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| 1770414002
| 9781770414006
| 3.90
| 8,800
| Oct 02, 2018
| Oct 02, 2018
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it was ok
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2021 reads, #1. This is one of the many novels I've read in the last few years through a recommendation from the ongoing "Five Great Books About..." s
2021 reads, #1. This is one of the many novels I've read in the last few years through a recommendation from the ongoing "Five Great Books About..." series at sci-fi publisher Tor.com's blog, in this case recommending interesting titles that all have to do with ways civilization might continue on in the face of societal collapse. But I'm starting to think that maybe I shouldn't accept these recommendations any more, because the vast majority of them are turning out exactly like Moon of the Crusted Snow did, mediocre to the point of active distaste, the kind of go-nowhere book which for some reason heavy genre readers just can't seem to get enough of. The novel starts off promisingly because of being set on a reservation for Native Americans (or, oops, "Native Canadians" I mean), a setting ripe for literary complexity and uniqueness; but then author Waubgeshig Rice does absolutely nothing with the promising concept, taking all the way to the 33% mark even just to establish the ridiculously simple premise that we already know from the dust jacket before we even begin reading (namely, all communication, electricity, internet and food delivery has suddenly stopped coming from "Down South," and no one on the reservation knows what's going on), then literally on the very next page introducing a cartoonishly cardboard mustache-twirling villain to serve as a heavy-handed metaphor for the white settlers who originally forced the natives into a reservation in the first place, with the exact simplistic plotline, simplistic climax, and simplistic resolution you can already guess at following. At a slim 200 pages, it feels like a book that never needed to exist in the first place, and it's destined to be one of those titles I see mentioned in another five or ten years and makes me think, "Wait, didn't I actually read this already at some point?" Buyer beware.
...more
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Jan 20, 2021
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Jan 20, 2021
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| B08Q82JCHP
| unknown
| 4.33
| 15
| Dec 09, 2020
| Dec 09, 2020
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it was amazing
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I'm thrilled to announce that one of the books I worked on as a freelancer in 2020 has finally finished its production cycle and is currently in books
I'm thrilled to announce that one of the books I worked on as a freelancer in 2020 has finally finished its production cycle and is currently in bookstores! It's a nicely meaty crime novel set in southwest Florida, in which we watch three separate storylines intermingle and crisscross, including a young man who's been arrested for a crime he didn't commit (and suddenly has a random opportunity to escape from the county jail where he's being held); the Black female cop who comes to realize that she may have arrested the wrong person; and the corrupt State Attorney who becomes obsessively determined to destroy the young man no matter what the cost. Keep my biases in mind, of course, but I personally think it's a pretty great novel, and certainly one of the most fun ones I've worked on this year (working with him after his time with a dedicated developmental editor, my role was to help him cut his enormous manuscript down by 20 percent without losing any of the story or character development), and I strongly recommend it to fans of Elmore Leonard and David Baldacci, or anyone who enjoys a tightly plotted thriller filled with interesting and memorable characters.
...more
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Dec 10, 2020
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Dec 11, 2020
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Dec 10, 2020
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Kindle Edition
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| 0345431626
| 9780345431622
| 4.15
| 5,564
| 1980
| Oct 12, 1999
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it was amazing
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Like the rest of the planet, I was blown away by the recent Netflix miniseries adaptation of The Queen's Gambit; and that reminded me that it's been l
Like the rest of the planet, I was blown away by the recent Netflix miniseries adaptation of The Queen's Gambit; and that reminded me that it's been literally decades since I last approached the work of the criminally underrated Postmodernist author Walter Tevis, who in a perfect world would be as famous and revered as his '60s through '80s peers like John Updike, John Irving, Margaret Atwood, etc. (Although let's not feel too bad for him -- even while alive, he got to witness successful film adaptations of three out of his six novels, including the pool-hall character drama The Hustler, its sequel The Color of Money, and the science-fiction tragedy The Man Who Fell to Earth, which as a bonus was the Hollywood debut of the then white-hot David Bowie.) I've already read The Hustler and Fell to Earth, and thought I'd put in a little more time before reading The Queen's Gambit, so instead picked up his second of his three sci-fi novels, Mockingbird from 1980. (For what it's worth, the only novel of his that hasn't been mentioned at this point is 1983's The Steps of the Sun, in which he predicts an early 21st century where the planet is dealing with an energy crisis, China has become a global superpower, and the American government has become overrun by corrupt members of organized crime, with the planet's last hope resting on a tech-industry billionaire who's built his own spaceship. Are we sure Tevis didn't have access to a time machine?) And although more far-fetched, Mockingbird also often deals in "nailed the prediction" territory, as we enter a United States in the 2400s that's on the brink of genocide; not from war or hunger, but literally from human laziness and sloth, because of a centuries-long program to replace all human labor with computers, robots and other automation. It's now led to a world where AIs run virtually everything, from janitor positions to college deans to elected government offices; and for centuries it's left humans with little else to do but guzzle marijuana and tranquilizers 24 hours a day, forget that written language even exists (because of all communication for the last century being exclusively through video and emoticons), and spend their days passively watching either pornography or Tevis's surprisingly accurate description of rave music and fractal graphics. It's easy to think, as I did at first, that Tevis is writing a damning indictment of modernity here; so it was surprising to read some interviews with him after the fact and realize that he actually meant for this to be a parable about drug addiction, and especially the alcoholism that he himself struggled with and eventually overcame in his real life, which as Queen's Gambit fans know is a subject that pops up over and over and over again in his short six-book oeuvre. (Tevis tragically died at the age of 57, from lung cancer brought on by a lifetime of smoking.) But it makes perfect sense once you do learn this, because what this book is really about is not the futuristic status quo Tevis sets up as the novel's milieu, but rather the handful of individuals who eventually decide to rebel against this status quo, quitting their habitual barbiturates cold-turkey and eventually "waking up" to the reality of the world around them (including the disquieting realization that the AIs have been occasionally putting sterilization drugs into the populace's unlimited free marijuana, in an attempt to keep the global population at an algorithm-optimized perfect balance; but that a minor assembly-line breakdown at the drug factory has led to these sterilization drugs being given out without pause for the last 30 straight years, leading to the looming extinction of the entire zonked-out human race, with not a single person now educated enough or even sober enough to realize that the problem is occurring or how to fix it). So when all is said and done, Mockingbird is not tragic as much as it is hopeful, because it's not actually about drug addiction but rather recovery from drug addiction. But of course there's a lot more going on besides this, including lots of pointed examinations of the justice system, race, corporate consumerism, the ironic "Monkey's Paw" style danger of getting what you wish for, and a lot more. That's perhaps the main reason to read Mockingbird in the first place; because much like Queen's Gambit, Tevis creates a very real-feeling, very detailed, very lived-in world in which to place his metaphorical story, making it easy not just to "grok his message" but to luxuriate inside the universe he's built in order to convey this message. Like his other books, it's in this way that I most recommend reading it, as a story with a message for us to learn and internalize but with Tevis clearly meaning for us to get lost inside the setting he's created as well, and to revel in the deliciously unexpected turns his plots always take (including one of the most devastating final paragraphs in the entirety of modern literature). One of the best books I've read this year, and coming in right under the wire at that, it makes me more excited than ever to take on The Queen's Gambit for the first time later this winter, and eventually all four of his other books as well. ...more |
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Dec 10, 2020
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| 0307268195
| 9780307268198
| 4.24
| 86,553
| Nov 09, 2009
| Nov 09, 2009
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really liked it
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I was raised in the 1970s by two enthusiastic tennis-playing parents, which means that my era of closely following along with the sport was the era of
I was raised in the 1970s by two enthusiastic tennis-playing parents, which means that my era of closely following along with the sport was the era of Borg, McEnroe and Connors, and that someone like Andre Agassi barely registered as more than a snotty upstart by the time I headed to college in the late '80s and stopped tracking professional tennis for good. So it came as a surprise, then, to learn from a recent freelance client that, at a certain point in the late 1990s, Agassi slipped in the rankings from #1 to 141 in an unprecedented two years, and that he responded to the challenge by literally downshifting into the tennis minor leagues and working his way back up, in grimy, sparsely attended tournaments on Midwestern college campuses for almost no money and certainly no prestige. This made me interested in Agassi as an actual person for the first time, so I decided to check out his 2009 autobiography, Open, co-written with Pulitzer winner JR Moehringer. It was pretty much what I was expecting -- physically bullied by an overly demanding Middle Eastern father since literally birth to become a tennis champion (as were all his siblings as well), Agassi quickly developed an intense hatred for the sport that led to most of the "bad boy" behavior he became known for in his twenties (dating celebrities, driving sports cars, refusing to wear white at Wimbledon), grinding it out on the ATP Tour year after year for reasons he can't even articulate clearly himself, a sort of combination of Freudian family issues and intense self-competition that drove him to stay in the game for decades despite never truly enjoying it even once. It'd be nice to say that the story came as a surprise, but unfortunately we've seen this situation over and over, whenever it comes to a child pushed unwillingly by a domineering parent into an activity they feel ambivalent at best about. Certainly the one person who comes off as golden here is Agassi's ex-wife, the fellow child star Brooke Shields, who is clearly presented as a wounded celebrity victim herself, in search of a kind of adult peace that she was simply unable to find with the Corvette-driving, Budweiser-poster-hanging man-child Agassi. (Agassi is now married to his fellow tennis champion Steffi Graf, and it says a lot about her notoriously private nature that she is barely mentioned here other than in the most generic "I love her so much" kind of terms.) It was nothing earth-shattering, although sports memoirs rarely are; but the real-life drama behind Agassi's career makes up for the pedestrian story, helped immensely by recruiting someone of Pulitzer quality to be his ghostwriter. It comes recommended in this spirit, which if nothing else has convinced me next year after the pandemic is over to attend a couple of these ATP minor league tournaments myself. (In Chicago, there are two major ones every year just a short train ride from my apartment, one in the tony suburb of Winnetka and the other in the downstate collegetown of Champaign.) Your results may vary, but it's at least worth picking up, no matter what your particular personal relationship is to tennis. ...more |
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Nov 03, 2020
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| 0449912558
| 9780449912553
| 4.12
| 66,711
| 1996
| Sep 08, 1997
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did not like it
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I picked up this 25-year-old book because of a recent article at the science-fiction blog Tor.com, examining a series of supposedly great books about
