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| 1473563259
| 9781473563254
| 3.65
| 8,501
| May 2019
| May 28, 2019
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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 | Jeanette Winterson | PG Wodehouse Finished: Christopher Buckley | Shirley Jackson Although she's in my Completist Challenge list, it's been years and years since I've read anything by Generation-X LGBTQ pioneer Jeanette Winterson; so with her recently publishing her first adult novel in four years, I thought this was a perfect excuse to finally do so again. Like most of her books, it is simultaneously a contemporary take on gender issues and a clever reimagining of a classic situation, in this case taking pieces from both the plot of and the story behind Mary Shelley's 1818 Frankenstein and exactly two hundred years later turning in an edgy new rethinking of it all, in which Shelley is now a partially transgendered science journalist who goes by "Ry," Victor Frankenstein is a Ray Kurzweil-type transhumanist who enters an intense sexual relationship with them, and the goal is no longer to bring a human cadaver back to life but rather to "download" a human consciousness to a computer server, within an industry that has recently seen the popular rise of the next generation of "sexbots" by the outspoken Welsh entrepreneur and openly sexist Ron Lord (Winterson's stand-in for Lord Byron and the closest thing this book has to an antagonist, if you don't count the born-again Christian serving as a judgmental liaison to all these people at an American tech convention, who just happens to share the name of the real-life Shelley's stepsister, Claire Clairmont). Like many of her novels, Winterson is less interested in a traditional plot here than in examining all the philosophical issues that come with the subjects she's bandying about, a funny and quickly paced story but one that doesn't really go in any particular direction, more devoted to asking questions than providing any answers. Unfortunately, Winterson also decided to weave in some scenes featuring Mary Shelley's actual real-life story as well, which is where the book loses my fifth star; not really needed in the first place in order to follow along with her contemporary redress of the plot, she also employs it unevenly and haphazardly through the manuscript, starting with a big dose of scenes from the early 1800s but then sort of losing the thread of it all by the halfway point, making a token effort near the end to tie everything back together but otherwise pretty much abandoning the entire conceit during the novel's second half. That's a shame, because the often unexpected details of the contemporary reimagining are more than enough to drive the entire book, while Winterson's callbacks to the tale's original Early Romantic circumstances tend to just distract us from the smart and often zany 21st-century tale she's mostly telling. That said, even Winterson with flaws is better than many other writers at their best, and Frankissstein's playful examination of gender, identity and hot sex was a great reminder of why I put her on my Completist Challenge list in the first place. I'm looking forward to throwing myself back into the beginning of her career next, where she became such a beloved cult favorite among me and my friends because of her headspinningly inventive early novels (such as 1992's Written On the Body, in which she presents an entire 200-page erotic thriller without once ever divulging the gender of the narrator); but for now, this is certainly also a book I recommend, one that does not require a familiarity with her previous work to enjoy. You need to be in the right mindset (don't expect a lot to actually "happen" in this book, for example); but for unique, thought-provoking and well-done looks at contemporary feminist and bisexual issues, both political and personal, it's really hard to go wrong with this always entertaining, always contemplative author. Jeanette Winterson books now read: Frankissstein ...more |
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Nov 08, 2020
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Nov 08, 2020
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ebook
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| 1624145396
| 9781624145391
| 3.62
| 21
| unknown
| Jul 03, 2018
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it was amazing
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This is one of a whole series of books I'm rapidly getting off my TBR list this month, that I would never really consider buying but that made for int
This is one of a whole series of books I'm rapidly getting off my TBR list this month, that I would never really consider buying but that made for interesting reads through my neighborhood library. It caught my attention because I'm now living in a co-op with 15 other people here in Chicago, and so am starting to enfold a few of the ideas from homesteading into my daily life; we have a garden just for ourselves, for example, that would usually service a whole neighborhood in a community setting, we brew our own beer, we make a small farm's worth of compost, we have industrial-sized barrels full of rainwater, we have a huge and productive pear tree in the backyard, and other such details that don't exactly make us the "Amish-Hipster" Stonger family at the heart of this guide, but at least are enough to make me interested in reading the Stongers' book in the first place. It's a fascinating combination of old beat-up Foxfire paperbacks with our contemporary Dot Com age -- one chapter will be on digging your own root cellar, the next on how to most optimally set up your solar panels -- which makes it engaging and thought-provoking even if you're not planning on actually doing any of the projects there in your 500-square-foot apartment 20 floors above ground level. For what it's worth, despite us already doing about a dozen of the things mentioned in the book, it yielded one more really good idea for our particular house (turning our unused, patchy front yard into an unstructured "food forest" combining fruit-bearing trees, berry shrubs and edible roots); while your results may vary, I bet nearly everyone can find at least one project in here to take on, no matter what your living situation. It comes warmly recommended in this spirit.
