The Book Discussion Thread

[Mysterious Dude]

Why read Dostoevsky when you can read The Very Hungry Caterpillar?

[Kurosawa Fan]

Why read Dostoevsky when you can read The Very Hungry Caterpillar?

I think the purpose of the list is to encapsulate the reading experience throughout an entire life. That's why there are books for every age. I think it's a pretty cool idea for a list, I'm just left scratching my head at some of their choices.

[Mara]

Why read Dostoevsky when you can read The Very Hungry Caterpillar?

This book is directly responsible for me eating a leaf once when I was sick to my stomach.

Great book, though.

[Mysterious Dude]

I read Nabokov's Pale Fire. I wish I had started with the index.

[ledfloyd]

I read Nabokov's Pale Fire. I wish I had started with the index.
?

This might be my favorite book.

[Mysterious Dude]

?
I was frequently confused. The index pretty much explains everything, or at least would have prepared me. Anyway, an often frustrating read, but I'm glad I stuck with it.

[TGM]

So the next installment of the Ninja Kat series is coming along pretty soon, but in the meantime, check out the first two chapters of my upcoming novel Velcro: The Green Lion in this little preview. B) http://www.velcrotheninjakat.com/2014/02/a-look-inside-velcro-green-lion.html

[dreamdead]

Finished Chang-rae Lee's On Such a Full Sea, his take on the academic dystopian book. Due to his reliance on the communal narrative voice--one which admittedly allows for a greater poeticism if not always clear interiority--the book remains too much at a remove. Although the assessment of Baltimore, or B-mor, is interesting, the book ends apropos of nothing, and feels like greater resolution is needed to actually anchor the themes and shifts that occur in the final pages. Atwood's world building, from its ecological to its sexual politics, are all far more nuanced and developed.

While I didn't love Lee's The Surrendered, this is the first of his works that I've actively indifferent toward. He still hasn't ever topped Native Speaker, which is frustrating.

[Winston*]

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BiESsWmIIAAjucW.jpg:large

[Mara]

Finished Chang-rae Lee's On Such a Full Sea, his take on the academic dystopian book. Due to his reliance on the communal narrative voice--one which admittedly allows for a greater poeticism if not always clear interiority--the book remains too much at a remove. Although the assessment of Baltimore, or B-mor, is interesting, the book ends apropos of nothing, and feels like greater resolution is needed to actually anchor the themes and shifts that occur in the final pages. Atwood's world building, from its ecological to its sexual politics, are all far more nuanced and developed.

While I didn't love Lee's The Surrendered, this is the first of his works that I've actively indifferent toward. He still hasn't ever topped Native Speaker, which is frustrating.

This is high on my to-read list. I'm a little disappointed... but I'll still read it.

[Mysterious Dude]

I read Out Stealing Horses, and it reminded me of something we've talked about before. The book's Wikipedia page includes this quote from Per Petterson:


Well, like I said, I do not plan, so that double meaning came up when I needed it. That is disappointing to some readers, I know. But for me it shows the strength of art. It is like carving out a sculpture from some material. You have to go with the quality of the material and not force upon it a form that it will not yield to anyway. That will only look awkward. Early in the book, in the 1948 part, I let the two fathers (of my main characters, Jon and Trond) have a problem with looking at each other. And I wondered, why is that? So I thought, well, it’s 1948, only three years after the Germans left Norway. It has to be something with the war. And then I thought, shit, I have to write about the war. You see, I hate research.

This reminded me of Anne Lamott's rules for writing literary fiction, as summarized here by Mara:


A. Commercial fiction is plot-based, while Literary fiction is character based, therefore:

B. You should absolutely not outline a plot for your novel but

C. Simply write good characters and go wherever they take you.

There was a strong implication that anyone who disagrees is a bit of a hack.

After thinking about it for the last six years, I'm beginning to realize I don't really like this trend. I find it very hard to believe, for example, that Charles Dickens or Victor Hugo didn't plan their books, and I don't think anyone would accuse them of not being sufficiently literary. And while reading Out Stealing Horses, the lack of planning was quite apparent. The story meanders or goes nowhere. Characters that seem important just disappear. The different elements do not come together coherently.

There's no right way to write a book, and if someone can write a good book without planning it, that's great. But I wonder if today's "literary" fiction will have the staying power of yesterday's.

[TGM]

So hey, my second book, and book two of The Ninja Kat series, has been published and is now available to own!

http://i1230.photobucket.com/albums/ee496/widdopc/greenlioncoverblog_zps5a7c3388 .jpg

In order to fight fire with fire in the continued war with the Devil Corps, Velcro heads off for the village of Redfield in search of the rogue Magician, Shiki, from whom she intends to learn the ways of Magic. However, the Ninja Kat's infamous reputation follows her, and as such, the only thing she finds in Redfield is banishment.

As Velcro departs to hone her skills, Redfield comes under attack, and their leader, the Elder Chow, goes missing. And in the resulting confusion, the citizens of Redfield reluctantly find themselves having to place their faith in Velcro to uncover the truth behind their predicament.

Picking up right where The Ninja Kat left off, Velcro: The Green Lion continues the action packed tale that takes our hero into new lands within the Country of Widows, uncovering new secrets around every corner. In these uncertain times as the world grows more aware of the Devil Corps' evil scheme, the lines begin to blur between who can be trusted. And Velcro will have to go back to her roots and confront her demons waiting at home in order to fully unleash the beast within.

Check it out on amazon in paperback (http://www.amazon.com/Velcro-Green-Lion-Ninja-Volume/dp/0985885629/) or e-book (http://www.amazon.com/Velcro-The-Green-Lion-Ninja-ebook/dp/B00IXAIGQY/)! :)

[Mara]

After thinking about it for the last six years, I'm beginning to realize I don't really like this trend.

I agree. I like a good literary novel, but the term "literary" is often used to disparage things like genre fiction which often have literary merit.

Plot isn't inherently bad. Plot for the sake of plot can be bad. Plot at expense of character can be bad. But plot does matter.

[D_Davis]

Plot is king.

[Grouchy]

Rock on, TGM!

[Mara]

Plot is king.

Too far the other way!

I'm in the middle of a Shakespeare project, and I was reading Harold Goddard's thoughts on The Comedy of Errors. Goddard is my favorite person to read when thinking about Shakespeare, as he is incisive, clear, and an excellent writer. Anyway, I was still thinking about the character vs. plot dilemma (aka plotters vs. pantsers) and found this:

"...the intellect makes a plan in advance and works toward its fulfillment, while the imagination, like a living organism, "grows" a plan as it were as it goes along. That of course overemphasizes the contrast. Artistic creation is not quite as unconscious a process as the statement implies, and the intellect is needed to keep the creative impulse in restraint. But for practical purposes we may say that The Comedy of Errors is a product of Shakespeare's intellect rather than his imagination. It was invented rather than created. It came out of the same side of the mind that makes a good chess player, or military strategist, a successful practical architect or technically adept composer of contrapuntal music."

I went over this several times in my mind, and I think it lays out the advantages and disadvantages of each approach, and why it is so necessary to find a balance between them.

[Mara]

By the way, I finished up Nate Silver's The Signal and the Noise and really enjoyed it. I was afraid it would come across as dull to someone who is not actively interested in statistical probability (or baseball, or earthquakes, or half of the twenty-five topics this book explores.) But Silver isn't interested in confusing the reader, or impressing us, but seems very earnest in his desire for everyone to understand why predictions matter and how we can improve them (separating the "signal" from the "noise.") It's a great book for stimulating your critical thinking. Think of it as the A Brief History of Time, but for data-consumers.

[ledfloyd]

That book is on my list of things to read.

[Kurosawa Fan]

The Halloween Tree is one of the best books I've ever read. That is all.

[D_Davis]

Almost every time I read a new J.G. Ballard novel, I'm completely blown away by how much insight he had into our modern culture and psyche. No other author that I've ever read is able to dissect and examine modern urban culture as poignantly and succinctly as Ballard was able to. I'm still profoundly sad that he is dead.

[D_Davis]

And just discovered this was released.

http://www.ballardian.com/wp-content/uploads/Extreme-Metaphors-PB-front-570x881.jpg

[D_Davis]

Really looking forward to this:

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51BvrcF4CiL._AA278_PIkin4,Bott omRight,-46,22_AA300_SH20_OU01_.jpg (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00GVZMZRY/ref=s9_wish_co_d64_g351_i1?ie= UTF8&colid=3B6JSWEZ1CEIL&coliid=I15GSKKOE2BXWB&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=left-1&pf_rd_r=14014BKPDJZM8NYW26NR&pf_rd_t=3201&pf_rd_p=1280661682&pf_rd_i=typ01)


But please, please, please FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, stop putting "A Novel" at the end of every fucking title. Jesus H. Christ I'm so sick of this fucking trend. STOP IT. They're even adding "A Novel" to titles of old books being reprinted - I noticed that a bunch of old JG Ballard books are now called XXX...a Novel. Stop it. This has got to be the most insipid and downright stupid trend in modern publishing.

[Grouchy]

Hahah, I confess I'd never thought about it but you're so right.

It's like, really? A novel? I thought I was buying a fucking trombone!

[D_Davis]

Hahah, I confess I'd never thought about it but you're so right.

It's like, really? A novel? I thought I was buying a fucking trombone!

It started a few years ago, and now everything says it.

I hate it.

The last time I went into a books store, 9 out of every 10 books on the new book table were called Something a Novel.

[Winston*]

You might think it was a biography of the real Man with Compound Eyes.

[D_Davis]

New Stephen King novel in November.

http://www.amazon.com/Revival-A-Novel-Stephen-King-ebook/dp/B00ILHW6AG/ref=wl_mb_wl_huc_mrai_2_dp

Guess what it's called?


Revival: a Novel

FUUUUCCCCKKKKKKK YYYOOOOUUUUU

[Mara]

It started a few years ago, and now everything says it.

I hate it.

The last time I went into a books store, 9 out of every 10 books on the new book table were called Something a Novel.

I Can See Why You Would Find This Annoying: A Post

[Winston*]

New Stephen King novel in November.

http://www.amazon.com/Revival-A-Novel-Stephen-King-ebook/dp/B00ILHW6AG/ref=wl_mb_wl_huc_mrai_2_dp

Guess what it's called?


Revival: a Novel

FUUUUCCCCKKKKKKK YYYOOOOUUUUU

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/0/09/Under_the_Dome_Final.jpg/200px-Under_the_Dome_Final.jpg
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/1/14/11-22-63.jpg/395px-11-22-63.jpg
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/e/e9/Doctor_Sleep.jpg/386px-Doctor_Sleep.jpg

[D_Davis]

Yep.

Just about every book in the last few years.

[ledfloyd]

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/9e/Wuthering_Heights.djvu/page1-350px-Wuthering_Heights.djvu.jpg

It's not that recent.

[dreamdead]

Midway through John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces. It's taken a while to get on the same wavelength as the novel, but when its satire lands, it's so good. Not so intrigued by some of the side characters like Burma Jones yet, but when it stays on Ignatius, it's dandy. The impotence of the work strike and subsequent hot dog vendor sections are mad fun.

[ledfloyd]

Man, that strike section is riotous.

I'm about 300 pages into Pynchon's Bleeding Edge, which is fun. As is typical with Pynchon, some of the digressions are more engaging than others, but the balance is mostly positive. Kind of uneasy with the 9/11 conspiracy angle it seems to be heading towards, but we'll see.

[dreamdead]

Knocked out two books pretty fast. Amy Waldman's The Submission continues my fascination with post-9/11 literature. This one concerns discussions of memorializing the Twin Towers, and what would happen if the winning submission to the committee was submitted by a (non-observant) Muslim. Beginning with this idea, Waldman tracks the various political machinations that form around the winner, from righteous right-wing believers and from leftist ideologues, chronicling how humanity falls aside in the desperate attempt to politicize everything. It's a smart book, and while the ending is contentious, using a jump forward in time to make sense of the narrative at hand, it's thoroughly smart and considerate. One of the premiere post-9/11 novels. It'll be interesting to see how history treats it.

Also finished out David Lipsky's Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace. Some of the digressions felt familiar in that I've seen Wallace make similar statements to other press, but the constancy of Lipsky's recording cast different dimensions to other areas of the dialogue. Really found it fascinating to think about Wallace's taste in music (Alanis Morissette) and taste in film. Liked the brief coverage of Mann's Last of the Mohicans and how its climax works, and the coverage on Spielberg generally. Really pushed my interest in tackling one of his novels even further to the fore.

[Milky Joe]

I'd recommend starting with his short stories as an appetizer, if you haven't already. For what it's worth, Wallace himself recommended "Little Expressionless Animals" in Girl With Curious Hair as an entry point into his fiction.

[dreamdead]

Thanks for the suggestion, MJ. I'll be tackling more of his nonfiction first, but look forward to trying some of the shorter fiction pieces over summer.

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie is phenomenal. Despite shifting some of his themes to fit a more teen audience, Alexie retains his command of tone and politics, exposing the fraudulent assumptions about race and education that exist when finances are denied to people. While the book tackles some of the typical coming of age issues, it places them within a context that undercuts the white people's problems by pointing out all the contingent issues and faults that go on every day that don't receive notice because those people belong to the wrong ethnicity. Trenchant stuff, and all the more infuriating that it's challenged and banned so frequently, even from public school optional reading lists.

Also knocked out Tahira Naqvi's collection Dying in a Strange Country, which examines issues of Pakistani Americans and the culture shock as those families visit America and work to understand how they fit within it. Good stuff, and a quality example of the short story cycle. Frustrating that Naqvi still hasn't published a novel a decade after this came out...

[Winston*]

Amazon review of Patton Oswalt's book

"ZSW is clearly a case of "Geez I must be hip if I'm reading this and finding it funny!". Um, no, you're not. It's like the person who thinks they're cool by listening to PJ Harvey's music. Folks, PJ Harvey sucks, and both you and I know it. Patton is tremendously talented, but this book is PJ Harvey in the lierary form."

[D_Davis]

I'm not sure how to take that, because I'm not a fan of either. :s

[Winston*]

I'm not sure how to take that, because I'm not a fan of either. :s

They are very similar artists.

[Mara]

Jeff Vandermeer' Wonderbook is so pretty I want to eat it up.

But the tone of the prose and the content are so annoying I want to give up halfway through.

[D_Davis]

I've enjoyed what I've read quite a bit. Lot's of good advice that my buddy and I have used in our RPG campaign.

Probably the best book on the craft of writing fantastic/weird fiction that I've read, but then again, it might be the only book on the craft of writing fantastic/weird fiction that I've read. :)

However, it's not as well written as his novels, which are quite extraordinary in terms of prose. Wonderbook reads a little too much like a Neil Gaiman novel in its tone for me to love the style, but the art and information are so well presented and useful that I can over look that. It is often inspiring just to thumb through.

[dreamdead]

Well, it's summer so it's time for attempt number two at Melville's Moby Dick. It's probably the premier American piece of literature that I've neglected, so it's gonna be the summer's attempt to gain perspective on its experimentation, language, and formal elements.

[ledfloyd]

I think Moby Dick is as close as we've come to a Great American Novel.

[Milky Joe]

It's just a Great Novel. Heck, it's probably the finest novel written in English, let alone America.

[ledfloyd]

I wouldn't argue with that opinion. But I think it speaks to something distinctly American.

[Mara]

I just could not enjoy or admire Moby Dick. The love it gets baffles me.

[Benny Profane]

I'm 3/4 of the way through The Recognitions by William Gaddis and I am mostly very pro. Like, best book I've ever read level of "pro".

And then there are small portions, mostly dealing with the main character Wyatt, son of a minister, where the book is almost impossible to comprehend without serious knowledge of the Bible, Christian history, and Greek/Roman mythology. Characters speak to each in other obscure references to these things and it can be extremely frustrating. Descriptively dense at times too.