I picked up this 25-year-old book because of a recent article at the science-fiction blog Tor.com, examining a series of supposedly great books about space aliens who behave in a way unfathomable to human understanding, expecting a novel along the lines of Peter Watts' brilliant Blindsight. But The Sparrow was most certainly not that, and I suspect now was never meant for a reader like me in the first place, in that it's actually mostly a book about religion but just cleverly using a sci-fi setting to examine the subject. Much like Liu Cixin's The Three-Body Problem (my review), it's about humanity discovering the existence of extraterrestrial life over at our nearest star, Alpha Centauri, although author Mary Doria Russell doesn't bother to do Liu's hard-science examination of how exactly to get there, instead simply declaring that it took 17 years to travel the four light years and not bothering to explain it in any more detail than that. The much bigger problem, however, is that the entire conceit of Russell's book is that it's actually a group of Jesuit priests and their friends who make the trip to the neighboring planet, prompted solely by the fact that the alien communication vaguely sounds like people singing hymns, and with the Catholic Church having the resources and infrastructure to actually build and launch their own spaceship years before the United Nations can get to the point of even acknowledging that such a trip would be worth taking. That decision then causes all kinds of basic structural and logic problems in the book, including the ludicrously untrained nature of the ship's crew (who are literally just random private citizens who happened to be personal friends of the dude who discovered the the ET signal, a developing-nation social justice activist who is only put in charge of the mission in the first place because he happened to be the first person to discover the signal, neither fact of which makes even the tiniest bit of sense); Russell's habit of giving these untrained crew members endless amount of annoying Seinfeld Schmoopy dialogue ("I love you, Schmoopy!" "No, I love you MORE, Schmoopy Poopy!"), which is like fingernails down a chalkboard to someone like me; the fact that, even after a 17-year journey, the crew still doesn't have any better plans for first contact once there besides to just wing it on the fly and hope it all works out; the similar fact that, once they are there, it's not so much that the aliens behave in a way that's incomprehensible to the human mind, but simply that it's not in the vein of the pious Christian crew's belief in what was going to await them (instead, you can picture the aliens more like a tribe of villagers in rural Afghanistan, even down to the vaguely Middle Eastern names Russell gives all of them); and most criminally, telling the story largely through flashbacks and flash-forwards, meaning that for a book supposedly all about the disastrous miscommunication between humans and an alien culture, you have to wade through 300 fucking pages of a 500-page book before you even get to the first moment of actually seeing the humans interact with the aliens. I suspect the reason so many people passionately love this novel is because it's such a unique way of examining the subject of religious faith; but as an atheist, the whole thing just left me really empty by the end, and I found myself with no other response besides, "Yeah, you dumb fucking Christians, you got exactly what you deserved for being a bunch of goddamned space missionaries to begin with. Next time stay home, you xenophobic idiots." That's not the kind of response I want to have after investing a month of my life into reading a glacially slow, dull-as-dishwater story, and the whole thing just left me angrily disappointed by the time I was finally finished with the big long stupid thing. Based on the amount of glowing 5-star reviews here, your results may very well differ; but if you're looking for an actual intelligent examination of how aliens might behave in a way totally incomprehensible to the human experience, The Sparrow is tragically not it. ...more |
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Oct 12, 2020
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Oct 12, 2020
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| 0312420331
| 9780312420338
| 3.60
| 22,890
| Jun 28, 1973
| Oct 05, 2001
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really liked it
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THE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they ever wrote Cur THE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they ever wrote Currently in the challenge: Isaac Asimov's Robot/Empire/Foundation | Margaret Atwood | JG Ballard | Clive Barker | Jim Butcher's Dresden Files | Lee Child's Jack Reacher | Philip K Dick | Daphne du Maurier | Ian Fleming | William Gibson | Michel Houellebecq | John Irving | Kazuo Ishiguro | John Le Carre | Bernard Malamud | China Mieville | Toni Morrison | VS Naipaul | Chuck Palahniuk | Tim Powers | Terry Pratchett's Discworld | Philip Roth | Neal Stephenson | Jim Thompson | John Updike | Kurt Vonnegut | PG Wodehouse Finished: Christopher Buckley | Shirley Jackson So before anything else, a technical note. The last time I was discussing my completist run of British countercultural author J.G. Ballard, back when I was reviewing his 1966 novel The Crystal World, I mentioned that I was going to do something highly unusual for me and this completist challenge, which was to read one of Ballard's story collections (to be specific, 1970's The Atrocity Exhibition), when I usually skip over story collections to concentrate only on an author's full-length novels. And that's because Ballard unusually first developed his mature style, and first amassed fans for this mature style, in the world of short fiction in the late 1960s, an arena less beholden to commercial pressures and therefore a place where much more experimentation could take place, unlike the science-fiction industry which forced him to write traditional straightforward tales with traditional straightforward James-Kirk-like protagonists, to serve as his first four novels when initially starting out as an unknown writer, the so-called "Catastrophe" novels whose review links can be found at the bottom of today's write-up. And so I did read it, but The Atrocity Experiment turned out to be so experimental and nonsensical, it barely holds together as a traditional narrative at all, and certainly would've been impossible for me to analyze critically like I usually do with these completist challenge reads. It did, however, successfully make the case to me that Ballard was writing the work he truly wanted to write here in the magazine world in those years; and in 1973, the culture around him finally caught up to his dark vision, when mainstream publisher Jonathan Cape decided to take a chance and publish his deeply unsettling, inherently controversial Crash, the first moment of Ballard's career when the author went "Full Ballardian" and still to this day one of his two most well-known books (the other being High-Rise, published two years later). And why is it so unsettling and controversial? Easy -- it's a nearly plotless 224-page ode to the sexually fetishistic possibilities of horrific car crashes, centered around the insane adventures of a mad scientist who leads a "Fight Club" type underground group dedicated to staging crashes for their own erotic whims, and whose ultimate goal is to die while simultaneously having an orgasm as he smashes into the limousene of the very real and very litigious Elizabeth Taylor, who didn't exactly take kindly to being included as the object of murderous obsession by the fictional protagonist of Ballard's novel. And indeed, reading it myself for the very first time this week, the book remains 47 years later so shockingly transgressive that it upset even me, and I've read just about every famous sexually transgressive novel that even exists by this point in my life. That's because the book isn't really about a bunch of weirdos who drive around the back streets of London staging car crashes so they can masturbate afterwards to the crime photos (the very thing that sinks David Cronenberg's disappointingly too literal 1996 movie adaptation), but rather is a metaphor for any person who derives profound soul-level satisfaction out of the misery of other human beings (the more perverse the circumstances the better), and by extension has been able to embrace the nihilistic mindset that allows them to float outside of themselves and see their own bodies as these "other humans" for whom they enjoy "inflicting misery" upon. It's essentially as bleak as countercultural literature ever got, kind of like if you wrote a full-length book that was a confession from a serial killer to a journalist about how much they love serial-killing, and having the journalist at the end go, "You know, I think I love serial-killing now too!"; and it makes it easy to see why it garnered quotes from mainstream publications at the time such as the New York Times' dismissal that "this is, hands down, the most repulsive book I've yet to come across." Unfortunately, though, it's still only getting 4 stars from me instead of a full 5, because it's just not very satisfying as a full-length novel-reading experience; as provocative as it is, it still only contains maybe 20 pages of plot development out of a 240-page book, and ultimately feels like Ballard stretching out one of his short stories from the '60s into a full-length book simply because someone paid him to. (And indeed, not only is there a short section of The Atrocity Exhibition very similar to this storyline, but that book also maintains a perverse obsession with Elizabeth Taylor, as well as a similar preoccupation with the genitals of then California governor Ronald Reagan that pops up in this novel too.) Frankly, I suspect this is also going to be the case when I get around to 1975's High-Rise, which I haven't read yet but have seen Ben Wheatley's 2015 movie adaptation, and so already know contains only a short story's worth of actual plot development, and in fact I suspect I may have to wait all the way until Ballard's '80s work before I start getting the traditional three-act story structures that I prefer as a heavy reader of novels. Before all that, though, I'll be taking on his very next book after this one, 1974's similarly experimental Concrete Island (in which a man becomes stranded in the desolate greenway between opposing lanes of a busy interstate highway, and discovers an entire society of misfits who are now living in the space full-time); so I hope you'll have a chance to join me here again soon for that. JG Ballard books now read: Crash | The Atrocity Exhibition | The Crystal World | The Burning World | The Drowned World ...more |
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Sep 23, 2020
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Sep 23, 2020
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Paperback
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| 163557563X
| 9781635575637
| 4.33
| 37,403
| Sep 15, 2020
| Sep 15, 2020
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really liked it
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Once it gets going, Susanna Clarke's new urban-fantasy novel Piranesi is really fantastic, telling the same kind of convoluted "secret history of magi
Once it gets going, Susanna Clarke's new urban-fantasy novel Piranesi is really fantastic, telling the same kind of convoluted "secret history of magic" that marked her first novel, the now modern classic Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, only this time in a more epistolary style and concentrating on a series of academic hippie occultists, looking via journal entries and newspaper articles at the sinister adventures they have between the 1960s and '90s. But the problem is that it just takes her forever to get to the actual story (all the way to the 33% mark of the entire manuscript, according to my Kindle); then once the climax is over at the 75% mark, the pointless denouement goes on forever too, a pretty unmistakable sign that this started life as a perfect little tight evil novella, but then was voluntarily self-bastardized when the more commercial voices in her life told her that it needed to be twice as long in order to be a "featured front-table book" at Barnes & Noble. (And indeed, with even the padded-out hardback only clocking in at 245 pages, the "interesting" section of 103 pages would in fact not have been long enough for her publisher Bloomsbury to have been able to get away with their current list price of $27 without starting a public riot.) That unfortunately takes what would've otherwise been a 5-star review from me and knocks it down an entire star; a book that's absolutely worth your time, but one that you should not even bother with until you reach the first moment you get past all the Fleetwood Mac cover-art bullshit at the beginning and come across the first conversation our motley fool hero has with a person who sounds like an actual sane, real human being (which, like I said, is right around the 33% mark). Seriously, you're not going to miss a single detail by skipping straight to here, and meanwhile you won't be bored to death and contemplate quitting the book altogether a half-dozen times, like I did. ...more |
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Sep 21, 2020
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Sep 21, 2020
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Hardcover
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| 0765377063
| 9780765377067
| 4.06
| 165,484
| May 2006
| Nov 11, 2014
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it was amazing
