By Peter Barnes. This is actually three related one-acts: and Handmaiden of the Second Kind, From Sleep And Shadow, and The Night of Sinchat Torah. All of these plays deal with the issue of faith and religion being put to the test, and how people react under these circumstances. In the first, a woman being tried by the French Inquisition in the 1400s pleads guilty to witchcraft and terrorizes her oppressors. At the end she confesses to God (and the audience) that it was all sleight of hand and trickery, because she did not want to be tortured or die. The second takes place after the English Revolution. A man whose wife is dying enlists the aid of a Ranter with peculiar beliefs. The latter (played by Alan Rickman) summons the spirit of the former’s first wife (Sarah), who is keeping the spirit of the second (Abigale) from returning to her body. In the third, three Jews in 1800s Poland cast out God for abandoning their people.

These are three interesting scenes all of which gnaw on a similar bone — this isn’t a form I had thought to use, but seems ideal for a piece that comes out of an ideological need, or perhaps any well-formulated idea or need.

By Christopher Fry. This is a comedic one-act in modern verse, set in classical times. A widow of a prominent accountant/administrator, Dynamene, is grieving to death in her husband’s tomb with her oversexed maid, Doto. As Dynamene goes to sleep, Doto is interrupted by Tegeus, a soldier who is guarding some hanging bodies outside. Tegeus shares his food and wine with Doto, they get to talking, and Dynamene wakes up, convinced initially that Tegeus is a spirit or supernatural, then turns to abusing him when he reveals himself to be a poor soldier. He is in awe of her noble self-sacrifice, they end up falling in love, poor Doto is left out of the loop. Dyanmene renames Tegeus to Chromis, and he goes to check on the bodies outside. When he comes back he is doomed, since one of the bodies is missing and the punishment for that is death. Dyanmene volunteers her husband’s body to replace the missing one, and all is well.

This play is really funny and cute, and also in verse. Which makes it all the more cute, in my opnion, although I’m not sure how it would sound or look on the stage. Other free verse plays (like the Abbey’s production of Medea) tend to sound pretty natural, although the words are prettied up, and I get the impression this play would be like that as well. Fry has written a lot of verse plays, and I own several, so it will be interesting to see how the style changes from play to play.

It’s nicely constructed into two person scenes, basically, with some small transitions, but it all takes place in a single interval of time without interruption. Each scenelet has clear objectives and conflicts, and there’s a particularly cute “getting to know you” scene between Tegeus-Chromis and Dynamene. Doto’s comic asides and written in burps and hiccups are also charming. She reminds me a little of the maid in Noises Off, coming in and out with sardines and talking to herself. A little dotty, but pretty nice.

All in all, a cute fun play to read in summer. I laughed.

By J.R.R. Tolkien. This is the prequel, as-it-were, to the Lord of the Rings. It covers the making of the earth, the early days of the elves and of men, and revolves in the center around the elves’ quest to regain the Silmarils, which were jewels stolen by Morgoth, a god who Fell from grace. It was Tolkien’s attempt to create a mythos for England, that is centered in things English, and also to provide a theological framework for his world of Middle-Earth. As a result, The Silmarillion reads much like the Bible, say, or the epic of Gilgamesh. It’s full of names, all of which are etymologically described in the glossary, and very confusing. It’s not so much of the X begot Y who begot Z, but more like X was angry at Y’s slowness and slew him, and thus began X’s exile from the lands ruled by Z, who was Y’s father. Complicated, to say the least.

Recommended for those seeking some relatively clean (well thought-out) mythology, but it’s not light or easy reading, and it’s not very swashbuckling. It’s kind of nice in its grandeur though, and a lot happens, even if it isn’t described in the most colorful way. Some of the mini epics and romances within the main story are beautiful in the way in which they mimic other cultures’ stories.

By JK Rowling, but if you didn’t know that you must be living under a rock. I really don’t have much to write about this book. It was entertaining for almost the entire 870 pages, and while I found it long-winded at times, I think that was because of the age group at which it was targeted, and not a fault on Rowling’s part. In the book, Harry becomes distinctly more teenaged, full of angst and having an existential crisis every 50 pages. He’s forced to contend with the fact that the good guys aren’t always perfectly good, and that the bad guys aren’t perfectly bad, which is important, and something that other children’s books usually touch on in the form of one or two characters. It’s more of an onslaught in this case. And that, I think, was the most enjoyable part of the book for me — it acknowledges the world is messy.

By Mark Helprin. This book was recommended to me by my friend Amrys, and for that I thank her. While I am not yet convinced that Helprin is God’s gift to writing, he does spin a damn engrossing tale. The chapters of this Memoir tell the unbelievable story of an extraordinary man who has been a lover, a thief, an investment banker, a gold-stacker, a WWII pilot, and and English teacher. It is not told chronologically. Rather, he picks up on themes of his life and follows them with his memories, coming across another thread and following that in the next chapter, and so on.

