Books, books, books...

[juv3nal]

so I'm pretty sure I love 'S. or The Ship of Theseus'

http://www.amazon.com/S-J-Abrams/dp/0316201642

 

despite not being far into it at all. It's just such a lovely object, bursting with newspaper clippings, a decoder ring, all sorts of weird ancillary documents.

 

caveat: I am totally a sucker for gimmicky things, and it is gimmicky as HECK.

think a low grade mix of Pale Fire, A. S. Byatt's Possession, & Nick Bantock's Griffin & Sabine stuff.

 

It even has weird ciphers that people are trying to solve online.

 

edit: some more pics of the interior here

 

edit2: holy carp there's full on weird ARG stuff going on with alternate versions of chapters being delivered to bloggers.

[Dosed]

Yeah, that is one of the more interesting and difficult techniques that Mantel uses, although I came to love it. Cromwell is suffused in every scene, present but not always visible, even when talking or acting. It took me a few chapters to figure out, too.

 

I did think it was a very well used technique, but I'm really only starting to appreciate it. It does make it difficult to forget that the main character is actually Cromwell sometimes, and it makes you feel like you're sort of spying on these other characters, which I guess is what Cromwell himself is doing to a degree. I don't think I'll bother reading the sequel as I've heard it's not as good, and I wasn't particularly in love with Wolf Hall anyway. By the dubs does any one use Goodreads.com? 

[namman siggins]

I'm almost done with Black Moon

Calhoun does marvelous job writing about insomnia and the mystic of sleeping and dreaming and what happens when one and society loses the ability to sleep; there's almost an esoteric wisdom that sleepers (those rare who can sleep) carry when talking about sleeping and when viewing the insomniacs.

The book fumbles a bit when moving through characters (each chapter deals with 4 different characters) and Calhoun’s prose can get awkward and a bit cumbersome.

Other than those complains, I'm really enjoying this book.

[seamus2389]

I did think it was a very well used technique, but I'm really only starting to appreciate it. It does make it difficult to forget that the main character is actually Cromwell sometimes, and it makes you feel like you're sort of spying on these other characters, which I guess is what Cromwell himself is doing to a degree. I don't think I'll bother reading the sequel as I've heard it's not as good, and I wasn't particularly in love with Wolf Hall anyway. By the dubs does any one use Goodreads.com? 

 

I started using food reads a couple hears ago as a way to keep a record of the books I have read. It's good although you have to be spot on when searching for a book/author any results.

[mondryle]

Goodreads is a great "book Facebook" but anyone reading this who hasn't visited LibraryThing should give it a look. It's more of a database than a social site but I love its clean design and the recommendations it gives are phenomenal.

[agorman]

I just finished Stoner. Thank you, thank you, thank you to everyone on here who talked so highly of that book. First time in a very long while that I've been moved to tears while reading a novel. It won't be leaving me anytime soon.

[Dosed]

I just use Goodreads as an easy way of tracking what I've read. I also check out some of the reviews afterwards just to see what people have said.

 

I finished The Flamethrowers a week or so a go and I just couldn't really get away with it. There was some really beautifully written scenes, and I found the whole social rebellion aspect fascinating, particularly the Italian rebels, but I loved The Motherfuckers too. But over all I just felt like it was trying to be too clever. I'm not even sure if half of the artists mentioned in the book were real, but it sure did make me feel like an idiot when it mentioned someone's name and I'd inevitably never heard of them. It also touched on some Futurist stuff too, and they infuriated me when I studied them briefly at university. I'm pretty sure we were supposed to guess that

Sandro was cheating on her from the beginning, but I don't see how that's supposed to be interesting. It's just like a non-twist. I knew what was coming as soon as we met the guy, and the pay off was not worth it.

. 

[Argobot]

Sandro was cheating on her from the beginning, but I don't see how that's supposed to be interesting. It's just like a non-twist. I knew what was coming as soon as we met the guy, and the pay off was not worth it.

. 

 

The fact that this seems so inevitable and obvious is kind of the point though. Reno's relationship with Sandro is so transparently doomed to the reader, but Reno's inability to see what is really going on is what the book is about-- being young and having no clue what you're doing.

[Tanukitsune]

I recently finished "How to Be a Villain: Evil Laughs, Secret Lairs, Master Plans, and More!!!", which was ridiculously disappointing, it just covers the basic villain tropes that you already now if you would buy this kind of book and despite being so short on content, it feels like it has some filler or maybe the people who made it had no idea of what they were doing.

