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.
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.
Pretty sweet garage sale haul. $2.
Absolutely. It all came out in Dreamcatcher and his books've been limping since. Cell was a nadir for me. Utterly regurgitated.Quoting Skitch (view post)
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.
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.
The severed arm perfectly acquitted itself, because of the simplicity of its wishes and its total lack of doubt.
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.
...and the milk's in me.
Going to read some more "Girlvert" today.
We're into STD land now.
"All right, that's too hot. Anything we can do about that heat?"
"Rick...it's a flamethrower."
"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.
"All right, that's too hot. Anything we can do about that heat?"
"Rick...it's a flamethrower."
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.
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.
The Boat People - 9
The Power of the Dog - 7.5
The King of Pigs - 7
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.
...and the milk's in me.
Side note: it would make a magnificent Miyazaki film. In fact, I'm really sad it's not a Miyazaki film.
...and the milk's in me.
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...
The Boat People - 9
The Power of the Dog - 7.5
The King of Pigs - 7
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...
The Boat People - 9
The Power of the Dog - 7.5
The King of Pigs - 7
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.Picked up Heinlein's Stranger In A Strange Land on a Goodwill for a buck.
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
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.
...and the milk's in me.
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.
...and the milk's in me.
I loved it but don't remember much about it. Read it a few years ago.
Now reading: The Master Switch by Tim Wu
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:
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.
The Boat People - 9
The Power of the Dog - 7.5
The King of Pigs - 7
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.
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