One constant thing however, is his hatred of coffee. So it was with much guilt that I sat down to read the book in a cafe in Berkeley with my double espresso. Since reading it I haven’t had a single cup, although I’m sure that will change eventually. I did have tea, after all. But the passion of his fight against the bean which he claims has “enslaved the world” is both humerous in its extremes and also reminded me that there are principles worth fighting for that seem absurd, but they help to define who you are. Sticking by your beliefs is important, and ther world would not be the same without iconoclasts.

I finally compiled a partial reading list from piles of slips of paper, text files, and my notepad. It daunts me in its length, and I have no idea anymore where to start. Some of these I’ve read part of and stopped, and many many books that are on my shelf are not on this list, but it’s a start at least.

Fiction
Breakfast at Tiffany’s (Truman Capote)
Maps (Nuruddin Farah)
Petersburg (Bely)
The Fall (Camus)
Gravity’s Rainbow (Thomas Pynchon)
An Underachiever’s Diary (Anastas)
The Melancholy of Resistance (laszlo krasznahorkai)
(Tsao Yu)
Little, Big (Crowley)
Otherwise (Crowley)
Everything is Illuminated (Jonathan Safran Foer)
Born Confused (Tanuja Desai Hidier)
The Course of the Heart (M John Harrison)
(John Sladek)
Mumbo Jumbo (Ishmael Reed)
(Gwendolyn Brooks)
King of Shadows (Susan Cooper)
Eden (Lem)
India Song (Marguerite Duras)
The Waved (Woolf)
Mrs. Dalloway (Woolf)
Carter Beats the Devil (glen david gold)
My Name Is Red (Orhan Pamuk)
Tigana (Guy Gavriel Kay)
The Road to Wellville (T.C. Boyle)
Summertime (Chabon)
Where Do We Go From Here? (doris dörrie)
The Procedure (harry mulisch)
Stories of Your Life (Ted Chiang)
(Nalo Hopkinson)
(Shashi Tharoor)
Eye In The Sky (Philip K. Dick)
Gertrude and Claudius (Updike)
Another Reason (Gyan Prakash)
Revenge (Stephen Fry)
Life of Pi (Yann Martel)
The Corrections (Franzen)
(Sherman Alexie)
Riddley Walker (Hoban)
Esau and Jacob (Machado de Assis)
The Cheese Monkeys (Chip Kidd)
Disgrace (Coetzee)
Meatless Days (Suleri)
The Clown (Boell)
The Setting Sun (Dazai)

Theater
Guernica (Fernando Arrabal)
Modern Arabid Drama (Jayyusi & Allen)
Masked Performance (Emigh)
The Playful Revolution (Eugene van Erven)
The Playwrights Guidebook (Stuart Spencer)
Performance Analysis (Counsell/Wolf)
Signs of performance : an introduction to twentieth-century theatre
Glass Menagerie (Williams)
Dinner With Friends (Donald Margulies)
Topdog/Underdog (Suzan Lori-Parks)
Prick Up Your Ears (Lahr)
Contemporary Greek Theater (Pavlos Matesis)
Angels In America (Tony Kushner)
The Three Uses of The Knife (Mamet)
The Way of the World (Congreve)
Zoot Suit (Valdez)
Under Milk Wood (Dylan Thomas)
The Heidi Chronicles (Wasserstein)
A Streetcar Named Desire (Williams)
Dream Play (Strindberg)
Our Town (Thornton Wilder)
Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (August Wilson)
The Convent of Pleasure (Margaret Cavendish)
Black Theater USA
A Full Moon In March (Yeats)
The Actor and Alexander Technique (Kelly McEvenue)
(Harry Kondoleon)
(Romulus Linney)
The Darker Face of the Earth (Rita Dove)
The Substance of Fire (Jon Robin Baitz)
Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism (Ania Loomba)
Seriously Funny (Nachman)
Dream on Monkey Mountain (Walcott)
Tales of the Lost Formicans (Congdon)
A Slight Ache (Pinter)
Fool For Love (Shepard)
Speed the Plow (Mamet)

