Truman Capote - In Cold Blood

When this kicked off I thought it was way too glossy, All-American and colour-supplement feature essay-esque.  It seemed like every page was overfilled with Americana.  I thought it would be too saccharine to tolerate for long and stylistically too insubstantial to carry hundreds of pages.  Everything feels like a slightly overworked scene from a cliched movie.  In the end, even though neither the prose or the dialogue grew on me much, I enjoyed the book and read it quickly after starting.

Two things stood out to me as important.  First, the pace and construction of the narrative.  Secondly, the depth and breadth of the research carried out to place the crime in its context.  Capote is an expert sketcher of characters and scenes and piqued my interest in the idyllic family, the pair of crims and how the horrific murders were eventually traced back to them.  It’s true that by the end, I had had about enough of these sketches when he began to profile the various members of death row in Kansas in exactly the same manner.  At that stage it felt like watching too many episodes of a TV show about murderers.  However, rather than the quality of the individual pieces of prose, none of which were especially memorable to me, it was how they were assembled and the diversity of their perspectives that made the book good. Capote clearly did his research, or made up a lot of stuff, but the end effect is the same, he builds interest in the characters and how things happened the way they did.  Inevitably, the brutal murderers are somewhat humanised by their hardscrabble backgrounds.  Capote also seems to surmise that jail was more of a hindrance than a help to both men.  Nonetheless, they seem so ordinary, and the crime is so pointless, it’s almost impossible to believe things like this can happen regardless of the mitigating circumstances.  But in a world of billions of people, or about 2.5bn in 1950, all sorts of highly improbable things ended up happening.  I was left thinking that problems of inequality, both financial and emotional, can end in violent outcomes in a society that values money above everything else.  But when much of a person’s actions depend on their individual childhood experiences and relationships, as Capote strongly suggests, the problem seems gargantuan and almost impossible to influence in all but the most meagre ways.  

A question that played on my mind after reading the book was why people, myself included, enjoy this genre?  Do I want to learn about the killers so I can dismiss them as a deranged aberration?  Do I want to rationalise them and their actions so the crimes seem less inexplicable?  There’s a contradictory pull of familiarity and differentiation - ‘they’re just like me’ and ‘they’re nothing like me / how could they do that?’.  At some level, murders are interesting to humans because they’re reasonably rare and deal in stakes of life or death.  As with all disasters, there is a fascination with how things can go so badly wrong. Perhaps, we imagine we have known a rage that could be murderous or can imagine some provocation that might drive us there.  Even if that is the case, which is debatable, I feel very few people consider shooting people ‘in cold blood’.  Smith, who does the actual killing, knows it is wrong but seems incapable of feeling anything about it.  Seen from this angle, being a murderer seems like a rare medical condition.  An absence of empathy so gaping that you can’t feel anything about cutting a man’s throat or shooting a defenceless teenager in the face.  Capote explores how responsible the perpetrators should be held for their crimes and the morality of capital punishment in a precursory way.  It’s not the highlight of the book but it is an interesting subject worth introducing and considering beside the specific case of the murders.  The book does this often and well.  It asks a lot of questions without adopting a strong moral stance of its own.  In this sense, the book is bleak.  The book’s highlight for me was the pacing of the narrative and the mastery of the subject Capote has acquired.  Regardless of whether the story is true to life or embellished, Capote knows every aspect of it and in that way has created a little world in which he is an excellent master and guide.  It doesn’t matter much to me if some of the characters turn out to be actors.

I would definitely recommend this book even though the prose wasn’t that great.  The narrative is adroitly spun and I did care about some of the characters, especially the crims, even though Capote hams them all up quite heavily.  It pushes a lot of the right buttons in terms of intrigue.  In a way that makes you feel a bit guilty about it afterwards. 

 

Cathy Park Hong - Minor Feelings

I loved how acerbic the author was in describing her experiences and so-called ‘minor feelings’ about her racial identity. As a white reader, it can be easy to say, ‘oh, that’s no big deal’ or ‘you can’t get worked up about that’ and Hong does an excellent job of explaining how useless that approach is. A bit like telling a depressed person to cheer up. One thing was very clear from the book, Hong didn’t gain anything from ignoring these feelings and could only understand herself and her life by accepting their existence and validity. The book has the feeling of someone getting a lot off their chest.



