Arukiyomi

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: 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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Context: While listening to this in the Wycliffe kitchens, I was informed that, due to Health & Safety regulations, I was no longer allowed to listen to audio books while I worked. Finished it off walking home.

REVIEW
This is a strange book. I didn’t really know what to think of it. At times it buzzed with melodrama a la Wells or Verne and at others went off into lengthy metaphorical satire a la Swift (at its best) and Rand (at its worst.)
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Context: Took this along as Mrs Arukiyomi and I walked up the hill at West Wycombe and took in this view of High Wycombe from our favourite bench up there.

REVIEW
This is labelled as a classic. I can’t for the life of me understand why unless (and it’s a big unless) it was somehow groundbreaking in its genre (whatever that was.) I’m willing to accept it as a classic if so but only reservedly at that. I kept waiting for something to happen or for the writing to develop any sort of depth but it disappointed me.
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REVIEW
This one might be hard to get hold of and I’m not entirely sure that if you have to work hard to get it, it’s going to be all that worthwhile.

It’s basically a history of the establishment of one wing of the Catholic church in Papua New Guinea . That wing is the Society of the Divine Word (SVD) and the book charts the establishment of the mission and it’s history right up until the late 20th century.
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REVIEW
For all you Dr. Who fans out there, this is not the Colin Baker of scarf fame. It’s much more mundane than that… unfortunately.

If you’re into Welsh, this is the book for you. I’m not and I’m reading this in preparation for language survey work in PNG. So, was it relevant? Juuuuuust about.
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REVIEW
Briggs focusses on lessons he learned while working over a period of years with a community of Mexicanos in New Mexico. He’s learned some valuable lessons, mostly through his methodological errors while conducting interviews.

He intended to get an idea of a community of carvers and so designed and set up some interviews with them to get detailed information. He was surprised to hear so many people responding to his ‘well-designed’ research questions with non-committal answers such as “Who knows?”

It was then he started realising that before he was going to learn about them, he needed to start learning about his own approach to life.
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Context: while I was reading this, our clothes dryer died in the garden and we had to string up an emergency washing line

REVIEW
A friend bought me this for my birthday last summer. He got hold of the list of unread 1001 books that I carry around with me and found one he’d read and ordered it via Ama$on. I’d never heard of it but as he’s done quite a bit of work in politics and therefore is a fan of Wilberforce, he’d read a lot around the battle to end slavery and had come across this title.
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