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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 |
date
 |
date purchased | owned | purchase location | added to swap | condition | format | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| B005SCR5R6
| unknown
| 3.00
| 1
| Apr 10, 2012
| unknown
| 
| None
| Notes are private!
| none
| 0
| Feb 21, 2012
| not set
|
Feb 21, 2012
| Kindle Edition
| |||||||||||||||
| 1933929111
| 9781933929118
| 3.90
| 10
| Apr 20, 2007
| Apr 20, 2007
| 
| None
| Notes are private!
| none
| 1
| Feb 18, 2012
| Feb 21, 2012
|
Feb 18, 2012
| Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
| 098215125X
| 9780982151259
| 4.30
| 103
| Oct 01, 2010
| Nov 02, 2010
| 
| (insert my usual preamble about my eh-ness about short story collections) That said, again, this book has some of the problems I normall...more (insert my usual preamble about my eh-ness about short story collections) That said, again, this book has some of the problems I normally have with short story collections, but there is a difference. Where too many authors have story collections that end up blending into what is basically the same story just told a bunch of different ways with some different characters and things happening and they might all seem different on the surface they are just treading on the same ground. See for example the suburban / familial angst authors, or the great but basically unhappy, drunk and smoking stories of say Raymond Carver, or the set something up so that there can be a ironic O. Henry-esque twist sort of story. These are just a few types, the science fiction story can be thrown in here, the George Sauders-esque surreal story, the edgy drinkin' druggin' fightin' & fuckin' of the Bukowski descendants, etc. It's not the authors fault that so many collections have stories that just blend into one another, it's just that they have this authorial voice and well it's the same voice in most of the stories, even if sometimes they are holding something in front of their mouth to get it to sound a little different. This collection isn't like that. Matt Bell takes on a variety of different types of stories, he takes from different genres and while there is a 'voice' that runs through most of these stories, it feels like each story is an attempt at doing something formally different. The tone of most of the stories is fairly bleak, the world either the whole world, or just the personal world of the characters seems quite often on the brink of total destruction, but how he gets to these points varies. When an author keeps trying new things though sometimes some of the attempts are going to fail with certain readers (well with me, maybe you will love all the stories. Maybe you will hate them). When the collection is at its low points the reading isn't unenjoyable or tedious, it's just more of a why do I care about this? But since they are only short stories and I have a fairly decent attention span I can keep going through twenty pages of I'm not really loving this, I can't get into this, or whatever goes on in my head when I'm reading something that isn't fully engaging without getting angry at the book for not delivering one hundred percent pure unadulterated Entertainment. To be fair, the stories I liked least were the ones, I didn't get. The ones that didn't seem to have an opening for me to squeeze understanding into. I'm not always the best reader, I read sometimes in less than optimal conditions, like squeezed into a subway car during rush hour, so it's quite possible I could have enjoyed the stories more if I gave them more attention. Sometimes, too, the stories that I wasn't enjoying too much for say the first half or more came together in a satisfying way towards the end. But why dwell on the negative? This collection has some really great stories in it, and they are worth reading this book to get to. I just took a short break from writing this review to leaf through the book, and I realized that I liked more of the stories than I thought I did. Even ones that I thought were only so-so when I first read them, looking back at the titles and leafing through the pages I realized that they almost all had some great moment, and with the longest (and maybe most so-so story) clocking in at just under forty pages, it's an impressive feat that there are so many awesome moments in such a small number of pages (13 stories, 238 pages). Why can't I be one of those reviewers who do a great job with short story collections? Why can't I muster up the energy to review each story? Why must I just turn every review into a tedious exercise of vomiting everything insignificant thought I have onto the page to be posted unedited? Fuck. Still with me? My favorite story in the collection is probably the last one. Which surprises me a little bit because it's not really a story in the traditional sense. "An index of How Our Family Was Killed" is just what the title promises, it's an index about a family of five that has had three of its members murdered, separately. It's an index of trying to understand what happened and how to continue surviving when you're part of a family that has a tendency to get killed violently. Insurance, policies, as in, Good luck getting one, if you're me. They never tell you that being from a family of murder victims is a risk factor, but it is. The whole 'story' is just an alphabetical list of what could be the index for a personal dealing with tragedy. It's a list composed with what I kept thinking of as an Oulipo sort of constraints, it's alphabetical and it manages to unfold a story through mere pointers that generally destroy the rule of show don't tell, it tells just enough to spark the imagination to make up its own narrative to support this index. At moments when reading this I was amazed at the construction, maybe I was giving the formal aspects too much credit, and maybe these entries could have been jumbled up in any order and basically done the same thing, but I like to think that there is a careful unfolding here and there is a part of me that loves shit like this, just because it's tough enough to tell a good story, it's even more difficult when you have to tell the story plus keep everything within some narrow range of what you can or can't do. Most of the other stories are more traditional than this one, quite often they have some post-modern or meta-fiction playing around going on, but they could be looked at by an average reader and be recognized as a story. I'm really sorry I'm not the sort of reviewer who reviews each story in a collection, I think this book does deserve that kind of treatment, but I'm just too lazy. I have no idea where I'm going with this review. Maybe one day I'll try to make it better, but probably not. The collection is better than this review. Resist denouement, resist the solving of mysteries and the revealing of truths, because it is only through these that you may be judged.(less) | Notes are private!
| none
| 1
| Feb 16, 2012
| Feb 18, 2012
|
Feb 16, 2012
| Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
| 0316066419
| 9780316066419
| 3.89
| 4,784
| Jul 11, 2007
| Jul 11, 2007
| 
| None
| Notes are private!
| none
| 1
| Feb 12, 2012
| Feb 14, 2012
|
Feb 14, 2012
| Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
| 0380715740
| 9780380715749
| 3.88
| 506
| 1981
| Apr 01, 2002
|
| None
| Notes are private!
| none
| 1
| Feb 11, 2012
| Feb 11, 2012
|
Feb 11, 2012
| Mass Market Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
| 0843957727
| 9780843957723
| 3.18
| 90
| 1952
| May 29, 2007
|
| It's quite possible I got a defective copy of this book from the library. Other reviewers praise Axelrod's talent as a writer, and talk about dirty s...moreIt's quite possible I got a defective copy of this book from the library. Other reviewers praise Axelrod's talent as a writer, and talk about dirty scenes that would have been scandalous in the 1950's. The copy of the book I had was chock full 'o bad dialogue, the wink-wink nudge nudge of just about every other pulp novel of the time period (although there is an anal-cavity search alluded to, but it's not like there were details about a gaping asshole, or anal prolapse (Best song title / Band name combo ever? I might go with "Decompression (anal prolapse) by Exploding Corpse Action, you can download their 1995 demo tape here, I'm sure Devon won't mind..... whoa hold on a second, I just realized that the page where I found the link to the demo tape, is a blog by Nate Wilson and it's chock full of links to downloads for almost impossible to find hardcore records, the kind of shit that never got digitized or put up on torrent websites, this is an amazing fucking find, and a treasure trove of DIY hardcore. There are pages and pages of stuff here, and I'm thinking maybe, just maybe there is a link to the demo tape for the punk band I was in? Maybe? The demo tape I've never heard, never owned and saw only once? It's possible, because we were friends with Nate and fuck I see the singer of the hardcore band I was in, Jay Krak in a picture on the first page of the blog, holy shit, this has just made my day, and you know what, I know no one reading this gives a fuck, but you also know what? This blog I just stumbled across all because I was looking to make sure that the song was really called "Decompression (Anal Prolapse)" is so much better than this stupid book).
Anyway, I should review the book instead of looking at that awesome blog. Because I didn't pay attention to the date the book was written, nor know when Hemingway ate lead, I thought the book was being sensational by making the plot about a fictional author who liked hunting, bullfights and Cuba kill himself but not before leaving behind one final novel that just might be the first good one he's written in quite awhile. Oh and he died by sticking the barrel of a rifle in his mouth and 'accidently' pulling the trigger. Sounds a lot like Hem, right? Funny thing is this novel was written almost a decade before Hemingway checked out. Prophetic? Is the author a Nostradamus? I have no idea, but it is a little creepy but not creepy enough to save this very short, but fairly uninteresting book. Did I mention the dialogue is terrible? It really is, the main character has 'snappy' cliche ridden monologues, the other characters don't even need to say anything while he just runs his mouth, sometimes for a couple of pages at a time, with all the awful pulp nonsense / garbage that passed for meaningful dialogue in American movies in the 1950's. He gets in a cab, and tells the driver, "Baby, step on it," and I almost thought that was the last straw for me and the book. Why would you call a cab driver baby? It's a stupid thing to call someone, and the cab driver was a guy. There are some red herrings and shit like that but with the limited number of characters you could see them coming from a mile away and by very little deduction have a good idea of where the book was going by the time all the principle characters had been introduced. But it's not really a terrible book. It's fast. I read most of it on a short bus ride across Queens. It's just the kind of book that maybe should have stayed lost, and if it weren't for the weird Hemingway prophecy sort of thing I'd probably have already forgotten I even read it a week ago. Now, go to that blog where you can download the Devoid of Faith discography CD, if you like fast hardcore with a singer who sounds like Grover you can't go wrong. One of my favorite CD's of the mid-90's DIY scene? Quite possibly.* *Ok, I've spent the last hour scrolling through every page of the blog. My old punk band Police Line's demo is nowhere to be found. That is ok though, I think I might try to email him and see if he would share it, but even if he doesn't it's no big loss, I've gone through almost sixteen years of never hearing or seeing the fucking thing once. There also isn't the Police Line Pushhead record (again I don't own it, but I was out of the band by then, but still I would have loved to own it), but the ultra-rare Devoid of Faith Pushead record is there! I would have paid a couple of hundred bucks for it at one point, I never did though but only because I never had a chance to buy it, or I was outbid when I tried to get it (But by coincident I'm wearing my Devoid of Faith T-Shirt right now, the one with the Pushead art that was on the record I never got to own). There is so much good stuff on there, and stuff I wish I had known existed years and years ago (how weird it is to think about being part of an 'underground' music scene at a time when there wasn't much of an internet and you had to learn of things by word of mouth and from zines and stuff like that and then you had to find some person who would sell the stuff, or try to mail a band directly, weird, huh?). A demo tape of a pre-Born Against band while they still lived in Albany? Yup, it's here. Obscure Japanese hardcore / thrash? Yep. Dis-bands you never heard of? Yup. Classics like the Slave LP by Infest, with the original mix and not like the bootleg nonsense that came out in the 1990's? Yep!! Most of Gloom Records discography? Well, duh. The Monster X / Spazz 7"? Uh-huh. The only things I was really hoping to find hidden in the pages upon pages of awesomeness (besides the Police Line Demo) were maybe the never released recordings the Paul Henry days of DOF, and the Exploding Corpse Action LP that never saw the light of day, oh, and a few things I've lost over the years like the Fit for Abuse Demo tape would have been nice and maybe the Homomilitia LP that I keep looking to find online with no luck, but I didn't actually think either of those would show up. (are you still reading this? Why? You can stop, this is just me dorking out in my own way). Better than Spotify, that is if you care about the sorts of music that hipster music douchbags and rock critics will never write books about.) (less) | Notes are private!
