ThunderPeel2001

Books, books, books...

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So my initial impression of River of Stars has gone down quite a bit.

 

The author is getting bogged down in literally saying the same thing over and over again from different characters perspectives. And the problems is, these perspectives are almost no different from each other at all. It's like he'd much rather spend forever building up to his great events than actually having them happen, to the point where two hundred and fifty eight pages in he's still building up to having one of the main characters actually embark on the quest that character began deciding to undertake at the very beginning of the book.

 

It's the equivalent of following Frodo around with the ring for a hundred pages, before he ever even leaves the Shire, deciding whether he should actually go, and then deciding to go, and then deciding what he should pack, and then telling people he's leaving, and then having the perspective of those people hes telling witnessing him coming to tell them he's leaving and... AGH! "Get on with it!" seems to a be a phrase not in Guy Kay's vocabulary. Not to mention the amount of times he's skipped years and decades ahead to give us a small glimpse of what will happen, only to skip all the way back again just to make the entire process of getting there feel even more like drudgery.

 

I'm on the verge of giving up on it altogether. The man just likes writing words down far more than he likes writing an actual story. Time to look for another book I think.

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If I hadn't fallen asleep in the middle of the yesterday, I would have finished the novel I'm reading (Reaper Man by Terry Pratchett) in less than 24 hours. That would have been a first for me. Oh well.

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Just started J.M.G. Le Clezio's The Giants. Really strange and interesting so far. His experimental 1960's novel The Flood blew my mind earlier this year, so I can't wait to get around to it. 

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I'm reading Bleak House. I haven't read much Dickens--I vaguely remember reading Great Expectations many years ago, but that's it. So far Bleak House is pretty great, despite some mind-bending gender politics. Dickens satirizes pretty much everyone, and his descriptions of Chancery practice are hilarious and are sadly still somewhat relevant. I'm surprised to find that I still have an appetite for this kind of stuffy prose. Cool book.

I finished this. I liked it. It was seriously melodramatic, and Dickens's views on what makes a good woman or a good man are pretty fucked up by conventional standards, but it was still entertaining and emotionally effective. I saw a lot of the twists coming (Dickens doesn't even really try and hide them), but I still teared up a little. The language is really beautiful: kind of ornate, but grammatically impeccable and in that sense quite modern. He also really savages philanthropists, phonies, and lawyers, which is very entertaining.  

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Loom of Ruin by Sam McPheeters

Fantastic first book from the singer of one of my favorite 90s hardcore bands, Born Against.

 

Occasionally absurd, easy to read, Pynchonesque (with a bit of Delilo) black comedy (though that’s all synonymous isn’t it) conspiracy centering around Trang Yang, a man who due to a series of incidents can only feel rage, and the lengths Chevron will go to figure out why his 9 franchises are slightly more successful than all the rest. It's a funny caper that toes the line of post modern nihilism, but remains funny, and hot hateful. 

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The Star's Tennis Balls by Stephen Fry.

 

I was very pleased (and surprised, since I had deliberately not read the back cover) that this story quickly turned out to be a modern take on The Count of Monte-Cristo. Well, parts of it anyway. Following Ned Maddstone as he is ruthlessly imprisoned for twenty years is very compelling, and seeing him come out better and stronger and smarter than everyone gratifying. Then, a curious thing happens. At the end of the book he actually gets his revenge in ghastly ways, but it feels completely hollow. I had hoped that Ned would realize at this point that his vengeance was petty, that his victims had already morally ruined themselves and lead awful, unfulfilling lives. The vengeance felt immature and degrading to Ned. At the very end, Ned seems to understand this too, and leaves everything behind to live in solitude. I'm considering whether my reactions were the intended effect or if Fry miscalculated how desperate the reader was for Ned to get his own back. It seems almost strange for him to build up the character of Ned as such a superhuman, only to allow him to ruin everything for himself. It's not a bad ending, quite interesting in fact, but not what I expected.

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Fry's endings are always interesting but feel oddly rushed in my opinion. The same holds for Hippopotamus, The Liar and Making History at least.

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Soon I Will Be Invincible by Austin Grossman is great if you're into comics.  I'm trying to describe it in a weird way so it's not coming out exactly right, but it's like how you would imagine a comic being properly ported into the new format of being a full size novel-ass novel, if it still did a lot of things that make comics comiccy.  Definitely recommend.

 

Max Ernst I clicked through your blog (or blog-like thing? I couldn't tell what it was), enjoyed the art but I don't understand tumblr at all, and then there was a half-naked cute twink boy with a cat mask.  Overall I don't know what the hell is going on, but keep it up.

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Max Ernst I clicked through your blog (or blog-like thing? I couldn't tell what it was), enjoyed the art but I don't understand tumblr at all, and then there was a half-naked cute twink boy with a cat mask.  Overall I don't know what the hell is going on, but keep it up.

