The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien

The Hobbit; or, There and Back Again
J.R.R. Tolkien
(HarperCollinsPublishers, London: 1999)
Originally published in 1937 by George Allen & Unwin

READ: May 2005

This is a wonderful book. I don't think I really need to say any more, do I?

But really, The Hobbit, or There and Back Again is a marvelous tale and everyone should read it at least once, even if they're not a Lord of the Rings fan. The Hobbit was of course written about 17 years earlier, in 1937. The book tells the fantastical tale of Mr. Bilbo Baggins, a hobbit of the Shire in Middle-Earth, and how he was "persuaded" to join a troupe of dwarves out to reclaim long-lost treasures and land from Smaug, a terrible dragon. He was hired to be a thief, but he wasn't much of a thief, I'm afraid; in fact, he knew very little indeed about the profession before he set out. At just under 300 pages, The Hobbit exacts much less of a time commitment than its companion LOTR, and if you have the same edition as me, it includes the first chapter from LOTR which of course is intended to entice you to continue on to the further challenge of Tolkien's larger masterpiece.

The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank

The Diary of A Young Girl
Anne Frank
(Penguin Books, New York: 1997)
Edited by Otto H. Frank and Mirjam Pressler
Translated by Susan Massotty
Originally published (in abbreviated form) in 1947

READ: April-May 2005

I think everyone has heard of this book, even if they have not read it. Like The Netherlands (Lonely Planet Guide), I read this in anticipation of our trip to Amsterdam in May. I knew that once we were there, we would be visiting the Anne Frank Museum. I knew the broad strokes of Anne Frank's story, but had never read her diary.

This version is called "The Definitive Edition". Basically, other previous editions had been published with much editing - this includes pretty much everything Anne wrote about. It is a charming and sad portrait of a young girl whose life was so drastically changed by the war. And the whole time that you read it, you are sad too, since you know how this ends, and you wish it were a "Make Your Own Adventure" book so that you could change the ending and make Anne's diary continue on beyond August 1, 1944. (On August 4, an SS sergeant and at least three Dutch members of the Security Police made their way in to the Secret Annex, likely tipped off by someone, and arrested all the occupants. Of the 8 persons who lived for about three years in the confines of the Secret Annex, only Otto Frank, Anne's father, survived the concentration camps which followed.)

I don't think I can add much more to this review. Everyone should read it. It's definitely a necessary read if you are going to visit Amsterdam and especially if you are going to see the Museum (which, in turn, is a necessary part of visiting Amsterdam). It really personalizes a dark part of recent world history, and Anne's last entry, poignantly personal, ends on a very faint note of hope, which feels even more chilling when you next read the words "Anne's diary ends here" and know what that, in fact, means. And if you can, go to the Museum, or at least visit the website.

Wanderlust, edited by Don George

Wanderlust: Real-Life Tales of Adventure and Romance
Don George, ed., at Salon.com
(Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto: 2000)

READ: December 2004-April 2005

Randal gave me this for my birthday last year. I started reading it over Christmas and then promptly forgot to bring it home from Winnipeg, where we were over the holidays. Thankfully, Randal's dad was nice enough to carefully wrap it up and pop it in the mail - I believe I got it back sometime in February.

And I was glad - it's a nice read. It's a series of stories of things that have happened to various travel writers, most (if not all) of whom have previously written for Salon.com's online literary travel journal. I took my time reading it once I got back, usually limiting myself to one story a night, since it was quite enjoyable for the most part.

Some of the stories are lovely and magical - like the woman who finds peace sleeping beach-side on a small Greek island. Others are funny, some are meant to provoke. The only one that I remember leaving a distinctly bad taste in my mouth was based on a southern Thailand beach - a promising start! - but focussed on the author's obsession with catching up with Leonardo diCaprio who was also in the south of Thailand filming, apparently, The Beach. It was really long, really shallow, and really dull. But by and large, the stories here captivated me or at least interested me enough to keep going. It's a nice way to "travel" when you can afford neither time nor money to actually do so.

A Little Taste of ... Japan by Jane Lawson and Charlotte Anderson

A Little Taste of... Japan
Jane Lawson and Charlotte Anderson
(Bay Books: 2004)

READ: March-April 2005

OK, I admit it up front: this is a cookbook. But it's quite lovely. In-between the many and varied traditional Japanese recipes are pages of information on Japanese culture, history, religion, geography, etc. I must admit to being a bit of a Japan-o-phile, and there is certainly much in here to keep me going for a while. It's been too hot to do any adventurous cooking this summer, but I plan on testing many exotic recipes from my many cookbooks as soon as the weather cools down, including a number from here (for example, rice soup, simmered pumpkin, and asparagus with egg yolk sauce - and sushi, of course). The recipes are by Jane Lawson and Charlotte Anderson has provided the complementary texts. Also (and this is very important in a cookbook, and all too often overlooked), it has beautiful accompanying photographs (both of the food and of Japan).