| none
| 1
| Feb 06, 2012
| Feb 07, 2012
|
Feb 08, 2012
| Mass Market Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
| 0143120743
| 9780143120742
| 4.33
| 3
| Jan 31, 2012
| Jan 31, 2012
|
| It rarely crosses my mind, but in theory (reality is a different story) I live with a predator with very efficient weapons and methods for killing. ...moreIt rarely crosses my mind, but in theory (reality is a different story) I live with a predator with very efficient weapons and methods for killing.  Mooncheese mostly sleeps though, and she is scared of unknown things and is more likely to run up to you and rub up against you than to do anything that would cause anything harm, but somewhere she has all the instincts needed to dispatch small prey with a ruthlessness we'd call sadistic if a human acted in such a manner. The first of maybe many asides.... A distant-distant relative of Mooncheese disproves the existence of god In 2006, a visitor to the Kiev Zoo proclaimed, 'God will save me, if he exists,' and entered the lion enclosure, where a lioness instantly sliced his carotid artery. This isn't the only case documented in this book of animals disproving the existence of a deity interested in interfering with human stupidity, arrogance and unnatural attempts at diluting the over-all gene pool with borderline insane actions. Big predatory animals don't care what you believe in. ...back to the 'review'. If you happen to forget the number of times some of these animal attacks actually happen, you are liable to start thinking that walking outside is going to probably fucking kill you. Most of the incidents in the book are super-duper rare. For example, ants can kill you, even in America where a ninety one year old woman living in a Texas nursing home was killed after being stung more than six hundred times by ants. What a fucked up way to go, you've lived through ninety something years of all the shit life has thrown at you, and then a swarm of ants kill you, while you're laying around in nursing home unable to move because of a broken hip. Ok, that is an extreme example, and there is only one other similar case mentioned in the book of a slightly younger woman who received twice as many stings and similarly died, but still in theory you could end up being killed by ants! But before the ants get you there are all kinds of animals out there that could inadvertently get you. From diseases spread through animals and the fleas and lice they carry, to their excrement, to you making the mistake to bend over in front of an angry deer who thinks you are challenging him and decides to crash into your head with antlers, to visiting the zoo (or the circus), to owning a dog, riding in an airplane that comes across a flock of birds, to getting infected by some creepy worm because you happened to swim in unclean waters, to being attacked by a rabid animal in your backyard, to having your face eaten off by an adolescent chimpanzee who looks so cute and just like the friendly ones in the movies that you just have to see if you can play with it, to so so so so so many other ways you might come across animals and either intentionally or unintentionally annoy them into attacking you. You might think that all of the animal kingdom is waiting outside to purposefully or accidently hurt or kill you after reading this book, of course if you look at the numbers, almost all of the cases here are either really rare, very dependent on living in poverty-stricken third world countries, being an asshole (or an idiot, don't try to feed lions from your car, don't try to pet a bear in the wild, don't pelt wild large wild animals with rocks and not expect the possibility of them attacking you back). Even with the right provocation, or if they are rabid, even this cute little critter might attack.  .One story in the book has a river otter making a predatory attack on a pet dog, another having a pet otter turning on people and having to be stopped by being beaten to death with shovels! But he does look so cute! Another counter-claim to the existence of god by a creature whose species has existed longer than a biblical account of creation can account for. ....an Apostolic preacher led his flock into the Limpopo in 1988, promising them divine protection. Thirty six of them were killed by crocodiles.  Back to the review The easy thing to do in a book like this is to blame either the animals or human stupidity / progress / greed / encroachment. In different cases sometimes there is one species to blame for a particular sort of attack, like elephants probably wouldn't be nearly as destructive in certain parts of the world if we hadn't cut off their lands with development so it's only natural that they start to come looking for food in villages. Or if you throw rocks at a gorilla and it can figure out how to get out of it's cage it is going to do it and be pretty pissed off at being attacked. A lot of the the incidents in the book come down more to animals and people being fairly poor judges of each others behaviors and motives. For example certain types of birds have a tendency to attack people, sometimes actually attack but more often just resorting to scare tactics like dive-bombing and various types of mobbing, because they think we give a shit about their nests when really were just walking around. Really neither of us are doing anything wrong, it's just a misunderstanding. Hippopotamuses see us as a threat if we happen to come between them and water when they are on land. For them we're engaging in a potentially threatening behavior, we might not even realize that we have just cut off the angle of escape for a hippo to the water. This book could have easily fallen into a holier than thou environmentalist about how awful we are, it doesn't do that. It pretty much just lays out attacks and most of the time if humans are to blame it's because we (maybe this is stupidity, I think it's just our way of viewing the world) forget that we are just part of the world and that there is no biblical (or otherwise) injunction stating we are masters of the animals, nope we're just part of the animal world, it's just that most of the time those of us living in the first-world are pretty removed from most of the animal world, and those that we do encounter aren't too likely to think of us as a possible meal, but sometimes that is only because we're bigger than them. (On this idea, I don't know what to make of a woman who was a sponsor for a cheetah at a local zoo, and decided to steal keys to the cage, sneak into the zoo one night and let herself into the cheetah's cage. The cheetah doesn't care that you are giving some hard-earned money to provide for it, it doesn't care that you are a wildlife lover, it saw this as a walking meal and dispatched the woman. Maybe the woman was suicidal, or maybe she just thought that cheetah's in a zoo were tame, people with more experience with animals grace these pages doing things maybe not as glaringly stupid, but certainly stupid enough given the knowledge of the animals they had). Quite a fun read. And apparently foxes are only dangerous when they are rabid, so my own animal stupidity at wanting to own one (that sounds awful, I mean co-habit with one) might not be as monumentally stupid as it could be. (less) | Notes are private!
| none
| 1
| Feb 04, 2012
| Feb 11, 2012
|
Feb 04, 2012
| Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
| 030737937X
| 9780307379375
| 3.20
| 284
| Jan 17, 2012
| Jan 17, 2012
|
| "I received 500,000 discrete bits of information today, of which maybe 25 are important." -- David Foster Wallace Words kill. ...more"I received 500,000 discrete bits of information today, of which maybe 25 are important." -- David Foster Wallace Words kill. John 1:1 might be a mythological fabrication, but in the end there will be the word, some word and then the end. Lights out humanity. Some hateful word, or rhetoric, or bottom line on a profit report, or words about imaginary superiority, (mis)perceived threats, words from fictional gods passed down through books filled with words, words that poison and kill. People die everyday from words, stupid things said, things thought in words, yeah, there are lots of other ways to go, but maybe almost everything that is really fucked comes down to words. All those fucking words. Just about anything in the world taken in too high of a dose is bad for us. What if this were literally, I mean medically, true of language, what if we passed a point where we became drunks with the DT's on language? That's what this book is simplistically about. How do we live in a world where we have to be post-language, post-meaning, where members of our family have the ability to poison us with their language. Language kills. Maybe I'm in a minority, maybe I'm an anomaly but I'm the only person I personally have experience about what actually goes on inside the head of. I'm not privy to anyone else's thoughts (thankfully. I can barely bear my own). Everything, aside from some physical pains and future aliments (most likely), that is wrong with me is because of words. Words that have fucked up my way of thinking, words that defeat and cut me down, words that have warped my perceptions of the world, the words my brain taunts me with, the words other people have said, words in songs, in books. Sticks and stones might break my bones but words have seriously fucked me up. Thinking is the first poison...Why the person himself not gutted of thought? Who cares about the word made public, it's the private word that does more lasting damage, person by person. The thinking should have stopped first. The thinking. Perhaps it is next in the long, creeping conquest of this toxicity, another basic human activity that will slowly be taken from us. Oh, I fucking hope so. And even if they don't fuck up directly there are just so many of them out there, so much language screaming at you from all kinds of sources. An almost white-noise of endless chatter with mixed levels of meaning. Endless strings of warnings, and news and attempts to call your attention to them, half-heard conversations in public places, deliberate words you seek out and all the ones you can't avoid. Words written with random bits screaming out boldly saying, LOOK AT ME!!! LOOK AT ME!!! PAY ATTENTION TO ME!!! I'M MORE IMPORTANT THAN ANYTHING ELSE!!! WHO THE FUCK CARES IF I HAVE NOTHING WORTHWHILE TO SAY, JUST FUCKING PAY ATTENTION TO ME!!!!! HIGHEST RECOMMENDATION POSSIBLE!!!! just shut the fuck up already and stop your constant bombardment on trying to get my attention. And here I am contributing to more words. More pollution of bullshit bits of information that I'm asking you to slog through to see if maybe there is something important, something worthwhile contained in it. How fucking vain of me. A worthwhile message? Ha! "Spreading messages dilutes them. Even understanding them is a compromise. The language kills itself, expires its host. Language acts as an acid over its message. If you no longer care about an idea or felling, then put it into language. That will certainly be the last of it, a fitting end. Language is another name for coffin." Lines like this show up frequently in the book. I've read this quote over probably fifty times. I've been slogging about this review for weeks now. Looking at the quotes I culled, trying to figure out what I mean to say about them, what I think they mean. Read it over again, I just did and it's a quandary, what is the message without language? The primordial, or a priori, or whatever the fuck big word you want to use, message that comes before the word. The feeling unthought, the thought that flutters without being cognizant, the moment of doing versus thinking? I think about how to do something and become frozen in inactivity unable to move. Too often I find myself muttering to myself after a pitiful performance in fighting that I started to think too much. When I don't think everything just flows, incredible shit happens, when I think, it all falls apart, I find myself muttering excuses that have to do with thinking. Ben Marcus couldn't have meant this, could he? "'Understanding itself is beside the point...Do not make of it a fetish, for it pays back nothing. That habit must be broken. Understanding puts us to sleep. The dark and undesired sleep. Questions like these are not meant to be resolved. We must never believe we know our roles. We must always wonder what the moment calls for'" We want stories with nice endings. We want mysteries resolved. I can remember spending most of one day in September about ten years ago watching endless tv, probably doing what most of America was doing, and I wanted to stop, I wanted to go do anything else, I was tired of seeing the re-runs of destruction played back over and over and over again, I wanted the images out of my own head, but instead I was having them further embedded, changed by the seemingly endless repeating shots of personally witnessed destruction. I kept watching because I wanted answers, I wanted someone to tell me this is who did it, this is why, I kept watching like I'd watch a movie to the end that I'd grown tired of just because I felt like I needed to be rewarded with some understanding, to know why. I thought I needed these words to put everything in order, to put back together what lay broken and destroyed, not on the streets of downtown but in myself, to let me know that the words that ran through my head didn't make me a total shit, that there was a reason, even if it were a bad one but a reason for what had happened. With understanding there came no difference. Socrates, or Plato or someone writing with those names blabbed about Know Thyself, understand yourself. I've spent at least two decades of my life trying to understand myself, trying to self-analyze, look for answers to the why questions, figure out this and that, and all I've done is drowned myself out in the feedback of self-consious and self-referential noise. It would have been better if I never gave 'myself' a thought, the unexamined life might not be worth living, but the examined life is fucking hell. Understanding? Ha! When Esther was finally old enough to walk to school by herself, she still wanted approval for things that were to basic to be considered talents. Eating an apple. Standing on one leg. Soon she'd want to be congratulated for waking up, leaving a room. Once she sat on our windowsill--she must have been eight or nine already. She was very pleased with herself, swinging her legs back and forth. Do you know, Dad, that I can do a trick? I joke sometimes about children and the things they are congratulated for doing, the simple things like walking, standing up, speaking a word, shitting in a toilet, the things you and I do everyday without much fanfare. I joke that I want this kind of praise, I want to be made to feel good about myself with kind words for doing the unspectacular, and I joke that kids shouldn't be praised for things like this, because they aren't that difficult, they will eventually figure out how to do all those things, so save the praise for really worthy deeds, like solving world hunger or curing cancer or something. I think I'm joking. It made me smile and even laugh a little bit to find this passage in the book. Maybe the joke isn't that we should hold off praise for the important things, but that just living and being able to swing your legs like this deserves some praise. Maybe those kind words are just an antidote to all the shitty words out there that we have to do nothing at all except to continue breathing to encounter. I don't know. I'm probably just an asshole for my 'joking' about wanting to be praised each time I succeed in not shitting myself and holding in a bowel movement till I get to the bathroom. I should have congratulated her. Who was to say this wasn't extraordinary? What did I really know about extraordinary things? This fucking review has been haunting me for a few weeks now. It's not the only one, I have four half-finished reviews I can see on my desktop, all opened with their words taunting me to add more words to them to make them mean something and maybe get read and earn some much coveted goodreads votes. I meant to say big important things in this review but then other words got in the way, I meant to use some carefully chosen quotes to spark lines of thought that would be interesting to myself and hopefully other people as well, instead I got into a narcissistic rambling, using the book as a springboard into the most boring topic imaginable. Fucking words. Blame them. I'm walking away scot-free on this one. Below are a couple of other quotes I was going to do something with. You should read them, and if they inspire any kind of thoughts they are probably better ones than what I would have written. Because restoring language to a people was only one small piece of his work. Child's play, I bet. Smallwork is right. In the end it's too small, isn't it? Easy enough to shoot everyone with a fluid so they could shout insults at each other again, launch their campaigns of vocal blame. Easy. He would do more than that. LeBov would also erase a belief system, remove love from the air as if it were only an atmospheric contaminant. Love was just a pollutant you could blow clear of a person, right, LeBov? If only you had the proper tools. If you listened so intently into nothing, using gear like this, you might hear anything you desired. It made you think we were still being sickened from some language we didn't even know was out there. Inaudible, sub-whispered, mouthed by an enemy from so far away, it could not even be measured. Still it pulsed some toxic on us that made us all crawl on our bellies and choke.(less) | Notes are private!