That being said, Gaddis is a genius and I can't wait to read more every night. He is also ridiculously funny.

[dreamdead]

This adaptation of Shakespeare's plays into prose form (http://www.avclub.com/article/gone-girl-author-gillian-flynn-writing-hamlet-adap-205172), set to debut in 2016, had me openly prepared to mock the concept, but man... that line-up is pretty wonderful. I'm pretty intrigued to see what Atwood would do with The Tempest, and several others would be worth checking out.

[megladon8]

I've begun reading "Girlvert". The writing itself is pretty awful, but the subject matter is simultaneously fascinating and horrifying.

I suppose I really shouldn't be surprised, but the abuse that occurs in the porn industry is truly sickening.

Rapists are not only allowed to walk freely, they are allowed to flourish and are celebrated.

[Mara]

This adaptation of Shakespeare's plays into prose form (http://www.avclub.com/article/gone-girl-author-gillian-flynn-writing-hamlet-adap-205172), set to debut in 2016, had me openly prepared to mock the concept, but man... that line-up is pretty wonderful. I'm pretty intrigued to see what Atwood would do with The Tempest, and several others would be worth checking out.

I'm extremely excited about Atwood and Anne Tyler. And I think they're not going to be straight adaptations but more variations-- different settings, etc. to explore the same characters and themes. I'm behind it.

It conflicts a little bit with the Shakespeare-inspired novel I'm working on, but I'll forgive it this once.

[Skitch]

I believe about 150 pages of Stephen King's Cell could've been cut out, but after slogging through I'm on to a pretty awesome second half. Anyone else feel he's lost his edge since his accident?

[Lucky]

I started the European smash, 6 volume autobiography of Karl Ove. I'm surprised at how quickly it grabbed me, I half expected this to be a slog.

[Skitch]

Pretty sweet garage sale haul. $2.

http://i.imgur.com/ZU8BpoV.jpg?1

[Sven]

I believe about 150 pages of Stephen King's Cell could've been cut out, but after slogging through I'm on to a pretty awesome second half. Anyone else feel he's lost his edge since his accident?

Absolutely. It all came out in Dreamcatcher and his books've been limping since. Cell was a nadir for me. Utterly regurgitated.

[Mysterious Dude]

I think most artists lose their edge when they get older. Perhaps most people.

[Sven]

I think most artists lose their edge when they get older. Perhaps most people.

Naturally. With King, it's that there was a near-death experience that oh so neatly divides the quality of his work.

[Milky Joe]

I'm 3/4 of the way through The Recognitions by William Gaddis and I am mostly very pro. Like, best book I've ever read level of "pro".

And then there are small portions, mostly dealing with the main character Wyatt, son of a minister, where the book is almost impossible to comprehend without serious knowledge of the Bible, Christian history, and Greek/Roman mythology. Characters speak to each in other obscure references to these things and it can be extremely frustrating. Descriptively dense at times too.

That being said, Gaddis is a genius and I can't wait to read more every night. He is also ridiculously funny.

Love that you're loving it, and yes, it IS hilarious. So many people miss the humor. It's simultaneously one of the funniest and most beautifully written novels of all time. It's almost comically beautiful at times, like, "how the hell did he just express that so perfectly?" He also seems to have internalized basically everything about the history of art, religion, philosophy, mysticism, architecture and wields it with a deftness that is hard to believe came from the mind of one man. Only James Joyce is on a higher level in that regard to my mind.

[Mara]

The Flight of Gemma Hardy by Margot Livesey wasn't great, but it was not great in an interesting way. By the premise it could have been awful-- it is a very close retread if Jane Eyre (sometimes a scene-by-scene rewrite) transposed to Scotland in the 50's and 60's. It isn't awful, but that's mostly because Livesey's prose is gorgeous and spare and she brings a thoughtful beauty to the story.

Here is what the book does not have:

*Anyone locked in an attic
*Any beds set on fire
*Anyone stabbed in the middle of the night
*Any madwomen wandering the halls at night, biting on people's wedding veils
*Any situation in which a young girl has to stick her hands on a stranger's wound to try and keep him alive until the doctor comes

In other words, it's Jane Eyre with all the melodrama excised, and what's the point of that? Due to her skirting of some of the more outlandish plot points, several things happen in the novel that don't make very much sense.

Gemma is also a more thoughtful, rational character than Jane. Jane was outwardly cold, but inwardly she was consumed with passion and-- more importantly-- rage. Because Gemma is so much more reserved, the romance barely registers in the novel. Most of the length deals with her upbringing, schooling, and search for her family and history.

With all that said, though, the first half of the novel is actually a really good read. Livesey has a keen eye for injustice and class conflict, and the story of an abused, unloved, and abandoned little girl could really have gone somewhere. It never maintains its momentum, though, and the last third, especially, dragged.

[megladon8]

Going to read some more "Girlvert" today.

We're into STD land now.

[megladon8]

"Girlvert" ended up being quite a satisfying read, despite Small's poor writing. A few of the chapters in the book would have benefited from less reliance on curses and a little stronger diction. I'm not talking about limiting the vulgarity - this is intrinsic to her personality and life, and works well throughout the entirety of the book. But her skills as a writer limit the possible emotional punch of a few of the chapters, such as her umpteenth attempted reunion with her druggie mother.

However, the overall gut punch of the book is undeniable. This is a woman who has, in the darkest times of her life, been in one of the darkest and most frightening communities in the country and she managed to come out the other side a stronger, balanced person.

In one chapter she recalls shooting a scene in which she was literally choked to death (lost consciousness and had to be resuscitated), all while her boyfriend just stood by and watched. In other chapters, she goes into brutally honest detail about the state of STD's and cleanliness in the porn industry, as well as how close she was to being a victim of the AIDS breakout in 2004.

It certainly would have benefited from some assistance in the writing/editing, but the strength of the whole outweighs the literary shortcomings in "Girlvert". It's not going to be used as a literature text any time, but for an educational glimpse into the porn industry coupled with a potent "hitting rock bottom" autobiographical tale, I recommend it.

[Dead & Messed Up]

Just read Quinn's Ishmael, the one where the gorilla talks to the guy about humanity's tendency toward consumption to the point of self-destruction. It's a Socratic dialogue, not a story, and it inherits the problem I've had with a lot of dialogues, which is that they're just monologues occasionally interrupted by polite and obviously ill-conceived rejoinders. This allows for a lot of proclamations that don't always hold water, especially the idea that the natural world is devoid of animals who take without need. IIRC, ants love to war the fuck out of each other, chimpanzees kill for sport, and dolphins can gangbang one of their own into oblivion.

At the same time, some of the ideas the story brings up are really hard to shake, because they're still fundamental problems with our culture. Mostly, the idea that Western consumptive culture is a self-contained spiral of bullshit. I don't know if there's a way to reconcile that problem with the benefits of society like medicine and improved communication. Although I guess Ishmael would raise an eyebrow and ask how "beneficial" they are. (The answer is "very.")

The most interesting idea, and the one that's really hurting my brain, is the very weird contradiction between Genesis and subsequent notions of man's dominion over nature. How, in Genesis, Adam and Eve are condemned to expansive agriculture instead of their paradise of take what they need and leave the rest, and Cain the agriculturalist is the evil brother of Abel the noble shepherd. In both cases, agriculture is looked upon unfavorably, as the mark of the weak-willed and sinful. I don't know if Quinn's contention that those stories belonged to Semitic hunter-gatherers is accurate, but it's an interesting position.

Anyway, it's put my head in a very weird state. That sort of collegiate state, where I want to skip class, sit around the quad, and just talk about life, man.

[dreamdead]

Phil Klay's Redeployment is a solid and occasionally thought-provoking collection of stories about Marine veterans, current soldiers, and others all trying to comprehend what their lives are amidst the politics of the '05-'07 Iraq War. There are probably three exemplary stories that I expect to see in literary anthologies in the coming few years, as they concisely but thoroughly engage the moral, psychological, and political repercussions of the Iraq War, although Klay is a smart enough veteran to knock let politics become a polemical force in his stories.

The collection as a whole doesn't quite have the experimental, transcendent arc of something like Tim O'Brien's In the Lake of the Woods or The Things They Carried, but it's a wonderful continuation and updating of the crises embedded within serving.

[Mara]

Well, The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making is the best book that I've read so far this year, and I didn't expect that.

It is a classical fairy tale (despite only being a couple of years old) complete with magical creatures and quests. In fact, it would feel too precious and anachronistic if Valente didn't have a firm handle on the underlying sadness and aching maturity to the whole thing. Part of me wants to qualify that this book is written for about 10-to-12-year-olds, but part of me feels that it was written very much for adults.

It would be easy to compare it to, say, Alice in Wonderland, the Narnia books, or The Wizard of Oz, but I think it actually owes more to The Phantom Tollbooth and works by Thurber. Valente obviously loves language and is having far too much fun with her overblown, whimsical, beautiful prose. The characters are absurd, loveable, creepy, and sometimes genuinely frightening. The best is probably A-through-L, a wyverary (half wyvern, half library) who accompanies our heroine, September, on her quest. I'm also fond of September's jacket, which doesn't have any lines but whose devotion to September is its own subplot.

Apparently it is beginning a series, and I will absolutely be hunting the sequel down right away.

[Mara]

Side note: it would make a magnificent Miyazaki film. In fact, I'm really sad it's not a Miyazaki film.

[dreamdead]

Very interesting. A friend had just spoken highly of Valente as someone just as interesting as Le Guin and L'Engle in terms of female sci fi/fantasy writers, and I'd grabbed this first book out from the library last week. We'll be doing a car trip to Ohio in a week or so, and this sounds like lovely fare for the trip...

[dreamdead]

John Joseph Mathews's Sundown is an early 1930s Native American novel about the Osage tribe, a people native to Oklahoma. (We live in the lands that approximate what their areas would have been.) It's a semi-autobiographical story, tracking a mixed white-and-Indian blood adjusting to life off the reservation, training for entry into World War I, and then working to reintegrate back into his tribe after the war is done. It's strongest in its opening sections, capturing something unique about college life and the inability to feel comfortable among others. However, Mathews isn't at his peak when framing the concerns of white women, as they come off far flatter than the elsewhere narrator Chal.

Also read Kirk W. Johnson's nonfiction account To Be a Friend Is Fatal: The Fight to Save the Iraqis America Left Behind, an attempt to bring Iraqi interpreters safely to America after they begin receiving death threats from extremists. It's a challenging read, and powerful throughout in its indictment of a U.S. bureaucracy that seeks to distance itself from its interpreter allies, even though all the other Iraq War allies airlifted their interpreters out pretty immediately.

Started Joe Hill's Heart Shaped Box today...

[Skitch]

Picked up Heinlein's Stranger In A Strange Land on a Goodwill for a buck. :)

[Dead & Messed Up]

Picked up Heinlein's Stranger In A Strange Land on a Goodwill for a buck. :)

Have you gotten much further? I'd be really curious to hear your thoughts once it's done.

[Skitch]

Unfortunately no. 60+ hour work weeks are hampering all my entertainment time. Work, eat, kids, pass out to an episode of Star Trek, repeat. I will report back asap. I can tell you I really enjoyed the first 40 pages though :D

[Mara]

I'm starting to get into the meat of Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe, and I'm very divided on it. Sometimes it feels like lyrical, insightful, and epic; but then three minutes later I'm cursing it for being turgid, self-important, and smug. I really have no idea what my final impression of it will be.

But whatever mind I am in: it is racist as all git out.

[Mara]

I'm starting to get into the meat of Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe, and I'm very divided on it. Sometimes it feels like lyrical, insightful, and epic; but then three minutes later I'm cursing it for being turgid, self-important, and smug. I really have no idea what my final impression of it will be.

But whatever mind I am in: it is racist as all git out.

I do not think I am going to finish this book. I have a good sense of it at 200 pages and don't really feel compelled to read 600 more.

[Benny Profane]

I loved it but don't remember much about it. Read it a few years ago.

[Hugh_Grant]

The Skies Belong to Us: Love and Terror in the Golden Age of Hijacking is an absorbing read. I don't want to give away too much (I had to stop myself from Googling the details of the participants of the skyjacking), but I will quote this bit from Amazon:


In an America torn apart by the Vietnam War and the demise of '60s idealism, airplane hijackings were astonishingly routine. Over a five-year period starting in 1968, the desperate and disillusioned seized commercial jets nearly once a week, using guns, bombs, and jars of acid. Some hijackers wished to escape to foreign lands; others aimed to swap hostages for sacks of cash. Their criminal exploits mesmerized the country, never more so than when shattered Army veteran Roger Holder and mischievous party girl Cathy Kerkow managed to comandeer Western Airlines Flight 701 and flee across an ocean with a half-million dollars in ransom—a heist that remains the longest-distance hijacking in American history.

[dreamdead]

I did a reread of Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, which I haven't read since 2002 and remembered only the scantest of plot details. There was a lot that seemed much more resonant as I've explored her canon, and there were multiple throwaway world building details that were returned to and extended out in the MaddAddam trilogy. I had thought I remembered Offred suffering a betrayal by those in her closest circle and thus being cast out to the bureaucratic overlords, so I was surprised by how new and ambiguous Atwood renders the finale.

Also surprising, so many of the gender issues that were prevalent in 1984, and 2002, still being so pertinent today. A lot of the thematics about re-education and how gender rights can be unlearned if never taught, resonate even more today when such issues should have been advanced and onto new issues.

[ledfloyd]

The Skies Belong to Us: Love and Terror in the Golden Age of Hijacking is an absorbing read. I don't want to give away too much (I had to stop myself from Googling the details of the participants of the skyjacking), but I will quote this bit from Amazon:
The guy that wrote this was on a podcast I listen to (99% Invisible). He was talking about how they considered building a fake Havana airport to combat early skyjackings, which was fascinating. I'm sure the book is great.

[Hugh_Grant]

The guy that wrote this was on a podcast I listen to (99% Invisible). He was talking about how they considered building a fake Havana airport to combat early skyjackings, which was fascinating. I'm sure the book is great.

Yes! In South Florida. That was one of the more fascinating bits.

[Mara]

I'm sure you've all been waiting with bated breath to see if I like Rainbow Rowell's new book, Landline.

And I do! It's not my favorite of hers (coming in about 3 out of 4) but that's in good company.

Of her former books, two deal very extensively with the process of falling in love (with Fangirl being the only book where the romance is rather secondary.) So I'm actually really glad that her new book takes a different focus, instead being about a couple who have been together for seventeen years, married for fifteen, and have two children. This is very much a book about Marriage, with a capital "M." This isn't one of those tiresome novels about a couple who have lost "the spark" and find it again-- Georgie and Neal are still very much in love, and attracted to each other, but each for their own reasons are fundamentally unhappy with their lives. Their marriage is falling apart because of the endless compromises and choices they have made over the years that keep getting them stuck in deep patterns with no clear way out.

Really, though, this is a novel about what Georgie herself finally calls a "MAGIC FUCKING PHONE." Circumstances force Georgie away from her family at Christmas and back into her childhood bedroom, where she hooks up her old landline telephone from the back of her closet that she used to use to call Neal when they were apart in college, and somehow... well, somehow the phone has the ability to call Neal back when he was in college fifteen years before, and gives Georgie the chance to emotionally review what brought them together in the first place, and what she can possibly change in the past. It could be a very silly premise, but Rowell handles it with her usually charm and insight. If I were to have one criticism, it would be that even I eventually get tired of endless conversations about, you know, feelings.

That said, it was charming, occasionally hilarious, and wrenching.

And as usual, I freaking love her prose.

"You don't know when you're twenty-three.