The Netherlands (Lonely Planet Guide)

The Netherlands (Lonely Planet Guide), 2nd ed.
Jeremy Gray and Reuben Acciano
(Lonely Planet Publications, Oakland (CA): 2004)

READ: March-April 2005

Yes, everyone and their brother uses Lonely Planet guides. But there's a good reason. I am a big fan. For the most part, they are well laid-out, have easy-to-use maps, and give you good starting points for restaurants, accommodations, etc. I think the problem arises when people fail to look outside their Lonely Planet. Or when - and it happens - a restaurant or hotel gets complacent about its appearance in the Lonely Planet and lets its quality slip. But I see guidebooks as a great way to start. They are a great way to get you started in a new country, a way to figure out the key first things to see and do. But you must also let serendipity guide you, at least some of the time.

The Netherlands Lonely Planet guide provides a very good introduction to the Netherlands and Dutch culture. I read this, of course, in anticipation of our trip to Amsterdam in May. At the time, this meant I read all of the introductory material, including cycling trips around the Netherlands, as well as the lengthy entry on Amsterdam itself and the shorter (but still quite detailed) entries on Den Haag (The Hague), Rotterdam and Maastricht, all of which we planned to go to but never made it, since there is so much to do in Amsterdam itself.

The trip was, of course, more enjoyable than the book, but that certainly isn't a reflection on the quality of this book - I wouldn't leave home without it.

Asleep by Banana Yoshimoto

Asleep
Banana Yoshimoto
(Grove Press, New York: 2000)
Japanese version originally published 1989
Translated by Michael Emmerich

READ: March-April 2005

OK, I admit it. I initially bought this book because I kept seeing it in the deeply-discounted Bargain Books section every time I went to Chapters (which is probably more often than I should go). And I think "Banana Yoshimoto" is one of the coolest names an author could ever wish to have. So I bought it.

I have since learned that Yoshimoto is in fact one of Japan's better-known contemporary writers. And Asleep is in fact a lovely book. It's a bit strange. As a translation, and from Japanese no less, where the pace of story-telling can be different from what readers are used to (at least readers like me, who perhaps overdose on Canadian literature now and again (though reviewing my book list of books read-to-date, I seem to be expanding those horizons this year)), the book feels slightly magical and other-worldly (though again, if you've ever been to Japan, that assessment isn't too far off the mark). In a way, speaking of Can-lit, Yoshimoto reminds me of Alice Munro (at least in the earlier days before I realized I was confusing Munro's books because they all dealt with women in unusual or awkward situations).

Asleep actually is three novellas about three very different women who have strange spiritual connections to sleep and all that it entails. And here I unashamedly steal from the jacket dust-cover: "One, mourning for a lost lover, finds herself sleepwalking at night. Another, who has embarked on a relationship with a man whose wife is in a coma, finds herself suddenly unable to stay awake. A third finds her sleep haunted by another woman whom she was once pitted against in a love triangle." There is a dreamy quality to the book itself - you could almost be reading some form of long poem. I took my time with this book, not wanting to spoil its sometimes near-perfect balance, but often was compelled to read "just a few more pages" to see what would happen next.

Yoshimoto has written a few other books which have been translated from the Japanese; of these, I think Kitchen will be the next one I search out (even if it isn't available on discount.

Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond

Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
Jared Diamond
(W.W. Norton, New York: 1997)
includes Afterword dated 2003

READ: March 2005

I'd been hearing about this book for quite a while before I finally read it, and it was definitely worth it. Jared Diamond is not a historian but a professor of physiology, and he tackles his historical subject accordingly. Rather than telling us what has happened to get us to where we are, he tries to tackle the deeper root causes; that is, why have modern-day societies ended up where they are?

Obviously this is a complicated question. Rather than basing his answers on ideas of race, culture or other such related notions of ethnicity or linguistics, Diamond points toward the natural and environmental resources that were available in each region of the world, allowing some societies to easily flourish and others to eventually perish. There is a reason apart from the nature of human beings themselves to explain why things have turned out the way they did. Food production played a large role in this: some regions of the world did not lend themselves easily to farming those items deemed necessary for the stabilization of populations - e.g., wild cereals - and there was thus no impetus to consider these alternate forms of food production. The same can be said for the domestication of animals - there just weren't, for a myriad of reasons, as many easily-domesticated wild animals in North America, for example, as there were in Europe. Diamond also points to the axes upon which knowledge about crops and farming expanded - to a large degree, it is
much easier to "transplant" farming techniques practiced in central Asia into central Europe, and vice-versa. The east-west axis of Asia and Europe provided for a huge geographical advantage versus other continents such as Africa and both of the Americas, all of which are predominantly north-south.

