E11even

Posted to craigslist on November 3, 2009

**Update: I have sold my copies of these books but you
can still find them via amazon.com by following links.**

I just returned from 7 weeks of traveling light and realize I don't need this stack of very nice books anymore. I was going to review them at thriftsellers.blogspot.com but realize now I don't have anything interesting to say about them. A nice variety of general interest reading to get you through some long damp Northwest nights.

Planes and Copters (1977-78 edition)
Pocket size manual of state of the art flying machines.

Ray Bradbury - Zen in the Art of Writing
Some useful truisms delivered in Bradbury's characteristic hyperbolic but endearing style.

Frank Norris - The Octopus
1901 muckraking novel in social realist vein. I didn't get too far into this tale of late 19th century railroad robber barons exploiting wheat growers in California. There was just too much plodding detail in parched narrative style to hold my interest. But you might like it.

Nick Jans - The Grizzly Maze
Timothy Treadwell was the subject of Werner Herzog's film Grizzly Man--an eccentric Californian with a troubled past who found peace cavorting with Grizzly Bears in the Alaskan wilderness until he and his female companion were mauled to death. This is an even-handed attempt to uncover the nature of Treadwell's motives, actions, and impacts by an Alaskan journalist who is not sympathetic to Herzog's documentary.

Evan Morris - The Word Detective
Interesting etymologies explained in an overly earnest and almost twee manner as if the author were trying too hard to fill the shoes of his highly accomplished parents whose syndicated word origins newspaper column he inherited. Still, a pretty good book to sit on the toilet tank for a quick literary fix during a private moment.

Richard Hough - The Potemkin Mutiny
Russian sailors get sick of eating maggoty meat and mutiny on their 1905 battleship. I didn't get very far into this one, either, but it's got a pretty cover.

Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory - My Dinner with Andre
The film version of this seems so extemporaneous but the words were all scripted and they're all here in this slim edition. Some really wild passages which will certainly make northwest lefties with a paranoid streak cheer.

News of the Weird
Hundreds of bizarre coincidences, freak accidents, perversions, anomolies, and incredible incidents each described in a terse paragraph or two. The only thing I didn't like about this was the weighting of the selections towards pain and humiliation.

Paul Theroux - Riding the Iron Rooster
See: http://thriftsellers.blogspot.com/2009/09/riding-iron-rooster-by-paul-theroux.html


The Incredible Incas and Their Timeless Land
Nice hardback small coffeetable book published by National Geographic Society in 1975. Pretty interesting if you're into South American indigenous culture.

The Onion's Finest News Reporting - Volume One
If you loved Mad Magazine as a child, The Onion is perfect for the adult you. This best-of compilation (the first in what is by now an enormous series) published in 2000 recaptures some of the highlights of that wacky decade we call the '90s. Remember when Clinton deployed vowels to Bosnia?

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury (1953)

"Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there. It doesn't matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away."

The Fahrenheit scale of temperature is completely insane, yet somehow charming in its anthropocentric ordering of the cosmos. At 451 degrees F, paper combusts. Combustion is what this book is all about. Books, people, cities--all burn.

Do you like books? This is a book for book-likers.

Often lumped in with 1984 and Brave New World (not bad company to keep), the key difference is the villain is you and me; that is to say, the "everyperson" who prefers distraction to taking action. The denial of history brings about endless bloody repeats.

F451 offers a grim and despairing view of the American mind as one distracted to death by television and the continual pounding of vapid music through uncannily iPod-like "seashell" earbuds which keep the wearer tuned out from reality. I happened to read those passages while watching clueless Seattleites absentmindedly run their powerboats near lake swimmers of whom they were completely oblivious. The future Bradbury predicted is here now, minus the bookburning. But in a way Bradbury could not have anticipated, books are losing their sacred status as carriers of culture as people turn to the internet for information. That repository of trivia and unchecked facts leaves history open to endless revision which, as Orwell warned, makes it easy to manipulate the present.

Although it offers a sad view of the declining American intellect, the book's ending is hopeful in a destroy-to-create paradoxical way.