The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins

Read: 26 July, 2008

Overall, I loved this book. Dawkins is a wonderful writer and I think I would have enjoyed his style regardless of the subject matter. The only major flaw that irked me was his habit of veering off into tangents, but even this was made bare-able by not only his writing style, but also by the fact that most of his tangents were just plain interesting. Dawkins makes his case even stronger, in my opinion, by fulling admitting to and even going out of his way to point out the limits of his own personal knowledge. At several times during the book, he will say that he suspects one thing but does not know for certain, showing an inquisitive and flexible mind, both humble and confident. It's a refreshing break from the average writer who seems all too sure of her/his omniscience.

With all that out of the way, I'd like to address a couple of issues with the book. The first is with Chapter Four or "Why There Almost Certainly Is No God." I found the whole chapter to be a disappointment. Dawkins takes the question of "if there isn't a god, how did everything fall into place so perfectly to produce us?" and tries to answer it with science. This points him in an awkward and unnecessarily defensive position because the question itself is not a legitimate one (something he never once says outright). It's like asking "how did my parents know to have sex at just the perfect time to conceive me?" It assumes that we are an end result, a goal that the universe has been working towards - rather than the more accurate assumption that the universe is merely ambling along in one of billions (to pick an unrealistically small number) of possible ways and we just happen to be a bi-product (one of many possibilities) that happened to emerge. There is nothing special about the production of us, whether as individuals or as a species.

Another quibble I had with the book is that Dawkins repeats multiple times that natural selection gets rid of negatives and keeps positives, which is just sloppy. What about the vast majority of mutations, which are just neutral? Or mutations that have both positive and negative expressions?I understand the need for brevity and keeping things simple, but this is a major point and something that a lot of Dawkins's opposition can't seem to grasp.

And the final detail that I took issue with is his statement that "[monogamy] is what we expect, and it is what we set out to achieve." Is it? Maybe he's right, I don't know. Maybe monogamy really is the default. But that's not what even the quickest glance around the diversity of human societies in the world today will tell me. Many societies involve one man and several women, some even involve one woman and several men. If monogamy truly is the natural default, why isn't this expression universal? Like I said, maybe he's right - but because his statement was counter-intuitive, the existence of polygamous societies should have been addressed.

With all that said, this was a fabulous book and I am very glad that I've read it. It ought to have stayed on topic a little better, but that's okay. There were no parts of the book that I felt weren't worth reading and that's more than I can say for most books.

100 Books Meme

Stolen from Lost Fort, just cause I love these sorts of things...

Instructions:
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Reprint this list in your own blog

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series – J.K. Rowling (Just The Prisoner of Azkaban)
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6 The Bible (the New Testament, but only bits and pieces of the Old)
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty-Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles– Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (not *all* of them, but a fairly sizeable number)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – J.R.R. Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
19 The Time Traveler's Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With the Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – C.S. Lewis
34 Emma – Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – C.S. Lewis
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin – Louis de Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh – A.A. Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel García Márquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – L.M. Montgomery
47 Far From the Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale – Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafón
57 A Tale of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love in the Time of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones's Diary – Helen Fielding (no, but I've read the sequel!)
69 Midnight's Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby-Dick – Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From a Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce (I started and then gave up. Dubliners ruled, but this was just kinda boring)
76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession – A.S. Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web – E.B. White
88 The Five People You Meet in Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

Vampire Chronicles #2: The Vampire Lestat by Anne Rice

Read: 14 July, 2008

Overall, I'd say that this was a good book. It wasn't fabulous, but it passed the time in an entertaining way. It didn't provide all that much food for thought. Despite the near-constant philosophical ramblings, I found that most of them contradicted with my own observations far too much to be thought-provoking (for example, one character explains that mortals will believe just about anything other than a supernatural explanation, preferring even the most ridiculous natural explanation - never mind all the talk about finding a good parking space being a "gift from god" or all the "real haunting" TV shows one sees on television). I do think that I liked it better than Interview With a Vampire, but that might just be because Interview was a bit of a disappointment after having seen and loved its movie.

The writing itself was fairly strong - not great, but better than average. There were some parts where present tense was used, despite the bulk of the novel being in the past tense. This wasn't done for any discernible purpose and it made those passages seem awkward.

