Airframe

Title: Airframe

Author: Michael Crichton

Published: 1996

Pages: 448

Rating: 3/5

This book kept me quite entertained on a flight to Seattle (which was, in retrospect, not the best idea, haha). Pretty standard Crichton thriller: rapid page-turning, short chapters, lots of tension. Great entertainment reading.

However, I really didn't think it was anything special. It certainly wasn't up to par with Jurassic Park, Prey, or Rising Sun. I'd say it compared most closely to Disclosure, but it wasn't quite as good.

On the other hand, Crichton's "issue du jour" for this novel was spot-on. It really attacks the media for shooting first and asking questions later, and that is definitely something worth exploring. I think maybe one of the biggest problems that this novel had was that this entire plot line was developed entirely too late; it only started around the midpoint of the text. There was, perhaps, a lack of focus, as much of the novel detailed an airline disaster and the investigation thereof. Some of this segment seemed like filler.

Anyway, only a few Crichton books left for me, really. And shame of all shames, the guy died. Damnit.

Whacky animation

How cool is this? Haha, I love it.

Fieldwork

Title: Fieldwork

Author: Mischa Berlinski

Published: 2007

Pages: 356

Rating: 4/5

This was a pretty bitchin' novel about anthropologists and missionaries, set against the background of tribal life in Thailand. It is written in the first person; Berlinski himself is the speaker, though he is not the protagonist. What was cool about this book was that it showed how anthropologists and missionaries are more or less doing the same work, though working toward entirely different goals. While anthropologists want to preserve and even immortalize native cultures, missionaries want to alter them.

Now, if you know me, you know that I wholly disagree with even the idea of missionaries, as I believe they are control freaks trying to dominate those weaker than themselves. The fact that they do this almost entirely without realizing how evil they are does not excuse their abhorrent behavior, in my opinion. But I'll get off my soapbox for now.

I read this book over several months, so I got to enjoy it slowly. Marielle picked it out as something we could read together, showing a talent for selecting books that I will probably enjoy. Marielle knows me well? Nothing new there, haha.

Anyway, I'd especially recommend this to anyone interested in anthropology, though it is an enjoyable casual read as well. Berlinski's descriptions of the natural world as it appears in Thailand are top notch, and the man has a way with words to boot. For a first novel, a very strong showing, I should say.

Pretty much need to get a résumé together for myself. Could be fun.

Great [existential] quote of the day:

"I stepped right out to the edge of the precipice. I thought that when Caroline saw me afterward she'd cry, "I loved that mashed-up piece of human wreckage." I looked over at the terrifying drop and my stomach lurched and all my joints locked and I had the following horrible thought: You experience life alone, you can be as intimate with another as much as you like, but there has to be always a part of you and your existence that is incommunicable; you die alone, the experience is yours alone, you might have a dozen spectators who love you, but your isolation, from birth to death, is never fully penetrated. What if death is the same aloneness, though, for eternity? An incommunicable, cruel, and infinite loneliness. We don't know what death is. Maybe it's that." -Steve Toltz, A Fraction of the Whole

This shit reminds me of something else I read, in the novel Shōgun:

"It's a saying they [the Japanese] have, that a man has a false heart in his mouth for all the world to see, another in his breast to show his very special friends and his family, and the real one, the true one, the secret one, which is never known to anyone except himself alone, hidden only God knows where." -James Clavell, Shōgun

I seriously dig on this kind of thinking. You really never can know another human being.

"Reluctance" by Robert Frost

Out through the fields and the woods 
And over the walls I have wended; 
I have climbed the hills of view 
And looked at the world, and descended; 
I have come by the highway home, 
And lo, it is ended.

The leaves are all dead on the ground, 
Save those that the oak is keeping 
To ravel them one by one 
And let them go scraping and creeping 
Out over the crusted snow, 
When others are sleeping.

And the dead leaves lie huddled and still, 
No longer blown hither and thither; 
The last long aster is gone; 
The flowers of the witch-hazel wither; 
The heart is still aching to seek, 
But the feet question 'Whither?'

Ah, when to the heart of man 
Was it ever less than a treason 
To go with the drift of things, 
To yield with a grace to reason, 
And bow and accept the end 
Of a love or a season?

This poem speaks to me so much...I love the way it gives form to the idea of reluctance.