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Oct 10, 2020
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Oct 10, 2020
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ebook
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| 1612197493
| 9781612197494
| 3.79
| 24,098
| Apr 09, 2019
| Apr 09, 2019
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really liked it
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As I detailed last week during my review of Marlee Grace's How to Not Always Be Working, like a lot of Americans I recently had just a complete and to
As I detailed last week during my review of Marlee Grace's How to Not Always Be Working, like a lot of Americans I recently had just a complete and total burnout nervous breakdown due to the unending pandemic of 2020; and as part of regrouping and permanently changing my lifestyle for the remainder of the pandemic, I've been seeking out books of philosophy that help me better understand how to better cope with the constant uncertainty, constant fear, constant enforced isolation and constant barrage of terrible news that we've all been going through for the last eight months and counting, and which led to my breakdown in the first place. Unfortunately, Grace's book wasn't it (it turns out instead to be one of those cutesy little gift books sold next to the cash registers at Barnes & Noble, and in practical terms almost worthless as a self-help guide); but in the comments section of that review, Goodreads member Rachel C. recommended Odell's book, which is almost exactly what I've been looking for. Originally written in the wake of Tr*mp's election in 2016, the digital artist and (somewhat ironic) corporate speaker's original aim was to write a thoughtful guide on how to opt out of our modern times' "attention economy" (think of your 24/7 obsession with checking Twitter on your phone, for example), which she effectively argues is what led to Tr*mp's win in the first place, since the attention economy only works by getting you so outraged and stressed that you will compulsively check social media for the latest outrages like the Pavlovian dog you are. But it turns out that the book is almost perfectly suited for our pandemic times four years later as well, as a growing amount of us start suffering from what Medieval monks used to call "acedia" -- not quite depression, not quite anxiety, but a sort of lethargy about the very idea of human existence, as the unending pressures of a rug being constantly yanked from under our feet, combined with the sudden inability to turn to members of our community and family to cope with it, is putting many of us in an emotional limbo that we seem incapable of crawling our way out of, even as the pre-pandemic inputs in our lives keep urging us to be productive, to give 110%, to crush it, to rip it, and don't forget to like, retweet and subscribe. Unfortunately it's not getting 5 stars from me, because Odell starts losing the narrative about a third of the way into the manuscript -- at a certain point she spends a couple of chapters in a row talking in detail about how great performance artists are, then a couple of chapters after that about how great environmentalism is, neither topic of which I was particularly interested in when picking up the book, and I ended up stopping my reading about two-thirds of the way through the book when I could see that it was destined to meander Malcolm-Gladwell-style through a bunch of other stuff I didn't really have any interest in. But the first third is great, exactly the kind of thought-provoking, intelligent writing I was looking for. I strongly recommend it for those who are also going through the kind of spiritual crisis I find myself in these days, which I suspect is a whole lot of you. ...more |
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2
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Sep 28, 2020
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Sep 28, 2020
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| 0312420331
| 9780312420338
| 3.60
| 22,906
| 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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| 4.40
| 71,607
| May 01, 2008
| Aug 11, 2015
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it was ok
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This is the second volume of Liu Cixin's "Remembrance of Earth's Past" trilogy which started with the much more famous The Three-Body Problem; and I'v
This is the second volume of Liu Cixin's "Remembrance of Earth's Past" trilogy which started with the much more famous The Three-Body Problem; and I've already done a long write-up of that book, so I recommend checking that out if you want to see my thoughts on the overall themes and concepts of the entire trilogy. Much has been made about these books being the centerpiece of what a growing amount of people are calling the "Golden Age of Chinese Science-Fiction" currently transpiring as we speak, with Liu and his peers having a reputation among native Asians that roughly corresponds to how we Americans think of the Holy Trinity of Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke and Robert Heinlein back in our own country's golden age of the 1950s. But there's a big problem with these so-called golden-age authors, which is that in their zeal to legitimize a genre that