Nonfiction General/Humanities
Elements of Typographic Style (Bringhurst)
Virtual Music (David Cope)
Market Killing (Greg Philo & David Miller)
Jazz Age Jews (Michael Alexander)
Postcolonial Transformation (Bill Ashcroft)
Post-colonial Studies (Bill Ashcroft)
A Concise Elementary Grammar of the Sanskrit Language (Jan Gonda)
Spaces of Difference — Ethnic Identity in British South Asian Families (Dhooleka Sarhadi Raj)
Disciplined Minds (Schmidt)
Development as Freedom (Sen)
Plagues and Peoples
The Power of Myth (Joseph Campbell)
A History of Russia, Central Asia, and Mongolia (Christian)
The Empire of the Steppes : a History of Central Asia (Grousset)
The Flash of the Spirit (Robert Farris Thompson)
The Puzzle Instinct (Danesi)
How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America (Manning Marable)
Globalization and Its Discontents (Stiglitz)
A Problem From Hell (Samantha Power)
The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Chris Burden)
The Modern Vegetarian Kitchen (Peter Berley)
The Man Who Deciphered Linear B (Andrew Robinson)
Myths of the Dog-Man (D.G. White)
The Wind of the Hundred Days (Bhagwati)
In the Chinks of the World Machine (Sarah Lefanu)
The Honors Class (Benjamin Yandell)
One World (Peter Singer)
Rethinking Multiculturalism (Bhiku Parekh)
Five Moral Pieces (Umberto Eco)
A Journal of the Plague Year (Daniel Defoe)
The Immediate Experience (Robert Warshow)
Color Conscious : The Political Morality of Race (Appiah and Gutman)
Perfume (Patrick Suskind)
The Greens Cookboook (Deborah Madison)
Sunset Vegetarian Cooking
Urban Injustice : How Ghettoes Happen
The Classic Era of Crime Fiction (Peter Haining)
Brown : The Last Discovery of America (Richard Rodriguez)
Trust In Numbers (Porter)
Anime : from Akira to Princess Mononoke (Susan Napier)
Deconstructions : a Users Guide (ed. Nicholas Royle)
Coming Home to Eat (Gary Paul Nabhan)
Ambient Century (Mark Prendergast)
Yellow : Race in America Beyond Black and White (Frank Wu)
I Have Landed (Gould)
The Power of Babel (John McWhorter)
Fat Land (Greg Critser)
Fat Cats and Running Dogs (Vijay Prashad)
The Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution (Hill)
Sound States
Wireless Imagination

Nonfiction Science/Engineering
Graph Connections (Beineke and Wilson)
Chance and Choice by Cardpack and Chessboard
Random Matrix Models and Their Applications (Bleher, Its)
Conceptual Mathematics (Lawvere & Schanuel)
On Numbers and Games (J.H. Conway)
The Blind Watchmaker (Dawkins)
Proofs and Refutations (Imre Lakatos)
The Logic of Scientific Discovery (Popper)
The Lady Tasting Tea (David Salsburg)
Difference Engine (Doron Swade)
Safe food : bacteria, biotech, bioterrorism (Marian Nestle)
A Wavelet Tour of Signal Processing (Mallat)
Listening (Handel)
Theoretical Neuroscience (Dayan & Abbott)

by Larry Gonick. This book was recommended to me by my friend Ann, who claims it’s the best introductory genetics textbook out there. And I would agree, if the person reading the book doesn’t know anything about genetics already. Unfortunately, I had seen most of the material before, in an introductory biology class, so it was not news to me. But the book is very clear in most of its explanations, which made it ideal as a review of that knowledge for me. It cleared up some of the gene regulation mechanisms that I had forgotten about, and the cartoon approach certainly made what was going on more intuitive.

I recommend this book to anyone who thinks “I’d like to know something about genetics” or “I wish I remembered more of that genetics stuff.” It’s not really for the crowd that wants more than nerdy cocktail conversation topics, but it will certainly teach you something while entertaining you, which is more than you can say of most textbooks. The best thing about it is the way in which it follows the historical development of genetics (something I missed in the class I took), which turns the whole subject into a story of sorts to follow. So go to the library, pick up a copy, and kick back on a rainy summer afternoon, and expand your brain.

H.P. comes out this week, and the Guardian is sponsoring a contest to see who can come up with the closest thing to the first 350 or so words of the book. I’ve already reserved mine at a bookstore in SF (in retrospect, probably a sub-optimal strategy, since that means I have to wait an hour to get it). I think it will look good on the shelf next to “Random Processes : Filtering, Estimation, and Detection.” In fact, I think HP6 should be “Harry Potter and the Annihilating Filter.” I’m sure it would sell lots of copies — Rowling could get it published by the IEEE and charge $150 a copy.

The Daniela Mercury concert was pretty awesome, all told. Unfortunately, I don’t know any Portuguese, so I have no idea what she was singing about. But I could usually sing along with the chorus by the 3rd time. Now all I have to do is learn how to dance and then go to Rio. And make sure I’m wearing the appropriate soccer jersey. GOOOOOAAAAAAALLLL!

by Kobo Abe. This is a truly bizarre Japanese novel. It reminded me a lot of Abe’s last book, Kangaroo Notebook, but also of some of the more surreal novels of Haruki Murakami (Dance, Dance, Dance in particular). The protagonist is a shoe salesman whose wife has been taken away in an ambulance. When he goes to the hospital, he discovers that she has vanished and tries to investigate, only to find himself caught up in the system of sex-crazed patients and sexually dysfunctional hospital staff. This is not a book for the sex-squeamish.

Like other of Abe’s novels, the outlook on life is pretty grim, but many of the situations he constructs are hilarious, especially the interactions between the narrator and his boss on the investigation, who wants to be a horse (and has found a novel way of achieving this goal). The book is told through a series of notebooks from the investigation, written by the narrator (who is forced to refer to himself in the third person for much of the time). It is hard to keep track of time in the writing, but the breaks between the formalism of the investigation and the narrator’s comments in the middle is one of the fun parts in the reading.

All in all, I wouldn’t say this is Abe’s best book, but it has a surreal quality about it that fans of Murakami or of Stanislaw Lem’s Memoirs Found In A Bathtub would like.