometimes it makes me sad if a book I really really love gets bad reviews, but it’s not worth it to get all bent out of shape. I probably dislike books that those people love, in return.

5. What is your own most common reaction when you get a comment that disagrees with your opinion of a book?

I’m not about to censor other’s opinions, so I just let them be. Unless of course, the language is abusive then I might moderate some comments but so far that hasn’t happened. If anything, I get more repsonses on posts I make that reflect poorly on books everyone else seems to have raved about. I don’t mind at all. I like to hear what everyone has to say, especially when their opinion is different from mine. It’s more interesting than just having everyone agree with you all the time.

6. What if you don’t like a book that was a free review copy? What then?

I’m still going to write about it and be honest. I am up front to people who send me books that my “reviews” are based a lot on personal opinion and what I like to read, so they shouldn’t expect rave reviews if they send me the latest hot romance novel or murder mystery. I’m just not into those kinds of books, so I probably won’t like it regardless of how well it’s written. And unfortunately, I’m not very good at stepping back and making an un-biased analysis of writing style, character development, plot arcs, etc. I’m just sharing my opinions on books. Including the negative ones.

7. What do you do if you don’t finish a book? Do you review it or not? If you review it, do you mention that you didn’t finish it?
I still make a brief note of what the book was about and why I stopped reading it. Sometimes it’s just as interesting to see what people don’t like in books as what they do. Also, I don’t want to forget a book I really disliked and pick it up a second time.

This has happened. One time a college roommate lent me a book that was her absolute favorite. I got a third of the way through and it began to feel very, very familiar. Finally I realized I’d read it before- and been terribly bored. I handed it back to her with the tactless remark “I’ve read this before, it was kinda boring” and she got quite offended. The book had touched her so much, she cried when reading it. If I’d recalled my first attempt, I could have avoided that whole unpleasant scene!

Keeping track of the books I abandon removes that problem.

I’m curious to hear what my fellow book bloggers have to say about this topic. I tag Charlene, Ravenous Reader, Chain Reader, Trish, Chris and anyone else who reads this and wants to participate.

Tags: memes

Horse People

Scenes from the Riding Life
by Michael Korda

This book is everything the previous one was not. Excellently written, thoughtful and full of information, it is a wide-ranging yet well-focused narrative on experiences with horses. It follows the author\’s personal journey into the world of horses, from rented rides in New York\’s Central Park to a privately owned stable in the countryside. Along the way he relates many stories of friends and acquaintances with horses, as well as the relationship of horse to man throughout history.

It is curious that, like Horseplay, this book also features a romance and divorce, with the narrator/main character leaving city life to be closer to horses. But those are all background notes, here. The horse is in the spotlight. Horse People touches on horses in art (introducing me to Rita Dee), horses owned by famous people (I glossed over most of the name-dropping) and all things horsey: formal dressage, casual trail rides, small-town rodeos, little girls and their ponies, the foxhunting elite, three-day eventing, backyard horses and thoroughbreds rescued from the racetrack. It expounds a bit on a few breeds: Arabians, quarter horses and thoroughbreds. The strongest impression I came away with was the sheer amount of work involved in caring for a horse.

Full of humor, interesting anecdotes and lots of good sense, this is a great book. I am certainly going to look for more books by this author.

Rating: 4/5 Published: 2003, pp 367

Tags: 4/5- Great Book, Animals Nonfiction, Current Reads

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat

and Other Clinical Tales

by Oliver Sacks

In the same vein as An Anthropologist on Mars, this book is a collection of twenty-four stories describing various neurological patients. They suffer from a wide variety of maladies involving perception- a woman who cannot tell where parts of her body are located, a man who has entirely lost his sense of balance, various patients with phantom limbs, Tourette’s syndrome, strange kinds of memory loss and more.

I first came across this book when a college roommate was reading it years ago. The title story seemed so bizarre I was a bit incredulous. The experiences related in The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat are a bit harder to relate to than those in An Anthropologist– it’s easier to imagine what it’s like to be a blind man with restored sight than a person who continually perceives one object to be another entirely. If anything, that makes this book even more fascinating.

Rating: 4/5

233 pages, 1970

More opinions at: Stuck in a Book
anyone else?