| none
| 1
| Feb 02, 2012
| Feb 04, 2012
|
Feb 04, 2012
| Hardcover
| |||||||||||||||
| 2.00
| 1
| Jan 01, 1943
| 1943
|
| I happened upon a digital version of this book and read through most of it. It's a silly book. It's not meant to be silly, but it is. The introducti...moreI happened upon a digital version of this book and read through most of it. It's a silly book. It's not meant to be silly, but it is. The introduction promises that if the techniques shown in the book are done correctly you will be guaranteed victory in any fight. This is probably true, if the techniques are done correctly and not as this book describes them to be done or if you do the techniques in this book you are fighting a person who is a quadriplegic, or some other form of cripple without the use of limbs or mobility. I wonder if any back in the 1940's read this book and then went out and got seriously hurt when they tried to box someone's ears in a fight, used a two finger jab or tried to do a 'strangle hold' (applied from the rear) by following step two, "Fling out your right arm to catch his chin, forcing it down and in against his throat."* I hope that the person on the receiving end of these 'attacks' found the humor in them and didn't hurt the misguided soul too badly in retaliation. Most of the moves in this book aren't wrong, it's just that they aren't going to work against an opponent who is fighting back, or capable of any sort of movement. Many of the moves center around the idea that you knee the opponent in the groin, this is probably sound advice, but it's not exactly a secret from the exotic lands of Asia. To catch a fugitive who is running away from you: 1. Take off your jacket as you run, holding it in both hands. 2. As you get close to him, fling the jacket over his head, and twist it around his neck. You can now handle him easily. I've never tried to do this, but I can't imagine it is very practical to do. It also offers advice on how to disarm an enemy of his Tommy Gun. And the move can also be used against someone with a sub-machine gun. The book is illustrated with some comical illustrations showing you exactly what it will look like when you sail your jacket over a fugitive's face (I would have thought you were using the jacket sort of twisted up like a rope, but you just throw it out like a sail to catch the dude's face, I really don't think this would work outside of a cartoon or maybe a movie). The book was also written during WWII, and since Ju-Jitsu is a Japanese Art there are a couple of slightly derogatory things to say about the Japanese in the book's introduction. They are evil, diabolic people who have no culture of their own but appropriate from others. Oh, the book also tells the ladies what to do if a gentleman sits too close to you at the movies and maybe makes unwelcome advances (elbow him in the side, two finger jab in the side or give him a thumbscrew). As I said this is a silly book but it's also a little dangerous because it could have given someone confidence to act bravely in a stupid manner. Is the book teaching any Ju-Jitsu? I have no idea. I don't know what Ju-Jitsu techniques are, I have a good basic understanding of it's Brazilian off-spring Jiu-Jitsu, but I don't really know what was taken directly from the Japanese martial art and what was developed later on. The most effective things in this book are probably the Judo throws, but if you went by the simple instructions given you would probably be lucky if you were able to throw someone without hurting yourself. At the time this book was written some of the ideas in it were probably mind-blowing to Americans. The idea of doing Eastern fighting styles in the pre-Karate boom of the 1960's, I would guess, looked like some kind of crazy magic trick, and this is a book showing you how you too can throw someone much heavier than you over your shoulder with ease. And maybe kneeing someone in the balls was considered an eye-opening idea to personal self-defense, it might be a fantasy on my part, but I imagine that the general view on fighting at the time was the same as when I was growing up, you were supposed to punch, just punch, kicking (along with just about anything else that wasn't a punch) was for girls and sissies. Or if not for girls, it was just generally thought of as 'unmanly' because it was considered dirty fighting. It should be obvious that this is just putting the advantage to a particular sort of person who is generally bigger, stronger and can throw a punch versus someone who would have to rely on other means of defending him or herself. I do wonder if books like this have ever really helped anyone. Or even how much a five hour class in self-defense helps someone if they are actually threatened. If you aren't a natural thug, you only get good at fighting through endless repetition and practice. I've been taught multiple times how to do a handful of judo and hapkido throws, probably more than five hours worth and I wouldn't trust myself that I could do one on someone who was attacking me. Maybe I'm just slightly stupid but when I actually doing live sparring any of the things I've read about, watched a youtube video showing me how to do, or been taught in class goes right out the window except for the things that I've done over and over and over again so they are done without any thought, the shit I think about are all just mostly great ideas that get me in worse situations than I was already in (yeah, I saw in this Cyborg video how to do a reverse armbar, I can just do that here, oh wait now I have someone on my back with a choke just about sunk in, shit (this would be my thought process from last night's sparring session)). I wonder almost daily on what can really be learned from just spending hours in a B&N reading "How to Win a Fight" books or the latest book outlining the fighting system of some MMA superstar, does reading these books over and over again do anything for you? I can see them giving some pointers and ideas to someone who already knows what they are doing, but as a way to learn? I've been wondering lately the same things about those one time self-defense classes that get offered to women, do they really do much? Are they dangerous because they give a delusional bit of self-confidence? Would anyone really be able to disarm the person holding a machine gun to their back just because they read the four simple steps in a book like this? Will I ever be able to fight like Fedor just because from time to time I leaf through the one How to Fight like an MMA Champion book I own (I only own it because a Borders going out of business sale had it really cheap)? Even if I read it everyday and studied it in my apartment would it ever make me a better fighter? Maybe, but I doubt it. *What is wrong with these three moves in particular? If you can get someone in a position where you could conceivably 'box their ears' effectively you'd be able to do something with a better chance of succeeding, chances are you would never the the chance to do this to someone. Two finger jab? You'll probably break or sprain at least one of your fingers doing this, you probably won't incapacitate anyone but you will have jacked up your hand badly enough that you just lost a weapon. And the strangle hold (applied from the rear)? You just put him in the position to successfully defend your choke, by pushing the chin down you are blocking your own access to his throat, really he just needs to wait until your arms get gassed out and you let go. The worst you are going to do to him using the technique in the book is give him a very temporary sore jaw. To make this move work you'd need to make space between his chin and throat and get your arm in there, and then ignore step where you hold on to one of his wrists and push your chest against him, but grip your left bicep with the right hand that is strangling, and put your left hand on the back of his head and push forward. To help, you can pull him towards you and push out your chest at the same time to put even more pressure. (less) | Notes are private!
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| not set
| Feb 03, 2012
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Feb 03, 2012
| Paperback
| |||||||||||||||||
| 0843955929
| 9780843955927
| 2.93
| 86
| 1986
| May 30, 2006
| 
| I almost clicked one star for this one. I did it! I clicked one star! Maybe I should go back and give the Max Allan Collins books one star, too, but...moreI almost clicked one star for this one. I did it! I clicked one star! Maybe I should go back and give the Max Allan Collins books one star, too, but they at least succeed in being an entertaining enough piece of genre fiction. This book doesn't succeed there at all. And it wasn't because I think I remember reading once that Bell thought DFW was floundering for not producing at the rate that Vollmann was. But I could be wrong about this. This book is remarkably bad. Not bad in the way remarkably bad manner of say Max Allan Collins' hardcase novels (of the few I've read) are bad, but bad in the, why was this book even written, bad category. I will grant that I'm getting tired of the crime-genre. I've read too much of it in the past few months. I want out. I don't understand how people can exclusively read one or two types of genre fictions, doesn't it get old being stuck in the same basic structures? Yeah, there are some brilliant writers contained in those structures, but there is also so much mediocre-ness. So much that is formulaic, and too often when a writer tries to break from the tried and true formulas you realize why those formulas are there in the first place, innovation just doesn't work sometimes in this element. (Yeah, literary fiction can be formulaic, too, but I think (in my opinion, mine) there is more room for writers to move about in the literary world, yeah there are a bazillion and counting Corrections knock-offs, but you can see them from a mile away and if you don't want to read yet another dysfunctional modern family novel you can easily avoid it, you can judge a book by the cover). While walking through the Times Square Subway station, transferring from the N train to the 7, walking up the steps that lead up from the platform that leads down to the N train, up to the platform that would be a couple of dozen steps to the long staircase leading down into the bowels of the station where the 7 train waits(I'll return to this in a moment, keep this somewhere in the back of your mind, because there is a reason I gave those details), I thought maybe I'm being unfair to the book, maybe I'm thinking of it as a 'crime' novel or a thriller (as Walker Percy raves about it being on the front cover) when really I should be reading it just as a novel, a literary novel? written by a literary novelist? Maybe I need to enframe the text and remove it from the context of being a hardcase novel and see it for what it is in a Heideggerian thing-in-itself essence or some shit like that. I thought this for a moment and then I thought, no, it still pretty much fails. And then I thought, yes it's boring, yes it's bogged down in details and minutiae, but then again so are the novels of John le Carré, but his slow pacing builds layers to the story, it's slow but the layers are all building to the edifice of the story. Not here. About three quarters of the novel could have been cut and it wouldn't have hindered my understanding of what was going on, or taken away anything from the plot. There is so much wasted details given, we get detailed directions of where the narrator walks to in New York City, which is great I guess, it shows that you are familiar with the Union Square / Chelsea / Williamsburg Bridge (I think maybe it's the Brooklyn Bridge) / Brooklyn Navy Yard areas of the city, but it doesn't add anything to the story. It was as necessary as the description I gave above of my walk from the N train to the 7 train. I could have just as easily said, I was thinking as I walked from the N train to the 7 train and it would have been just as fine. Directions. What the narrator ate. And again what he ate. The time he wakes up. The long first chapter where he shots his dog because the dog is getting on in the years (I kept thinking, that was a pointless chapter, and I kept thinking that there is a reason he included it, and it will come back in some significant way later on in the book, but nope, he does return to the dead dog theme but it's only as a neat little bookend to wrap up the book, totally unnecessary (in my humble opinion, but what do I know I'm just some doofus who works in a big box bookstore and writes reviews on the internets). The narrators a part-time drunk, we know this because we are given too many pointless scenes of him drinking too much in bars. He seems more like some dude who likes to tie one on now and then, but through repetition of seeing him drinking yet again and because we are told he's one the reader can be safely ok with thinking that the narrator is his old friend the drunken protagonist of hard-boiled novels. Instead of giving (probably, I didn't count, but I'm making an educated guess) about forty pages or so to the narrators drinking, mostly in scenes that do nothing for the plot, Bell could have just said something like, 'I took my place on the stool at the bar, even though it was a new bar the familiarity of the place made me feel at home, and when the first shot of bourbon hit my stomach I felt like I was home again", yeah that sucks, but you get the idea. He's comfortable in bars drinking copious amounts of booze. Even though Bell gives an excessive amount of tedious details about the day to day life of the narrator, I didn't feel like I really knew anything about the character. He never comes alive. None of the supporting characters do either. Everyone feels like a stock character lifted from the hardboiled handbook. But what about the actual 'crime' element? Well, once the novel finally gets around to this somewhere just a few pages past the halfway point, the novel doesn't get any stronger. It quickly became apparent that the whole first half of the book wasn't adding too much to the story, it was background material and a chance to put lots of details in place in lieu of having to tell a story. If I didn't think too much I might think that what was happening in the first half was a slow progression, but that wasn't the case, it was mostly just filer, pretty much none of the 'background' and 'build-up' added anything to the novel. The crime element itself was farcical, unintentionally. It made no sense, it made no sense why people acted like they did, why in the age of Swiss Bank Accounts and Off-Shore Accounts and other ways of moving money around that half of the stuff needed to happen that was happening. This could have been given an explanation, and I would have been happy with one, but instead none was offered. I feel like Bell expected me to think the crime element was well thought out and because he had bombarded me with unnecessary details earlier in the novel (and continued to throughout the novel). At one point I was suspecting that Bell was guilty of just withholding information from the reader that could have been given earlier and then he would spring it on me to make the story come together and make it seem like a mystery had been solved when there hadn't really ever been one except why I was being kept in the dark. But that wasn't the case. There was nothing offered. There is actually so much in this book I could point out as being bad. Like, when he has the narrator sniff some heroin and then he goes through withdrawl for three days. Really? One sniff of heroin and you're going to be junk sick? Did you learn your drug facts from one of those War on Drug ads or an After School Special? It makes me wonder what other 'details' about film editing, currency exchange and other things in the book are fabricated bullshit (not that I'm an expert on heroin, but I've known people who have dabbled in it and one friend who killed himself with it to have at least a bit of knowledge about what sniffing heroin does and does not do to you). While the writing itself is fine, what the well strung together words mean and the story they are working towards telling is pretty much a waste. Needless to say, I wouldn't recommend this book to anyone. Maybe this is the result of what happens when a 'literary' writer thinks he just can slum it and churn out a piece of genre fiction. (less) | Notes are private!
