God Hates You, Hate Him Back: Making Sense of the Bible by CJ Werleman

I downloaded this book mostly on the merits of the title; it sounded like it ought to be pretty damn funny. I was also interested in the author’s idea of using the Bible as evidence against its own God. The purpose of the book was to show, using the actual text of the Holy Bible, that God is rather a horrible person to be worshipping. The author’s strategy was to go through each book of the Bible, summarizing the general ideas and discussing particularly horrifying scriptures.

Unfortunately, this book was not nearly as entertaining as the title would suggest. The author started out by throwing in a lot of jokes, some of which were even funny, but many of which were just sort of lame. As he gets into the middle of the book, he kind of forgets to make any jokes or commentary and just summarizes each book of the Bible. Which gets pretty boring. I might not have even bothered finishing the book if it weren’t for the fact that I wanted to review it.

I think the author did a good job of picking out the specific scriptures that most Christians either aren’t aware of or deliberately choose to ignore. He makes a number of good points about them. However, sometimes I think his arguments could’ve been more persuasive if they had been better written. While I agreed with nearly everything he was saying, I don’t think his writing could convince anyone who started out even the least bit critical of his viewpoint. I certainly wouldn’t recommend it for anyone religious, since most of his jokes are very deliberately offensive and his writing isn’t especially persuasive. It would be handy for pissing people off, but not necessarily for making them think twice about their beliefs.

Overall, I probably wouldn’t recommend this book. Some of the content is good, but it’s not all that enjoyable to read. Maybe the best parts of the book are the quotations at the start of each chapter. One that particularly cracked me up was this: “Life in Lubbock, Texas, taught me two things: One is that God loves you and you’re going to burn in hell. The other is that sex is the most awful, filthy thing on earth and you should save it for someone you love.” – Butch Hancock. Anyhow, to get back on topic, I’m quite certain that you could find this information from much more interesting and well-written sources. I’d give it 2 stars.

The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro

…in which an aging butler reflects upon his career and the direction his life has taken. The Remains of the Day takes the form of a travel journal kept by Stevens, the butler of Darlington Hall. Stevens is writing this journal as he makes a several day road trip to meet Miss Kenton, previously the housekeeper of Darlington Hall during the glory days of Lord Darlington. Ostensibly he is going to gage her interest in returning to her post years after she quit it, but gradually reasons of a more personal nature begin to appear. As Stevens crosses the English countryside, he recalls his relationship with Lord Darlington, his philosophy and goals as a butler, and his past interactions with Miss Kenton.

The journal is written some time after World War II, when Stevens is deep into middle age. At this point in time, Lord Darlington is dead and Darlington Hall has been bought by an American man. However, most of the incidents related in the journal take place in the late 1920’s and early 1930’s. In this period, Stevens is at the height of his career. He is a butler of the highest caliber, and unflinchingly dedicated to his work. His philosophy is that he can best serve society by serving one of the great men whose duty it is to shape society, and this is who he believes Lord Darlington to be. Some time after Stevens is taken on, Miss Kenton is hired as the new housekeeper. Her status in the house is on par with Stevens’; she is the head of the female staff members. While Stevens is very serious, reserved, and traditional, Miss Kenton is something of a spitfire. Though their personalities occasionally clash, the two develop a strong professional relationship. 

The Beast in the Garden: A Modern Parable of Man and Nature by David Baron

... in which the author reconstructs an escalating series of cougar encounters with humans in Boulder, Colorado and discusses the unintended consequences of living with wildlife. The Beast in the Garden focuses on the reappearance of cougars in suburban Boulder in the late 1980's. Though it is nonfiction, the many separate sightings are cobbled together to form a narrative, and the book does have what could be called "main characters". The style reminded me very strongly of Jon Krakauer's writing in Under the Banner of Heaven.

