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September 11
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jcg
gave
 
to:
The Town That Forgot How to Breathe: A Novel (Paperback)
by Kenneth J. Harvey
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my rating:
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jcg said:
"The first part of the book balances delightfully on the cusp between reality and hallucination, but about halfway through it loses its direction. The parts with the army and "Gamma rays detected in sector 7, sir!" read like a bad 1950s scie...more
The first part of the book balances delightfully on the cusp between reality and hallucination, but about halfway through it loses its direction. The parts with the army and "Gamma rays detected in sector 7, sir!" read like a bad 1950s science fiction story.
There's really too much going on. There are spirits and troubled relationships and a mysterious illness and electrical distrubances and tsunamis and hallucinations and house-to-house searches and bodies and irrational anger and helicopters and fairies. The author doesn't seem to know what the story is about. Even the title is odd as the town didn't really 'forget' how to breathe, somehow the breathing disturbance has something to do with relationships to people who drowned long ago, but that explanation is buried under microwaves and gamma rays.
The book seems unfocused as the action follows several characters throughout the events, but fewer characters would have made the book tighter - the stories of the policeman and the doctor didn't really add anything to the narrative and could easily have been left out, or at least cut down considerably. In the end, the author can't decide if he wants to leave the reader with a mystery or a physical explanation. He tries to mix the two and leaves nothing but a confused mess.
The writing is flowing, but there is far too much of it. It would have been an engaging read at half the length. The author thanks Janet Power "for helping to determine the novel's tone and direction." All I can say is she done him wrong.
...less
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September 08
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jcg
gave
to:
Howl and Other Poems (City Lights Pocket Poets Series)
by Allen Ginsberg
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my rating:
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jcg said:
"This was the first book I read outside the mainstream canon of Shakespeare/Shelley/Yeats. It blew my mind then and it blows my mind everytime I read it. Ginsberg opened up the language. His spontaneous sounding style was actually the result of craftm...more
This was the first book I read outside the mainstream canon of Shakespeare/Shelley/Yeats. It blew my mind then and it blows my mind everytime I read it. Ginsberg opened up the language. His spontaneous sounding style was actually the result of craftmanship and endless revisions. He crafted the language to sound like that. It was a new way of using language in the 1950s and still resonates strongly today....less
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jcg
gave
to:
fractal economies (Paperback)
by Derek Beaulieu
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my rating:
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jcg said:
"A wonderful adventure in language, signs and communication complete with a thought provoking essay.
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September 07
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jcg
gave
to:
A Coney Island of the Mind: Poems (New Directions Paperback No. 74)
by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
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my rating:
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jcg said:
"One of my favorite books of all time. I don't think any other book had such an effect on me when I was young - except perhaps Lorca's Gypsy Ballads which I could only read in translation. It truly blew my mind and let me see the world from a new per...more
One of my favorite books of all time. I don't think any other book had such an effect on me when I was young - except perhaps Lorca's Gypsy Ballads which I could only read in translation. It truly blew my mind and let me see the world from a new perspective. It showed me the possibilities of language....less
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September 03
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jcg
gave
to:
The Coyote Kings of the Space-Age Bachelor Pad (Paperback)
by Minister Faust
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my rating:
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jcg said:
"Minister Faust is a creative writer, he just doesn't know when to stop. Maybe I am just in the wrong demographic for this book, maybe it would appeal to someone brought up on role-playing computer games.
I enjoyed the monologues of the two charac...more
Minister Faust is a creative writer, he just doesn't know when to stop. Maybe I am just in the wrong demographic for this book, maybe it would appeal to someone brought up on role-playing computer games.