Yeah, Roger Ballen is a beast. Really great contrast between prison scenes and childhood insecurities. I don't know if the piece you mentioned is meant to be a comment on sexuality, but it sure is an eerie composition anyhow. 

 

On topic: blasting my way through Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber short story collection. They are incredible. They are retelling of fairy tales, yet so much more than the hacky 'adult versions' you see littered in book stores. I'll let the author explain:

 

My intention was not to do 'versions' or, as the American edition of the book said, horribly, 'adult' fairy tales, but to extract the latent content from the traditional stories.

 

Tackles a lot of gender, sexuality and power issues. Plus, her prose is wonderful. Can't wait to read the rest.

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I'm about halfway through The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. Absolutely loving the book so far. I came to this book right after Cloud Atlas, and I am really impressed with the way Mitchell can write such vastly different novels with such skill. His  ability to write a charcter's voice is incredibly remarkable. I'm not as good as putting my thoughts into words as some of you are here, but I find it a gorgeous novel, and a great read so far. 

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You're absolutely right! Funny enough, I read the novels the exact other way, and was still smitten by his careful mastery of prose.

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I just finished "You" by Austin Grossman, and although it had some wonderful observations about video games and did a good job warming my heart with nostalgia, it was ultimately a pretty disappointing book.  I've seen it draw comparisons to Ready Player One (which I loved to an almost unreasonable degree), but You is too disjointed to reach anywhere near those heights, in my estimation.  The world feels interesting and real, with smart discussion about how games work and why they matter, and the in-depth examination of the Video game oeuvre of the fictional game company definitely hit the same mark that RPO did in terms of making me feel what it would be like to play those games.  Unfortunately, that's really the only thing the book gets right.  The protagonist feels totally undefined, and the important people in his life are just the thinnest sketches of characters.  The plot feels arbitrary, as events seem to just happen so that one (admittedly interesting and fun) exploration of a fake Video game of a certain era can be imagined after the next.  I know many people loved Grossman's previous book, Soon I Will Be Invincible, but although I totally remember that I read it, and I remember being pleased to see someone do a thorough exploration of superhero tropes that I love, I can't really remember any details of it one way or another.  I suspect You will have the same effect on me in the long run: "Oh yeah, that was kinda pleasant, and there was some cool talk about video games...but nothing about the characters or the plot stuck with me at all."

 

One thing I will definitely remember, however: there are repeated references to installing old games off of 3.25" disks, and a comment about how these disks are called "crispies."  I had to quiz my older brother, with whom I shared many a computer game in the 80s and 90s, to confirm I hadn't gone crazy: floppies were 5.25" or 3.5", and no one has ever called a 3.5" disk a "crispy" rather than a "floppy", even if "floppy" was something of a misnomer for the 3.5" format.  The disk size issue in particular seemed like a pretty glaring error in the tech nostalgia.  Was there some weird disk format I've never heard of that could've been referenced here?  And has anyone heard the term "crispies" applied to disks?  Please validate my incredulousness.

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I found my old copy of It and flicked through it and then remembered why I stopped reading King when I was 18. A shocking amount of his writing follows the format "As [name] went to [window, door, another room], she/he thought about [events]." It happens so much I started to think it was intentional character device, but I don't think I can give him that much credit.

 

Also, he does a lot of "and that was the last time they saw [name] alive", which is a cheap way to build suspense.

 

This weekend I also started and gave up on The Recognitions for the third time. Next time! 

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I'm reading Mike Davis' City of Quartz. It's a social history of the city of Los Angeles from the first group of white settlers who wrested control of the city from the Spanish up until the early 90's (before the Rodney King riots). It's been a fascinating read so far. Davis' premise is that the Los Angeles has a self fabricated history that describes itself as both idealized utopia and realized dystopia. In it I've also learned about the racist origins of Home Owner's Association, and the factoryization of real estate speculation.

 

I kind of can't put it down.

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Mike Davis is rad! He and Solnit are some of my favorite thinkers today.

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Mike Davis is rad! He and Solnit are some of my favorite thinkers today.

 

Which reminds me that I've been sitting on that Solnit book on Muybridge for way too long.

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I finished Bring Out the Bodies, the sequel to Wolf Hall. I have a lot of undigested thoughts about it that I'll do the enormous disservice of grouping into pros and cons:

 

Pros:

- The tone and feel of Wolf Hall carried over perfectly for me, which is a huge feather in Mantel's cap.

- I liked the subtle ways Cromwell continued to grow as a character, especially with regards to his thoughts on love, marriage, and family.

- Mantel covered the trial and execution of Anne Boleyn without really being tawdry or ugly, which I did not think possible.

 

Cons:

- Early on, I thought that the slights from Brereton and Weston were building towards a confrontation with Cromwell, presumably the trial. This was not the case. I was disappointed that Cromwell did not even dream of his enemies' ruin, not in any explicit way, until Henry gave the okay. Maybe it was in character, but I almost felt as though Mantel passed over a chance for Cromwell to exert himself in an overt and powerful way, because it did not flatter him to do so.