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The Jason Pettus 2020 Autumn Reading Challenge (join us!) #11: A book currently being adapted into a movie or TV show I had heard about this science-fic The Jason Pettus 2020 Autumn Reading Challenge (join us!) #11: A book currently being adapted into a movie or TV show I had heard about this science-fiction novel here and there over the last several years, after its 2015 English translation officially became the first book in history to garner a Hugo Award for a native Asian author, and kicked off the whole meme about how we're currently living through the so-called "Golden Age of Chinese Sci-Fi;" but after Netflix recently announced a few weeks ago that they're making a brand-new high-profile adaptation of the entire "Remembrance of Earth's Past" trilogy (being co-produced by no less than the showrunners of Game of Thrones, Brad Pitt, Rian Johnson, and Rosamund Pike), I thought it was finally time for me to read at least the first book of the trilogy myself and see if it's deserving of all its hype. And the answer, thankfully, is yes, yes it is! I don't think it's a spoiler at this point to reveal that the book is centered around the concept of humans learning of the existence of extraterrestrial life for the first time, then quickly realizing that this far-advanced extraterrestrial life is currently on its way to Earth to invade us. But a lot of attention has been given to the conceit here that the first people to learn this information are Chinese scientists in the middle of Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and '70s, one of the most shameful moments of the entire 20th century outside of the Holocaust itself, and a story concept that should at least inspire you to read the Wikipedia page on the subject, if like me you barely know anything about it. It's there that you'll learn that one of the hallmarks of the Cultural Revolution was that every single subject in human existence was forced to be parsed through the prism of far-left political ideology, so much so that even basic scientific facts were deemed to be "untrue" by Mao's homegrown army of radically liberal teenaged fanatics, since they came from "Western Capitalists" and therefore were inherently "decadent" and could not be trusted (a situation that doesn't remind me of any current American counterpart whatsoever, oh God please don't "re-educate" me, Wokes). This is what's garnered the book so much attention in Western circles, the mere novelty of imagining a sci-fi story through the kinds of Eastern filters that are so unknown and new to us (including not just Maoist politics but a fair amount of ancient Chinese mythology too); and I was worried that when I read it myself, I was going to learn that this novelty is the one and only thing going for it, with it otherwise being just a so-so genre tale on its own merits. But thankfully this turned out to be much more interesting than that, a story that can hold itself up no matter what its background, because of its dual dedication to hard science and soft sociology. Namely, a huge chunk of this book is dedicated to a logical examination of the physics problem of the book's title, the idea that when three stars of varying sizes are locked in a gravitational orbit around each other, any poor planet that might be stuck between them (such as the homeworld of our invading aliens, for example) would be tossed and turned in such a chaotic and random way that it's virtually impossible for scientists to develop a stable prediction of where it would be knocked around next, leading in their case to a series of deadly hot and deadly cold seasons (some lasting for days, others for centuries) that essentially wipe out the entire "Trisolaran" species over and over and over, leading to a spiritual crisis by the 200th iteration in which they decide that their only remaining option is to abandon the planet for good, and go move permanently to the nearest habitable planet they can find (which unfortunately for us is Earth, located just four light years away). But then the other big concept that Liu bandies about -- and frankly what I as a non-scientist found much more interesting -- is the way the human race might react if they actually do discover at some point in the future that extraterrestrial life exists. We pretend that it's going to be a unifying moment for all of humankind, either benign (as we collectively sob in awe of the universe's majesty) or malignant (as we collectively build a world army to combat the invaders). But what if it instead unleashes a planet-wide civil war that easily crosses national borders and socioeconomic levels, one that threatens to destroy the human race long before the aliens actually get here? What if millions of defeated, cynical intellectuals and environmentalists react to the news with, "Good, let them invade us, humanity has proven itself to be worthless anyway, so they can't do any worse of a job running this planet than we have"? And what if these defeatists build their own army for the purpose of laying the groundwork for the coming alien invasion, precisely because their technology is so advanced that we can only perceive it through godlike religious terms? It's essentially Liu taking the old joke of "I for one welcome our new alien overlords" then examining it in the most realistic, most terrifying way possible; and it's actually this development that drives most of the book's plot (or at least the first book; I haven't gotten to the other two yet). When you combine it, then, with this hard-science look at the coming aliens and why they're leaving, and the uniquely Chinese history and culture from which the whole story is filtered and presented, it results in a really unforgettable book, a dense and sometimes hard to follow story that I nonetheless devoured in three days of fevered, almost addicted eight-hour reading sessions. I can see why the Game of Thrones dudes would be interested in this, because Liu presents some really flabbergasting mental images along the way of telling this story; but unlike a lot of Hollywood-friendly sci-fi tales, I can also see why the nerdiest nerds of the annual World Science Fiction Convention (aka "Worldcon") would award this the Hugo, because it's a grand return to the hard-science-based 1950s and '60s novels of such American Silver Age masters as Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke and Robert Heinlein (which shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone familiar with the history of Chinese science-fiction, in which all the way up to the 1990s it was still only these '50s Silver Age authors who were widely available to read in the first place). I still suspect that this novel's overwhelming love and success is due more to the specific moment in history we're living through, and that writers like Liu and his Chinese peers will come to be thought of in another 20 or 30 years as just another group of interesting but not outstanding genre writers; but as long as we are living through this moment, I encourage Americans to take full advantage of it, and to enjoy this novel for exactly what it is, a chance to read a really ripping genre actioner but told from a cultural standpoint you're never experienced before. It's best thought of in these kinds of terms, as a decent story with a unique perspective instead of a mindblowing story just on its own; and those who can embrace this attitude will find a lot here that's worth your time and attention. ...more |
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Sep 15, 2020
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Hardcover
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| B00N7TDP8K
| 4.07
| 114,111
| Apr 21, 2015
| Apr 21, 2015
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it was amazing
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The Jason Pettus 2020 Autumn Reading Challenge (join us!) #13: Ask your parent or child to recommend a book, then read that Every time I visit my elderl The Jason Pettus 2020 Autumn Reading Challenge (join us!) #13: Ask your parent or child to recommend a book, then read that Every time I visit my elderly parents in suburban St. Louis, their bedside tables are always overflowing with cheap paperbacks by David Baldacci; so when it came time for this particular task of the 2020 Autumn Reading Challenge, I thought I might finally try one of his books myself, which I chose simply by looking him up at Goodreads and picking the one title of his 30 books with the highest amount of ratings (in this case, over 106,000 and counting, still with an average score of 4.07 even after adding them all together, which I took as a good sign). And in fact, this book provides a nice opportunity to look at a little literary theory as well, in that I ended up really loving it, but intensely disliked a similar crime novel I read just a few weeks ago, Ian K. Smith's The Unspoken (my review), and in either case am not a particularly big fan or heavy reader of the crime genre in general. So why did I like one of these so much more than the other, despite on the surface seeming almost like interchangeable books? Those reasons include... --Balducci relies less on cliches. Although our protagonist here, Amos Decker, is a low-stakes private investigator like Smith's hero Ashe Cayne, Balducci gives him a much more modern and realistic universe to occupy; a former cop in a mid-sized Ohio city who has given up on life after his wife and daughter are killed, Decker's world revolves around Walmart parking lots, cheap "all suite" hotel chains, unhinged meth addicts, and other 21st-century details that make the book's milieu feel very contemporary and very realistic. Smith's book, on the other hand, feels like he picked up a library copy of some Raymond Chandler '30s dime-store noir and just transplanted it part and parcel to 2010s Chicago, including the dusty office in a run-down skyscraper, the dame with gams that just won't quit who mysteriously appears one day behind the frosted glass window of his office's front door, and all kinds of other worn-out tropes that feel like he's not so much giving us a crime story, but rather a retread of other crime stories that he happened to read in preparation for writing his own. --Balducci's gimmick is ridiculous but not too ridiculous. The high concept here is that Decker suffers from hyperthymesia, a.k.a. perfect recall of every memory he's ever made in his life, a super-rare medical condition but one that actually exists in the real world. It's just barely believable enough to allow the reader to buy into it if they choose to, especially since it serves the dual purpose of making him an astounding investigator, but also the thing that drove him to suicidal homelessness, since he's literally not capable of forgetting every single last detail of his family's murder, two character aspects that are absolutely crucial to this book's storyline and that helps us better root for him. But the gimmick in Smith's book is that Cayne is a darkly violent avenging angel at night when he's not solving crimes, who has set up an elaborate system of secret real estate holdings and soundproof dungeons for the purpose of kidnapping criminals who "got away with it" because of legal technicalities, slowly torturing them over months, then (in the case of this particular book) slathering the victim with peanut butter and bacon bits and then releasing a cage full of hungry rats to eat him alive. That doesn't necessarily stretch credulity any more than Decker's hyperthymesia, but in this case in the exact opposite direction, making for a distasteful hook that's hard to reconcile with the morally pure "hero" we watch solve crimes during the day, and that makes us more disengaged with whether or not he actually solves the crime he's been hired to investigate. --Balducci lets the audience solve the crime with him. One of the things I'm coming to realize, as I read more and more crime novels here in middle-age, is that heavy fans of the genre like it precisely because they get to be crime-solvers themselves, and that the best books of the genre very clearly lay out all the clues and leads for the reader in the same style and order that they're revealed to the protagonist, giving us a sense of satisfaction if we can solve it ourselves before the book ends, or at least a sense that we weren't cheated if it still comes as a surprise. Baldacci does this in spades here in his first Amos Decker title, showing that someone mysterious is executing a personal vendetta against him, laying out both the crimes and the clue-gathering in a meticulous, orderly way, so that the eventual solution relies completely on information we as readers have already been privy to. It's at once a logistically complex plot and an emotionally simple one, both satisfying and moving by the time the book is over. Smith, on the other hand, spends the vast majority of his page count laying in red herring after red herring, building too obviously evil a family around the missing billionaire twentysomething daughter at the heart of that book's crime; then at the end he reveals that the guilty party is (view spoiler)[a character we never even meet until the moment of his arrest (hide spoiler)], which even I as a non-regular could tell was a giant cheat for this genre, and led to an ending that wasn't satisfying in any way at all. --And Balducci is simply a better writer. It was easy by the time I finished this to see why Balducci has become one of the biggest names in the crime genre these days, because he's simply very good at it. His prose is tight and rat-a-tat without falling into cliche, with fantastic turns of phrase on a regular basis ("I may be fat," Decker at one point tells a man threatening him, "but I'm two of you"), and a strong dedication to the three-act structure that serves him well with a genre novel like this. Smith's prose, on the other hand, at all time belies the dilettante he is (his main job is actually as a "celebrity doctor" for shows like The View and Rachael Ray, and as a writer he's much more known for his nonfiction books on diet and nutrition), and like his world-building feels not so much like he's telling us a crime story, but that he's a space alien who only knows what the concept of crime is because of reading a bunch of other people's books on the same subject. So all in all, a surprisingly great read, and an instructive experience on understanding more about why crime fans become heavy readers of the genre in the first place, and what exactly it is they're looking for from this genre. I have to admit, after a first four decades of my life where I barely dabbled in this story form, I'm starting to read more and more of these types of novels as I age into my fifties, and Balducci is someone I'll definitely be coming back to next summer, when it's time for me to start the beach-read cycle over again. I hope as always you'll still be around to join me for that; but in the meanwhile, this particular title comes strongly recommended. ...more |
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Sep 10, 2020
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Sep 17, 2020