Tags: 4/5- Great Book, Nonfiction (general), Past Reads

Wild Horses I Have Known

by Hope Ryden

In the public library the other day I started browsing, and picked up several more books on wild horses. This one caught my eye because of the great photography; it wasn\’t until I sat down to read it that I realized it\’s juvenile non-fiction. Still well-written and enjoyable; I even learned some new things.

Wild Horses I Have Known describes experiences the author had observing and photographing wild horses. Most of the brief chapters describe behavior, survival tactics and social organization of the horses. The last chapter explains that horses are not really a non-native species brought to the American continent by Spaniards, but were actually re-introduced. Horses were once native to North America, evolving \”from tiny Eohippus to might Equus, the true horse\” which roamed across North America for two million years before becoming extinct. I had no idea.

I also learned that bachelor stallions who don\’t yet have their own mares will sometimes hang around a mare who has left her herd to give birth, then make off with the mare and new foal to start his own herd. That stallions will not only rescue mares that have been appropriated by other stallions, but also go after foals which have gone astray. And the most curious incident Ryden observed was during a skirmish between a stallion and a group of young bachelors, when the stallion knocked one of the yearlings off his feet, and then instead of biting him, pulled hair out of his mane!

Rating: 3/5 Published: 1999, pp 90

Tags: 3/5- Good Read, Animals Nonfiction, Current Reads, Juvenile Nonfic

Horseplay

by Judy Reene Singer

Judy van Brunt runs away from her cheating husband to live and work on a horse farm in North Carolina. Her riding skills deemed inadequate, she quickly gets relegated to the position of groom, while receiving lessons. Both the job and the lessons are exhausting work. She becomes infatuated with the first handsome, rich man she meets and incessantly talks men and horses with her fellow female grooms. The farm boards wealthy patrons\’ horses, as well as breeding, training, selling and showing in dressage competitions. I thought I would learn about what dressage actually is, and the lore of life around horses. But this story is more about romance, gossip and jostling for status among the rich and snobbish. I enjoyed the horsey parts and much of the witty humor, but many of the characters were flat to the point of caricature, and after a while the repetitive puns, jokes on names and humor involving food became tiresome. By the end I was barely skimming the pages to see how predictably it would turn out. I realize now this book just isn\’t what I was looking for; it\’s light reading: humorous, witty and somewhat sarcastic.

In the middle there\’s a puzzle, involving loading six horses into a trailer: \”Merkury couldn\’t be stalled next to Allegreto because they were archenemies. Allegretto didn\’t like Ivan, and Lexus hated Merkury, but Sam, the buffer, could be put next to anyone except Nero. By 5:30 am, we were using paper and pencil to do math permutations. By six o\’clock, we were up to second-degree integers from calculus. A solution was finally found…\” but isn\’t given in the book. Can you solve it?

(Here\’s a good example of the exaggeration that makes up the humor in this book: with a pencil, paper and writing only the names, I solved it in two minutes. I think I would find Horseplay hilarious as a movie, but I just don\’t care much for reading this sort of thing.)

Rating: 2/5 Published: 2004, pp 278

Tags: 2/5- Just Okay, Animals Fiction, Current Reads, General Fiction

improvements?

A question for my readers: Does anyone find the Title Index (found near top of sidebar) useful? Would an index by Author name be better, or both? Or does no one use it at all, preferring to dig through the archives?

An Anthropologist on Mars

Seven Paradoxical Tales

by Oliver Sacks

Oliver Sacks, neurologist and author, takes us inside the experiences of his patients in An Anthropologist on Mars. Here are the lives of a painter who went color blind after an accident, a man with a brain tumor that eclipsed all his memories except for those prior to 1970, a surgeon with Tourrette’s syndrom whose symptoms disappeared while he performed surgery, a man who after forty-five years of blindness had cataracts removed and could make no sense of the visual world, an artist whose photographic memories of a certain place overwhelmed his life, and two autistic individuals- one severely disabled yet an extraordinary artist and the other a professor who understood animals’ interactions better than people’s- using that to build herself a successful career. This last patient was Temple Grandin, who I’ve also read about from her own personal accounts.