Hong introduces the concept of ‘speaking nearby’ a subject in the book and it's a fitting description of this patchwork of reflections with no real narrative. Hong touches on her family history, her childhood, her reading, her writing or failure to write, speaking broken English and the art and biographies of her heroines in the process of speaking nearby the subject of race. Some of these passages were really brilliant and moving. For example, I loved her writing about the gruesome death of one of her favourite artists (Theresa Hak Kyung Cha) and whether the silence surrounding it was respectful or disrespectful. She handles the moral and philosophical niceties with delicacy and speaks with the authority of someone who has researched and considered the subject extensively and carefully. At the other end of the spectrum, adolescent tales about her psychotic friend stealing her poems at college don’t feel very nearby at all. Plus it feels kind of shitty to drag her mentally unstable former friend in public via her book; a fact she even acknowledges. Maybe it’s supposed to be warts and all but I still thought it was the worst part of the book.



I enjoyed Hong’s prose. It is pithy and easy to read while still being inventive and maintaining a distinctive voice. Of course, being the pedant that I am, there were some upsetting moments. I have no idea what a ‘pooched stomach’ is, a tummy that looks like a dog? The dictionary didn’t know either. I also couldn’t understand why the word ‘molecule’ is used about a sweet her father is eating - how could anyone eat anything in such invisible, microscopic quantities and why use such a technical term? She also used two of my least favourite phrases: 1) ‘thought experiment’ - it’s not an experiment because there’s no control and it means exactly the same as ‘think about’ but is pretentious and inaccurate 2) ‘late capitalism’ - should be ‘recent capitalism’ unless the date for the death of capitalism has been set and only Hong’s been told about it - sigh!



Hong is great at highlighting the white bias in media that I ordinarily wouldn’t be at all aware of. Why is everyone in a film like the remake of ‘Bladerunner’ white, including the enslaved children? However, when she started shredding ‘Moonrise Kingdom’ I did wonder if it was possible to be nostalgic about certain aspects of the more racist past without it being an overt endorsement of racism itself? A film about white kids at camp in New England during the 60s doesn’t seem racist to me just because it doesn’t have any people of colour in it. But maybe that’s just because I’m white and I like Wes Anderson. I was more interested when Hong notes that there are hardly any people of colour in any Wes Anderson films except for subservient subcontinental Indians. Her characterisation of him as a collector and the idea that collections are defined by what they leave out also fascinated me. But the specific criticism of ‘Moonrise Kingdom’ struck me as unfair.



Much as I love Hong’s anger and brutal critique of anyone and everything, sometimes I wondered if she’s at risk of fetishing her indignation. Sometimes I would read passages littered with the accusatory ‘you’ while thinking, ‘who is ‘you’ in this context?’. Probably, it’s the white man and I’m willfully misunderstanding it. But sometimes it feels like Hong likes nothing better than to get indignant with rage at a certain individual, situation, novel or film. Then again, sometimes her anger itself was revelatory. Like when her white friend starts crying after Hong gets racially abused on the subway. My natural reaction is to explain it away like it was a bad experience for everyone or perhaps her white friend is a sensitive and emotional person, who may have experienced traumas of their own that are being triggered by the violent shouting match. Either of those things could be true. But Hong’s anger makes her description lucid and conveys the visceral nature of her feelings. This was really helpful to me and taught me a lot. All told, there’s more good in Hong’s anger than bad. Her idea of refusing to be indebted really struck a chord with me. For all the talk of being grateful for life, it could also be said that life is rudely thrust upon a person and the idea of choosing to be born makes little sense to me as I am now. Childhood certainly mainly seems to be following orders for most of us. Who knows? In any case, Hong’s anger was a roaring furnace that powered the book and lit it up but sometimes it felt a bit out of control and threatened to consume everything else.



This was a well written book and taught me a lot about a subject I’m naturally ill-informed about. Parts of it were really wonderful but other bits felt boring and narcissistic.

Gino Segre - A Matter Of Degrees

 This was a lovely, engaging wee book that manages to make some arcane topics interesting and accessible to the lay reader.  It also gave me a fresh perspective on the world because I’ve never thought about it through such a rigidly temperature focussed lens and it was rewarding! Alongside distance and time, Segre sets up temperature as one of the fundamental modes of human measurement and gives the reader a whirlwind tour of a universe viewed through temperature.