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| Jan 31, 2012
| Feb 2012
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Jan 31, 2012
| Mass Market Paperback
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| 1564786862
| 9781564786869
| 3.96
| 136
| 1999
| Jan 17, 2012
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| Aphorism laden novels have a tendency to catch my eye and make me want to read them, but they don't always deliver the goods. It's the melancholy par...moreAphorism laden novels have a tendency to catch my eye and make me want to read them, but they don't always deliver the goods. It's the melancholy part of me that usually sees them and gets very excited over seeing pages that just have a line like, "WHAT DOES GOD SMELL LIKE?" or "BEING IN FOREIGN COUNTRIES DOESN'T CHANGE US. WE EAT WITH OUR MOUTHS NO MATTER WHAT COUNTRY WE ARE IN." Maybe these aren't the most profound statements ever made, but something about an book that is willing to just put something like that on a page, by itself, makes me want to read it (and I never think of the wastefulness of doing something like this, it's all about the presentation, fuck the pragmatics). What kind of child wonders what God smells like, or finds solace in the fact that no matter what country her and her family find themselves in they still eat with their mouths? We're dead a lot longer than we're alive; that's why we need a whole lot more good luck when we're dead people. The narrator is a young girl whose mother and stepfather escaped from the poverty and oppression of Romania to the West. They are a circus family. Her mother hangs from her hair and does tricks. The stepfather is a clown. There is little happiness in their refugee / gypsy-like existence. What does rich mean?[...]Someday I want to spend a lot of money to buy a Chinese servant who will always stay awake so I don't have anymore bad dreams. He'll be named Chin-Chan and look out for me, and I won't be afraid anymore. And everybody will be surprised. The family dreams of a better life, but they are incapable of getting anywhere close to achieving it. The stepfather beats on the family and has an incestuous relationship with his genetic daughter, and possibly with the narrator, but this is never made explicit but it's possible from the childlike perceptions that things aren't as they should be between her and her stepdad. The writing captures a childlike perspective well, a childhood forged in poverty and a lack of education, with travelling and a borderline outlaw sort of existence. It mixes the elements of the orthodox religion of her mother's family with the the fairy tales she hears and tries to make sense of the world with a perspective that doesn't always know (or maybe just doesn't want know) the difference between the fantastical and the real. As a thread running through the story is the story her family would tell her about the child who was cooking in the polenta, and her constant attempts to figure out why the child would end up in the polenta, was it the child's guilt that led her there? The parents? Was it an accident, or something horrific that had to be done to the child because the child is the type that deserves to die. As the novel goes on she re-interrupts the story again and again, and as the story progresses new details are added and she takes delight in making her older sister add more gruesome details to what happens to the child once it is cooking in the polenta. I'm not doing a great job selling this book to you, am I? So much about this book could have failed, and it toed the line between being a success and a gimmicky novel (is this the right word, gimmicky?). It could have been precocious, and it could have wallowed in the muck of incest and abuse, but even when the narrator says something like, "No man has touched me where it counts. I think about nothing else. I want to be raped by two men at the same time.", there is nothing shocking about the statement. In the twisted world the girl has grown up in (she is twelve maybe thirteen at the time and her mother has gotten her employed to dance naked in some kind of circus show, and has glued on pubic hair to make her appear older), it's more just another element of the sadness of her life than an edgy thing. Again what child thinks of things like this? What leads a child to think like this? The book is at least semi-autobiographical. The author was part of a circus family that escaped from Romania and eventually found refuge in Switzerland. The author also ended up killing herself at the age of forty even though on the surface she was enjoying considerable success in the theater and won a prestigious prize for this novel. Exactly how much of the book is autobiographical I have no idea, but according to the essay at the end of the book the basic outline of the narrators life is the same as the novelist's. I'd pictured happiness differently. (less) | Notes are private!
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| Jan 30, 2012
| Jan 30, 2012
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Jan 30, 2012
| Hardcover
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| 0060594667
| 9780060594664
| 3.79
| 7,688
| Oct 2010
| Oct 05, 2010
| 
| I'm fairly certain that my reaction to books is dependent on things going on outside of the text itself. Certain books read at certain times of my li...moreI'm fairly certain that my reaction to books is dependent on things going on outside of the text itself. Certain books read at certain times of my life affected me in ways that I can't imagine they would affect me now. Other times the shit that is going on in my life makes me unable to give a book that I might otherwise really enjoy the kind of attention, or mood, or something that it really deserves. Is this one of those books? Maybe. I see gushing reviews for this. And I went into expecting to love the book. I was looking forward to it, really I was. Maybe I was expecting too much? Maybe. Or maybe it wasn't the type of book that I would really enjoy while sitting in a Chicago Airport for an extra hour and a half because of delays, and continuing reading while sitting on the tarmac waiting to take off because of even more delays, a couple of them bordering on absurdly comical and finally finishing somewhere just past Toledo at thirty something thousand feet while the plane banged around from turbulence. Maybe all of those things and the annoyance in my head that I'd be getting back to New York close to midnight and that it would be a pain in the ass to get home at that hour using public transportation was putting me in the kind of mood where just about any book was going to lose its luster. Maybe that is what my three star rating is all about. If so, I'm sorry Mr. Franklin. If it means anything this is a really high three stars. The book sort of reminded me of some of George Pelecanos' later novels, like The Way Home (and another one that I read but apparently never rated, stupid Greg), and that is a good comparison (actually, maybe the comparison sucks and you might not think these are alike at all, but I mean it's a good comparison in my head because I thought quite highly of The Way Home). I really liked the character of Larry Ott, he was so pitiful and beaten down that I wanted to think he was totally unbelievable, but the more I thought about him and his station in life I started to realize how perfectly created he was and how he couldn't be any other way. I didn't care so much for the character of Silas 'thirty two' Jones, I didn't like that he gave his name as thirty two, I thought that was kind of absurd but not in a good way (although I guess it is believable), but more I just didn't think his character was as developed, and in another novel he might have been fine but being paired off with the amazingly developed character of Ott he seemed too formulaic. I think the novel could have used more of something. I'm not sure exactly more of what, but I think the characters of the town could have really come to life in the way that Donald Harington's do, I'd be interested to see Franklin use some of his minor characters in other works, but I don't think he's the type of writer to do this kind of thing (I have no basis for saying this, he might be, I've only read this one book by him and here I am blabbing like I'm some kind of expert, fuck you Stahl, why don't you just write your fucking book report already). One other thing I didn't like too much about the book was the ending. I didn't mind the way the main story of the book wrapped up, but then there were still four or five chapters left, which was used to wrap up some of the underlying conflicts in the novel. Maybe it was the delays and annoyances of traveling (I don't care for flying much, it's almost always unpleasant for me, with either the morbidly obese sitting next to me (three times now, three! and I rarely fly) or else my head is so fucked up by the pressure changes that I'm deaf and feel like someone is sticking ice picks in both of my ears for most of the flight), but once the main story wrapped up I started to get impatient for the book to end. There was some good stuff in the 'wrap' up part of the book, but there were also a couple of moments that I had a hard time accepting that the characters would act the way they did, and frankly (I almost wrote frankly Franklin, but then thought better of it, but see I didn't really write it because it's not in the main thread of the review) I kind of would have liked not knowing how the characters turned out after all of the main conflict had resolved. Probably, though, I'd be bitching and moaning about loose strings of the plot if the book didn't have these last few chapters. I wish I had loved the book like Karen does. If you haven't done so yet, you should read her review of the book, and see the picture she has of her and Tom Franklin at a book signing, and be more influenced by her great review than my whining rant about the woes of being a privileged fuck who was delayed a couple of hours in a couple of thousand mile trip that he was still able to make in a mere ten hours. (less) | Notes are private!
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| 1
| Jan 26, 2012
| Jan 26, 2012
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Jan 26, 2012
| Hardcover
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| 0140120041
| 9780140120042
| 3.59
| 49
| unknown
| May 02, 1989
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| None
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| Jan 23, 2012
| Jan 26, 2012
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Jan 23, 2012
| Paperback
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| 0380763621
| 9780380763627
| 3.73
| 401
| Dec 01, 1982
| Jun 01, 1992
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| None
| Notes are private!
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| 1
| not set
| Jan 23, 2012
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Jan 23, 2012
| Mass Market Paperback
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| 0679752986
| 9780679752981
| 3.65
| 1,112
| 1970
| Oct 21, 2009
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| None
| Notes are private!
| none
| 1
| Jan 21, 2012
| Jan 23, 2012
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Jan 22, 2012
| Paperback
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| 145162445X
| 9781451624458
| 4.14
| 136
| Jan 10, 2012
| Jan 10, 2012
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| One thing is certain, however. The metaphysical 'rule', which is held as an ironclad conviction by those whom I have debated the issue of creation, n...moreOne thing is certain, however. The metaphysical 'rule', which is held as an ironclad conviction by those whom I have debated the issue of creation, namely that "out of nothing nothing comes," has no foundation in science. Arguing that it is self-evident, unwavering, and unassailable is like arguing, as Darwin falsely did, when he made the suggestion that the origin of life was beyond the domain of science by building an analogy with the incorrect claim that matter cannot be created or destroyed. All it represents is an unwillingness to recognize the simple fact that nature may be cleverer than philosophers or theologians.
