I finished William Faulkner’s “Absalom, Absalom!” last week, but due to a bout of sickness and the mind-exhausting nature of the book, I held off on making the usual post-book post.

This is the second of Faulkner’s books that I have read, after taking down “The Sound and The Fury” last year. After reading that book, I did some additional reading about the story and the author. I remember seeing somewhere that it was considered one of the most difficult books to read.

For some reason, I hadn’t considered that his other writings would be incredibly taxing to get through. While “The Sound and The Fury” had three different narrators — including one who was mentally handicapped and lacked a concept of time — and a male and female character with the same name, “Absalom, Absalom!” has multiple narrators who sometimes tell parts of each other’s lives.

It’s the kind of book where you read five pages and realize you haven’t the slightest clue what just happened. Fortunately, one of the narrators is just as confused while he is being told the story, and halfway through the book makes sure everyone is clear.

The most difficult part of Faulkner’s style is that he writes in a stream of consciousness that creates incredibly complex sentences. He’s probably the only writer I have ever seen use two colons in the same sentence.

I started typing out an example and realized the sentence literally took up an entire page. The punctuation sums it up pretty well: six dashes, 12 commas, two sets of parentheses and a semicolon. It also includes the phrase, “lurking in dim halls filled with that presbyterian effluvium of lugubrious and vindictive anticipation…”

There’s a reason it took me a month to read the book. That’s not to say, though, that I didn’t enjoy it. The story is solid, one that has one of those moments 200 pages in that makes you glad you slogged through everything that came before.

Plus, Faulkner used one of my favorite words — verisimilitude — and described a guy wearing an overcoat over a bathrobe as looking “huge and shapeless like a disheveled bear.” I defy you to picture a disheveled bear and not be entertained.

If the title of the post put that song in your head and you want to indulge, here it is. The group is notable for having a singer that once prompted a former roommate to ask if the phrase “belly tap” should be hyphenated. I think we decided it should, though I’m not sure we came up with a clear definition of the term.

Probably for the best.

Knowing the sound of an author’s voice can completely change your reading experience.

I just polished off David Sedaris’ “When You Are Engulfed In Flames,” a book I read entirely with his voice running through my head. Sedaris is a sort-of frequent contributor to Chicago Public Radio’s “This American Life” and thus I have heard his very distinct voice many times.

It was a bit jarring that from the very first paragraph it was as if I was listening to a book on tape. The way he punctuates the paragraphs led me through each sentence just the way he would speak it. It made me read slower, sitting over certain words and phrases and putting in pauses where he would have taken a breath between sentences.

It reminded me of an episode of Seinfeld where George says he can’t read because the voice in his head is too annoying. He then buys a popular book in the audio format, only to find that the narrator has the same annoying voice.

I didn’t mind this experience so much. What I did find odd about Sedaris’ voice is that he looks nothing like I would have expected. Click on any of the stories on this page to hear his voice.

Before I looked up his picture, I always envisioned he looked something like this.

In reality, he looks like this.

Before finding I was so very wrong, I actually thought I had a pretty good ability to translate a voice into an image. If there were records kept in this area, I would have been undefeated after hearing WAMU radio host Kojo Nnamdi and NPR’s Diane Rehm. They look exactly as I pictured them.

Okay, back to a few points about the book itself. It is a collection of anecdotes that doesn’t have a plot, yet the pieces do combine to give a sort of rounded-out picture. If you have heard his “This American Life” stuff, expect much of the same.

Early on he is talking about being at a house in Paris with some family. There is a conversation about accusing his sister of “wanting to be French.” Her husband interjects that they are in fact from the United States.

“‘Americans,’ he repeated. ‘We don’t live in France, we live in Virginia. Vienna, Virginia. Got it?’ I looked at this guy and knew for certain that if we’d met at a party he’d claim to live in Washington, D.C. Ask for a street address, and he’d look away mumbling, ‘Well, just outside D.C.'”

