Book Review (Canon): Bloody Jack

Bloody Jack: Being An Account of the Curious Adventures of Mary “Jacky” Faber, Ship’s Boy

Written by L.A. Meyer in 2002

The Raccoon: Determined to move beyond her life of urban poverty in the early 1800s, an orphan girl disguises her gender and joins the British navy.

UNMASKED: Meyer likely wrote Bloody Jack for children, featuring young protagonists and humorous situations to drive the action forward.  Nevertheless, the novel is stuffed to the brim with brilliant content and a heroine that no reader should be deprived of meeting, making it a worthwhile read for all ages.

The very first sentence sets up three characters and their attitudes, and the following paragraph fills in the narrator’s entire present situation, all without a hitch.  Meyer maintains this pace and fluid storytelling throughout the entire novel; every single sentence either adds to the reader’s understanding or gives him/her something new to think about.  Moreover, the book is incredibly witty, and most of the humor arises from scenes rather than from dialogue, so that the smirk that one line brings to the reader’s face stays for the rest of the page (and often the next page as well).

Meyer’s greatest achievement in Bloody Jack is “Bloody Jack” herself, the protagonist and narrator.  The novel is heavily character-driven, and Jacky’s own daring nature steers her into events, rather than the author forcing them on her.  Her balance of sarcasm and curiosity ensure that the minutiae of ship life and navigation are understood but not overbearing.  Entertainingly, the reader actually witnesses the book’s language become more refined whenever Jacky mentions her studies or the passing months.

Bloody Jack is the first novel in a twelve-book series, and I already know that I will stay for the entire voyage.  I encourage you to join.

Strengths:

• Several scenes are unforgettable due to their humor and creativity.
• Meyer accurately and openly addresses the issues of gender stereotypes that naturally arise from the book’s plot.
• Bloody Jack does not attempt to glorify piracy and violence, and Meyer effectively shows the characters wrestling with notions of bravery, morality, and reason.
• Meyer avoids the trope of writing characters who are outrageously modern for their time and/or who invent earlier versions of modern machines without any relevant education.  Jacky possesses enviable yet realistic imagination and resourcefulness.

Weaknesses:

• The love interest never seems to have done or said anything worthy of Jacky’s attention.

Rating: 19/20 dissections

Ideal Setting: Read this whenever you need a push to go beyond your comfort zone.

Book Review (Rucksack): The Great Gatsby

The Great Gatsby

Written by F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1925

The Raccoon: The Great Gatsby follows Nick Carraway, a young man who moves to New York City in 1922 in hopes of making a fortune.  Over the course of several months spent with his rich neighbors, Nick comes face to face with the pitfalls of the American Dream.

UNMASKED: The Great Gatsby was far too short.  Fitzgerald aimed to show his readers a glimpse of the “Lost Generation,” the millions of people across the United States who became disillusioned with the notions of justice and brotherhood after World War I; however, this noble goal yielded such a lack of significant events or turning points that after I finished the book, all I said was, “Oh.”  So that’s what happened.  So what?

The entirety of The Great Gatsby resembles only three or four episodes in a drama that should have contained at least ten, with another season following.  Due to the book’s length, the characters fit into perfect stencils, and the reader is given neither time nor motivation to relate to them.  Moreover, the narrator’s belief that he is unimportant to the story began as an intriguing idea, with the promise of filling out the other characters.  Unfortunately, Fitzgerald executed it as nothing more than a way to skip several weeks at a time in the story.

Finally, the book ends abruptly, with Nick circling back into the same position that he began the story in.  The reader is left to move on and never think of The Great Gatsby again.

Strengths:

• Fitzgerald’s realistic dialogue greatly helps to show the characters’ thoughts and personalities.
• The novel serves as an accurate historical study of the 1920s.
• The slight sprinkling of metaphor matches the way we regularly see the world.

Weaknesses:

• Many interesting ideas are introduced but never revisited.
• I am confused about what Fitzgerald defines as love and why it existed between such flawed characters.

Rating: 14/20 oranges

Ideal Setting: Read this whenever you feel jealous of the insanely rich.  The Great Gatsby shows just how much worse your problems can be when you have money.

Book Review (Canon): A Gentleman in Moscow

A Gentleman in Moscow

Written by Amor Towles in 2016

The Raccoon: During the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov is sentenced to house arrest and forced to spend the remainder of his life in Moscow’s opulent Metropol Hotel.  Determined to master his circumstances and live a full life regardless, he changes the lives of dozens of guests as Russian history unfolds.

UNMASKED: I have always had a weakness for the concept of the gentleman, if my glowing review of The Count of Monte Cristo is any indication.  However, I believe I can objectively say that A Gentleman in Moscow is a brilliant book.

