American Gods by Neil Gaiman

I received a copy of 'American Gods' for Christmas and it took me awhile to sit down and read it.  But once I started, it was quite easy to get drawn in. Most fantasy novels have a significant flaw that spoils them for me.  They can create any powers they like for anyone they like.  It's hard to maintain dramatic tension in those circumstances.

American Gods has a much more creative and interesting approach.  The premise is that people who immigrated to the U.S. brought their gods with them.  These gods take on actual physical form as people but their 'powers' get weaker and weaker as fewer people believe in them.  Each of the gods has the character (in reduced fashion) of the original with those types of powers / skills.  But they look and act like people who live on the margins of society.

He takes gods from many of the different 'pantheons' around the world - which makes it interesting.  I recognized some and would like to know more about some of the others. The interaction between the gods of the old world and the gods of the new world is particularly well done.

The book has some of the flaws of much fantasy / science fiction (a pace that is too slow, an over reliance on tension caused by confusing the main character, characters that are not very fully realized) but, overall, this was an interesting book and the end was a very creative resolution of the story lines.

Merchant Kings

I have finished the book 'Merchant Kings: When Companies Rules the World, 1600-1900'.

Quite interesting.  I hadn't quite realized the power that these government sponsored monopolies held.  The governments benefited because they didn't need to pay for armies and navies in those territories and the trade was enormously beneficial to the sponsoring countries.  But, of course, there was no concept of rights for the people in those territories.

This book makes the distinction between being a 'producer/consumer' and a 'citizen' very clear. 

I don't like the growing trend to describe citizens as consumers of government services.  It's not really what this book is talking about but I think it is pernicious.

Unaccustomed Earth by Jumpa Lahiri

My book group just finished reading this book.  Amazingly well written short stories.  Usually I am not fond of short stories because by the time I get engaged in the story, it is over.  But these are marvelous.  The characters feel fully real and I find I want to know much, much more about them. 

Much of the stories center around the theme of immigrants living in a foreign land (here).   The stories feel extremely real.  A lot of isolation and loneliness, too, unfortunately.

Great book but it did leave me feeling sad.

Unbroken

I have finished reading "Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption". I cannot think of an adequate way to describe the courage and endurance of Louis Zamperini. Truly an amazing story.

While reading this story, it became clear that most of the events had been told repeatedly before they were written down.  They had the cadence of an oral history.  When I got to the end of the book, I found that after the war, Louis Zamperini spent years telling his story to various groups.  Whether intentionally or not, this allowed him to hone the way he told the story to make it very accessible to an audience.

I had the same sense of an oral history when I read the 'Little House on the Prairie' stories.  I believe that Laura Ingall Wilders told these stories repeatedly to her sister who went blind.  The process of telling them orally influenced the way they were presented in the book.

This probably used to happen more - before literacy was widespread and before the printing press made printing accessible to more authors.  

Cleopatra

I just finished reading Cleopatra.  It was quite interesting.  My previous knowledge of Cleopatra was based pretty much on Shakespeare :-) so it was nice to hear more of the actual history.  I really enjoyed the author's effort to dig into the limited set of information that is available and present this in a balanced way.  Especially since virtually all of the information that is available was written by her enemies.  History is truly written by the winners.  Very interesting to think of Cleopatra as a powerful woman when powerful women were considered very, very dangerous (at least by the Romans). 

Cooperation

I have just finished reading a very interesting book" The Evolution of Cooperation" by Robert Axelrod.  It was written in the 1980s by a professor as a result of a study he did of the Prisoner's Dilemna game.  The conclusions are fascinating.

I won't go through all of the thinking right now but the basic point is that there are many situations where cooperation is a better overall strategy than competition - regardless of whether the participants recognize that situation or are actual adversaries. 

"The main results of Cooperation Theory are encouraging.  They show that cooperation can get started by even a small cluster of individuals who are prepared to reciprocate cooperation, even in a world where no one else will cooperate.  They analysis also shows that the two key requisites for cooperation to thrive are that the cooperation be based on reciprocity, and that the shadow of the futue is important enough to make this reciprocity stable.  But once cooperation based on reciprocity  is established in a population, it can protect itself from invasion by uncooperative strategies."  Page 173

Here's hoping for a growth in cooperative strategies in 2011 !