Ninja Sock Puppet

Ninja Sock Puppet made a comment on his review of Blueprints of the Afterlife

"I wasn't looking for Catholic afterlife answers in this book at all. I wanted the book to answer its own questions that it raised instead of leaving i...more "

Ninja Sock Puppet rated a book 3 of 5 stars

Blueprints of the Afterlife
by Ryan Boudinot (Goodreads Author)

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DBR.

I've done a lot of thinking about the afterlife. I've read Doubt and numberless Dawkins, Hitchens, Gould, Hawking, Darwin, Adams, and God books. I read Introduction to Christianity by the current Pope (then Cardinal Ratzinger, a name which sugges...more

Ninja Sock Puppet made a comment on his review of Mrs. Dalloway

"Thanks, Brian. You too, Tommy and Kelly. I think Clarissa would be the type of FB friend who is always setting up her other friends with each other."

Ninja Sock Puppet made a comment on Elizabeth's review of Mrs. Dalloway

"I'm not generally threatened by feminism or strong women (look who I married! But I know you're not talking about me) and I self-identify as feminist,...more "

Ninja Sock Puppet made a comment on Eh?Eh!'s review of Mrs Dalloway

"There were classical and literature references? I mean, she quoted some Shakespeare a few times, but it's not like Cymbeline was one of the greats or...more "

Ninja Sock Puppet made a comment on his review of The Mrs. Dalloway Reader

"Thanks, Esteban! Ceridwen pointed out that I chose some strange 'Reader' thing instead of the real book, so I've copied and pasted it over there.

http:...more "

Ninja Sock Puppet rated a book 5 of 5 stars

Mrs. Dalloway
by Virginia Woolf

read in February, 2012

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The tragedy of being human is not mortality; it's not as simple as fear of time, or emptiness or pain. It's in growing old and discovering your regrets, the what-ifs, the parallel universe where you followed your passion (and became fabulously lucky...more The tragedy of being human is not mortality; it's not as simple as fear of time, or emptiness or pain. It's in growing old and discovering your regrets, the what-ifs, the parallel universe where you followed your passion (and became fabulously lucky in the daydreaming lottery) and had a life of beauty, talent, and fortune. Growing old is not as much about getting gray hairs, losing your hair, gaining weight, taking more naps, or growing more hair in other, weirder places, but about becoming more yourself, both refined and unvarnished: the younger romantic becomes an old sap; the sexy fun girl settles down to an over-content family life; the mousy artist wakes up one day to discover she's got taste, real talent, maybe a small audience, but that the lines she lays down never match the ones in her head and can only approach them in a vulgar palimpsest of imperfection.

Mrs. Dalloway is about growing old. It's about regrets, love, and people. Above all, people, and how we are all interconnected through bonds of varying lengths and weights. It's about the surface and deep thoughts that people have while doing people things, normal and ordinary. This interior dialog is the entirety of the book, and I'm convinced that there is no narrator, only glimpses into different characters' thoughts as they have them, scenes as they see them. The scenes that others ascribe to an omniscient narrator are really from a particular character's point of view, and what they see informs how that character thinks. This is true with the skywriting airplane scenes and especially at the party itself, where multiple POV characters come together in one place and we catch a disorienting hall of mirrors effect seeing all these familiar characters through each others' eyes.

Woolf is great at characters. They are so realistically rendered, it's obvious that she loves them each so much that she doesn't dare play favorites but instead renders them as faithfully as she can, with as much shine, posture, blood, and sweat as she can muster. They are concerned with themselves, their station, they reflect on their history, and muse about their futures. Occasionally like Richard they realize happiness (though he couldn't quite work up the nerve to tell her that he loved her), more often like Clarissa wonder what things might have been like and busy themselves over the people in their lives, but sometimes, like Septimus, flounder and grasp and clutch at the illusion of perfection, the difficulty in distinguishing intelligence and insight from madness.

The tragedy of being human isn't that we're smart, though being smart certainly compounds the tragedy: we invented God because we have an inkling of what perfection is, and we know that while we may strive for it in our art, our bodies, our ideologies, our lives, and yes, even our dinner parties, we can only die part-way up some imaginary hyperbolic curve while imagining that if only we'd chosen a different major, quit drinking, done something differently, we'd have died further up. That's the tragedy of our lives, that we not only can't live up to the perfection we imagine is possible, and that we're biologically incapable of just stopping, sitting down, and realizing that things are just fine the way they are too, that those talented and beautiful young people are just as broken as we are, and are just better at hiding it right now. But more importantly, that we are just as talented and beautiful, and that it is our own familiarity with ourselves, our own conception of impossible perfection which prevents us from seeing ourselves as such.

