The Witches of Eastwick

By John Updike

I was listening to NPR a few months back and they had an obituary on John Updike, an author I had certainly heard of, knew little about and had never read. I say obituary, but it was more of a remembrance, a tribute (link provided at the end of this post). It made me want to read his books.

I thought witches wouldn't be such a stretch for me after my streak of vampires lately.

This book spanked my bottom! John Updike can write. He writes a wonderfully fun and slightly sinister story (it was about witches!) with some incredible prose. I love the way he crafts paragraphs and his descriptions were surprising, hand painted images. He has a way with language. It made me want to read everything he has ever written.

The story is simply about three friends who are also witches and a man that comes into their lives and changes everything for them. They have some bewitching times and push the envelope on what society expects of women. Provoking, on a number of levels.

[Describing the sound of a cello] " . . . it's vibratory melancholy tones, pregnant with the sadness of wood grain and the shadowy largeness of trees . . ." (20)

"We all dream, and we all stand aghast at the mouth of the caves of our own deaths. . . " (210)

"The little trees, the sapling sugar maples and the baby red oaks squatting close to the ground, were the first to turn, as if green were a feat of strength, and the smallest weaken first. Early in October the Virginia creeper had suddenly drenched in alizarin crimson the tumbled boulder wall at the back of her property, where the bog began; the drooping parallel daggers of the sumac then showed a red suffused with orange. Like the slow sound of a great gong, yellow overspread the woods, from the tan of beech and ash to the hickor's spotty gold and the flat butter color of the mitten-shaped leaves of the sassafras, mittens that can have a thumb or two or none. . . The ferns underfoot in fading declared an extravagant variety of forms. Each cried out, I am, I am. There was thus in fall a rebirth of identity out of summer's mob of verdure. The breadth of the event, from the beach plums and bayberries along Block Island Sound to the sycamores and horse-chestnut trees lining the venerable streets (Benefit, Benevolent) on Providence's College Hill, answered to something diffuse and gentle within Alexandra, her sense of merge, her passive ability to contemplate a tree and feel herself a rigid trunk with many arms running to their tips with sap, to become the oblong cloud oddly alone in the sky or the toad hopping from the mower's path into deeper damper grass - a wobbly bubble on leathery long legs, a spark of fear behind a warty broad forehead. She was that toad, and as well the cruel battered black blades attached to the motor's poisonous explosions. The panoramic ebb of chlorophyll from the swamps and hills of the Ocean State lifted Alexandra up like smoke, like the eye above a map. Even the exotic imports of the Newport rich - the English walnut, the Chinese smoke tree, the Acer japonicum - were all swept into this mass movement of surrender. A natural principle was being demostrated, that of divestment. We must lighten ourselves to survive. We must not cling. Safety lies in lessening, in becoming random and thin enough for the new to enter. Only folly dares those leaps that give life." (97 - 98)

Here is a link to the obituary:
http://www.onpointradio.org/shows/2009/01/remembering-john-updike/

Apparently there are movies and musicals and all sorts of productions based on this book. I had a hard time getting the original cover, the one from the book I read!

Book 23

The Afghan Campaign

By Steven Pressfield

"I wished once to become a soldier. I have become that. Just not the way I thought I would." (350)

A compelling and harrowing coming of age war story written by the extremely talented Pressfield. The story is told through the eyes of the young Matthias who comes to serve Alexander the Great in this Afghan campaign. The reader grows up with Matthais as he moves from a child to a man and into a soldier, bearing the memories he must endure to get there.

Another simple narrative throughout this story explores the role of honor in Afgan society at that time. It involves a woman and the code of honor which binds her by death to anyone who breaks that code of honor. The clash of cultures unopened is riviting and heart breaking.

Pressfield tells this story with an engaging storyt, simple but beautiful prose and a deep heart for the soldier's experience, coming from his own history as a Marine.

His books are popular with our troops. I completely understand why- he writes from the soldiers point of view, in an authentic and fearless way. He writes the truth of war, not just the glory or horror. He tells the truth from both of these extremes and everything (painfully) in between.

"We are keenly aware that we are boys, not men like Flag and Tollo. We do nothing like they do. We don't talk like them or stand like them; we can't even piss like them. They inhabit a sphere that is magnitutdes above us. We ape them. We study them as if we were children. They remain beyond us." (37)

"It is simultaneously extraordinary and appalling to see how efficiently our Macks (Macedonian soldiers) work this. They slaughter an entire male household with barely a sound, so swiftly that the wives and infants are cast into dubmstruck shock. It is the kill of wolves or lions, the cold kill of predation. It is work." (45)