This takes us all around and covers a fairly overwhelming list of topics and subjects including quantum physics, mammalian biology, the steam engine, deep sea diving and everything in between.  The author usually tries to focus on a personality and a discovery in order to break up the technical explanations and give some human interest to the text. But it is the ideas that he covers and the way he links them to philosophical questions about the history and future of humanity and the earth that made the book so interesting for me.  Indeed, even though some of the character sketches and potted histories are really good, there are too many of them and the format is too familiar for one to really stand out.  There is even the odd dud like the story about Einstein’s fridge design, which was curious, but felt off topic.  There were other sections where I wanted a stronger connection to the central theme and a couple where he lost me completely!  But, on the whole, the author’s passion for the subject and his gift for explaining its intricacies make it an enjoyable read.  The sections about photons, neutrinos, thermal vents on the ocean floor, the impact of asteroids, planetary movement, the earth’s temperature history and climate change were all very memorable and excellently explained.  Probably my favourite was a section on how life might have survived a global ice age deep under the sea where life exists using sulphides from thermal vents.

The book is very broad and introductory and sometimes it felt like the scope had been stretched too far or the material was too varied.  On the other hand, it introduced a lot of very interesting topics to me and gave plenty of ideas for further reading so it’s easy to forgive the odd section that rambles or tends towards the tangential.

This was a thoroughly enjoyable read, similar to ‘Stuff Matters’ by Mark Miodownik but replacing material science with temperature focussed physics!  Both gave me lots of new perspectives, probably partly because my scientific knowledge is shockingly poor, and had the feel of a specialist obsessive assessing a huge breadth of subjects through the narrower lens of their expertise.  Also ordered ‘The First Three Minutes’ by Steven Weinberg because of this book.

Robert Louis Stevenson - Master Of Ballantrae

 This was a shoddy book that didn’t have much to recommend it to me.  Much of it gave the impression that RLS was making it up as he went along or, at least, changing his mind about what kind of novel it was during its composition.  The book starts out with the premise that its contents represent a collection of found documents. However, in the end it only seemed to consist of the reflections of ‘Mackellar’ - the exasperating narrator - and an excerpt from an Irish General.  I wondered why RLS would bother setting up this ‘found documents’ situation when it brings nothing to the plot and the story is effectively told as a plain narrative.  It also made me compare it very unfavourably with ‘The Confessions Of A Justified Sinner’ By James Hogg, which uses the same device a lot better.  Perhaps RLS was going to invent a greater diversity of documents but changed his mind!

The story itself is facile, long winded and supposes the credulity of a children’s adventure book or a James Bond film.  It’s all told in a loquacious and high falutin style, which is entirely appropriate to the character of Mackellar but was still annoying and boring to read.  Mackellar is forever protesting his lowly nature but then recounts how his wise counsel solves all the family problems.  This simultaneous grovelling and boasting made me detest the character and treat his testimony with a good deal of suspicion.  Apart from his eternal devotion to his masters we learn very little about his history or personal life.

This question of who Mackellar is and for whom he is producing these documents was the most interesting part of the book.  However, the question is never really fleshed out or thrown into relief because there aren’t any other perspectives to contrast with his.  Someone suggested to me that the Master of Ballantrae and Mackellar are the same person and this made me more excited about the book than at any point during reading it.  Sadly, looking back on it, I don’t think there’s enough evidence to support this.  I also don’t believe RLS was doing anything as clever in this mish mash of a book.

When the book starts it feels like it will be a historical novel because there is a lot of context about The Jacobite Rising and Bonnie Prince Charlie but this ultimately proves to be of minor importance.  All of a sudden it is a species of pirate story, seemingly one of RLS’s favourite themes, then in exile, then back in Scotland for some duelling, then off to India, then back to Scotland again, then to NY, then off into the wilderness for a prospectors vs. natives treasure hunt.   Most of the major narrative events consist of a change of place for the master and/or the rest of the cast or the master dying and then turning out not to have been dead after all.  None of the scenes are especially well drawn and none of the characters are developed very deeply.  It all had the feel of a confused and overly complex children’s adventure.

I wouldn’t recommend this book and thought it was worse than ‘Kidnapped’ but I’m hopeful that ‘Treasure Island’ or ‘The Strange Case Of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’ will be better!

Robert Louis Stevenson - Kidnapped

 I can’t say if it was the content of the book itself, a change in my mindset while reading it or a combination of the two but I felt a real difference between the first and second half of the book.  I would’ve been much happier if the book finished after David Balfour’s eventual return to the mainland from Erraid.  