If you are from the D.C. area, you know this dance all too well. I went to college in Pennsylvania and used the phrase “just outside D.C.” more times that I could begin to count. No one knows where Vienna is, even though it is home to the high school of such noted alumni as myself, my brother and even my sister. “Just outside D.C.” is close enough.

Sedaris later talks about his own time living in France, during which he became fond of the spiders living in his house. He took interest in every aspect of their lives, particularly the main female, April (he named all of them).

“Why Marty or Curtis or Big Chief Tommy didn’t mate with April is a mystery, and I put it on a list beside other nagging questions, such as ‘What was Jesus like as a teenager?’ and ‘Why is it you never see a baby squirrel?'”

I understand that many of you have only read the blog since it moved to this location. But those who were around in the MySpace blog days (or read the archives I copied over) know that I agonized over the squirrel question myself. You can read my take here.

The last chunk of the book is about his quest to quit smoking. Naturally he gives a detailed description of what different cigarette brands say about a person and describes his chosen brand (Kools). I don’t know anything about cigarettes, so I appreciated his efforts to educate those in the same boat.

“For those who don’t smoke, a mild or light cigarette is like a regular one with a pinhole in it. With Kools it’s the difference between being kicked by a donkey and being kicked by a donkey that has socks on.”

Now that is a description you don’t hear very often.

I know I have written before about my affinity for John Steinbeck’s writing and his evocative descriptions of settings. He has a knack for putting you in the story, making you feel the sunshine and the breeze blowing through the trees.

Today, Sedaris made me smell a cigarette. I have been around enough smokers in my life to have a thorough knowledge of the various smells. But right now I life in a pretty smoke-free area and can’t recall the last time I had those aromas flowing through my nose. And then I read:

“Sitting there in that hot little room, I wished I’d taken the advice of my friend Janet, who filled a baby food jar with an inch of water and a half-dozen butts. This she carried around in her purse, and whenever she wanted a cigarette, she’d just unscrew the lid and take a whiff of what even the most enthusiastic smoker has to admit is pretty damn nasty.”

Now I make no judgment about smoking — if you want to, knock yourself out. In the experience of being lost in this text, this section immediately brought that smell to my nose even though there is no cigarette anywhere near where I was sitting.

It was a really strange experience, but like the book, one that I found very interesting.

George Orwell’s “Animal Farm” was first published in 1946, and was seen at the time as a commentary on Stalinist Russia.

Today it offers a look into other totalitarian regimes, as well as one tremendous way we could improve the political system in the United States. There are not many lawmakers in the U.S. who do much that is drastically different from their peers, which results in year after year of seemingly similar results.

Napoleon the pig offers a strategy I would love to see implemented on the Senate floor as he and a rival pig argue about the merits of building a windmill on the farm. His opponent has drawn a complex set of plans that sits on the floor of a shed. Napoleon enters.

“He walked heavily round the shed, looked closely at every detail of the plans and snuffed at them once or twice, then stood for a little while contemplating them out of the corner of his eye; then suddenly he lifted his leg, urinated over the plans, and walked out without uttering a word.”

Now that is politics at its best. Of course in the Stalinist style of government, Napoleon later became the leader and claimed that he was in favor of the windmill all along.

Orwell said himself that his writing was always directed against totalitarianism. “‘Animal Farm’ was the first book in which I tried, with full consciousness of what I was doing, to fuse political purpose and artistic purpose into one whole.”

If you close your eyes, so to speak (hard to read if you actually do it), you can forget about any comparisons to Communist Russia, or current day North Korea and Iran, and see the artistic beauty of a story about animals overthrowing their masters to take responsibility for their own lives. Of course, you can’t keep those blinders on for long as the comparisons fly off of every page.

After years of Napoleon’s rule, the farm has less food than ever and has an overpopulation of pigs (the ruling class) and dogs (the security force). Orwell describes the pigs, especially Napoleon and his main deputy, as fat while the other animals are struggling to eat. Of course this comes as the pigs convince the other animals that there is no food shortage and that, in fact, there has never been more food at the farm.

Sound like any current nation to you?

Just reading about the reporting of Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein wore me out.