at the time had virtually no respect, these often self-taught writers (and very often full-time scientists, who did creative writing simply as a hobby) leaned way too heavily into the goal of introducing realistic hard science into their fictional stories, at the expense of ignoring much more basic literary issues that are required to make for actual good fiction stories, such as realistic and complex characters, a well established three-act plot that moves not too fast and not too slow, and dialogue that sounds like it came out of the mouths of actual human beings, and not space aliens who are just taking blind guesses at what humans actually sound like when they talk to each other. And yes, you've probably guessed by now that this is the exact problem with The Dark Forest; now that Liu has already set up the fascinating concepts that allowed the first book to glide so smoothly despite its faults, his creaky Heinlein-like basic literary problems are much more noticeable here in the second book, which like most second volumes of a trilogy is much more devoted to ploddingly putting the pieces into place for the coming third volume, and not nearly as much to luxuriating in the complex, fascinating world-building details that made the first book such a success. (But for another recent example, see my review last week at Letterboxd.com about recently rewatching all four "Hunger Games" movies, a story series that suffers from this exact same problem.) And this is not to mention another similar problem as the work of Asimov and Heinlein, which is the growing complaints about the undisguised sexism and lack of female-character agency in this book, best explained here in this review by The Book Smugglers. This may fly with Chinese audiences, whose authoritarian government as recently as the 1990s had banned all contemporary American genre writers newer than Asimov and Heinlein in the first place, thus providing an explanation for why this kind of clunky, mediocre prose has exploded in popularity there (and the fact that the country's sci-fi authors seem to be getting away with more openly criticizing the government than mainstream writers I'm sure doesn't hurt). But here in the US, we've already gone through not one, not two, but three entire generations of subsequent SF literary developments since the popular height of our own golden age (including the "New Wave" of the '60s and '70s, typified by writers like Ursula K. Le Guin and Philip K. Dick; the "Cyberpunk" era of the '80s and '90s, led by William Gibson and Neal Stephenson; and the "Singularity/New Weird" writers of the '00s and '10s like Cory Doctorow, Charles Stross and China Mieville); and not only that, we're currently in the middle of our fourth new generation of post-golden-age genre writing, the so-called "Woke Age" best typified by unprecedented threepeat Hugo winner N.K. Jesmin. I know this is going to sound arrogant, but 70 years of subsequent progression and complexity in this genre, under a democratic government that's not allowed to just blanket-hide entire sections of the library from its citizens, simply makes American sci-fi readers more sophisticated in 2020 than their Chinese counterparts; and that makes books like The Dark Forest simply more problematic for readers like us, a novel I found intriguing but unfortunately just not very good, and with all its seams and holes openly showing now that it doesn't have the admittedly fascinating concepts from the first book to hide them. It makes for a book I want to root for (I'm as much for the increasing diversity of this genre as anyone else), but unfortunately can't, and calls into serious question now whether I'll actually read the concluding volume Death's End (to say nothing of the author-approved fan-fiction fourth novel, one-named author Baoshu's 2019 The Redemption of Time). If you're to read it at all, it's best approached in a similar way, with low expectations and patience for its problems, certainly not the kind of grand follow-up to the much more riveting The Three-Body Problem I was expecting. ...more |
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Sep 22, 2020
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Sep 22, 2020
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Hardcover
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| 0765377063
| 9780765377067
| 4.06
| 165,889
| 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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Sep 15, 2020
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Hardcover
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| B072NXSB14
| 3.81
| 6,844
| Jan 21, 2020
| Jan 21, 2020
