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| # | cover | title | author | isbn | isbn13 | asin | num pages | avg rating | num ratings | date pub | date pub (ed.) | rating | my rating | review | notes | recommender | comments | votes | read count | date started | date read |
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date purchased | owned | purchase location | condition | format | ||
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| 9781939987051
| 4.00
| 5
| Dec 01, 2012
| Apr 01, 2013
|
I'm the publisher of this book! Longer essay on the reasons I signed it coming soon!
| Notes are private!
| none
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1
| not set
| Apr 02, 2013
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Apr 02, 2013
| Hardcover
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| 4.61
| 31
| Jan 01, 2012
| Jul 2012
|
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C...more
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.) Chicago-based Heiko Julien is part of that whole young super-duper-indie lit crowd that includes Tao Lin, Jordan Castro, Megan Boyle and more, who I'm really fascinated by precisely because they make me feel so freaking old; I like to imagine all of them hanging out on a Tuesday night at some loft party I'll never get invited to, wearing '80s sweatbands and doing coke with app developers who moonlight as supermodels. I mean, that's certainly how Julien's latest short book I Am Ready to Die a Violent Death comes off, as if you have stumbled into some real-life Wes Anderson movie, which to be clear I mean as a good thing; his writing is so sharp as to sometimes be incomprehensible, and so ridiculously self-deprecatory that you think it might actually be coming full circle and making fun of you, and that you're just too stupid to catch on. I mean, here, look...  Right? I don't know what the f-ck to do with a page like that, writing that is not quite prose and not quite poetry but a sorta drunken Twitter hybrid of the two; so I guess I'll just sit back and enjoy the ride, even though a lot of it goes over my head so fast as to give me windburn. It's like this with all these writers I just mentioned, which is what makes them simultaneously so controversial and so popular among the hipster-lit crowd in Brooklyn and at HTMLGiant; and so that makes it easy to both make fun of and take seriously Julien's work, depending on what mood you're in, because you sense that it might just be the next big wave of the arts, and that you should perhaps be a little threatened by that fact. And hey, you'll at least finally be in on some underground thing a lot sooner than it took you to catch on to the Harlem Shake. You sad, old loser. Out of 10: 8.0, or 9.0 for fans of experimental literature(less) | Notes are private!
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1
| not set
| Mar 06, 2013
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Mar 06, 2013
| ebook
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| 0062122681
| 9780062122681
| 4.03
| 399
| Jul 10, 2012
| Jul 10, 2012
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(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C...more
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.) I know a number of the people involved with this book, so it wouldn't really be ethically right for me to purport to do an "objective" review of it; but I at least wanted to make a mention of it here at the blog, mostly because it finally came up to the top of my to-read list last week, after first entering way back in July. (July! Shame on me! I am so sorry to all you authors that it's taking me so long to get through your books right now; but we're about to start bringing on additional reviewers soon, so we'll finally be getting that list whittled down to size before too long.) Anyway, this is an anthology of all-new work by some incredibly impressive writers, and edited by genre heroes Sam Weller and Mort Castle, all in honor of the recently passed Ray Bradbury, a Chicago-area native (for those who didn't know) who had one of the most interesting and varied literary careers of the entire Mid-Century Modernist era. And indeed, I think a big reason why it was so easy for Weller and Castle to attract the likes of such heavy hitters as Margaret Atwood, Dave Eggers, Harlan Ellison, Neil Gaiman, Joe Hill, Alice Hoffman, Kelly Link, Audrey Niffenegger, Joe Meno, Bonnie Jo Campbell and a lot more is precisely because Bradbury had a career that was so hard to define, a man who dipped his influential toes into horror, science-fiction, crime, Young Adult, even hippie weirdness without ever being trapped in one or another, and I think it's natural for writers to be inspired by this and want to occasionally do some Bradburian walking off the beaten path themselves. It's such a fitting and loving tribute because it's so smart and dense on its own, and Weller and Castle are to be commended for putting together one of the most entertaining compilations I've read in a while. It comes strongly recommended. Out of 10: N/A(less) | Notes are private!
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1
| not set
| Jan 24, 2013
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Jan 24, 2013
| Paperback
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| 0312420110
| 9780312420116
| 3.51
| 213
| Jan 01, 1967
| Jun 01, 2002
|
(As of summer 2012, a first-edition copy of this book is being sold through the rare-book service at the arts organization I own, the Chicago Center f...more
(As of summer 2012, a first-edition copy of this book is being sold through the rare-book service at the arts organization I own, the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com/rarebooks]. Here below is the description I wrote for its listing.) Known affectionately by her fans as "The Dark Lady of American Letters," like many writers the late Susan Sontag is almost equally known for her personality, celebrity and controversial views as for her varied body of work itself. A serious academe even at an early age, who had logged in time at the University of Chicago, University of Paris and Oxford all by 25, Sontag was known as a distinctly European-style intellectual who spent her life championing the challenging countercultural writers of that continent; celebrated mostly for her heady critical essays, among other achievements she was the person to coin the word "camp" as a positive term for "so bad it's good," a virtual pillar of the entire Postmodern era, plus came up with an entirely new way for us to envision the relationship between photography and us as its subjects and viewers, an obsession that even bled into Sontag's personal life, in that this notorious bisexual was romantically involved with famed photographer Annie Liebowitz for the entire last decade of her life. But despite all this, interestingly Sontag primarily considered herself a novelist, odd to realize given that she only wrote four of them in her long career, two near the beginning and two near the end. 1967's experimental Death Kit was the second, and only the third book of her career overall, after 1963's similarly groundbreaking The Benefactor and the essay collection Against Interpretation in 1966, considered one of her most famous books because of containing the aforementioned "camp" essay. And indeed, there's a lot to be said for one online reviewer's sum-up of Death Kit as "what Kafka would've written if he had been a '60s hippie;" after all, Sontag always saw her formative years in continental Europe as the most important period of her life, the years when she first fell in love with Kafka himself and other cutting-edge Modernist European artists, a love that would not just stay with her the rest of her life but in many ways help define her in the eyes of American audiences. A sometimes nonsensical, dreamlike tale just dripping with symbolism throughout, it is perhaps the story of a pissy corporate executive who loses his temper one evening on a delayed commuter train, manages to sneak off the stopped train, in a fit of rage kills the wisecracking employee trying to clear the tracks, and sneaks back on board without anyone noticing, spending the rest of the story in an existential cloud of guilt and deep thoughts; or maybe none of this actually happened, and what we're really watching is our unreliable narrator experience a complete snap from reality "American Psycho" style. In any case, there is also Diddy's sexual obsession with an easy blind girl to contend with, the travails of his microscope-manufacturing job, and all kinds of tangents to be had about the nature of humanity, the slippery definition of "truth," and all kinds of other Big Issues. A book almost guaranteed to go up in value as the years continue, this a must-have for those interested in the history of countercultural intellectual thought, as well as Postmodernist literary history in general.(less) | Notes are private!
| none
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1
| not set
| Jul 25, 2012
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Jul 25, 2012
| Paperback
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| 1597803944
| 9781597803946
| 3.79
| 34
| Feb 01, 2012
| Feb 06, 2012
|
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C...more
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.) This technothriller by W.G. Marshall posits a well-worn idea at its core (a freak accident turns a couple of people into six-thousand-foot-high giants, at which point all hell breaks loose), but easily elevates itself above most other stories of this kind by taking an ultra-realistic and scientifically accurate look at just what such an occurrence might actually be like in the real world; so not only are our normal-sized heroes battling the giants themselves, but also the now human-sized and unstoppable bacteria that was on these people's skin when the transformation took place, the airplane-crashing waves of superheated air that come with each exhalation by the giants, not to mention the simple challenge of trying to communicate with a creature whose ear alone is the size of a skyscraper, making even the most powerful amplifier ever made effectively non-comprehensible. So as such, then, readers shouldn't expect anything above Jerry Bruckheimer level in terms of characterization and plot; but I have to admit that I found this to be a real rollicking delight anyway, merely from the pure audaciousness of its mundanely disgusting details (ugh, igloo-sized piles of dandruff, UGH) and the breakneck speed in which it introduces these details. A strong contender for CCLaP's Guilty Pleasure Awards at the end of this year, it comes strongly recommended to Michael Crichton fans and other lovers of simply-told but fantastically imagined what-if stories. Out of 10: 8.8(less) | Notes are private!