I was aware of the basics of Watergate before reading “All The President’s Men” but the details of the entirety of their reporting is staggering. If the film version of the story included everything, it might take four days to watch.

It was odd picturing the story in my mind as I read. I know what Woodward looks like, and yet every time he was mentioned all I saw was Robert Redford. With no clear picture in my mind of Bernstein, I was of course forced to go with Dustin Hoffman in his stead.

The two make so many phone calls, and pursue so many sources in such a dogged fashion that I am sure that I would have given up long before anything significant came out of their Watergate stories. It is striking, even now, even knowing how everything eventually turns out, to see how borderline comical the details were by the time they came out.

How so many high-ranking people thought they could get away with whatever they wanted shows an arrogance that really reigns as the theme of the story. At every step, as every detail came out, those involved offered new denials and language that said all allegations were ridiculous. Of course they all turned out later to be true.

One thing I could not get over was the convention of referring to the reporters as “Bernstein and Woodward.” I think that in any casual conversation, anyone would say it the other way. I would bet that they decided to just do it alphabetically in the book, which is fine if that’s how they want it. But I still found it jarring each time I came across it. Maybe they should put out a new press release so that we all commonly refer to them in alphabetical terms.

I did check Google, and the combination of “Woodward and Bernstein” and “Woodward & Bernstein” far surpasses that of “Bernstein and Woodward” and “Bernstein & Woodward.” I’m not about to cross Google.

Tomorrow marks the 30th day of June, and thus the 30th consecutive day of blogging for me. Fortunately, I already know exactly what I am writing about and it should be a fantastic time for all (with great pictures of bees!). Similar Bat time. Same Bat channel.

My daily trips to elementary school were easy. We lived in the neighborhood right behind the school, and all it took to get there was an easy five-minute bike ride.

It is that kind of access to education that makes me–and every one of you reading this–very fortunate.

In Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin’s “Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace…One School at a Time” there is the story of a young child who has to walk for two days, then float down a river to reach his school. Never mind that he has never been away from his home and can’t swim.

But the prospect of an education for the Pakistani child is enough of a reward to go to such lengths.

The book is one of those that makes you almost feel bad to read it while sitting in an air conditioned room in a comfy chair.

After spending time in the mountainous northern region of Pakistan as a climber, Mortenson becomes inspired to help the people living in the area. He sees how simple things–like schools–could make a huge impact on their lives.

The description of his efforts and the way he bonds with the people of the far-flung villages just shows how different this world would be if we all just sat down to talk. So many misconceptions about nationalities and religious affiliations have poisoned the perceptions of too many minds.

At the dedication ceremony for one of the schools Mortenson helped build, Syed Abbas, leader of northern Pakistan’s Shiite Muslims, gives a speech. It is September 14, 2001, and Abbas says the day is one the Pakistani children and their children will remember–not because of the terror attacks, but because “today, from the darkness of illiteracy, the light of education shines bright.”

Mortenson described the speech, saying the entire crowd was in tears by the end: “I wish all Americans who think ‘Muslim’ is just another way of saying ‘terrorist’ could have been there that day. The true core tenants of Islam are justice, tolerance, and charity, and Syed Abbas represented the moderate center of Muslim faith eloquently.”

It is the lack of knowledge, or the understanding that comes with the exposure to another culture, that can so often lead to incorrect assumptions and unfair groupings. Mortenson often gave talks during his time in America, transitioning from his experience climbing K2 to the efforts to build schools. They often served as fundraising events, but also frequently drew only a few attendees.

For one such speech in Montana, there were only six people. One, however, turned out to be Representative Mary Bono, who told Mortenson she learned more about the region in that hour than she had in all the briefings she had attended on Capitol Hill. For all the intelligence gathering and report after report, it took a guy who had spent months living with Pakistanis to give a clear view of what was happening on the ground.

“Three Cups of Tea” is one of those books you should read and pass onto someone else. If you want to skip ahead to learning more about Mortenson’s efforts through the non-profit Central Asia Institute, check out their website.