While there are certainly many other factors that have led to the modern-day political, economic and social structure of the world, Diamond does raise some interesting points. If you've been avoiding it because it was slightly over-hyped, take my word for it: it is worth the read.

One Earth by Kenneth Brower

One Earth
Kenneth Brower
(Collins Publishers, San Francisco: 1990)

READ: March 2005

This is a coffee-table book, with beautiful photos by more than 80 of the world's leading photojournalists. It is not, however, your average stock photograph collection of beautiful places. Many of the photos portray environmental challenges that are facing the Earth. Many others are of peoples whose way of life is being challenged. The pictures cover much ground: from consumers in a packed Toys R Us store in New Jersey to the rice terraces in the Himalayan foothills of Nepal, from volunteers cleaning up a French river to Los Angeles with and without smog, and from capsule hotels in Japan to the spread of deserts across Africa. Each photo is captioned with a concise explanation of the problem or the solution being undertaken by various groups or persons. What I want to know is how things have changed in the 15 years since this was published.

Microserfs by Douglas Coupland

Microserfs
by Douglas Coupland
(HarpersCollins Publishers Ltd., Toronto: 1995)

READ: February 2005

I first tried to read Microserfs sometime during my undergrad in 1996 or 1997, and just couldn't do it. I am an on-again, off-again Douglas Coupland fan (Generation X and Life After God were great, Girlfriend in a Coma bit the big one), and just couldn't get into Microserfs way back when. And now, I have no idea why. It's a fabulous book. I couldn't read it fast enough. And when I was done, I felt emotionally drained but oh-so-happy to have made it through. So worth it.

Microserfs is the story of Dan, a programmer at, yup you guessed it, Microsoft. It takes place in the mid-1990s (1996 or so?) during the heyday of Internet and computer applications development (the first boom). And his computer nerd friends, of course. They don't do a whole lot...well, if you consider developing new products and trying to find their identities and whole raison d'être, is not "a whole lot". It's a remarkable well-written story that is an early foray into exploring the blurred line between narrative and technology (at the risk of sounding somewhat academic). And the ending had me in tears (but happy ones).

I gave this to my brother, who is also somewhat of a computer geek, two years ago for Christmas and he thought it was fantastic. So there.

Hyperspace by Michio Kaku

Hyperspace : A Scientific Odyssey Through Parallel Universes, Time Warps, and the 10th Dimension
by Michio Kaku
(Anchor Books, New York: 1995)

READ: January-February 2005

A great book. Definitely a must-read. It's been a while since I last picked up a science book of any kind, but I've become interested more and more in learning about this sort of thing. Over Christmas, a great programme aired on Nova on PBS, called The Elegant Universe, which surveyed the development of multiple dimensions and string theory in the realm of (largely) theoretical physics (also a book, which I intend to read sometime soon as well). I missed it over Christmas (visiting family, etc.), but the programme is available online, and I highly recommend it.

Anyway, it's definitely nerdy of me, but it's a field I find interesting (and one in which I have absolutely no training). I haven't taken a physics class since grade 10 (Secondaire IV for all you hard-core Québecers in the crowd). So I resolved to read it in order to better understand the Nova programme. In clear, simple language, Michio Kaku, a professor of theoretical physics at the City College of the City University of New York, outlines the history of the development of the theory of hyperspace. In a nutshell, things are simpler to understand when expressed in higher dimensions. He gives the (commonly-used) example of someone who is flat and lives in a flat, two-dimensional world. To such a Flatlander, a three-dimensional object would not make sense, as it would never remain constant from second to second. For example, if a 3-D apple were to fall onto the Flatlander's world, a Flatlander could only view it in segmented 2-D slices. Brown lines representing the apple stem. Then red or green lines, changing rapidly, first growing larger then smaller, as the apple passes "through" his world. A Flatlander cannot think in 3-D since there is no way to represent this in his world. We have the same problem living in our three-dimensional world, but it is generally accepted that there are at least four dimensions (the three familiar ones of space, and the fourth of time as posited by Einstein), with the possibility of a fifth (a space-time dimension). However, for hyperspace to be feasible, there are, in fact, many more dimensions - likely 10 or 11. (Some superstring theories, which is related to hyperspace, suggest as many as 26!)

Anyway, a good read for anyone who's wondered about physics but was too scared to ask, as it were. Simple language, good explanations, very interesting.