I think it is fair to say that both halves are action packed, both contain caricatures more than characters and both, at times, stretch the reader’s credulity.  All of this seems appropriate for a children’s adventure novel.  However, for whatever reason, I found the first half to be engaging and the second to be sloppily constructed and overwrought.  The tale of David’s journey to Cramond and his subsequent dealings with his curmudgeonly uncle were great and I found the young nephew’s suspicions to be an excellent starting point for the plot.  Of course, things take a turn for the more fanciful once the adventure begins in earnest and David is kidnapped.  That said, the ignoble crew and the inevitable mishaps were well drawn and of a piece.  The appearance of Alan Breck Stewart provides a good catalyst for David’s eventual escape and the fight scene would have made for a perfect, action packed crescendo - or so I thought at least!  I didn’t have much objection to the self-imposed stranding on Erraid either.  It provided a good foil of ignorance and incapacity to the all too capable performance of Alan and David during the fight!

After that, I felt like the book took a turn for the worse.  Perhaps I thought that after such an ordeal, David would stop at nothing to get back to his uncle as quickly as possible.  Perhaps the somewhat ridiculous Alan Breck began to wear a bit thin as he took up more narrative and dialogue.  I’m not usually a fan of historical characters appearing in novels.  I feel it’s a bit uninventive and usually results in the repetition of a few hackneyed character traits.  This was certainly the case for the highly romanticized chieftain in hiding, Cluny, and Alan Breck Stewart. 

The second half of the book also struck me as far more haphazard and unnecessarily flamboyant.  While the incidents of the first half hung together nicely, I felt the author was scrambling for material in the second.  David meets extraordinary guides, unwittingly becomes an accessory to the murder of the king’s agent, embarks on lengthy clandestine journey through Scotland, which is made to sound more like Hollywood Lord of the Rings set than anything like the real Highlands, without shelter and witnesses a farcical piping competition between ABS and another legendary clansman.  The tone and quality of the dialogue also seemed to deteriorate until I had the sensation that one cliche was being piled on top of another until the whole edifice keeled over.  

The denouement was reasonably satisfactory, with the exception of some highly floral and badly drawn interactions between David Balfour and his uncle’s lawyer back in Cramond but I felt like the book had already been spoiled by the journey from Erraid.  I would recommend this book because, at its best, it’s highly enjoyable but I would have preferred a shorter, edited version.   

Ursula K Le Guin - Earthsea

He stood tall and proud as the mighty oak whilst the wind whipped his mysterious and scarred visage and lightning broke the dark, stormy sky behind him.  He wore simple tweed britches, hand sewn leathern booties and the shaggy fleece of the flippitytoot, from his native lands of Giveashit, for warmth against the harsh winter.  He carried a staff of Baobab, palladian shod.  They called him Pidge but his true name, in the ancient, primordial tongue of the Snifftyflob, was MageLord 3000. 

I should preface these ramshackle reflections by saying I am not usually a reader of the ‘fantasy genre’, depending on how it’s defined.  First, it strikes me that a lot of fantasy books are about a fairly narrow cast of wizards, dragons, witches and ogres.  That’s not to say there is anything wrong with those types of characters.  They don’t pique my interest much.  On the whole, I tend to think to myself, rightly or wrongly, ‘humanity is interesting and varied enough for me I’ll probably leave the fantasy for another day’.  

The prose in the book wasn’t much to my liking and I found it meandering, facil and cliched.  It was never pithy or concise and was often confusing and verbose.  I found a lot of the characters and scenes to be overwritten and full of romantic nostalgia for the world she’s created for them.  ‘What do you expect from a fantasy novel?’, you might ask.  

I got more enjoyment out of the themes in the book, for example, the idea in the first book of Ged battling against the darkness, which he has created, to save his life and identity.  At other points, I felt like it was too much of a mish mash of borrowed ideas, for example, light and darkness (Bible), a young man going on a journey to establish his own identity (Greek epic, Jung).  One theme I thought a bit ridiculous was the desperate attempt to establish a positive female perspective in the fourth book.  In the preceding three books women are depicted as crafty seductresses (Ged in garden, Book 1) or evil devil worshippers and child sacrificers (Order of Preistesses, Book 2).  However, in the fourth book there is an abrupt change from men, mage lords and mighty staff wielding wizardry to a focus on mothering, nurture and the importance of domesticity and anything relating to women while men are scolded instead.  