"You don't know what it means to crawl into someone else's life and stay there. You can't see all the ways you're going to get tangled, how you're going to bond skin to skin. How the idea of separating will feel in five years, in ten-- in fifteen. When Georgie thought about divorce now, she imagined lying side by side with Neal on two operating tables while a team of doctors tried to unthread their vascular systems.

"She didn't know at twenty-three."

[megladon8]

Continuing my love affair with small press stuff, I am reading "Long Lost Dog Of It" by Greek author Michael Kazepis.

Seems very interesting. A multi-character story taking place Greece, with all surrounding a killer who is obsessed with JFK.

[Mara]

I've started listening to the Shakespearean comedies through the Arkangel audio series during my commute. They're really, really good. Since they're not including stage directions or visual cues, you can sometimes get a little lost as to who is speaking unless you're already really familiar with the play. ("Wait, why is Sylvia running away? Oh, it's Julia. Has it been Julia this whole time?") However, in the tradition of old radio plays they do give cool audio cues in the background to indicate what is happening as much as possible (pens scratching, doors closing, etc.)

It also has a great cast of Shakespearean actors, including David Tennant, Damian Lewis, Alex Jennings, Greg Wise, Amanda Root, Bill Nighy, etc.

So far the only really bad choice is in Two Gentlemen in Verona, where in order to remind us that there is a dog in this scene (aside from the fact that the actor is, you know, addressing a dog) they had a "dog" panting and slurping and snorting the whole time. As it would be impractical to record a dog doing this for ten minutes at a time, it was pretty obviously a person heaving wetly and closely into a microphone, and it was frankly gross.

Still lots of fun, overall.

[megladon8]

"Long Lost Dog Of It" developed into something completely different from what I expected - a haunting and tragic dissection of crime story tropes.

It uses noir archetypes and common plot threads to comment on the romantic stories these elements are used to create, and how the real life stories they're often based on are nothing close to romantic or sexy.

The writing is hit or miss and very obviously the work of a first time writer, but Kazepis sneaks in some beautiful prose and metaphors towards the end that really tie everything together.

It's a brisk read, so if the subject matter sounds like it might appeal to you I would certainly recommend giving it a try.

[Winston*]

Just listened to this again.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PhhC_N6Bm_s

[dreamdead]

I know it's not altogether loved on these boards, but I found Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go quite powerful. The first eighty pages were slow, and the narrative voice has the potential to irk, but once Kathy settles into the world and begins piecing together bits of how their upbringing was, or the balance that Tommy makes between art and humanity, or even the beached boat, there's a melancholy air to the proceedings that continues to well up, until the ending coalesces into a strong indictment with equal parts "Harrison Bergeron" and I, Robot. I could likely read another twenty pages of Emily pontificating about how society renounced caring for and educating Kathy, and those like her.

And that last line is so finely written, capturing the melancholy while underscoring the pragmatism that is a part of Kathy's conditioning.

[Mara]

Oh, I really liked it. It's a lovely, elegiac piece.

[Mara]

I am done-- DONE-- with books that are intended as the beginning of series, so they don't have a complete plot arc. I didn't spend four hundred pages on this book to have it end right before the climax. I hate you and I hate the trees that were cut down to make you.

[Mara]

I don't hate the trees.

I feel really bad about saying I hate the trees.

[TGM]

So hey, the e-book edition of my second novel, Velcro: The Green Lion, is available for free this week on amazon. Check it out. :) http://www.amazon.com/Velcro-The-Green-Lion-Ninja-ebook/dp/B00IXAIGQY/

[Mara]

Has anyone read The Quick by Lauren Owen? I find myself wanting to talk about it a lot but it's taking me a long time to finish (a long time = about a week so far; it's dense) and I'm not sure how I'm going to feel about the book overall until I see how it sticks the landing.

I was intrigued enough to check it out by reading an article that claimed the book drastically switched genres about a hundred pages in. I'm not sure that's entire accurate. It might be better to say that the book takes quite a while to reveal what genre it has always been. And putting it the first way makes it sound like a one-trick pony, pulling the rug out 1/5th of the way into the novel, and I'm not sure that's really fair.

Anyway, I think I like it. But I need to finish and digest it.

[Mara]

Anyway, I think I like it. But I need to finish and digest it.

Okay, I finished it and I'm coming down positive, though not ecstatic. More than anything I'm impressed a book like this got published at all, especially by a first-time novelist.

[dreamdead]

Asimov's Foundation has great concepts and thematic elements, but it isn't especially fascinating to reflect on; the range and years that that it extends outward is its strength. I was in love with the first third of the novel, but found myself less invested as it kept going. I, Robot, however, was one that ended almost too quickly, but kept growing in my esteem as I reflected on it. I think I'm done with Asimov for now. Enjoyable and I have a stronger understanding of his contribution to the field of sci fi.

Sarah took out Pat Frank's 1959 apocalyptic Alas, Babylon, so that'll likely be the next bit of genre-reading.

[dreamdead]

And finished out Pat Frank's Alas, Babylon. It does a respectable job imagining the apocaplypse of a nuclear attack from Russia, but man some of the gender and racial politics in it are uncomfortably retrograde. Women are constantly viewed as house-bound in the wake of the attack, any flings by white men with Spanish women are undone by the need to "mature" into a more prototypical white wife, and all the blacks exist to support the white characters, sacrificing themselves out of nobility so that others can be verbally and physically rewarded.

All this sounds much worse on some level than the book makes itself out to be, since Frank orchestrates changes in culture that undo racist and segregationist policies. However, within that apparent kindness and humanity, there's a second layer of limitations allowed to the characters. Again, on some level this is in keeping with the 1959 publication date--it just prevents the book from becoming prescient in these more cultural contexts, limiting how successful the book can feel to a contemporary audience.

[D_Davis]

Asimov's Foundation has great concepts and thematic elements, but it isn't especially fascinating to reflect on; the range and years that that it extends outward is its strength. I was in love with the first third of the novel, but found myself less invested as it kept going. I, Robot, however, was one that ended almost too quickly, but kept growing in my esteem as I reflected on it. I think I'm done with Asimov for now. Enjoyable and I have a stronger understanding of his contribution to the field of sci fi.

Sarah took out Pat Frank's 1959 apocalyptic Alas, Babylon, so that'll likely be the next bit of genre-reading.

Love I, Robot - so good.

Hated Foundation. It's just a silly secular humanist wet dream, and one that makes little sense. Asimov made sure we knew that humanity had outgrown it's use of religion and spirituality, and yet the characters still proclaimed a need for something outside of them by conjuring the word "Space" in lieu of "God" - as in "What in Space...?" There is also absolutely no dramatic drive in the first book, and nothing at stake.

For much better future history (also from an agnostic / secular humanist perspective), check out Olaf Stapledon's work - far more thoughtful, better written, and interesting: Last and First Men and Darkness and the Light.

Alas Babylon has been on my to-read shelf for some time.

[D_Davis]

Started a re-read of Robert Anton Wilson's Cosmic Trigger I last night. So good.

[D_Davis]

As summer ends, and the air turns cool while the leaves change color and fall to the ground, there is no better author to read than Ray Bradbury. Indian Summers, Fall, October and Halloween belong to Mr. Bradbury and his uncanny ability to capture the essence of childhood on the verge of preternatural maturity marked with a supernatural imagination.

This year, I'm starting with Farewell Summer, Bradbury's follow up to his defining masterpiece, Dandelion Wine. Farewell Summer was meant to be his first full-length novel to be published (Dandelion Wine and The Martian Chronicles were collections of similarly-themed short stories), but that distinction ended up going to Something Wicked This Way Comes. And so Bradbury sat on Farewell Summer for some time - nearly five or six decades - and it ended up being the last novel he published before his death.

I can't imagine a more apt book to cap off such a career.

Farewell Summer is a story about a group of kids who declare war on time, on growing old, and on the onset of adult responsibility. But like all kids, the group discovers that their war is futile. For all Summers end.

[D_Davis]

I'm really looking forward to reading Sam Harris' new book - Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion. Never, in a millions years, would I have imagined that Harris and I would have something in common.

[D_Davis]

Ray Bradbury's Farewell Summer is a brisk and tremendous read. While not as good as Dandelion Wine, it does a remarkable job of presenting a close to the themes introduced in that book. It's a coming of age tale punctuated with Bradbury's indelible imagination , mixing in elements of adventure, magical realism, and drama. I can easily imagine a young Steven King reading it and being inspired to eventually write It.

It is a little didactic, and perhaps too on the nose with its thematic explanations, but at the same time it is also a parable, a tale from which we can, and should, learn something important about the human condition. With his beautifully written prose, Bradbury creates a work that is brimming with nostalgia for that last summer before a kid moves onto adolescence, and a work that rejoices in the idea of aging gracefully and embracing the inevitable change we all must undertake.

It is a perfect book to read as the air becomes cooler, as we move into autumn, and the perfect book with which to end the career of one of the great literary masters of all times.

[Mara]

I finished Sarah Waters' Fingersmith and went on Goodreads to see the general consensus. At least three different reviews referred to it as "lesbian Dickens" which is total nonsense, because the book is "lesbian Wilkie Collins" if it is anything. It straight up steals at least three plot points from The Woman in White, although they play out differently enough that it works to good effect. It's a potboiler of a pseudo-Victorian novel, and it has plenty of fun twists.

[Mara]

Well, I quite liked Fingersmith last month, so when I was reading a recommended Halloween reading list and found Sarah Waters' The Little Stranger I decided to check it out. I found it a very absorbing and entertaining take on the much-played "dangerous house" trope. This fairly hefty book (almost 500 pages) benefits from having long stretches where nothing creepy or potentially supernatural is happening, which makes the scary parts much more frightening, as if they are coming from nowhere.

Mostly, it is a story of class conflict and aristocracy in decay, taking place after WWII where a social-climbing doctor is obsessed with the decaying mansion of an impoverished, struggling family that cannot upkeep the family manse as they think is their duty. The house is an albatross, crumbling and unprofitable, sucking all the time, energy, and money that the survivors are scrabbling to keep. It might also be literally trying to kill them; though it is also implied that this could just be delusions of the inhabitants' fraying mental state.

By the way, if you are more frightened by structural defects, water damage, and crumbling infrastructure than you are by ghosties, this book is going to terrify you. I am totally going to dream my house is falling apart tonight.

[dreamdead]

Finished out John Okada's No-No Boy, which is (seemingly?) the first Japanese American novel and set in the immediate aftermath of the internment camps for Japanese Americans. The book tracks the isolation and dislocation that a Japanese American twentysomething now feels after serving two years in jail for refusing to identify as an American during wartime. It's got a powerful sense of indicting a whole culture in America, and the novel wisely shifts to assess how the mainstream culture is slowly willing to accept the Japanese even as it continues to marginalize African Americans. It's a little too one-note in terms of gender issues, in that the Japanese American women are rendered a little too simplistically as silently suffering and offering themselves to other Japanese Americans for sexual release. Quite good despite a few reservations.

Started Julia Alvarez's How the Garcia Girls Lost their Accents, which looks to be interesting. Lots of interviews where there's family sniping about Alvarez taking their stories and transferring them to the page transparently...

[D_Davis]

As influential in my life as anything.

RIP, and thanks for all the stories.

http://www.cyoa.com/pages/r-a-montgomery-1936-2014

[Kurosawa Fan]

I think David Sedaris has lost me. I just finished Let's Explore Diabetes With Owls, and there was hardly a laugh in the entire book. That's three in a row (if we include Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk) that have pretty well fallen flat. The problem seems to be two-fold. First, his politics have taken center stage in many of his essays, and while I'm usually inclined to agree with his position, I can't stand the way he approaches it, with such crassness and obviousness. That's never more apparent than in his fictional pieces in Owls. They are just painfully blunt and ugly, and not the least bit humorous. The second issue I have with him might actually be my own problem. He's reached a status in life that I just can't relate to, and his pithy judgments on the people and places around him lack bite because it feels more like petty whining. He's traveling around the world, complaining about losing his passport, his summer cottage in West Sussex, having social relationships with his French dentists, eating in China, etc. Meanwhile I'm working out how my wife and I can see Europe at least once in our lives. He's at his best when he's talking about his childhood and his family, but those topics come up less and less. Even in an essay about his relationship with his father, he starts it off with the following paragraph:

"It was late September, and Hugh and I were in Amsterdam. We'd been invited out for dinner, so at five o'clock we left our hotel and took an alarming one-hundred-twenty-dollar cab ride to the home of our hostess, a children's book author who lived beside a canal in the middle of nowhere."

He then goes on to describe her incredible home, her attractive son, etc., all as a way to set up a story about his father pressuring him into getting a colonoscopy. I don't consider myself a bitter person in regards to money. I live a very happy, comfortable life with my family, and while I'm certainly not rich, I have no desire to work as many hours as it would take for me to become rich. I've made my peace with who I am and what that means for my finances the rest of my life. That said, I'm not interested in hearing the complaints of someone who is touring the world, living a lavish life, and who finds inconveniences to focus on and relay. He still has some funny observations, but they are mixed in with extravagances that push me away. In short, the David Sedaris I fell in love with wouldn't bother to let us know that his cab ride was $120 unless that was the focus of his ire.

[dreamdead]

Finished out Graham Greene's Brighton Rock, which registers for me as solid but minor Greene. It lacks the focus on dedication that The Power and the Glory captured, and has little of the fascinating theological questions that foreground The End of the Affair. Yet it's still a solid enough thriller, with the kind of character balance and study of theme that makes me return to his writing. This one's just an inferior version of his other novels. The most powerful aspect is definitely Rose's relationship with the Boy, and her attempt to listen to his recording, and all the blunt horror that's going to wash over her immediately afterwards.

[Morris Schæffer]

Just purchased "Life Itself" by Roger Ebert. Has anyone read it?

And I came across a book called "Ready Player One" by Ernest Cline, but didn't buy it yet. Thoughts are always welcome. :)

[D_Davis]

I avoided Ready Player One because it sounded too pandering. Most of the good things I read about it really only commented on how nostalgic it was, and about how many pop-culture references the author cites. I don't like being pandered too, and I don't like stuff that just name-checks a bunch of stuff for cred, but I'm not sure if my decision to avoid the novel are warranted. I'd love to hear from someone about whether or not the novel offers up any insight into the topics, themes, and pop-culture it is evoking, or is it just a series of "hey, look what I know!" and "hey, remember this?" moments.

[Morris Schæffer]

I avoided Ready Player One because it sounded too pandering. Most of the good things I read about it really only commented on how nostalgic it was, and about how many pop-culture references the author cites. I don't like being pandered too, and I don't like stuff that just name-checks a bunch of stuff for cred, but I'm not sure if my decision to avoid the novel are warranted. I'd love to hear from someone about whether or not the novel offers up any insight into the topics, themes, and pop-culture it is evoking, or is it just a series of "hey, look what I know!" and "hey, remember this?" moments.

Seems like smart reasoning. It's just that I know of so little books about videogames and such. Incidentally, didn't you mention a book a while back in the VG thread? I'm sure it was you, and I think it was a book on videogames but not sure if it was a novel or not. Because I was really intrigued by it, but forgot the title.

[D_Davis]

It was a non-fiction, Console Wars.

Also, check out Masters of Doom. It's amazing. All about the history of id. One of the best books I've ever read.

And for a good overall history of the medium, The Ultimate History of Video Games contains a ton of cool stuff.

[dreamdead]

I'd encourage anyone interested in how politics and protest mesh consider reading Evan Osnos's Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China. Osnos illuminates how bureaucracies of power in the last fifteen years have escalated so that mere grievances online get silenced, how China's various Ministry factions shut down dissent, and chronicles the excesses of the age. It's always lucid prose, and every chapter in the second section--where Chinese citizens are ambitiously, and sometimes futilely struggling to get the truth out--just continue to ignite a need in me to assign Jia Zhangke's films to students so that they understand the machinations that other civilians are under.