I'm not going to even attempt to figure out if what Lawrence Krauss is saying is scientifically correct. I have no way of knowing, even though his is a pop-science book, many of the arguments went flying over my head like some high velocity particle being expelled from a black hole (with apparently no need for high energy because of some properties of black holes, gravity, quantum stuff, particles and other things that I can just nod along with). I could whine that the lack of footnotes, or citations to where I could read the articles dealing with this stuff is missing, but I have a feeling that a) it's easy enough to do a bit of library research to uncover any of the articles but b) if I tried to read any of them my brain might collapse into itself like some unstable quantum universe under the pressure of my own ignorance. One reviewer I noticed was turned off by the constant return to 'bashing' big G and his believers around. This reviewer believes that Krauss should have laid off a little and just let the science speak for itself. Fuck them, I say. Bash away. Yeah, the believers might not be the ones who will ever read this book, but throw rocks at their flimsy and childish beliefs. Why? Because we (I mean I) live in a country where more people believe in angels than believe in evolution and I work in a bookstore where more people will probably buy the book that has the prayer for ridding your life of satanic demon birds in it than will buy this book. Any chance you get throw intellectual rocks at the fuckers, because guess what? They are throwing rocks all the time, and they are name-calling and attempting to push their medieval bullshit fear mongering on everyone. That said, it's not like there is name calling going on in this book, it's just the author is pointing out that there is no reason to revert to creation myths to explain things, science is doing a fairly good job at chiseling away at a fairly comprehensive picture of the universe without the words, let there be light being said and logos permeating the cosmos. All this aside though, the book is really interesting. I would do an awful job at even trying to paraphrase the arguments and discoveries that points to everything in the universe was created out of quantum fluctuations in 'nothingness', or in the empty space where until fairly recently everyone thought was just empty space, but now scientists are realizing is filled with 'stuff' that is a whirlpool of strange goings ons and contains more dark energy than all of the observable energy in the whole big, gigantic, universe. Want some of the details on how this is so? Read the book (I sound like the old commercial from the 1980's for that Scientology tract). It's a fascinating idea, and sucks even a little more 'meaning' out of our existence, what if we really are only here because of some particles popping into existence at the mind boggling strange quantum level and because they went through an inflationary period in the mind boggling tiny amount of time before they would normally pop back out of existence (apparently at this level things do pop in and out of existence fairly often, how exactly scientists know this I can't say, but it sounded convincing to me) and because of that everything we can possibly see and tons of stuff that is so far away from us that we will never be able to see even using the most powerful technologies we have was formed. Fucking incredible, right? Maybe not the most comforting, it's not going to reassure you that you really are important and that something bigger than yourself loves you, but really more beautiful and amazing than the idea that some jealous being floating around the ether decided on a whim to create the world and then lingered around for billions of years before throwing some gigantic temper tantrums on the equivalent of a few grains of sand on the gigantic beach that would be 'his' creation. The ideas in this book are 'dangerous', if I was feeling sleazy and wanted to dupe some stupid motherfuckers, I would set out to take the basic premises of this book and concoct some New Age book using a few scientific facts and make a Secret-esque book about the power to create something from nothing. I'll leave that to people with less morals and more ambition than me though. There is a lot of ground in this book to misunderstand and trample around on to make all kinds of nonsensical 'metaphysical' extrapolations from. And speaking of metaphysics, without the quotes and not in the way that most people use the word (when people generally ask for the metaphysics books they aren't looking for philosophy they are looking for New Age), the ideas in this book are like a giant wedge to shove into classic philosophical arguments. If the idea of nothing can come from nothing is overthrown by science what does that do to whole lines of philosophical reasoning? This is one of the basic tenets of Western Philosophy, it's what you learn in Philosophy School, it's how you help shape logical arguments about the Big Questions. All the way back to Aristotle (and beyond, but I'm going to stop there, it gets different when you step back to Plato, and the Pre-Socratics, well just forget it), it's this basic idea that works to create his own speculation about creation (he sidestepped the question in a way by saying the universe must be eternal since there could be no prime-mover), and following his logic it's one of those tools that most philosophy people carry around in their mental toolbox to help them call bullshit on arguments with weak premises. Krauss likes to take pot-shots at philosophers, too. And this is probably not a bad thing. I can imagine a Zizek getting a hold of a few of the ideas in this book and running rampant through Lacan and Hitchcock with them to make up some unsettling and absurd claims, but lets consider him and his ilk theorists, and not philosophers for the sake of this review, but it would be fascinating (and unrealizable, because of the whole space time continuum and all) to have honest to goodness heavy-weight philosophers take this kind of knowledge and re-work it into their own views of the universe. What would an Aristotle or a Spinoza be able to do with their own philosophies with the added benefit of years and years of scientific discovery at their disposal? I'm not saying they would advance our knowledge necessarily beyond what we have now, but what avenues of thought would they go down by knowing more about the physical world then the time they lived in? Or, more realistically, would these great philosophers not hang their head in shame if they saw that their works were still being read and certain arguments of theirs still being wielded even in the face of scientific discoveries that led them to be obsolete, did any of these philosophers ever want to be just accepted as blind dogma? I'm losing a bit of control on this review. So I'll sum up, the world is strange and beautiful and we are more likely than not just an insignificant part of it, but we are observers of it and we should be open to understanding it as it is, even if it's not the most comforting version of the world that we might want, just because it Is and there is nothing else. (less) | Notes are private!
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| Jan 07, 2012
| Jan 21, 2012
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Jan 21, 2012
| Hardcover
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| 0743463056
| 9780743463058
| 3.73
| 299
| 1956
| Nov 01, 2002
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| None
| Notes are private!
| none
| 1
| not set
| Jan 16, 2012
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Jan 16, 2012
| Mass Market Paperback
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| 0984807802
| 9780984807802
| 5.00
| 2
| Apr 01, 2012
| Apr 01, 2012
|
| Hello shit, this is my review for Loom of Ruin so suck my fucking lizard* Wait, let me start over..... Hello, SHIT, this is my revie...moreHello shit, this is my review for Loom of Ruin so suck my fucking lizard* Wait, let me start over..... Hello, SHIT, this is my review for Loom of Ruin so suck my fucking lizard. Sam McPheeters wrote a novel! And it's really good, so I'm not going to feel like a stooge blabbing on about a novel that I secretly think is shitty but because I'm in awe of the author I'm just going to go on like a retarded fanboy with his fingers stuck on the html tags that make words bold. Sam McPheeters was the singer of Born Against (and later Mens Recovery Project, and part of some other projects too).** One of my regrets in the punk part of my life was even though I lived only thirty miles from Albany and a hundred and eighty miles from New York City I spent a few years totally unaware of the DIY Hardcore world, and only knew Albany to be a place where chugga-chugg tough guy bands were strumming away on the E-minor chord and throat growling about jock-esque shit while punching and kickboxing in the crowd. If I'd been more aware of my sort of immediate surroundings I might have had a chance to see Born Against. I never did, but I was a co-worker and friend with someone who was dubbed Sam McPheeters official best-friend by some people. I was going to gush about Born Against and how awesome they were. They were but this is a review for a book and not a band the author was in twenty years ago. Born Against still sound good today, though. That is if you like screaming political hardcore music. One more Born Against regret, my first band (first band that played shows, as opposed to just being a working concept with friends) toyed around with doing a cover a "Mary and Child"***, we were going to play it at a show in Plattsburgh and I was supposed to sing for it, I was really looking forward to flailing around screaming Mary and probably hurting myself, at the last minute though we decided against going through with it. I'm convinced it would have been one of the best performances of my musical career. (Here I was going to make mention that the Born Against Patch I had on my backpack was the cause of a high amount of 'annoyance' to people who were offended by the image of some boy scout types marching with a flag and the words "kill, kill, kill" next to them. I never understood why this patch angered some people, (along with my Kill the Man Who Questions t-shirt (which just said Kill the Man Who Questions)) it was something that I got a fair amount of shit for where normally I never got shit for the messages or images on other patches or t-shirts, but anyway I couldn't find a picture of the patch online, but I saw this:  What a fucking show!! I'm fairly jealous of the couple of hundred people who were probably at this show). Anyway, the book. The book centers around Trang Yang, an Hmong immigrant living in Los Angeles. When he first arrived in LA he got caught up in Mexican Rights rally and got accidently clubbed by LA's finest. A few years later on the eve of 9/11 he caught a stray bullet in the head from another of LA's finest. The bullet did a Phineas Gage to him, severing part of his frontal lobe and leaving him with relatively unharmed but living now in a state of constant anger and rage. He's an angry man prone to violence who owns a string of Chevron gas stations and is officially allowed to do pretty much anything he wants because the LAPD has a hands off policy on him because of their previous two accidents with him. Trang is annoyed by pretty much everything that one would find annoying in the world, inconsiderate people, the LA Lakers, grandstanding leftists who pretend they are priests, and just others in general with the things they do. He's quite absurd and frequently hilarious in his reactions to the people around him. "Trang had set out to that afternoon to kill the Los Angeles Lakers. Two hours earlier, he'd stopped at his Imperial Highway station and discovered on of their stickers on a Subaru. After punching out the Filipino family inside, a simple idea had occurred to him. Why not go to the root of the problem? He hated the Lakers as he'd hatted little else; hated the grandstanding, the purple and gold crassness, the overfed arrogance, the rap that celebrated them from every other passing car. The team offered everything he despised about white people and black people in one small, killable assemblage. Enough was enough." Armed with the machete he uses to protect his gas station from people who are coming to steal his gas he heads off to kill the Lakers (spoiler? He doesn't actually kill them, he gets sidetracked). His rage is like a top spinning around the story, colliding and bringing all of the other characters and events together with an apocalyptic fury. Trang is at the center of the story, but he isn't really the center of attention. His actions cause things to happen but really only so much could be done with a character who speaks almost no English and only has one emotion. He's looming always in the background, but it's the assortment of other characters who really make up the story. Some of these characters appear briefly, some die violently a few paragraphs after they are introduced, some are genuinely famous people making little cameos, and some are fairly obvious caricatures for real people or at least real types of people. The easy thing to do when you're writing something that is at least vaguely political is to just lampoon and take cheap shots at the other side and in this book there are the occasional shots at right-wingers, but most of the lampooning going on here is aimed at the left, at the Prius drivers and the community activists, the ironic racists and well, liberals in general. One of the more likable characters in the book turns out to be a Republican, and well it's sort of what had made Born Against so great, yeah they had songs and mocked what was awful about the Right or the system or whatever you want to call it, but they spent a lot of their energy on 'the scene' and their side of the political spectrum. The book spirals out from Trang as a violent and almost joyful satirical march towards total destruction. It's not the sort of book that is probably going to be loved by everyone, but it's really fucking good, seriously. I'm not just saying that because of my ongoing Sam McPheeters fascination. It's the type of book that fans of Bizarro sorts of books would really enjoy, it's the kind of 'punk' novel that you kind of hope novels will turn out to be but usually fail to deliver on. (view spoiler)[This might just be one of the most fun portrayals of the world coming to end (hide spoiler)]. Sorry, if this review is a little disjointed, I've been working on it on and off for weeks now. I keep deleting parts, adding other parts, feeling embarrassed at my gushing and then bored with what I had previously written. I want this review to stop taunting from my computer's desktop, so I'm going to just go with whatever is already written, and maybe, just maybe someone will think this review is good enough to get them to buy this book! *This would be an appropiation of the first track, "Neil", off of Born Against's "The Rebel Sound of Shit and Failure" 'best-of' CD, the original is bassist Neil Burke saying, "Hello shit, we're Born Against so suck my fucking lizard". ** He was also once in the audience of the Montel Williams show and got to be one of the people who got the microphone, and was a caller for the Phil Donahue show (I don't know of any video footage on the internet of it, but it was sampled into a Born Against 'song' (The Sam McPheeters part starts around 3:20). ***This wasn't my favorite Born Against song. "Half Mast" was. (less) | Notes are private!
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| 1
| Jan 15, 2012
| Jan 19, 2012
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Jan 15, 2012
| Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
| 0547577516
| 9780547577517
| 4.37
| 49
| Nov 01, 2011
| Nov 01, 2011
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| None
| Notes are private!
| none
| 1
| not set
| not set
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Jan 15, 2012
| Hardcover
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| 0743291727
| 9780743291729
| 3.72
| 242
| Jan 02, 2007
| Jan 09, 2007
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| Some settings and plots belong so strongly to one writer that you can't remove them from it. I'm having a hard time thinking of other examples, but I...moreSome settings and plots belong so strongly to one writer that you can't remove them from it. I'm having a hard time thinking of other examples, but I know they are out there. But if you are writing about the seediest of the under-under belly of late 1940's / 1950's LA, and you are showing Hollywood stars as being amoral degenerates, and you have Mickey Cohen lingering around in the background, and you have an unsolved missing woman / murdered woman at the center of your plot you are treading on James Ellroy territory. It's unavoidable, it would be like setting a novel in Dublin on June 16th and not expect readers to be thinking Joyce the entire time they are reading your words. This isn't a James Ellroy novel though, it's a Megan Abbott novel. And I had to keep reminding myself of that and I had to keep thinking stop judging this as Ellroy, it's not Ellroy. But it almost could be, it could the lost novel of Ellroy's that he wrote say between Suicide Hill and the start of his LA Quartet. It's a novel Ellroy could have written if he hadn't taken that drastic turn away from just writing good crime novels and began to pare down his prose with a scalpel until he reached the staccato brilliance of his USA Trilogy. It's the novel that Ellroy could have written in between the time he went from being good to being great. I'm being so unfair though. This isn't a James Ellroy novel! I am kind of envious of Karen that she will get to read this without having any Ellroy to compare it too. I think that she needs to rectify this situation though and read some Ellroy at some point this year. He's just too good to miss out on. But this is a review for a Megan Abbott book. It's a good throwback noir novel. It's grittier than a lot of the things I've read from the actual era. It wallows (perhaps a bit too much?) in the cliche snappy dialogue, but as Ellroy (he's back, sorry, this is from the blurb he provided on the front cover, you can't miss him here) says, she's a deconstructionist, and you get the feeling that she is having a fun time taking apart some of the hard-boiled tropes and amplifying them for some purpose that I can't quite put my finger on. For example when one character questions to himself why he just called a woman a doll, when that isn't how he normally talks, you get a level added to the text that isn't in your usual hard-boiled noir writing (or at least not in it's original versions, these days just about everyone has played with the genre in some way or another). As a story it's good and there are enough little twists and turns to keep the plot flowing nicely. Her writing is a little wordy in this book, and I was surprised when I just looked up on Wikipedia and saw that this book came out the same year as Queenpin. Her writing in the other novel was a bit snappier and would have fit better for a novel that is treading so far on to you know who's territory. I'm giving this three stars, but it's a high three stars and I thought it was much better than most of the other crime novels I've given three stars to, but I feel like comparing it to you know who and to Queenpin I've got to be a little harsh. (less) | Notes are private!
