ThunderPeel2001

Books, books, books...

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You know what book's a bunch of hot air? Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer; it isn't anything but storytelling gimmicks and kitsch.

I just read Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by the same author, since I seemed to recall having heard about it on one of the casts.

It matches your expression exactly: "storytelling gimmicks and kitsch". I don't like to post pure non constructive hate. But that's basically what I felt throughout the book (that and utter boredom). Never I have seen an author indulge that much in his own visual cheesiness.

You spend the whole book expecting Whoopi Goldberg to jump in. UGH.

Had to vent, sorry.

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The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe is the first thing that came to my mind. The main character is a torturer (though that only figures into things tangentially) and an extremely unreliable narrator.

Probably my favourite works of speculative fiction by far.

Tried it, and found it fascinating and utterly boring at the same time. Author reveled in saying "hey, there's something weird and odd about this world, but nevermind I'm not going to bring it up for another hundred pages." And the narrator is so TOO self aggrandizing. I did really enjoy it at times, when it's being clever and you can see the self congratulatory auto biography of it all. It's also extremely well written, almost poetic at times, but I found it rather severely uneven. The thoughts of a horny 12 year old torturer aren't really that fascinating to me.

Thanks for the suggestions all, and since "noir" was mentioned I remembered a book that's getting a movie "Inherent Vice". Don't know why I picked that specifically, based solely on me enjoying the cover art and a small comparison to The Big Lebowski, but so far it's interesting.

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Can't go wrong with Thomas Pynchon (he said, having only read a bit of V and putting it aside when exams hit).

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Isn't Alex lying at the end of A Clockwork Orange, though? I remember picking that up. Also, a self-questioning character isn't one lack depth, even if they end-up on the morally "good" side of things.

Nope. The 21st chapter is a little controversial. It's apparently a (serious) happy ending, and it was cut by the US publishers until 1986 -- when Burgess asked for it to be reinstated -- because it was felt to be unbelievable. According to Wikipedia, in Kubrick's opinion, the final chapter was unconvincing and inconsistent with the book -- which is why the film omits it.

Probably makes more sense if Alex IS lying, but I'm guessing Burgess didn't see it that way.

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I am reading some Evelyn Waugh, and while he is wonderfully sharp and observant, his portrayal of race makes me uncomfortable.

In other words, I am shocked that a British white male from long ago was kind of racist.

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So Inherent Vice is great!

This is coming from someone that's loved Chinatown, The Big Lebowski, and LA Confidential as movies. And Inherent Vice is a, it's not an actual Noir LA Confidential type. It's not about the big overarching plot all tied together. There sort of, is one, but that's not what makes the book good. It's about weirdo characters and situations and etc. It very much has stuff in common with The Big Lebowski, but being a book is able to drift in and out of coherency more. It's about the journey, and weird side tangents and characters, more than it is about the big mystery or anything. And I'm loving it for it, and that Paul Thomas Anderson (There Will Be Blood, The Master) is tackling the movie.

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Oh man, allow me to throw my pocket change in here and tell you to read David Goodis and James M. Cain, but mostly David Goodis. There's been a Goodis revival in recent years and you can find a great collection of his work through Library of America. I'm tempted to say that Goodis invented noir as we know it while Cain fathered it. It wasn't until a few years after The Postman Always Rings Twice that Goodis would play his hand, really sinking his teeth into the idea that noir is largely about your protagonist circling the drain faster and faster until he just washes away.

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In case someone missed the blog post, the books for February, March and April are By Blood by Ellen Ullman, Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino and Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel, respectively. I would personally have chosen Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler instead, as I found it much more interesting than Cosmicomics. I read The Complete Cosmicomics a long time ago, though. Maybe I should re-read it and see if I'm able to enjoy it more now.

Oh yeah, also, people should probably buy The Complete Cosmicomics instead, provided that they can find one and that the price difference is not too large.

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I would have chosen If on a winter's night a traveler as well or even Invisible Cities, but I'm just glad that they're reading Calvino at all. If on a winter's night a traveler was a life changing book when I initially read it. That somebody could have so much damn fun exploring some incredibly complex ideas was fascinating. The book is also largely an older exploration of a lot of the same ideas that Cloud Atlas approaches but does not dig as deeply into.