A great book that's getting better with every chapter I read.

[Morris Schæffer]

It was a non-fiction, Console Wars.

Also, check out Masters of Doom. It's amazing. All about the history of id. One of the best books I've ever read.

And for a good overall history of the medium, The Ultimate History of Video Games contains a ton of cool stuff.

Ah so it was! I remember now as did you. :)

Masters of Doom was an amazing read, but thanks for the tip anyway.

[dreamdead]

I'm sure you've all been waiting with bated breath to see if I like Rainbow Rowell's new book, Landline.

And I do! It's not my favorite of hers (coming in about 3 out of 4) but that's in good company.


That sounds about right for me as well, though I haven't read her debut novel. Knocked Landline out in under 24 hours, which speaks to the eminent readability of her prose and storytelling, but I think I prefer her stories about teens than adults. There's an element about being enraptured diagnosing and deconstructing emotions that feels like an adolescent trait, so that other issues (cultural, sociopolitical) drifted out of the picture here. And that sense of single-mindedness resonates best with teens and college-age protagonists, not with people in their late thirties.

There was a degree to which I was excited by Rowell's treatment of Georgie's sister and stepfather, but those elements are peripheral to the plot. Not too surprised this book dominated the Goodreads charts this year, but wish it'd have been more mature in discussing other themes. Great for what it was, and a fast devouring read, but I suspect that this will just be "ok" in my mind in about two weeks.

[Mara]

Yes, I just stumbled into owning my own copy of Fangirl, and just rereading the first twenty pages reminded me of how much I loved it... and how Landline was sort of pedestrian in comparison.

BTW, for those who missed the news, YES Rainbow Rowell is going to be writing a Simon Snow novel coming out next year. (Simon Snow = the book-within-a-book of Fangirl.) It is one book, not eight, and it is not fictionally written from the point of view of Gemma Leslie or Cath, so it probably won't fit exactly into the Fangirl universe. However, it is supposed to make Simon and Baz canon, so we have that to look forward to.

[Benny Profane]

Based on some MCers high praise I picked up a copy of The Silent Cry by Kenzaburo Oe. I'm only 100 pages into it after 2 weeks, because every time I start it up it puts me to sleep. Does it get less boring/depressing? Thinking about giving up on it which I never do.

[Melville]

Based on some MCers high praise I picked up a copy of The Silent Cry by Kenzaburo Oe. I'm only 100 pages into it after 2 weeks, because every time I start it up it puts me to sleep. Does it get less boring/depressing? Thinking about giving up on it which I never do.
The whole book is pretty grim, but I found the ending profoundly inspiring. It elevated everything before it for me; I can only think of a few other books or movies with such deeply resonant, morally rich endings. But I also never found any of it boring, so your mileage may vary.

[D_Davis]

Started reading Murakami's latest, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage. It's very good so far. I really enjoy Murakami's straight forward, non-nonsense style, and the story has a great sense of mystery and sadness to it.

[D_Davis]

There's a Doubleday edition of JG Ballard's The Atrocity Exhibition on eBay right now - $14k.

This is a truly rare book, because only a small handful survived being pulped after they were printed because the book was declared to be obscene.

I would love to own this piece of literary history.

[Mara]

So, I have been trying to read The Orphan's Tales by Cathrynne M. Valente for over a month and I just... can't. I thought the format was cool and unusual at the beginning, but the endlessly shifting perspectives and the "nested" story format have become tiresome. I read for a few pages and I need a break. Also Valente's dense, intricate prose works better in small doses and in her books for children (which I started reading last year and loved.) Now it just feels ridiculously overwritten and precious.

I wanted to like this book so much, but I think it's going back to the library today.

My new commute is not friendly for reading, so my number of completed books is going to be tiny this year.

[Winston*]

This is an excellent book.

http://www.asparrowhawkslament.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/final-H-is-for-hawk-cover.png

[D_Davis]

So, I have been trying to read The Orphan's Tales by Cathrynne M. Valente for over a month and I just... can't. I thought the format was cool and unusual at the beginning, but the endlessly shifting perspectives and the "nested" story format have become tiresome. I read for a few pages and I need a break. Also Valente's dense, intricate prose works better in small doses and in her books for children (which I started reading last year and loved.) Now it just feels ridiculously overwritten and precious.

I wanted to like this book so much, but I think it's going back to the library today.

My new commute is not friendly for reading, so my number of completed books is going to be tiny this year.

It's a great book, too bad you don't like it.

I would recommend her Myths of Original, which contains her singular masterpiece "The Book of Dreams", but if you don't get along with her dense and intricate prose style, you may not dig it.

[dreamdead]

Having started Melville's Moby Dick back in mid-December, I have finally crossed the mark to 200 pages left to go. It's a strange book in that even the many digressions have their own beauty, but there's been times in the past few months where it just sits on a shelf. It remains singularly rewarding even if I'm unsure when I'd ever desire to pick it up again.

[dreamdead]

And... finished with Moby Dick. Last 200 pages went by in a flurry. Amazing how little respite and coda the novel offers, with Melville conveying the crew's death two pages before wrapping up. While it's been building toward that inevitability, I actually expected Ishmael to offer more of a lament about the fate of the crew--instead, it's basically all about a churning maelstrom for the last thirty pages and then a one-page coda.

Marvelous and immersive reading experience, despite the length of time it took, and wholly rewarding.

[dreamdead]

Halfway through Joanna Russ's The Female Man. The opening is more formally challenging than I expected, but it's started to reveal its rhetorical composition more thoroughly.

I quite love many of the more autobiographical digressions about how Russ expects the book to be received, and how she heads those complaints off at the start. A lot of anger in this book, but it's so artfully structured and developed that it never loses sight of its objective.

[D_Davis]

Too embarrassed to discuss in the SF thread? Embrace the genre ghetto!

;)

Russ is great.

[Skitch]

Finally finished Stranger in a Strange Land. I assumed the end was going to be abrupt when they had so much left to wrap up and only 20 pages remained. Not sure how I feel about the end. All in all a thumbs up, but....that ending....hmmmm.

Next up, Rendezvous With Rama.

[dreamdead]

Too embarrassed to discuss in the SF thread? Embrace the genre ghetto!

;)

Russ is great.

Well, I've doubled down on this and Octavia Butler's The Parable of the Sowers, so I do like seeing how women transform genre tropes to engage in gender issues.

Russ's book is fading away just a little bit in terms of its narrative, though I like the study of multiple parts of herself. Russ develops her anger especially effectively, and its epilogue does a fascinating reversal of more tempered anger. And several sequences have amazing prose and development--if anything, I want just a bit more clarity in sections of the narrative; there are whole sections where I felt adrift. Does Russ have other books you hold to be equally good as The Female Man?

[D_Davis]

I got something really cool yesterday. A chapbook of my favorite short story, signed limited ed. of 500, with a signed postcard advertising the event at which the book was originally sold.

http://i.imgur.com/M8vm9Zd.jpg?1

http://i.imgur.com/BGpTbTD.jpg?1

[dreamdead]

Jon Ronson's So You've Been Publicly Shamed is the sort of breezy nonfiction that sneaks up on you in power. A study on how social media platforms have been used to silenced transgressions where the punishment seldom fits the crime, it tracks multiple instances of individuals who thought a funny tweet or private joke would not be monitored and broadcast to countless thousands. In doing so, Ronson tracks how we regulate and overtly delight in shaming others, so that it becomes a public ordeal.

All of this leads to how difficult it is for these individuals to reclaim their lives and careers after the internet's done shaming them. Some of the material here, on designers fashioning algorithms to privilege innocent returns on Google searches after a public shaming, is quite interesting, and while Ronson's conclusion is difficult on some level--suggesting that it's basically never worth shaming an individual for any small transgression, something that's difficult to translate to teaching where student plagiarism remains sadly high--it's powerful stuff.

[ledfloyd]

So The Crying of Lot 49 is my favorite Pynchon novel by a pretty decent margin. I only have three more to get to — V, Mason & Dixon, and Against the Day.

[D_Davis]

Wow! Penguin Classics is releasing an omnibus version of Thomas Logitti's Grimescribe and Songs of a Dead Dreamer, later this year. (http://www.amazon.com/Songs-Dreamer-Grimscribe-Thomas-Ligotti/dp/0143107763/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1432676260&sr=1-2)

This is the first time that Ligotti will have been published by a major publisher.

[Dead & Messed Up]

Reading bios of Lovecraft and Poe.

Guys were profoundly fucked up. I learned that Lovecraft's mom grew his hair out long as a toddler and "feminized" him to the point that he occasionally called himself a little girl. To say nothing of his Anglophilia and racism. And Poe was a helpless mooch who wrote his foster father constantly for extra money - always insisting he didn't need it. He also wrote anonymous appraisals of his own work for literary publications. To say nothing of his alcoholism and adoration for his pubescent cousin.

Both were different in many ways, but they both were raised in foster families, were sickly, died young, saw little success in their lifetimes, and carried an odd mix of overt pride and deep shame. On that last bit, they're probably like many people.

[Ezee E]

Anyone read The Last Policeman? Great premise. About 150 pages in.

[Lucky]

Haven't read that, but The Third Policeman is good. Just started reading All the Light We Cannot See.

[Winston*]

The Yiddish Policeman's Union is also good.

[ledfloyd]

Atticus Finch is a racist now.

[EyesWideOpen]

Bought my first e-reader. I got a Kindle Voyage in the mail today and really digging it so far. The screen is fantastic.

[Spinal]

Jon Ronson's So You've Been Publicly Shamed is the sort of breezy nonfiction that sneaks up on you in power. A study on how social media platforms have been used to silenced transgressions where the punishment seldom fits the crime, it tracks multiple instances of individuals who thought a funny tweet or private joke would not be monitored and broadcast to countless thousands. In doing so, Ronson tracks how we regulate and overtly delight in shaming others, so that it becomes a public ordeal.

All of this leads to how difficult it is for these individuals to reclaim their lives and careers after the internet's done shaming them. Some of the material here, on designers fashioning algorithms to privilege innocent returns on Google searches after a public shaming, is quite interesting, and while Ronson's conclusion is difficult on some level--suggesting that it's basically never worth shaming an individual for any small transgression, something that's difficult to translate to teaching where student plagiarism remains sadly high--it's powerful stuff.

I just finished this book, and I'm not sure I got the same message from it. I thought that the point was that Twitter's danger is that it only knows how to employ a nuclear option, when certain people merely need a little slap. There is no setting for a nuanced scolding and certain people have their lives destroyed over relatively minor offenses.

[D_Davis]

"Oh come on, it was ONE FUCKING LION!"

[dreamdead]

I just finished this book, and I'm not sure I got the same message from it. I thought that the point was that Twitter's danger is that it only knows how to employ a nuclear option, when certain people merely need a little slap. There is no setting for a nuanced scolding and certain people have their lives destroyed over relatively minor offenses.

Indeed. You've captured a more succinct version of my comment. I suppose where I'm most interested in Ronson's book is in the two most interesting sidenotes--how the Bob Dylan accuser feels pity, almost, for taking the fabricated quotes to the attention of the media and destroying the author, and in the notation about estimates of what Google earned when everyone googled Sacco's name to understand the big deal for her transgression.

There are now three instances of short-lived napalming of lives this year on twitter (Brooklyn fire selfie, Rachel Dolezal, and the Cecil/dentist debacle). In the last instance, I'm fascinated by how long the Yelp reviews will tarnish his reputation or if he's able to petition to get them removed. I don't endorse their actions, but I'm thoroughly fascinated by this notion that online users thrive on this faceless destruction and how it's killing the ability to react to any transgression with nuance and grace.

[D_Davis]

I finally started The Streets of Laredo, the final installment of the Lonesome Dove series. It is very good. So much happens between Lonesome Dove and this final chapter, and not just insignificant stuff. The Hat Creek cattle company is dissolved, characters from LD die, get married, and pretty much everything the characters fought so hard far in LD is nothing but a sad, faded memory. Streets picks up about 15 years after LD, and follows the sad and bitter last days of Captain Call, on the trail of a Mexican train bandit, during the final years of the great American West.

I love this series so much. If Streets ends up being great, this might be the strongest book series I know of. While Lonesome Dove is heralded as the masterpiece, and I agree, there are some days when I think that Comanche Moon is actually better.

Anyhow, it feels good to back in McMurtry's vision of the west.

[ledfloyd]

I read the first Last Policeman book. It was decent, but something about Winters prose-style doesn't fully engage me the way I typically get involved in mystery novels. I started the second one, and I don't know if I'm going to finish it.

[D_Davis]

I didn't think that McMurtry could get more bleak than he was with Comanche Moon, but I was wrong.

Damn.

Streets of Laredo is down right dark.

It's also fucking great.

[D_Davis]

Streets of Laredo continues to be remarkable, proving that the LD series is probably the greatest series I've ever read.

Two chapters have stood out thus far: chapter 13, which deals with Pea Eye leaving his family to work with Call again, and chapter 16, which deals with Famous Shoe's walk to the edge of the world where the birds roost. Each of these could probably be ripped from the book and read as masterful short stories. McMurtry's language is completely unlike any other author I've read. It is written with the rhythm and cadence of an epic poem, built with deceptively simple prose that cuts straight to the heart of the matter, reflecting the nature of the characters in its directness and frankness. He also writes about gore and violence better than any other author I've read, dealing with each in a way that leaves me sick and disgusted, in a way that doesn't glorify, but condemns and reveals the evil nature of humanity at its worst.

Anyone here who loves epic and powerful fiction needs to read Lonesome Dove, and then continue on with the other books. McMutry is a national treasure - enjoy him while he's still around.

[D_Davis]

God, this book!

I read Lonesome Dove, and thought it was the best thing ever. Then I read Comanche Moon, and thought it was just as good if not better. And now Streets of Laredo, which is also just as good if not better.

What a remarkable achievement.

[Mara]

I haven't been keeping up with reporting on the books I've read this year, but Fun Home was freaking amazing.

[D_Davis]

Streets of Laredo, by Larry McMurtry, is one of the saddest, most gut-wrenching, most heart-breaking works of fiction I've ever read. McMurtry has been called the greatest anti-sentimentalist to ever write western fiction, and this book solidifies that title. This is a book about the end of the west told not with they mythical and poetic vision of Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West, but with the cold, hard and pragmatic vision of a group of men and women who lived hard and rough lives in a time and place that cared little for the sanctity of human life. And once again McMurtry has populated his book with two of the greatest, most purely-evil, most despicable villains to ever grace the printed page: Joey Garza and Mox Mox. The men and women who are at once the victims and heroes of the story are left psychologically and physically battered and broken, at best, dead and mutilated at worst. Although, perhaps, it is those who lived who got it the worst.

The Lonesome Dove series has proven to be the greatest work of fiction I've ever read. I cannot recommend these books enough. For fans of westerns, there is no question. Read them. For fans of American genre literature, there is no questions. Read them. For fans of straight lit, there is no question. Read them. They are powerful statements, and powerful works of fiction brimming with beautiful prose and characters and situations that I will long remember, and will be re-read a multitude of times during the rest of my years.

[D_Davis]

I started reading a book that is scaring the hell out of me: Remembering Satan, by Lawrence Wright (author of the book on Scientology, Going Clear).

It's not scary because of anything supernatural - far from it. It's scary because of how easily false accusations can utterly destroy a human life. That is a very, very real fear of mine, and this book, a journalistic look at one of the most famous cases of the satanic panic hysteria found in American in the '80s and '90s, perfectly illustrates just how unfathomably easy it is.

