A Wrinkle in Time

By Madeleine L'Engle

Some people find solace in comfort food. I have a habit of looking for solace in comfort books. A Wrinkle in Time is the literary equivalent of Mom's mac & cheese.

A Wrinkle in Time is the first book I remember reading. I remember loving Where the Wild Things Are and anything by Richard Scary but those were books that were read to me. I'm sure I read other things first, but Madeleine L'Engle's was my guide on my first solo trip into literature (or at least my first foray into grown-up "chapter" books.)

Even without any clear recollection of the plot, I remember being absolutely in love with A Wrinkle in Time and I decided, perilously close to 20 years on down the road, that I'd indulge my nostalgia.

Mom's Mac & Cheese may not impress many gourmet chefs and Madeline L'Engle's tale of a misunderstood girl doesn't compare to the great works of fiction, but like all great comfort foods, it doesn't pretend to be anything more than what it is. And it's delicious. Soft, warm and Soul-affirming, A Wrinkle in Time takes you back to being curled up under the blankets in your childhood bed.

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell

By Susanna Clarke

'Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell' is in many ways more a piece of historical fiction than it is a Tolkienian fantasy. There is no wand waving or lightning and fireball battles between wizards. There is no epic 'good versus evil' battle at the end. Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell is a character driven story about jealousy, ambition, and loss. The magic is almost incidental.

Ms. Clarke crafts an alternative version of England at the beginning of the 19th century - the twist being that magic has returned to England - that is so wonderfully immersive that you can nearly smell the damp earth and musty libraries.

Ms. Clarke has structured the book as a sort of post-action record compiled for posterity. This structure gives Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell it's most remarkable feature - its footnotes. These glorious footnotes explain bits and pieces of magical history to help us, the reader, understand references made by Strange, Norrel, and others. Each one is a jewel of compressed storytelling, a tiny window into the wider magical world beyond the confines of this book.

You get the feeling Ms. Clarke could write he own version of The Silmarillion, filling out a complete history of the world she's created.

Though the book starts off slowly, the writing is rich enough and the characters intriguing enough to get the reader into the meat of this book. Once there, read slowly to savor the world Ms. Clarke created. The end of the book comes much quicker than one would expect from an 800-odd page novel.

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell masterfully mixes action, drama and comedy into a attention-consuming whole that left me with a wonderfully satisfied feeling.

Jeeves and the Tie that Binds

By P.G. Wodehouse

'Jeeves & The Tie That Binds' was assigned reading for a college 'Humor in Lit' class. As so often happened to me in college, I managed to get through the class without doing the assigned reading.

What a mistake!

A week ago I happened to pick 'Jeeves & The Tie That Binds' up off of my bookshelf. I rarely so much as chuckle when reading, but P.G. Wodehouse's bumbling Bertie Wooster and his arch-English Butler Jeeves had me laughing out loud.

The story is a whirling cacaphony that includes Bertie's friend Ginger Winship standing for Parliment, money troubles, the Junior Ganymede club book (and it's dangerous contents), engagements, disengagements, theft, and every other manner of absurdity. Not that the plot really matters. P.G. Wodehouse's comic genius is in his wordplay and comic timing.

If you really want to delve into Wodehouse, you would find the ever present English obsession with class but you'd also be ruining a wonderfully light hearted piece of writing through over-examination. At only 208 pages, it's the perfect book for an airplane flight or a train ride.

The Children of Hurin

By J.R.R. Tolkien

'The Children of Hurin' - in many ways an expanded chapter of 'The Silmarillion' - is the dark and tragic tale of Turin, the great Hero of Men in the First Age of Middle Earth.

Thousands of years before the events of 'The Hobbit' or 'The Lord of the Rings' the race of Men is proud and the Elves have yet to start their long decline which culminated with their leaving Middle Earth at the end of LOTR. The struggle between Morgoth and the Free Races in 'The Children of Hurin' is the struggle between great powers at their height. There are no reluctant heros in this tale.

After 'The Battle of Unnumbered Tears' Hurin, Human King of Belirand, was captured by Morgoth. When Hurin refused to give Morgoth the location of the hidden Elven city of Gondolin, Morgoth cursed Hurin's children. 'The Children of Hurin' is their tortured story.

Other reviewers have recounted the basic plot and I won't bore you by rehashing it. Instead, I'll give you my impression of the book.

'The Children of Hurin' is Tolkien at his darkest. You imagine this Middle Earth as a dark and frightening place, where even the power and fierceness of those on the side of 'good' is terrifying. This is the story of a cursed man. There are no bright spots, no comic turns, no Samwise Gamgee or Pippin to lighten the mood. This is a story where every character is some version of Boromir, Farimir, and the Last Steward of Gondor. Pride, deceit, struggle, violence and defeat dominate.

The language is slightly more archaic than that of 'The Lord of the Rings' but far less so than 'The Silmarillion,' giving us a very readable story. 'The Children of Hurin' is full of all the same detail and history that we are used to from Tolkien's other works. This story is every bit as good as the rest of the Tolkien canon. The Dragons, the swords, the magical cities and power of fate that Tolkien gave us in 'The Lord of the Rings' is here in spades.