| none
| 1
| Jan 14, 2012
| Jan 17, 2012
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Jan 14, 2012
| Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
| 0385534957
| 9780385534956
| 3.65
| 126
| Nov 08, 2011
| Nov 08, 2011
|
| This book sparked a few different emotions in me. Some of them good, like a reminder about why I love books so much, and some not so 'nice', like the...moreThis book sparked a few different emotions in me. Some of them good, like a reminder about why I love books so much, and some not so 'nice', like the recharging of the 'punk' part of me that used to write zines and point accusatory fingers at things that annoy me. Many of the essays in this book mix the borders between the personal and the real subject at hand. This is sort of like what DFW does so well (but in a more introspective manner, DFW might have laid bare an image of his psyche, but he never seemed to drag out all of his old skeletons and his life out into the open, Lethem does), and what is probably something that can be traced back to the 'new journalism' of the 1960's and has a rich pedigree of Tom Wolfe's and Joan Didion's and all of that, but which for me (because I didn't know these people back then when my own tastes were being initially shaped, or if I did I only knew them as names with no context to attach to them, I can't remember (I just lied. I would have known Tom Wolfe, my mom had recommended I read Bonfire of the Vanities when I was in high school, so I had been aware of him, but I still had no real context to place him in, he was just that guy who wrote that book about those yuppies, as opposed to that other book about those yuppies where the one yuppie kills other yuppies, a favorite book of mine around the time these sensibilities I'm now talking about began to form), what I knew of them at the time), is going to be forever tied to the personal zines and columns in Maximum RocknRoll that I loved, appropriated, re-worked and was inspired by (I may have pointed this out elsewhere, but a parenthetical aside is the perfect place to restate (or state it for the first time, if in fact I never made this comment in a review before) that before there was DFW for me (who would seem to be an obvious influence on this annoying habit of mine of interrupting almost all my reviews in this manner of writing asides within the 'actual' text, which one might think I would just use footnotes (a la DFW) if it were possible to format footnotes with hypertext in the goodreads review format), there was Rev. Norb of MRR, he constructed whole monthly columns filled with glorious asides nested within nested parentheses and I have no idea who influenced him but he was my original influence in the wonders of breaking a text with multiple streams midstream, seventeen years after first reading one of his columns I'm still playing at copying him, the footnote would come a little later to me and while it can serve the same function it is not nearly as in your face as an annoying series of parentheses (am I in one now? Shit I have to go back and check (nope I'm not)), I mean you can just skip going to a footnote, but if you want to try to read this review you'll have to navigate these asides. I understand if no one actually does navigate them. My own influences (since this is a book of influences) the ones you don't hear mentioned very often outside of certain zine-centric worlds or maybe in indie publishing are (were) Cometbus, and Ben Weasel, the above mentioned Rev. Norb, Jen Angel of Fucktooth, Al Burian of Burn Collector, Cindy Crabtree of Doris, Mykel Board, George Tabb(MRR, again. How I loved and looked forward to reading the columns), Kathleen Hanna and Ian Mackaye. This is the panoply of voices that shaped my own first attempts at writing. All the fancy 'real' authors would come later. As my friend Ben (not goodreads Ben, but Ben (whose last name I don't know, it's kind of amazing how many people from my punk days I don't know the last names of) from the Disenchanted (the band I saw more than any other band ever, I saw them something like thirty or forty times, they literally played almost every Albany DIY show for a couple of years, and my own band played almost every one of our shows with them), said the last time I saw him (over ten years ago at a Locust show at ABC No Rio) and I asked him what he was up to, he said that his new band was going to be different from The Disenchanted, "More thank yous and less fuck yous", I wish I could get to the point where there were more thank yous than fuck yous, and consider this first part of the review my own thank yous to influences, but my own influences always have a fuck you ready to explode as an almost moral imperative.
This book has made me think quite a bit about my own influences, about what made me and how I go about writing my reviews (since I don't even entertain the notion anymore of doing any writing besides ranting in reviews on the internet). Without anymore pre-review nonsense, here is the review and inevitably more tangential nonsense. The author I really really like one of Jonathan Lethem's books. I like another one. And the few others I've read have done very little for me. I haven't read most of his newer work, you can go to my bookshelves to see what I've read, if you're interested. Lethem has a previous and much shorter collection of essays called The Disappointment Artist, I think that's a fairly apt title for something of his, he's not one of those writers that is always knocking it out of the park. He falls down and the readers get to see it happen. A probably un-apt comparison that I've been working with in my head while reading this book is that Lethem is like DFW's over-excitable little brother. He's got some of the same sensibilities but it's rawer and feels less mediated. For all of DFW's brutal honesty and introspection you know deep down that you are seeing exactly the DFW that he wanted you to see, it might have been close to his real person, but it was also a very crafted lens you were you looking at him through. Lethem has that same honesty but you get the feeling reading him that he has no problem just blurting shit out (even though you know that it's also mediated, it's just not as constructed..... my analogy is falling apart, and I can't get it to work right, time to move on). Lethem is a giant nerd. And one of the things about nerds is that they have no problem waving their nerd flag around, showing the world exactly what they love even if it's not something very cool to be interested in, never mind to love with devotion. He's a book nerd who loves his sci-fi, but also loves his post-moderns, and his lesser known all-stars like Dawn Powell ("With too many uniformly lavish editions, the novice reader, wading in, is at the mercy of dumb luck. This happens a lot. Steerforth Press, meaning well, has made it as likely that a reader curious about Dawn Powell will come out of a bookstore clutching the glum early volumes set in Ohio or the misfiring The Happy Island, as that they'll snag Turn, Magic Wheel or The Locusts have No King. Will that reader try twice? Behind the gorgeous jackets, flawed books jostle beside the masterpieces) and Hartley. He's a music nerd. He's a movie nerd. Aside from some of his book nerd tendencies, he and I I think move in different worlds of nerdom when it comes to music (his being much more mainstream for my tastes), and I just have never been able to sustain enough interest in movies to move from a casual watcher of films to being someone who could get worked up over certain works. He's also an ex-bookstore clerk, putting in more ten plus years on the job and sharing some of the stories to go along with his tour of duty ("After all, didn't every novelist work as a clerk in a bookstore until they'd published their first book?"). This book is a testament to the different things that Lethem loves. And he loves to gush and his gushing is infectious. It's also a chronicle of himself as he tries to figure himself out in various pieces of writing. He comes across as very honest, although what he says could be a momentary belief that's liable to change. The Book Is good. It's tedious to read too many occasional pieces at a time though. Sort of like it's tedious to read too many short stories at a time for me, and it's why I generally don't read too many short story collections or essay collections. Only one piece (so far) was a real snooze-fest, and it actually put the brakes on this book for me for over a week. It was a short-story he included that my sleep deprived brain couldn't muscle it's way through when I was first reading the book, and I felt so blah about going back to the story that I let the book sit for a week or so before I decided I should start carrying it to work and reading it as my subway / break book. The story ended up not being as terrible as it seemed at first, and the book picked up again right after it and it's been pretty smooth sailing ever since, although the sheer number of little essays is a little overwhelming and for some reason I never want to pick up the book when I'm in my apartment. The Review Not the review for this book, but The Review in general. Reading this book has put me in a very self-aware mindset, thinking about my own work (pathetic that I consider my unedited book reviews on a website as my 'work', yes I know), and it's inspired in me a bit of a desire to self-flaggelate or at least pull back the curtain on my own thoughts about reviewing. Most of this I've probably said in other reviews, but maybe not. I can't remember what I've actually written and what I meant to write and never did. I don't like book reviews. For someone who reads as much as I do, and considers himself to be a booknerd and is pretty up on the current state of the book world, I almost never ever ever read professional book reviews. They are boring to me. Actually, I think they are bullshit. When some pompous twit can only tell me that it was a book reviewed two weeks ago in the New York Times and then gives some condescending look when I have no idea which book they are talking about, it doesn't bother me (ok, this rarely happens, but it happened right before Christmas and I wanted to laugh at the man and tell him I don't give a shit what the NYTBR says about anything, I didn't though, and it turned out to not even be a book, but an essay that wasn't about any particular book and trying to explain this to the man was a failure and he called me some name and I said something back to him, and you're the dumb ass who can't understand what he read). I don't give a fuck what Michiko Kakutani thinks about a book. If anything her praise is a sign that the book might be something I'd rather not read. And I don't care to read some novelist 'reviewing' (jerking off) a fellow novelist's (friend's) book. It's all so polite. I also don't like book reports. I don't like someone reiterating a plot to me. I don't like someone possibly ruining the unfolding a plot by a childish, this happened and then this happened and then this happened. I don't like boring book reviews, and I generally don't like being told by a reviewer if they would recommend the book or not. I can usually tell if you they liked the book and if they would recommend it by what they have said (I'm guilty of this also, but I still can't figure out how to write a book review for a book I love that gets my enjoyment across). I also don't like too many gimmicks and I hate hate hate boilerplate formulaic reviews (I especially hate hate hate hate hate boilerplate formulaic gimmicky reviews). For example there is one reviewer who I'll admit that I found a few of his reviews amusing at first, but they now have the appeal of a long-running and tired sitcom re-hashing the same tired old jokes and stale structure. They are boilerplate dribble, and worse than that they are filled with tired gimmicks that feel as fresh as the jokes a tiresome uncle repeats every Thanksgiving. I will grant that they are mechanically better written than any of my reviews, but that's not saying much, most reviews on here are technically better written than mine. I'm a swamp of bad grammar and awful syntax. Now that I've pointed out some things I hate, I'll also point out that I'm guilty of just about everything I hate (except for writing professional book reviews, I'd be willingly guilty of this, too but I doubt the NYTBR would ever come knocking on my door). But, I like to think that I give a fair amount of thought to my reviews and their (lack of?) structure. I don't like writing the same review over and over again. It bores me, and why would I do this if it was boring to me? Writing book reports bore me, so I don't do it. But, still I keep feeling the urge to write these very long winded 'reviews', which I think of more as an extended personal narrative than individual reviews. I think of my own reviews more as a diary that I write for an audience that I believe has actually read every single one of the entries and is just able to follow the progression of ramblings and confessions I spit out. I treat my own reviews sort of as a journal of what I've thought about what I've read, even if what I've thought about might have very little to do with the books themselves but might only be tangentially related to something in a book. I like reviews that are honest, that give away more about the author of the review than the book. I like to read how the book affected someone. I like to see them get angry or genuinely bubble over with excitement (I don't care to see that every book you read is a highest possible recommendation, but maybe some people are just better than others at picking only winners, Vegas must be great for people with that kind of skill), but that being said I can't stand reviews that judge other readers for liking something that they don't like (guilty guilty guilty, I judge all the time, but I try to keep an open mind that others can like what they like without blanket accusations, I probably hate some of my own reviews). Does all of this say much about reviews or maybe say more about what reviews I vote for and don't vote for? Maybe. Maybe not. I actually don't vote for a lot of reviews because I never see them. I'm an awful goodreader who is bogged down constantly by the amount of material being thrown at him. Wrapping up If you've actually waded through all this muck, thank you! I should return to the book at hand, yes? It's a good book and it's a wonderful portrait of Lethem with all (well not all I'm sure, but quite a few) of his warts being put on display. It's a difficult book to get through just because of it being composed of so many short pieces, and they do start to run together when you try to read the book for any real length of time. I could have done this book more justice by going in to more particulars, talking about essays I enjoyed, pointing out more subjects being discussed in the book. I could have done that. Maybe I should have. (less) | Notes are private!
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| 1
| not set
| Jan 14, 2012
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Jan 14, 2012
| Hardcover
| |||||||||||||||
| 0380763656
| 9780380763658
| 3.82
| 507
| 1976
| Nov 01, 1991
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| I guess I should state that this is the second Matthew Scudder novel.