It details the bizarre case of Paul Ingram, a husband, father, and sheriff officer in Olympia Washington, and how was - completely out of the blue, and falsely - accused of satanic cult actions and sexual abuse by his two daughters and son, accusers who went on to accuse multiple members of the community. What's most fascinating - and scary - is how easily the accused confess to the crimes, even though they had absolutely no memory of doing any of it, and there is absolutely zero evidence. Their whole basis for doing so is shockingly simple: Ingram believed that his daughters would lie about something so horrible, so he must have done it, and then repressed the memory. Multiple times he sits and listens to the graphic details of how he and his buddies continuously raped and abused his daughters and son - details completely fabricated based on other repressed memories and a prophecy from a church youth leader - and rather than deny them, he says that it must be true. He must have done it, because why would his family lie about such things?

Absolutely wild. If I was reading this as some Stephen King story, there is no way in hell I'd believe that some one would be as stupid as Imgram, as easily manipulated. But here it is, in all its true life detail and factual evidence. Originally the pieces were serialized in the New Yorker. The book collects all of the parts.

[dreamdead]

In the middle of Zadie Smith's NW and David Foster Wallace's Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. The former has an interesting visual experimentation akin to Dos Passos's USA trilogy, trying to capture the vernacular of the commoner, but Smith is more attuned to psychology than Dos Passos ever was in that epic.

Just finished "The Depressed Person" from Wallace, and that was a bravura piece extolling, and indicting self-pity and the wallowing of excess guilt at the hands of the title character. The asides and repetitional phrasings grew from a chuckle, to a grin, to being wholly impressed with how Wallace turns emotions around through his recursive structure. That and the diving board story are the wonderful pieces so far.

[D_Davis]

Just got Mary Doria Russell's Epitaph: a Novel of the O.K. Corral.

Sounds like it's going to be incredible.

[D_Davis]

Epitaph is incredible so far. A large portion of the first 100 page are from the POV of Josephine Marcus, later to become Earp's wife. It's great to see these parts of the story from her perspective.

Russell's writing is mostly fantastic. She has a great ability to turn a catchy and witty phrase.

[D_Davis]

After finishing Lawrence Wright's Remembering Satan, and getting almost 1/2 way through Going Clear the past few days, I'm completely enthralled by this author's ability to report a story in such a no-nonsense, straight to the point way. Every single page of Going Clear is simply overflowing with information, and yet it never becomes cumbersome or overbearing. I did a year-long independent study of Scientology back in the late '90s when the all of their documents were first beginning to appear on line, and so there isn't a lot of new information in the book (at least not yet), but Wright details it all with clarity, and meticulously orders it all so it makes a narrative sense.

[D_Davis]

Going Clear is fantastic. Absolutely frightening and informative, and infinitely interesting on a number of levels.

And now onto Danielewski's The Familiar Volume one.

Holy shit.

There will be 26 volumes more of this?

[D_Davis]

115 pages into The Familar: Volume One.

Far more difficult-to-decipher than House of Leaves, and a lot of the language is purposefully obtuse, with some being written in pidgen, and some in Singlish (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singlish_vocabulary).

It is an absolutely gorgeous book. Heavy as a brick, brimming with color and style. It's a real joy to hold, even though it can be tricky to find a comfortable reading position in places like the public bus.

I'm choosing a quick read my first time through, not bothering with looking up the meanings of the Chinese and Hebrew writing, nor am I looking up the definitions of foreign words. I'm simply reading to get understanding from the context, and after I'm finished I'll go through a FAQ to read translations and what not.

So far, I'm totally down with reading two of these year. Word is, Danielewksi has the first 10 volumes finished, so he's totally on schedule to release at least 2 volumes a year for the next 12 years.

[D_Davis]

Familiar Volume 2 arrived today.

Volume 3 due next Summer.

Thumbing through volume two, it looks like Xanther goes on a crazy journey.

Got about 1/4 left of volume 1. The main story surrounding Xanther and her parents is great. Love it. About half of the other PsOV are OK, and a couple of them I can't stand. Luckily, the ones I can't stand are the shortest. Not only are they hard to read, but they are really, really boring. Looks like those characters also also minor parts in volume 2, thank god. I still don't really know what's going on, or what the larger narrative is. Although there are a couple of threads that seem to be tying things together - at least some of it.

[D_Davis]

Started Dave Cullen's Columbine.

Hard to read and utterly haunting.

[Morris Schæffer]

I'm in the middle of reading this really cool book about movies, a movie of which there is precious little information as to its conception if it hadn't been for one of the actor's keeping a diary. It's called "Spielberg, Truffaut and Me: A Close Encounters Diary" and was written by Bob Balaban. It's a very funny, insightful and informative read delivered in snack-sized bites. I can't wait to finish it.

[Irish]

At some point, Morris, you gotta post your top ten of all these cool film books you're reading.

[Morris Schæffer]

At some point, Morris, you gotta post your top ten of all these cool film books you're reading.

I don't actually read that often, but it's true that these are my kind of books.

[Mysterious Dude]

I read Ulysses. I've had more rewarding experiences.

[D_Davis]

I started a most delightful book this morning: The 13 1/2 Lives of Captain Bluebear, by Walter Moers, a German author and cartoonist.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/e/e6/Bluebear.jpg


First of all, the book as some of the most charming and expertly drawn illustrations I've ever seen in a novel. And there are tons of them. It's almost what I would call a real graphic novel, in that the words and pictures are equally as informative and important to the story, but it is not a comic book.

http://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/photo.goodreads.com/hostedimages/1403000399i/10024601.png



It reminds me of a less bawdy Hugh Cook novel. It's the tale of Captain Bluebear, a blue bear, born in a walnut shell on the high seas, and all of his adventures with a group of minipirates in a fantastic land. It is very much in the tradition of Tall Tales and Just So Stories, with a ton of dry humor, nonsense, wit, and adventure. I had never heard of Moers before, but I am delighted to discover that he has a bunch of books, and it looks like they've all been translated into English and are being published by the great folks at Overlook Press.

http://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/photo.goodreads.com/hostedimages/1403000399i/10024602.jpg


It's kind of weird to me how few examples there are of the illustrations in this book.

[TGM]

So I've been hard at work on the third Ninja Kat book as of late, and finished a full draft earlier in the week, which is now in the hands of test readers. So it's coming along, but in the meantime, I went ahead and released the first chapter of this new novel, which is available to read now. :) http://cwiddop.blogspot.com/2016/08/velcro-masquerade-coming-soon.html

[TGM]

Just dropping by to let you all know that Velcro: The Masquerade is now available! :)

https://i1230.photobucket.com/albums/ee496/widdopc/masqueradenowavailable_zps4b58 nc3o.jpg

http://cwiddop.blogspot.com/2016/12/velcro-masquerade-now-available.html

[Spinal]

Just finished re-reading the Song of Ice and Fire books, this time using the Feast with Dragons (http://afeastwithdragons.com/) revision. Has anyone else done this? I thought it was a huge improvement and makes the material in A Feast for Crows work a whole lot better. You aren't overloaded with Cersei and Brienne stuff like you are when you read them as published.

[Lucky]

I'm surprised I let myself go this long without reading The Sun Also Rises, but I think it resonated with me more at this age. My favorite Hemingway.

[Peng]

Lemony Snicket's new and just concluded series (All the Wrong Questions), which is a prequel series to A Series of Unfortunate Events and concerns a young Lemony Snicket the character, is really good. If ASoUE is an absurdist spin on gothic novels, this one is on hard-boiled noir detective. One great thing is that you can hear his voice becoming more and more like the adult Snicket who narrates ASoUE as the series goes on. Here are my thoughts right after I finished each of them:

1. Who Could That Be at This Hour?

This is my second time after back when it was released. But only the beginning of the book stays with me before this reread, because although this has the snappy pace and catchy writing of ASoUE, it doesn't have a more "normal" presence like the Baudelaire siblings to ground all the eccentricities and colorful details. Lemony Snicket as a character isn't bad, but he blends into the surroundings as part of the weirdness. So even if it's a pleasant, fun read, the case doesn't stay with me much (and the book is so open-ended that I had waited for the whole series to be available before I starts over again this time). I do love those details though, and enjoy Handler's delightful writing as usual though. 3.5/5

2. When Did You See Her Last?

Still kind of open-ended and still leaving quite a few questions more than individual installments of ASoUE. But now that the the introductions are mostly out of the way, the characters, their relationships, its unique world, and many eccentric details deepen, becoming more involving and fun. The joys are now pretty much in the same way as spending time in the world of an ASoUE book. 4/5

2.5. File Under: 13 Suspicious Incidents

A nice collection of thirteen little mysteries set in the main location of All the Wrong Questions series. The mysteries are not very memorable in themselves, but they are full of colorful local characters (in the best style of Snicket's quirky ones) and great worldbuilding. 3/5

3. Shouldn't You Be in School?

Snicket's AtWQ has always had two layers at play. First is putting his own dry, absurdist spin on hard-boiled noir detective genre (like he did with the gothic genre in A Series of Unfortunate Events) minus all the overt adultness, which still doesn't exclude stuff like violence and a recurring femme fatale. Second is playing in his own universe that has been previously established in ASoUE, with the main character the narrator of that one, and various ties and characters to them (while still having those references be accessible to new readers). And this third book is the best in the new series so far because those layers come off both strongest here. The noir-ish story is darker and more thrilling, with some real danger, an encounter or two of impactful violence, and even a dash of romance and heartbreak. And it intertwines fully with Snicket's own life and organization, with his past (as shown tantalizingly in ASoUE), various characters, and recognizable references coming into very sharp focus here, and at the service of the new story (instead of being mere fan-service) to boot. If we call the world of both series Snicket-verse, this is one of its very best. 4.5/5

4. Why Is This Night Different From All Other Nights?

Not as varied and rich in characters and locations as the third book, because the setting is more confined to a single train. But it's still a fun Snicket take on both Agatha Christie-ish mystery and noir detective. Also a really good ending to the series, with a great mix of unexpected revelations and nicely ambiguous questions (I loved ASoUE's The End, but I imagine the general reception to this will be better than that one, because it's such an unexpected but fitting climax). And Snicket really stays through to the form of both his noir genre spin and his increasingly grey area of Snicket-verse, delivering a conclusion that has more than a touch of appropriately strong bitterness, and some small flickers of hope. 4/5

[Peng]

Otto Friedrich's City of Nets: A Portrait of Hollywood in the 1940s. I can see the influence of this book, and there are indeed passages and anecdotes still as compelling as ever. I think Mark Harris's narrow, propulsive focus in his own two books (Pictures at a Revolution and Five Came Back) spoils me though, because this one covers a lot, and I checked out mentally a bit two or three times since I'm more interested in the film side of things. Still cumulatively an immense book that captures an era in films so well through such colorful, thoroughly researched details.

[Peng]

It (Stephen King)

Its influence maybe makes it seems a little familiar (such as 20th Century Boys), and the adult parts' insistence on repetition of six-to-seven people, complete with so many descriptive details in their separate lives and heavy, HEAVY foreshadowing of doom, can drive me a little nuts. Not to mention those town digressions; they might grow on me later on but it can get tiresome at times, no matter how colorful or well-written.

However, the mingling of the past and presence is superb; the kid parts are great and beautifully evocative. King really has a great, intuitive way of writing children and teens. The way their mindsets perceive the threats that are beyond their years, and directly related to their fears, is what makes this evil and its many forms still so terrifying and fresh. And despite my complaint above, the big chapter "The Reunion", and the sub-chapter "Bill Denbrough Gets a Look" in particular, is one of the best things King has ever done; the blurring of past and presence is so affectingly powerful in its dark nostalgic rush. The way he brings that kind of blurring up again around the end really brings that theme to a satisfying wistful finish; you can't go home again like when you are kids, but you can sometimes evoke them in your adulthood to drive you forward.

It is messy, overlong, and sometimes ill-considered (you know the scene, but I think the execution pulls it off somewhat)... but also, one of the most poignant and beautiful novels about growing up I have read. 4/5

Watership Down (Richard Adams)

Instantly captures a strong sense of mythical power in the first few chapters, and then continues to build and build from there, so that every facet of the world, its spirituality, and the rabbits' adventure is enveloped in an atmosphere of gripping epic, the nature's and man's mundane details completely transformed. Plus just one of the most beautiful epilogues ever. 5/5

[Dead & Messed Up]

Listening to an audio book of Crichton's The Lost World due to a mix of nostalgia and easy listening while doing chores, etc., but came across this gem of repetition: "Diego shrugged, his expression indifferent. He was unimpressed. He saw no reason for concern."

[Skitch]

I had cassettes of the audiobook for Sphere, complete with sound effects and score. I listened to it multiple times. Its why I still defend that movie. I have so many fond memories of being totally lost in that world through headphones on my walkman.

[Dead & Messed Up]

Researching a story by reading the Malleus Maleficarum, a classic Catholic treatise on witchcraft, what it's like, how to deal with it and dispel witches and all that stuff. Apparently this boy was a best-seller second only to the Bible for the better part of 200 years.

Which is horrifying, because the book is dull, repetitive, childish, insular, woman-hating bullshit. It's my fault for expecting otherwise; I was hoping for some exciting imaginative nonsense in the vein of The Lesser Key of Solomon, where at least they get buckwild imagining all kinds of demons:

http://www.mysticfiles.com/img/magic/72-demons-evoked-by-king-solomon-part-i/72-demons-evoked-by-king-solomon-part-i01.jpg

Hell yeah.

But nope, just a bunch of tiresome strictures and proscriptions, and bits like "When a woman thinks alone, she thinks evil" and "...'femina' comes from 'fe' and 'mina,' meaning lesser." Shit like this burrowing into the cultural consciousness for two centuries is probably why we still can't have nice things.

[Just noticed how the frog looks like he did not sign on for this fusion experiment.]

[Dukefrukem]

DD, now that you're back, I'm on Book 5 of the Dark Tower. Currently stalled out. Book 4 really killed my interest.

[D_Davis]

DD, now that you're back, I'm on Book 5 of the Dark Tower. Currently stalled out. Book 4 really killed my interest.

Book 4 is my least favorite. Skipped most of it the first time I read it. Skipped the entire flashback. Book 5 is my favorite. It's the best.

[Dukefrukem]

Shit well I better get back on my horse then.

[D_Davis]

I re-read the series in 2016. Skipped most of book 4 again. The stuff with Blaine is great.

[Dukefrukem]

That's book 3 and also my favorite.

[D_Davis]

Book 3 is fantastic. For a long time, it was my favorite. It is the most quest-orientated one, and I love a good quest/traveling/adventure story.

[Peng]

Cloud Atlas

My opinion/love for the film adaptation will color this a lot, but here goes. While I admire, am engrossed and occasionally moved by the book, I feel like the structure and the style, while highly ambitious, need to be a bit more rigorous. The reincarnation motif and each story referencing one another, in which the film pours all in with cross-cutting and big feelings, stands out and feels more cutesy in the context of this more high-minded gambit. Remaining with a story for a long chunk means that some stories will have to be compared, sometimes in inevitably unfavorable light, when we are cut off from the last one or move forward to the next (for me, Adam Ewing and Timothy Cavendish are lacking). Also, the struggle in reading through the (otherwise engaging) post-apocalyptic story with shredded dialect is just too real.

Still, for the most part Mitchell's total control of each stoy's pacing and style suck me in. Surprised by how pretty faithful the film turns out to be, except the last two stories, and the film's best bits are only magnified in the book, especially Robert Frobisher's characterization and arc, the fun pulpiness of Luisa Rey's investigation, and the catharsis of Adam Ewing's story, which closes out the book most wonderfully. Sonmi-451's story remains my favorite of the lot like in the adaptation, despite being vastly reconceived. The core of her character's journey is just too involving, whatever deviations each version has from each other. 4/5

[TGM]

Cross posting here, because why not? But I just released the synopsis and cover reveal for the upcoming fourth Ninja Kat novel, VELCRO: POLLUTED WAR. Check it out. :cool: http://cwiddop.blogspot.com/2017/08/velcro-polluted-war-coming-soon.html

[Mysterious Dude]

Portnoy's Complaint - this guy sure has a lot to say about his own penis.

