The Thin Red Line

It almost feels like a cheat to blog about a book I first read more than twenty years ago, but the fact is the past few days I have been ignoring three new novels awaiting my attention (including Water For Elephants, which I really want to read) in order to re-read for the bazzillionth time John Kennedy Toole’s comic masterpiece A Confederacy of Dunces.   So rather than attempt to write what would be yet another paean to what is already a well-known and well-loved novel  OR tease out three paragraphs of  on the stories of having met Toole’s mother at a speech and reading she gave at Dominican College in New Orleans (where Toole himself had been on the faculty prior to his suicide) and the errrrr unforgettable experience of seeing the work produced as a MUSICAL at LSU in Baton Rouge.  

While as a fan of the book it was enthralling to see Ignatius and the other characters come to life, let’s just say that no one who attended that production could be very surprised that this particular adaptation never made it even to off-off-Off-Off-OFF Broadway (nor even another single production so far as I know).   So anyway, rather than write the umpteenth review of A Confederacy Of Dunces,   I decided to do something just a little odd and unusual.

The other morning I was shelving in the 000’s and it occurred to me to wonder what the first and the last books in the non-fiction collection are.  Due to the way our stacks are laid out the 990’s are quite nearby the 000’s so I wandered over to the 990’s and found that the very last book, at 999 was Sharing The Universe–Perspectives on Extraterrestrial Life by Seth Shostak.   Shostak, who holds a Phd in Astronomy is identified as one of the leading scientists investigating other life in the universe.

What was most striking to me about this book was how similar in topic it was to books in the 000’s about unexplained phenomena, books about the Loch Ness Monster and the Alien Abduction Survival Guide.  

I returned to my cart and picked up the very first book at 001 which proved to be Five Minds For The Future by Harvard education professor Howard Gardner.   Published by the Harvard Business School Press,  I found this odd treatise about five different "minds" or ways of thinking that Gardner suggests will be important to humans in the future– the ‘disciplinary mind’, the ’synthesizing mind’, the ‘creating mind’, the ‘respectful mind’ and the ‘ethical mind’.    Neither of these books is particularly recommended though it was for me an interesting exercise that left me with the vague impression that knowledge is something of a circle making the beginning and the end almost but not quite the same place.

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This entry was posted on Friday, March 14th, 2008 at 10:50 pm and is filed under Book Reviews, Books, Fiction, Libraries, New Orleans, Non-Fiction. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.