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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 always when it comes to William Gibson and this completist challenge, first a technical note. Although I have already read the first seven books of Gibson's oeuvre, I did so decades ago when the books were first released; so I am not counting them here yet as part of my completist challenge, even though you may see me occasionally make references to them in my contemporary reviews.] Back when I read William Gibson's 2014 The Peripheral soon after it came out, I have the clear memory of having to rush my way through it, because of it being a library book that was just about to expire; so to be honest, I can't tell you if I reacted much more favorably to its 2020 sequel Agency this week because it's objectively a better book, or merely because I had a chance to take my time with this one and savor it more fully, which of course is always a requirement if you want to truly enjoy the work of this complex, genre-hopping genius. And yes, I know that he claims that it's not actually a sequel, but instead a standalone story that simply takes place in the same milieu as the previous one; but given that it shares a lot of the same characters, and also builds on the storyline of the previous one, with a growing ur-plot that's clearly leading to a massive showdown in the coming third volume (but more on that in a bit), I myself think it's fair to call it a sequel against Gibson's wishes, and to caution you that you should really read The Peripheral before taking on this one. To give you a brief primer, we're visiting an Earth 150 years in the future, that has undergone and barely survived a series of disasters that are collectively known as a "slow apocalypse" they call the "Jackpot," in which 90 percent of the former human race is now dead and nearly every animal species extinct, but with the remaining humans now living in a technologically maintained utopia, albeit one now entirely controlled by a kleptocracy of Russian oligarchs who essentially purchased the inner core of London (a real-life "semi-autonomous" state known as "The City of London," which exists outside UK jurisdiction because of an obscure Medieval decree). The only place on Earth not now under their control is China, which rolled up its welcome mat at the beginning of the Jackpot and hasn't interacted with the rest of the world since, becoming in recent decades a secretive wonderland of technology so advanced as to seem like magic. This includes a mysterious new generation of quantum computers that have accidentally achieved the goal of establishing communication contact with the past; although with each new contact, a new branch of alternative reality is now spun off, meaning that that Earth's future is now no longer guaranteed to be the Jackpot-suffering future of the "main Earth" that serves as the center of our trilogy's setting. And since these bored Russian oligarchs no longer have anything to do besides keep collecting their money and fighting with the other oligarchs, a bunch of them have started the habit of spinning off new alternative Earths and then purposely fucking with them just for fun, using their ability to email and video chat with the past to turn those alternative Earths into miserable nightmares, total global dictatorships, full-on nuclear war, and the other kinds of dark amusements you would expect from bored Russian trillionaires. So both of the books so far, then, use their storylines to hop back and forth between this "main Earth" and a different "alternative Earth," each essentially being about the struggle of the goodies from Earth Prime to fix the disasters that the baddies caused there, for no other reason than that they're humans and they feel the obligation to help out fellow humans, even ones who seem to be barely beyond imaginary constructs in a theoretical reality that can be winked out of existence again at any moment. In the first book, this alternative Earth was set about 30 years in our current future, in which a long-standing alt-right domination in politics has turned the American Midwest into a nearly lawless state of violence and anarchy, our heroes being a series of blue-collar workers and PTSD-suffering military veterans who essentially work out of a fictionalized version of an abandoned Walmart warehouse; and this might be one of the reasons I cared for this book less, because I simply didn't like the milieu that Gibson chose to tell that story, painting this near-future with overly broad strokes that belies Gibson's inability to talk about the Trump era without resorting to inane and obvious stereotypes, which to be fair is a problem just about every liberal author is having these days. (But for more, see my disappointed reaction to Neal Stephenson doing the same thing in his own latest novel, the muddled mess Fall: Or, Dodge in Hell.) This time, though, our alternative Earth is set in 2017, one that's almost exactly like ours except that Hillary Clinton won their 2016 election, and the British public voted to stay in the European Union instead of exit; and our heroes are all located in the tech startup community of the San Francisco Bay area, including our main protagonist who has become mainstream famous for being "The Greatest App Beta Tester In History," which is what starts her down the rabbithole of artificial intelligence, military wetware, and other insane concepts that make up the heart of the plot. To be frank, Gibson's much more in his natural wheelhouse with this setting, a community that in real life he spends a lot more of his own time in, which is what makes this book more exciting, more precise, and just plain more fun than the first (or at least, like I said, if my memories of The Peripheral are to be trusted). I'll let the actual story remain a surprise, which I couldn't in reality recap easily anyway, since it's because of the famously dense plots that so many people become fans of Gibson in the first place; but like I mentioned, of growing interest in this second book more than the