For any true Tolkien fan, 'The Children of Hurin' is unmissable. For those who enjoyed 'The Lord of the Rings' and 'The Hobbit' but failed to get through 'The Silmarillion' this new posthumous release is a great inroad into the history of Middle Earth.

Invisible Cities

By Italo Calvino

When I was in architecture school one of my assignments was to draw three cities from those described in Calvino's 'Invisible Cities.' His amazingly descriptive and yet vague recollections made for a great jumping off point.

Each chapter of 'Invisible Cities' is the narrator's evocative recollection of a fanciful and fantastic city. The descriptions are perfectly distilled in strikingly vivid yet dreamy prose photographs.

Loosen your ties to reality and let this book take you. Read it uncritically and let the scenery wash over you. There is no plot. There are no characters. This is a book about the intersection of reality, language, and the senses. It isn't to be missed.

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

By Jared Diamond

"Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed" examined the environmental reasons for the collapses of various societies including the Mayan civilization in Mexico, the Vikings in Greenland, and the Polynesian societies on Easter Island, Pitcairn and Henderson Island, among other various societies. Not limited to examining failure, Diamond also provided explanations of the ways that societies recognized and avoided environmental collapse. Examples of these successes include Japan at the time of Tokugawa and the New Guinea highlands.

Diamond arranged his examination of collapsing societies around the five stress points that cause societies to fail: Environmental damage, climate change, hostile neighbors, loss of friendly trade partners, and a society's responses to its environmental problems. Any one, though usually two or more can cause a society to collapse. Obviously, the more problems a society has the more difficult it is to avoid collapse. (The presence of hostile neighbors, climate change, environmental damage and a poor response to environmental problems is usually a more dire situation than just the loss of a trading partner - though not always.)

For all the time spent citing examples from history, "Collapse" isn't just a collections of facts about the past. Diamond also provides up-to-date evidence of the problems we face now. He exposes our own society as no more permanent than that of the Maya.

Diamond finds evidence of the coming collapse of our society in Montana, which he examines extensively. Lack of water to grow food is one of the great causes of societal collapse and Diamond shows the problems the western U.S. is having supporting its population. He also points to the many other small 'first signs' of coming problems such as the rich insulating themselves in gated communities.

For all the dire examples, Diamond doesn't damn western society. He doesn't declare that we've already driven off the cliff of un-sustainability but he does show us that we're quickly racing towards it. His examinations of what worked in the past, what didn't work in the past, and what is going on right now, show that the most important 'point' out of the five is the response a society has to the new environmental pressures. If we can formulate the right response, there's no reason why our society shouldn't be among the list of civilizations that side-stepped collapse.

Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West

By Cormac McCarthy
Cormac McCarthy's 'Blood Meridian' is an examination of man's nature when the constraints of civilization are broken.

Like McCarthy's other works, 'Blood Meridian' is set in 'The West.' Not Hollywood's 'Wild West' mind you, but a violent and frightening landscape of emptiness, dust and blood. You will find no show-downs between 'white hats' and 'black hats' at high noon here. America's national myth is drawn and examined and opened and destroyed to drive home the idea that 'Blood Meridian' is about us.

As everyone notes, the violence starts early in the book and it never abates. Mr. McCarthy forces the reader to look, compels us not to turn away. The horrific violence is the vehicle McCarthy uses to move the novel from a story on his pages to a narrative within the reader's mind. Once the reader follows the characters across the border between civilization and chaos we find that, like McCarthy's characters, the violence has stripped us of our humanity. We've left it behind.

As we read, Glanton and 'The Judge' become OUR king and OUR high priest. As The Kid's humanity slowly withers, we are compelled to recognize the degradable nature of our own humanity. The Kid is both the reader personally and a representation of the individual, both as part of society and opposed to society. If we are honest with ourselves we must allow Mr. McCarthy to show us that when faced with humanity's ever-present interior horrors (represented perfectly by 'The Judge') we are just as helpless as the pointedly nameless protagonist.

That is the true horror of 'Blood Meridian.' Not the blood. Not the guts. Not even the dead babies. The horror of 'Blood Meridian' is that at any time we are a one choice, one action, away from the world of 'The Judge.' The constraining forces of 'civilization' are tenuous at best. And once the thread of humanity has been broken we are all either members of Glanton's gang or its victims.

Mr. McCarthy's dense and at times difficult language paints a strikingly vivid picture. His word choice can be archaic and obscure, but no word (or sentence) in 'Blood Meridian' ever seems awkward or out of place. 'Blood Meridian' makes you work to understand what's going on, especially when McCarthy writes dialog. The 300 page book seemed much longer to me. While I occasionally found myself rereading passages the more likely reason was that Mr. McCarthy can construct two or three paragraphs that impart every detail of a hundred mile journey, all within half of a page.

'Blood Meridian' is not a pretty book. It does not fit within today's entertainment consumer's expectations. 'Blood Meridian' is Hieronymus Bosch, not Claude Monet. Don't let that dissuade you. Mr. McCarthy has created a novel sublime in its ability to frighten and disgust you. It's well worth the effort.