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Sep 10, 2020
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| 1492338508
| 9781492338505
| 3.25
| 8
| unknown
| Mar 16, 2019
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it was ok
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I picked this up because the book's promotional material promised that it's similar to James Howard Kunstler's World Made by Hand, which I'm a hesista
I picked this up because the book's promotional material promised that it's similar to James Howard Kunstler's World Made by Hand, which I'm a hesistant but legitimate fan of. But not only did this turn out to be nothing like that book, it turned out to not really be a three-act novel at all, but rather a series of writing-workshop exercises that one might do in preparation for writing a novel, which author Roberta Park seemed to give up on and say, "Screw it, I'll just publish the exercises instead." Specifically, the entire first two-thirds of this already short book is nothing more than the kinds of first-person monologues by each major character (and there's over a dozen of them) that you might pen in a writing class while you're trying to get a feel for who exactly these characters are and how they might behave in your eventual novel about them; but there's no plot in these monologues, no story development at all, just an endless series of personal essays by a bunch of strangers who all consider themselves environmentalists, and who are only connected by their increasing dread that something bad is going to happen to the environment soon. Then in the last third, we skip entirely ahead to some unknown point in the future (30 years? 100 years? It's difficult to exactly tell), at which point the environmental apocalypse that everyone was dreading has already completely come and gone, and with enough time passing that not only have the survivors written a book about their experiences, but it's now old enough that the generation after them now generally shuns that book and considers it a forbidden topic of conversation. So when the then next generation of children of this already next generation of survivors decide to make a school play out of the book, it makes no narrative sense whatsoever, other than that it gives Park an easy excuse to refer to the events of the verboten book without having to actually write any of the book itself; and in the meanwhile, there are literally dozens of off-handed references to the events between these two sections that we never see or hear about ourselves, making it feel like there's a giant 300-page middle section of this manuscript that's completely missing. I found it a very dissatisfying read, as if the author had collected up their notes for a book they gave up on and decided to just lazily foist those notes on me instead, and it does not come recommended to other readers. ...more |
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Sep 04, 2020
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| B07CWT59DC
| 3.49
| 1,207
| Sep 10, 2019
| Sep 10, 2019
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DID NOT FINISH. I've wanted for a long time to become a regular reader of Jesse Ball, if for no other reason than that he's so prevalent on social med
DID NOT FINISH. I've wanted for a long time to become a regular reader of Jesse Ball, if for no other reason than that he's so prevalent on social media and at Goodreads, it's pretty much impossible to be in the indie-lit community without knowing who he is. But alas, this turned out to be the wrong book of his to start with, a short and deliberate literary experiment that feels so tossed-off that it's nearly impossible to fully get into. Basically a wholesale ripoff of The Handmaid's Tale, combined with a few elements from Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers, it's set in a fascistic future in which society has decided to deal with the dual problems of refugees and an overflowing prison population by essentially watching Escape from New York too many times, and blocking off huge sections of land as their own lawless autonomous states where the "undesirables" are forced to live, which all people (citizens and non-citizens) are allowed to enter and leave at will, but once inside is a place where anyone can be raped or murdered legally. Then the way they deal with these dangerous elements out in the middle of civilized society is by...I think laying a system of pipes everywhere that can spew out poison gas whenever it's needed? And then giving every legitimate citizen a gas mask that they carry around with them at all times? And personal canisters of poison gas that they can throw down whenever feeling threatened? And then forcing them all to memorize nursery rhymes about how great the gas masks are? Or, um, something like that? None of it makes very much sense, and Ball very purposely writes it with such a complete abandon of basic logic that it's impossible to read it as a realistic story taking place in a realistic world; so the only way you can read it is as a fairytale for grown-ups, a prose style I have little tolerance for, further emphasized by the fact that everyone in the future apparently has reverted back to the kind of stilted, overly formal speaking style of Quakers or the King James Bible. (But for more, see James Howard Kunstler's World Made By Hand , in which Thy Apocalypse Hast Made Thou Survivors For Some Reason Speaketh With Noeth Contractions Whatsoevereth!) Ultimately the whole thing just feels like another one of those endless "Aren't Those MAGAs Crazy and Horrible?" books of the 2010s; and I've gone on record many times about how dissatisfying I find the entire "Aren't MAGAs Horrible" genre, in that these well-meaning liberal authors just get so overwhelmed by their hatred and frustration with the alt-right, nearly none of them can exercise the patience and discipline to churn out a truly good book on the subject, but instead almost always devolve into the fairytale-like "And then, boys and girls, the glorious Trumpian revolutionaries strung all the nasty liberals up on crucifixes!" nonsense like is seen here too. It made me lose patience with this book really quickly, literally at the 20 percent mark according to my Kindle, at which point I skipped ahead and read the last 20 percent and realized that it never gets any better (in fact, arguably it gets even worse), at which point I gave up for good. I still want to be a fan of Jesse Ball, so if you're a well-read fan of him yourself, I'd love it if you would recommend what you consider his two or three best among his now 15 books in the comments below. Looking forward to reading some work by him that was better than this one! ...more |
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Sep 04, 2020
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Sep 04, 2020
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Sep 04, 2020
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| 068800265X
| 9780688002657
| 3.84
| 118
| 1974
| Apr 1974
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it was amazing
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I recently watched the trippy 1974 sci-fi movie Rollerball for the first time (see my review over at Letterboxd), and I loved it so much that I though
I recently watched the trippy 1974 sci-fi movie Rollerball for the first time (see my review over at Letterboxd), and I loved it so much that I thought I'd track down the original story by William Harrison it was adapted from, which was first published in book form the same year as the movie, and was very nicely still available on a dusty back shelf of the Chicago Public Library. So what a surprise, then, to learn that Harrison wasn't actually a sci-fi author at all, but rather a veteran of literary fiction, a big admirer of Joseph Conrad and Graham Greene whose own stories are mostly similar examinations of masculinity among world-weary globetrotters, but who dabbled in experimental science-fiction in the '70s (mostly through commissions from Esquire magazine) because it was the Countercultural Era and this is what literary fiction authors did during the Countercultural Era. So in this particular collection, the pieces are sometimes straightforward Modernist-style tales, set in a variety of interesting locations (Montana, the south coast of Spain, a small town in Missouri); but sometimes they reflect the magical realism that was so trendy at the time because of authors like Gabriel Garcia Marquez (see for example the story of the magician who can literally make himself disappear), with only one or two pieces in this book that stretch all the way out into actual genre writing. And as far as the title piece, it is way, way darker and more violent than the movie, which fans of the film will find hard to believe. In his original story, the balls are as heavy as bowling balls and are shot out of cannons at 300 mph, spinning around the top edge of the stadium track like a roulette ball and tempting players into possible suicide in order to get an edge over their opponents; and the whole point of the sport even existing is that somewhere between one and fifteen people are killed at every single match, thus better explaining the original story's title, "Roller Ball Murder" (as in, it's a combination of a roller derby, basketball, and murder for sport). He also makes the world that created this game a lot clearer than the movie does, picturing a time in the future in which a debilitating war between Europe and Asia has resulted in private corporations now being the new city-states (displaying shades of premonition that cyberpunk writers like William Gibson would grab and run with a mere decade later), and those corporations having had their own war of attrition that has resulted in a total of six global enterprises now running the entire world, which all now have Orwellian names like ENERGY, FOOD and LUXURY. Like all these stories, it's really not much more than a character sketch drawn out into a little longer of a piece; but Harrison was quite good at these elongated character sketches, and I found this entire book to be fascinating and really readable. It comes recommended to those who want to go to the trouble of tracking down this long out-of-print title. ...more |
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Sep 02, 2020
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Sep 02, 2020
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Hardcover
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| ASIN:B08GJ
| 4.00
| 5
| Aug 21, 2020
| Aug 21, 2020
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really liked it
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I picked this up because the dust jacket copy claimed that it was similar to the work of George Saunders, who I'm a big fan of; and while it didn't tu
I picked this up because the dust jacket copy claimed that it was similar to the work of George Saunders, who I'm a big fan of; and while it didn't turn out to be similar to Saunders at all, I nonetheless found it pretty great. It's the story of a sorta Tom Cruise or Bruce Willis type character, an aging Hollywood action star whose best friends are a couple very similar to William H. Macy and Felicity Huffman, two admired stage theatre veterans who pick up occasional film and TV work to pay the bills; so when his son and their daughter start dating and eventually get married, everyone seems to be blissfully happy. But there's a dark secret lurking underneath all this billionaire gloss, one that I'll let remain a surprise so to keep this review spoiler-free, but certainly one that eventually involves secretive assassins, a mysterious bordello, what may or may not be psychedelic hallucinations, and a whole lot of murder. Less David Lynch and more Eyes Wide Shut, you can reliably count on there being rational explanations for all the weirdness by the end; but it's the bizarre journey to get there that's the delight, a short and quickly paced novella that slips into the cracks between crime fiction and horror. It comes enthusiastically recommended in this spirit, a one-day read that will be just the ticket for genre veterans who are on the lookout for something a little more unique than usual.
...more
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Sep 02, 2020
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Sep 02, 2020
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ebook
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| B08GJ9CTMZ
| unknown
| 4.00
| 3
| unknown
| Aug 21, 2020
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really liked it
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I picked this up because the dust jacket copy claimed that it was similar to the work of George Saunders, who I'm a big fan of; and while it didn't tu
I picked this up because the dust jacket copy claimed that it was similar to the work of George Saunders, who I'm a big fan of; and while it didn't turn out to be similar to Saunders at all, I nonetheless found it pretty great. It's the story of a sorta Tom Cruise or Bruce Willis type character, an aging Hollywood action star whose best friends are a couple very similar to William H. Macy and Felicity Huffman, two admired stage theatre veterans who pick up occasional film and TV work to pay the bills; so when his son and their daughter start dating and eventually get married, everyone seems to be blissfully happy. But there's a dark secret lurking underneath all this billionaire gloss, one that I'll let remain a surprise so to keep this review spoiler-free, but certainly one that eventually involves secretive assassins, a mysterious bordello, what may or may not be psychedelic hallucinations, and a whole lot of murder. Less David Lynch and more Eyes Wide Shut, you can reliably count on there being rational explanations for all the weirdness by the end; but it's the bizarre journey to get there that's the delight, a short and quickly paced novella that slips into the cracks between crime fiction and horror. It comes enthusiastically recommended in this spirit, a one-day read that will be just the ticket for genre veterans who are on the lookout for something a little more unique than usual.