It takes a certain writing talent to be able to churn out multiple books that people will actually read. It’s one thing to have one popular book, but to have someone read three or four of your titles means you’re doing something right.

If you have been paying attention to the book blogs, you certainly know John Steinbeck is high on my list. Raymond Chandler is an author I know won’t disappoint me with his tales of hard-boiled detective Philip Marlowe.

I was first introduced to Chandler in a college English class. It was one of those courses that at the time seemed unduly difficult but looking back is just the type of educational challenge I wouldn’t mind revisiting. Each of our major papers in the class was preceded by two or three smaller thought writings that all led into the bigger effort. We had to meet with the professor and basically discuss our thoughts and arguments for the papers before and after we wrote them.

One of the professor’s favorite things to say was, “yes, but what are the implications of that?” It wasn’t enough to have a thesis and an argument to support it — you had to explore what followed from that argument.

Chandler’s “The Long Goodbye” was a major part of the theme we explored that semester: The Jewish detective novel. If you are a fan of Jack Bauer or Don Draper, then Philip Marlowe is the detective for you. He has the no-nonsense, anything-for-justice streak of Bauer and the suave, crisp style and mannerism of Draper.

Because of the genre I won’t reveal any of the plot of this one, but do have two notes. First, I have to mention the use of the word “weisenheimer,” which is massively underrated in our language. The second is an excerpt that gives a bit of an insight into Chandler’s writing style (Marlowe is narrating):

“She put my card beside a pile of freshly type letterheads. She leaned back and put one arm on the desk and tapped lightly with a small gold pencil. I grinned at her. The little blonde at the PBX cocked a shell-like ear and smiled a small fluffy smile. She looked playful and eager, but not quite sure of herself, like a new kitten in a house where they don’t care much about kittens.”

Now that’s a description you don’t hear very often.

The problem for me is that I am nearly at the end of Chandler’s collection. I think there are only three or four of his books that I haven’t yet read and mystery novels are not as re-readable as other genres. Fortunately, Barnes & Noble seems to have other books available, and there’s also this Internet thing I have been hearing about that may offer some other titles.

It would seem from my lack of recent posting that I forgot how to write, lost my computer, fell in a well, moved to a cabin in the wilderness without Internet access or was called away for a secret CIA mission in Tajikistan.

But none of that happened. I was out of town for a few days, and other days just got filled with other things.

A few of those involved reading books. Three of them to be exact. Since none of them really inspired the kind of reaction that would normally merit their own long post, I’m going to zip through them all here as a group.

The first is “The Book of Basketball” by Bill Simmons. This will be the easiest post-book writing of all time: If you already read his stuff on ESPN.com and like the NBA, you will enjoy it. Though I must say it is probably 150 pages too long.

Second on the list is John Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men,” one of those titles I felt like I should have read a long long time ago but never did. If you have been following my reading habits for any amount of time you should know that I think Steinbeck can do no wrong and this certainly follows that trend. My only regret is that I didn’t wait until it was warmer outside. There’s something about his writing that I think is best enjoyed when sitting in the sunshine with a light breeze rustling the leaves of nearby trees.

A number of his books are quite short by conventional standards — somewhere around 100 pages. But the nature of his writing is such that you find yourself 80 pages into the story and not even cognizant that you are nearing the end. He spends so much time and so much care crafting a story involving a small cast of characters and taking place over just a few days. And yet despite the lack of pages, you feel as if you have been told a complete story and had all of your questions answered.

The latest of the trio is Erik Larson’s “Devil in the White City.” This one is a longtime coming, since multiple people recommended it to me last summer and I finally got around to acquiring a copy and reading it. But it was well-worth the wait. I dog-eared a few pages, as I normally do, but in looking back I either don’t remember what seemed noteworthy or think it would give something away to those who end up reading the book.

So I’ll keep it more generic, and in keeping with the theme of this post, short. If you enjoy history, you’ll be into the descriptions of how the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair came into existence. Considering the technology and building techniques in use at the time, it was really a remarkable feat of engineering and construction. Add in the auxiliary products and attractions that were first introduced at the event and you have a long list of things that are still very much a part of our daily lives.