| none
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1
| not set
| May 03, 2012
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May 03, 2012
| Paperback
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| 1621050203
| 9781621050209
| 3.66
| 93
| Mar 01, 2012
| Mar 01, 2012
|
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C...more
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.) Regular readers will remember Midwestern bizarro author Patrick Wensink, whose previous titles Sex Dungeon For Sale! and Black Hole Blues have both been reviewed here in the past; and now his latest and most ambitious is here, the booze-fueled rock-and-fast-food trippy comedic saga Broken Piano for President. Although let's be clear right away, that this is simply going to be way too silly for a lot of people's tastes, a sort of grown-up fairytale about a grizzled music veteran, JFK conspiracies, world-dominating burger franchises locked in mortal combat with each other, and a lot more; but for those who do consider themselves fans of the decidedly underground literary subgenre known as "gonzo fiction" (think Douglas Adams combined with psychobilly music, filtered through a six-year-old who's been given a sip of beer at a family reunion and now won't stop screaming poop jokes), Broken Piano is absolutely on the high end of the gonzo scale, a well-done piece of dark wackiness that will be adored by the same people who enjoy getting wasted and going to Monty Python midnight screenings. Sure, it got panned terribly at Publishers Weekly, but it was still a bizarro novel from a basement press that managed to get reviewed at Publishers Weekly; and that should tell you everything you need to know about the relative strengths of this book within a genre that is usually fairly weak, a foul-mouthed charmer that comes with a strong but limited recommendation, only to those who think in advance that they might enjoy such work. (You know who you are!) Out of 10: 8.0, or 9.5 for bizarro fans (less) | Notes are private!
| none
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1
| Apr 25, 2012
| Jul 12, 2012
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Apr 25, 2012
| Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
| 4.38
| 21
| Apr 23, 2012
| Apr 23, 2012
|
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C...more
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.) APOLOGIA: A deliberately all-positive, consciously biased critical essay, usually written to convince others to believe a certain way To understand in a nutshell what I like so much about Chicago author Lauryn Allison Lewis's work, let me relate a little story about her that I'm sure she doesn't like me repeating -- that when we were first putting the promotional material together for her new novella with the center, the apocalyptic fairytale solo/down, she admitted that she was uncomfortable with me comparing it to a David-Cronenberg-style "body horror" tale, in that she's hardly read any books that usually fit that definition and frankly isn't much of a fan of the horror genre in general. But it's precisely because Lewis doesn't read much horror that solo/down works so well as a unique and unexpected horror story, a statement that can be applied to her writing in general; that in her determination to carve a niche out for herself and her idiosyncratic writing style, she often does a great job at accidentally churning out really original genre tales too, even while already in her young career strongly following the tradition of people like J.G. Ballard and Thomas Pynchon in creating literally a one-person genre for herself. (In fact, if I hold real still, I can already hear the stoned undergraduates of twenty years from now, calling their classmate's new piece very "Lewisian.") Certainly this was on display in Lewis's more experimental self-published 2011 chapbook The Beauties (coming out next year in full novel form by our pals at Silverthought Press), the Chicago hipster must-have of last summer which made such a splash among the local literary community; but here with solo/down she's trying something a little different, not exactly following the rules of a certain trope but at least seeing if she can work within the universe of certain tropes, most notably the mad scientist story. Because that's ultimately what this is, buried under all the complexities we'll get to in a bit, the sociopathic scientist in question fueled more and more in this direction because of a hazy, ill-defined apocalyptic moment that has happened before our story opens, an unnamed series of events that has left acid in the rain, too much junk in the clouds for plants to get adequate sun, and a swarm of semi-intelligent "battle bugs" that have devastated America's crops. Our bleeding-edge botanist Amse, then, along with her doting assistant Jin, are recruited or perhaps kidnapped by a shadowy organization (maybe the government? maybe a private corporation?) and placed alone in a crumbling former 300-employee vaccine-making compound from the 1930s in the middle of nowhere, charged with conducting unholy experiments in combining plant and insect DNA to produce crops that can violently defend themselves against attackers. It's here where the "body" part of our body-horror tale kicks in; because after deciding that she wants to experience for herself the ultimate alchemistic act -- pregnancy -- and after having Jin artificially inseminate her, a lab accident ends up mixing together this hybrid DNA with the now twin embryos in her womb. And while I'll leave the rest of the complicated series of events a surprise, let's say that Lewis gets a lot of mileage out of very cleverly exploring what is usually the cliche of the "evil twin," and that there's a level of blood and disaster at the end that will keep even the most fervent Fangoria reader happy. But then, let's not forget that an entire two-thirds of this story is not about this but something else entirely; the mysterious Solo, that is, not quite an angel and not quite a demon, not exactly benevolent but not exactly malevolent either, and the magical, mystical, explanation-defying things that happen when it decides to get involved with our dysfunctional little family and the increasing amount of danger they're facing. That's what makes Lewis's work such a challenge sometimes to edit but always such a pleasure to read, is that she refuses to ever take the easy way out; everything from her plots to her characters and even themes are always big, messy, chaotic, and not proscribing to the usual rules of either a particular genre or even the three-act structure in general. I saw all of these things in The Beauties, which is why I commissioned her a year ago to write the brand-new piece that would eventually become solo/down; but in this case I was particularly interested in building some tighter walls around that explosive creativity of hers, under the belief that something interesting would inevitably come from the process. I like to believe that something has, and I hope that you will grow to feel so too, and to eventually see this book as I do, as one of the most unique titles that CCLaP has ever put out and bound to be strongly remembered for a long time by all who read it. If you haven't downloaded a free copy for yourself yet, I encourage you to do so as soon as you have a chance. (less) | Notes are private!
| none
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1
| not set
| Apr 25, 2012
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Apr 25, 2012
| ebook
| |||||||||||||||||
| 1616145358
| 9781616145354
| 3.81
| 414
| Jan 10, 2012
| Jan 24, 2012
|
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C...more
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.) This is the third volume now of Mark Hodder's steampunk series, in which the real-life Victorian explorer Richard Francis Burton and libertine artist Algernon Swinburne fictionally team up for a series of adventures in an alt-history 19th century, and nicely illustrates the problem with missing the first title in such a series when it comes to following along with the rest; for while I didn't seem to have much problem following along with the second volume, The Curious Case of the Clockwork Man, mostly I suspect because it didn't contain much background material about the first volume, this third chapter contains just a huge infodump about the book that started it all (The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack, that is), a complicated backstory that involves time travel, multiple possible histories, and a sacred prehistoric meteorite that holds the key to the far-future quantum mechanics that are causing all the space-time-hopping messes in the first place (or, um, something like that), and I have to confess that I had a hard time simply trying to keep up with all the complex exposition. (Also, series fans, be aware that Hodder seems to have grown tired of the entire premise of Swinburne playing Dr. Watson to Burton's Sherlock Holmes, and that this third volume is mostly a Burton adventure with a few drunken wisecracks by Swinburne randomly thrown in here and there.) Granted, this universe is a much more original and creepy vision than most steampunk novels, the main reason to read the books in the first place -- in particular I really love the idea of genetic engineering being mastered long before electronics, so that the streets and skies are filled with giant dead bugs whose hollow exoskeletons are used as industrialized human vehicles -- but I also have to confess that by not getting hooked on this series from its start, I'm finding it increasingly difficult with each new volume to stay emotionally connected to the proceedings, the problem in a nutshell with all these endless so-so series that sci-fi publishers love putting out. It should be kept in mind when deciding for yourself whether or not to pick up a copy. Out of 10: 8.2(less) | Notes are private!
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1
| not set
| Apr 12, 2012
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Apr 12, 2012
| Paperback
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| B007IOH42S
| 4.27
| 22
| Mar 09, 2012
| Mar 09, 2012
|
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C...more
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.) I don't know if it's been simple mistakes I've been experiencing recently, or if the public is having a harder and harder time telling the difference, or if it's a case of publishers trying to eat their cake and have it too, but it seems lately that I've been receiving a growing amount of review books specifically marketed to me as grown-up titles, when after reading them I've realized that they are actually Young Adult at best, or even juvenilia at worst. I mean, take Michael Panush's The Stein & Candle Detective Agency, Volume 1 for example, which I know for a fact was publicized as adult fiction when first pitched to me at the electronic ARC service NetGalley.com, because I just checked again right this second and it's still listed there as such; but after reading just the first few stories in this blam-blam alt-history serial actioner, I came to realize not only that it's something only an overly caffeinated thirteen-year-old boy could love, but that it even sounds like an overly caffeinated thirteen-year-old boy wrote it, a cartoonishly immature thriller in which a whole series of easy cliches (steampunk, private eyes, Nazis, '50s biker gangs, vampires, etc) are haphazardly stirred together into a muddled, unsatisfying stew, and then garnished with the kinds of jokes you might hear at a junior-high-school talent show. I'm not sure whether to be more troubled by the fact that this was thought to be appropriate to pitch to me as a middle-aged reviewer of exclusively adult fiction, or that this would indeed be appropriate anymore with an alarmingly high number of genre-fiction litbloggers; and while I agree that it's unfair to single out Stein & Candle for this entire phenomenon, this is certainly the first time that I've specifically stopped and thought out loud, "This was glaringly inappropriate to publicize to someone like me, and it really bothers me that the publisher has received justification from our arrested-development culture at large to do so anyway." Buyer beware. Out of 10: 6.4(less) | Notes are private!