[TGM]

So just finished Release by Patrick Ness, and it was another mostly solid read. There's two stories going on, and I thought the main story was really great stuff, while the other kinda felt a bit flimsy at times, and by the end, perhaps a bit overly-obvious. Doesn't ruin the book by any stretch, but felt a bit misplaced, particularly compared to Ness' similar incorporation of fantastical elements in his other books.

But like I said, the main story was outstanding, and has a very real and genuine feel to it, something that most anyone can really relate to, not only people dealing with the specific problems brought to light, and it's well worth the read on its own.

Do we have to start ranking Patrick Ness novels? I think so...

A Monster Calls
Chaos Walking
The Rest of Us Just Live Here
Release
The Crane Wife
More Than This

[TGM]

Cross-posting here. So it's here now! Book Four of The Ninja Kat series, VELCRO: POLLUTED WAR, is now available! Check it out! :cool: http://cwiddop.blogspot.com/2017/11/velcro-polluted-war-now-available.html

https://i.imgur.com/AI4vkfT.jpg

[D_Davis]

Got my book shelves back up after putting in a new floor, painting and putting up new trim. My books have been packed away for nearly 6 months because of complications with the project. It was a ton of fun opening up all the boxes, and putting everything back on the shelves. I missed my old paper friends. Also boxed up three boxes of books to sell.

https://scontent-sea1-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/23722217_2045495222341209_1813 313805223613225_n.jpg?oh=cfd74 1bfb9a568bc5c06e0b804416740&oe=5A8CFB6A

[megladon8]

That’s a beautiful set up, D. Sometimes the act of touching and looking at all of the books as you (re)organize can be so satisfying.

I really need to get reading again. I’ve been without the bug for nearly 2 years now. Started a few things that didn’t catch my interest and dropped them, but didn’t pick anything else up.

[D_Davis]

I haven't been reading much since Trump was elected. Can't seem to focus on anything except for the complete destruction of my country.

[Grouchy]

Not sure where to put this - I read the book The Disaster Artist in one day. It's compulsively readable. I felt a little bad about what Sestero was doing - revealing intimate details of his close friend who's obsessed with privacy to the point of paranoia - but when I was capable of leaving that aside, the portrait of the character is fascinating.

[Mysterious Dude]

Sue Grafton died, and she was only one book away from finishing her alphabet series, having published Y is for Yesterday earlier this year. I haven't read any of the books, but I am oddly disappointed.

[D_Davis]

Yes!

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51EiwwLi-sL.jpg

[Peng]

Telegraph Avenue

I read a few reviews and reactions after this, and it seems like I chose the wrong Chabon to be my first, reportedly one of his weakest (maybe the weakest?). It’s certainly charming and full of gorgeous proses, each character so distinctly well-drawn, and his ambitious scope makes the place and its people feel so lived in. But they are buried under all those momentum-sapping run-on descriptions, metaphors, anecdotes, and references. They are always compulsively readable and colorful (also nice that the film Black Panther came out shortly after I started this, so the key references all resonate), but they too often cross over from being some engrossing world-building details into a feeling of someone fulfilling word counts, interrupting the book’s flow too much.

Also, the most prominent storylines, which are the estranged father-son relationship(s) and the fate of record store, happen to be the least interesting to me. I want to spend more time on the two women’s midwifery practice and the complex, rather achingly portrayed relationship between the two teenaged sons instead. Apart from a few stings from those two stories, the ending kind of petered out too. 2.5/5

[Peng]

For all his gifts as a writer on display in The Bone Clocks (rich character-building; decade-spanning narrative with serious momentum; intricate, lovely writing), David Mitchell turns out to be just barely adequate, borderline on uninspired at times, when it comes to fantasy. The long penultimate chapter, which finally goes into full-blown fantasy, feels a bit deflating after the tantalizing and evocative glimpses of its hidden premise for the majority of the book. He strains a bit to convey the rules, wonders, and dangers when it's time to go into that world fully, and it doesn't quite come alive easily for him. Thankfully by that point we are immersed in quite a number of characters in their rich, humane tales (a weird, tediously fact-dumping section about Iraq War asides), both alive and dead, and even on opposite sides of good and evil, that we are still invested in the outcome.

And Mitchell grounds that fantasy well and brings it home splendidly with the graceful final chapter, where he projects the future of our inevitably post-apocalyptic world in all its savageness and persisting humanity. Amidst that environment, he shows both the ripple effects of the preceding chapter, and how, for all its out-of-this-world elements, even that fantasy interlude can turn out to be more and more of a (life-changing) footnote in the face of world constantly changing and time marching on. 4/5

[Milky Joe]

Telegraph Avenue

I read a few reviews and reactions after this, and it seems like I chose the wrong Chabon to be my first, reportedly one of his weakest (maybe the weakest?).

I would recommend Wonder Boys. That's one book I could read every year and never get tired of it, and I'm not even a huge fan of Chabon. Cavalier and Clay is probably good too but I haven't read that one.

[Peng]

Well, I didn't read Wonder Boys, even if at this point I'm ready for some medium-sized-or-less Chabon. I did read his most famous book though, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, and liked it a bit less than I expected, even if I still liked it a lot. Time jumps and subplot/character dead-ends mute the impacts of some intriguing transition phases in a decade-spanning story too much, and of the haunting power that some relationships or tangents should inspire more. It's also clear now, in my second Chabon, that I will always struggle with the way he reaches a new character or location and then backs a long way up to provide intimate background details for them. This is done way better here than in Telegraph Avenue though because it's often interwoven with the intersection of history and comic book milieu, so it mostly adds to the momentum. Best of all, the titular pair are such vivid characters to be invested in, exceeding anyone in his last book I read. The tenor of World War II and comic books' places in it are already an interesting and layered setting to spend time in, but it's the evolving characters of Kavalier and Clay, along with their relationships, that make it consistently gripping and occasionally moving. 4/5

[Peng]

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms (which a collection of three Dunk and Egg novellas) is ASOIAF in minor key, and the three tales are so fun and infectious that I wish GRRM is able to spin out a few more of these in between his major saga books' long droughts.

[Peng]

First quarantine reading done: Inherent Vice, my first Pynchon. I only watched, never read, The Big Sleep, but reading this is not far from that one's lanky Hawksian enjoyability in moment-to-moment basis rather than in big picture plot. No definitive thread to hold on to, which usually would be a personal big trouble for me as a particular type of reader. But Pynchon's masterful prose and situational creativity have too much immense surface pleasure for the book not to be a joy to read, and it's all nicely grounded by the unsentimental melancholy of an era's impending end. 4/5

[Peng]

Second phase of quarantine reading:

The Mysterious Affair at Styles (Agatha Christie) (reread) - One characteristic of Christie's mysteries is that, although her works don't lack for characterization and description, the writing is concerned with plot above all else most of the time. So if I am not memorably hooked into remembering how they resolve (Roger Ackroyd, Death on the Nile, And Then There Were None, etc.), which is often independent of how good or bad I personally find the books are overall, I will only remember the plot but not the ending, and it feels like reading the mysteries anew again. Which sounds like a knock, but it's one of her appeals for me. Same with this book, in which Poirot's resolution catches me off guard, again. Being her first book, she has yet to refine the dynamic between Poirot and Hastings, which comes off as writerly trick of audience misdirection/keep-away game rather a genuine relationship, and so obvious to the point of annoying often. It's amazing though how her enduring format comes cozily, fully formed right out of the gate. 3.5/5

The Bone Collector (Jeffery Deaver) - The plotting and villain are wayyyy too ludicrous, especially against realistic procedural details. To give Deaver credit though, this still proves to be a fast, involving page-turner even through so many well-researched nitty-gritty crime scene process details, which are very well integrated throughout. Haven't seen the film yet, but based on the book Angelina Jolie was such a spot-on casting. 3/5

The Sun Also Rises (Ernest Hemingway) - Only past experience with Hemingway is reading "Hills Like White Elephants" back in my one-year exchange student's US high school English class, in which I have a fond if vain memory of being the only student to answer the teacher's question of what it's actually about. I remember the fascinating rhythm of his sparse style ("Iceberg Theory" and all that) while reading that short story, but here at novel-length I'm more mixed about. Personally, I find it doesn't go well at all with his more travelogue passages, making it a struggle in interest at times, and the many new places that have to be introduced to us doesn't make the story flow smoothly. The beginning Paris section and the last chapter, and to a lesser extent any sustained group scene, is my kind of richly evocative that I remember from years ago though. 3/5

[Peng]

Bleeding Edge (Thomas Pynchon) - A testament to Pynchon's writing that this, my second of him, is still fairly compulsively readable, despite me finding it a clear step-down from Inherent Vice. Both have labyrinthine plots, tons of humorously digressive tangents, and several seriously oddball characters. But I find IV's ones so distinctive and memorable that I can more or less follow in the moments with its swirl of characters/atmosphere as unifying throughline, while I struggle often throughout BE when it loops back to some plotlines or characters that clearly have been introduced or stressed before, but I am not able to retain how or why they're figuring into the current pages right now. I just think the paranoia here is too standardly conceived for Pynchon's brand of digressive writing, with not as many truly transporting tangents (and most of those are in the early pages, like the post-divorce cruise) and memorable characters (Windust) as IV.

That said, the protagonist's family and their importance on her provides a potent alternative interest throughline, and Pynchon's description of the Deep Web and their intersection with real humans and cultures at the time (especially the post-disaster avatars) plucks some real transcendental chords, and almost resonates as much as IV's enveloping impending-end-of-era signifiers. 3/5

[megladon8]

Just finished The Hypnotist by Lars Keplar.

Poorly written, but held my attention for the 500 page length.

Contains a huge writing pet peeve of mine - a million chapters. Feels like a product of TV obsessed culture, unable to keep their attention on something for more than a few minutes at a time. The book is 503 pages and has 100+ chapters. It would have significantly more than that if it weren't for a nearly 100 page section without breaks 2/3 through.

All in all just such an oddly paced book.

So many red herrings and loose plot threads.

And once I got to the violent street gang of 6 year olds who name themselves after Pokemon, I think my brain fully checked out.

[Peng]

A Farewell to Arms (Ernest Hemingway) - After struggling a bit through The Sun Also Rises, I find Hemingway's writing style much more effective within this higher-stake context of war time. What felt rambling and aimless there feel hauntingly glancing and emotionally evocative here. For example, that devastating blast during the first act comes off even more horrific due to his muted descriptiveness, which, intentional or not, conveys a sense of delayed shell-shocked impact that's both apt and powerful. And this time, instead of feeling shrugged off, the ending really lingers with me. 4/5

[megladon8]

Monstrumführer by Edward M. Erdilac is kind of masterful.

It acts as a direct sequel to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and is written like historical fiction taking place during WW2, primarily in Auschwitz.

It tells the story of a young Polish Jew named Jotham who, along with his brother Eli, is captured and sent to Auschwitz to work. Jotham ends up being a sort of "messenger boy" for Mengele, who is aware of the work of Victor Frankenstein and is attempting to incorporate elements of it into his experimentation on Jewish prisoners.

It is harrowing, sad, and feels deeply personal (as Erdilac often writes about the Jewish experience).

Totally nails the ending, as well.

Highly recommended.

[Skitch]

A good friend of mine wrote a book about her husband. Its unbelievable, and all true. Available on amazon. A homeless child, protected from gangs by street hookers, clings to the bottom of a train...one crazy thing after another.

https://i.imgur.com/DbFWFgN.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/5Vg5f3a.jpg

[Morris Schæffer]

Hey Duke started reading a new Preston and child, Old Bones. About archeology and the infamous Donner party. Sans prendergast though. Pretty good so far, even if the writing is a little predictable.

[Peng]

Last three books read in 2020:

The White Tiger (Aravind Adiga) - Works better as scathing sociological satire than character-driven story, but the former frequently draws blood that the latter's lack of tightly emotional arc/steps doesn't matter too much in the end. 4/5

Rage (Stephen King) - I can see why this story had resulted in a scary resonance to the point that King had to let it out of print to disencourage further associations. In turning a realistic scenario into his own brand of twisted therapy session, King has both written an increasingly contrived plot (to the book's detriment) that nonetheless strikes a particular universal nerve about that most vulnerable time in life, emotionally and forcefully. And even if it doesn't fully work, the book's queasy fascination and underlying pathos are hard to dismiss. 3/5

The Turn of the Screw (Henry James) - Kind of begrudgingly come around to it by the end, in which its ambiguity feels rather complex and masterfully employed, to finally some haunting result. But I share the complaint that this really seems overwritten, especially compared to the beginning framework story, so it must be a deliberate choice on James' part to have the governess' voice be this intricately run-on. The style may suit the troubled point-of-view of psychologically repressed, unreliable narrator, but I feel it undercuts the atmosphere and story flow too much that I get often exasperated in the first half. Still, what I love about the 1961's adaptation The Innocents are fully from this (structure, ambiguity) that I can't help but at least like it a lot on that level. 3.5/5

[baby doll]

The Turn of the Screw (Henry James) - Kind of begrudgingly come around to it by the end, in which its ambiguity feels rather complex and masterfully employed, to finally some haunting result. But I share the complaint that this really seems overwritten, especially compared to the beginning framework story, so it must be a deliberate choice on James' part to have the governess' voice be this intricately run-on. The style may suit the troubled point-of-view of psychologically repressed, unreliable narrator, but I feel it undercuts the atmosphere and story flow too much that I get often exasperated in the first half. Still, what I love about the 1961's adaptation The Innocents are fully from this (structure, ambiguity) that I can't help but at least like it a lot on that level. 3.5/5I'm guessing this is your first encounter with James? Long, intricate sentences are kind of his thing, for better or worse, and he pushes it to the breaking point in the novels and stories after "The Turn of the Screw": I think What Maisie Knew and The Wings of the Dove achieve something close to a perfect balance of interior perception and external drama, whereas I find The Golden Bowl (widely regarded to be his masterpiece) a bit monotonous and exasperating. It's like climbing a mountain and then not having a view of anything.

[Peng]

I'm guessing this is your first encounter with James? Long, intricate sentences are kind of his thing, for better or worse, and he pushes it to the breaking point in the novels and stories after "The Turn of the Screw": I think What Maisie Knew and The Wings of the Dove achieve something close to a perfect balance of interior perception and external drama, whereas I find The Golden Bowl (widely regarded to be his masterpiece) a bit monotonous and exasperating. It's like climbing a mountain and then not having a view of anything.

Yeah my first. After reading some (goodreads) complaints about the writing, I was confused when the framing story (which has the Bly story as a manuscript to be read) was ok enough in term of non-native's reading difficulty. When the manuscript began and governess' pov kicked in though... lol. Speaking of goodreads, I very much enjoyed this review after having finished the book:


There is a presumption that a book, if written concurrent with a certain time period during which a ruler of notable longevity reigned and originating from an area of the world long known, during that time period in particular, for an effusiveness of style in excess of that which may be, at a minimum, absolutely required to convey a particular message or idea, may, on occasion, if not predominantly and generally, tend toward a style that, when compared and contrasted with styles of later writers in other, more distant geographies, or even stylists who espouse minimalism within the bounds of the same geographic region, might be best described, at least insofar as it can be generally encapsulated with a description of any sufficient brevity, as, to varying degrees, ponderous, overwrought, and, in the main, at least with respect to the general population, and in particular those of the Twitter generation, overly wordy.