I enjoyed the monologues of the two characters in the first four chapters and thought I was in for a good read. After 36 pages of irrepressible ranting, time to get on with the story. Then chapter 5 introduced a new character monolgue. Chapter 6 has the first two characters walking home. Chapter 7 has them arriving home. Chapter 8 is about making breakfast. Chapter 9...well, you get the drift. Cuteness can only get you so far. After a few more new character monologues, we finally meet the mystery woman in chapter 14 and it looks like things will start to happen. Nope. More monologues. I mean, the characters are already established, do we need pages and pages of more cuteness? By chapter 24 I had enough. Minister Faust is a writer desperately in need of an editor - someone to tell him when enough is enough....less
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jcg
gave
to:
Borkmann's Point: An Inspector Van Veeteren Mystery (Hardcover)
by H akan Nesser
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my rating:
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jcg said:
"A disappointing book. The first part relating the three murders is very good, but around the middle the narrative drops dead as the detectives wander around with no clues, have meals, play chess, drink wine, get together to discuss the fact that they...more
A disappointing book. The first part relating the three murders is very good, but around the middle the narrative drops dead as the detectives wander around with no clues, have meals, play chess, drink wine, get together to discuss the fact that they have no clues, etc. After that the book is mostly clichéd padding. There's a coincidence which leads to false suspect, there's a false confession, there's a detective who pursues a clue without telling anyone what the clue is and subsequently disappears. Cliché, cliché, cliché. The big disappointment is that the police don't solve the case, killer reveals the motivation for the murders in a long, tell-all confession. Too bad, it started out so good....less
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September 01
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jcg
gave
to:
Stranger in a Strange Land (Paperback)
by Robert A. Heinlein
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my rating:
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jcg said:
"I read the edited version a long time ago and have now read the uncut version. The book would not suffer from being cut down considerably. The premise and the story are imaginative, but all the polemic about religion, politics, art and other subjects...more
I read the edited version a long time ago and have now read the uncut version. The book would not suffer from being cut down considerably. The premise and the story are imaginative, but all the polemic about religion, politics, art and other subjects could have been left out, and the book would have been better for it - let the story tell it, don't lecture us. The book really goes off the rails sometimes, especially in the conversations between Foster and Digby in heaven.
The revelations about the potential of the human mind to engage in telekinesis, telepathy and other psychic phenomena is intriguing. However, the attitudes in the book raise serious concerns.
Men do all the thinking and organizing, women do their bidding and are pretty much objectified. A woman is described as a "little imp with lively legs and lovely lewd lascivious lecherous licentious libido." and that about sums up the status of women. There are also several references to the need for women to be spanked.
The sexuality in the book is juvenile male fantasy stuff and homosexuality is grokked as a "wrongness." Pornography is grokked as good and we are told that when a woman is raped it's partly her own fault. Much is made of female nudity in the book, but very little of male nudity. Women walk around naked for the enjoyment of the men who look at them - and the women enjoy being looked at - but the men don't walk around naked for the women to look at. It's never mentioned that the women enjoy looking at the men the way the men appreciate the women or that men enjoy being looked at naked.
The notion that a woman's self-esteem is based on how much men admire them is something women have been fighting since the days of Jane Austen.
Another disturbing attitude is that people who are "wrong" are simply murdered. Viscious criminals and corrupt politicians are executed without recourse to due process of law. That's a very scary direction to go.
(A note on pornography: there is nothing inherently wrong with pictures of people naked or engaging in sex acts. The problem with pornography is that it is an industry which victimizes people.)...less
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August 25
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jcg
gave
to:
Paradise (Oprah's Book Club)
by Toni Morrison
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my rating:
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jcg said:
"This was my second attempt to read a Toni Morrison novel. I can't remember what the other one was, but I had to give it up because it was too depressing. I had the same experience in this book, it was just too ugly for me - people being relentlessly ...more
This was my second attempt to read a Toni Morrison novel. I can't remember what the other one was, but I had to give it up because it was too depressing. I had the same experience in this book, it was just too ugly for me - people being relentlessly brutal to each other. It doesn't give one much hope for human relationships.
I enjoyed her style in the beginning, the way she wove the backstory into the action - even though it was a grim scene of men hunting down women....less
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jcg
gave
to:
Gravity's Rainbow (Paperback)
by Thomas Pynchon
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my rating:
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jcg said:
"If this book had been half as long I would have finished it, but wading through 760 pages was a little too much. If you walk on the beach you might wade in the water part of the time, but you don't want to spend your whole vacation doing it. The impo...more
If this book had been half as long I would have finished it, but wading through 760 pages was a little too much. If you walk on the beach you might wade in the water part of the time, but you don't want to spend your whole vacation doing it. The import of the book was lost in a sea of trivia.
I could see Pynchon's talent in his seamless language and the way he wove everything together, but I found that a little goes a long way, and this went a very long way....less
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August 24
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jcg
gave
to:
The Master and Margarita (Paperback)
by Mikhail Bulgakov
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my rating:
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jcg said:
"A great surreal, hallucinogenic romp of a novel. Literature can be fun!
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