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1
| Mar 18, 2012
| Jul 20, 2012
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Mar 18, 2012
| Kindle Edition
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| 0345534417
| 9780345534415
| 3.55
| 2,695
| Jul 01, 2012
| Jul 10, 2012
|
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C...more
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.) To tell you the truth, about a month now after I first finished this book, I just now had to re-look at the manuscript just to remember what it was about; and that should give you a good idea of this book's inconsequential nature, competently done but bound to be quickly forgotten by the culture at large. One of those funny "bizarro" authors who uses over-the-top scenarios to comment on some ultra-trendy issues, this story sees the rest of the galactic community finally discovering the presence of Earth, specifically by becoming obsessed with Earth music which is thousands of times better than their own, but then getting bogged down into a universe-collapsing crisis over exactly how much money they owe Earth lawyers for the trillions upon trillions of illegal downloads the universe has unwittingly perpetrated. Well done for what it is but awfully silly nonetheless, it comes recommended to hardcore fans of, say, Douglas Adams or Monty Python. Out of 10: 8.1(less) | Notes are private!
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1
| Mar 05, 2012
| Jul 05, 2012
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Mar 05, 2012
| Hardcover
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| 0316608459
| 9780316608459
| 2.94
| 452
| Mar 01, 2012
| Mar 26, 2012
|
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C...more
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.) It would not be off the mark to call Mark Leyner the "King of the Bizarro Authors," given that he is one of the only practitioners in the whole country of this "Monty Python meets Psychobilly" subgenre to regularly score lucrative contracts with large mainstream publishers, and to be featured in such national media outlets as Entertainment Weekly. And now after a long hiatus, he's finally back with a new novel, the appropriately absurdist The Sugar Frosted Nutsack; and after reading through this latest inspired piece of weirdness, it's easy to see why he's the undisputed king of this particular genre, because the pure sense of imagination that Leyner brings to the table far outstrips almost anything that almost any other American bizarro author is writing these days. Ostensibly about a group of ancient gods that are still around to meddle in human affairs, now living in a penthouse apartment at the top of a Dubai skyscraper, like most bizarro novels this is merely chapter-one window-dressing so that the marketing people have something to write on the dust jacket, with the story quickly expanding so to eventually be about everything in the world and nothing all at the same time, a gloriously chaotic wallowing in the pure joy of language itself, a proud literary tradition that (with a little squinting) can be directly traced all the way back to G.K. Chesterton at the end of the Victorian Age. Granted, this is a bawdy and hyperactive version of Chesterton, but I believe that proto-nerd would highly approve of the work of Mark Leyner; and so will fans of Douglas Adams, Will Self, David David Katzman and Hunter S. Thompson, a clever stream-of-consciousness fairytale that's best experienced by passing it quickly from one ear through the other, and letting the burningly unique images seer a tattoo on the back of your psychic retinas. Out of 10: 9.0, or 10 for fans of bizarro fiction (less) | Notes are private!
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1
| not set
| Jul 20, 2012
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Mar 04, 2012
| Hardcover
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| 4.50
| 2
| May 08, 2012
| May 08, 2012
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(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C...more
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.) As I've said here before, usually when a book falls under the category of "bizarro," you can reasonably expect the literary version of a wacky 1940s Warner Brothers cartoon; but sometimes the results can actually be quite different than this, as evidenced most recently in John Oliver Hodges' disturbing yet memorable novella War of the Crazies, a book just as strange as any other gonzo tale you might come across, but rooted much more in the realities of actual day-to-day life. Taking its cue off such '70s groundbreakers as Midnight Cowboy, Hodges begins by assembling a group of characters who feel like they could exist in the real world, yet if they do undoubtedly live in one of those freakish shadow societies in America that the rest of us "normals" are always getting mere glimpses of, during episodes of Cops or YouTube videos of Juggalos -- there's the mentally challenged Ruth, for example, the lesbian sexual predator Silva, and the bizarre Jewish hoarder and spiritual sugar-daddy Noyo, making up the core of their dysfunctional little "family" -- and then plunks these characters down into a situation that certainly seems realistic, yet is so weird and disturbing that it can't help but feel like a derelict funhouse at times, in this case the three of them (plus various other hangers-on) living their curious lives within the confines of a dilapidated, crumbling house in the middle of the rural wilds, a sort of anti-commune that much like the abandoned house in Fight Club seems to encourage the evermore disturbing behavior of our characters hothouse-style, the point not really being to follow the loose plot but rather to wallow in the semi-sympathetic, semi-damning portraits that Hodges paints of these desperate lumpen-proletarians. A dense yet quick read that kept me legitimately absorbed until the very end, despite the lack of a strong storyline, this is the very definition of engaging alternative literature, and those who are curious to see what contemporary writers are doing away from the usual three-act structure of long-form storytelling would be wise to pick up this dark yet blackly humorous thought-provoking tome. Out of 10: 8.6(less) | Notes are private!
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1
| not set
| Feb 22, 2012
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Feb 22, 2012
| Paperback
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| 1936383330
| 9781936383337
| 3.92
| 24
| Oct 24, 2010
| Oct 24, 2010
|
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C...more
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.) I never quite know what to say whenever a book like Tony Rauch's Eyeballs Growing All Over Me…Again comes in, because it seems that there are so many things stacked against its chances of being memorable; it's a collection of unrelated stories to begin with, never a good thing as far as trying to be distinctive, not just a genre book (horror) but filled with very typical genre tropes, with only workmanlike dialogue and plots that seem to come and go before they've even had a chance to sink in. So in other words, not a bad book, but certainly a very typical mediocre one; and that's how the majority of the books that are sent to me end up being, which I suppose is why such books virtually define the term "middle of the road." If you're a horror or bizarro fan with a large sense of curiosity, definitely I encourage you to pick up a copy, although otherwise you can pretty safely skip it. Out of 10: 7.5(less) | Notes are private!
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1
| Feb 05, 2012
| Mar 22, 2012
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Feb 05, 2012
| Paperback
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| 1841493341
| 9781841493343
| 3.77
| 5,183
| 2003
| Feb 03, 2005
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(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C...more
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.) I recently had the chance to acquire every single book ever written by trippy sci-fi author Charles Stross, and so have decided to spend the year actually reading and reviewing them here for the blog; and I've decided to read them in chronological order, too (or, the general books by chronological order, then take on the themed series one at a time), which means that first up is his 2003 novel debut Singularity Sky, which along with his other early classic Accelerando are the ones that really first established him as a major genre force, and that helped cement the cliche of the SF "British Invasion" of the early 2000s. And so that's what makes it an even bigger shock than normal to find out that the novel is not a serious-minded brainteaser, like I think of whenever I think of the other Stross novels I've already read, but rather a very funny absurdist comedy along the lines of late-period Robert Heinlein. Not actually a story about Ray Kurzweil's famous theory of the "Singularity" (that is, the moment in the future that computers gain sentience, and thus usher in a new blazingly fast era for humanity where the mechanical and the biological blur into unrecognizable forms), the novel instead takes this Singularity moment as its historical start, and the fact that humans quickly figure out how to time-travel, at which point a mysterious alien force known as the Eschaton literally create a human diaspora to stop such development, by taking 90 percent of Earth's population and magically scattering them on various inhabitable worlds across the cosmos, these people now free to develop whatever kinds of societies they want but with "the big E" stepping in again whenever a "law of causality" is about to be broken, doing things like wiping out entire star systems to ensure that these stupid hairless apes don't accidentally erase the universe's existence. Our actual tale, then, takes place hundreds of years after the events just described, when this scattered humanity have formed an endless series of different governments, tech capabilities, and even corporeal forms; to be specific, it's the story of a race of post-human creatures known as "The Festival" who exist mostly as forms of pure information as they travel the cosmos, who literally create new fantastical bodies whenever they stop at a new star system, then proceed to create a kind of benevolent chaos in that new system for awhile (the actual "Singularity Sky" of the book's title), swapping unheard-of technology for new info about the universe from that new system before finally getting their fill, dumping their temporary bodies, and taking off again for yet another century-long flight to the next habitable system, in this case the recipients being a militaristic quasi-fascist colonial dictatorship who shun technology and who clearly resemble the Bush administration that was in power when this novel was first published in the US. As always with Stross, this is a lot of infodump to take in at once, with the above recap only scratching the surface of this expansive storyline, and with my promise that the whole thing becomes much clearer once you read the actual book; but like I said, the biggest surprise is that Stross plays all this mostly for laughs, a sort of ridiculous adventure tale about a backwards military that purposely builds outdated tech into their warships for the purpose of "tradition," and who then tries to fight a conventional war against a group that can barely fathom what the concept of "war" even is, and who are so technologically advanced over their opponents that they see the traditional battles as little more than you or I swatting at a pesky fly on a hot summer day. I know this all sounds a bit disjointed in a small write-up like this, but trust me when I say that the whole story when written out is a comic masterpiece; and it's easy to see why this made such a big splash when it first came out, after a 1990s that saw perhaps the lowest point of SF in its entire history. It comes highly recommended, and needless to say that I'm looking forward to the next book on the list, 2004's Iron Sunrise which just happens to be a direct sequel to this volume. (less) | Notes are private!
