Eco, Umberto Baudolino. New York : Harcourt, 2002.
ISBN 0151006903.
Call Number: PQ4865 .C6 B3813 2002 (1 copy).

In this piece to fiction that is as mythically epic as any of Eco’s work, the Italian Professor reminds us of the most important lesson of history: The only absolute part of truth is its malleability.

Set amidst the sacking of Constantinople (not Istanbul) in the second crusade, the title character recounts his life story, even as the city burns, to a court historian, Niketas. The adoptive son of Fredrick Barbarossa and a self-confessed liar, Baudolino tells a fabulous story about his life-long search for the mythical ruler known only as Prester John. John, who was largely invented by Baudolino, is said to rule over a vast christian nation far to the east full of fantastic creatures and strange phenomena including a river of tumbling stone. Over time, even Baudolino’s companions, who helped conceive of this Prester John, begin to believe in his existence.

Playful and accessible, Baudolino presents a world that is simultaneously recognizable and yet somehow skewed, and in doing so points a finger both at belief and our preconceptions of history.

-Jonathan Gallaway, Blackboard Manager

Fénéon, Felix. Novels in Three Lines. New York: New York Review of Books, 2007.
ISBN: 9781590172308
Call number: PQ2611 .E565 N613 2007

In 1906, French anarchist, art critic, and former clerk Felix Fénéon went to work for Le Matin, a Paris broadsheet, where he wrote the small news clips known as “faits divers” - sometimes translated as “hard facts”. Never more than a few lines, they covered the outliers of the everyday: oddities, obituaries, and accidents. Today, we would call these “Short Takes” or “News in Brief” and they’d be in a sidebar or tucked away on A17.

Fénéon’s faits divers are, instead, a world unto themselves. Consider this example:

On the bowling lawn a stroke leveled M. André, 75, of Levallois. While his ball was still rolling he was no more.

Or my favorite passage, this one:

The sinister prowler seen by the mechanic Gicquel near Herblay train station has been identified: Jules Ménard, snail collector.

There isn’t much to say, to add, to this work. Fénéon himself wrote anonymously, these stories saved only by the attention of his mistress who clipped them from the paper. He never published any of his own work in his lifetime, despite being closely tied to the vibrant intellectual culture of Paris and championing artists like Georges Seurat and Paul Signac. It stands to reason that one could easily read these works as trifles or period pieces. Just as easily, however, can they sit with Nietzsche’s aphorisms of The Gay Science or Stein’s poetic experiments of Tender Buttons.

And by way of final recommendation, allow me to direct you toward the Fénéon Twitter feed, which is, in its own way, nearly perfect.

-Phil Rollins, Learning Technologies Developer (prllns on Goodreads)

Image from Amazon

Adiga, Aravind. The White Tiger. New York : Free Press, 2008.
ISBN: 9781416562597
Call Number: PR9619.4 .A35 W47 2008

Aravind Adiga’s debut novel, winner of the 2008 Man Booker Prize, is an angry yet absorbing tale of ambition in twenty-first century India.

The White Tiger follows protagonist Balram Halwai from his village in rural India, known in the novel as “The Darkness,” to the city. Born a member of a caste of sweet makers, Balram finds a position as a personal servant in the rapidly developing India of call centers, air conditioned high rises and shopping malls. The reader follows Balram as he recounts the indignities, sacrifices, schemes and crimes he endures - and perpetrates - along his relatively modest rise.  Balram is an engaging and often hilarious narrator, and his tales of shifting hierarchies and tumultuous power dynamics make for page turning reading. For all of its humor, however, The White Tiger is at its heart a serious look at injustice and poverty. Adiga suggests that while the rapid ascent of India in the global economy of the twenty-first century has its beneficiaries, the cost to the soul of the nation will be very steep indeed.

-Trish Nugent, Special Collections Librarian/Archivist

Dick, Philip K. Four Novels of the 1960s. New York: Library of America. 2007.
ISBN: 1598530097
Call Number: PS3554 .I3 A6 2007

In many ways, Philip K. Dick is the quintessential science fiction author. His novels are rich with ideas, dizzying in scope, and profoundly concerned with the human condition in a world made sick with progress. On the other hand, his novels are often unwieldy, his writing at times an afterthought. It would surprise no one -  having read a novel like “A Scanner Darkly” or “The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch” - to learn that Dick himself was prone to hallucinations, mysticism, and extensive, punishing drug abuse. Even without the frequent (and typically institutional) drug use in his novels, they are clearly the product of a mind straining against itself or, possibly, a world out of joint. Both are frequent themes in his work.

