Book Reviews

Growing up with a father who constantly believed that civilization was going to end, post apocalyptic books hold a special draw to me. So after watching the genius of No Country for Old Men, I went to download this book for a trip between Seattle and Spokane. This book seems to me the literary equivalent of Brian Eno, using simple and repetitive motifs to propel the flow of the medium in a slow but inevitable manner. Many parts of a standard genre are entirely missing, While the author gives tantalizing hints as to what may have happened, they are not enough to reconstruct the apocalypse. The characters remain unnamed during the novel and encounters with the rest of the bitter edge of humanity are sparse. Adjectives for cold and dark abound and made me feel cold even when I should have been perfectly comfortable. However, the books greatest strengths were also its greatest weaknesses. Many of the events seemed cyclical, and at times the plot seemed as aimless as the characters themselves: wandering with little hope. Still the ability of the story to survive trough incredible constraints is commendable and no doubt, The Road breaks the mold for storytelling.

Seriously, Ayn Rand needed an editor. We get to watch an interesting struggle take place in the first 300 pages, only to watch it repeated three more times in the next 900. Like being forced to watch Chronicles of Narnia 4 time in a row or read state of fear cover to cover to cover to cover again.

I couldn’t help be reminded of the Animorphs series that I read in elementary school. Too many aspects were the same, if only expanded to fill the 600 page hardcover. The narrative was straightforward peppered with lonely SAT words and inconsistent use of italics. But the novel wasn’t bad. Meyer seems to be trying to explore the rift between mind and body, and even if I didn’t feel much force in the events she described, at least I was entertained to think about it.

Mostly outdated. The only real worthwhile part is al-Batal’s essay on why the communicative approach is necessary for attaining proficiency.

This week, my wife tested positive for COVID. We don’t know where she got it, may as well have been outer space. I watched our internal quarantine protocols fail as COVID spread to me and our son. We are no scientists, but this thriller was happening in real life in real time. When I read Andromeda strain 20 years ago, it was a page turner until the ending taught me the definition of anticlimactic. Nothing the scientists did mattered, because the virus independently mutated to harmlessness. After two years of lockdown and fear, today’s COVID has no symptoms for me, and is less severe than the last cold that passed through our household for my wife and son. While the plot of Andromeda Strain was emotionally disappointing, it was predictively dead on. ...

What makes Arabic hard? This question is one of the fundamental and repeated queries of the Arabic student. Neophytes may think it’s the alphabet, others may think it’s the vocabulary, but I believe, and I think that many others would agree with me in saying that the most difficult part of Arabic is grammar. Since many grammar rules are never exposed in most verbal or written texts, it is possible for even advanced students of the language to maintain little more than an elementary proficiency in syntax and grammar. I even remember one Saudi student in Spokane telling me it was easier for him to write papers in English than it was for him to write them in Arabic. ...