...more
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Aug 27, 2020
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Sep 02, 2020
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Aug 27, 2020
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Kindle Edition
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| 0374520968
| 9780374520960
| 3.63
| 3,732
| May 1966
| May 01, 1988
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really liked it
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THE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they ever wrote Cur THE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they ever wrote Currently in the challenge: Isaac Asimov's Robot/Empire/Foundation | Margaret Atwood | JG Ballard | Clive Barker | Jim Butcher's Dresden Files | Lee Child's Jack Reacher | Philip K Dick | Daphne du Maurier | Ian Fleming | William Gibson | Michel Houellebecq | John Irving | Kazuo Ishiguro | John Le Carre | Bernard Malamud | China Mieville | Toni Morrison | VS Naipaul | Chuck Palahniuk | Tim Powers | Terry Pratchett's Discworld | Philip Roth | Neal Stephenson | Jim Thompson | John Updike | Kurt Vonnegut | PG Wodehouse Finished: Christopher Buckley | Shirley Jackson So with 1966's The Crystal World, I now finally finish up my reading of JG Ballard's "Catastrophe" novels, the Mid-Century-Modernist-style straightforward science-fiction books that first gained him a fan following at the beginning of his career, before the Postmodernist era ushered in a culture that allowed for him to write the much weirder, much darker "Ballardian" novels that he's now much more famous for. (To give you a sense of the timeline, with this book we're now currently seven years away from Crash, and nine years away from High-Rise.) Like the other Catastrophe novels, this book is centered around a natural disaster that threatens to destroy all life on the planet within the next decade (in this case, something in space is starting to convert all of Earth's swampy areas from organic matter into crystals, which scientists have determined is proceeding at a rate of 400 new yards every single day); and like the others, Ballard comes up with a "scientific" explanation for this that barely makes sense and that he almost immediately shrugs off (in this case, writing about a decade after the real-life discovery of "antimatter," he proposes that a phenomenon called "antitime" is turning the most primordial areas of Earth back into the state they were in when the planet was first formed trillions of years ago); and like the others, Ballard pays only lip service to traditional Mid-Century-Modernist sci-fi story elements (a James-Kirk-like protagonist; a love interest for this Kirk-like protagonist; an armed conflict between rival groups that this Kirk-like protagonist finds himself stuck in the middle of), which feels at all times like it's something his publisher is forcing on him but that he has zero interest in writing about; and like all the others, the only time the book rises above ho-hum to truly interesting is when Ballard is writing about the growing amount of people who feel like humans should actually be embracing the catastrophe, in that they believe it will usher our race into our next natural stage of evolution, which comes off to everyone else like they've gone psychotically insane. (And yes, like the others, this group of psychotically insane "true believers" includes at least one Catholic priest who has interpreted the catastrophe as proof that God has abandoned his children.) I've found it fascinating to read these novels long after the fact, and to see that they clearly show a young Ballard who is itching to write about the black pit at the heart of the human soul, but who in the early 1960s is simply not being allowed by his publisher to just go full-out into such territory, but is instead boxed in by the Silver Age genre expectations that his more famous "hard science" peers like Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein had made such an unthinking norm by then. (Let's never forget, after all, that after Ballard attended his first Worldcon science-fiction convention in 1957, he became so depressed by the state of the genre that he completely stopped writing altogether for an entire year.) As such, then, all of these Catastrophe novels come with only a limited recommendation, suitable only for Ballard completists who like me are interested in seeing how his Ballardian elements started peeking out here and there during the start of his career. (If you're only going to read one of them, make it the book before this one, 1964's The Burning World, which is very clearly the best out of all four; and like me, you can entirely skip the first Catastrophe novel altogether, 1961's The Wind From Nowhere, which later in life Ballard entirely disavowed as "unreadable paycheck garbage" just as soon as he was famous enough to get away with it.) Apparently, though, the one place Ballard was getting a chance to go "full Ballardian" in these years was in the decidedly less commercial world of short fiction; and it's this medium that I'll be exploring next, in his 1970 linked story collection The Atrocity Exhibition, the first book of his oeuvre that most fans point to as finally showcasing Ballard in his mature form. I hope you'll join me here again later in the year for my look at that. JG Ballard books now read: The Crystal World | The Burning World | The Drowned World ...more |
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Aug 11, 2020
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Aug 11, 2020
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Paperback
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| B08BKV8V4W
| 4.00
| 2
| unknown
| Jul 27, 2020
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it was amazing
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This short book turned out to be way, way better than its semi-cheesy title and cover art would lead you to believe, so much so that I'm tempted to ad
This short book turned out to be way, way better than its semi-cheesy title and cover art would lead you to believe, so much so that I'm tempted to advise author Donnie Comstock to just start all over and release the same story under an entirely different name and cover. Set in a world that undergoes a nuclear apocalypse on, like, page five, the first comparison that will pop into many readers' heads will be Andy Weir's The Martian, in that the book is a first-person journal from a very smart, very rational scientist who manages to survive the apocalypse (he happened to be a prepper on top of everything else), then struggles during the rest of the book with all the post-apocalyptic challenges that are thrown his way. But the farther into the story you go, the more you realize that this is actually a classic "anti-villain" story in the spirit of Breaking Bad; that is, unlike our good-guy hero in The Martian who we root for more and more as the story continues, the narrator of Mad Scientist starts out as a good guy, but then slowly becomes more and more unhinged, in a way that's easily justifiable from his viewpoint but that nonetheless results in more and more horrendous behavior as the months and years continue. (Also of interest to Breaking Bad fans, the way our unreliable narrator dispatches a group of Mad Max-style scavengers who try to break into his underground bunker, which is as delightfully clever and absolutely evil as Walter White's disposal of his drug-dealing competitors.) And then too, this book will remind many people of The Walking Dead only without zombies, in that a huge chunk of the manuscript is devoted to examining the various ethical and moral issues that come with the idea of surviving in a dangerous, lawless post-apocalyptic land. (So yes, in other words, it's The Martian meets Breaking Bad meets The Walking Dead; and yes, I only wrote that sentence so it can be eventually quoted by the publisher.) The best compliment I can give this book is that I feverishly read it from cover to cover in a single day, even putting off dinner and cancelling meeting up with my friends in order to do so. That's the sign of a really gripping, really compelling genre actioner, when it literally becomes "un-put-downable," and it comes strongly recommended to other sci-fi fans in this spirit. You'll cheer for our gene-splicing hero, then eventually you'll be ashamed that you ever cheered for him, a surprisingly sober story with a high amount of gravitas for being set in circumstances that so often are used by other authors to tell a deliberately silly tale. Just in terms of pure entertainment, Apocalypse for a Mad Scientist has turned out to be my most pleasurably surprising read of the last year. ...more |
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Aug 05, 2020
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Aug 05, 2020
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Kindle Edition
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| B07V5KKSZT
| 3.81
| 204,704
| May 19, 2020
| May 19, 2020
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DID NOT FINISH. I had the opportunity to read this Hunger Games prequel for free, so I decided to go ahead and do so, especially since I'm not particu
DID NOT FINISH. I had the opportunity to read this Hunger Games prequel for free, so I decided to go ahead and do so, especially since I'm not particularly saddled with nostalgia for the original (I was already in my forties when the original trilogy came out, so I read them with pleasure but also with the disinterest of a middle-ager who was curious to see why the kids were going so crazy for them), so I wasn't going into it with any particular baggage about Suzanne Collins' fan-controversial decision to make the villain of the original trilogy now the hero in this. But no matter what your opinion of this decision, the fact is that it's hard to pull something like this off, especially when you choose to make your protagonist continue the kind of sniveling, manipulative behavior that originally made him a villain in the first place, essentially making this a story about a place that's already terrible and the events that led to it becoming even more terrible. That's a tall order for a 500-page novel, to pull out something compellingly readable about suddenly making your villain the hero even as they continue acting like the villain, within a world of shit that you already know beforehand is just going to remain shit even by the end of those 500 pages; and Collins is simply not up to the task, making me lose interest quickly in this, a book which ultimately doesn't have much more to say than the story of why a fascist society eventually becomes cartoonishly fascist. When all is said and done, it feels too much like a cynical cash grab to re-boost a waning public interest in the "Hunger Games" franchise -- if Collins was legitimately interested in flexing her literary muscles again, it feels more likely that she would've just written a brand-new story in a brand-new universe -- and when you add the fact that I don't usually read childrens' books at all, that was exactly enough to make me give up on this novel soon after beginning. ...more |
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| B000PC71RS
| 3.73
| 94,893
| Sep 1996
| Jan 24, 2001
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DID NOT FINISH. For those who don't know, I moved into a community co-op here in Chicago earlier in the year; and one of the people I now live with, a
DID NOT FINISH. For those who don't know, I moved into a community co-op here in Chicago earlier in the year; and one of the people I now live with, a 75-year-old former '60s hippie, is assembling his latest book of poetry which I'm helping him proofread and lay out, which among other things includes several odes to the work of Joyce Carol Oates, an author I'm not familiar with at all, which recently inspired me to try at least the three specific novels that my housemate references in his own poetry book. Unfortunately, though, We Were the Mulvaneys seems to have been the wrong one to start with, or at least according to both my reaction to it and my friends' comments on the book here at Goodreads; for at 500 pages, Oates' infamously rambling prose and obsessive focus on throwaway details does her manuscript no favors here, the story of a farm family who are ripped apart in the 1970s by an event I'll let remain a surprise, but that apparently doesn't actually happen until you're nearly 300 pages into the story. I can't attest to that myself; because three weeks after I first checked out the ebook from my local library and had it then expire and automatically delete itself from my Kindle, I still had barely made it past page 75, a novel so slow and so digressive that I literally kept falling asleep every time I tried to tackle a few more pages of it. The next Oates title in my reading list is 1990's I Lock My Door Upon Myself, which at a much more manageable 98 pages is a book I'm feeling a lot more confident about actually finishing; for those of you like me who are just starting out with her and want to explore a bit about why she's so beloved, I would suggest that you too start with one of her much smaller and more digestible titles. Check back here next week for more!
...more
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Aug 05, 2020
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Aug 03, 2020
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| 9781735078304
| 3.64
| 25
| Aug 21, 2020
| Aug 21, 2020
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liked it
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The entire time this week I was reading Doc Cage's American Slaughterhouse, the second of the first two titles by new transgressive small press Audax
