Archipelago's free e-books

I'm sure you've seen this elsewhere, but this is an offer I don't mind seeing as a repeat. Archipelago Books is offering 30 of its titles free as ebooks until April 2nd. The list of books can be found here. The books I've read from Archipelago have been of a consistently high quality, so even the titles I'm not familiar with I would recommend.

Books on the list I've read and recommend are Bacacay by Witold Gombrowicz, The Expedition to the Baobab Tree by Wilma Stockenström, Stone Upon Stone by Wiesław Myśliwski, and Posthumous Papers of a Living Author by Robert Musil.

Archipelago is a non-profit organization, so I'm sure that any donation or additional book orders will be appreciated. They're a great publisher and this is a generous offer on their part!

University of Chicago Press: 75% off eBooks through August 16th

I've limited my acquisitions of books this year but I'm picking up a few eBooks courtesy of the University of Chicago Press' flash sale. Also note that UCP makes an eBook available for free each month. Check out their site each month or get on their mailing list to see what's available. If you haven't checked out their site, it has links to their blog and so much more.

I have no affiliation with UCP. Also, I take no responsibility to damage done to anyone's budget other than my own.

Banned books available at Internet Archive

From Open Culture, "Internet Archive has opened up access to 74 banned books." Click on over and download any favorites or books you have been wanting to read.

Convergence by Christopher Paul Turner

Convergence book site

Convergence combines career advice with commercial fiction in a novel about 4 young scientists striving for academic success. Each journey takes many twists and turns as these researchers make significant discoveries, under impossible conditions, while dealing with unscrupulous colleagues. To keep their careers alive, however, they are in the end forced to consider something that would normally be unthinkable. What directions each of them end up taking may not only define their character but ultimately determine their destiny.

Convergence documents the surprisingly cut-throat world of science and reflects the real-world experiences of tens of thousands of young researchers everywhere. There are four main storylines, each involving a woman seemingly unrelated to the other three. Convergence begins by slowly taking the reader into the world of science and discovery, a seemingly benign culture that appears full of supportive people. However, despite the apparent purity of the four main protagonists, sinister undercurrents are ever-present and each storyline gets ever darker as the novel progresses. After many unpredictable plot-twists Convergence stops being purely a science mystery and develops into a slow-burning political drama.

The quotes come from the book's site (linked above). When the author contacted me earlier this year I was too backlogged at work (not to mention reading), but I was interested in the descriptions. Having seen dubious choices made by doctors on which medical devices (implanted into the brain) to use, the topic intrigued me. The book is available for $8.50 and you can read the first chapter for free.

The book reads mainly as a mystery, or rather mysteries, unraveling what has happened with four individual Neuroscience researchers in addition to the narrator. While each story is unique and separate, an overarching trend emerges as well as the possible convergence of their stories.

In addition to the surface story and allegorical meaning, there was a symbolic linking of the researchers’ plights with that of a cell’s difficulty during (and after) a stroke—people/agents intended to assist can inflict maximum damage. While there are many quotes at the book’s site, I’ll add one that I don’t believe is there:

“A truly skilled Machiavellian knows that formal conspiracies will almost always fail. They much prefer the stealthy approach of seeding a network with false beliefs, then stepping back and letting nature take its course. The inherent nature of any human network will allow any agenda to resonate within the community; the beauty of this is that the network does all the work. Indeed, the agenda will eventually get distorted and then amplified by countless reiterations before it becomes part of the collective awareness,” he explained.

eBook: A Listening Thing by William Michaelian

How do we face life’s seemingly insurmountable problems? For Stephen Monroe, an unsuccessfully self-employed typesetter still in love with his ex-wife, Mary, the only acceptable thing to do is to hang in there and fight — for love, for what he believes in, and for the voice inside him that’s struggling to be heard.

With humor and grace, A Listening Thing reveals the crumbling world of a talented man finally learning to face himself and the many mistakes he has made. Leaving behind the shabby desolation of his apartment for a weekend visit with Mary at his mother’s home, Stephen finds hope, and discovers love is more generous than he’d ever expected.

- About the novel from the book site

- The Wikipedia entry on the book

I don’t recall how I first stumbled on William Michaelian’s main website, but I do know Recently Banned Literature, his site of “poetry, notes, and marginalia”, became a daily visit. The link for the book noted above has several good synopses and reviews, as well as readers’ and the author’s comments. Since those overviews cover the basics (and much more) I’ll focus on items that initially struck me and have stayed with me in the week since I read it, as well as a few things I don’t see mentioned in the comments yet.

Repeated references to Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable give an idea of the framework, with Stephen Monroe blending musings and recollections with details of his less than ordinary life as he searches for meaning. Stephen has self-awareness…maybe too much so, as he dwells on his own and society’s shortcomings. Yet he does so with humor and self-deprecation, endearing him to the reader. He is full of contradictions, reflecting his current status of limbo between states of being and not being.