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| not set
| Jan 18, 2012
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Jan 18, 2012
| Paperback
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| 0983208077
| 9780983208075
| 4.03
| 33
| Apr 15, 2012
| Apr 17, 2012
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(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C...more
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.) I recently joined a new service called NetGalley.com, an internet startup that aims to be the tech-savvy middleman between publishers who are handing out electronic ARCs (advance reading copies) and independent reviewers like me who are seeking out such ARCs; and this was the very first title I requested through the service, because it sounded like something right up my alley, a thriller about an old German movie from the 1920s that mysteriously appears on the doorstep of the filmmaker's granddaughter one day, after decades of assumptions that every copy had long ago been destroyed, which supposedly through flashback form was also going to explore the heady days of the Weimer Republic in that country, a brief window between the world wars in which radical liberals were put in charge of the government and experimental art was allowed to flourish in a way that few industrialized nations had seen before or have witnessed since. But alas, in reality this turned out to be more like The Historian meets The Da Vinci Code, two novels I've actually read in the past and have despised in both cases, a lazy exercise in empty name-dropping (hey, look, everyone, our narrator is talking to Fritz Lang! Oh, and now he's talking to Leni Riefenstahl!) that much like Forrest Gump only mentions these people merely to be mentioning them, not to give us even the slightest insight as to what it must've been like to be an artist within such an exciting, apocalyptic time in history (instead, see something more like Berlin Alexanderplatz); and with go-nowhere modern scenes that seem to exist only as a cheap framing device for introducing the flashbacks in the first place, until veering into ridiculously silly territory in the third act with the introduction of a shadowy Opus-Dei-type cabal of European cinema scholars slash professional assassins, who even in the 21st century go around destroying subversive films from the 1920s and killing the people who have seen them so that NO ONE WILL EVER KNOW THE AWFUL TRUTH (or, er, something like that). The kind of book that tries to convince you you're in Germany by occasionally having characters slip in "gut" instead of "good" in their English conversations, this is exactly the kind of hacky, dumbed-down mess I expressly try to avoid here at CCLaP, and I hope it's not an early sign that NetGalley is to become the place where mainstream presses dump their unreadable crap on an unsuspecting pool of amateur litbloggers. It does not come recommended. Out of 10: 3.3(less) | Notes are private!
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1
| Jan 14, 2012
| Feb 29, 2012
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Jan 14, 2012
| Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
| 193555428X
| 9781935554288
| 3.53
| 263
| Jan 25, 2011
| Jan 25, 2011
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(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C...more
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.) By all laws of the current literary market, the comedic novels Spurious and Dogma by philosopher Lars Iyer (comprising two-thirds of an as-yet unfinished trilogy) shouldn't really exist at all, and it's a testament to the suddenly hot Melville House that they've not only published them, but have been promoting the newest with all the pomp and resources usually afforded only to Stephen King potboilers; for these are not traditional novels nearly as much as they are the spiritual grandchildren of Samuel Beckett, absurdist and cyclical tales where the point is not really to see "what happens" but rather to wallow in the abstract pleasures of language itself. Comprised as a series of conversations between a philosopher who just happens to be named Lars and his doppelganger and frenemy known only as W., and with the story details grounded in just exactly enough reality to seem plausible (they live on opposite sides of Britain; W. has recently become a Malcolm-Gladwell-type popular public prognosticator; Lars is experiencing a mysterious mold problem in his house that threatens to take over the entire building), readers will nonetheless get quickly frustrated if expecting such silly things from these books as a plot or character development; instead, this is more like getting a glimpse of what it must be like inside the head of a college professor while they're in the middle of having a nervous breakdown, a series of funny yet sometimes impossible-to-follow rants and arguments between the two that reference as many obscure thinkers and experimental artists as Family Guy does '80s television shows (and many times just as randomly). I agree with a lot of other critics I've come across, that I immensely enjoyed these silly yet high-falutin' comedies, but can't imagine another human being who will as well; and for that many unrelated strangers to say the same thing is a powerful statement indeed, and makes one understand why the publisher has put such a big promotional push behind what's essentially the very definition of idiosyncratic writing. As you can tell, it takes a special type of personality to enjoy these books; but if you're already a fan of such things as Waiting for Godot and A Confederacy of Dunces, you owe it to yourself to at least take a stab at these frustrating but ultimately satisfying head-scratchers. Out of 10: 8.8(less) | Notes are private!
| none
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1
| Jan 11, 2012
| Feb 29, 2012
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Jan 11, 2012
| Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
| 1612190464
| 9781612190464
| 3.99
| 97
| Feb 21, 2012
| Feb 21, 2012
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(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C...more
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.) By all laws of the current literary market, the comedic novels Spurious and Dogma by philosopher Lars Iyer (comprising two-thirds of an as-yet unfinished trilogy) shouldn't really exist at all, and it's a testament to the suddenly hot Melville House that they've not only published them, but have been promoting the newest with all the pomp and resources usually afforded only to Stephen King potboilers; for these are not traditional novels nearly as much as they are the spiritual grandchildren of Samuel Beckett, absurdist and cyclical tales where the point is not really to see "what happens" but rather to wallow in the abstract pleasures of language itself. Comprised as a series of conversations between a philosopher who just happens to be named Lars and his doppelganger and frenemy known only as W., and with the story details grounded in just exactly enough reality to seem plausible (they live on opposite sides of Britain; W. has recently become a Malcolm-Gladwell-type popular public prognosticator; Lars is experiencing a mysterious mold problem in his house that threatens to take over the entire building), readers will nonetheless get quickly frustrated if expecting such silly things from these books as a plot or character development; instead, this is more like getting a glimpse of what it must be like inside the head of a college professor while they're in the middle of having a nervous breakdown, a series of funny yet sometimes impossible-to-follow rants and arguments between the two that reference as many obscure thinkers and experimental artists as Family Guy does '80s television shows (and many times just as randomly). I agree with a lot of other critics I've come across, that I immensely enjoyed these silly yet high-falutin' comedies, but can't imagine another human being who will as well; and for that many unrelated strangers to say the same thing is a powerful statement indeed, and makes one understand why the publisher has put such a big promotional push behind what's essentially the very definition of idiosyncratic writing. As you can tell, it takes a special type of personality to enjoy these books; but if you're already a fan of such things as Waiting for Godot and A Confederacy of Dunces, you owe it to yourself to at least take a stab at these frustrating but ultimately satisfying head-scratchers. Out of 10: 8.8(less) | Notes are private!