The entire time this week I was reading Doc Cage's American Slaughterhouse, the second of the first two titles by new transgressive small press Audax Books, I kept thinking of the old joke about how Nihilists and Absurdists ultimately say the same exact thing in conversations, the only difference being the tone of voice in which they say it. (NIHILIST [glowering through the smoke of their clove cigarette as they apply another layer of mascara around their eyelids] "The universe is a meaningless void and individual human lives are worthless blips." ABSURDIST [sipping a craft beer in a t-shirt while laughing and shrugging] "The universe is a meaningless void and individual human lives are worthless blips!") That tells you everything you need to know about the difference between this book and the other of the first two titles by this press, Calvin Loch's Incel Mantis: Diary of a Redpilled Man, which I had a chance to review earlier this summer and was really delighted by. In the former case, Loch understood -- like Jim Thompson, Chuck Palahniuk, and Bret Easton Ellis have also understood* -- that these kinds of stories about serial killers, told from the viewpoint of the killer themself, need to have a pretty hefty dose of over-the-top outrageousness in order to go down smoothly with most readers; because fiction about serial killers is an inherently absurd thing to begin with, and most readers would generally prefer to lightly float on top of the story as a disinterested witness, not get dragged down into the muck where our raping, homophobic, racist anti-villain lives themself. After all, the creepy glowering goth dude with the clove cigarette has a right to exist, but we all know how excruciating it is to get trapped in the corner of the party with him. Ultimately American Slaughterhouse will have its fans, and these fans will be very satisfied with this book, which is why it's still getting 3 stars from me despite not personally liking it. But to be clear, those fans are the tiny minority of alt-right boogalooers who refer to Tr*mp as their "God Emperor," exchange their Qanon manifestos at 8chan, and consider Fox News to be "just not conservative enough." That makes the book an ultra-niche one for an ultra-niche audience, and not something with a larger and more cross-stream appeal like Incel. The "Supreme Gentlemen" of the world will like this book just fine; but if you'll forgive me for saying so, I myself prefer to laugh and drink my way through the Apocalypse. *And of course this is to say nothing of the growing number of lesbian and transgender writers in the transgressive genre, from Kathy Acker to Lynn Breedlove and more, all of whom seem to understand this need for absurdity even better than the straight white males who get a lot more attention and accolades. But that's a whole other story for a whole other time. ...more |
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Jul 22, 2020
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Jul 22, 2020
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| B08CT994KB
| 4.71
| 7
| unknown
| Jul 10, 2020
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it was amazing
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I admit, I did a certain amount of groaning and eye-rolling when first approached by noir small press Audax Books about reviewing their latest title,
I admit, I did a certain amount of groaning and eye-rolling when first approached by noir small press Audax Books about reviewing their latest title, the provocatively titled Incel Mantis: Diary of a Redpilled Man, because historically speaking, books I've received of this type under these circumstances have tended to be so terrible as to be almost unreadable. So it comes as a huge relief to be able to convey that this actually turned out to be one of the most surprisingly great novels I've read in the last year, with a smart wit and a high quality to the prose that you usually don't find with books of this type. The secret here is that this is not actually a book about incels at all; although marketed by the publisher as the "true thoughts" (if not true story) of self-defined "Supreme Gentleman" Calvin Loch (but more on this in a moment), which he supposedly first shared as a nonfiction memoir online until "public condemnation forced him underground," in actuality this is a murder mystery told from the viewpoint of our violent unreliable narrator, in the style of Jim Thompson's classic The Killer Inside Me, with only lip service paid to the incel movement through a random scattering of the specialized vocabulary (Chads, betas, blackpills, etc) that this movement uses to both justify and encourage each other's behavior. Don't get me wrong, this is the precise reason the book is so good; for without the need to stick to any real-life events or a hardcore incel mindset, Loch instead provides us a nearly perfect three-act genre plot, smoothly guiding us through an evermore insane journey that starts at the quiet suburban law firm where he initially works, and ends with him being an international fugitive hiding out on a Caribbean island, with several detours along the way to interact with a thinly disguised Jeffrey Epstein. Plus, in the same spirit as Mary Harron's brilliant film adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis' American Psycho, Loch deliberately adds several scenes here that are just so over-the-top hilariously absurdist, we're left wondering whether he actually means for this to be a drama at all, but rather an extremely clever black comedy designed expressly to take the piss out of the incel movement, not champion it. Let's be clear -- I don't buy for even a second that "Calvin Loch" is actually the person he's portraying himself as here. For one glaring thing, Loch-the-author is rather hard on Loch-the-character; at various points he describes himself as openly racist on top of his incel-like misogyny, with a huge amount of self-hatred and a growing belief that maybe suicide would be the best thing he could do for the world, a history of mental illness that requires medication that he sometimes skips, and an insistence that we shouldn't actually trust a word he's saying, because he might just be insane and making everything up. (Also, despite the author supposedly being American, his dialogue is full of British mannerisms -- "I've" instead of "I have," "I'm on about" instead "I'm talking about," "cop on" instead of "grow up," and more.) And also to make it insultingly obvious, since we now live in an age where we're all forced to be this insultingly obvious, let me clearly state that I in no way agree with or endorse the incel mindset, nor do I recommend the slaughtering of other human beings. But you don't have to be an incel to enjoy Incel Mantis: Diary of a Redpilled Man, just like you don't have to be a corrupt Texas sheriff serial killer to enjoy The Killer Inside Me. This should instead be looked at as a deliciously dark pulp noir, a great new addition to the genre that marks Audax as a growing power in this wing of the publishing world. (Or, at least we'll see -- I have another one of their books, the 9/11 paramedic serial-killer novel American Slaughterhouse, in the queue for review in another couple of weeks.) It comes strongly recommended to those who can stomach it, a delightfully horrible tale for those who are tired of our All Earnest Times. ...more |
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Jul 12, 2020
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Jul 12, 2020
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| B08B3X5Y5W
| 3.50
| 14
| Aug 21, 2020
| Aug 21, 2020
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it was amazing
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I admit, I did a certain amount of groaning and eye-rolling when first approached by noir small press Audax Books about reviewing their latest title,
I admit, I did a certain amount of groaning and eye-rolling when first approached by noir small press Audax Books about reviewing their latest title, the provocatively titled incel: How-to-Kill Handbook, because historically speaking, books I've received of this type under these circumstances have tended to be so terrible as to be almost unreadable. So it comes as a huge relief to be able to convey that this actually turned out to be one of the most surprisingly great novels I've read in the last year, with a smart wit and a high quality to the prose that you usually don't find with books of this type. The secret here is that this is not actually a book about incels at all; although marketed by the publisher as the "true thoughts" (if not true story) of self-defined "Supreme Gentleman" Calvin Loch (but more on this in a moment), which he supposedly first shared as a nonfiction memoir online until "public condemnation forced him underground," in actuality this is a murder mystery told from the viewpoint of our violent unreliable narrator, in the style of Jim Thompson's classic The Killer Inside Me, with only lip service paid to the incel movement through a random scattering of the specialized vocabulary (Chads, betas, blackpills, etc) that this movement uses to both justify and encourage each other's behavior. Don't get me wrong, this is the precise reason the book is so good; for without the need to stick to any real-life events or a hardcore incel mindset, Loch instead provides us a nearly perfect three-act genre plot, smoothly guiding us through an evermore insane journey that starts at the quiet suburban law firm where he initially works, and ends with him being an international fugitive hiding out on a Caribbean island, with several detours along the way to interact with a thinly disguised Jeffrey Epstein. Plus, in the same spirit as Mary Harron's brilliant film adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis' American Psycho, Loch deliberately adds several scenes here that are just so over-the-top hilariously absurdist, we're left wondering whether he actually means for this to be a drama at all, but rather an extremely clever black comedy designed expressly to take the piss out of the incel movement, not champion it. Let's be clear -- I don't buy for even a second that "Calvin Loch" is actually the person he's portraying himself as here. For one glaring thing, Loch-the-author is rather hard on Loch-the-character; at various points he describes himself as openly racist on top of his incel-like misogyny, with a huge amount of self-hatred and a growing belief that maybe suicide would be the best thing he could do for the world, a history of mental illness that requires medication that he sometimes skips, and an insistence that we shouldn't actually trust a word he's saying, because he might just be insane and making everything up. (Also, despite the author supposedly being American, his dialogue is full of British mannerisms -- "I've" instead of "I have," "I'm on about" instead "I'm talking about," "cop on" instead of "grow up," and more.) And also to make it insultingly obvious, since we now live in an age where we're all forced to be this insultingly obvious, let me clearly state that I in no way agree with or endorse the incel mindset, nor do I recommend the slaughtering of other human beings. But you don't have to be an incel to enjoy incel: How-to-Kill Handbook, just like you don't have to be a corrupt Texas sheriff serial killer to enjoy The Killer Inside Me. This should instead be looked at as a deliciously dark pulp noir, a great new addition to the genre that marks Audax as a growing power in this wing of the publishing world. (Or, at least we'll see -- I have another one of their books, the 9/11 paramedic serial-killer novel American Slaughterhouse, in the queue for review in another couple of weeks.) It comes strongly recommended to those who can stomach it, a delightfully horrible tale for those who are tired of our All Earnest Times. ...more |
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Jul 11, 2020
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Jul 11, 2020
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| 0441010644
| 9780441010646
| 4.13
| 21,658
| May 2001
| May 27, 2003
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liked it
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I have no idea if this is actually true, but Alastair Reynolds' 2001 Chasm City, book 2 of his remarkable "Revelation Space" series, feels at all time
I have no idea if this is actually true, but Alastair Reynolds' 2001 Chasm City, book 2 of his remarkable "Revelation Space" series, feels at all times like it was actually the first book he wrote in the series, that he couldn't get it published and so moved on to another story set in the same universe, and that after the surprise smash success of that one (2000's Revelation Space [my review], the book that gives the entire series its name), his publisher Ace then hastily published the first book 14 months later as a "sequel" to capitalize on the newfound interest. Partly it feels this way because the plot of Chasm City doesn't have anything to do with the ongoing epic storyline established in Revelation Space and then (hopefully?) continued in books 3 through 6; set in the eponymous city that served as only one of a dozen locations in the sprawling first book, it tells a self-contained noir crime story that doesn't even touch on Revelation's ongoing saga about a billion-year-old galaxial war that wiped out nearly all life as the universe then knew it, and how the remnants of that war affect the modern human race a billion years later as Earth finally starts expanding for the first time beyond the confines of the Solar System. More troubling, though -- and why I suspect that this is the work of a younger and less experienced Reynolds, that was originally rejected by publishers when first making the submission rounds -- Chasm City simply isn't as good as the mindblowing Revelation. In fact, it's much, much worse, a simplistic revenge story that doesn't even begin to justify its wearying and sometimes glacially slow 700 pages, with almost none of the fantastical hard-science thinking-out-loud that has made these books so beloved among those in the scientific community. Granted, it has a clever third act twist, but it ends with a silly and rushed climax that dishonors the nearly thousand pages that came before it, and a storyline that just in general did not engage me in the obsessive "must! read! more!" way that Revelation did, a disappointment that left me actively angry that I wasted a month of my life on it. Make no mistake, I'm going to continue with the series; but from this point forward, I'm also going to check each new book at Wikipedia first, to make sure it actually follows the saga first established in the initial volume. It's getting 2 and a half stars from me, rounded up to 3 here at the no-half-point Goodreads, but certainly in either case is not a book I recommend to others. ...more |
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Jul 07, 2020
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Jul 07, 2020
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| unknown
| 4.12
| 26
| Jun 12, 2020
| Jun 12, 2020
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really liked it
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This is a retro cyberpunk actioner like is so popular with the kids these days; and as someone who was a big fan of the original cyberpunk genre when
This is a retro cyberpunk actioner like is so popular with the kids these days; and as someone who was a big fan of the original cyberpunk genre when it first appeared in the '80s and '90s, I'm glad to see a new appreciation for what I think is a very clever style of storytelling. Here, Gordon is heavy on the military/chase-scene side, describing a complex mythos whose most interesting feature is a layer of augmented reality that's been slapped on the surface of every real thing in the physical world, as if the entire scenery around you had been wrapped in a Michael Bay movie that you can't look away from. It's never going to win the Hugo Award, but it's a solid-enough thriller for heavy readers of the genre, especially convention goers since Gordon means for this to be volume 1 of a new series. That's exactly what this novel feels like, a book you would expect from one of those authors you party with at all the science-fiction conventions; that's neither good nor bad, just a reflection of who will like it the most. That would typically get it 3 1/2 stars from me, rounded up to 4 here at the no-half-point Goodreads.