first is the Earth Prime's goodies feeling the increasing desire to figure out how to stop the Russian kleptocracy of their own reality from having the unbreakable stranglehold over the planet's resources that they currently do, and it seemed clear to me that the coming third book in the trilogy is going to concern itself a lot with trying to use the lessons learned and friends made in these various alternative-reality "stubs" in an attempt to change the history of Earth Prime itself. That's what makes me call this a true sequel, and not just a standalone story set in the same universe like both the author and the publisher insist; I suspect things are coming to a head here, and that we're going to get a concluding volume that's going to require you to have read both of the previous books to truly understand the magnitude of the stakes involved. That's why you should do yourself a favor and just go ahead and read both of these books now, instead of skipping The Peripheral and heading straight to this one, a 1-2 punch that I suspect will be a lot more satisfying when read right in a row, instead of six years apart like I did. (If nothing else, it will prepare you for the coming TV adaptation from Amazon Prime Video in 2021.) In any case, I think it's undeniable to opine that Gibson is on the absolute top of his game here, a book that in pure adrenaline and pure entertainment easily rivals the '80s "Sprawl" trilogy where he first made his name. Although it threatens to go over the heads of casual fans of this genre, any hardcore science-fiction reader would be wise to pick this up right away. William Gibson books now read: Agency | The Difference Engine | The Peripheral ...more |
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DID NOT FINISH. David Mitchell has probably been on my "Really Want To Explore This Author But So Far Haven't Read Even A Single One Of Their Books" l
DID NOT FINISH. David Mitchell has probably been on my "Really Want To Explore This Author But So Far Haven't Read Even A Single One Of Their Books" list longer than anyone else. He first entered my radar way back in 1999 with his debut Ghostwritten, because of his New Weird writing being compared within my circle of friends to such beloved authors as Haruki Murakami and China Mieville, a reputation that just accelerated as he banged out such bizarro hits in the early 2000s as number9dream, Black Swan Green, and Cloud Atlas (currently his most famous book, because of the high-profile Hollywood adaptation by the Wachowskis and Tom Hanks' subsequently infamous Jar-Jar Binks impression). So I was excited when I found myself this month with an opportunity to read his brand-new Utopia Avenue for free, and thought this would finally give me a chance to experience Mitchell's beloved weirdness for myself. But alas, I realized really quickly that this book was not going to provide me that experience; it is in fact one of Mitchell's only straightforward narratives of his career, and in fact not only that but a historical novel of all things, using a fictional folk-rock band to explore the environment and details of London's famous "Swinging '60s" era, when bands like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones dominated both global music and global culture. The book may be good and it may not (although, from the cartoonish amount of overly obvious references to '60s London pop culture embedded in just the first chapter, I suspect it leans towards the latter); but in any case, it's not for his skills in historical fiction that I'm interested in Mitchell in the first place, so I gave up on this quickly. One day, David, one day I'll finally explore your New Weird titles!
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| 2.94
| 2,658
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DID NOT FINISH. The best compliment I can give the new novel Memoirs and Misinformation, "co-authored" by Hollywood star Jim Carrey and Brooklyn journ
DID NOT FINISH. The best compliment I can give the new novel Memoirs and Misinformation, "co-authored" by Hollywood star Jim Carrey and Brooklyn journalist Dana Vachon (i.e. Carrey sent him a bunch of unhinged emails at three in the morning, and Vachon turned them into a readable manuscript), is this -- that even if Carrey's name wasn't attached to this, and the story's protagonist not actually a lightly fictionalized version of Carrey, it would still be a pretty decent novel, a zany and absurdist send-up of New Agey celebrity lifestyles that in the spirit of Mark Leyner just randomly zigs and zags all over the place. But there's an inherent problem with novels like this too, which is that when you're essentially writing out a cartoon in which anything can happen and there are no repercussions to any actions, the stakes in that plot are now virtually non-existent, eliminating that burning desire to know "what happens next" that so often propels us through three-act novels in the first place. I used to have a bigger tolerance for these go-nowhere gonzo fairytales when I was younger, but I find my patience wearing thinner and thinner for these kinds of stories the older I get; so although I enjoyed the first 25 percent of this book that I actually read, at that point I reached my fill and lost my enthusiasm for reading any more. It should be kept in mind when deciding whether or not to pick it up yourself.