- On a similar note, I could not believe that Mantel chose not to have Mark Smeaton tortured by Cromwell in any way, shape, or form. Even taking into account the long-term smear campaign of the lowborn Cromwell, reports of the trial are pretty clear regarding the condition of Mark. To be told that it was the result of a night locked in a closet, some self-inflicted wounds, and a general case of the blues was the first time I just plain rejected Mantel's narrative by dint of prior knowledge. I didn't like it, and thankfully it passed, but it was still irritating. Even if Christophe had hit Mark more than twice, that would have been something to substantiate the rumors that survive to us.

 

Sorry, I know my two critiques are mostly just (history) nerd rage, which isn't fair. I found this an even smoother and more pleasant read than Wolf Hall. I can't wait for the third book, whatever it's going to be titled, especially because I'm sure Mantel will be more willing for Cromwell to act like the flawed being he was.

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Restarting JMG Le Clezio's The Giants and it might be one of the most compelling, through provoking novels I have ever read. It is a strange, almost experimental (but not difficult to read) novel about the city of Hyperpolis, a "city of electronic signage dominated by cybernetic giantism". It talks about the disorientation of the senses and the loss of identity in large, man-made structures. It laments the extinction of the real. It suggests that corporate advertising hijacks original thought and pushes us into a collective direction. It is a call to rebellion. 

 

Also, it was written in the late 1960's, but it is still just as prevalent as ever. If not, more so.

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Is it available in English yet? I'm trying to find the listing on Amazon, and failing.

Speaking of works in translation, My Struggle by Karl Ove Knausgaard is currently rocking my face. Everyone compares it to Proust because it's semi-autobiographical and lengthy (only the first two of six books have been translated to English so far), but it also reminds me a lot of Chris Ware with the dwelling on death/mortality, the examination of everyday life, and the suggestion of moments that are weighted with meaning beyond their immediate context, often in a way that's difficult to describe or capture clearly.

It's really a remarkable work, and worth checking out even if you won't be able to finish reading it for a few years.

And Kroms, I totally have a mental list of favorites. Tony Judt was on the list too until he passed away recently, as well as Roger Ebert. :[

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I have mental lists of favourite authors or books (The Yiddish Policemen's Union, Skippy Dies, A Song of Ice and Fire) or bands (Pixies, Portishead), but thinkers is one I consider a bit amusing. I'm not teasing you! But this idea that you'd go up to someone and say, "You're one of my favourite thinkers!" makes me smile. I'd never even considered that. But in a good way, promise.

 

--

 

I've been reading The Inheritors by William Golding. It's wonderful how he manages to get Neanderthals' lesser intelligence across without being judgmental, condescending towards his audience, or resorting to cheap tricks. He just makes something as trivial as putting a log across water a difficult, mundane task for them, then phrases their cognitive processes in ways that make you realize the Neanderthals were less intelligent than Homo sapiens. I'm not far into it, because I'm catching-up on much, much needed sleep these days, but this far I recommend it.

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Yeah, The Giants is in English. The 1975 original print is out, but it has been reprinted as part of the Vintage Classics range. No Amazon listing so far, which is strange. Maybe it is a United States thing? This is the edition I have. I accidentally bought it twice (long story), so if it becomes rare I am prepared.

 

Le Clezio's The Book of Flights is next on my list.

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I just started reading Ellen Ullman's (infamous By Blood author) first book The Bug. It's a fictional story about a 1984 tech startup that borrows heavily from Ullman's own experience as a programmer. Personally, I really enjoyed By Blood, but I know it was one of the less popular Idle Book club picks. But The Bug doesn't seem to have any of the same issues that By Blood did, plus it's a really fascinating look at early computer programs. There's a completely bonkers scene where a programmer complains about this new mouse technology and how complicated the right click, left click interface is.

 

It's a worthwhile read, I think, for people who generally liked By Blood, but were maybe unsatisfied with the prose and the characters.

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Finished Wolf Hall last night. I have some thoughts but I'll wait until bookclub thread. I started "I Captured the Castle" by Dodi Smith on my partner's recommendation, and so far I'm totally charmed. It's really well-written and has a lot to say about reading, writing, and  (I think) philosophy, but it's also packed full of sympathetic characters put through amusing circumstances. 

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I read Edgar Allan Poe's "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" last night.

I was interested in it, and I love that style of mystery story. But... I can't lie, I was disappointed to find out who did it.

Not sure if this is necessary (it came out in the 1800s, I think the statute of limitations might be up on spoilers for it) but I'm putting it in tags just in case.

Anyways, I am fairly disappointed to learn that it was caused by some obscure animal not usually found in that area of the world. (In this case, the "Ourang-Outang"). I feel like it was a bit of a cop-out.

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