I don't know if that makes the book a better candidate than Cosmicomics for its thematic relationship to Cloud Atlas or a worse candidate for exploring ground they have already tread lightly on previously.

Also, it is possible to get The Complete Cosmicomics for cheap now in the US at least.

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So Inherent Vice is great!

This is coming from someone that's loved Chinatown, The Big Lebowski, and LA Confidential as movies. And Inherent Vice is a, it's not an actual Noir LA Confidential type. It's not about the big overarching plot all tied together. There sort of, is one, but that's not what makes the book good. It's about weirdo characters and situations and etc. It very much has stuff in common with The Big Lebowski, but being a book is able to drift in and out of coherency more. It's about the journey, and weird side tangents and characters, more than it is about the big mystery or anything. And I'm loving it for it, and that Paul Thomas Anderson (There Will Be Blood, The Master) is tackling the movie.

I liked Inherent Vice a lot. Much lighter read than The Crying of Lot 49 and, presumably, all the other Pynchon novels as well. I'm not sure how long-time Pynchon fans reacted to it, but I found the book really interesting. I'm even intrigued about the movie adaptation. It could work! I'm not sure if (rumored) Robert Downey Jr. is the right choice to play the part of Larry "Doc" Sportello, though.

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I started reading some of these ebooks I got from indie bundles. I seem to have bad luck since the last ones I read had the same theme and sucked. The Heretic was marines vs. demons and it felt like I was reading a bad F.E.A.R. novelization, the next one was about a "damned" cowgirl fighting demons.

She could not have a worst introduction, she just tortures a guy who was holding his gun for no reason and she uses nightmarish ghosts to nearly drive him insane or kill him... I struggled through it until she met some demonic werewolf who claims she has amnesia and they were lovers... And then I deleted the ebook.

I have the same sensation when dealing with my game backlog, after a few bad ones in a row I kinda don't want to continue until I find a good one, except I have no idea if these books I got from the bundles are any good. I swear to God if I have to read another book about guns and demons I will scream.

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I'm not sure if (rumored) Robert Downey Jr. is the right choice to play the part of Larry "Doc" Sportello, though.

I always pictured a Taxi-era Christopher Lloyd (with a pony tail). When re-reading Lot 49 I realized a lot of the stuff I thought I really liked about it was actually in Inherent Vice, so gotta go re-read that again now too. :)

Those are the only two Pynchon books I've ever finished, after abortive attempts on Gravity's Rainbow, Against the Day and Mason & Dixon over the last decade or so.

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Just finished Pattern Recognition, by William Gibson, immediately after completing Idoru. The paranoia and fatigue of post-9/11 culture is eerily illuminated, and Gibson can smith a sentence pretty damn well:

"And then she hears the sound of a helicopter, from somewhere behind her and, turning, sees the long white beam of light sweeping the dead ground as it comes, like a lighthouse gone mad from loneliness, and searching that barren ground as foolishly, as randomly, as any grieving heart ever has."

I've heard good things about All Tomorrow's Parties, so I'll be reading that next.

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Of course, when the same is as good as Gibson can get, that's not necessarily bad. I'm a huge fan of his new current-dayish work.

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At this point, I'm convinced that Alice Munro does short stories better than anyone else that has ever lived. Ever story is so masterfully crafted, each character so rich, it blows my mind that I slept on her as long as I did.

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After seeing Looper finally on Friday night it reminded me a medium level Philip K. Dick novel, it also made me realise that I hadn't read one of his books for well over a year with the last one being Time Out of Joint (I've read about 15 all up). The only one I have on my to read pile is one of his realist novels Humpty Dumpty in Oakland so that shall be my next book.

As for Pamuk's The Silent House, it was okay but you can really tell this is an early novel as a lot of the themes he seems to explore later in his career are touched on but not really dominant. Interestingly enough I seemed to be the only one in my reading group that found the novel at least somewhat enjoyable.