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1
| Jan 11, 2012
| Feb 29, 2012
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Jan 11, 2012
| Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
| 4.05
| 203,908
| 1865
| 1946
|
The CCLaP 100: In which I read for the first time a hundred so-called literary "classics," then write reports on whether or not they deserve the label...more
The CCLaP 100: In which I read for the first time a hundred so-called literary "classics," then write reports on whether or not they deserve the label Essay #63: Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871), by Lewis Carroll The story in a nutshell: Written in 1871, six years after the original, this sequel to Alice in Wonderland is designed to be yet another piece of nonsensical, absurdist storytelling, picking up soon after the first book left off and this time with Alice stepping through a large mirror to reach Lewis Carroll's notorious funhouse alt-universe instead of falling down a rabbithole. As such, then, there's not much of a three-act plot to actually convey, but rather a series of silly, unconnected adventures presented vignette-style, although with it important to note that Carroll designed these adventures to often relate to the original book in clever, symmetrical ways -- so while Wonderland uses playing cards as its main theme, deploys changes in size as a frequent plot device, and opens on the spring day of May 4th, Lookingglass uses chess as its main theme, deploys changes in time as a frequent plot device, and opens on the autumn day of November 4th. The argument for it being a classic: You frankly don't find a lot of people arguing specifically for Lookingglass as a standalone classic; but certainly there's a lot of people who think that the two short Alice books should actually be considered one long volume, and that such a volume should absolutely be in the standard canon of classics. And that's because Carroll came along at just the right precise moment in history for something like this; a long-haired bohemian when younger who was best friends with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood of painters, this movement's obsession with pre-Renaissance fairytales and the like came right when British children were becoming literate by the tens of millions for the very first time, when Sigmund Freud was profoundly changing the way we thought about dreams and the subconscious mind, and when organic forms based on nature were all the rage in architecture, theatre, and interior design. Carroll's delightfully bizarre and precious stories exactly scratched an itch that a wide swath of the population had, elevating the quality of children's stories beyond the simple-to-memorize folk tales they had mostly been before, and tapping into a mania for fantasia that would eventually blossom into the trillion-dollar "fantasy" genre we have today. The argument against: Just like its supporters, this book's critics become so mostly predicated on whether you consider Wonderland and Lookingglass two smaller volumes or one larger one; because if it's the former, they argue that the second book can't possibly stand up to the greatness of the original, and in fact can often come across as tired and wearying when reading both books in a row. Other than that, about the only other argument you find against Carroll online is simply that his writing style is overhyped, and that even though the Alice books can be entertaining to be sure, perhaps it's best not to call them undisputed classics that every person should read before they die. My verdict: So let's just admit that today is one of those days when one of my original rules regarding this essay series is coming back to haunt me -- basically, to avoid as much as possible books I've already read, because of the CCLaP 100 mostly coming about in the first place as a way of getting myself better educated as a book reviewer. So while it would've been easy to declare the original Wonderland a classic if I had been reading that (which like most Americans I seem to have almost completely memorized by now, because of all the endless adaptations that have come out since), this becomes a lot more problematic when it comes to the sequel, because except for a few highlights (the "Jabberwocky" poem, the walrus story that inspired the Beatles song), Lookingglass is clearly inferior in both originality and lasting cache, and it's hard to argue for its classic status when such a better volume is laying there right next to it. But still, there's as equally a strong argument that it was Lookingglass that actually cemented the reputation of both books -- after all, Wonderland was passionately loved when it first came out but only by a cult audience, with it not being until the sequel that both books finally caught on with the mainstream -- so I guess it doesn't really hurt to count the two as one larger volume, certainly something that Carroll himself would've wanted you to do too. And when you do that, it's nearly impossible to deny the cultural importance Alice has had to society, a story collection that not only upped the sophistication of children's literature in a huge way but that has sparked the imagination of literally every generation since, its id-inspired creatures standing in over the decades for everything from British political issues to psychiatry to the countercultural mindset. Although just Wonderland will do in a pinch, I encourage you to instead read both these quick reads if you're going to be tackling one of them anyway, the first so you can say you did and the second so you'll actually get some original stories you've never heard before. Is it a classic? Yes, but only if you consider both Alice volumes to be one larger whole (And don't forget that the first 33 essays in this series are now available in book form!) (less) | Notes are private!
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| not set
| Jan 11, 2012
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Jan 11, 2012
| Hardcover
| |||||||||||||||||
| 1621050068
| 9781621050063
| 4.22
| 36
| Nov 03, 2011
| Nov 03, 2011
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(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C...more
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.) As I've said here many times before, although I'm a fan of so-called "bizarro" or "gonzo" fiction, I also acknowledge that even under the best of circumstances, the subgenre takes some getting used to; after all, many of the stories that fit into this category are not much more than nonsensical dream transcripts with some random sex and violence thrown in for good measure, with not even an effort made to fit in a three-act plot but rather existing as a sort of literary form of a wacky old Warner Brothers cartoon. For example, take Michael Allen Rose's Party Wolves in My Skull, the latest title from Eraserhead Press's "New Bizarro Author Series;" its premise is not much more than that one day, a man's eyeballs stage a coup and run away from his body, leaving two holes to his brain that are promptly taken over by a series of microscopic, pot-smoking feral wolves (or maybe "frat-boy wolves" would be the better term), who essentially wreak havoc on our narrator because of him unable to see what kinds of nefarious things they're actually doing. Deliberately silly and gross, like many of the titles in this series, its fans already know who they are; but for the rest of you, a strong stomach and a high suspension of disbelief is encouraged. Out of 10: 7.5(less) | Notes are private!
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1
| Jan 08, 2012
| Feb 15, 2012
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Jan 08, 2012
| Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
| 1770460519
| 9781770460515
| 3.83
| 1,381
| Jun 2004
| Oct 11, 2011
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(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C...more
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.) It was just a month or two ago that I was reviewing Daniel Clowes' Mister Wonderful, lamenting that little wisp of a story and declaring how much I was looking forward instead to his next major masterpiece; and now it's here, in the form of a giant oversized hardback called The Death-Ray, although with "new" perhaps not being the best term, in that this is actually a reprint of a 2004 issue of his idiosyncratic comic book Eightball. Nonetheless, this sees Clowes in the same brilliantly dark, surrealist form as such past classics as David Boring and Like A Velvet Glove Cast in Iron, telling the story of a nerdy, antisocial teen and double orphan in the mid-1970s who discovers that his dead father committed bizarre genetic experiments on him as a child, granting him superhuman abilities every time he smokes a cigarette but also an uncontrolled rage to go along with it; the story itself, then, is partly about what a sociopathic loner like him might actually do with such powers, partly about his "Ghost World"esque loser best friend as he transitions from heavy metal and dysfunction to punk rock and relative normalcy in those same years, and partly what can only be called the most deconstructionist take Clowes has done yet on the entire subject of visual storytelling in the first place (and this from a guy who spends a lot of time thinking about the conventions of the comic-book format), the story itself hopping back and forth between different styles and color palettes in order to set different emotional tones for different scenes, and Clowes brilliantly adding context to dialogue by sometimes literally cutting voice bubbles halfway off with the edges of his story frames. A fantastic treat for existing fans, and a great starting point for those unfamiliar with his work, like a lot of artists throughout history a conservative President in power seems to do wonders for Clowes' artistic output, with him churning out classic after classic during the Bush years but now in a seemingly constant flounder since Obama got elected in 2008. An absolute must-read for all of CCLaP's readers, and a book that will very likely be making my best-of lists at the end of the year. Out of 10: 9.6(less) | Notes are private!
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1
| not set
| Nov 30, 2011
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Nov 30, 2011
| Hardcover
| |||||||||||||||
| 1616143673
| 9781616143671
| 3.62
| 140
| Jan 01, 2011
| Jul 26, 2011
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(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C...more
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.) Regular readers will remember last year's Ghosts of Manhattan, from genre veteran and Doctor Who scriptwriter George Mann, and how I found it only so-so when originally reviewing it myself; and now its sequel is out, Ghosts of War, which I decided to go ahead and read as well, partly because a copy was nicely sent to me by our buddies at Pyr and partly because I've always suspected that I didn't give the first volume a fair shake. And indeed, the good news is that this "Art Deco Steampunk" actioner came off this time as much better than the original, I suspect partly because both Mann and myself have grown more into these characters and setting; for those who don't know, it's set in an alt-history 1920s New York, in which a Shadow/Batman-style crimefighter is assisted by lots of fanciful tech gear, while facing complications not from German spies but ones from a still-strong and now antagonistic British Empire, who has been locked into a cold war of sorts with the US for decades on end by now. Of course, in my defense, it's also clear that this sequel is simply better than the original as well, and very specifically addresses some of the problems that I mentioned about the first book; for example, while I found what Mann actually did with this milieu in the original to be rather uninspiring, this time he comes up with a real corker of a dilemma, one I'll let remain a surprise but let's say ties in nicely with the work of HP Lovecraft, who in real life was writing his best-known stories right in these same years. Essentially more of the same but now just a little sharper, a little brighter and a little smarter, it comes recommended to both traditional steampunk fans and aficionados of Early Modernist noir serials, a rousing thriller that stands strongly against the Victorian setting where most of these types of novels are usually placed. Out of 10: 8.4(less) | Notes are private!