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| 3.19
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| Feb 13, 2018
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This is exactly what the dust jacket promises -- a book-length Penthouse letter, structured as a Choose Your Own Adventure tale, by a woman famous for
This is exactly what the dust jacket promises -- a book-length Penthouse letter, structured as a Choose Your Own Adventure tale, by a woman famous for being an alt-porn pioneer but not exactly known for her soaring prose. As such, then, this should be looked at more as a fun experiment than as a serious literary endeavor, impressive from its mere existence but not something that most people will enjoy actually reading from start to finish. (Also, if you're not already familiar with the kind of outre, Mountain-Dew-commercial type of sexuality that Angel promotes through her video production company, you should probably acquaint yourself before picking up this book, because what she finds erotic will clash with a whole lot of other people's opinions on the subject.) Glad I picked this up and checked it out, but also glad it was for free through the public library. It comes tepidly recommended in that same spirit. [Enjoy my writing? Get a lot more of it at patreon.com/jasonpettus.] ...more |
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| Sep 18, 2018
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2020 reads, #13. DID NOT FINISH. This Novel Of Right Now starts out great, setting up what looks like is going to be a black comedy about a Millennial
2020 reads, #13. DID NOT FINISH. This Novel Of Right Now starts out great, setting up what looks like is going to be a black comedy about a Millennial Brooklyn intellectual who has a nervous breakdown after a series of hipster disasters (his alt-country girlfriend turns down his marriage proposal, the analytical essay he works on for six months gets no notice in the obscure lit journal where it's published, etc), decides in his delirium that everything is the fault of Baby Boomers, moves back into his parents' basement and starts a Boomer-rant YouTube channel that becomes a viral sensation, then eventually inspires a youth terrorist organization dedicated to destroying this elderly and rapidly dying age group, Weather Underground-style. But then I got about 25 percent in and the novel suddenly went completely off the rails for me, switching focus now to our protagonist's actual Boomer mother, at which point the manuscript collapses into a rambling 50-page MFA thesis, in which an unending series of page-long paragraphs go into minute, pointless detail about a bunch of subjects that are completely unrelated to the hundred previous pages I just had invested in, the kind of New England academic twaddle that I found myself just unable to choke my way through. (Then again, author Daniel Torday is the director of creative writing at Bryn Mawr College, and an editor at The Kenyon Review, so I suppose this slide into the MFA gutter is not entirely unexpected.) I skipped ahead at that point to the end of the novel, but what I read there was just more of the same, and so I felt justified in officially giving up on this disappointingly well-started novel and chalked it up to yet another example of why so few members of the general population even bother reading literary fiction anymore. Your results may vary, of course, but for me this was a textbook example of everything that disappoints me about contemporary commercial fiction.
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| 2.10
| 595
| Mar 2018
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DID NOT FINISH. To his credit, at least Sean Penn avoided the most common problem when a famous actor decides to write a novel, which is to turn in a
DID NOT FINISH. To his credit, at least Sean Penn avoided the most common problem when a famous actor decides to write a novel, which is to turn in a manuscript that reads like a prose version of a screenplay. Unfortunately, though, this also turns out to be the main problem of the book -- that in his zeal to produce a novel sufficiently literary and un-movie-like, he bent over way too far in the opposite direction, giving us a story so pretentiously written that it's almost unreadable as a simple piece of commercial fiction. Essentially what he's doing here is affecting the prose style of the "bizarro" genre, in which the whole point is to write in a deliberately over-the-top purplish way, a writing style that's intentionally supposed to call attention to itself and how clever it's being, usually to support a plot that's equally zany and over-the-top, kind of like a written-out version of a Looney Tunes cartoon (think Mark Leyner, Chuck Palahniuk, etc). But here, Penn is using the cartoonish prose style of bizarro lit to instead tell a politically-based social-realist tale, which from the synopsis and Penn's background I'm assuming has to do with a California septic-tank salesman who accidentally becomes a CIA-backed assassin, the entire thing a veiled indictment of political conservatives and the so-called War On Terror. But I don't know this for sure, because Penn's writing style is so glaringly artsy-fartsy here that I barely made it through 25 pages of the book before angrily giving up, a novel I had been looking forward to and so whose abandonment hit even harder this time than usual. The printed-page equivalent of that sixty-something dude with the ponytail and fedora hat at the poetry open mic, who performs limericks about Donald Trump that make the rest of the room groan and dash outside for a cigarette, it does not come recommended to a general audience.