I read Mrs. Dalloway at the gym. I have been pretty good about working out since I quit smoking last year, but not as great at dieting so while I'm not fat I really could stand to lose twenty pounds. I always mean to do better, but let's be honest everybody means to do do better and those of us who do are either inhumanly determined or genetically predisposed to doing better already, if you know what I mean. So yeah, I quit smoking after twenty years but I can't seem to lose twenty fucking pounds. So I turn on the music, open a book and start sweating.

When I read The City & The City and then Lolita at the gym I invented a rating system of minutes. Lolita was a forty-five-minute book, but then I loves me some unreliable narrators. City was a five-minute book. This means that after five minutes I'd look up and curse quietly and go back to reading, and five minutes later I'd repeat, angry that I had still fifty minutes of sweating to go.

Dalloway was at least a half hour book. Ceridwen finished it on a plane and said she cried, so I was worried how I'd appear, a middle-aged overweight sweaty white guy bawling on the exercise bike at the YMCA. The older I get the less I care, but I'm not that old yet. Luckily, the knife twisted differently for me and I came away with a respect for what Woolf accomplished without having to pretend that I was working out so hard my eyeballs were sweating too. I was surprised by what she did with POV, and how she connected with me, however tenuously, from across years and age and gender and sheer fucking talent, and made me feel as if while she hadn't peered into my mind, we both had peered into hers, that we're both just people, and after all, everyone are all just people.

That's the real tragedy of being human: that despite being surrounded by others we can't feel that connection every day of our lives, every waking moment; that we're islands after all, or sailboats tacking toward a mutual horizon, or that we are the mutual asymptotes approaching infinity, never quite capable of really touching, the closer we get the more merely parallel we become.

I think I'm going to leave work a little early today. I'm going to go home and I'm going to kiss my wife and we're going to have a glass of wine and talk about people, love, life. Growing old. Beauty, and talent, imperfection, and above all, connection. This is the life we have made for ourselves. It is not, perhaps, the life we might have imagined, not as large, or impactful, or perfect (no Prime Ministers will be attending our party); but it is ours and it does not need a Prime Minister to be meaningful.(less)

Ninja Sock Puppet rated a book 5 of 5 stars

The Mrs. Dalloway Reader
by Virginia Woolf

read in February, 2012

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The tragedy of being human is not mortality; it's not as simple as fear of time, or emptiness or pain. It's in growing old and discovering your regrets, the what-ifs, the parallel universe where you followed your passion (and became fabulously lucky...more The tragedy of being human is not mortality; it's not as simple as fear of time, or emptiness or pain. It's in growing old and discovering your regrets, the what-ifs, the parallel universe where you followed your passion (and became fabulously lucky in the daydreaming lottery) and had a life of beauty, talent, and fortune. Growing old is not as much about getting gray hairs, losing your hair, gaining weight, taking more naps, or growing more hair in other, weirder places, but about becoming more yourself, both refined and unvarnished: the younger romantic becomes an old sap; the sexy fun girl settles down to an over-content family life; the mousy artist wakes up one day to discover she's got taste, real talent, maybe a small audience, but that the lines she lays down never match the ones in her head and can only approach them in a vulgar palimpsest of imperfection.

Mrs. Dalloway is about growing old. It's about regrets, love, and people. Above all, people, and how we are all interconnected through bonds of varying lengths and weights. It's about the surface and deep thoughts that people have while doing people things, normal and ordinary. This interior dialog is the entirety of the book, and I'm convinced that there is no narrator, only glimpses into different characters' thoughts as they have them, scenes as they see them. The scenes that others ascribe to an omniscient narrator are really from a particular character's point of view, and what they see informs how that character thinks. This is true with the skywriting airplane scenes and especially at the party itself, where multiple POV characters come together in one place and we catch a disorienting hall of mirrors effect seeing all these familiar characters through each others' eyes.

Woolf is great at characters. They are so realistically rendered, it's obvious that she loves them each so much that she doesn't dare play favorites but instead renders them as faithfully as she can, with as much shine, posture, blood, and sweat as she can muster. They are concerned with themselves, their station, they reflect on their history, and muse about their futures. Occasionally like Richard they realize happiness (though he couldn't quite work up the nerve to tell her that he loved her), more often like Clarissa wonder what things might have been like and busy themselves over the people in their lives, but sometimes, like Septimus, flounder and grasp and clutch at the illusion of perfection, the difficulty in distinguishing intelligence and insight from madness.