Book 2 was an impressive piece of writing and struck me as the most creative perhaps because it wasn’t full of ‘fantasy’ characters from central casting.  In fairness to Le Guin, it’s possible that I find some of her characters and style hackneyed because so many people have copied it.  I have read that some people consider her incredibly influential and innovative but I am not really in a position to comment.  

This wasn’t a book that I enjoyed or would recommend because it is too long, the prose is bad and there aren’t enough good themes or characters to make it worthwhile.  Books 1 & 2 are certainly better than 3 & 4 and would be enough to get a taste of her style.  That said my favourite character was from Book 3, so there you go.  It was Sopli.

Will Ashon - Chamber Music: About the Wu (In 36 Pieces)

This book is a work of great passion and obvious obsession with the subject matter. It self-consciously takes a magpie approach to the selection and presentation of material. This is both a good and a bad thing. A precursory glance at the books I’ve rambled about on this blog will show I employ a similar strategy with my reading so, in some ways, I admire it. On the other hand, I’m not writing a book!


Beginning with the good stuff, Ashon knows what he is talking about when it comes to making music, listening to music, selling music and pretty much anything else to do with music. His explanations of sampling techniques and equipment are great. His knowledge of its history and the genealogy of influences are deep and detailed. He breaks down how a track makes its way from an artist’s bedroom to a studio album, or at least how that happened in the mid 90s when ‘36 Chambers’ was released. He knows how record deals work and where to look for the split of royalties between group members. All in all, he’s very strong on music, how music is made and how the music industry works. He has also analysed the subject matter, and seemingly almost any material connected to it, forensically.


On the other hand, the same magpie approach yields some less shiny objects to adorn the nest. Ashon covers huge swathes of non-musical history, anthropology, sociology, economics and geography in a manner that’s much less clear than the stuff on music. He achieves the considerable feat of being simultaneously superficial and rambling on subjects like race, slavery and economics. He references some great books in his chapter length summaries of these gargantuan subjects but, on the whole, there are much better authors to read on these complex topics. Sometimes, the chapters read more like a stream of consciousness and it’s hard to work out what he’s even on about. The chapter about weed would definitely fall into this category and I wasn’t even stoned when I read it! The overall effect is to diminish the quality of the book and make it too long. Occasionally, a nice connection is made or an interesting tangent described but I would have much preferred it if he got rid of about ten chapters and wrote at greater length on the stuff he is really good at writing about (see para 2), which is often too short and left me wanting more. Maybe I should blame the editor, maybe he got carried away with the idea of having 36 chapters or maybe it’s just me who’s irritated by this sort of thing. One of the chapters contains hundred-odd word summaries of a selection of Shaw Brothers films which influenced the group’s members, which struck me as utterly pointless. I would imagine that Ashon has watched them all, which is what makes him such an expert on this topic, but it brings little insight or enjoyment to the reader to read skeletal plots one after another. Similarly, each chapter has a tiny, black and white photo of what I assume are scenes from Staten Island. Again, it’s evident from the book that he has been there and visited all the central locations in the creation of the album and this results in interesting and valuable prose sections. But why try to crow bar in a bunch of average snaps of suburban NY, which are neither interesting nor valuable? Selection of material and knowing what to focus on and what to leave out are the weakest points of this book.


The style of the prose is mixed too. Sometimes it’s like reading a music magazine with puns and pop culture references. Other times it’s all high falutin Granta / Oxbridge stuff with a religious use of ‘we’ instead of ‘I’ (though he does acknowledge the absurdity of this in a note) and words like ‘impedimenta’ and ‘praxis’ bandied around just so you know he is REALLY VERY CLEVER! The prose certainly wasn’t the highlight of the book even though it was good in places.


The book finishes on a high note with a brilliant conspiracy theory about how Ghostface Killah might have been the real architect of the group’s structure and success, which is normally attributed to the RZA. Only a true aficionado would even be able to construct a theory like this and it showcases all Ashon’s undoubted knowledge and immersion in the subject in a very flattering light.


At its best the book is informative, well written and fascinating. However, too often it strays into vague tangents and attempts to cover way too much ground given its scope. It would have benefitted from tighter focus on the areas where Ashon is a real expert and omission of his ill-fated attempts to explain slavery, capitalism etc. etc. in one chapter.