I was incredibly surprised to learn that Towles is American, as he describes Russia with such detail and nuance that one can only assume he is narrating his own life.  Moreover, his narrating prowess is unmatched; no other author can show his characters' thoughts this deeply without ruining the flow of the story resorting to using first person.  Although there are a few hiccups, in which Towles tries and fails to engage the reader further by speaking directly to him/her, the remaining 95% of the book reads so seamlessly that the end of each chapter became invisible to me.

As for the actual content, Count Rostov is the charming protagonist that all book lovers have been waiting for.  His antics in conversation, unusual knowledge specialities, and peculiar philosophies make for constant entertainment.  The way he immediately treats any new character as a best friend is humbling as well as useful in fleshing out the story.  Towles does not need to encourage us to laugh and cry with Alexander; the reader wants to spend time with him, and it hurts to turn the final page and bid him, as well as the rest of the stellar cast, goodbye.

Strengths:

• The novel accurately and thoroughly shows Russian culture and philosophy throughout various periods of the 20th century, making the events more exciting and true to life.
• The reader feels a strong connection with every character, and none of them can be categorized into archetypes.
• Although there are lulls in the action, and the story spans thirty years, I was always engaged in the events.
• The book changed my perspective on both Cold War countries.

Weaknesses:

• A few burning questions are left unanswered.
• Towles’ second-person tangents ruin everything that makes the rest of the novel so exceptional.
• One character has several years of her life sandwiched into one chapter as a retconned explanation for her current situation.

Rating: 17/20 flights of stairs

Ideal Setting: Read this whenever your routine begins to grow monotonous.  If one man can spend roughly 12,000 days in the same hotel and find new adventures, surely boredom is a choice.

Book Review (Rucksack): The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Written by Mark Twain in 1884

The Raccoon: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn stars Tom Sawyer’s best friend, Huckleberry Finn, whose journey down the Mississippi River with a runaway slave challenges his learned customs and opinions and replaces them with an authentic, although disheartening, view of the world.

UNMASKED: Ernest Hemingway believed that all modern literature comes from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and I am inclined to agree with him. One of the first things I noticed when I began reading the book was the lack of flowery language and obtrusive metaphors, a welcome shift from earlier classics.  Furthermore, Twain addresses societal issues directly but quietly, does not write in any characters as “extras,” and lets his work broaden and grow instead of conforming to a central theme or plot line, all of which are hallmarks of my favorite contemporary authors.

With its young protagonist, “Huck Finn” is commonly thought of as a children’s book, and the story is in fact very accessible to children.  And young adults.  And adults.  Huckleberry’s narration is childlike, not childish, and there is plentiful humor and appreciable content for any age group.  Like Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief, I know that rereading The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn several years from now will be a new, yet equally rewarding, experience.

Strengths:

• Twain weaves an impressive amount of satire and humor into a story that has never been labeled as a comedy.
• The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is Twain’s argument for total equality and societal reform, without seeming to push an agenda.
• One does not need to read The Adventures of Tom Sawyer before this novel.
• Tom brings another dose of outlandish plans, but he does not steal the limelight from Huck’s unique story.

Weaknesses:

• This is not a comment on the book itself; simply the version I read.  The Penguin Classics Kindle Edition of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn reads, as my friend put it, “as if it was translated into Spanish and then back into English.”  Most of the words are butchered beyond repair, sometimes through spelling and other times through what must be intentional misuse of a thesaurus (i.e., “financial institution” as opposed to “riverbank”).  I stuck with the edition as a suicidal challenge of my comprehension abilities, but if you would prefer not to question the meaning of half of the sentences, you may want to purchase one of any of the other 203 editions of the novel (don’t ask how I was so lucky).

Rating: 20/20 cameleopards

Ideal Setting: Read this outdoors and away from society’s expectations, so that you may experience true freedom.

CANDY BOX: Last Thursday

Tell someone that the meaning of life is 42, and they will likely stare blankly at you.  Occasionally, however, someone will correct you that it is not the meaning of life, but the ultimate answer to life, the universe, and everything.  This hoopy frood is someone who knows where his towel is; he is the person who has put aside his sanity and read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

All of the beauty of “HG2G” lies in the syntax of author Douglas Adams.  From the two-page tangent on the many creative uses of towels for interstellar hitchhikers, to a full transcription of the existential thoughts of a whale spontaneously brought into being several miles above a planet’s surface, to one character’s all-consuming pride in designing Earth’s fjords, to the biting political satire and revolutionary epiphanies of having an unwilling President of the Galaxy, to exactly why humans are the third-most intelligent species on Earth--I could go on for hours about the dozens of humorous passages in the book, although you may have to stick a Babel fish in your ear to understand it all--every paragraph is worth framing on your wall as entertainment each time you pass by it.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is the first book which comes to mind whenever I am asked for a recommendation, and I pity anyone who hasn’t experienced the work.  However, having read the book eight times, along with the additional four books in the series and Adams’ other renowned novel, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, I believe I can safely say that the only redeeming quality of the novel is that Adams wrote it.