Sometime while reading the second half of this book today it dawned...moreI guess I should state that this is the second Matthew Scudder novel. Sometime while reading the second half of this book today it dawned on me that Scudder is quite a bit like another character I came across recently. At first I couldn't remember which one, but I knew it was from one of the Hard Case novels I've devoured in the past three months. I thought maybe it was from an earlier Lawrence Block novel, but then it hit me, Scudder is a lot like Matt Cordell (I had to look this up just now, I have no memory of character names for the most part) from Ed McBain's 1958 novel The Gutter and the Grave. Now I'm looking at the names and I see two Matts, and I see two surnames with two syllables each and d sound at the end of the first syllable. I don't know if I'm on to anything, or if I'm just noticing something that maybe Block was upfront about, or if I'm just an idiot and really there are only so many ways to create an ex-New York's Finest who reluctantly solves crimes (but Cordell wasn't a cop he was a PI, actually the more I think about it there are quite a few differences, but there are quite a few similarities, too). I didn't love this one as much as Sins of the Father, the first book in the series. Actually, I'm sort of lying. I liked it about as much, but what made me love the first book was the weird surprise revelation of Scudder's character towards the end of the novel, and well, I now know that part of his character and when something similar to the ending of the first novel happens in this one there wasn't really the awe inspiringness going on. It's sort of like when you first read someone's witty review, that is say written in the style of the book they just read or uses a particularly funny style of pictures and you think it's good and you vote on it, and then you see that the same thing is done again for the next book, and the one after that and the one after that and so on and so on, and you stop liking it and you realize that it's actually sort of annoying. This is kind of like that, but since it's only the second novel and there were lots of other things to enjoy about the novel it didn't bother me (this thing I'm talking about but not actually saying what it is), and I can imagine Block continuing to use this device or aspect of Scudder's character and still keeping his books fresh and enjoyable, unlike say a James Bond movie which is a whole franchise that I find unbearably tedious in it's cookie cutter plot. I really dislike those movies. I'm not complaining though, I'm just trying to obtusely point out why I only gave this book four stars. On to book three now. (less) | Notes are private!
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| 1
| not set
| Jan 12, 2012
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Jan 12, 2012
| Mass Market Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
| 0385523823
| 9780385523820
| 3.84
| 1,433
| unknown
| Mar 18, 2008
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| "Jill's always on me about my clogged pipes, but I'm a big guy-they don't call me Big Bernie for nothing-and I crave junk food like a baby craves...more"Jill's always on me about my clogged pipes, but I'm a big guy-they don't call me Big Bernie for nothing-and I crave junk food like a baby craves the tit. Besides, I'm beginning to believe that anything I do to extend my life is just going to be outweighed by the agony of living it." Welcome to Knockemstiff, Ohio. Hometown of Donald Ray Pollock and literary home of a whole slew of fucked up redneck, hillbilly, poor white trash. What is it about white trash that makes for such good readin'? I think I wrote about this in a recent review, so I'll just leave the question hanging here. This is a collection of stories all taking place in Knockemstiff, Ohio. The stories are sometimes interrelated, some characters guest star in multiple stories and the book is bookended and anchored towards the middle with stories about one particular family. Years ago, well about ten. I had this idea I knocked around in my head for a long time (a couple of years probably), about writing a series of stories that would make up a book all about the trashier side of white Saratoga Springs, my surrogate hometown. I completed two of the stories (shhhh, I like to think I've never completed any), and started or at least jotted down premises for the rest of them. I gave up on the whole idea after awhile and the book is now part of the incredibly amazing library of unwritten books I have conceived of that would have (I'm sure) shaken the ground of American Letters. I was going to maybe share one of those stories, but I think they might actually be lost in some landfill or wherever old hard-drives go to die. Oh well, or maybe they are just somewhere on my computer in a folder I can't remember making. Anyway, back to the book. These are a series of short stories that all are really fast to read. I think there is something about them that fooled me into reading them faster, and I tried to slow myself down by taking a break after a story or two, but then I'd find myself reading another book and not giving this book the attention I think it deserved. Even with my slipshod style of reading it, I know that there is something good going on here, and one day I should return to it and read them again, slower and without other books getting in the middle of them (I'm currently having a problem with starting books, I have about five books going on right now, I need to just start finishing some and not starting anymore until I do, but so many different titles keep calling out to me and I'm impatient). While I'm not personally white trash (I don't think), I have spent quite a bit of time in my past watching them, frequenting the same places that they go to, getting called a faggot by them, going to their homes to deliver food and furniture, taking away furniture from them, working with them and still to this day being more afraid of them in a Wal-Mart when I'm home visiting my parents than I ever feel in New York City. This past Christmas I was home and visiting Wal-Mart to try to find a cable of some sort for my Dad and I got to overhear so many delightfully ignorant conversations about a whole host of topics. The kinds of things that if you read you might think were total fabrications, people really believe some of this shit? (I'm feeling too lazy to share them here, some of the topics included 'how calenders lie', 'why I don't trust the post-office', and 'how even going on the internet at all causes identity theft' (followed up by, 'how I'm smarter than all those other motherfuckers', this particular man was pontificating right in front of where the cable was that I needed to get, so I spent longer than I should have listening to him)) The point of that blabbing is that after my years of careful study of them I feel like Pollock nailed them so well. I felt like I was back nursing weak coffee at the Spa City Diner or standing on a rickety set of stairs leading up to a double wide at the Pyramid Pines trailer park (you know, the one out behind Wal-Mart with over three hundred units). I'm not up to going to into very many particulars about the stories themselves. They are good even if it's doubtful very many of the characters can be called good. They are fucked up people, making bad decisions and trapped in bad lives with no hope of redemption. I (and maybe you) just get to get some enjoyment out of taking a glimpse into these lives and slum it for a couple of hundred pages. Oh, and before I leave this review, I just wanted to share this other passage from the book. How depressing is this? This is like Raymond Carver level tightly packed depressing in the details. Or maybe it's just me. "Sharon was heavy, too, but over the years she learned the secrets of makeup application and how to camouflage her thick body with brightly colored sweats."(less) | Notes are private!
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| 1
| Jan 09, 2012
| Jan 16, 2012
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Jan 09, 2012
| Hardcover
| |||||||||||||||
| 1566892740
| 9781566892742
| 3.95
| 306
| Aug 23, 2011
| Aug 23, 2011
|
|  It's been like ten years since I saw or read Trainspotting, but I remember being annoyed with the movie when I first saw it. The book had e...more It's been like ten years since I saw or read Trainspotting, but I remember being annoyed with the movie when I first saw it. The book had ended with a nihilistic pessimism that the movie kind of spun into a 'selling-out' of sorts (if cleaning up, screwing over your friends and trying to escape the zombie existence of a junkie can be called selling out). The young, angry and idealized version of myself kind of hated the ending to the movie. As I made my way through this book, the voice of Ewan McGregor saying the whole, choose blah blah blah part of the movie kept playing as a soundtrack in the back of my brain, somewhere just in front of the occipital lobe. This book is a sort of, choose life! type of coming of age sort of novel. If coming of age can be applied to a post-college living abroad as a privileged poet sort of story line. The book is about a fairly unlikable young poet who is living in Madrid for a year on some kind of grant to study poetry and the Spanish Civil War. He's a self-obessed bi-polar, liar who fakes his way through interactions and feels like he is duping everyone into thinking he is a poet when in reality he thinks he's just a talentless schmuck. As any good humanities major will do he over-contextualizes everything, and confuses convoluted thoughts with being ponderous ideas. He's sort of like an everyman of directionless humanity students who fool everyone (and themselves?) into thinking they are something greater than they really are. This particular story works as a fairy tale of sorts. The misunderstood, or is it unnoticed genius, becomes one when he realizes that, Yes, I really am a great poet, it hasn't just been a pose the whole time! This is the fairy tale I think of most humanity majors, after years of bullshitting through papers and realizing that they can argue anything if they just find a few quotes and spin some words around in counter-intuitive directions that they aren't just colossal fakers but the bona-fide real deal authentic kissed by an angel embodiment of if not genius than at least exceptional talent. For a small press book, this has had a fair amount of buzz it feels like. Or at least a few people have asked for it by name, and it was difficult to get into the store for a bit. I don't quite know why this book has gotten that attention, rather than some other small press book. It's ok. I think many of the blurbs are, um, a tad superfluous. I don't know if I read the same book that Jonathan Franzen described as beautiful. I think it's possible that so many 'serious' writers blurbed the book because it is one of those books aimed directly at over-educated folks who have the nagging suspicion that everything they do is deep down not that important, and that the guy who picks up our garbage from the curb every Tuesday and Friday is quite possibly doing something more beneficial for society than the 'life of the mind' and scribbles put to paper and put up on the internets. I think the book is honest, and I think it's a good book but it also feels like many a book and story I've read before, or maybe it just feels like a modified version of some of my own life, without the realization of genius and the pat on the back that I am (was?) doing something worthwhile. (less) | Notes are private!
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| 1
| Jan 04, 2012
| Jan 06, 2012
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Jan 04, 2012
| Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
| 0671211803
| 9780671211806
| 3.98
| 400
| 1972
| Apr 01, 1972
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| None
| Notes are private!
| none
| 1
| Jan 02, 2012
| Jan 02, 2012
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Jan 02, 2012
| Hardcover
| |||||||||||||||
| 0061431850
| 9780061431852
| 4.22
| 7,061
| Aug 28, 2006
| Mar 09, 2010
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| I can't be the first person to see this connection, but I didn't notice any of my friends mention this so I'll use it as the starting off point for my...moreI can't be the first person to see this connection, but I didn't notice any of my friends mention this so I'll use it as the starting off point for my review of this book. Jellicoe Road is the novel equivalent of Arcade Fire's debut album Funeral. "Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)" was used super-effectively in the trailer for "Where the Wild Things Are", but it's a song cut from the same cloth of this book, if there ever is a movie it, I'd think this song would have to be dusted off for another trailer. Or maybe they could get away with using "Wake Up" in this imaginary movie of the future. My goodreads friends have probably written better reviews of this book than I will write here. I'd recommend reading their reviews. Part of me wanted to give this four stars, just because it's probably kind of a girly book, and because there are a couple of loose ends in the novel that seem kind of forced to tie themselves up nicely. A lot of people I know also love this book, and the contrarian part of me wanted to say, it was good but it wasn't that good. But it is that good, and it's strengths are so strong that they allowed me to overlook the couple of contrived ways of wrapping up the story. And it's not really a girly book at all, but by the packaging of the book I can't see it getting read by that many teenage boys. Actually do teenagers like this book? My couple of goodreads friends who read this whom are close to being teenagers were the people who rated this lowest. It's a fairly complex book for teenagers, like the narrator's personality it's not the friendliest book when you first encounter. It's the kind of book that can infuriate you at the start if you try to hard to make sense of everything that is going on. I didn't worry about this though. Too many friends loved this book, and they weren't all the type that could gush over a Ben Marcus like novel that has no easy way to circumnavigate the text. I trusted that the author would do her job and that when things needed to make sense they would, and they did although it took me about a hundred and fifty pages before I had grasp on who the all the characters backstory were. But, it's nice when books take their time to unfold, I just don't know how much patience kids (teens) would have with it. I like to think I'm wrong though, and teens are better readers than their adult counterparts who whine like babies if a book demands anything more than turning a few pages. I'm floundering more than usual with this review. It's a beautiful and sad book and I'd recommend it, even if I can't write a review that does it any justice. (less) | Notes are private!