The tragedy of being human isn't that we're smart, though being smart certainly compounds the tragedy: we invented God because we have an inkling of what perfection is, and we know that while we may strive for it in our art, our bodies, our ideologies, our lives, and yes, even our dinner parties, we can only die part-way up some imaginary hyperbolic curve while imagining that if only we'd chosen a different major, quit drinking, done something differently, we'd have died further up. That's the tragedy of our lives, that we not only can't live up to the perfection we imagine is possible, and that we're biologically incapable of just stopping, sitting down, and realizing that things are just fine the way they are too, that those talented and beautiful young people are just as broken as we are, and are just better at hiding it right now. But more importantly, that we are just as talented and beautiful, and that it is our own familiarity with ourselves, our own conception of impossible perfection which prevents us from seeing ourselves as such.

I read Mrs. Dalloway at the gym. I have been pretty good about working out since I quit smoking last year, but not as great at dieting so while I'm not fat I really could stand to lose twenty pounds. I always mean to do better, but let's be honest everybody means to do do better and those of us who do are either inhumanly determined or genetically predisposed to doing better already, if you know what I mean. So yeah, I quit smoking after twenty years but I can't seem to lose twenty fucking pounds. So I turn on the music, open a book and start sweating.

When I read The City & The City and then Lolita at the gym I invented a rating system of minutes. Lolita was a forty-five-minute book, but then I loves me some unreliable narrators. City was a five-minute book. This means that after five minutes I'd look up and curse quietly and go back to reading, and five minutes later I'd repeat, angry that I had still fifty minutes of sweating to go.

Dalloway was at least a half hour book. Ceridwen finished it on a plane and said she cried, so I was worried how I'd appear, a middle-aged overweight sweaty white guy bawling on the exercise bike at the YMCA. The older I get the less I care, but I'm not that old yet. Luckily, the knife twisted differently for me and I came away with a respect for what Woolf accomplished without having to pretend that I was working out so hard my eyeballs were sweating too. I was surprised by what she did with POV, and how she connected with me, however tenuously, from across years and age and gender and sheer fucking talent, and made me feel as if while she hadn't peered into my mind, we both had peered into hers, that we're both just people, and after all, everyone are all just people.

That's the real tragedy of being human: that despite being surrounded by others we can't feel that connection every day of our lives, every waking moment; that we're islands after all, or sailboats tacking toward a mutual horizon, or that we are the mutual asymptotes approaching infinity, never quite capable of really touching, the closer we get the more merely parallel we become.

I think I'm going to leave work a little early today. I'm going to go home and I'm going to kiss my wife and we're going to have a glass of wine and talk about people, love, life. Growing old. Beauty, and talent, imperfection, and above all, connection. This is the life we have made for ourselves. It is not, perhaps, the life we might have imagined, not as large, or impactful, or perfect (no Prime Ministers will be attending our party); but it is ours and it does not need a Prime Minister to be meaningful.(less)

Ninja Sock Puppet rated a book 5 of 5 stars

Lolita
by Vladimir Nabokov

read in January, 2012

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Three things. First, my favorite quote:

"Raising a cold eye from book to clock in the positively sultry Beardsley College library, among bulky young women caught and petrified in the overflow of human knowledge."

I love it because he creates a vivid v...more Three things. First, my favorite quote:

"Raising a cold eye from book to clock in the positively sultry Beardsley College library, among bulky young women caught and petrified in the overflow of human knowledge."

I love it because he creates a vivid visual metaphor of the stillness of a library; that knowledge overflows from libraries like amber, catching and petrifying people; and within the metaphor is coded Humbert's peculiar distaste for women older than 15, that they are 'petrified' like fossils. I don't know. Maybe explaining what I love about it destroys it, but I love it nonetheless.

Second, this book contains the best unreliable narrator I've ever read, a guy who will tell me the facts ("I hurt my thumb against his hard head"), both allowing me to infer what Humbert would like me to draw from those facts (he was fighting! He is not a coward!) and the inference that I actually drew (Humbert has no idea how to punch a person). Explaining it really does make it seem silly. Humbert's just like that.

Third, while looking up the names from the Americanaesque roadside motel ledgers that mystified Humbert (James Mavor Morell was a character in a Shaw play called CANDIDA! Anagrammes (to use the Continental form, of which and asides in grammar as abused as Lolita Humbert is the master!) for Ted Hunter are NEED TRUTH, RUTTING HEN, RENTED HUT!) I discovered that someone had written the entire ledger as part of a debauched text-based interactive fantasy game called Mentula Macanus: Apocolocyntosis by One of the Bruces and Drunken Bastard in 2011. The title is a reference to a Roman satire, and there are classical references to similar material throughout the entire thing.

