Arukiyomi

Context: Read this throughout the first week of Wimbledon and finished it just as Serena Williams won her quarterfinal match.

REVIEW

Tambaran is more than a sum of ideas and artifacts associated with the men’s cult; it is the very sign and symbol of Arapesh culture, the personified mystique of a total way of life….

Thus concludes Tuzin’s remarkably detailed description of the initiation rituals of the men of a number of related tribes in the west of Papua New Guinea.

He outlines each of the initiation rites associated with the five grades of the Tambaran, a cult exclusively reserved for men and kept secret on pain of death from women or children. Each of these initiation stages takes months to complete, requires the participation of whole villages of people, the consumption of mountains of sweet potatoes and wild pigs and amazingly complex rituals. Some of the rituals might make you feel a bit squeamish…
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Context: Borrowed a guitar while I was reading this as mine’s in PNG.

REVIEW
Švejk is one of literatures great great characters. If English did not so dominate the world of writing, he would be more widely known. He’d also be more widely known if Hašek had been a better writer technically. While his characterisation is wonderful, his narrative skills little short of genius and his satire razor-sharp, this is balanced by a lack of scenario that tended to leave me bored at times. Did he achieve what he set out to do? Absolutely. It just wasn’t as interesting nearly a hundred years on as it would have been when the ashes of the Austro-Hungarian empire were still warm.
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Context: Listened to this as we moved from High Wycombe to Cambridge and settled in in Bar Hill.

REVIEW
Not one of Greene’s best and one of his later works. It doesn’t really hold a candle to the other greats I’ve read of his, and I’ve read pretty much all of his as he’s one of my favourite authors. I had hoped for more from this. Alas…
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Context: A reclining chair, a lamp and a cushion on a cloudy Saturday morning.

REVIEW
I’ve read a couple of other McEwan’s which always captivated me until about halfway through. Admittedly, Amsterdam was shorter than either Enduring Love or the much longer Atonement and so, if it was going to follow suit, it would have to be somewhere in the first fifty pages. Well it didn’t. For once, McEwan held me past the halfway point. But, again, he just can’t seem to finish well.
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Context: On the bookshelf along with this were several other first edition Wodehouse hardbacks, some with very good dustjackets from the 1930s. Lovely.

REVIEW
I couldn’t help thinking of Huxley’s Crome Yellow as I read this. It’s not a patch on that of course, but Wodehouse is at his best here with wry wit and classic humour.
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Context: Moved my desk to a doorway to get a better wireless connection while reading this.

REVIEW
The latest in a series of books I’m reading at the moment to inform me about the cargo cult movements of Papua New Guinea. I seem to be reading them in descending order of merit. Swatridge’s book I was looking forward to in particular because it was written twenty years after the others and I was hoping for some perspective and a more informed view being as it was published in 1985. Unfortunately, the man is a teacher and not an anthropologist and this shows quite clearly.
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Context: Discovered the music of Eric Bibb while reading this one. Love it.

REVIEW
This is a bit mistitled I feel. Perhaps Kenelm felt that a name like Mambu would sound exotic. Perhaps his parents felt the same way about him.

Mambu was a Cargo cult prophet who appeared on the PNG scene shortly before WW2. He is generally believed to be the first documented guy to spread Cargo cult belief over a relatively wide area. Little is actually known about him and it would be impossible to fill a three hundred page book like this with anywhere near enough information. You’d be lucky to get 300 words out of him in fact. So, what is Burridge’s book about then?
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Context: The first book I read in a new pile of hard to find anthropology and linguistics books from Cambridge University Library which my resourceful helper found for me.

REVIEW
When I told my friend I’d spent the day reading about Cargo cults, she thought I was organising some shipping of household effects overseas. I took it that Cargo cults aren’t widely known outside the anthropological or missiological communities too well and, even within the latter, are likely to be known only if there’s some risk of encountering them. After reading this though, I’m inclined to believe that the basic tenets of Cargo cult beliefs are alive and well in our own western communities.
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Context: One of the books on the bookshelf in our bedroom at our new place in Bar Hill.