Train Man by Nakano Hitori

Train Man is a love story set in Japan and told through threads on the chat forum 2-Channel. One day, a geek is riding the train when he notices a drunken old man harassing some women. In a rare display of courage, he steps in and defends the women. Not to say that he performs some heroic feat; he just tells the guy off rather than pretending that nothing is happening (which would be the more typical response). The old man tries to pick a fight, and at that point another passenger steps in to help. At the next station, the pervert is arrested and the women on the train thank him for defending them. One of them happens to be young and rather attractive; she was the person sitting next to him before the commotion started. The geek relates this story to his friends on 2-Channel, and is dubbed Train Man from here on out.

Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami

As I seem to be doing fairly often these days, I started reading this book not knowing exactly what I was getting into. Sure, I had read the excerpt on the back, but I somehow feel like it doesn’t do the book justice. Here’s what it says:

“When he hears her favourite Beatles song, Toru Watanabe recalls his first love, Naoko, the girlfriend of his best friend Kizuki. Immediately he is transported back almost twenty years to his student days in Tokyo, adrift in a world of uneasy friendships, casual sex, passion, loss and desire- to a time when an impetuous young woman called Midori marches into his life and he has to choose between the future and the past.”

True enough, those are the things that happen in the book. I could’ve rambled on for several paragraphs attempting to explain the plot, but that’s a better summary than what I would’ve come up with. But the best parts of this book are the things the plot summary can’t describe. This is a book that really sucked me in, so I’m not sure I’ll be able to describe it in an entirely coherent way. I feel like I can’t look at it from the outside, so it’s going to be hard to structure any kind of analysis. This may have to be a bit more free form than is typical of the reviews on this blog. Let’s just see how it works out.

First of all, the characters. There aren’t that many central characters, but each one of them feels incredibly real. The author also manages to do this without making them feel like “typical” people. Toru, the main character and narrator, isn’t unusual in any particular way, but he doesn’t feel generic. Naoko is, as she would describe herself, “deeply flawed” but very human. Midori is just all kinds of eccentric. The only character you don’t get to know particularly well is Kizuki, Toru’s best friend and Naoko’s boyfriend. But this makes plenty of sense; he exists only as a memory that Toru and Naoko share. Near the beginning of the story, when he and Toru are nineteen, Kizuki commits suicide without any known motive. Kizuki is something of a blank space, but his death leaves a deep and lasting mark on Naoko and Toru.

As for the plot, it doesn’t feel nearly as dramatic as the excerpt on the back of the book makes it sound (Casual sex! Passion! Desire!). The events are almost everyday; it’s the life of a young man who is drifting through youth in a difficult time. Some exceptional things happen, but the story is more about relationships and how they shape a person’s life. By killing himself, Kizuki injures Naoko and Toru in ways they may not be able to recover from.

What stuck with me throughout the book was a strong undercurrent of emotion. The characters don’t bounce back and forth between ecstasy and misery (once again, not a hugely melodramatic book), but every time I started reading I would fall into a very particular mood. It was sort of a melancholy tinged with beautiful and sometimes painful moments. I am a sucker for books and movies that engage me emotionally, and this one did, perhaps on a somewhat unhealthy level. Naoko’s mental health is not so great, to put it lightly, and you feel it in all her interactions with Toru. Since the greater part of this book is about Naoko and Toru, and Toru’s thoughts about Naoko when they aren’t together, there’s sort of a fog of depression over the whole thing. The more time I had spent reading the book, the longer it took for me to shake off a vague feeling of sadness when I stopped. I think the author’s treatment of the struggle of coming to terms with mental illness and lasting wounds really struck a chord with me.

Once again, I don’t feel I’ve done a particularly good job of describing this book. It felt almost like its own world to me, and when I try to talk about it, it’s as if I’m on the inside trying to look out and see the whole thing at once. Which really isn’t possible. But I would like to say that I found it incredibly beautiful and moving. I’m thinking I’ll read it again rather than moving on to my next book. I would absolutely recommend it.

Room by Emma Donoghue

Just recently, a group of ALTs (Assistant Language Teachers) in my city formed a book club. Our first selection: Room. I doubt I would’ve stumbled across it on my own, but I’m very glad it was suggested for the book club, because it turned out to be a pretty awesome book. It’s a first person narrative from the perspective of a five-year-old boy named Jack. Jack has lived his entire life in a single room, which he refers to simply as Room. Though Jack doesn’t know it himself, it soon becomes apparent to the reader that Jack and his mother (Ma) are being held captive in what is essentially a storage shed converted into living quarters. It is later revealed that Ma has been living in this shed for the past seven years.