...more
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Jun 03, 2020
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Jun 03, 2020
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ebook
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| 0679761675
| 9780679761679
| 3.77
| 10,948
| Apr 1964
| May 30, 1995
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really liked it
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THE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they ever wrote Cur THE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they ever wrote Currently in the challenge: Isaac Asimov's Robot/Empire/Foundation | Margaret Atwood | JG Ballard | Clive Barker | Jim Butcher's Dresden Files | Lee Child's Jack Reacher | Philip K Dick | Daphne du Maurier | Ian Fleming | William Gibson | Michel Houellebecq | John Irving | Kazuo Ishiguro | John Le Carre | Bernard Malamud | China Mieville | Toni Morrison | VS Naipaul | Chuck Palahniuk | Tim Powers | Terry Pratchett's Discworld | Philip Roth | Neal Stephenson | Jim Thompson | John Updike | Kurt Vonnegut | PG Wodehouse Finished: Christopher Buckley | Shirley Jackson Figuring out where to start with my completist read of Philip K. Dick turned out to be more complicated than with many of the other authors in this challenge; for while with most you can simply start with the first book they published and move forward chronologically from there, that's complicated in PKD's case because he started his career as basically a hack writer of quickie Silver-Age-style Mid-Century-Modernist sci-fi, while the main reason to read him now is for the trippy mind-bending classics of his 1970s late career, and especially the ones he wrote after his drug-complicated hallucinatory schizophrenic breakdown in February and March of 1974. But the whole point of doing a completist challenge is to search back and start before an author got to their mature classics, to see whether you can spot telling signs in the early books of the masters they would become; but I'm aware that the earliest of his books is not much more than mediocre pay-per-word space-opera kiddie stuff, and I don't want to actively torture myself just for the sake of saying that I did a truly complete read of his entire oeuvre. So I thought a good compromise would be to start with his 1962 The Man in the High Castle, which won PKD his first and only Hugo Award for Best Novel, and was also the first book that made many in the industry say, "Oh, okay, this isn't just a hacky writer of quickie pulp stuff, he's capable of greatness too." But I've already read High Castle, albeit almost 30 years ago; and I also just recently watched the Amazon Prime adaptation of the book as well, and wasn't feeling like going through such a well-known project again as my first PKD read. So instead I chose the first book after that, 1964's Martian Time-Slip, and now at this point am promising to stick chronologically to the rest, until we finally reach the final book he wrote before his premature death, 1982's The Transmigration of Timothy Archer. At that point, then, I'll decide whether to go back and read all those early space operas from the 1950s, or the string of '50s titles that only got published in the '80s after his death in order to further cash in on his name. Whew! As I was expecting, Martian Time-Slip reads through a lot of its page count like the kind of normal mid-'60s Silver Age sci-fi story that was so in vogue at the time, combining the "Long and Grand Terraforming of Mars" trope with the "Libertarians in SPAAAACE!!!" trope to tell a tale of political intrigue between the various factions (private institutions, national governments, the UN) who have formed the first settlements on a barely livable Mars, with PKD in this case envisioning a red planet that already had life when Earthlings first visited, essentially distant cousins of African aboriginals who have now suffered essentially the same colonial, oppressive fate as those Earth cousins did hundreds of years ago. But we know we're in for something different when PKD suddenly takes a detour in our Mars tour to examine the fate of the small number of autistic children who have now been born on the planet, who are all basically removed and housed in a special institution walled off from the rest of society, and with there being a hot debate over whether autistic children shouldn't instead be quietly euthanized upon diagnosis, because there's so much to be gained right now by convincing Earth's overly crowded population to emigrate to Mars en masse, and that's going to be even harder if everyone's convinced that their children will come out as deranged freaks. In fact, echoing common actual medical theory at the time, PKD posits here that autism and schizophrenia are actually the same thing, only one being a form you're born with and the other a condition you specifically develop (and hence is the one form that can eventually be "cured"); and as the page count continues, the story becomes more and more focused on this particular aspect of Martian society, as our main menagerie of characters slowly become convinced that autism/schizophrenia is actually a case of select humans having the ability to time travel using only their brains, much like how others are apparently born with the gift of ESP, and that they're experiencing the space-time continuum in such a profoundly different way than us that it renders them virtually incapable of normal communication with non-affected people. Mind you, this is all in service of a convoluted plot about Martian politics and a coming secret land grab, and the story never really transcends the mid-'60s boundaries that PKD was forced to work within at the time in order to have any kind of viable commercial career. But in this case, you really can see him yearning to add the trippy stuff he was genuinely interested in exploring within what's essentially a Robert A. Heinlein pastiche (just from the standpoint of the political plot, this could easily be a sequel to The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress), and is a nice portent of the truly weird, truly brilliant novels that would start coming out of him in just another ten years. It's not perfect, which is why it's not getting five stars from me; but if I was a contemporary sci-fi reader back in the mid-'60s, I would've finished this and thought, "Hmm, yeah, that was quite clever and good. I bet this guy's going to have even better stuff down the line." That's always a great thing to catch in the early volumes of any author in this Completist Challenge, and makes me excited to dive into the next PKD book, The Game-Players of Titan which was basically published at the same exact time as this one but by a different publisher. See you again then! Philip K. Dick books now read: Martian Time-Slip ...more |
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May 31, 2020
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May 31, 2020
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| 0142003239
| 9780142003237
| 3.66
| 27,648
| Apr 05, 1954
| May 27, 2003
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it was amazing
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THE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they ever wrote Cur THE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they ever wrote Currently in the challenge: Isaac Asimov's Robot/Empire/Foundation | Margaret Atwood | JG Ballard | Clive Barker | Jim Butcher's Dresden Files | Lee Child's Jack Reacher | Philip K Dick | Daphne du Maurier | Ian Fleming | William Gibson | Michel Houellebecq | John Irving | Kazuo Ishiguro | John Le Carre | Bernard Malamud | China Mieville | Toni Morrison | VS Naipaul | Chuck Palahniuk | Tim Powers | Terry Pratchett's Discworld | Philip Roth | Neal Stephenson | Jim Thompson | John Updike | Kurt Vonnegut | PG Wodehouse Finished: Christopher Buckley | Shirley Jackson As a fiftysomething member of Generation X, my childhood introduction to James Bond was with the late '70s Roger Moore titles, when the spy had been thoroughly transformed by then into a cartoon character, as he winked his way through a veritable checklist of hyper-specific tropes (the explosions! The gadgets! The laaaaadies!) to help us all experience at least a little empty fun during the downer Carter years, and to make sure that at least one Playboy bunny a year earned an IMDB credit. So that's been making it particularly interesting to me to go back and read all the original Bond novels in chronological order, because the character famously started as not much more than a slightly exaggerated version of the actual MI-6 employees author Ian Fleming hung out with as part of his job during and after World War Two. In fact, in his 1953 Casino Royale debut I covered last time, we're presented with a mean, misogynistic sociopath who's almost unrecognizable from the suave ladykiller of the Hollywood version, who views post-war spy work with the same world-weary tone as Fleming's peer John Le Carre's early novels, and with the only part of the Bond Mythos already in place being that his boss's codename is "M." Here in 1954's second Bond novel, we at least see the introduction of many of the franchise's greatest hits -- M.'s sexy and sassy secretary Miss Moneypenny, the tech-providing Q., his fondness for martinis -- although here they're all much more down-to-earth references that make the story feel more like a Tom Clancy tale than the "snipers on snowmobiles" antics of the Bond movies. Q., for example, provides nothing fancier here than a scuba wetsuit, the "tech miracle" in this case being only that he managed to get it shipped from London to the Caribbean in less than a week; and so is the rest of this story grounded a lot more in reality than you would expect from 50 years of Bond cinematic insanity. That said, we're treading on eggshells here, because in Live and Let Die we're having a famously politically-incorrect author during the middle of a famously politically-incorrect time throw his entire novel into the middle of the 1950s African-American experience; the villain is a Haitian who now lives in New York City, a big chunk of the book takes place in Harlem jazz clubs in the middle of the night, and the story famously ends in the dark voodoo backwoods of Jamaica. Say what you will about Fleming's ability to pull off these scenes and characters (those looking to be offended will indeed be offended very, very quickly), but he at least creates a milieu that's almost eerily perfect for a smart, complex spy thriller, and takes care not to paint the complex POC world population in any kind of single simple light. By creating a story about a self-taught genius who's simultaneously trained in dirty tricks by the OSS and KGB during WW2, then goes to work after the war for the Mafia as an excuse to gather intelligence as a Soviet spy, using his deep connections in the African-American community to have a virtual national network of telephone switchboard operators and train porters at his beck and call, Fleming creates a setting and a plot framework that both works as an enjoyable batshit genre story and that feels only a tiny bit cranked up from some of the MI-6 adventures Fleming actually went through in real life. That's really the biggest surprise here, that Live and Let Die is exquisite as a summer genre read -- as exciting as any of the Bond films, but much more realistic and believable, yet pushing every detail to just exactly one bit crazier than you typically see in just normal day-to-day life, the exact key to creating a really zippy genre actioner. No wonder the Bond novels started catching on more and more beginning here, culminating a decade later when President Kennedy mentioned that one of the Bond novels was in his list of favorite books of all time, which kicked off the international craze that led to the Hollywood movies and all the rest. This has me excited now to read all the rest, and I might just sneak in the third book in the series (1955's Moonraker) before this summer ends. Ian Fleming books now read: Live and Let Die | Casino Royale ...more |
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May 26, 2020
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May 26, 2020
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| 9781777129507
| 4.69
| 16
| unknown
| Apr 12, 2020
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really liked it
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The problem with genres that are overly specific in their tropes, such as crime procedurals or zombie actioners for two well-known examples, is that a
The problem with genres that are overly specific in their tropes, such as crime procedurals or zombie actioners for two well-known examples, is that all the stories in those genres all tend to eventually blur into each other, until it's all sort of just one big collective story in our heads and with little difference between each title. That's the heart of the problem here with T.S. Beier's post-apocalyptic thriller What Branches Grow, her published debut through specialty press Nostromo; for while it's entirely well-written and a fine example of the genre, that genre itself (from Cormac McCarthy's The Road to Mel Gibson's The Road Warrior) relies on such a very specific combination of tropes that it feels more sometimes like Beier is filling in a puzzle, getting her Post Apocalyptic Bingo Card marked up one square at a time until she can finally turn it in and go home. That combination of competent but derivative usually gets 3 1/2 stars from me, bumped up to 4 here because of the unusual and interesting climax; but the majority of the book isn't anything different than The Walking Dead but with no zombies, so the main reason to read it is if you're a fan of the post-apocalyptic genre specifically, and enjoy reading a lot of different takes on the subject that are only slightly different from each other. It comes with a narrow recommendation to that specific fan base, who will like this a lot.
...more
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May 24, 2020
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May 24, 2020
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ebook
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| 0515142247
| 9780515142242
| 4.04
| 113,516
| Jul 20, 1998
| Oct 28, 2008
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liked it
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THE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they ever wrote Cur THE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they ever wrote Currently in the challenge: Isaac Asimov's Robot/Empire/Foundation | Margaret Atwood | JG Ballard | Clive Barker | Jim Butcher's Dresden Files | Lee Child's Jack Reacher | Philip K Dick | Daphne du Maurier | William Gibson | Michel Houellebecq | John Irving | Kazuo Ishiguro | John Le Carre | Bernard Malamud | China Mieville | Toni Morrison | VS Naipaul | Chuck Palahniuk | Tim Powers | Terry Pratchett's Discworld | Philip Roth | Neal Stephenson | Jim Thompson | John Updike | Kurt Vonnegut | PG Wodehouse Finished: Christopher Buckley | Shirley Jackson The readthrough rate of my TBR pile has fallen to a dismal level during the quarantine -- the only three books I've managed to actually finish in the last eight weeks have been the super-dense "Terra Ignota" science-fiction trilogy by Ada Palmer, with another three or four books that I started then gave up on -- so for this year's Summer Reading Challenge, I've decided to pick a bunch of "easy reads" from my Completist Challenge list, books that aren't necessarily intellectually light (although some are), but that I at least anticipate being smooth reads that I'll be done with quickly, so I can make some major forward movement on my gigantic to-read list before Labor Day finally rolls around. And hey, no better way to start off an easy-read summer than with our square-jawed, grit-filled antihero friend Jack Reacher, who is sure to punch and swear his way out of any weird random situation he happens to find himself in, as he wanders the back roads of AMERICA with not so much as even a wallet on him. 'America's all capitalized, of course, because one of the notorious details of the Jack Reacherverse is that author Lee Child is British, and had never stepped foot in the US before starting this cash-cow franchise; so he's not just giving us a cartoonishly simplified depiction of all the cliches of AMERICA in these books, he's giving us his simplified depiction of the terrible American genre novels he himself was raised on, which themselves are cartoonishly simplified depictions of all the cliches in AMERICA. That makes these books (or at least the first two so far) more like the literary equivalent of a Tommy Wiseau movie, a "so terrible it's actually great" experience that will regularly have you grasping your head as you read onward while yelling in a deadpan voice, "WHAAAAT. THEEEE. FUUUUCK." They're not subtle, that's for sure, and are just filled to the brim with ludicrous scenes and unintentionally hilarious dialogue; but they deliver the goods, it can't be denied, if by "goods" you mean fast-paced thrillers that can be read quickly even in a distraction-filled environment, with just enough of a winking sense of humor about itself to make the proceedings not just bearable but sometimes extremely clever. That's why there's ten bazillion Jack Reacher books, and why I'll probably continue ingesting one or two each summer until I'm through them all myself. Lee Child books now read: Die Trying | Killing Floor ...more |
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May 17, 2020
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May 17, 2020
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Mass Market Paperback
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| 1945814500
| 9781945814501
| 3.81
| 237
| May 08, 2018
| May 08, 2018
|
liked it
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2020 reads, #20. Another MFAey indie-lit character drama, which you know is indie because everyone is kinda miserable. It's no coincidence, I think, t
2020 reads, #20. Another MFAey indie-lit character drama, which you know is indie because everyone is kinda miserable. It's no coincidence, I think, that Dixon Evans thanks a number of people at the end who I also know in real life, because this sounds almost exactly like the kind of indie-lit character dramas they're all doing too; and God bless you all for it, okay, but man do I wish that all of you would take greater chances in your stories besides just the usual indie-lit cliches, symbolically tied together through whatever quirky thing the characters are dealing with in this particular version (in this case, forest fires in California, and the dysfunctional "Fleabag" type protagonist in the middle of the proceedings). This will please that whole crowd, all several thousand of them, the ones running all the indie lit presses and indie lit blogs and indie lit readings and indie lit podcasts, who just got done deliberating over whether or not to attend AWP this year; but I yearn for something better and more surprising than this, which is why the only middle-of-the-road score from me today.