And then there’s the murder. Well, the murders. If you didn’t know it was a true crime story, you wouldn’t believe the actions of one of the main characters, a psychopath who eludes the detection of law enforcement at the time to perpetrate a borderline impressive list of dastardly deeds. Larson weaves the two storylines together with a superb use of historical background and primary documents to give a complete sense of what it was like to be in Chicago at that time. A very info-dense story at times, but well worth the read.

You’re almost 60 years old, and your wife wants a divorce. Your health isn’t exactly great thanks to the cancer you just beat back and it seem clear that your daughter–your only child–doesn’t like you very much.

What do you do with the rest of your life?

That’s the fundamental question answered in Paul Auster’s novel “The Brooklyn Follies.” This is the second Auster novel on my bookshelf, after reading “The Book of Illusions” in 2008. My thoughts on that title here.

“Brooklyn Follies” shows how you can make the decision to dust yourself off, cast aside all of the negative aspects of your life and resolve to basically start over. The main character, Nathan, goes back to Brooklyn, the place where he grew up, and rebuilds his life one lunch and one project at a time.

The beauty of Auster’s writing is the ability to start with a relatively simple cast of characters and bring out their complexity one by one. He’s then able to meld them together, amplifying those character traits in a way that wasn’t apparent on their own. When a new player enters the scene, there’s a sort of mystery novel element to each one, giving you the feeling that no matter how small their role now you know they are going to play a part in the larger story later on.

My favorite example in this book is a young girl, Nathan’s great-niece. Early on you learn her mother is not exactly in the reliable department, foreshadowing a time when the mother’s decisions eventually force her to send the girl to her uncle (Nathan’s nephew, the mother’s brother). The girl, Lucy, is incredibly smart but suffers all kinds of issues from growing up in a less-than-stellar home environment. But she has quirks that you can’t help but laugh at sometimes.

Her mother tells the story of when Lucy was in daycare, and the teacher called her mother with a concern: “When it came time for the children to have their milk, Lucy would always hang back until all the other kids had taken a carton before she’d take one herself. The teacher didn’t understand. Go get your milk, she’d say to Lucy, but Lucy would always wait around until there was just one carton left. It took a while for me to figure it out. Lucy didn’t know which carton was supposed to be her milk. She thought all the other kids knew which ones were theirs, and if she waited until there was only one carton in the box, that one had to be hers.”

You can clearly see that scene playing out, the little girl leaning against the wall trying not to be noticed. Her eyes are wide as she slowly watches the milk cartons disappearing. She looks down and shuffles her feet, trying to act casually indifferent as the worry rages inside her. As the last kid in line approaches the carton she slips in behind him, ready to claim her milk and give a sigh of relief as another day in a system she doesn’t understand passes by.

Nathan has a friendship with a rare book dealer for whom his nephew works. The nephew is a grad-school dropout who was studying literature and thus knows tons of random stories about authors. He tells one about Franz Kafka going to a park where he finds a young girl who is upset about losing a doll. He tells the girl that the doll went on a trip, which he knows because the doll gave him a letter. The girl asks to see it, and he tells her he left it at home but will bring it to her. Kafka goes home and composes a letter, from the point of view of a doll, and gives it to her. He writes one every day for three weeks, slowly separating the doll from the girl’s life until she’s no longer sad the doll has moved on.

One reason I’m reading less so far this year is that I have been spending time on a writing project of my own, one that involves composing letters from a fictional person who also happens to be female. It’s a really interesting challenge to write outside of your “voice” especially when you are putting yourself in a perspective completely opposite of your life experience.

A last interesting tidbit from Auster’s story. One of Nathan’s last ideas in the book is to create a service for “regular” people to commission their own biographies. If you’re famous, it’s not hard to get someone to write about you. If you’re famous enough, hundreds of writers will take on your life story. His idea is to create a sort of insurance where you pay a small amount each month and at the end of your life your relatives get a book about you.

