The Princess Bride - the book

Just a quick post to let you know that I finished reading the 30th anniversary edition of The Princess Bride: S. Morgenstern's Classic Tale of True Love & High Adventure by William Goldman. I might have mentioned earlier that I feel like I'm one of the last few people on the planet who has never seen the movie. (But how many have read the book?) I was so on the fence about the book after I finished it, I didn't even give it a rating on goodreads.com.

I did love the cleverness of a story within a story. About the illusion of this being an abridged version of a longer, earlier book by another author. The cleverness of Goldman's story about how his father had read the original to him when he was a child, sick with pneumonia and had his father only read him what he considered to be the good parts. There was other cleverness, other humor, but I'm not sure I would have stuck with it if I didn't want to finish the book before seeing the movie.

I'm looking forward to discussing this at Books & Beer Club this coming week. I might watch the movie over the weekend. I might wait until book club. But once I do, I'll come back and revisit this post.

Dan Brown's Origin

I really had no idea what to expect when I started Origin by Dan Brown. The only Dan Brown book I'd read prior to this one was The Da Vinci Code. But everyone read The Da Vinci Code, right? This novel was recommended by a community book club member as a title that would be interesting to discuss. It was selected. I read the book. And then, due to family commitments, I missed the meeting! This is a meeting I wish I could have attended.

Dan Brown is a master of red herrings and very open-ended chapters. The chapters were quick and easy to read. And as you finished one, you wanted to read on to see where Brown was going. A discussion of the book would most likely include the writing style as well as the storyline.

In this Robert Langdon book, the Harvard professor and expert breaker of codes and symbols is drawn into a controversial news announcement regarding science versus religion. His former student, scientist, futurist Edmond Kirsch, is letting the world in on where we come from and where we're going. We being the human race. Edmond is murdered in the early part of the book. We read on to find out why Edmond was murdered and what was going to be in his announcement. What he had to say was supposed to damage or destroy the world's ancient religions.

Kirsch's invention, Winston, his artificial intelligence counterpart, leads Langdon and Ambra Vidal, fiance to the prince of Spain, on the quest to unleash Edmond's planned announcement as well as to figure out who killed their friend, Edmond. Some of the book is quite fantastical, but for me, it was interesting to imagine just how far artificial intelligence might go in my lifetime. This book certainly left me with a lot to think about.

Since I often forget what I've read about 5 minutes after I've read it, now that I'm mostly reading on my iPad, I've developed the habit of screen capturing pages that I want to go back to. Sometimes I'll write notes of the screen chapter so I'll remember why I thought that passage was important in the first place. It's exceptionally handy for books that I'm reading in advance of a book club discussion.

Here's what I thought was important in Origin.

Early in the book, I thought the science versus religion... or science versus anti-science was going to stream into global warming. Maybe because what he's written about scientific fact doesn't seem to jive with the dispute over global warming today.

"Science is the antithesis of faith," Kirsch continued. "Science, by definition, is the attempt to find physical proof for that which is unknown or not yet defined, and to reject superstition and misperception in favor of observable facts. When science offers an answer, that answer is universal. Humans do not go to war over it; they rally around it."

How much is truth in this book? I know the book was well-researched, but some of the modern technology is alarming.

Several years had passed since an American kid named Cody Wilson had designed "The Liberator" - the first 3-D-printed polymer gun - and the technology had improved exponentially. The new ceramic and polymer firearms did not have much power, but what they lacked in range, they more than made up for by being invisible to metal detectors.

And here is something I have thought myself quite often and have it expressed it to others very recently.

"Consider this!" Edmond declared. "It took early humans over a million years to progress from discovering fire to inventing the wheel. Then it took only a few thousand years to invent the printing press. Then it took only a couple hundred years to build a telescope. In the centuries that followed, in ever-shortening spans, we bounded from the steam engine, to gas-powered automobiles, to the Space Shuttle! And then, it took only two decades for us to start modifying our DNA!"

"We now measure scientific progress in months," Kirsch shouted, "advancing at a mind-boggling pace. It will not take long before today's fastest supercomputer will look like an abacus; today's most advanced surgical methods will seem barbaric; and today's energy sources will seem as quaint to us as using a candle to light a room!"

I realized how little I knew about Francisco Franco and how ruthless he was, all in the name of religion. Nor did I realize that Spain had a national political agreement to "forget" everything that had happened under Franco.  We must never forget!

Here's another line that jumped out at me. When, exactly, was this book written?

Fake news now carries as much weight as real news.

Edmond had a Tesla Model X specially designed specifically for him by Elon Musk. Ambra wants Langdon to watch a video - while he's driving. He embraces the self-drive mode the same way that I did when I first test drove a Tesla.

"Autopilot," she said.
The effect was quite unsettling, and Langdon could not help but leave his hands hovering over the wheel and his foot over the brake.
"Relax." Ambra reached over and placed a comforting hand on his shoulder. "It's far safer than a human driver."
Reluctantly, Langdon lowered his hands to his lap.
"There you go." She smiled. "Now you can watch this Casa Mila video."

When my brother was 13, I think he snuck out of the house and bought himself a Radio Shack  Tandy personal computer. My brother is now a successful IT professional.

"Tandy TRS-80," Winston said. "Edmond's first machine. He bought it used and taught himself BASIC when he was about eight years old."

Here's another bit that I liked. And I'm not a huge fan of Brown's simplistic language. But this worked for me.