Billed as 'a romp through the waning days of the Roman Republic; like “The Waste Land meets Book VI of the Aeneid,” but with more dick jokes', the game is acclaimed in its small way as a commentary on the pornographic text games that twists the Leisure Suite Larry form, and is really less pornography itself than literary criticism. The Humbertian Ledger code was a surprising thing to find in a game written as a joke for a competition, based on Stiffy Makane, an eighth-grader's juvenile interpretation of what sex must be like if it were entirely text-based and with other eighth-grade boys pretending to be interested girls.

But this is exactly why I thought it was brilliant. Humbert would agree. Humbert would have complained in gangly French phrases about the game but he would have played it through to its climactic end just the same.

Thanks, internets, for catching and petrifying me in your overflowing knowledge.(less)

Ninja Sock Puppet rated a book 5 of 5 stars

The Coldest War (The Milkweed Triptych, #2)
by Ian Tregillis (Goodreads Author)

read in October, 2011

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Disclaimer: Ian and I are friends. He lovingly calls my wife and kids 'the first drafts' because clearly they are only a work in progress. He and I, we're at least galleys. So that explains the five stars up there. This book is the second of the Milk...more Disclaimer: Ian and I are friends. He lovingly calls my wife and kids 'the first drafts' because clearly they are only a work in progress. He and I, we're at least galleys. So that explains the five stars up there. This book is the second of the Milkweed Triptych, and it's due out first as an audiobook in December before the print edition comes out next year. It's a weird experiment, and more or less because Tor fucked up. It was supposed to be coming out this month.

If you haven't yet read Bitter Seeds, go do that now. I'll wait right here.

When I first found out that Ian had sold a trilogy to Tor Books I was really happy for him. It was exciting, and I couldn't wait until his book was published so I could brag about how I knew this author and people would stop mid-conversation and stare at me, gaping because they were listening to a guy who knows an author *personally* and how cool must that be to be me.

Later he called me and asked me to do his website. It still stands as my favorite project of all time, because we sat down and figured out the entire thing all at once, and even figured out more or less how the Alternate Reality Game we were planning would fit into it eventually.

Even later, when the first book was due to be released, we actually created the Alternate Reality Game. I was stunned to discover that I'd already programmed the site for it and all we had to do was add content. Even though I knew we'd talked about it, it was still surprising to find it all there, staring at us eerily as if we'd sent it through a time machine and it had popped into existence at our feet.

I have a saying: when I put my keys somewhere I'm likely to find them later, or when I write myself a note to do something in the morning, I call it 'taking care of my future self'. I can't count the times I've thanked my past self for looking out for me. Past me saves me a lot of time.

I imagine that this is all sort of what it's like to be Ian, and by extension his wonderful (and seriously evil and insane) character Gretel. She can see into the future and even direct its course by peering ahead and remembering her own conversations with people and her own experiences from the future. So how do you defeat a monster like that?

Ian made me swear to never tell him what I thought of his books, good or bad. It was a demonic bargain I'd made with him so he'd give me advance copies. Therefore the rest of this review has a spoiler alert on it, because if you are Ian then you should stop reading because I'm about to do just that. And after what I've seen of your books, you are not a person on whose demonic bargains I would like to renege.

(view spoiler)[
In Bitter Seeds, the first book of this trilogy, Gretel is mysterious and scary, but mostly just a cog in the overall puzzle. Raybould Marsh is the dashing James-Bondish main character, and he and his warlock sidekick William Beauclerk fight the battery-operated Nietzschean Nazi supermen while the entire world goes to hell in a handbasket. I read it and really liked it. I even said I liked it in my review, but it was understood in the context of the review that I would say that I liked it either way simply because we are friends and I got to work on his kick-ass website with him.

This one I couldn't put down at all once I started it. This is the first book I've read in about a year (not including that idiotic fist-bumping A-Team guy book Ceridwen made me read) and it was really worth it. It almost doesn't feel like the second book in a trilogy because the characters are twenty years older and a lot has happened since then, and the story is really tight. Ian is mean to his characters, and they don't have very nice or happy lives. And if they do, it's only so they can really appreciate the huge loss when their nice happy lives are ripped brutally from them, usually because somebody dies or becomes a horrible twisted caricature of a human.

