My book group wants to read The Help by Kathryn Stockett and I find myself with grave reservations. Anything written by a white woman in the 21st century about black women in the 1960's strikes me as ripe for error. Plus, apparently, she attempts vernacular.
I'm vaguely reminded of The Secret Life of Bees, and that book was stupid.
Has anyone read it? Does it have worth?
...and the milk's in me.
Now reading: The Master Switch by Tim Wu
Awesome. I read that with today's copy of the Vancouver Sun beside me. The front page headline: "Baby boomers engaging in risky sex, survey finds." Different world from Thompson's, I guess.
Wishful thinking, perhaps; but that is just another possible definition of the featherless biped.
Cory Doctorow interviews William Gibson
http://www.boingboing.net/2010/10/05...last-nigh.html
Haven't listened, yet, but I bet it's awesome.
MLV gets nobel prize. I should have finished that one book of his I started, so I could tell other people I have read him before he goes superstar.
"Over analysis is like the oil of the Match-Cut machine." KK2.0
Never read anything by this guy. Where is Grouchy when we need him?Quoting lovejuice (view post)
Well, I've read La Ciudad y los Perros, which apparently is titled Time of the Hero in English. Good book.
so, i'm through 230 pages of freedom in ~36 hours. i can't remember the last time i was into a book like this.
To celebrate Vargas Llosa's Nobel win, here is a picture of Gabriel Garcia Marquez after he was thumped in the face by Mario:
so yeah, at the risk of overselling it. this is the best book i've read in a long long time. it completely lived up to the hype and reminded me why i love reading so much. it's not without it's faults but i think it's incredibly adept at capturing the timbre of the bush years. much like the corrections captured the late 90s. both through the microcosm of a middle-class midwestern family. franzen seems to have perfected the social realist novel and i just hope we don't have to wait as long for his next book.
i would be surprised if i read five books published in the next decade that i enjoy more.
Read Miguel Syjuco's Ilustrado a while ago. The unpublished manuscript won the Man Asian Prize, and it has since gone on to enjoy success and acclaim. It's about this student whose mentor, a famous Filipino author, is found dead in the Hudson River. Ruled a suicide, the student (also called Miguel Syjuco) thinks differently, and heads to the Philippines in search of the truth, and a lost manuscript. It's kind of an ultra-modernist, post-colonial, super-literary mystery book. I dunno. It was pretty good. Syjuco is clearly a pretty brilliant guy, but I found the book was so concerned with its blog posts and blog comments and diary entries and flashbacks and interview excerpts and novel excerpts and autobiographical excerpts that it just killed any dramatic drive it may have had. That is, up until the end, which is kind of a twist, but also weirdly emotionally gripping. Really the only time in the novel I was truly invested in what was happening. As a side note, I found the fonts annoying. It's supposed to make it easier for the reader to distinguish between different storytelling methods, but sometimes the small, italicized stuff is just difficult to read.
About halfway through David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, which I am loving except for the Luisa Rey part.
Wishful thinking, perhaps; but that is just another possible definition of the featherless biped.
i liked the luisa rey part. it kind of let's you relax a bit, and it's positioned well for that. also, i've always been a sucker for a detective story. but yes, it doesn't seem as high concept as the other parts. still, one of my favorite books of the last decade.
So, The Corrections. Take out the Lithuania part and you got yourself a pretty perfect book.
Not that that was bad, or anything. Just felt very out of place.
Now reading: The Master Switch by Tim Wu
Gave up on the awful Day By Day Armageddon. That stuff is just not my thing.
Moved on to The Woman in the Dunes by Abe. Liking it so far.
Agree. I also didn't think the section on the cruise ship was great, but other than that, yeah, seriously good book.
Wishful thinking, perhaps; but that is just another possible definition of the featherless biped.
OK, yeah. Especially the part about the doctor prescribing a club drug to a septuagenarian. Forgot about that whole ridiculous conversation.
Now reading: The Master Switch by Tim Wu
I powered through The Corrections on a train ride when it first came out, and I read it so quickly that I barely remember anything... except Aslan and the druggie cruise. And something about a liquor cabinet and someone limping. And a woman has an affair with both a husband and wife.
That's it. That's all I remember.
...and the milk's in me.
