What I've been reading: Books No. 25-26

[sarahmichigan]

Book No. 25 was "Aha! Gotcha: Paradoxes to Puzzle and Delight" by Martin Gardner. I've had this on my "to read" list for years and finally got around to checking it out. It amuses me highly that the book came out of a compilation of filmstrips Gardner had done around various logic puzzles. The book is full of illustrations, which makes some of the explanations a lot easier to follow than they would be otherwise. He groups the book into several sections and groups the paradoxes under headings such as "Number" and "Time." I knew quite a bit of the stuff about ancient paradoxes (Zeno's paradox, the sultan who leaves camels to his 3 sons) and  paradoxes from set theory, but other stuff was brand new to me, and I really enjoyed the heck out of the topology sections. I recommend this to people who enjoy brain teasers or are generally interested in math, science, or philosophy & logic. You can see a few sample pages on this Boing Boing link.

Book No. 26 was "Born on the Fourth of July" by Ron Kovic. I make it a point to read a handful of books by disabled authors every year and it recently occurred to me that this book would count. I'd seen the Oliver Stone movie adaptation many years ago and, just by chance, ran across it on cable in April. The movie is visually stunning and has its moments but feels disjointed and you don't get a lot of insight into Kovic's thoughts, just his actions, in the movie. I was pretty sure the memoir would be more revealing, and it is. If you've seen the movie adaptation, know that Oliver Stone conflated scenes, moved them around in time, and made them up wholesale. The whole plot line where Kovic, played by Tom Cruise, runs through the rain to have one last dance with the Kyra Sedgwick character never happened. All Kovic ever says about that in the book is, though he was a jock, he was shy with girls and never went to junior or senior prom. The book tells the tale of Kovic's time serving in Vietnam and then having a change of heart and protesting the war as a wounded vet. The book flips back and forth between fairly straightforward first-person memoir to more impressionistic and stream-of-thought pieces in the third person, I'd guess to symbolize the disassociation he is feeling. The book feels rough around the edges, as an early draft of it came tumbling out in a couple weeks as a form of catharsis for the author, and he wasn't a professional author when he wrote it. But it does feel raw and real. I thought this was well worth a read and recommend it to anyone interested in the fate of Vietnam vets, especially wounded ones who had to endure horrific conditions in VA Hospitals of that time.

1. The Two Towers [fiction]- JRR Tolkien (unabridged audiobook)
2. The Argonautika [epic poetry/fiction]- Apollonios Rhodios, transl. Peter Green
3. To the End of June: The Intimate Life of American Foster Care [nonfiction]- Cris Beam
4. The Jazz [fiction]- Melissa Scott
5. Live from Golgotha [fiction]- Gore Vidal
6. Stones for Ibarra [fiction]- Harriet Doerr
7. Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot [nonfiction/memoir]- John Callahan
8. The Tresspasser [fiction]- Tana French (unabridged audiobook)
9. The Decameron [fiction]- Giovanni Boccaccio
10. March: Book 2 [graphic nonfiction]- John Lewis & Andrew Aydin, ill. Nate Powell
11. Ordinary Light [nonfiction/memoir]- Tracy K. Smith
12. The Short Bus: A Journey Beyond Normal [nonfiction]- Jonathan Mooney
13. March: Book 3 [graphic nonfiction]- John Lewis & Andrew Aydin, ill. Nate Powell
14. The Vegetarian [fiction]- Han Kang
15. First three volumes of the "Bitch Planet" comic series [graphic fiction]- Kelly Sue DeConnick, ill. Valentine DeLandro
16. Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal [nonfiction]- Mary Roach (unabridged audiobook)
17. Bad Monkeys [fiction]- Matt Ruff
18. The Book of Negroes [fiction]- Lawrence Hill
19. The Rules of Attraction [fiction]- Bret Easton Ellis
20. How to Grow Up [nonfiction/memoir]- Michelle Tea
21. The Book of Genesis [fiction/mythology]- ill. R. Crumb
22. The Terranauts [fiction]- T.C. Boyle (unabridged audiobook)
23. The Galaxy Game [fiction]- Karen Lord
24. The Chapel of Ease - a Tufa novel [fiction]- Alex Bledsoe

Comments

[airsucker]

I think what I want most in a book about Viet Nam is why the war happened and what led up to it. I've seen a few movies about the war, but they never seem to cover why we were there in the first place, which seems likes it's been completely avoided as a topic.

[sarahmichigan]

Some of the best books on that are older, published just a few years after the war ended. I hear good things about ‘The Best and the Brightest,’ by David Halberstam and ‘In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam,’ by Robert S. McNamara with Brian VanDeMark.