"What makes Afghanistan so miserable is there's no shelter. The wind howls out of the mountains with not a twig to break its rush. Terrain is spectacular, but its beauty, if you can call it that, is stern and unforgiving. No trees intercept the rain, which descends, when it does, in volumes unimaginable. In the hot season you bind covers round every surface of metal exposed to the sun. To touch them unprotected blisters you to the bone. Now comes the wind. To trek in such a gale is like marching in a tunnel. The universe contracts to the cylinder between your muffled eyes and the rucksack of the man in front of you." (68)

In a speech by Alexander, beloved by the troops: "This is not conventional warfare. It is unconventional. And we must fight it in an unconventional way. Here the foe will not meet us in pitched battle, as other armies we have dueled in the past, save under conditions of his own choosing. His word to us is worthless. He routinely violates truces; he betrays the peace. He comes back again and again. He hates us with a passion whose depth is exceeded only by his patience and his capacity for suffering. " (70-71)

"Our women are still with us. The ordeals of mountain and desert have transformed them. They have earned our respect and their own. They fear now only the halt, when the corps may decide it no longer needs them. Biscuits paints my sore-pocked soles with vinegar and binds them with molesckin. Ghilla sets bones. Another girl, Jenin, sets up as the outfit's source for nazz and pank. The women have become indispensible. Even Flag defends them." (130)

" 'There must be a way to be a good soldier in a rotten war.' Boxer laughs. 'When you find it, Matthais, be sure and let us know." (156)

"The depth of horror one experiences to witness this is impossible to convey by the medium of speech." (176)

"The Afghans . . . posess two invincible confederates: the scale of their land and its desolation." (186)

"The enemy loves to attack out of the rising or setting sun. In the mountains, vales and even shadows can conceal battalions. In prarie country, dust storms building late in the day provide cover behind which the foe maneuvers and strikes. The tribesman appears along your track, where you think only your own men are coming from. He knows how to use glare to blind you and grit and rain to obscure his nubers. Suddenly he's on top of you." (231)

In The Company of Soldiers

In the company of soldiers
I have no need to explain myself.
In the company of soldiers,
everybody understands.

In the company of soldiers,
I don't have to pretend to be a person I'm not
Or strike that pose, however well-intended, that is expected
by those who have not known me under arms.

In the company of soldiers all my crimes are forgiven
I am safe
I am known
I am home
In the company of soldiers.

Read this book!

Book 22

Every Last Drop

By Charlie Huston

A vampire book found in the mystery section of the library. This is an intriguing, dark, compelling book about a vampire and his world. A world that sits right beside Manhattan, Queens, Brooklyn in New York state with living human beings (read blood for the taking) and how they negotiate that tension. Huston realistically and painlessly creates a whole vampire reality without distracting from the story at hand (sometimes a story gets lost in the need to share all the background about the politics or some new world that the reader must grasp in order to follow the story). Compelling from the beginning, for me mostly because of the misenthropic vampire who takes lead in the story. A kind of anti-hero, a dirty Harry with really sharp teeth.

He weaves a good story. I really don't want to reveal much about it except note that it looks like this is the fourth in a series. Which is kind of a bummer for me as I now feel I have knowledge that may taint my later reading of the first few books in the series. But it is what it is.

If you have any interest in vampire stories this is one of the most interesting and surprising ones I have read. It is well written, although if you are afraid of a few cuss words you would do best to avoid this book. It deals with heavy themes that are, in the end, about the darkest reaches of the human experience.

Book 21

Descartes Bones

Descartes Bones: A Skeletal History of the Conflict between Faith and Reason
Russell Shorto

Written with vigor and humor this book is the story of Descartes skull. Really. But it takes you deeper than that without feeling like you are mired in philosophical fiddle-faddle. Shorto takes a small object with a heavy history and lightly skirts a story full of intrigue and curiosity about how we as modern folk were born.

Why Descartes? It boils down to his "cognito, " and more important the implications of taking doubt and questions down to the very end of its logical conclusion. It is, what we know as, I think therefore I am. The author explains it this way: "Once the acid of his methodical doubt had eaten its way through everything else, what he was left with was not, technically, even an 'I' but merely the realization that there was thinking going on. . . thinking is taking place therefore there must be that which thinks." (pg 20)

The author then weaves the story of this great thinkers skull with the intricacies of the history of thought pre-Descartes (what led him to think and express what he did) and his legacy. He describes with good conviction that the Enlightenment thinking splintered off into those who took Descartes method and incorporated it into religion, those that were secular in a moderate way and then radical secularists. All of this can be channelled in the ultimate book, in this author's opinion, Discourse on Method. It was significant because it was written for the public at that time, in the French language and not latin. Further, he wrote in the first person. Each of these points was revolutionary on its own.

And just because I can't help myself, I leave you with some of my favorite musings from the book on death: "Death is the event in life. It is our chief organizing principle. It's why we rush and why we dawdle, why we butter up our bosses and fawn over our children, why we like both fast cars and fading flowers, why we write poetry, why sex thrills us. Its why we wonder why we are here." (pg 43)

Book 20