Ian once said that it felt as if Gretel were staring back at him because she knows everything he knows. It becomes difficult to figure out how to defeat an antagonist like that, because you can't help but follow their plans. That's some seriously creepy stuff there. I won't actually spoil it for anyone, but this is the book where we start to see why Gretel did some of the creepy things she did in the previous book, and it makes them that much more horrifying. She's an evil nutter but by the end of the book you know exactly why.

But more than that, the Eidolons (demonic creatures clearly inspired by Lovecraft) are well-done, giving you the sense that they span space and time and are only aware of us in the way we might be aware of the Whos on that tiny speck of dust that Horton hears, if Horton's manifestation into our perception were a timeless roiling black horror of unnatural geometries that induce madness by their mere presence. They have the power to erase us if we but stumble into their view. Seriously creepy, right?

But Ian is the nicest person I know. He's the only one of my friends that I'd fly halfway across the country to see. I won't even fly halfway across the country to see my own family. Yet in his spare time he came up with the only fictional character to give my wife nightmares. Imagine what he'd do if I speak too loudly from my tiny speck of dust floating here in space?
(hide spoiler)]

And that's why I'm never going to tell Ian what I think of his books.(less)

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Ninja Sock Puppet made a comment on his review of Blueprints of the Afterlife "I wasn't looking for Catholic afterlife answers in this book at all. I wanted the book to answer its own questions that it raised instead of leaving i...more "
Jan 21, 2013 11:31am · see review
Ninja Sock Puppet rated a book 3 of 5 stars Blueprints of the Afterlife by Ryan Boudinot (Goodreads Author)	Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
DBR. I've done a lot of thinking about the afterlife. I've read Doubt and numberless Dawkins, Hitchens, Gould, Hawking, Darwin, Adams, and God books. I read Introduction to Christianity by the current Pope (then Cardinal Ratzinger, a name which sugges...more
Jan 19, 2013 07:26am · see review
Ninja Sock Puppet made a comment on his review of Mrs. Dalloway "Thanks, Brian. You too, Tommy and Kelly. I think Clarissa would be the type of FB friend who is always setting up her other friends with each other."
Feb 24, 2012 07:27pm · see review
Ninja Sock Puppet made a comment on Elizabeth's review of Mrs. Dalloway "I'm not generally threatened by feminism or strong women (look who I married! But I know you're not talking about me) and I self-identify as feminist,...more "
Feb 24, 2012 11:47am · see review
Ninja Sock Puppet made a comment on Eh?Eh!'s review of Mrs Dalloway "There were classical and literature references? I mean, she quoted some Shakespeare a few times, but it's not like Cymbeline was one of the greats or...more "
Feb 24, 2012 09:57am · see review
Ninja Sock Puppet made a comment on his review of The Mrs. Dalloway Reader "Thanks, Esteban! Ceridwen pointed out that I chose some strange 'Reader' thing instead of the real book, so I've copied and pasted it over there. http:...more "
Feb 23, 2012 03:00pm · see review
Ninja Sock Puppet rated a book 5 of 5 stars Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf read in February, 2012	Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
The tragedy of being human is not mortality; it's not as simple as fear of time, or emptiness or pain. It's in growing old and discovering your regrets, the what-ifs, the parallel universe where you followed your passion (and became fabulously lucky...more
Feb 23, 2012 02:58pm · see review
Ninja Sock Puppet rated a book 5 of 5 stars The Mrs. Dalloway Reader by Virginia Woolf read in February, 2012	Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
The tragedy of being human is not mortality; it's not as simple as fear of time, or emptiness or pain. It's in growing old and discovering your regrets, the what-ifs, the parallel universe where you followed your passion (and became fabulously lucky...more
Feb 23, 2012 02:57pm · see review
Ninja Sock Puppet rated a book 5 of 5 stars Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov read in January, 2012	Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
Three things. First, my favorite quote: "Raising a cold eye from book to clock in the positively sultry Beardsley College library, among bulky young women caught and petrified in the overflow of human knowledge." I love it because he creates a vivid v...more
Jan 26, 2012 06:16pm · see review
Ninja Sock Puppet rated a book 5 of 5 stars The Coldest War (The Milkweed Triptych, #2) by Ian Tregillis (Goodreads Author) read in October, 2011	Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
Disclaimer: Ian and I are friends. He lovingly calls my wife and kids 'the first drafts' because clearly they are only a work in progress. He and I, we're at least galleys. So that explains the five stars up there. This book is the second of the Milk...more
Oct 23, 2011 08:35pm · see review

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