Finished Mitchell's Cloud Atlas. He's a hell of a writer. Takes on a multitude of voices and masters them more convincingly than most authors can master just one. I must say I liked the first half a lot better than the second half. In the beginning, you're discovering these new voices and being led into these new worlds, new plots, new character motivations, but in the latter half, a lot of it degrades into, like, really basic thriller mechanics. Both speculative pieces (these reminded me of all Foundation's worst tendencies, but written way better), the Luisa Rey part, and even Cavendish's section, to a certain degree, became extended chase sequences complete with action movie cliches. I was really disappointed. I mean, sentence to sentence, the writing's never less than stellar, but ultimately it felt repetitive and landed in fairly standard ruminations about the nature of man, etc. But then it ends off with Frobisher and Ewing, and those were definitely my favourite parts. Both seemed like the most fully realized characters, and both deal with suicide, depression, isolation, loneliness, creation--in short, things Mitchell is probably a lot more familiar with, personally, than, say, gunfights or vast corporate conspiracies or all-out war.
Started reading Hear Us Oh Lord from Heaven Thy Dwelling Place by Malcolm Lowry.
Wishful thinking, perhaps; but that is just another possible definition of the featherless biped.
huh, i enjoyed the second half more than the first. the way climax after climax piles up it's kind of thrilling. but i never though it devolved into cliche.
also, you corrections fans should read freedom. i'm interested in hearing your opinions on it.
Really?
[]
These sorts of things just seemed ridiculous to me is a book that was otherwise so original.
Wishful thinking, perhaps; but that is just another possible definition of the featherless biped.
well the entire luisa rey story was a cliche so that was kind of the point. and if i'm remembering right, the cavendish character was influenced by/read/watched the luisa rey story so it could have been a case of life imitating (bad) art? granted, it's been two or three years since i read it and my recollection of the details is a bit cloudy. at the time i was reading it though i had no complaints.
he is a great writer though, i've never gotten around to reading any of his other novels. but i need to do that sometime.
Mitchell's an awesome writer. I won't rank or compare him to others (what's the point), but the way he combines vast themes (the random connections between humans, reincarnation, the end of the world) with intimate, detailed settings (a frozen pond in 1980s England, a coffee shop in tomorrow's Tokyo, a train transporting backpackers over the Mongolian steppes, a remote island in Ireland) and challenging structures (the Russian-doll of styles in Cloud Atlas, the connected dots in Ghostwritten, the comic-book-novel in Number9Dream, the novellas in Black Swan Green) is extraordinary. He also understands the effectiveness of using modern iconography (the car chase, the assassin, the gangster) to enthrall the reader, and connect him to the story's deeper aspects.
I've read every one of his books save "The Thousand Autums of Jacob de Zoet" (it's next up), and they're all terrific.
Marry Me: A Romance bu Updike features more adulterous, unlikeable characters, however these are a lot more "mainstream" than Rabbit. Two middle-class thirty-something couples living in Connecticut go through a summer of indecisiveness of whether to stay together (for ease, for security, for the children) or break their marraiges and pursue passion and inspiration. While the wavering can get pretty exhausting, it does a great job of portraying what it means to be infatuated with someone you shouldn't be. The guilt, the selfishness, the one-track mind. The idea of a person compared to who they really are and what they can deliver. And Updike has a way of describing things that is just amazing (if sometimes a little heavy-handed).
Now reading Chronic City by Lethem.
Now reading: The Master Switch by Tim Wu
Read Tinkers by Paul Harding. Won the Pulitzer. Seriously gorgeous stuff. Mostly images, very little story. Poetic, lyrical, etc. But also very sad. At the same time, it feel like a kind of small book, as if the whole is less than the sum of its parts, all of which are finely-tuned instruments of beauty.
Wishful thinking, perhaps; but that is just another possible definition of the featherless biped.
Just to give you guys an idea of how good the prose is, here's a scene in which a guy imagines his father's thoughts while the father tries to pick up an apple:
"Hands, teeth, gut, thoughts even, were all simply more or less convenient to human circumstance, and as my father was receding from human circumstance, so, too, were all of these particulars, back to some unknowable froth where they might be reassigned to be stars or belt buckles, lunar dust or railroad spikes. Perhaps they already were all of these things and my father's fading was because he realized this: My goodness, I am made from planets and wood, diamonds and orange peels, now and then, here and there; the iron in my blood was once the blade of a Roman plow; peel back my scalp and you will see my cranium covered in the scrimshaw carved by an ancient sailor who never suspected he was whittling at my skull--no, my blood is a Roman plow, my bones are being etched by men with names that mean sea wrestler and ocean rider and the pictures they are making are pictures of northern stars at different seasons, and the man keeping my blood straight as it splits the soil is named Lucian and he will plant wheat, and I cannot concentrate on this apple, this apple, and the only thing common to all of this is that I feel sorrow so deep, it must be love, and they are upset because while they are carving and plowing they are troubled by visions of trying to pick apples from barrels. I looked away and ran back upstairs, skipping the ones that creaked, so that I would not embarrass my father, who had not quite yet turned back from clay into light."
Wishful thinking, perhaps; but that is just another possible definition of the featherless biped.
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