I wasn’t near the Internet when I finished the book so I couldn’t look to see if this kind of service actually exists, since it seems like a pretty logical enterprise. Today I spent about seven seconds on Google and found that for roughly $15,000 this British company will write a biography about anyone. Not sure if they’ll travel to the United States.

How much can you learn about something or someone in the blink of an eye?

According to Malcolm Gladwell’s “Blink,” the answer is far more than you would ever think. I’ll do my best to avoid rhyming for the rest of this post, but no promises.

Gladwell writes about many different studies and situation in which people rely on their first impression. The result is that a lot of times it appears that your first inkling, that very first feeling you get when you look at someone, can often be right.

One of his examples is a study of teacher effectiveness. Researchers compared evaluations from students after a semester of class with people who only saw short clips of the same teacher. Those short clips were just 10 seconds long, then cut to five and eventually two seconds — all without sound. In the end, those evaluating the teacher based on a two second clip without sound came up with virtually the same results as those who took an entire semester course.

It is that kind of first impression that can be very useful in helping us move through our lives. If something feels wrong, there’s a good chance there is a problem. What Gladwell says is that in many of those experiences you don’t can’t express why you feel the way you do because that information is buried in your subconscious.

Sometimes it takes time for the active part of your brain to catch up and be able to make sense of what your body instinctively already figured out.

Another extension of that thought is the idea of “priming,” which involves cueing someone to an action without them realizing they are being affected in that way.

One study Gladwell brings up here involves subjects who have to walk down a long hallway to reach a testing room. There they are giving sets of five words — three of which can be put together to make a simple sentence. They are asked to do so as quickly as possible. What they don’t know is that one word in each group are designed to make them feel old (Florida, gray, lonely). Then they compare how quickly the subjects walk down the hallway afterwards, and found they walk much more slowly.

The implications of priming could have some of the most practical value of the things Gladwell brings up in the book. He also writes about a study similar to one I read a few years ago in which minority students were asked to list their race before taking a test, with a control group taking the test without the classification.

The outcomes of these tests have all shown that when students are asked to list their race, they tend to perform as a stereotypical student of that race. Black students score much lower overall, Asian students score higher on math, etc. Those in the control groups don’t show those changes in performance, which are dramatic differences.

Gladwell writes that this book is much less of a call-to-action type of read than his first. I wrote about “The Tipping Point” last year, which breaks down society into different groups of people needed to take an idea/product/etc. from slow adoption to prevalence in our society.

If we are to give attention to one idea in “Blink” it has to be the effects of priming. Standardized tests exist for the purpose of comparing a large set of students on what is supposed to be an equal playing field. But there exist very real implications if we have priming questions that so grossly distort the performance of many test-takers.

One of the reasons there are boxes for race on national tests are to collect the data necessary to evaluate how scores change over time within and among certain groups. Take away those questions, and we lose the data. But with so many studies showing that those boxes can have such an adverse effect on the outcomes of the test, do we need to continue collecting what we know is compromised data?

“Blink” also opens a Pandora’s box of feeling manipulated by corporate America. As I begin to catch up with the rest of the world on the show “Mad Men,” there are lots of parallels about how seemingly simple things have a huge effect on how a product sells. Change a bottle, the color of the shirt the mascot is wearing on the label, and you have a chunk of market share.

Gladwell talks about the Pepsi Challenge, in which soda drinkers were blindfolded and given sips of Pepsi and Coke and asked to pick which one they prefer. The result was a big win for Pepsi, as far as the Challenge went. When it came to sales, Pepsi still lagged. Gladwell interviewed a former Pepsi executive who said that type of sip test brings a “blink” judgment, one that will always be won by the sweeter product. Over time, however, tests in which people have the product in their home for a week or a month are far more effective in determining future sales.

If you’re interested in how our judgment can help make decisions before our brains even know what’s going on, definitely dive into this one. I don’t think you can go wrong with Gladwell’s style and the interesting ways he looks at the way we react to our world. That said, if you’re new to Gladwell I think “The Tipping Point” is about 1 percent better.