...more
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Notes are private!
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none
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1
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not set
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Mar 12, 2020
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Mar 12, 2020
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Paperback
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| 0451457811
| 9780451457813
| 3.99
| 306,603
| Apr 2000
| Apr 01, 2000
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really liked it
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THE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they ever wrote Cur THE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they ever wrote Currently in the challenge: Isaac Asimov's Robot/Empire/Foundation | Margaret Atwood | JG Ballard | Clive Barker | Jim Butcher's Dresden Files | Philip K Dick | Daphne du Maurier | William Gibson | Michel Houellebecq | John Irving | Kazuo Ishiguro | John Le Carre | Bernard Malamud | China Mieville | Toni Morrison | VS Naipaul | Chuck Palahniuk | Tim Powers | Terry Pratchett's Discworld | Philip Roth | Neal Stephenson | Jim Thompson | John Updike | Kurt Vonnegut | PG Wodehouse Finished: Christopher Buckley | Shirley Jackson As I've mentioned here before, I made a major new bibliophilic discovery last year, when I learned that there are tons of authors out there whose entire oeuvres have been packaged up by fans and put out as BitTorrent streams; and with ebook files being so insanely small in size, this means that you can often download the entire career of an author in less than ten seconds with the click of a single button. Consequently, this has inspired me to branch out and sample a series of genre authors who I normally wouldn't, especially ones with franchises who release a title a year just in time for your next vacation to the beach, which has been hit-and-miss but always an interesting process. Take Jim Butcher, for example, whose 15 "Dresden Files" novels I knew not a single thing about before last week, besides that they're urban fantasy and that they're perennially showing up on the "New Releases" shelf of my neighborhood public library. So on a whim I decided to read the first in the series, 2000's Storm Front; and I have to say, I liked it enough that I'm at least going to continue with them (as opposed to, say, Lee Child's "Jack Reacher" series, whose first title underwhelmed me so much that I'm not sure if I'm ever going to read book 2). I'm not actually that familiar with urban fantasy, but it feels to me as if this is an ur-example of what you might expect from the genre; it's the tale of a gritty private detective (Harry Dresden of the franchise's title) who happens to be an honest-to-God wizard as well, within an alternative reality where such things as magic, vampires, fairies and demons are supposed to actually exist, mingling in their own realm called "Nevernever" but up to now never revealing their presence to human mortals. Dresden is the first such magical creature to go public with this information; but since all the other magical creatures tend to hide their activities from humans, most mortals don't actually believe that Dresden is a real wizard, and most of his jobs tend to be of the "X-Files" variety, i.e. weird stuff is happening and the client thinks, "What the hell, maybe this weirdo who claims to be a wizard can figure it out." Granted, I almost gave up on the book right in chapter 1, because of Butcher setting the novel in my hometown of Chicago but then making three major basic errors about the city in literally the first ten pages, never a good sign of a book's quality going forward. (For what it's worth, there is no 10th Street in Chicago [it's instead known as Taylor Street]; there is no such thing as "Midtown Chicago" [you're thinking of Manhattan, Butcher]; and no one would ever describe March in Chicago as "cool and windy" [it is instead still bitterly cold and miserable here in March].) Thankfully, though, the book gets a lot better as it continues, never exactly Pulitzer material but certainly much higher in quality than many genre franchises with annual beach-read releases. The secret here is that Butcher builds in a tremendous amount of natural conflict, which keeps the proceedings interesting and high-stakes -- there's the frisson between him and the rest of the supernatural world, between him and the world of mortals, between him and the skeptical police officers who must put up with him on a regular basis, between the different factions of Nevernever, not to mention between the actual characters involved in this particular crime and investigation -- and also because Butcher has such an expansive and fascinating sense of world-building right here in the first volume of the series, presenting a fully fleshed-out complex universe right from the get-go, with constant hints and references to past events that sound interesting enough to take up entire books unto themselves (and which I assume actually do take up entire books unto themselves later in the series). Now add a decent sense of humor, consistent rules about magic that are easily understood by the reader, and a dedication to the fundamentals of procedural crime-fiction writing, and you're left with a book that could've been better but is still pretty great as it is. That's why I'm officially adding Butcher today to my always expanding list of authors in this Great Completist Challenge; and I look forward to taking on the next title in the series, 2001's Fool Moon, later this summer while I'm lounging around Chicago's 10th Street Beach. This won't be for everyone; but if you like either fantasy novels or crime ones, there's a lot in Storm Front for you to enjoy. [Enjoy my writing? Get a lot more of it at patreon.com/jasonpettus.] ...more |
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Feb 21, 2020
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Feb 21, 2020
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Mass Market Paperback
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| 0062857843
| 9780062857842
| 4.63
| 1,291
| Jul 23, 2019
| Jul 23, 2019
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really liked it
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2020 reads, #12. I mostly know J. Michael Straczynski (or JMS as his fans call him) because of his TV show Babylon 5, a 1990s sci-fi series that foret
2020 reads, #12. I mostly know J. Michael Straczynski (or JMS as his fans call him) because of his TV show Babylon 5, a 1990s sci-fi series that foretold the rise of complex characterization and serial storytelling in the "Peak TV" era a decade later; but he's equally as famous for his record-breaking stints in the comic-book industry, his screenplay for Clint Eastwood's Oscar-nominated Changeling, and for co-showrunning the Netflix series Sense8 along with the Wachowskis. In any of these cases, though, I don't think anyone would've suspected that JMS's childhood was the stuff of nightmares, complete with sex-molesting grandmother, a mother who tried to murder him as a baby, and a violent, alcoholic, deeply racist father who still proudly displayed the mini-Gestapo uniform that was lovingly made for him by the Nazis he happily bummed around with as a child himself in World War Two eastern Europe. That JMS overcame this and became a normally functioning adult at all is a miracle worthy of celebrating, especially when the very first move he made as a newly independent adult was to fall straight into the arms of a religious cult; but the way he built himself up into an award-winning, cultishly loved millionaire sci-fi author along the way makes his life the stuff of legend, especially when reading this candid autobiography and realizing that he did it the longest and hardest way possible, literally starting by grinding out one-acts for no pay and turning in a dozen articles a week for his local college newspaper, accepting such ignoble assignments as punch-up for '80s children's cartoons like He-Man and The Real Ghostbusters, eventually becoming a freelance entertainment journalist for the LA Times and host of a SoCal radio talk show about sci-fi, continuing to write 80 hours a week like clockwork no matter how little or much that work was actually getting purchased and published. It's a mesmerizing, inspiring story, and the only reason it's not getting 5 stars from me is because it also backs up his critics' main complaint, that his writing is the very definition of pedestrian and lacking style. This is a great story, but it would've been mindblowing if told in a witty and sophisticated way; this is more like hearing an accountant tell it in the most plodding way possible during a dinner party filled with other accountants, which still makes it great but lacks a certain final oomph. It still comes recommended to a general audience, though, a story so crazy and unbelievable that you can't help but get sucked into it, no matter what your opinion is of our narrator or even whether or not you've heard of him before. [Enjoy my writing? Get a lot more of it at patreon.com/jasonpettus.] ...more |
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1
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Feb 17, 2020
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Feb 17, 2020
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Hardcover
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my rating |
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|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
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| 3.90
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it was ok
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Jan 20, 2021
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Jan 20, 2021
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| 4.33
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it was amazing
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Dec 11, 2020
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Dec 10, 2020
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| 4.15
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it was amazing
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Dec 10, 2020
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Dec 10, 2020
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| 4.24
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really liked it
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Nov 03, 2020
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Nov 03, 2020
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| 4.12
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did not like it
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Oct 12, 2020
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Oct 12, 2020
| |||||
|
| 3.60
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really liked it
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Sep 23, 2020
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Sep 23, 2020
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| 4.33
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really liked it
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Sep 21, 2020
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Sep 21, 2020
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| 4.06
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it was amazing
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Sep 15, 2020
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Sep 15, 2020
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| 4.07
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it was amazing
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Sep 17, 2020
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Sep 10, 2020
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| 3.25
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it was ok
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not set
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Sep 04, 2020
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| 3.49
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Sep 04, 2020
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Sep 04, 2020
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| 3.84
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it was amazing
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Sep 02, 2020
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Sep 02, 2020
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|
| 4.00
|
really liked it
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Sep 02, 2020
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Sep 02, 2020
| |||||
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| 4.00
|
really liked it
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Sep 02, 2020
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Aug 27, 2020
| |||||
|
| 3.63
|
really liked it
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Aug 11, 2020
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Aug 11, 2020
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| 4.00
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it was amazing
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Aug 05, 2020
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Aug 05, 2020
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| 3.81
|
Aug 04, 2020
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Aug 04, 2020
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| 3.73
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Aug 05, 2020
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Aug 03, 2020
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| 3.64
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liked it
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Jul 22, 2020
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Jul 22, 2020
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| 4.71
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it was amazing
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Jul 12, 2020
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Jul 12, 2020
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| 3.50
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it was amazing
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Jul 11, 2020
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Jul 11, 2020
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| 4.13
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liked it
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Jul 07, 2020
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Jul 07, 2020
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| 4.12
|
really liked it
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Jun 03, 2020
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Jun 03, 2020
| |||||
|
| 3.77
|
really liked it
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May 31, 2020
|
May 31, 2020
| |||||
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| 3.66
|
it was amazing
|
May 26, 2020
|
May 26, 2020
| |||||
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| 4.69
|
really liked it
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May 24, 2020
|
May 24, 2020
| |||||
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| 4.04
|
liked it
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May 17, 2020
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May 17, 2020
| |||||
|
| 3.81
|
liked it
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Mar 12, 2020
|
Mar 12, 2020
| |||||
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| 3.99
|
really liked it
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Feb 21, 2020
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Feb 21, 2020
| |||||
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| 4.63
|
really liked it
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Feb 17, 2020
|
Feb 17, 2020
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