 

"OK, here's the chapter on Evil Laughs:

HAHAHA!
MWAHAHA!

DONE! Next chapter!"

 

The definitions are kinda painful.... like the lairs for example. No, book, the creepy forest is not a liar, it's a place were people have their lair! No, book, a dungeon is not a evil lair, it's PART of an evil lair.

 

I guess this was made for a quick buck and I fell for it, either that or it was done by evil genius who spent so much time working on their plans they forgot about their book deal, which is still a funnier concept than anything I read in that book.

[namman siggins]

Just ordered Gaddis's Carpenter's Gothic and I'm excited to read it. This is going to be my first William Gaddis book and I've been told this is where to start and then move on to J.R. & The Recognitions.

I'm now reading Goat Mountain by David Vann and its main characters are three generations of men (grand, father and son) and it deals with the aftermath of a horrible decision (his son shoots and kills a poacher).

Reading Goat Mountain has a Cormac McCarthy vibe to it: the exploration of violence, an almost biblical exploration of family dynamics, and using the landscape as a character that changes and mirrors our protagonists.

[Coods]

Back on the DFW grind with The Pale King. hoo boy.

[Argobot]

I recently finished reading The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides. There was a lot of talk when that book first came out, specifically about how the Leonard and Mitchell characters were seen as stand-ins for DFW and Eugenides. That reaction, plus a lot of very vocal negative reactions from female reviewers, kept me from reading this book until now. I cannot say for sure whether I liked this book or not, but I am very glad I read it. There's a lot about being a young, confused 20something that Eugenides gets painfully correct, but there's almost an equal number of things that made me cringe. For instance, I really dislike how male authors feel the need to constantly remind the reader of the female protagonist's preternatural beauty. It's clunky and immediately makes me suspect of what else I can expect from the book.

 

I would call this one of the more ambitiously flawed novels that I've read in the past few years, and that alone has made reading it feel worthwhile. Even though it didn't entirely win me over in the end, I still feel that Eugenides captured that bizarre limbo of post-adolescence, pre-adulthood. This book is also one of the few fictional stories where the ending's significance actually felt earned and significant, instead of feeling like an afterthought. This is a book that I personally wrestled with while reading, which is probably the best possible experience that you could ask for from fiction.

[Mangela Lansbury]

Just ordered Gaddis's Carpenter's Gothic and I'm excited to read it. This is going to be my first William Gaddis book and I've been told this is where to start and then move on to J.R. & The Recognitions.

 

Save JR for last. The way it's written makes it a bit difficult to approach, to say the least.

 

I've been trying to get into Tao Lin lately, but failing miserably. He has interesting ideas and characters, and I understand what he's trying to do with the monotonous, flat language, but... well, monotonous, flat language gets pretty uninteresting over the course of 250 pages. I think I'll just stick to his short stories after I'm done with Taipei. I don't think I can take another book written like this.

[Ucantalas]

So on Tuesday the Canadian author Farley Mowat passed away.

 

He wrote some good books. I remember reading "Owls in the Family" and "Lost in the Barrens" in school.

[agorman]

So after finishing Stoner about a month ago, its been stuck on my mind for quite some time. I was talking with a friend about it, who's currently reading it, specifically about the character of Edith. While I understand she was raised in a emotionally disconnected environment, and had her sexuality completely suppressed as she grew up, which I think makes her actions more understandable, she seems a little overly-characatureish....exisiting primarily to make Stoner's life more difficult. I know a few of you have read it, and are very positive about it, and I'd be interested to hear what you think about her character. 

Edit: Maybe this isn't the right thread to be asking this in. If so Ill move it elsewhere

[Argobot]

I go back and forth on Edith. For a book that does such a good job of showing how painfully mundane existence can be, Edith often felt like an unrealistically cartoonish character. It doesn't help that the student Stoner has an affair with is such an ideal opposite of Edith, almost like Edith was purposefully written to diminish the questionable morality of Stoner's actions. The book ends with the relationship between Edith and Stoner in a much better place than it had been for the entirety of their marriage, which is why I can't bring myself to fully condemn this character.

 

I'm never sure if I'm being too lenient or too harsh on how women are represented in fiction, and my inability to form a concrete opinion on Edith is just another example of that.