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| not set
| Oct 20, 2011
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Oct 20, 2011
| Paperback
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| 1569479755
| 9781569479759
| 3.59
| 408
| Aug 23, 2011
| Aug 23, 2011
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(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C...more
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.) So before anything else, let me caution my fellow New Weird fans that Chicagoan Alex Shakar's Luminarium is not the trippy sci-fi novel that its cover, jacket copy and breathless Dave Eggers blurb promise it to be, and that those picking it up expecting it to be such are going to be severely disappointed, especially by the "anti-trick" ending that provides a rational explanation for all the bizarre things that happen before it. If what you're looking for, however, is an extremely clever and well-done character-heavy look at the zeitgeist of the Bush years, seen through the filter of such mid-2000s cultural detritus as virtual worlds, New Age mythology and the Disney-owned town of Celebration, Florida, then this Believer favorite is going to be right up your alley; because of all the 9/11 novels I've now read, this is arguably the best of them precisely because it takes such a sideways look at the subject, essentially sneaking up on the issue by instead concentrating on the co-founder of a Second-Life-type MMORPG that's been co-opted by Homeland Security, who rapidly unravels after starting to receive what seems like a series of otherworldly online messages from his comatose twin brother, while simultaneously participating in an academic neurological study that may or may not be slowly granting him psychic powers. Full of all kinds of wonderfully nerdy details sure to delight any metaphysical tech-head (for one great example, the '70s Cray supercomputer that one brother gives the other as an elaborate joke gift, which is then turned into the online-startup "Prayerizer.com" that will send billions of pleas to God per day on your behalf for a nominal fee), but combined with the kind of quirky character-building details that MFAers are always on the lookout for (like the main character's habit of still performing in cheesy magic shows for children's birthday parties with his stoner hippie dad), Shakar almost magically manages to pull together these and dozens more widely scattered references into one coherent whole by the end, ultimately delivering a profound message about the schism between faith and technology in a world of 3D avatars and planes slamming into skyscrapers. Although the book definitely has its problems, which is why it isn't getting a higher score today -- I would've liked to have seen less academic stream-of-consciousness, for example, and more Chabonesque action scenes, such as the wickedly great section where our punch-drunk hero rampages through the headquarters of his startup's new corporate masters -- Luminarium is nonetheless well worth your time, but only for those prepared to enjoy it for what it is instead of being disappointed for what it's not. It comes recommended in that spirit. Out of 10: 9.0(less) | Notes are private!
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1
| Oct 07, 2011
| Nov 30, 2011
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Oct 07, 2011
| Hardcover
| |||||||||||||||
| 1841496472
| 9781841496474
| 3.48
| 233
| 2010
| Jan 01, 2010
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(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C...more
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.) This book has been getting a lot of play recently from some unusual sources for being put out by a mainstream science-fiction publisher, and the reason becomes obvious once you read it; because although containing some fantastical elements, this is mostly a very astute political thriller that deals with a lot of issues from our own times all the way back to the Nazi era, and even way back into antiquity. The story of a young Scottish female computer programmer originally from "Krassnia," a fictional former Soviet republic that sounds like it's supposed to be located right around where the Victorian Age's Crimean War was fought, the tale is a complicated one involving the ancient half-myth history of the region, a secret about the area that the Russians have been hiding from everyone else since World War Two, a modern "Arab Spring" style uprising that may or may not be taking place there soon, and whether or not the CIA may or may not be helping this revolt along by commissioning the creation of a local-language "World of Warcraft" style MMORPG, that actually exists as a safe gathering place for protestors to make their plans, and which may or may not accidentally actually reveal the location of this giant secret that everyone is trying to get their hands on, because of the videogame's terrain being based on an old out-of-print hippie guidebook to the area's folklore penned by our hero's mother in the countercultural '60s, to cash in on the "Lord of the Rings" craze going on at the time. Whew! It's a lot to take in, but Ken MacLeod does it with a lot of aplomb and humor, making this much more Graham Greene than Ben Bova; and kudos to Lou Anders and Pyr for taking on this hip, ripped-from-the-headlines title to begin with, and expanding their scope beyond the steampunk, urban fantasy, and other traditional fan favorites that they're mostly known for. A hard-to-classify book that will generate a lot of passion from its fans, this is one of the rare genre tales here at CCLaP to get a score in the 9s, and it comes happily recommended to a wide general audience. Out of 10: 9.2(less) | Notes are private!
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| not set
| Jan 18, 2012
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Oct 03, 2011
| Hardcover
| |||||||||||||||
| B005EH5W7U
| unknown
| 3.73
| 15
| Jul 24, 2011
| Jul 24, 2011
|
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C...more
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.) The more bizarro novels I end up reading here at CCLaP (not by choice but because of so many bizarro authors specifically sending me their books, I think because of a reputation I've picked up in their circle for being kind to bizarro authors), the more I'm realizing that even among this most original of genres, there are still certain running themes that repeat among a whole series of these books, a lot of them first established by groundbreakers so long ago that their followers might not even know they were the originators. For example, it's becoming clear just how much the entire bizarro genre is defined solely through the work of early gonzo pioneer Kathy Acker, and how many of these books take on the same general Acker premise for their own; that is, an adherence to a general fairytale trope that already exists (pirates, ogres, Alice in Wonderland) but then filling that trope with details that are truly transgressive, which for those who don't know the difference is not just subversive (i.e. challenging the system) but actively celebrates things that many others find repulsive. This is all essentially a long preamble to my look at August V. Fahren's Thursday Thistle, because that's essentially what the book is -- an Ackeresque transgressive fairytale but with the author I'm not sure even being aware of Acker's work, which I think says a lot about just how common this has become within the world of bizarro fiction, of taking Grimm-like conceits about Little Red Riding Hoods then raising the stakes to a ridiculously adult degree. As such, then, certainly it's a well-done book just on its own, and a great introduction to the genre for those who are new to it; but it will try the patience of those already well-read in this genre, and be actively disappointing to existing obsessive fans of Acker herself. And in the end, I guess that makes it kinda middle-of-the-road in general, which is why it's getting a middle-of-the-road score today. Out of 10: 7.9(less) | Notes are private!
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1
| Sep 19, 2011
| Nov 30, 2011
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Sep 19, 2011
| Kindle Edition
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| 0765329468
| 9780765329462
| 3.88
| 1,468
| Sep 01, 2011
| Sep 27, 2011
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(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C...more
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.) Regular readers will of course already be familiar with Cherie Priest's remarkable steampunk series known as "The Clockwork Century;" back in 2009 I reviewed the first volume Boneshaker (best described as Victorian zombies meet Doom-style videogame in the bowels of subterranean Seattle), while last year I took on Dreadnought, in which we follow a souped-up locomotive as it winds its way across the Great Plains, deals with a now two-decade-long Civil War, and confronts giant iron military robots. And now we have the third novel in the series, Ganymede, which has yet another impossibly engaging hook to hold together its rambling plot: it's the story of this alt-history's very first submarine, built and lost by the Confederates, rediscovered by a black female brothel owner in New Orleans who secretly works for the Union, salvaged and piloted by a burly zeppelin owner whose usual job is shipping smuggled goods, and with the whole situation complicated by the Texas Republican Army, defiant pirate guerrillas, and shadowy Chinese entrepreneurs. And indeed, as you can see, there's a good reason that a growing number of people are starting to call this perhaps the greatest steampunk series in the history of the genre*; and that's because with each volume, Priest squeezes in several novels' worth of flabbergasting ideas, making each story expansive as hell while still keeping a tight control over the three-act structure. (And please realize, by the way, that it's not just these three novels that make up this series, but also a handful of standalone stories and novellas, plus a comprehensive website.) One of my favorite genre novelists working today, and a fangirl who walks the walk just as well as her readers (her cosplay convention outfits are almost as famous as the books themselves), Ganymede comes with a strong recommendation, and is the exact kind of title for those who only read one steampunk book a year. Out of 10: 9.0, or 10 for steampunk fans *Well, okay, it's hard to beat the steampunk novel that started them all, William Gibson and Bruce Sterling's The Difference Engine; but still. (less) | Notes are private!