Written not as an examination of illness, but an exploration of the world of the mind, these studies demonstrate how the perception of the brain creates the reality we live in. Oliver Sacks says: “These… are tales of metamorphosis, brought about by neurological chance, but metamorphosis into alternative states of being, other forms of life, no less human for being so different.”

It’s a very fascinating book, one I highly recommend.

Rating: 4/5

327 pages, 1995

Tags: 4/5- Great Book, Nonfiction (general), Past Reads

Keeper and Kid

by Edward Hardy

The best thing about this book is that I really, really could relate. My daughter is the exact same age as this kid. Raising a toddler really can make you feel like you’re always dealing with one demand or disaster after another. But at least I was somewhat expecting that. It’s not the case with Hardy’s main character, James Keeper.

He’s been divorced for several years, now in a new relationship but continually thinking of the old one. One day out of the blue he gets a phone call: his ex-wife is in the hospital. Nearly on her deathbed (though he doesn’t know it yet) she asks him to promise to take his dog back. Only later when he shows up to collect, it’s not a canine but a child: his child, fathered three years ago during a trip to a family reunion he attended to maintain a false front for a grandfather who didn’t know they’d divorced. This guy doesn’t know how to deal with kids, but he has one now. Worse, his girlfriend doesn’t want to have anything to do with kids at all. In the ensuing winter months, James (or “Keeper” as he’s often called) slides around trying to find his footing in the new, strange territory of fatherhood.

I had a hard time putting Keeper and Kid down. Alongside the main story, I was intrigued with Keeper’s interesting job: finding old, valuable items to sell online or in his scrapyard/antique shop. I liked the surreal part of his weekly card nights with friends where they viewed forty-year-old slides chronicling the vacations of an unknown family, found in an antique chest. And most of the descriptions of life with a toddler rang home. Though I got a bit tired of Keeper’s hopelessness and self-pity his friends prove themselves to be true, and he learns that no one can raise a child alone.

Rating: 3/5

294 pages, 2007

Read another review:
Booking Mama
Book Addiction

Tags: 3/5- Good Read, Current Reads, General Fiction

A Sand County Almanac

And Sketches Here and There
by Aldo Leopold

Aldo Leopold is considered \”the father of wildlife conservation in America.\” He spent a lifetime working for the U.S. Forest Service and Game Management department in Wisconsin, continually advocating better land use and wildlife management. This book is his magnum opus. I always saw it on my mother\’s bookshelf growing up, so it lodged itself as a book of great importance in my mind. Yet I didn\’t read it until I was in college and picked up an illustrated copy at a garage sale one summer. Immediately I found myself immersed and delighted with the beautiful lyric prose, detailed and poetic descriptions of wildlife, and thoughtful, convincing arguments presented in the final sections.

The book is arranged in a manner that draws the reader in, to solidify and build towards Leopold\’s famous Land Ethic treatise. In the first part he describes a year on his exhausted farm in Wisconsin, describing the seasons, the land, the animals that live and travel there. The second part (Sketches Here and There) describes the natural history and local fauna/flora of different parts of the country: Idaho, Illinois, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, Oregon, etc. In the final section of the book Leopold expounds in detail the idea that land is a community of living things and can be a lasting and positive part of culture itself, if we use it wisely and treat it with respect.

A Sand County Almanac is a classic, one of the best pieces of nature writing I have ever read. It stands shoulder to shoulder with Silent Spring in terms of impact and lasting impression on me. Some parts of the book echo sentiment and ideas I recently read in Adventures with a Texas Naturalist.

Rating: 5/5 Published: 1949, pp 228

Tags: 5/5- Loved It, Classics, Nature, Past Reads

A Great and Terrible Beauty

by Libba Bray

I read a great review about this book on Jenclair\’s blog A Garden Carried in the Pocket, and have been wanting to read it for some time. Finally have it in my hands, but I just couldn\’t get into it. Something about the writing style just fell flat with me, and my mind kept wandering. So after forty pages I put it aside, perhaps to come back to later.

Abandoned 403 pages, 2003

Tags: 0/5- Abandoned, Fantasy / Sci Fi, Young Adult

Month: March 2008

and Other Clinical Tales

Seven Paradoxical Tales

RATINGS / SUBJECTS: