Recent Reading

I finally finished Shadow of the Wind, which is the book I've been reading for a week or two. I probably would have been finished earlier, but it was one of those long reads where I took a break occasionally to read other books.

Long Way Round, by Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman: Remember when Ewan McGregor and his pal Charley drove around the world on motorcycles? You don't? That's a shame, because it was pretty good. It was on, um, some cable channel. Possibly Bravo, although I can't think of why they'd show it. I watched about half the episodes, and they were largely interested in Ewan and Charley dropping their motorcycles and then being worried about the Russian mafia. The show was fairly entertaining, but I liked the book more because it dealt more with Ewan and Charley talking about their reactions to the trip and less with video of the scenic vistas. I mean, not that I object to scenic vistas, but it wasn't the angle that really interested me.

I also liked that the book talked about Claudio, the cameraman a bit more. After all, Claudio rode his motorcycle just as far as the two stars, but he almost never got to be on camera. So it was nice to see Ewan and Charley credit him for all his hard work.

The Shadow of the Wind, by Carlos Ruiz Zafón: This was really good and also really long. It was fairly reminiscent of The Club Dumas by Arturo Perez-Reverte in that it talks about books a lot. And also in the fact that it was translated from Spanish. It was very good but kind of hard to explain. I was certainly able to identify with a young reader seeming to be the only person who's read a given book and trying to find any information about the author. Oh, and thanks very much to Strega, who recommended this book to me!

Blink, by Malcolm Gladwell: This guy's premise is that intuition is a valuable human skill and (and this is the important part) often more reliable than prolonged thought. He presents various examples of people who are good at "rapid-slicing" but I was never really convinced that they weren't just "jumping to conclusions". I'm willing to stipulate that some people are able to rapidly assimilate information and come to correct conclusions, but that's not the same thing as saying that it's always a good idea to trust your first instinct.

One interesting aspect of the book was how much time he spent basically arguing against his premise. Because he does admit that first impressions can be led astray by unconscious prejudices, which means that he spends awhile covering them. I think the theory is that by being aware of our innate tendency to think that tall people are smart, we can account for that; the effect on me, though, was that I wished he'd spent more time defending his actual thesis.

"Mr. B" or Comforting Thoughts About the Bison: A Critical Biography of Robert Benchley by Wes D. Gehring

I've wanted to read this for a very long time. I'm a huge Robert Benchley fan, but biographies are hard to find as he's no longer that well-known. This is the most prominent book about him, but it lists for $99.95 at Amazon, which I was never able to justify to myself. Luckily, my girlfriend is extremely clever and located it for ten bucks on eBay. Hooray!

Unfortunately, it's not a very good book. The author uses the word "antiheroic" roughly every other page -- and note that I'm not exaggerating here. I wanted to say something hyperbolic like "millions of times per paragraph," but I'm afraid you won't take me seriously. This is a word that's used over and over again, and it's not even used right. An antihero is someone like Han Solo, Elric, or Colonel Blood (in Pyrates, by George MacDonald Fraser). Gehring, however, is apparently using it to mean a Walter Mitty type; a nebbish. After awhile, the repetition of the word "antiheroic" really starts to grate.

Also, the book is very heavily footnoted. And I have nothing against scholarship, but is it really necessary to have three or four footnotes per paragraph when you're talking about a writer of light comic essays? And when most of the footnotes just reference the same piece over and over again that was called out in the main text anyway? This tendency gets even worse in what should have been the neatest part of the book: Benchley's letters home from Hollywood get reprinted here (well, some of them do, anyway), but they're almost unreadable due to the amount of bracketed commentary and "clarification" that Gehring has shoved in.

And anyway, Marion Meade's biography of Dorothy Parker has more biographical information about Robert Benchley than this book does. I'm still delighted to own it, since it's one of the only examinations of one of my favorite writers, but I really wish it had been better.