Mike's Archive

Category: Books

  • The Iditarod

    My pal Gordo likes to give me a hard time about liking off-the-wall sports — I live for curling, cornhole and hope to someday take a crack at Irish Road Bowling. I like regular sports too — basketball is my true love, and the Red Sox my one and only team. But baseball and basketball players often do what they do for all the wrong reasons, as guys like Johnny Damon proved this winter. I love sports like curling for one simple reason: people who play them do it because they love it, and for nothing else. When there’s no fame or fortune awaiting the winners, all that BS doesn’t get in the way of doing it for the love of competition.

    This brings me to my latest obsession — The Iditarod Sled Dog Race. This obviously, if you know me, is something that I’d never actually do, but I respect the heck out of the fine people that pull it off. I fear them as well — they are all flippin’ crazy. OLN covered the “last great race” this year, and the coverage was strangely compelling — the trials that each musher goes through just to make it to the end is absolutely stunning — as is the scenery.

    I also just finished reading Winterdance: The Fine Madness of Running the Iditarod, a book written by two-time finisher Gary Paulsen. I’m often wary of non-fiction sports books — they usually manage to bore me about halfway through — but this read like a bestselling thriller, comically describing the absolute ridiculousness that was Paulsen’s run from Minnesota (where he learned to mush) to Nome.

    My favorite part — Paulsen describing his attempt to make it out of Anchorage (just the ceremonial start of the race) alive:

    “We went through people’s yards, ripped down fences, knocked over garbage cans. At one point I found myself going through a carport and across a backyard with fifteen dogs and a fully loaded Iditarod sled. A woman standing over a kitchen sink looked out with wide eyes as we passed through her yard and I snapped a wave at her before clawing the handlebar again to hang on while we tore down her picket fence when [the lead dog] tired to thread through a hole not bigger than a housecat…”

    If you like sports and competition at all, give Paulsen’s book a read.

  • Atlas Shrugged

    About 8 years ago I started reading the book Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand. I very much enjoyed it until page 698 when I placed the bookmark in it for the last time and was distracted by some other book. Thereafter, the thick, almost-1100pg tome with the ethereal sketch portrait of Ayn Rand sat on my shelf, mocking me. (more…)

  • The Geographer’s Library

    Another of the many “historical suspense” novels capitalizing on the success of the Da Vinci Code, The Geographer’s Library is the debut novel from Jon Fasman. I rarely pick up a book on a whim without doing some research first, but I was in the libary the other day and this book was featured in the New Fiction section, and something about it made me take it home.

    Fasman has crafted an interesting story that is really two books in one — a current day tale centering around a small-town journalist investigating the death of a mysterious professor, and the story of the “library” of the famous philosopher Al-Idrisi, a collection of priceless objects that have been scattered around the world and may or may not have mystical powers.

    The story surrounding current day journalist Paul Tomm is highly absorbing, a well-crafted page turner that unfortunately only takes up about half of this novel. The “library” portion is bloated and overlong, and most disturbingly completely unnecessary. One expects that, after having struggled through pages of nonsense related to this so-called library, that at the very least it will have provided key details to the story’s resolution, but that fails to happen. It really is a shame, because I enjoyed the majority of this novel only to be let down at the very end.

    A decent debut for Fasman and not a bad way to spend your time, but doesn’t quite live up to its potential.

  • Books Overview / Da Vinci

    I don’t claim to be some kind of literary expert, or even to read all that much, but I do enjoy a good book and will not hesitate to share any interesting reads in this space. I just ask that you not treat me as the New York Times Book Review — I’m just a guy who likes to read from time to time.

    I’m also not ashamed to admit that I liked the Da Vinci Code. For some readers, I may have immediately lost all credibility, but let me explain for a minute before you assume my complete ignorance towards the written word.

    The way I see it, there are two elements to a great book — the writing and the storytelling. Dan Brown’s writing is not good — but the guy is one heck of a storyteller. Sure, he uses a ton of cliched suspense tactics and makes some questionable assumptions based on historical myths, but the book is one hell of a page turner. Obviously, it would be nice if Brown could have taken his writing to the next level, but not everyone can be Michael Chabon. The best book I’ve read in the past, say 5 years, is, without hesitation, Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. This is also an engrossing story, but, unlike Brown’s book, it is also incredibly well-written. Just a mind-blowing read.

    I recently read this book called Truth and Fiction in the Da Vinci Code by historian Bart Ehrman, the point of which was to pick apart the logic behind Brown’s book. And while it is certianly in vogue to prove Brown’s FICTION wrong, this book shed little light for me on the actual events on which the DVC was based. One example was particularly illustrative of my frustration: Ehrman calls out Brown’s description of the Council of Nicea. According to character Leigh Teabing in the DVC, the council was where Jesus’ divinity was first decided — Teabing implies that this divinity was in question before the council. According to Ehrman, however, everyone who attended the council already believed Jesus was devine, it was just the details this divinity was decided that were in question. Without explaining this in excruciating detail, the jist is that all Christians at this time believed that God was the one and only all powerful being, and the fact that Jesus was ALSO divine calls this all into confusion. So, a bunch of people got together and devised the holy trinity, a compromise of divine proportions.

    My issue with this is that, although Ehrman is correct in pointing out Brown’s creative rewriting of the story, it does little to change the overall point of Teabing’s story — that a bunch of human beings gathered around to decide how a man was divine. If you truly believe that Jesus was a diety, then it would also be logical to believe that humans don’t get to decide in what way he was divine. He either was or was not, and the fact that there had to be a council of men to decide this calls it mere existence into question. Ehrman uses this particular example as a foundation for much of his argument, and it seems more like a nit-pick than a major flaw in the novel.

    I’ve strayed from my original point that DVC is simply an entertaining thriller, but I suppose the additional thought is that it is just a silly to hate the DVC simply because that’s the “in thing” to do as it is to take Brown’s fictional assumptions at face value.

    (Read Kavalier and Clay first anyway.)