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I just finished Mitchell's The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet, which has been in the barrel since Chris mentioned it almost a year ago. I don't know how much I want to talk about the book, because I liked it better than Cloud Atlas but found it less ambitious. Still, maybe it was ambitious in more insidious ways? I expected a detailed portrait of Japanese society at the turn of the nineteenth century, but instead got a beautiful homily about the ugliness of colonialism/imperialism from the ground up. I don't know if de Zoet is the best portrayal of a pious man that I've ever read, but I did like that no one was a child or an idiot for believing what they did. That's so rare in historical fiction, usually someone has to be right and someone else wrong.

As a side note, there was a scene about a third of the way through where they have to remove a kidney stone from one of the hands. I was so pleased to see the scene almost perfectly mirrored by a moment in the second season of Deadwood. Nothing makes me happier than being reminded of that show, even a demonstration of the fact that kidney stones were impossibly lethal before the twentieth century.

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I also enjoyed Jacob De Zoet more than Cloud Atlas, mostly because it immensely exceeded my expectations. I generally do not enjoy straight historical fiction, but this book was so amazingly well researched and planned that it managed to win me over despite me prejudices against the genre (I think it helps that Mitchell never falls into that common historical fiction trap, where every possible detail is painstakingly described to the point that it supersedes the actual narrative). De Zoet is a great character, but it speaks to Mitchell's talent as a writer that he's able to completely remove De Zoet for a huge chunk of the book and not have the narrative suffer for it.

This book also convinced me to finally read Wolf Hall, which I also avoided because of its historical fiction premise, and it too ended up being amazing.

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Cool! I just started reading The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. The beginning was very strong (as were those of the first two Cloud Atlas stories) and I was instantly hooked.

I'm glad that I bought the Kindle edition of the book. Turns out that my archaic English navy, trade and colonial vocabulary is really poor. I would never have checked all the (key) words on dictionary if I was forced to type them in manually.

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Just smashed through J.M.G Le Clézio's The Flood. This book is weird, strange, and kind of mind-blowing. Sadly, so few English readers have read it, so resources on it are hard to find, despite the author receiving the Nobel Prize recently. I would describe it as a book that takes Camus' The Stranger and takes it even further. While the first forty pages are written as a purely sensory experience, and thus a little disorienting, the book is wonderfully translated. Some of the passages are so eloquent and moving that I'm surprised that English wasn't the author's original tongue. The novel deals with death and sensory understanding, and how a fascination of oblivion can hasten your demise. 
 
A taste of the prose:

For the years, the years would continue to unfold in their serried ranks, no more distinguishable from one another than buffaloes at a watering-hole, and the years would become centuries, and the centuries would follow one another in turn, like great striations of marble. In the remote future, far beyond this place, this moment, time would still be thrusting out its branches, a growing tree. Languages would decline, arts gutter into oblivion. Ideas would glide smoothly on, small boats borne by the stream, never reaching any destination. There would be no end, just as there had been no beginning: simply night falling over the world’s achievements, veiling them on its own axis, swiftly at the periphery, almost stationary towards the centre. And eternity would be there, not hidden, but omnipresent; not an external pall, but permeating the inner heart of things, at the centre of time’s central point. (p. 264)

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I also enjoyed Jacob De Zoet more than Cloud Atlas, mostly because it immensely exceeded my expectations. I generally do not enjoy straight historical fiction, but this book was so amazingly well researched and planned that it managed to win me over despite me prejudices against the genre (I think it helps that Mitchell never falls into that common historical fiction trap, where every possible detail is painstakingly described to the point that it supersedes the actual narrative). De Zoet is a great character, but it speaks to Mitchell's talent as a writer that he's able to completely remove De Zoet for a huge chunk of the book and not have the narrative suffer for it.

This book also convinced me to finally read Wolf Hall, which I also avoided because of its historical fiction premise, and it too ended up being amazing.

Mitchell has spoken about how challenging it was to write even a single sentence, because the simplest action taken by a character would require extensive research to confirm its authenticity to the period---and all of that research in turn introduced its own challenge of ensuring those sentences weren't overwhelmed by the fruit of that research.

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I picked up The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles by Haruki Murakami today since I enjoyed one of his short story collections quite a bit. Has anyone read Mo Yan? I looked at Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out at B&N this morning and it seemed like the kind of thing I might like just from the description and all of that. Almost bought it but I bought Moby Dick instead since I think I need to brush up on the literary canon a bit.

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