Book and Movie Reports by Ed

Book/movie report: Fight Club by Chuck Pahlaniuk All together now: The first rule of fight club is you don't talk about fight club. Having now broken it, yes, this book and movie are the source of that ironic meme. I saw the movie several times before ever reading the book. I never saw the surprise coming in the movie. I know I never would have picked it up in the book, even though it's far more obvious in the book. I'm just not that clever. The book starts with the first-person unnamed narrator attending support meetings for people with horrible diseases. He doesn't have any of these diseases: this is the only way he has to make a connection with people. It's at one of these support meetings that he meets Marla Singer, whom he hates on sight, because she, too, is a faker and is ruining his experience of faking. As you can tell, this is a darkly comic book. Shortly afterwards, he meets Tyler Durden, a charismatic guy whose goal is to destroy civilization. Go...

Book report: Outliers, by Malcolm Gladwell Okay, I'm officially a Malcolm Gladwell fanboy. I read and loved "Blink" and "The Tipping Point". First off, he has brilliantly clever ideas. Then, he does an amazing amount of research of all kinds to delve into unexpected aspects of these ideas. Finally, he writes so clearly and beautifully about each of these topics that it's a pleasure to read. For example, "Outliers" starts with a fascinating presentation of the immigration of poor peasants from a small Italian village to a town in Pennsylvania. His storytelling is wonderful, but then he provides an unexpected puzzle: in this little town, heart disease is practically unknown. How can this be? His examination – and elimination – of all the obvious possibilities introduces the main theme of "Outliers": the reasons behind success. In statistics, an outlier is a data point that lies far beyond most of the other data points. In the world of...

Book report: Velocity, by Dean Koontz I guess that bestselling novelists can get away with this. By "this" I mean 416 pages of filler wrapped around a plot that makes no sense. I picked this book up because I was looking for something escapist to read. I had enjoyed a couple of Koontz's thousand other novels. "Lightning" was a pretty good science fiction story. Maybe "enjoyed" doesn't really apply to his "Intensity" as much as "held on with both hands afraid to let go". Anyway, that's why I started reading "Velocity". It begins with several dozen pages of a barroom windbag that, as near as I can tell, has nothing to do with the rest of the story. I can see how these bestselling authors can turn a fairly slim story into a brick of a book. Description. Lots of description. What the bar looks like. What the glasses look like. What everything looks like. When, later, a character walks up to a house, we get every ...

Book report: A Thousand Splendid Suns, by Khaled Hosseini This is an absolutely harrowing novel about one woman, Mariam, then another, Laila, suffering in male-dominated and Islam-dominated Afghanistan from the 1970s to the 2000s. They face near-constant abuse and cruelty from beginning to end. This is one of those stories where, just when you think things can't get any worse, things get MUCH worse. I found myself saying, "Oh, please, no," many times through this book. The nightmare of the lives of Mariam and Laila takes place while Afghanistan goes through a number of upheavals. I’m no historian, but these include a president overthrown, a dictatorship, a Communist puppet-state of the USSR, a civil war against the Soviets, more civil war as the victorious mujahedeen (sp?) lead factions against each other, the brutal rule of the fundamentalist Taliban, the post-9/11 attack of the US against the largely-innocent population, and the comparative freedom afterward. Not su...

Fountainhead Babysitting Service (not really a book report on The Fountainhead, by Ayn Rand) "Hello. Is this the Fountainhead Babysitting Service?" "Yes." "We need a babysitter for tonight." "Why?" "We're going to the movies." "Movies are a mindless distraction from reality." "But we're going to see Shrek." "You should be spending your time in profitable work." "I worked all day. Now we're going out to relax." "You must give of your all, exploding in a paroxysm of creation, only to rise again from exhaustion to begin the promethean act of creation anew." "I install sinks." "Oh." "So, you come highly recommended, but I just want to ask you a few questions." "Very well." "What will you do if the baby starts crying?" "Endeavor to explain that crying is contrary to a life of rational self-interest." ...

Book Report: The Supergirls, by Mike Madrid This book traces the history of female super-powered characters from the 1930s to today. It's a remarkable fact that, although society has tended to deny power to women, women with amazing powers began to appear shortly after the introduction of Superman and Batman. Indeed, as the book points out, female superheroes have often been role models for girls and women, representing in many cases women having powers beyond men and women triumphing over men. One theme of the book is how this image of power has changed as the roles of women in society have changed. Madrid has done a remarkable job in reconstructing the early history of female superheroes, considering that most of the original stories have been out of print since the 1930s and 1940s. At first, these characters were simply adventuresses and female detectives, but it wasn't long before women with genuine superhuman powers began to appear and gain popularity. This isn't d...

Movie Report: It Might Get Loud "It Might Get Loud" is a fascinating documentary about legendary rock guitarists Jimmy Page, The Edge, and Jack White. (If you haven't heard of at least one of these guys, you can stop reading now.) These three may be from three different generations of rock, namely the 60s, 80s, and 00s, but each has an obsession about guitars and the music they make. Jimmy Page is best known as the lead guitarist of Led Zeppelin, a rock group that was on top from day one. They pretty much created heavy metal. Page is a master of the dynamic range possible in both acoustic and electric guitars, from delicate strumming to absolute hurricanes of sound, sometimes within the same song. In the movie, he starts playing some immediately recognizable riffs and you realize: this song that I know by heart? This is the guy who first created and played that song. And that song. And that song. Dozens. Hundreds. Amazing. Before this movie, I wasn't very familiar ...