This book is divided into five sections. For the first section, Jack does not know that there is a world outside of Room. His world consists of an 11 by 11 foot space with a bed, wardrobe, table, TV, sink, toilet, bathtub, lamp and stove. He has been taught that the things inside of Room are real, and everything else is just TV. To his mind, there are only three real people in all of existence: himself, Ma, and Old Nick, the man who comes in the night. However, Jack doesn’t know much about Old Nick because Ma has Jack hide in the wardrobe every night so that Old Nick can never look at him.

However, in the second section of the book, Ma reveals to Jack that some of the things on the TV do exist outside of Room. That in fact, there is a whole world outside. Jack doesn’t believe her until one day he sees an airplane through the skylight of the shed. From that point, Ma begins the process of “unlying”, gradually explaining the world outside and how the two of them came to be in Room. While the book moves relatively slowly at first, the pace picks up toward the middle and there comes a breaking point when Ma realizes that her cooperation may no longer be enough to guarantee their safety. Well, I suppose “safety” is a relative term in this case. Anyhow, I won’t say what happens in the plot past this point, but there are pretty much only two possible outcomes, so you can likely guess where things are headed.

While the plot of the story is fairly unusual, the writing style is really the most unique thing about this book. It’s written in the voice of a young child, which takes some getting used to, but more than that, it’s written from the perspective of someone from an entirely isolated world. What would it be like not to know what wind, or rain, or rocks were? To be the only child in the universe? I think this passage is a fairly good illustration of Jack’s thinking:

“Mountains are too big to be real, I saw one in TV that has a woman hanging on it by ropes. Women aren’t real like Ma is, and girls and boys not either. Men aren’t real except Old Nick, and I’m not actually sure if he’s real for real. Maybe half? He brings groceries and Sundaytreat and disappears the trash, but he’s not human like us. He only happens in the night, like bats. Maybe Door makes him up with a beep beep and the air changes. I think Ma doesn’t like to talk about him in case he gets realer.” (18)

Something I take for granted is the concept of separation, but to Jack, there is nothing in the world that belongs solely to him or solely to Ma. He hasn’t been alone even once in his life. Variety is another thing. In Jack’s world, there is only one Bed, one Lamp, one Table. Each of them is a singular entity; he doesn’t have a concept of “tables” or “beds” as categories.

With the interesting themes, unique writing style, and heartbreaking story, I was pretty well sucked into this book. It’s written in such a way that it all starts to feel real. I read it in two or three sittings, but if I had read it all at once I think it would’ve had even more of an impact. I would absolutely recommend Room. It’s disturbing in a lot of ways, but fascinating as well. There isn’t much in the way of explicit violence, but the undercurrents are very dark. I don’t think I’ve done it justice in my description of it. Please, if you’re up for an entirely new perspective on the world, read this book.

The Neverending Story by Michael Ende

So, English language books being somewhat scarce in my part of Japan, I have not been reading a lot lately. My selection has been entirely dependent on what books I stumble across in local bookstores. My most recent discovery: The Neverending Story. I watched the movie as a child, but honestly can’t remember more than a few images, so I won’t be making any comparisons between the two.

The story begins with a fat little boy named Bastian Balthazar Bux going into a bookstore and, for reasons he does not fully understand, stealing a book. He decides that he must run away forever since he is now a thief, and comes up with the brilliant idea of hiding in the attic of his school. The school he was supposed to be going to in the first place. The first section of the story is about him gradually being sucked into the world of the book.