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| 1938604431
| 9781938604430
| 3.60
| 898
| Jul 18, 2017
| Apr 03, 2018
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The more of this Juggalo Noir novella by Elle Nash I read, the more it grew on me, which I suspect is what I'll find to often be the case once I post
The more of this Juggalo Noir novella by Elle Nash I read, the more it grew on me, which I suspect is what I'll find to often be the case once I post this and start reading other Goodreads reviews of this 2018 literary debut from respected indie publisher Dzanc. Certainly it starts off as only a mediocre morality tale, which plays out much like as if Nash was sitting around getting high one afternoon while watching the Jerry Springer Show and thinking, "You know, I bet these young rural metalheads caught in strange sexual love triangles all have interesting stories that got them to that place," then worked backwards from there for six months before arriving at this manuscript. But I don't know, I suppose I got more and more into our soul-dead, medication-snorting, Marilyn Manson-loving teenage anti-hero the more I got to know her, a pitch-black portrait of alienation and psychosexual dysfunction that starts out glib and cliched, but that Nash works hard to deepen and add complexity to as this character-heavy tragedy continues, turning her not exactly into an unreliable narrator but showing how she might be the instigator of much bad behavior, while remaining sympathetic to what drives that behavior that makes all the people around her so exasperated and offended. It's a tight, dark little story that can be read in its entirety in a single afternoon, not without its problems (including as well its prose that can get too purplish at times) but still a nasty little charmer when all is said and done. [Enjoy my writing? Get a lot more of it at patreon.com/jasonpettus.] ...more |
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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: Martin Amis | Isaac Asimov's Robot/Empire/Foundation | Margaret Atwood | JG Ballard | Clive Barker | Philip K Dick | Daphne Du Maurier | William Gibson | Michel Houellebecq | John Irving | Kazuo Ishiguro | John Le Carre | Bernard Malamud | China Mieville | 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 Oh brother, here we go again. It's pretty much impossible to not have this reaction anymore when sitting down with a new book by French provocateur Michel Houellebecq, a writer who American liberals don't have the slightest idea how to react to, because there's literally not a single artist in the US who produces this kind of work -- that is, sophisticated and witty literary novels that are adored by the academic community (he literally won the Legion of Honor, the French government's most prestigious non-military award, six months before I'm writing this review), but whose heroes are the exact kind of Trumpian alt-righters who give liberals apoplectic attacks. Houellebecq ironically first gained fame in the early '90s because of Generation-X leftists believing that he was actually writing brilliant ironic satires of the alt-right, warmly embraced by the American artistic community because his portraits of dour misanthropes seemed so spot-on; but after 25 years now of proving that he hasn't been writing parodies but rather straight-up aspirational fantasies about these misanthropes (and in hundreds of tense interviews has proven to be pretty misanthropic himself), the American left now has no idea how to react to him, so most typically just dismiss his work out-of-hand anymore as "worthless fascist trash," even as he's proven with each subsequent book to be more and more a prophetic soothsayer of his times, way more than most of the writers embraced by the left. (For one eerie example, his 2015 speculative-fiction novel Submission, in which a Muslim is elected the President of France and Christian liberals start voluntarily converting to Islam in the millions simply for petty political gain, just happened to be released on the exact day that Muslim extremists violently attacked the comics journal Charlie Hebdo for printing a cartoon making fun of their religion.) And so too is it with his newest novel, Serotonin, which has been out in his native France for almost a year now, but with the English version just recently being released. You can think of it as being about two main subjects, the minor one being the rural agricultural issues that have led to the recent "yellow vest" protests that have polarized and often shut down France in the last year. Told through the usual Houellebecqian filter of a meek civil servant who barely hides a seething contempt for his co-workers, our protagonist in this case is a scientific consultant for the Ministry of Agriculture, with much of this book being a look at the way that the central EU government in Brussels is essentially destroying France's (and the rest of Western Europe's) farming industries, because of such factors as technocrat billionaires prioritizing the financial bottom line over all other considerations; ignorant middle-classers religiously worshipping "organic" produce versus "genetically modified" food, despite having no idea what the two terms actually mean from a scientific standpoint; globalists making the glorification of "developing nations" a more important thing than protecting their own local markets; the agencies in charge of these regulations being filled with do-nothing halfwits, France's freefalling educational system