It would be impossible to sum up even one of the four novels in this collection using this space. Needless to say, they represent some of the best of his work. “The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch” contains some of Dick’s wildest ideas (which is saying something) while “The Man In the High Castle” is a more conventional - yet totally entertaining - alternate history set in the early 1960s wherein the US has lost World War II. “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” would later be reduced to “Blade Runner” and probably remains his best-known work for that reason. However, “Ubik” is his virtuoso performance: formally, it is his most readable and densely layered work. Illusive, allusive, elusive, it is one of the very few Dick novels that puts it all together without falling apart. His vision of a commoditized future is only one element with the ring of prophecy to it, and like the best works of the genre it poses many more questions than it hopes to answer.

More than describing fantastic worlds or space battles, Dick’s best work seeks the human element in a confusing and shifting world. And what is most surprising, of course, is how familiar it all is.

- Phil Rollins, Learning Technologies Developer (prllns on Goodreads)

Konigsburg, E.L. The View from Saturday. New York, N.Y. : Atheneum Books for Young Readers, 1996.
ISBN: 068980993X; 0590129007
Call Number: PZ7 .K8352 VI 1996; PZ7 .K8352 VI 1997

Noah, Nadia, Ethan, and Julian.  Together, they form the Souls – the only sixth grade team to beat the seventh grade (and possibly the eighth) in the history of Epiphany Middle School.  Each sixth grader has journeyed to the heart of Epiphany – from as far as the Sargasso Sea to as near as the local school bus.  Each Soul tells a magical tale that weaves together turtles, bullies, strange weddings, laxatives, underdogs, and more. The View from Saturday brings together “four jewel-like short stories” – one for each team member – and brings back the deliciousness of purposeful conversation, laughter, and above all, 4:00 tea.
Newbery Award Winner.

-Ria Newhouse, Learning Commons Coordinator

Harrison, Jim. The Beast God Forgot to Invent. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2000.
ISBN: 0-8711-3821-2.
Call Number: PS3558 .A67 B4 2000

“The danger of civilization, of course, is that you will piss away your life on nonsense.” This is how Jim Harrison begins the first of three novellas that comprise The Beast God forgot to Invent. In this novella, which shares its title with the book, we watch as an aging collector tries to locate, in all senses of the word, a once wealthy young friend who is torn out of society by a horrific accident. It is in this discovery of a creature, reduced to little more than id, virile and brain-damaged, that we find a life so abundant, that it could not possibly exist in civilization.

In language that undulates between the humorous and the visceral, we are presented with characters caught in the constant metamorphosis of changing identity. In the last of the three stories, entitled I Forgot to Go to Spain, a quixotic biographer finds that he has squandered the dreams of his younger self, and finds himself barely recognizable. In a moment of introspection he ponders “The language I was using to describe myself to myself might be radically askew.”

Jim Harrison writes from a place of such prodigious life and reverence, that reading him is to swim once again in some childhood memory, suddenly uncomplicated, unmoored from the lives we have led.

Those interested may also wish to look into Jim Harrison’s other works which range from fiction (The Woman Lit by Fireflies, Julip) to poetry (Returning to Earth, The Theory & Practice of Rivers and New Poems)  to essays (Just Before Dark).

-Jonathan Gallaway, Blackboard Manager

Bolaño, Roberto. 2666. New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008.
ISBN: 9780374531553
Call Number : XX(819121.1) (1 copy in process)

Bolaño’s literary body is woven tightly together without ever being sewn up, and in 2666 - his final novel before his death in 2003 at age 50 - he refuses still to close old wounds and old characters. While the title has been said to refer to the Biblical Exodus from Egypt, a mystical future date of redemption, or simply an earlier novel, the story’s wobbly orbit is Santa Theresa - generally considered to be a fictionalized version of Ciudad Juárez in northern Mexico. It is here that a flood of unexplained murders of young women has threaded itself into a pervasive atmosphere of dread. Like many of Bolaño’s works, the dread is not so much fixed on a point as existential, with the events of the book coloring and being colored by it as they weave to the fore and to the background. The city and its murders are never too far behind, even when globetrotting around Europe (in “The Part About the Critcs”), moving backwards through time (”The Part About Archimboldi”) or following a sportswriter (”The Part About Fate”). A harrowing fourth section - “The Part About the Crimes” - is a masterfully rendered portrait of this landscape, and may have you putting down the book a few times to regroup. No light reading, that.

For those new to Bolaño’s world, it might be said that the equally masterful Savage Detectives or the more compact Distant Star would be better starting points. That might even be so. But, then, that’s the beauty of Bolaño: you can pick up the thread wherever you like and follow wherever it leads. Probably, like Newton’s cannonball, back in on itself. At a high velocity.

Phil Rollins, Learning Technologies Developer, (prlins on Goodreads)