[Patrick R]

James Crumley's "The Last Good Kiss" is really really really good, despite the fact that his love of masculinity puts me a little on edge. Like, I get it, it's a detective novel in the style of Chandler, dames and square jaws and stuff. But man, this novel takes it so far.

 

But it's about as literary and character driven as you can ever hope a detective novel to be. And the road trip structure and settings are incredible. It's a really good book but I have the feeling that if I had a couple drinks with Crumley he'd end up calling me a faggot.

[Nappi]

So after finishing Stoner about a month ago, its been stuck on my mind for quite some time. I was talking with a friend about it, who's currently reading it, specifically about the character of Edith. While I understand she was raised in a emotionally disconnected environment, and had her sexuality completely suppressed as she grew up, which I think makes her actions more understandable, she seems a little overly-characatureish....exisiting primarily to make Stoner's life more difficult. I know a few of you have read it, and are very positive about it, and I'd be interested to hear what you think about her character. 

Edit: Maybe this isn't the right thread to be asking this in. If so Ill move it elsewhere

 

Edith was definitely my biggest problem with the book. She felt like some sort of ridiculous caricature to me for the majority of the book. Her portrayal book wasn't any worse than, for example, that of the damsels in the typical detective novels, but when contrasted with Stoner himself, it was quite distracting.

[Merus]

The Machine of Death collection is pretty damn good. You'd think it'd wear out its welcome, but they ran through the obvious permutations early on with what were clearly the best stories with that particular theme. A sizable chunk of the better stories don't have any predictions in them whatsoever, and are about dealing with the questions raised by the existence of a machine that tells you how you will die, with unerring accuracy. 

[JonCole]

I recently finished Terry Goodkind's Sword of Truth series, which I quite enjoyed for fantasy genre fare. The first book in the series, Wizard's First Rule, is included in the latest Humble eBook Bundle DRM-free (though, you have to beat the average for it) - https://www.humblebundle.com/books

 

Highly recommended! Also heard good things about The Alchemist in that bundle, might buy it mostly for that with the rest as a bonus.

[Twig]

I'm anti-recommending the Sword of Truth series. It's the worst fantasy series I've ever read by a long mile. God I hate it so much. Ugh. It's so fucking preachy. The first few books are like "all right this could be fun" dumb fantasy crap dumbness, which is great!, but then it devolves into Goodkind shoving anti-communism down your throat for the rest of the series.

 

Sorry. I fucking hate it. Sorry again.

[JonCole]

Wizard's First Rule doesn't get into that preachy stuff at all, it isn't until maybe the fifth or sixth in the series when it delves into that stuff. The first book, like many in series like this, can be read as a complete without needing to go beyond it if you're concerned. And calling it "anti-communist" may be true, but Goodkind's message is slightly more nuanced than something so blunt as damning a socioeconomic system completely.

[Twig]

I think his message is pretty goddamn blatant and straightforward. I also forgot to mention the sheer hatred he presents for pacifism. ANYWAY. Yes, the first book is fine. There's a reason I read the whole series. The first book is fine. The second and third book are fine. It gets worse and worse and by the end I was reading out of spite.

But whatever. You're free to like what you want! I hate it so so so much. It should've ended at the first book, with maybe a few more chapters to wrap things up. Dang.

 

I'll stop now. Thinking about the series makes me BOIL WITH RAAAGE and that's reason enough for me to walk away now.

[osmosisch]

Sword of Truth is basically an objectivist manifesto by the time the Pillars of Creation book rolls around. That's where I quit in disgust. The first was OK, barring the gratuitous sex/torture stuff.

[Mangela Lansbury]

Sword of Truth is basically an objectivist manifesto by the time the Pillars of Creation book rolls around. That's where I quit in disgust. The first was OK, barring the gratuitous sex/torture stuff.

 

If the gratuitous sex stuff bothered you, I really don't know how you could make it through an entire book named Blood of the Fold. (sorry, the really terrible inadvertent pun of that title still entertains me more than a decade later)

 

I've been laid up for a few days, so I've gotten some reading done. Mostly just pulpy light books, but I'm finally getting around to reading some Arno Schmidt. I've really enjoyed his short stories so far, but the way he throws around punctuation marks like they're going out of style (I guess he just felt colons were underutilized or something since he just throws them in at seemingly random places) will probably end up driving me away. The content of the writing is great, but his style. Oof. I love experimental fiction and it's still grating on my nerves.