REVIEW
This only takes about thirty minutes to read from cover to cover – not that you have to read the cover of course. But in that short time, Thomas takes your imagination and kneads it gently at first and then in increasing intensity until you find yourself whirling through the streets and homes of his small Welsh seaside town.
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Context: Finished this off just after a shopping trip to Tesco’s where I got two free blocks of cheese (always complain politely!)

REVIEW
Recently, I read The Old Devils by this guy’s dad. I really didn’t think that it rated much. Well, Martin Amis seems to be, at least at my first reading of him, a chip off the old block.
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Context: First fiction I’ve borrowed from a British library in well over a decade. Got this one the day I joined Bar Hill library.

REVIEW
This is the story of what happens when an event is allowed to settle into one’s memory so deeply that, in time, it stains one’s entire being. It’s evocatively written and asks deep philosophical questions about the nature of relationships.
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Context: We listened to this in the car over weeks and weeks. Less than twenty minutes after we finished, the car’s engine died and had to be scrapped.

REVIEW
Murakami is world famous for his story-telling and prose, his metaphysical realities and the way he plays with concepts, roles, characters and places. I’ve now read three of his books and I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s some of the most cleverly written rubbish I’ve ever had to recycle.
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Context: Listened to this from librivox.org as we moved from Piddington back to Bar Hill.

REVIEW
Get a good look at that cover because that’s as scary as this ‘tale of terror’ is going to get.
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Context: Discovered this at a key time in my walk with God at Wycliffe.

REVIEW
Boy I needed to read this book. It’s amazing how God brings things into your life at just the right time. If I’d read this even two months before I did, I would have binned it as heretical or at least disagreed strongly with it. But when God’s Spirit gets hold of you and changes you from the inside out, it’s amazing to see just how different the world looks.

By the time I found this book sitting on the shelf of the library at Wycliffe, I was ready to hear what it had to say.
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Context: Packing up to go on the move again while I read this, not sure where or for how long this time.

REVIEW
This is the second book I’ve read of his. Seeing as he’s my dad and I read voraciously, it would be a bit harsh not to add his books to my list wouldn’t it. This is the story of my dad’s experiences taking a job in a west African country and reaching out to the local community there with the good news about Jesus.
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Context: Started to learn to play the piano at some point in the months I spent reading this.

REVIEW
Many of you know that I’m pretty fixated with the 1001 books list because it makes me read stuff I would have no idea of. This is usually a good thing and the reason I picked this up in a charity shop.

Mixes history and fiction in the way that Don DeLillo did in Underworld.

…it said on the back. Any reference to DeLillo’s waste of timber almost had me running for the shredder. And to cap that comment the TLS reviewer then said:

Stephenson’s book is more successful than DeLillo’s and much funnier.

Mmmm… not hard. Your average telephone directory would achieve about the same effect I feel.

Stephenson’s novel features the role of codes and cryptography from WW2 up to the modern era (well, the 90s anyway.) It features a range of characters (aka nerds) all of whom, either through choice or otherwise, are caught up in this elite and secretive society. To say he writes a complex plot with a panoply of characters spanning decades better than DeLillo is, in fact, superfluous (see my review of Underworld). But does he do it well enough?
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REVIEW
This is an excellent book. It is at once thought-provoking, revealing, informative and very well written.

Kulick spends months and months in the village of Gapun where no one under the age of 10 uses their vernacular language any more in favour of Tok Pisin, a pidgin language and one of Papua New Guinea’s lingua francas. His investigations into why this is so are carefully documented here in a very readable account of the social life of the village, its people and their culture.
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Context: We spilled pesto on the bed just as I was finishing this off after dinner – mad rushing of covers to the bathroom but all is fine now.

REVIEW
Long ago, I read Auster’s Music of Chance which I liked enough to rate as good. This book wasn’t as good, IMO and so I’m rating it okay. It’s a trilogy by title only really. At a total of just over 300 pages, you can hardly call any part of the three a book in its own right. I think Auster’s plan was to weave three views of the same story. For the life of me though, I couldn’t figure out what that story was really meant to be.
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REVIEW
This is an excellent overview of the immensely detailed and frustrating world of multilingualism. Edwards’ style is very very readable, often ironic and he uses a lot of very worthwhile examples and case-studies to illustrate his text. He’s also extremely well-read, citing everything from Plato to contemporary sources.
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