HG2G lacks depth of character; every creature present is a tool for one or more jokes.  The plot is thinly aligned as well, with the protagonists accomplishing very little by the end of the novel.  Moreover, there isn’t much of a problem to solve even if they had wanted to.  The overall entertainment value and surprisingly profound questions that the book raises outweigh these weaknesses.  Nevertheless, recently I have been plagued by one issue.

If The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy succeeds only in matters not related to the actual story, if the characters’ journey is not worth telling under any other author, is HG2G still a good book?

I would love your input in the comments section.

Book Review (Canon): Ready Player One

Ready Player One

Written by Ernest Cline in 2011

The Raccoon: When the eccentric creator of a globally popular virtual reality platform dies without heirs, he leaves his fortune to whomever can solve the cryptic challenge in his will.  Millions of people enter a frenzied race to find a hidden easter egg within the creator’s world, including impoverished teenager Wade Watts.

UNMASKED: Ready Player One aims to simulate the experience of playing a video game, and the author brilliantly surpasses this goal.  Cline creates a gigantic world to explore, establishes five characters with unique mannerisms and skills to journey with, and delivers both convoluted puzzles and ridiculously intense action scenes, beating out a majority of games on the market.

Of course, Ready Player One is still just a book, and one with a predictable, linear storyline to boot.  I found the novel to be a welcome change (still with just as much to offer) from slow-paced, analysis-heavy literature.  However, not every reader would agree that the streamlined work holds equal value.  Cline’s story is great fun, and it inspires me to break my routine and begin a quest to achieve something truly meaningful on a global scale, yet I cannot say whether it will ever be widely considered a worthy read.

Strengths:

• Cline humorously ties hundreds of 80’s references into the hunt.
• Cline fully utilizes the virtual reality setting to describe awe-inspiring landscapes and cinematic battles.
• The novel discusses how bleak the future could be if we do not fight climate change and wealth inequality without forcing a reform agenda down the reader’s throat.

Weaknesses:

• By the end of the first chapter, I knew exactly how the book would end.
• The character development is almost nonexistent.

Rating: 17/20 colorful, dancing blobs

Ideal Setting: Read this when you are regretting spending time on “mindless” games.  Sometimes adventures are necessary to live life to the fullest.

Book Review (Rucksack): Other Minds

Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness

Written by Peter Godfrey-Smith in 2016

The Raccoon: Science philosopher and scuba diver Peter Godrey-Smith tackles the history of consciousness and what we can learn from cephalopod behavior.

UNMASKED: Other Minds hurts to read.  Such is the nature of any text or person drawing awareness to the complex machines underlying ourselves and the world around us.  During the week I spent working with Godfrey-Smith’s book, I had to process world-changing ideas several times.  I am sure my friends grew sick of the questions I frantically texted to them at random hours of the day (“If life is just chemical reactions that started with single cells, is living matter any different from nonliving matter?” “If you can make decisions without consciously being aware of them, can you have a human without a soul?” “Would we be better off with decentralized brains and more neurons in our arms like octopuses?”)

AND YES, my dear readers, “octopuses” is the correct plural choice (“octopodes” works as well, should you ever desire to piss off an English teacher).  I cannot thank the author enough for explaining the etymology of our many-armed friend and relieving me of my agony.

Despite the many revelations about consciousness and evolution, most of which inspired only helplessness and fear in me, Other Minds is an incredible book.  While we all have the right to be suspicious of anyone who combines “scientist” with any other profession or hobby in his title (science guitarist, scientist chef) Godfrey-Smith proves his expertise by interweaving layered, impactful research; reasoned, detailed philosophy; and clear, relevant underwater photographs.

Strengths:

• Nothing is superfluous; every study and personal tangent adds value to the book.
• Although the book is about “Other Minds,” most of the material ties into our lives and thoughts.

Weaknesses:

• The information is presented in large block paragraphs, making it easy to zone out and lose one’s place.

Rating: 19/20 aliens

Ideal Setting: Read this before your next visit to an aquarium, so that you are not caught off-guard if an octopus escapes its tank or a cuttlefish changes color in complete darkness.