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| Nov 02, 2011
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Sep 02, 2011
| Paperback
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| 1439184461
| 9781439184462
| 3.65
| 3,179
| Jan 01, 2011
| Oct 04, 2011
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(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C...more
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.) So yes, after reading the abysmal Downtown Owl a few years ago, I infamously declared here that I would never read a Chuck Klosterman book again; and indeed, I would've never read this latest of his, The Visible Man, if it had not randomly shown up on the "New Releases" shelf of my neighborhood library on an exact day when I was perusing it. But now that I have, I'm sure glad I did, because the book is something I thought Klosterman incapable of; this is Klosterman quite convincingly reinventing himself, shedding his Postmodernist, Gen-X skin precisely by writing a book that stabs that skin to death, sets the corpse on fire, then sh-ts all over the ashes. And to explain that better, I need to go into a little literary theory of mine, which I've gone over here before but will do again, because I find it naturally interesting; and before I start, let me acknowledge that it's an unproven theory that a lot of people don't agree with… The basic crux is that I and a lot of others believe that Postmodernism officially died on September 11th; and by "officially" I mean "symbolically," because as with any cultural movement, Postmodernism actually changed only gradually over a period of a few decades, with us as humans making order out of the chaos by arbitrarily picking important dates in those periods to serve as beginnings and endings of such eras. And just like how the last couple of decades of Modernism, the 1950s and '60s which you can also call "Late Modernism," can be further broken up into "Beat" writers, "Pop" painters, "New Wave" filmmakers and more, so too can the last few decades of Postmodernism (or "Late Postmodernism," the 1980s and '90s) also be broken into subdivisions like "Generation X" writers, "Brat Pack" actors, "grunge" musicians, "Deconstructionist" architects, etc. These are the unfortunates of any given era, because the tropes of that era are so well-known by then, the last artists of that movement can only achieve fame through cartoonish exaggerations of them; and although many of them push through to become the groundbreakers of the next era, that group of creatives in general tends to get blamed for driving that era into the ground for good, and for necessitating the cultural shift to the new era in the first place. And so that means these artists must basically all reinvent themselves in the middle of their careers, or become passé faster than a three-year-old rerun of American Idol. And so some Postmodernists like Douglas Coupland and Bret Easton Ellis successfully did so, becoming relevant to a whole new generation by trying to strip all the cool irony and empty pop-culture references of Late Postmodernism from their work, by embracing genre conventions sometimes and wallowing in earnestness others; and then some people like Augusten Burroughs or James Frey simply didn't, and their quasi-true, quasi-BS smartypants '70s-laced gimmicky shtick started getting real old real fast the moment the World Trade Center was destroyed. And this new era too can be given a name, which some call The New Sincerity and some Post-Irony and some simply Post-9/11 Literature or the 21st Century Arts; it's really up to history to determine which terms like these stick, and especially right now when things are so new that no one's in agreement about any of it yet. And so for a long time did I think Klosterman was going to fall into this latter camp, of essentially gimmicky hacks who were never able to transcend the gimmicks that gave them successes right at the end of the Postmodernist period, much like all those trendily popular "Genteel" writers of the early 20th century, huge in their own time but now nearly forgotten because of the ascendancy of Early Modernism in those same years; and especially after the bitter failure of his full-length fiction debut, Downtown Owl, which had been hyped as his opportunity to break out of the endless clever-but-empty essays about heavy metal and breakfast cereal and celebrity interviews that his entire nonfiction career had so far been based on, but which turned out to be more like a 200-page Chuck Klosterman article but even more quirky and precious than his journalism work, if such a thing is possible. But with The Visible Man, Klosterman has done something very smart indeed, and what a lot of Postmodernists have ended up doing as a transition into Sincerism (see for example Eric Bogosian's Perforated Heart, which has the same device at its core), which is to announce the death of Postmodernism but through a highly original, highly symbolic metaphor, a sideways look at the subject but which ultimately says more about them as '80s and '90s artists than the subject matter might indicate at first. So in this case, Klosterman wrote a literal psychological horror tale, with a premise that feels very much like it could've been an early David Cronenberg film; basically, an Asberger's-suffering sociopathic genius manages with military resources to invent a suit/gel combination that effectively turns a person invisible (or that is, the cutting-edge micro-lenses contained in the gel that's smeared over the suit has the almost magical ability to bounce back all light to a viewer as the images directly behind the suit itself), then becomes obsessed with silently observing people in their homes for days on end, to back up his nihilistic thoughts about the worst of human behavior, pumping himself full of amphetamines to stay awake and suppress his appetite, slowly turning himself crazier and crazier with each successive experience. And so part of the book is written as a series of direct monologues from this literal mad scientist, polished things that feel the most Klostermanian and I assume were the first parts the author wrote; but then perhaps realizing that he needed something more to hold it all together, part of this is written from the standpoint of the psychologist who our unnamed narrator Y. starts seeing, a highly confrontational relationship where the doctor is able to parlay all the critical things about Y.'s character that Y. himself would never be able to acknowledge through first-person monologues. And that's smart of Klosterman to do, and shows a legitimately profound jump in maturation for him as a writer; because the Klosterman of Fargo Rock City would've been happy with just the polished monologues themselves, and The Visible Man would've again been a clever but ultimately empty book like all his others, and we wouldn't have had a chance to explore this fascinating character in a much more complex way, or for Klosterman to be able to make some really critical comments about Y. himself, for example just how troublingly polished these monologues of his precisely seem, as if the patient had pre-written these glib anecdotes and then memorized them all for the benefit of the doctor during their sessions. And that gets into what I was talking about before; that on top of this being a literal simple genre tale, it's also easy to argue that on a deeper level, this is an autobiographical novel as well, Klosterman angrily rejecting the over-analytical pop-culture-obsessed celebrity-interviewing cartoon character he had become by the early 2000s, literally by turning that persona into a borderline-psychotic villain. And the reason it's easy to argue this is that Klosterman himself throws all kinds of little clues into the mix that point in this direction; for example, there's the fact that so many of these monologues sound like Klosterman essays in the first place, or the moment that Y. directly compares what he does to the job of the average celebrity interviewer, the aspect that lazy journalists have most picked up on this fall when talking about the book. But there's also a whole series of smaller digs that he gets in, such as when the doctor asks why Y. doesn't just write a book about his experiences instead of relaying them vicariously through combative therapy sessions, and he responds that "everyone seems to hate it when I try writing down my stories," and that he doesn't know what gets lost in the writing process that remains when he's simply talking about it to someone else. Make no mistake -- The Visible Man's narrator is deliberately designed to be unsympathetic to the point of sometimes being despicable, with the Victorian-style story-framing very early on hinting at a grand tragedy to end it all; and whenever our psychologist hero (not coincidentally the most earnest, sincere character to ever appear in a Chuck Klosterman book) complains about Y's overuse of empty pop-culture references, his haughty intelligence combined with manic bouts of self-loathing, his habit of stilted, one-sided "conversations," and his mocking intolerance for anyone who doesn't agree with his grandiose theorizing, I think it's very safe to assume that Klosterman is not only talking about the worst parts of himself at the same time, but just in general about the aspects of Late Postmodernism that had most turned it into an eye-rolling parody of itself right at the popular height of Klosterman's early career. Like I said, after Downtown Owl I had thought Klosterman incapable of career-redefining insights like these; so I'm glad to see that I was wrong, and now officially again look forward to his next books down the pike. Although definitely still with its problems, which is why it isn't getting a higher score today, A Visible Man has a lot to teach us about the ways our entire culture is changing here early in the Obamian Age, and it comes strongly recommended to one and all. Out of 10: 9.1(less) | Notes are private!