[Peng]

Thoughts on a few of the books I read during 2021's first quarter (and a bit over that):

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (L. Frank Baum) - Read the Thai-translated version almost 20 years ago, in which I still remember its pretty nifty cover (https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/proxy/WccAlYYVG8gqi7SQmi4Dt9Vc9X_EGr d4fvLeNo4YfjGQzAslB1phHW9zBQpw WWucV_fbYbuq7eA5imVX2Hg9Oy6L), and also that I bought one with a huge chunk of the book missing (not ripped out, just skipped over several pages numbers), so coupled with time past this practically counts a first read to me. Biggest takeaway is that Baum's stroke of genius is Oz, whom he envisions as a delightfully cynical creation that rubs up against the classical charm in the rest of the book just right. 4/5

My Sweet Orange Tree (José Mauro de Vasconcelos) - Questionable Thai translated version and even worse editing, but this classic book manages to rise above both, with its story's tough-tender ratio calibrated just right, never being too cruel while not softening the environment that the main kid character must face either. 4/5

The Queen's Gambit (Walter Tevis) - Save for some standard minor expansions/elisions (the biggest may be at the Paris tournament), the series is surprisingly faithful to this book, and in turn, much like the series, the book is surprisingly engrossing for centering around a game I barely know anything about. In a way, it really makes me appreciate what a stellar adaptation/direction job Scott Frank has made with the series, because he is able to smartly visualize Walter Tevis' deft writing of chess, which is descriptive of each movement and strategy without ever sacrificing the game's emotional/plot stakes. Quite a feat to this reader who is kept rapt by pages of chess description when he knows nothing about its rules at all. It's exemplified of the book as a whole as well, which balances the plot's escalation of its competition scale with the protagonist's internal life masterfully. Makes me want to check out the rest of Tevis' works soon, especially The Hustler and The Color of the Money. 4.5/5

[Ezee E]

A Farewell to Arms (Ernest Hemingway) - After struggling a bit through The Sun Also Rises, I find Hemingway's writing style much more effective within this higher-stake context of war time. What felt rambling and aimless there feel hauntingly glancing and emotionally evocative here. For example, that devastating blast during the first act comes off even more horrific due to his muted descriptiveness, which, intentional or not, conveys a sense of delayed shell-shocked impact that's both apt and powerful. And this time, instead of feeling shrugged off, the ending really lingers with me. 4/5

I think this is his best book.

[Peng]

I think this is his best book.

I was gifted a big Hemingway's-four-novels-in-one book, and now there were For Whom the Bells Toll and The Old Man and the Sea left to see if I would prefer anything else (although someone has rec-ed A Moveable Feast to me). Kinda been putting it off because FWtBT is the longest one.

[Peng]

The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien)

The Fellowship of the Ring - 5/5
The Two Towers - 4/5
The Return of the King - 4.5/5

Since the books are written as one, I waited until I finished all three to write about them. But I really hadn't expected my preference of the books to exactly match the one I have of the films.

FOTR, like the film, is the one I love best with its sense of a world springing up fully established and vivid. It's also the only book where Tolkien's world-building doesn't get exhausting sometimes for me yet, because the nature of this part is one whole forward trek with a brief pause in the middle (Rivendell). It's paradoxically a straight-line narrative of epic scope, in which its one-group focus allows you to both luxuriate in its rich environment while engages its vividly thought-up adventure. No surprise that this one makes for most faithful adaptation (and imo best film) as well.

TT's splitting of narratives cleanly into two halves (or for each "Book") threw me off at first. Book 4 with the trek towards Mordor is as engrossing as FOTR, and with Gollum in the mix, also with a touch of psychological twistedness like in the film. However, I don't know if I'm alone in finding the purely Men part here and in ROTK, though by no mean bad, my least favorite section of LOTR. Book 3's Men part, in comparison with the more intimate telling of Frodo/Sam/Gollum trek, clearly aim more towards mythic language that marks the nobler rise of Men. But it may be too distancing and a tad excessively "noble" (especially towards Book 3's end and Book 5's start) to the point that a drinking game can be made by taking a shot every time you come across "And lo!"/"And behold!"

In ROTK, even if that noble tone of the language ramps up even more, it mostly suits Book 5's Men part better, with the story's bigger sprawl and gravitas as this nears the end. Meanwhile, Book 6 may be the best of them all: a grand, at-times heartstopping conclusion of an epic quest (Sam is as aching a creation originally here as he comes off, perfectly translated, onscreen); followed by some chapters self-checking if the characters/world can go back to their status quo after they have been through war; before a heartwrenching epilogue answer with "never fully" -- if not physically (an idyllic land ravaged), then mentally (a scar not healed in more ways than one). For all of LOTR being an influential high fantasy archetype with its seemingly simple tropes of good and evil, Tolkien is also there first before today's gritty "realism" of the genre, with the powerful pragmatism of his fantasy in showing complex struggle against that evil (Gollum) and the consequence afterwards (Frodo).

[Peng]

The Stanley Kubrick Archives (Alison Castle) - 4.5/5

Cover of the edition I read:
https://www.libri.it/image/cache/data/covers_2019_3d/9783836555821_3d-800x800.png

The in-depth details and images would have made this already essential, but it's also assembled by Castle with such thorough chronological background that makes it a great read. However, this would have been full 5/5 for me if not for two issues:


1) Each film has a central essay detailing from its conception to its release, so I was anticipating the one for 2001, only to disappointingly find out that it's the only one that breaks away from the format, and is composed of timelines and disparate essays on different elements of the film instead.

2) From Barry Lyndon onward until Eyes Wide Shut, each film's central essay is all by Rodney Hill, whose writing is tad too hagiographical on Kubrick for my taste. For example, the theatrical release part of his essay -- on every single Kubrick film he writes on -- always points out how Kubrick's films were misunderstood upon initial reception by some circles, preemptively dismissing the criticisms by bringing up praises from critics who "get it", which gets eye-rolling by the third or fourth time he uses this already.

Also, I was looking forwards to reading about the treatment of Shelley Duvall on the set of The Shining. Considering the involvement of his estate and family with the book, I didn't expect that section to be seriously disparaging towards Kubrick or anything, but past essays haven't shied away from mentioning the frictions or differences Kubrick can have with other actors, like Spartacus (Kirk Douglas and the film's British actors) or Lolita (Shelly Winters). But all Hill mentions, in a positive tone, is why Kubrick casted Duvall for the role, which feels crossing the line from too hagiographical to borderline dishonest for me.


This is still engrossing in details and gorgeously put together though, even through sections of Kubrick films that I'm not a big fan of (eg. Lolita), so that I'm very glad I blind-bought it.

Trivial side-note: this book has a ton of BTS stills, and as I was reading through it, I was curious to see Kubrick's switch from his early, relatively fresh-faced look to his more common, older bearded image in later career. I know it's an age thing, and the film's production took over a few years, but it's funny to see from the pictures how most of that transformation seems to take place primarily over his time on 2001.

[Ezee E]

Love that book. It's my favorite coffee table book. Read it cover to cover.

[Peng]

Love that book. It's my favorite coffee table book. Read it cover to cover.

It actually tempts me to rewatch the Kubrick I'm meh on (Lolita), which I thought wasn't possible.

[Peng]

Little Women (Louisa May Alcott) - Knowing about the book's background and Alcott's opinion of it herself, from around the time of Gerwig's adaptation, helps clarify my opinions about the two halves, in which I prefer the first part over the second. The second half's arc is compellingly plotted-out in putting the sisters through more complex world of adulthood, but the writing is a tad more convoluted and doesn't feel as effortless as the charming first half. Also, Alcott's touch of lightly having a moral around the end of almost every chapter is really suited more to the simpler narrative and childhood trouble of the first half as well. All that said, this remains readable and lovely throughout. 3.5/5


The Long Walk (Richard Bachman/Stephen King) - My love for Stephen King in his sprawl mode more than most (my favorite of his being The Stand) may be a Monkey's Paw wish since that mode can produce his worst works as well. But The Long Walk might be the first King I love for its brutal simplicity, setting up a few introductory chapters of characters and premise then just push the narrative right off, dropping off its world-building in bits and pieces non-intrusively along the way. Its concept is so succinct yet so horrifyingly immediate that this might be his most compulsive read ever. A good thing too because if this is among of his more sprawling novels, I might have actual problems with the crowd spectacle aspect of it, but the relatively sparse writing keeps that as only a few occasional speed-bumps along the way. King also crucially populates the story with different, believably portrayed kinds of male adolescence, so that you can feel yourself getting drawn into this group of doomed boys further and further. And he nails the ending for this one too. 4/5

[Peng]

For Whom the Bell Tolls (Ernest Hemingway)- I was hugely apprehensive at first when I saw how thick the book is, given both The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms (even if I enjoyed the latter quite a bit) in which his writing doesn't seem able to support a novel of this length (Can't wait to dive more into his short stories after The Old Man and the Sea). But either Hemingway slightly changes his style, or his writing evolves over time; here he still writes in sparse, terse prose, but it's more detailed, emotive, and even at times properly compulsive, which makes the novel his most engrossing yet. At times it's also unsparing in depicting wartime; the two long monologues by two female characters separately recalling the unimaginable cruelty they either experience first-hand or become a witness to will stay with me for quite some time. And the ending packs a haunting punch even more than A Farewell to Arms. 4/5

[Peng]

The Old Man and the Sea (Ernest Hemingway) - Going briefly over some popular low-star reviews on goodreads, I'm glad I went through my Hemingway four-novels-in-one omnibus book chronologically, as I can see myself being similarly nonplussed (although wouldn't hate it to the same level of some) if this is the first book of his I read. But seeing his rhythmic, sparse style evolving over the years (paradoxically but somehow fittingly) into expansive epics, culminating with For Whom the Bell Tolls that's my favorite so far, I find the scaling back of scope into simple but precise storytelling achieve a mythic, at times transcendental power. Ultimately moving, and reread may prove very rewarding here. 4/5

My ranking of the omnibus:

1. For Whom the Bell Tolls
2. The Old Man and the Sea
3. A Farewell to Arms
4. The Sun Also Rises

[Peng]

Just finished Brave New World, and to make yet another redundant comparison, I may like Orwell's 1984 better in term of actual story, but find Huxley's dystopia world-building here more provocative, disturbing, and, if my memory of reading 1984 in high school is reliable (need to reread it one of these days), a bit more well-written too. Mostly a draw, maybe slightly favoring towards Huxley's for now. 4/5

[Peng]

Hatchet (Gary Paulsen) - Sparse to the point of almost feeling like a draft at times (the "Secret" barely figures much into Brian's headspace or the events, so that it feels like it is put there to not make him feel too bare a character), which makes Paulsen's writing tics of repetition for effect stand out a bit. Its sole focus on the central story and procedural survival details still makes for a vivid and compelling read though. 3.5/5

Roadwork (Stephen King) - Not necessarily a good book, but at least I'm glad King wrote it early in his career, because his current, more extended prose would render this down even more for me. As is, King's storytelling momentum makes this generically executed arc still compulsively readable. 2.5/5

[Peng]

Finally finished Dracula, which is more fascinating than I expected. Haven't realized how many iconic tropes and characters of vampire lore today come fully formed from this book. Rich text too, which I'm mostly intrigued by the Victorian mores, especially on gender (I'm far from knowledgeable but is this pretty progressive for the era, no? Especially Mina's character). Most of all though, there are some truly evocative, atmospheric passages here, which has me realize this is probably the first time I ever read a full-on classic Gothic novel. At first I'm intimidated by the denseness of the language, but it soon gets involving I adjust quickly; two highlights are the Jonathan-at-Transylvania opening and the mid-book Lucy section. I think that denseness is a mixed fit for the characters' planning stages though, making a lot of the third act feel redundant and almost tedious. But all in all, a deserved classic I'm glad to get around to. 4/5

[Mara]

I really enjoyed the whimsical ambiance of The Night Circus by Ellen Morgenstern. It was imaginative and thoughtful and fun, but I can't help but feel that it would have been much more effective if it had been cut way, way down-- like 1/3 of the way. Every storyline overstayed its welcome.

In the pro-brevity column, Comfort Me with Apples by Catherynne M. Valente was an excellent little horror novella that resisted the urge to bloat itself bigger than the story. I enjoyed it immensely. I have found myself liking Valente more and more over the last few years, with finding some of her earliest works too stylized to be interesting, enjoying her Fairland series for children, and then totally loving Space Opera. The Past is Red was comparatively less ambitious, but still really impressive. I'm interested to see where she goes next.

[Peng]

Wuthering Heights feels like an epic deconstruction of the genre even when it has just started. The intensity of its passion, in both writing and story, is used to some perversely unromantic effect, especially as the second half pushes the emotional cruelty to some startling places. In fact, although I overall liked the structure of filtering this story through two peripheral characters, I think that the (mostly productive) distance doesn't fully serve Heathcliff's character in the second half at times, with our character remove from him flattening his successively outrageous schemes/actions into one-note villainy a bit much. It sure makes for some propulsive page-turning though. Still marvel at the bracingly unlikable characters Emily Brontë has served as her story's central and supporting figures (even the most likeable ones like Cathy has some realistically mean tendencies), and somehow pull it off. 4.5/5

[Mara]

Few writers have despised their fellow human beings as thoroughly as Emily Bronte did. I really think Wuthering Heights is brilliant, but its reputation has been tarnished by those who want it to be some epic, sweeping romance and for Heathcliff to be a bad boy romantic hero. Just let it be what it is: a novel-length treatise on how awful human beings are.

[Mara]

To Be Taught, if Fortunate by Becky Chambers is the best kind of hard sci fi. It pairs a deep respect and love for science with thoughtful dissection of what constitutes life, what price is acceptable to further human knowledge, and how to be an ethical citizen of a broader universe. The story is a deceptively simple one of a small crew of scientists and engineers who are on a decades-long exploratory mission, but there's no big horror-reveal or action-packed metaphor. It's just a hard yet compassionate look at human choices. Beautifully written. I loved it.

[Peng]

The Picture of Dorian Gray feels like two very good stories that keep interrupting each other when put into one book. Dorian Gray's moral decay is familiar if still largely gripping gothic drama, while Lord Henry's long epigrams, which I gather tire some readers out, I find both fun and gorgeously articulated (Wilde's prose is great throughout, but especially so during Lord Henry's sections), then fascinating when considered in context of them with Wilde's own worldviews. But I think the way the latter is used as corrupted influence on the former is too thin so that they dilute each other a bit. Loved how Wilde arrived at that ending though. 4/5

[StuSmallz]

It inspired a cool King Diamond record, too:


https://youtu.be/aq6sEQSWIao

[Peng]

Call for the Dead (John le Carré) - After reading The Little Drummer Girl as my first le Carré and really enjoying it earlier this year, I finally start his works at the beginning, which is much more of a murder mystery with spies as detectives. Enjoyable enough, and le Carré distinguishes it with details of spy agencies' inner working and field spycraft, but only around the edges (mostly in Smiley's briefly sketched personal life, and the dead guy's wife) can one see glimpses of the writer's psychological depth and melancholy later on. 3.5/5

[Mysterious Dude]

So, Gone with the Wind is super-racist. I'm not talking about dated stereotypes (though it has those, too), I'm talking straight up white supremacist, Birth of a Nation, "slavery was good actually" racism. I had no idea.

[StuSmallz]

Well, isn't the movie kind of exactly the same way, though?

[Mysterious Dude]

The movie is also racist, but not to the extent that the book is. The book has five pages explaining why the Ku Klux Klan was necessary to preserve justice in the south, whereas the movie does not mention the Klan at all. If anything, it's pretty impressive how the movie managed to tone down the racism.

