more book club fodder

Another book club choice here--interesting setting, taking place in a 1930s travelling circus. However, not really something I would recommend. Predictable romance and an ending that nicely cleans up any loose ends. The best parts of the book take place when the narrator is shown as an old man in the nursing home, not when he is remembering his youth in the circus. I guess that tells you something about how much drama I felt in the circus sections. A fine, but not ultimately engaging, read. Deserves about two and a half or three out of five stars.

I am in agreement with Josh Marshall

Josh Marshall at Talking Points Media makes essentially the same point I did about the rules of winning the Democratic nomination in this post from yesterday: http://talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/185225.php. He's more eloquent and convincing than me, though.

My new fear

is that McCain will pick Lieberman as his running mate and the Dems will go with Obama. The "bipartisan" repubican ticket will take a lot of the wind out of Obama's beyond partisanship rhetoric. Maybe McCain wants a true blue conservative to solidify his base; maybe he wants someone with some geographic importance; maybe Lieberman wouldn't accept a VP offer. I don't know, but it does scare me.

Roland at the Tower

I do not aim with my hand. He who aims with his hand has forgotten the face of his father.
I aim with my eye.

I do not shoot with my hand. He who shoots with his hand has forgotten the face of his father.
I shoot with my mind.

I do not kill with my weapon. He who kills with his weapon has forgotten the face of his father.
I kill with my heart.

At long last, I've completed Stephen King's Dark Tower series. The 7 books run about 4500 pages all told, and are a serious undertaking. I would advise you to know what you're committing to prior to deciding to take on this much volume. Is it worth it? It's hard to say, frankly. The series has it's ups and downs, and doesn't end as strongly as one would wish. However, if you're a King fan, he views this as the story that connects all of his stories into a larger thread, and is probably required reading for a full understanding of his work.

It's hard for me to be too critical of the series. After you have spent this much time committed to any endevour, I think it's natural to want to find worth in what you've engaged in. Looking back and surveying my feelings about the books as I read them, I generally felt entertained, but that the stories were not the amazing literary gems that some online would contend. I can pretty much extrapolate this opinion from each individual book to the series as a whole. I will defend it as an enjoyable and complex epic, but I will not make the case that it is more than the sum of it's parts. It's not.

Two points specific to the final book in the series, entitled simply The Dark Tower. I agree with other critics that the villains that have been up throughout the over 1000 pages of this novel are dispatched of with almost ridiculous ease. The Man in Black, Mordred, and the Crimson King all given long mytholgies (the Man in Black extending all the way back to The Stand, before the Dark Tower series even began) but are written out of the story in the course of a few paragraphs. An inadequate demise, I felt. There are also those who complain about the actual ending and what Roland finds in the Tower. I won't give it away, but I will say that I found the conclusion to be satisfactory. Like many others, I was antipating, but also dreading, what Roland might find in the last room at the top of the Tower; King's ending feels right to me. If you don't like it, you should have taken his advice, where he says plainly that readers may not like what is coming and pleads with us not to continue, and quite reading before the last 20 pages of the book.

The series has plenty to recommend it: tension, fun characters, good action sequences, and a meticulously imagined alternative world that is fascinating. But it is also full of unlikely coincidence, unexplainable intuition, and deus ex machina. Take it for what it is. Ka is a wheel; time is a face on the water.

I am glad that I am done with this, and will have a little more freedom to read other authors now, though I do intend to go on reading King's other stand alone works. I still think the haters out there are terribly unfair to King, an author that is undeniably fun to read and sometimes achieves greatness. He certainly is unafraid to take risks, as this series proves.

Stray political thoughts

First--I freely admit that I am glued to the Democratic race between Senators Obama and Clinton. My view is probably colored substantially by my partisanship for Obama, but I don't think I'm unable to see reason. At this point, the conventional wisdom seems to be that Obama will reach the convention with a slight lead in elected delegates, but Clinton may win several large states (obviously she has already won Ohio, and narrowly squeaked out Texas) just prior to the convetion. In this scenario, the votes of party superdelegates, who are mostly elected officials and a elected party officials, would ultimately decide the winner. There are various schools of thought as to how the superdelegates should vote, but in the end, they will vote in the way that they feel is in their best self-interest, and there's not much that anybody can do to stop that. However, the argument being put forth by the Clinton camp, most recently by PA Gov. Ed Rendell this morning on Meet the Press, is that Clinton should get the nomination based on her winning several, large swing states that will be critical for Democrats to take in November. Because she has done this, even if Obama has a lead in elected delegates, superdelegates should vote for Clinton, the argument goes. First off, it is offensive to me, as someone from a small and mostly conservative state, to suggest that my vote in the Democratic primary system does not deserve to be considered. But more to the point is that if you got in your time machine and went back to December 2007, before the Iowa caucus, and asked both camps what they needed to do to get the nomination, they would unamimously and without controversy, agree that the one thing required to win the nomination would be to have more delegates than the other candidate. Now that the Clinton campaign has determined it is unlikely for her to be in a position of having more elected delegates, they have produced this new line. Since the Democrats, by virtue of their name, are theoretically the party that believes in democracy, I find it hard to believe that we could possibly select a candidate that has fewer elected delegates, or even more importantly, I would like to see the candidate with more popular votes, period. Of course, this is politics, so actual scruples play little role, if any.

Also, it was nice to see Tom Daschle defending Obama on Meet the Press this morning, and on CNN earlier this week. It breaks my heart to see this intelligent, reasonable person that used to hold so much power in the US Senate because it reminds me what South Dakota has given up in order to put a Bush troglodyte into office. Tom has a new book about health care in America out, and I look forward to reading it. From many of the people I've talked to, South Dakota has a real case of buyer's remorse over their decision back in '04. I miss you, Tom.

more dostoevsky short stories

I finished this collection a couple weeks back, and I can't say there is too much to recommend about it. Dostoevsky, of course, is a good storyteller, but I think it's better to approach his longer novels than getting bogged down in the many, many short stories he wrote. Many of these are well done, but not earth shattering. Some of these stories I had already read in the Great Short Works book, but did not realize this because the titles were translated differently.

The themes in these stories are familiar to readers of Dostoevsky, and I don't have much to add. They're enjoyable for those that know what they're getting into, but are not essential reading by any stretch, and I don't think the short story is the format that he is best in--he needs at least a little space to work.