The world described in The Neverending Story (also the name of the book Bastian is reading) is called Fantastica. Fantastica is in a state of crisis because the Childlike Empress, who is essentially the center of the universe, has fallen ill. None of the doctors can figure out what’s wrong with her or how to cure it, and Fantastica is being swallowed up piece by piece by the Nothingness. As such, a boy named Atreyu is called upon to go on a quest and find the cause of the Empress’s sickness. If she can be cured, Fantastica will be saved; if not, the entire world will be destroyed. As Bastian reads about Atreyu’s quest, he becomes more and more immersed in the story until he is called upon to become a part of it. UPCOMING SPOILER ALERT: Skip the next paragraph if you don’t want to hear about it. However, the “spoiler” I’ll be discussing is only the resolution of the first part of the book, so it doesn’t give away all that much.

Bastian enters the story and the first conflict of the book (the Childlike Empress’s illness) is resolved. This happens maybe halfway through the book, and the rest is devoted to Bastian’s journey through Fantastica. The guiding principle laid down by the Childlike Empress is: Do What You Wish. Bastian travels from one wish to the next, seeing various things and gradually becoming a different person. For a long time I didn’t really see where the author was going with all of this, but eventually the next conflict is introduced: how will Bastian get home, and why should he even want to?

I thought that the plot of the book was fairly solid, and the world the author described was very original. Some of it was a bit silly, but that seems perfectly reasonable for a book intended for children and young adults. The descriptions were very evocative. One thing that I found a bit irritating, though, was the author’s style. To me, his writing style seemed a bit pretentious. “Precious” might be a good word for it. It sounded like he was trying to write it in an old-timey, fairy tale sort of fashion, essentially screaming at the reader, “This is a classic work of fantasy!” It got on my nerves. However, I was interested enough in the story to keep reading, so it couldn’t have been that horrible.

The characters were interesting, though not necessarily likeable. At the beginning of the book I mostly felt bad for Bastian, and by the end I was pretty sick of him. I was more or less indifferent to the Childlike Empress. Atreyu was a fairly static character, but at least he seemed like a decent person. And I rather liked Falkor the luck dragon. All in all, I would recommend reading this book if it comes your way, or if you’d like to know how it compares to the movie. I’d be interested to rewatch the movie now that I’ve entirely forgotten how it went.

Monster by A. Lee Martinez

Monster: A Novel by A. Lee Martinez. Orbit, 2009. 342 pp, ISBN 978-0-316-04991-7

Hello! My name is Andrea, and I am a guest contributor. I'm also a friend of Emily and Emma. I read a mix of fiction and non-fiction, as well as a ridiculous quantity of manga. As far as non-fiction goes, I tend to like things about animals, particularly birds and cats.

In very simple terms, this book is about two characters who end up having to save the universe from an entity who could best be described as an immortal crazy cat lady. It's basically an adventure novel, but with humor and a large dose of cryptozoology.

The main characters are a guy named Monster and a woman named Judy. Monster works for a branch of Animal Control which specializes in monsters and magical creatures. Judy, on the other hand, works in a supermarket. Their interactions begin when Judy finds a yeti eating all of the food in the freezer isle, and from that point on, fate keeps throwing their lots together. However, the story doesn't turn into a romance. I was actually surprised, since I'm used to the pattern of male and female characters pairing up when they end up in these types of situations. It was kind of an interesting change of pace.

What I loved about this novel was not so much the plot (which was fine), but the mythical creatures that kept popping up everywhere. There are a lot of them, and many of them are quite humorous. They are described in plenty of detail, but the descriptions aren't rambling and don't take over the book. I'm the sort of person who enjoys watching the hunting, gathering and shelter-building parts of the show Survivor, but couldn't care less about the game itself. In a similar manner, I loved reading about how Monster and Judy tried (and occasionally failed) to control the strange creatures that kept disrupting their lives. My favorite creature in the book was probably the imp, which was described as a cat-like creature with big ears and a fox face. I also liked Chester, a paper gnome who was Monster's partner at work. He reminded me of a shikigami, but he was not created by Monster and had a will of his own.

I would recommend this book if you are in the mood for a comic adventure, or if you enjoy cryptozoology in general. I don't know that it is a must-read, but it's definitely enjoyable. The writing style is not too complicated and it doesn't take a long time to read. I read it over the course of a slow day at work.