[Peng]

Sense and Sensibility (Jane Austen) - First experience with this story is Ang Lee's film back in 2019, which I liked a fair bit but commented that "the P&P protagonist, whose personality seems a combination of two sisters here, ensures that the mores of the time and most men in her life don't shade into borderline emotional cruelty that makes this rather rough for me at times".

At the time I haven't read any Austen yet (rectified by Pride and Prejudice last year, which I loved). After reading this and then rewatching the film, it's funny how knowing the story from the insides out changes your perception of it (or reading Austen since then adjusted me to the mores better). I no longer think that, but being Austen's first novel makes the lumpiness of the structure understandable on why I then found the men seem more like mere plot mechanics to make our two leads suffer (and even in the book here I still find both romances somewhat underdeveloped). But if not to the level of P&P, Austen's writing and banter are delightful and intricate from the jump, even if a lot of it still feel like a test run for P&P plot-wise. Also, because I forgot most of this story since that 2019 Ang Lee watch, both reading the book and rewatching the film has me feel like one of the men (Colonel Brandon) really has more chemistry with one particular sister (Elinor) than what Austen has them ended up at. 3.5/5

[Peng]

The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes (Suzanne Collins) - This prequel takes the power rot theme at the heart of Mockingjay (my favorite book of the original trilogy) and runs the gamut with it. Not entirely successful (the least of all 4 Hunger Games books), but at least it's more ambitious with ideas than I expected. Arguably too ambitious, in fact. As much as I disliked cleaving a story into two parts, with the Mockingjay films among them, this book might actually benefit from it, as the final section feels halfway between an epilogue and a semi-sequel, making the book having an ungainly structure with lurching rhythm. Still, this is interesting enough in not being a retreat, but charting out its own identity with good world-building and colorful characters that I still find the book worthwhile. One aspect of the story's final beats also has such haunting ambiguity that I hope the film nails it. 3.5/5

[Peng]

Mansfield Park is more ambitious and thornier than previous Jane Austen stories I've experienced thus far, and thus maybe why its momentum and rhythm are sometimes off for such a long book. But it's engrossing in its portrait of Fanny, an Austen heroine in a unique position of vulnerability for once, who has a timid personality but remains with an unshakeable value core. She's surrounded by nicely different shaded level of personalities too; the Crawfords especially are such fascinating narrative friction in their mix of genuine feeling for Fanny and other less savory attributes. And you can tell Austen herself had met a personality type like Aunt Norris up close and often because she's almost too vividly real, a character that doesn't feel the least dated and personally I find her among Austen's top (semi-)villains ever. 3.5/5

[Peng]

A Little Life (Hanya Yanagihara)

Finished this under 1 month, which is impressive considering these busy days I tend to read on average 10-20 minutes before bed (this one I sometimes lost myself in and then went way past to 1 hour late into the night, and then the story bothered my sleep lol). Anyway, the discussion around this since its release has been divisive, and I find the criticism legitimate, as I have trouble with the book myself at various points. The repetition and over-the-top succession of traumatic backstory I agree are detrimental, but I didn't have a problem with them as much as how Yanagihara parcels them out, dividing in chunks and ending each with obviously looming ominous statements about how it may get worse. It just feels tacky to me to have that kind of horrific story as partly suspense device for both characters and audience to go "What is Jude's past and how terrible is it going to get when revealed next?" I did get actively angry at the Caleb section, as it's a concentrated convergence of those issues, then upped the physical and mental degradation by some notches; previously those issues are contained to the past, but this character and his actions clang tonally hard and feel simplistic within the comparatively normal present-day story and characters, revealing the extreme of how problematic Yanagihara's conception of Jude's backstory is. It's why, apart from the book's compelling introduction (100+ pages or so) passages, I find the story being less bothersome in spots post-Caleb, and especially post-Dr. Traylor last bit of backstory.

The parts I loved, I really LOVED though. Someone mentioned this before, but I agree with them finding Yanagihara's prose deceptively simple and effective, with some passages having the power to stop you in your track simply just by their simple but conventional statements of emotional truths or analogies. She dives into the present-day characters' feelings and dynamics deeply and with such heartfelt emotions without getting torturous or convoluted; the camaraderie is conveyed so well between these characters, whether platonic, familial, or romantic. They just come alive and you feel like you have known them and their dynamics as if you were there, especially as the years went by and their persisting pains and frustrations evolve along with the ebbs and flows of many relationships. These characters will stay with me for a long while, especially the bond between Jude and Harold; I am now not much a cryer when reading (and the problems I have with Yanagihara in the first paragraph blocks me a bit), but that last chapter did me in good. 4/5

[Peng]

The Murder on the Links (Agatha Christie) - 3/5 (re-read)

Second Poirot book's lighter tone from stuff like Hastings' romance and pompous Giraud character helps, as the solution hinges on convoluted layer upon convoluted layer even for the genre, such that for a Christie book it inspires less of satisfyingly snapping feeling in how various elements come together and more of "I guess, if these things happen to align together in order at that time." As said, the lighter tone somewhat alleviates such brain strain, and Christie is starting to nail the Poirot/Hastings banter and dynamics here.

Klara and the Sun (Kazuo Ishiguro) - 3.5/5

My second Ishiguro novel after Never Let Me Go, which I read around 2008-2009 so my memory is a bit fuzzy, but I remember as being so evocatively melancholic. Klara and the Sun has many thematic and stylistic overlaps with that book, but constricting a viewpoint entirely to the titular character's limited understanding of the human world. The tension between the humans' action and what Klara interprets of it and their world is fascinating and what drives the main narrative, but also what makes it doesn't measure up to that previous work I've read, as it feels less cohesive, and the humans' inter-drama are also at times less interesting and/or unconvincing. That said, I loved how the book doesn't explain the rules of this sci-fi world unless/until Klara knows or is informed about them directly, every of other characters' interaction with her is always compelling, and that coda is an exquisite heartbreaker.

[Peng]

American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (Kai Bird & Martin J. Sherwin) - 4.5/5

Makes my head spin at the unbelievably thorough details of a life placed within societal and political context at large weaved into a smooth biographical narrative. Sometimes it gets too overwhelming when the thoroughness means names and details are thrown at you non-stop when it switches to/introduces a new scenario, but compelling, staggering research achievement nonetheless, which makes for some real page-turner at several pivot points; I flew so fast through the vast conspiratorial set-ups gaining unstoppable steam against Oppenheimer at his security hearing, which on Strauss' part is so much uglier and more insidious than what is shown in the film (by adaptation and time necessities).

The Remains of the Day (Kazuo Ishiguro) - 4/5

My first experience with this story is the 1993 film which I watched and loved almost two decades ago as a teen, even if my memory had faint so what had stood out in my memory before reading this was mostly the aching almost romance. As somewhat expected, the original as allowed by being written is able to make both Mr. Stevens' severely stiff upper lip and his tentative romance being even more subdued than the film, to the point of that he comes off a pathological shell at times. And there are some instances or passages where I feel that first-person narrating voice crosses over into too affected signifiers, a rendition of admittedly powerful concept more than a fully natural voice. But it remains overall effective all the same, especially in the very suppressed romance so that, when it is fleetingly but explicitly addressed by a few words among Miss Kenton's one paragraph of speech near the end ("For instance, I get to thinking a life I might have had with you, Mr. Stevens" https://awardsworthy.org/images/smilies/smileys/cry.gif which the film understandably omits, because that medium's overall tenor has already allowed it to be a bit more explicit before then), those words linger to pack quite a haunting gut punch.

[Peng]

The Man in the Brown Suit (Agatha Christie) may be one of Christie's more ludicrous plots, but the whirlwind, one-thing-after-another pace (in a good way) and a host of colorful characters make this a very fun read. 3.5/5


Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI (David Grann) - By adaptation necessity, Scorsese's film must be more of a focused snapshot compared to the book even at 3.5 hours, as Grann manages to lay bare how the corruption, exploitation, and murders operate in ways even much more systematic and widespread across power spectrum; truly grotesque. He manages the trick of making it a compelling read while maintaining a tone that never veers into sensationalistic itself. He caps it off with a final somber modern-day section, a writer's exploration of the present that feels like the seed for which Scorsese and Roth manages to cannily adapt it to the film's epilogue, different but working in similar way for both that medium and the director. 4/5

[Peng]

The People in the Trees (Hanya Yanagihara) - 4/5

Not sure if my slight ambivalence to this is from coming to it after A Little Life. Largely different story, but there are more than a few traces that Yanagihara will use later in that one. Mainly, even if I find the structure ambitious, and its separate parts gripping in their individual arc and challenging empathy, the story eventually feels cohering not too satisfyingly in the end from those parts? Reading about the book afterwards, maybe it's from this story being "inspired" by a real person (in which his wiki reads broadly similar to the lead) so there's something akin to biopic shapelessness settling in. The book confirms, however, that I find Yanagihara an exquisite prose stylist, with this in a different register from her next book too; many passages here are evocative, engrossing, or masterful in its morally-shaded viewpoint, or sometimes all three at once.


Room to Dream (David Lynch & Kristine McKenna) - 3.5/5

This book about David Lynch is half-biography/half-autobiography, alternating one chapter of Kristine McKenna's biographical assembling of Lynch's life/work during a period (with interviews from his relatives, acquaintances, work associates) with the following chapter in Lynch's own remembrance during that same period. While I wouldn't want to lose either side of McKenna (informative) and Lynch (which has a feeling of stream-of-consciousness run-on sentences in the best possible way), I find the structure approaching repetitive often, especially in the early going; it may be possible that a concurrent structure incorporating both voices in one chapter might make for a book that flows better for me. Still, Lynch has such a distinctive and illuminating voice even in writing, and his life is interesting enough that going back and forth is worth it and I'm often enchanted anyway (well, maybe not the part about his successive relationships in which the new one starts right on the back/behind the back of the previous person, in which the latter is almost always caught up unaware; reading Isabella Rossellini recounting her own experience of that is especially brutal).


Emma (Jane Austen) - 4/5

I started reading Austen at Pride & Prejudice, then went back to Sense & Sensibility and has read her works chronologically since, which has shown how much she progressed as a writer, even if the overall effects may vary for each story. Mansfield Park is my least favorite so far, but it feels also like her most ambitious and thornier at that point. Emma didn't quite supplant P&P as my favorite, but it may be her most psychologically and sociologically rich yet, from having a heroine freed from her previous ones' worries of inferior monetary and/or social standings, so Austen is able to craft a more fully flawed protagonist, and has her navigating and interacting with Highbury village people, in which their society and class standings between each other may be Austen's most vividly portrayed yet.

It also makes this one of her narratives that are on the more stalled momentum side, since at times (whether for satiric or character effect) the characters will go into long-winded stretches of dialogue interaction, especially from Miss Bates or Mrs. Elton, which feels specific as to be authentic for Austen's experience but can get too unwieldy. Still, that the characterization is sharp and a lot of the comic scenarios Austen has thought up are engrossing and funny in their satirically intricate details help alleviate that a lot though.

Ranking of Austen I've read so far:
1. Pride & Prejudice - 5/5
2. Emma - 4/5
3. Sense & Sensibility - 3.5/5
4. Mansfield Park - 3.5/5

[Peng]

A Small Town in Germany (John le Carr?) - 3/5

The book's wiki has the background that at the time of writing this book, John le Carr? was going through a nervous breakdown (from marriage dissolution), which honestly tracks. Reading his books in chronological order has me see how le Carr? steadily gets bleaker and more cynical with each one, and I feel it reaches a zenith so far with his first non-Smiley espionage novel here, to the point that it almost overwhelms the story whole. The above personal crisis plus his worry on the state of the world at the time seemingly combine so that at several points the book becomes muddled with iterations of bureaucratic details, characterization, and events that stress on how dysfunctional and hopeless the systems (British Embassy/spycraft), politics (world/Germany), and people in them are generally. Instead of having that worldview enhances the storytelling, it stalls from le Carr? establishing that environment repeatedly. Thankfully, the general intrigue of this plot outline is conceptually strong enough to halfway counter it, and finally a momentum steam of real plot throughline emerges in quite a doozy of a reveal of the past, making the third act quite gripping and end on a really haunting note. Still, my least favorite of his so far.


The Professor (Charlotte Bronte) - 3/5

Charlotte Bronte's first novel but published after her death is also my first of hers, with Jane Eyre next, and even if I am ambivalent about it, this is a promising start. Main problem I think is Bronte feels most at home right at the beginning, when her male protagonist is swirling past a Dickensian journey of up-and-down fortunes, in which his life opportunities chance upon the characters he pass in his life, some who can be cruel (and where even the one with most opportunity for him has the entertainingly spikiest and most unsure personality in the entire novel). Even the middle section where he relatively has more stable life still has the less propulsive but still intriguing aspect in his coming-of-age and navigating life/romance's first disappointments and complications. But the final act when things settles down reveals how bland this protagonist is to sustain a pure character arc, now with less of other characters and incidents, right down to the rather interminable last chapter. Still, what I knew about her most famous novel from cultural osmosis had me look forward to it based on how strong that first act is.

[Peng]

Poor Things (Alasdair Gray) - 4/5

Coming to this after the film has me appreciate how each work is so very much of its own medium, with the book so chockful of Scottish historical/political dimensions, postmodern structure, and metatextual playfulness (to the point that it has me recall Life of Pi of all things). Sometimes the adherence to that structure and/or metatextual framework can bog it down with its dense lumpiness, but it compensates by helping the overall book being increasingly bracing and provocative about the satisfaction of fiction (especially when conveyed with privileged point of view) towards the end.


Giovanni's Room (James Baldwin) - 4.5/5

My first Baldwin, and his prose is so gorgeous in style and psychologically vivid it is able, in short spaces, to conjure up images of people, places, and a lifetime of conflicts/feelings. The whole is accumulatively devastating, but personally the two most evocative, breathtaking stretches are the protagonist's pre-France life (his first sexual experience, and his relationship with his father growing up) and especially the whole first night he first met Giovanni, which is such an electrifying passage conveying an unstoppable emergence of connection and desire.

[Peng]

Northanger Abbey (Jane Austen) - 3.5/5

Not surprised to read afterwards that Austen wrote this over some years, since while reading I sometimes had trouble reconciling the lead in the Bath section (where she is very sensible to the point that her rightfully declining a peer-pressure invite over and over is one of Austen's most suspenseful/excruciating sequences, so great) with the Northanger Abbey section (where the novel was making a Gothic-parody point so that some of her projected imaginations about people she's living with with are wild), a difference also pointed out in the wiki. It would explain that very rushed ending as well; Austen's usual intricate psychology and social-norm description in the rest of the novel make the last two chapters of pure summary feel like someone hurrying to finish up their PowerPoint slides.

Still, if this is her most inconsistent novel in term of narrative flow and lead characterization, at least it is a result of Austen in a different, broader, spoof-leaning mode, which comes with some priceless individual passages that may be the funniest she has written (like the whole first night at Northanger Abbey). Also, this mode produces some broadly but distinctly, memorably drawn supporting characters, like the Thorpe siblings and especially General Tilney, the latter who is striking for being such a realistically very flawed non-villain.


One Hundred Years of Solitude (Gabriel Garc?a M?rquez) - 5/5

I have bought the book for some time, and the impending Netflix adaptation finally prompted me to start it last month. At first the first few dozen of pages really intimidated me with how dense it is, but soon Garc?a M?rquez?s rhythm (in Gregory Rabassa's translation that seems to be highly praised by both the writer and general critics) in what comes off as tight, compacted condensation of handed-down history, familial highs and lows, intruding political/capitalist reality, and casual wonders draws me in and rarely release its grip after. That rhythm derives its power from his turns of phrases and parsing out of deep history and human details, which are both vividly imaginative and concise at once. Plus just one of the most indelible endings and last lines ever.