Since I visited Recently Banned Literature before reading the novel, part of the book felt like a continuation of Michaelian’s posts. Through Stephen the reader is continually challenged to look at things in different ways…to approach something in various manners in order to fully experience and understand it. Dreams, as surreal or inaccurate as they appear, can contribute in comprehending or appreciating something:

Memory, after all, is a delicious thing. It is also a dangerously inaccurate medium in terms of self-exploration. Often, what we think we remember is not what happened at all, but, rather, what we wished had happened. Or, depending on what has taken place since, memory can supply us with a litany of excuses for why we are the way we are. Experience settles on us layer by layer. In time, with geologic force, information is distorted, compressed, or even obliterated — until it surfaces again in a different, yet familiar and recognizable form, triggered by a sight, scent, or sound. This causes things to shift and buckle at a psychological level, shaping us in the process, making us who we are. All the while, to preserve our hard-earned identities, we tell ourselves stories. These stories are endlessly fascinating. They also provide nourishment for our egos, which prefer fable over the challenge of new, reality-based information. We often mistake the comfort that results for sanity.

Stephen’s disappointment in himself, as well as watching the discontent of others, has the potential to continue his downward spiral. Yet his triumphal moments come when he simply ‘is’, released from the past (or at least as he views it) and from expectations (his, more than others). He goes beyond thought when translating his drawing of Uncle Leo into a story. In the trip to his mother’s house, his reconciliation with Mary begins when he lets go of both the past and the future.

Stephen’s resilient nature, causing him to carry on even though he doesn’t know how to or why, provides the opportunity for things to improve. Resiliency figures in all the characters lives in one form or another. Mary and Stephen’s mother both carry on in the face of loss and grief, the mother essentially willing Stephen and Mary’s reconciliation. As trite as it can sound, it is easy to discount our capacity for endurance as well as the ability to shape ourselves. Many thanks to William for making this novel available for free, especially after the troubled history in getting it published!

eBook: A Trip of Goats by Kim Crawford

When twelve-year old Jule runs away from home in search of a mystical goatherding vagabond, he is unprepared for life on the backroads of Georgia. Jule must confront a strange menagerie of adults, from the pathetic to the comic to the depraved, and shield a young girl from the depradations of harsh life in the mid-sixties south. But even as he stays a step ahead of the private investigator his domineering father has dispatched to retrieve him, his own goal proves more elusive still.

- Book description from the book site

The book description sells short some of the better parts of the book. The book is currently available for download for $5 at the above link. I’m not much in the habit of disclaimers, but for the record I have no connection to the author other than occasionally reading his weblog.

The book covers two episodes in Jubal Lee (Jule) Jackson’s life during the summer and fall of 1966. The first section introduces the reader to Jule and his family during their summer vacation. The most important person in Jule’s life, his father and former state senator Montgomery Jackson, initially comes across as a crude and rude pleasure-seeker who only thinks of himself. As you learn more about the father, however, a more complex character emerges.

The second episode, and the bulk of the book, follows Jule’s picaresque romp through eastern Georgia as he searches for the Goat Man. Jule hopes the “goatherding vagabond” he glimpsed during the summer can help him understand why his father acts the way he does. Maybe picaresque is technically the wrong word as Jule is only a part-time rogue, displaying a sense of morality and maturity sometimes beyond his twelve years. But the characters he encounters, including the neighborhood drunk, a porno maker, escapees from the criminal psych ward (who sometimes display more sanity than those around them), and many more make for colorful convergences.

The southern flavor is strong which disproportionately increases its appeal to me. From the geographical detail(such as physical descriptions of the countryside or of landmarks like the Uncle Remus Golf Course) to cultural touchstones (whether the brief mention of a Stuckey’s pecan log or the recurring Merle Haggard song), I was transported back to that time and (a close by) place.

When reading one of Rick Bragg’s family books (All Over But the Shoutin’ or Ava’s Man), I find myself thinking “I KNOW these people,” having grown up with family and friends that exhibited many characteristics of his family. While I (fortunately) didn’t have the exact same reaction to Crawford’s characters, it was like I had heard about many of the characters while growing up. It’s what helped the story ‘feel’ real despite characters and action that descends into apparent simple satire. Or what would work well with the story, a screenplay of growing up in the South in the ‘60s.

The message delivered by the Goat Man can seem commonplace with his bland (but focused) analysis, but I didn’t mind at all. When you can identify with both Jule and his father, it’s a message that doesn’t hurt being heard often. In addition Jule gets an early lesson in the disparity between an idealized life and its reality. As I hope you can tell, I enjoyed Crawford’s eBook quite a bit. I know it’s not for everyone, but it hit the spot for me.