I did take some issue with the narrative voice. For one thing, the start of the novel had a completely different tone to the rest. There's some half-hearted attempt to explain this, that Lestat is so old and has lived through so many linguistic eras that he switches between them from time to time. All well and good except that the voice of the first couple pages is never used again. All that explanation stuffed into the story when Rice could have just as easily re-written the first few pages to match the tone of the rest. Not to mention the fact that the voice of the first few pages was incredibly annoying, to the point that I considered not reading on.

My other major issue with the narrative voice is that it is very similar to the one used in Interview With a Vampire. There was no distinct personality showing through as I have seen in so many other novels. The Vampire Lestat was a novel best written in first person, and that was a good choice, but in terms of skill, Rice ought to have stuck to third person instead. This became even clearer during Armand and Marius' narratives. If I put the book down and picked it up again later, I could easily forget who was telling that part of the story. It's forgiveable in this case because of the plot - that Lestat is re-telling the stories he'd been told in the past. So it's conceivable that he is re-telling them in his own way. But this doesn't excuse the likeness of Louis's and Lestat's stories.

There was also a bit of sexism present, as in Interview With a Vampire. Female characters are given very little page time. In this book, there is the added discussion about how female vampires are unpredictable or mad. That being said, however, the narrators of Interview With a Vampire and The Vampire Lestat are both male and it is a character who makes the statement about female vampires. I am willing to accept that the sexism of these novels is from the characters and not the novel itself, especially since Claudia and Gabrielle both seem to be strong and independent (in mind, though Claudia, of course, is completely dependent in other ways) woman with clear and consistent goals. In many ways, I've found those two (with the possible addition of Eleni) to be more interesting than Louis, Lestat, Armand, or Marius. It's a shame they don't get their own stories (or maybe they do? If anyone reading this review knows of a Rice book where any of these three gets their own story, I'd love to know which one).

And my final complaint is with the names. I've never heard a French name like "Lestat." Just saying it, it doesn't sound French at all, even if the final T is pronounced (which would be a no-no in modern French). I don't know where Rice got it from, but I personally think it was a very poor choice. It killed my suspension of disbelief every time it came up because I would try to say it in French, as I do with Louis's name, and it just wouldn't work.

I loved the inconsistencies between Interview With a Vampire and the Vampire Lestat. I also liked that the explanations in the Vampire Lestat for questions that had been left unanswered fit well into a separate narrative of their own. This was something that had bothered be in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. The subsequent novels attempted to explain away a lot of what had happened in the first, and this killed the jokes and made the subsequent novels feel like they were mostly there as additional material rather than stand-alone books. This was something Rice successfully avoided.

P.S.: What's the deal with Typhon? Why is the name Set never mentioned? If anyone knows, I'd love to hear it!

Cairo by G. Willow Wilson and M.K. Perker

Read: 10 July, 2008

This is the first actual full-length graphic novel I've ever read, so I don't have all that much to compare it to. That being said, I enjoyed it immensely. It's a short read. I went through it in about five hours while at work, so I had a whole lot of distractions.

I loved the way mythology was used in the story. The result was an urban fantasy injected with just enough realism to make it all seem possible. The use of Arabic in the story was also well done - just enough to give the story an exotic flavour while not enough to confuse a non-Arabic speaking reader.

The illustrations are beautiful, both realistic and stylized with just enough shadow to give it a gritty feel. There were a few chronological errors (in one part, for example, a character is wearing glasses, and then taking his glasses out of his pocket and putting them on), but these are few and truly unimportant in the face of the work as a whole.

The characters themselves were fairly two-dimensional (the wide-eyed blonde American who wants to change the world, the censored journalist, the Israeli special ops soldier, the American teen who wants to do a suicide bombing in the hopes that it would teach all the kids who teased him in High School a lesson, etc.), but I do understand that it's probably unavoidable in this sort of medium where the space available in which to tell the story is so limited. Even so, strong writing made these stock characters pop and made me hold my breath hoping that they would all come out all right.

In conclusion, I think this is a great book, perfect for anyone interested in world mythology or the middle east.