I call it 'Prayer for the Future.'" Edmond closed his eyes and spoke slowly, with startling assurance. "May our philosophies keep pace with our technologies. May our compassion keep pace with our powers. And may love, not fear, be the engine of change."

There were a few other lines that I highlighted, but as I am reviewing them, I realize a few of them are spoilers which I choose not to include here.

The Librarian of Auschwitz

Antonio Iturbe's The Librarian of Auschwitz is a fictionalized story based on the true life story of the family camp at Auschwitz and the librarian in the children's school that was run by a fellow named Fredi Hirsch.

The book inspired me to do a lot of research on my own. How did I never hear about a family camp at Auschwitz? The idea behind the family camp was similar to the idea behind Terezin. The Nazis wished to have "model" concentration camps that seemed more like ghettos than actual camps should the International Red Cross come a calling. The school was set up more to keep the kids positively occupied than to teach them anything since books and most things related to learning were forbidden. The school library did possess eight books. These books took on such a great importance while in the camp. They gave Dita something to hold on to. She evolved so much by escaping into the world of her books and by learning from the actions of the characters in the books: both real characters and fictionalized ones. My biggest problem with the novel, though, was that I wasn't sure if it would have better had the book been a narrative non-fiction instead of this fictionalized account which included so many real life people. I'm just not sure.

I think I wrote this recently about another Holocaust book but this one was really grizzly to read. The violence, even though I know it actually occurred, remains unfathomable.

Some random observations I made while reading the book:
1. Children are so important. The Nazis lodged children in Terezin separately from adults. They didn't want children to bear honest witness.
2. My former father-in-law left Poland to explore Communism and living in Russia.
          He's left behind the period of his adolescence when he allowed himself to be
          bewitched by the teachings of Karl Marx, when he believed that internationalization
          and Communism were the answers to all of history's problems.... he was a Czech,
          and he was a Jew. When the Nazis entered Prague and began to round up the Jews,
          Ota finally realized his place in the world: Blood and a thousand-year tradition tied him
          so much...
3.       Mothers always know more than their children think they do.
4.       Dita admits that sometimes her mother drives her mad - no matter how she's feeling,
          Liesel always says she's fine. How can Dita know the truth?
          But Mrs. Adler is always feeling fine for Dita.
   When I'd phone my mom each night and ask her how she was or how she was doing, she'd always say, "I'm fine. We're all fine. Everything here is fine." After my mom passed away, my dad said, "You know she was lying to you, didn't you?" I did. Even though it was reassuring to hear her say she was fine. I can still her saying that in my head.
5.       Dita wonders why the guards are so angry with the prisoners, given that they
          are the ones who have been humiliated and deprived of everything, given that
          they've barely set foot in the camp and haven't done anyone any harm, given
          that all they're going to do is obey and work feverishly for the Reich without
          asking for anything in return. But these robust, well-fed, and well-dressed guards
          prove to be furious. ... Dita is surprised by the irritation of their aggressors, their
          display of indignation toward people who have done them no harm.
   In a word, propaganda?
6. Along the same lines:
          It occurs to Dita that if Hitler hadn't come to power and the war hadn't broken out, this unscrupulous woman now standing in front of them with a killer's glint in her eye would be yet another of those slightly plump, pleasant hairdressers who give the girls ringlets and cheerfully comment about the neighborhood gossip. Their clients, including German-Jewish women, would lower their heads, and she would cut their hair with her scissors, and none of them would be the least bit worried about placing their necks in the hands of this oversized woman who is addicted to somewhat fanciful, upswept hairstyles. If anyone had insinuated that, some years down the track, Elisabeth Volkenrather might be a murderer, the entire community would have been outraged. Good old Beth? That woman wouldn't hurt a fly! they'd say indignantly.
    Leaders - or people with loud voices - are able to set the tone and they give others permission to show them worse selves. They feel empowered. They become people that their neighbors might not recognize. They show selves that would have been hidden had everyone been trying to be politically correct and trying to get along.
7. Along the lines of "first world problems."
          Hours of waiting in line, again. But it's not like the lines in Auschwitz, because here
          people are making plans as they wait. There are also angry people, even more irate
          than those who waited in half a meter of snow for a watery bowl of soup or a piece
          of bread. Now those who wait are irritated by the delay or because they've been
          misinformed or because of the number of papers they need. Dita smiles to herself.
          Life is back to normal when it's the same things that annoy people.
8. I caught 3 mistakes in the translation. In one instance the name Rudi was written when it should have been Fredi. Another time, it was Elisabeth instead of Liesel. And I only found one grammatical error. These momentarily distracted me until I remembered that I was reading a book that had been translated. Unlike other reviewers who have complained about the translation, I thought it was done very well. The language flowed and the descriptions worked.
9. After completing the book (which ends with real-life updates about characters we've met in the book), I went on to read more about the author and about real-life Dita Krauss. I have a children's book titled I Never Saw Another Butterfly: Children's Drawings and Poems from the Terezin Concentration Camp, 1942-1944 by Hana Volavkova (editor), Vaclay Havel (Afterword), Chaim Potok (Foreward) and United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (contributor).

I searched the book to see if I could find Dita's drawing that I'd read was being displayed in the museum at Terezin.

Not the best scan.

In addition to reading, Dita escaped her pain and distress thru drawing. Sound like anyone you know?

I'm glad I read The Librarian of Auschwitz. I did learn quite a bit. I was once again reminded at how easily a group can be scapegoated and systemically removed. Would I recommend it? Clearly, it's not for everyone.