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| Oct 20, 2011
| Dec 07, 2011
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Aug 27, 2011
| Hardcover
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| 0307593312
| 9780307593313
| 3.79
| 47,554
| 2010
| Oct 25, 2011
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(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C...more
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.) It was an ex-girlfriend in the 1990s who introduced me to the early work of Haruki Murakami, which has made me a big fan ever since; so needless to say that I've been looking forward to the English release of his massive new epic 1Q84, a three-book sensation in his native Japan which was released as a literal thousand-page tome here in the US last October. But alas, after finally finishing it last week, I became acutely aware of just how long it's been since I've stayed abreast of his latest work (besides the slim After Dark from 2007, I haven't actually read any of his new books since 1997's life-changing The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle); because not to put too fine a point on it, but 1Q84 is f-cking terrible, and it makes me wonder now if Murakami has been slowly devolving over the early 2000s to this terrible point, or if this is yet another case of an aging writer deciding that he's going to write his Grand Unforgettable Saga and then simply not being up to the task. Essentially a short story padded out to twenty times its natural length, it tells the intertwined tales of a number of people in 1984 Tokyo as they are affected by a group of malicious spirits known as The Little Ones: there's the serially raped teenage-girl runaway from an apocalyptic cult that gets its cues from these spirits, for example, who has written a tell-all book about her experiences disguised as a Murakamiesque bizarro tale; there's the young novelist who was secretly hired to turn this raw manuscript into a mainstream-friendly book, which has now become a huge bestseller; and then there's his old childhood sweetheart who he hasn't seen in twenty years, a gym instructor who also happens to be a professional assassin, charged by her rich, elderly client with killing only men who abuse women, and making it look like a natural death so that the battered wives will receive the full amount of the life insurance. And granted, that's a very Murakami-sounding setup, especially when you add such strange random details as emergency stairs on the side of an elevated highway that lead to an alternative universe, magical cocoons made out of thin air that contain soul-dead doppelgangers of ourselves, and sexual obsessions over things like big ears and balding men. But instead of weaving this together in his trademark memorable way, which in his '80s and '90s work feels like you're glimpsing some sort of Grimm-like grand cultural mythology that's been mostly forgotten over the centuries, Murakami here plods forward with no subtlety as if he were writing some supermarket-aisle horror potboiler; and then what makes this turn from merely bad to freaking intolerable is what I said before, that the story itself is so thin that most chapters exist solely and exclusively just to get across one single plot point (you know, like a bad JJ Abrams television show that makes you sit through an hour of mediocre crime drama each week, just so that you can learn officially one more thing about the show's mysteries in the last thirty seconds); and with Murakami maintaining the infuriating habit over an entire thousand pages of having a second character literally repeat every single line a first character is telling them, literally so that he can double the length of the book without having to come up with double the story. (Or to misquote The Simpsons: "The key to comedy is repetition." "The key to comedy is repetition?" "The key to comedy is repetition!") And meanwhile, what was promised to be complex references to the concepts introduced in George Orwell's 1984 amounts basically to a couple of characters every hundred pages or so remarking, "Hey, have you ever read George Orwell's 1984? That's a weird book, isn't it!"; and sadly, this book also continues the troubling tradition among contemporary Japanese literature in general of coming up with creative justifications for including scenes of graphic rape of teenage girls (in this case by arguing that the teenage girls being raped here are actually ghosts, and it's okay to write fetishistically detailed ten-page descriptions of teenage girls being raped when they're ghosts!). A book that would've actually been okay if not so-so if published as 200 pages, it's unforgivable at a thousand, and its breathless embrace by the academic world simply proves once again just how full of sh-t the academic world is. The good news is that this novel has inspired me to put The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle on reserve at my local library, so I can read it again for the first time in fifteen years and see whether my twentysomething memories of it have been playing tricks on me, a review of which will be coming later this year; but the bad news is that, anyway you look at it, 1Q84 is a major and bitter disappointment from what used to be one of the most clever and original writers on the planet, and it does not come recommended. Out of 10: 6.9(less) | Notes are private!
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| Apr 05, 2012
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Aug 27, 2011
| Hardcover
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| 0141183047
| 9780141183046
| 4.55
| 4,919
| 1982
| Dec 31, 2002
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(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C...more
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.) This was recommended to me by a friend of mine, Chicago bizarro author David David Katzman, specifically because of the growing influence it's apparently having these days on all lovers of the surreal; because for those who don't know, Fernando Pessoa was sort of the Portuguese version of Franz Kafka, a white-collar worker in Lisbon during the Early Modernist era of the 1910s through '30s, who barely published anything during his own lifetime but left behind over 25,000 pages of brilliantly obtuse work after his death. In fact, this particular novel wasn't even published for the very first time until 1982, which is why it's only now in the 2000s that it's starting to have a wide global influence for the first time, the pieces left by Pessoa in such a fragmented state that modern editors weren't sure what order the snippets should even appear. As you can imagine, then, this leaves the reading experience as a challenge to say the least, but a deeply rewarding one for the dedicated lover of experimentalism who can stick with it for the entire thing, as Pessoa weaves together observation with introspection, served with a healthy dose of cutting-edge style; and it's for sure destined to eventually become just as much a landmark of Early Modernist experimentation as T.S. Eliot or even Kafka himself. It comes recommended to those looking to expand their knowledge of this period of literary history, as well as fans of modern bizarro and gonzo fiction. (less) | Notes are private!
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| Aug 03, 2011
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Aug 03, 2011
| Paperback
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| 1936383519
| 9781936383511
| 3.88
| 24
| May 19, 2011
| May 19, 2011
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(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C...more
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.) Because I end up reading so much of it (because of the authors in this subgenre having such strong professional networks over at such lit communities as Goodreads.com), I can attest that there are generally two types of so-called "bizarro" fiction that exists, a style equally known by the terms "gonzo" and "strange;" there is the type of odd that's literally like a text cartoon, obtuse and non-narrative and that only appeals to a niche crowd, and then there's the type of odd that gets you a writing job on a Sam Raimi Saturday-afternoon television show, a much more preferable type of odd simply for being more entertaining, which usually succeeds by taking a realistic concept for its core and then hanging a bunch of surreal elements off it. Take for example Patrick Wensick's Black Hole Blues (a writer I've reviewed before), which can be actually fairly well described by the simple phrase "Raising Arizona meets quantum physics," a dual storyline about twin brothers who respectively become a world-famous country musician and a pioneer at Europe's Large Hadron Collider, and how it becomes clear that the pair's pasts are actually complexly entwined after a sudden artificial black hole at the LHC threatens to end all life on the planet. Odd as that may be, it's still pretty easy for most audience members to at least comprehend, a storyline that at least adheres to the normal rules of time and physics; and so that's what lets Wensink add some truly bizarre details to the throwaway moments, such as the delightful chapters narrated not by the grizzled country star but his actual guitar, disgusted at the fat, soft old man the singer has become, and lamenting the days when he got more sex than any of the other guitars that would go out back then on their giant '70s arena tours. That kind of crap is hilarious, without us necessarily losing track of what's going on in our main plotline, which much like Douglas Adams' "Hitchhiker" books is the exact kind of bizarro I like best; like all gonzo comedy, it's not for everyone, but definitely is one of the ones you should pick up if you're only going to try one of these types of books this year, a rollicking story that will intensely appeal to all the Monty Python fans and Comic Book Guys of the world. Out of 10: 8.7, or 9.7 for fans of bizarro (less) | Notes are private!
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| Jun 24, 2011
| Jul 22, 2011
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Jun 24, 2011
| Paperback
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| 1601830041
| 9781601830043
| 3.43
| 14
| Jul 01, 2008
| Jul 01, 2008
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(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C...more
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.) I confess -- I so love the guilty pleasure of enjoying a book more than I probably should that I dedicate an entire best-of list to the subject here at the blog at the end of every year; and there's not much better of an example of what I'm talking about than John H. Sibley's Bodyslick, which to be clear is not much better than mediocre in actual quality, but that boasts a high concept I found irresistible, essentially day-after-tomorrow science-fiction meets blaxploitation film, set in a gritty futuristic Chicago and with there being not a single stereotype of "urban fiction" ever invented that Sibley doesn't love. And indeed, to be fair, in relative terms to the other kinds of projects in this vein, Bodyslick actually isn't bad at all, with writing that's essentially on par with, say, the average episode of the cheesy cable thriller Burn Notice, another big guilty pleasure of mine; but even while we can acknowledge something like Burn Notice as a lot of fun, we also must acknowledge that it's simply not that good from a technical aspect, something that's important to note with Bodyslick as well if you want a chance of enjoying it for what it is. A book that probably should've gotten a lower score than it's getting, but that got bumped up a little merely from Sibley's always gleeful embrace of over-the-top melodrama (and yes, I admit, half a point extra just for that outrageous front cover as well, which made me warmly laugh every single time I pulled it out in public this week and caught the looks of all the people around me), this is not only an official product of Vibe magazine's publishing wing but also feels many times like what The Boondocks' Aaron McGruder would come up with if hired to write a parody of Vibe magazine's publishing wing, and it comes specifically recommended to those who enjoy reading with tongue firmly in cheek. Out of 10: 7.8(less) | Notes are private!
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| Jun 24, 2011
| Jul 22, 2011
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Jun 24, 2011
| Paperback
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