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| Jan 2012
| Jan 02, 2012
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Jan 02, 2012
| Paperback
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| 3.92
| 101
| Jan 03, 2012
| Jan 03, 2012
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| January 21st addition to the review:
Ryan Boudinot sent me the page of the manuscript that mentions Minor Threat! How awesome ...moreJanuary 21st addition to the review:
Ryan Boudinot sent me the page of the manuscript that mentions Minor Threat! How awesome is that! And now for the review as it was written a few weeks ago: She yearned for plot but instead absurdity after absurdity had been thrown before her, absurdities that alluded to obscured purposes A true bit of historical fact that maybe my goodreads friends of the Northwest know, but which I didn't. Seattle was originally called New York. And then it was called New York Alki. Alki, was a word in a local Native American tribe that sort of means someday, or by and by. So for a year or so what would be known as Seattle was called something like Future New York. Then someone decided it was probably silly to name yourself after another city that is in itself named after another place and person, and they went with Seattle. In this book, New York City has been destroyed and it's in the process of being rebuilt exactly as it was on an island in Puget Sound (ok, not New York City, but Manhattan, my own wreck of an apartment wouldn't be reproduced in this recreation, but my blessed New Age section of the bookstore would). I've been giving quite a bit of thought to this review, and it's stumping me. I'm not sure what I'm going to write, but the book needs a review. It's really good and I need to try to convey that and maybe influence someone to give this a shot. If for some reason you think my taste in books are similar to yours, or you think that because I like a book you might like it too, then the simple quick review here is the book is really good. It's not perfect, but I think it's so worth your time (and even money) to read it. The problem I'm having with coming up with a review, is that I don't want to spoil anything in the book. There are things I want to write about but they almost all come at the risk of giving away precious bits of the plot. Part of the goodness of this book is the way it unfolds, the slow and tantalizing way the author exposes the story, the backstory, the whole world his novel takes place in. I've read some literary critic or professional reviewer or someone (I can't remember whom though), who thinks that it is his place to give away all the plot because it allows the reader to fully appreciate the book if they aren't involved in the infantile joys of wondering, what happens next, or why or get involved in any of the real joys of having putting yourself in the hands of very capable storyteller and not knowing where the journey is going to lead you. Maybe it's unconscious, but there is also a strain of goodreads cub-book-reporters who find nothing wrong with giving away the entire basic narrative structure of a book (save for maybe some honest to goodness spoilers) after a few perfunctory dick jokes and maybe the names of some alcoholic beverages written in bold. All of his might just be laziness on my part, I find it boring to write play by plays of a book, but as a reader I've never read Cliff Notes and I have little interest in having a hack breakdown a piece of literature into a book report. But, I'm probably just grasping for straws in justifying my own laziness in writing about the actual plot of a book in my own reviews. I want to write this review. I'm afraid of spoiling anything. I'm going to put the rest of this review in what I hope will be nested spoilers, levels of spoilers. I'd recommend not reading on if you want to read this book. But if you keep reading on, then I'd recommend not clicking on the spoiler buttons within the spoiler unless you have either read the book, or have no interest in reading the book but for some pathological reason feel the need to read everything I write on the internet. But before I do that, I'm going to say again, this book is really good. It's George Saunders and David Foster Wallace filtered through Philip K. Dick and the movies of Richard Kelly. It's what I imagine Ballard is like when he's at his best, but I wouldn't know because I have only read Crash, and he mostly exists as an idealized author in my head, and I imagine him to be awesome, but I fear he won't live up to that awesomeness so I stay away from his work. It's not a perfect book, but it's so good for so much of the book that the faults I have with it are ok. If you need everything in a book wrapped up neatly, if you need to know what was wrong with Hal and don't care about everything else that is great in a book, then I'd say stay away from this one. That's as much of a spoiler as I'm giving in this non-spoiler zone. I was beginning to understand that the end of the world wasn't something that came about all at once. There was no climatic event that definitively destroyed life as we knew it. Rather, it happened incrementally, so slowly it was difficult to notice, the frog in the boiling water. A few of us saw it coming but were dismissed as insane , or we blew our cred by drawing lines in the sand and declaring that the world would end on a particular date. You know the cartoons with the sandal-wearing bearded freak on a street corner holding a sign reading "The end is near." The end was a slow but accumulating tabulation of lost things. We lost species of animals, polar ice, a building here and there, whole cities. There was a time when we lived on streets where we knew our neighbors' names but now we were all strangers isolated in our condos late at night, speaking across distances to our lonely, electronic communities. Children used to play in forests. We Used to gather around a piano and join our voices together. I tried to determine whether these sad thoughts were just the result of growing old. Probably, but that didn't make them any less real. Maybe I had lost so much myself-my family, my friends-that I couldn't help but project my grief onto the world at large. It was no longer enough for me to grieve for a lost mother, father, sister, or friend. Now my grief intended to encompass the planet (view spoiler)[I'm not sure if this constitutes a spoiler, but I personally enjoyed not knowing what had taken place to make the world as it was in the first chapter of the book until later on in the novel. The world is (or isn't) some kind of dystopian, post-apocolyptic hell in the first chapter that introduces us to Woo-jin Kan, a retarded guy who is also the worlds greatest dishwasher who lives in a trailer surrounded by garbage in Seattle with his morbidly obese step-sister who is used for her obesity to grow body parts for medical purposes in her many folds of fat. It's a shitty world. But it's not the entire world of his post-nightmare (or as it's called in the book, the Age of Fucked Up Shit), it would be like reading The Jungle and saying that is the way the world was at that time. No, that was the reality for certain people, but there were many realities that made up the whole world that people were living in. That and this is just one of the shittier versions of reality. The fucked up-ness of the world looks awful at first. And it is awful, but in the first chapter our imagination can run a little wild and it feels like we are visiting something truly fucked and alien to our own world. The thing about this book, the possibly scary thing, is that there isn't anything going on here that can really be safely regulated out to sci-fi fantasy (ok, maybe the sentient iceberg, and the endless red carpet scene, but those are more absurd than attempts at being prophetic about what could happen (I'd guess that there are lots of ways New York City could get wiped off the map, terrorist attacks, earth quake, giant tidal wave, meteor, or what not, but I'm guessing an unstoppable ice berg that moves across Canada from Alaska destroying major metropolitan areas with polar bears acting as it's own SS force of storm troopers isn't going to happen, it's a cool image though). Things are bad, but they are only a handful of steps different from our own world. It's still a world of rampant consumerism, crappy reality TV, scary amounts of dependence on the interwebs, excessive celebrity worship, etc etc. As the story goes on, as more details unfold, the reader learns that the cataclysm that put into motion a series of relatively small events that wiped out somewhere around eighty percent of the population, and in a way was trying to hit the reset button on humanity, was the work of a ground of geniuses, who thought that they were saving the world by doing this. It's the humanity is a virus that needs to be wiped out or contained sort of pessimistic view, but with a twist that humanity needs to survive because it's humanities goal to spread life throughout the universe (here the story sort of hacks into the New Age beliefs of our own planet's life being originally created by aliens from other worlds (this idea is normally yawn inducing to me, but here works, maybe because it's not being screamed as being some vast conspiracy, and because I could read it without smelling the incense I normally smell when I see the covers of books that push this idea in the New Age section of my store). Do you want to know how the world ends? It wasn't with a whimper or a bang, it was (view spoiler)[by hitting the red fire button on a 1970's Atari controller (hide spoiler)]. One of the interesting things to think about (well for me) is (in relation to the scope of the book), was the pushing of humanities reset button a success? Is the world that Woo-jin occupies at the start of the book really a "Brave New World"? Is it better? Is carrying around a handgun produced by Coca-Cola part of an enlightened humanity? Is humanity enlightened by awful events, or is there just a temporary awareness of our own humanity (on say September 12th) and then a fast return to carrying more about what celebrity is fucking what celebrity than less ephemeral concerns? What does this say about us as people? Would a better world be created by keeping us all in a state of constant shock from horrific events? These aren't things necessarily addressed in the book, but it's things I started thinking about. But, is the book about any of this? What about the title? What does the afterlife refer to? Or I think, more interestingly, what is the center of this book, what is the point the reader is supposed to stand in and view the events going on? I wish I knew some people who read this already, because I'd love to talk about this while the book is still fresh in my mind. The book is something of a multi-dimensional mobius strip. With the BioNet stuff, and the DJ'ing and hacking of people and the whole Abby Fogg story, the question of what is actually happening is a confusing one. Parts of the story are obviously not happening, they are all in someone's head, but which parts and whose head? The anchor of the whole novel, the series of interviews going on with Luke Piper that gives the reader a lot of the background to what is happening is also fraught with unreliability, and the fact that this interview connects and exists in relation to the rest of the narrative threads through Abby's character very difficult to know if there is any reliability in the story at all. Is what happened, what happened? And (view spoiler)[what does Luke (I'm just getting this now, is this a Star Wars / Bible reference (the name) and isn't Piper have a Luke on his home planet connotation, wasn't something called a sand piper or something, I'm too lazy to google) see when he goes outside at the very end of the book (hide spoiler)]? (hide spoiler)] Those are some of the questions I have about the book. I kind of would like to talk about some of them with someone, but so far I don't know anyone else who has finished the book, so I'll wait. (less) | Notes are private!
| none
| 1
| Jan 2012
| Jan 04, 2012
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Jan 01, 2012
| Hardcover
| |||||||||||||||||
| 038076363X
| 9780380763634
| 3.87
| 1,049
| 1976
| Sep 01, 1991
|
| As my first bit of book reviewing for the new year (being started seven minutes into the new year, yep another exciting new year's eve with me reporti...moreAs my first bit of book reviewing for the new year (being started seven minutes into the new year, yep another exciting new year's eve with me reporting on books here on goodreads), I'll admit that I was wrong in my opinion of Lawrence Block. For years I thought nothing of him, I thought he was another of those male macho writers, sort of a mystery version of say a Vince Flynn, or a Brad Thor, or some other preposterously monikered hack. Or I thought he was the type of writers old men read, like cozy mysteries for the greatest generation. What he read while she was off reading a novel where a cat is solving some crime that has to do with sewing and baking. Maybe it was the titles of his Thief who.... series of books. Maybe it was the boringness of his Hit (X) book covers. Maybe it was a lot of things. But I liked to think it was this picture of him that made me feel ambivalent (nope, not ambivalent, actually fairly sure that I would never pick up a book he had written) about him:
This picture for years at the book factory annoyed me. The way he seemed to be coming at me with his glasses off. The picture kind of freaks me out. It was the type of picture I expect the father of someone named Brad Thor would take. So I was wrong. I know I am wrong about this next statement but I'll throw it out there anyway; it's quite possible that Lawrence Block can do no wrong. Why is he so fucking good? I have a feeling that eventually in this series there are going to be mediocre books, and some will be better than others, and that it's not humanely possible to keep up with Hit (x) series at the same high level that the first book reached. But, after reading seven of his novels since the middle of October I'm starting to feel confident that even when he's writing a mediocre book (and he wrote a shit ton of books so they aren't all going to be home runs) he is writing at pretty much a whole different level from most of his peers (Westlake and Ellroy as exceptions). Even his pretty silly Killing Castro reads better than a lot of the other Hardcase books I've read, and even his Jill Emerson signed novel Getting Off has something about it that just shouldn't be there in a novel that is basically a repetitive sex and violence book that would make Stewart Home think about maybe interjecting something extra into the story to mix things up a bit. I'm not going to say it's his writing, his writing is fine, but I can't think of any particular passages that have really sung for me, it's not like Ellroy where the prose just rips at you, or Chandler where you just can't believe how much beauty he wrenches out of what should be typical noir schtick. Block's prose is fairly unobtrusive, which is a good thing, too often in crime novels when you notice the prose it's because of it is making you cringe. It's the characters. He creates amazing fucking characters. Matthew Scudder is one of these amazing fucking characters. Until about twenty pages till the end I thought this was going to be a four star book. It was good, but not great. I liked it but didn't love it, but then the fucking ending! I'm usually not that blown away by the way a book ends, it's usually a fairly foregone conclusion by the time the book chooses to wind up. There might be a twist, but you have a feeling the twist is coming. The book feeds you signals to know how the story is going to go, and if maybe some details surprise you the general arc doesn't. So fucking good. I think it's quite possible Lawrence Block might be one of the best writers out there and he's been hiding from me in plain sight for years.(less) | Notes are private!
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| 1
| Dec 31, 2011
| Dec 31, 2011
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Dec 31, 2011
| Mass Market Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
| 0380700816
| 9780380700813
| unknown
| 3.66
| 366
| 1956
| May 1986
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| None
| Notes are private!
| none
| 1
| Dec 30, 2011
| Dec 30, 2011
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Dec 30, 2011
| Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0843955880
| 9780843955880
| 3.85
| 125
| 1953
| Jan 31, 2006
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| None
| Notes are private!
| none
| 1
| Dec 28, 2011
| Dec 30, 2011
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Dec 28, 2011
| Mass Market Paperback
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