failing at teaching them enough to make informed decisions; and much more. With Houellebecq himself having actually been an agricultural scientist and IT administrator before ever starting to write professionally, most of his books at least touch on the subject of the dangers of the mouthbreathing masses making policy decisions about highly technical subjects they don't understand in any way whatsoever; but here in 2019, the general culture has finally caught up with him, making his exasperated rants about egg tariffs and cheese quotas something now for the evening news and front-page headlines. But it's his second and more major subject in this book that will actually be of interest to a greater amount of readers; and that's his look at all the negative things that come with aging, and specifically how the late middle-aged years (being defined here as mid-forties through early sixties) are a particularly depressing time for one and all, in that it finally reveals our lives as the empty shams they've been all along, which before now was easily hidden by the ambition, optimism, good looks and sexual prowess of youth. This is the existential crisis that our "effeminately named" (his words) narrator Florent-Claude is facing as Serotonin opens; recently turning 46, he's realized that he can't stand the woman he's currently dating, has nothing but contempt for his co-workers, neighbors and acquaintances, and has contributed so little to human society that he might as well not even exist. So that's exactly what he does -- learning that it's perfectly legal in France to "abandon your identity" and live off the grid, he essentially ditches his entire former life with no notice, living in a series of hotels (only ones that allow smoking, of course) and basically getting through his days due only to the overwhelming success of a brand-new type of antidepressant medication (which is where this novel's title comes from). As his existential crisis grows, now within the emotional solitude of anonymous crowds, Florent-Claude starts nostalgically looking back on the successful romantic relationships of his youth, wondering what magical factors existed in them that he's now somehow seemed to forgotten; but as he makes a series of road trips to revisit these old flames (the journeys that drive most of this minimalist plot), he comes to realize that they too have become insufferable, boring, defeated, bloated body-horror victims in late middle-age too, just like himself, and that the "love" they shared in their twenties was basically an optical illusion that was perpetuated by the optimism of youth and a healthy heap of horniness. This will of course inevitably inspire the same accusations of misogyny against Houellebecq that the usual suspects always level at him with each new book, but to call Houellebecq a woman-hater is to utterly miss the point of why his novels are so fascinating; it's not that he hates women, it's that he hates everybody, with Florent-Claude in typical Houellebecqian fashion dishing up equal-opportunity piss and vinegar for every race, creed, class, gender and sexual orientation on this big wide planet of ours, often in ways so cartoonishly over-the-top that you can't help but occasionally darkly chuckle at the sheer outrageousness on display. A Houellebecq novel is not an easy thing to get through, that's for sure, and to do so you have to believe in your own optimism about the human race enough that you can lightly tread on top of the peaks of hatred he builds here, instead of falling into the valleys in between, where you too run the risk of becoming a bitter sociopath just like his characters. Thankfully the vast majority of the human race is not like his characters, which is the exact reason to read his books, to glimpse and better understand the tiny part of humanity that is; and in a world where I can read and enjoy Roxane Gay and Naomi Klein while agreeing little with anything they have to say, so too can I read Houllebecq and Jordan Peterson and Jack Donovan in the same spirit, not as political declarations but rather to satisfy my insatiable curiosity about the entire world and all its light and dark corners, just like should be the goal of all informed and curious human beings. Houellebecq is not "worthless" as an author simply because you disagree with his opinions; indeed, this might be the best reason of all to read him, precisely to better understand a section of humanity you rarely interact with otherwise. It's in this spirit that I recommend this book, not Houellebecq's best (that would be The Possibility of an Island, so far the only straight-ahead science-fiction novel of his career), but certainly an uncanny product of its times, a book that explains better than most exactly why Trump is currently the leader of the free world, no matter what you personally think of that fact. Michel Houellebecq books now read: Whatever | Submission | HP Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life | The Possibility of an Island ...more |
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Nov 21, 2019
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Nov 21, 2019
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| 0802135668
| 9780802135667
| 4.22
| 1,461
| 1982
| Apr 22, 1998
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did not like it
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The world saw the passing this week of Nick Tosches, who unfortunately was the very definition of an artist whose career sounded better on paper than
The world saw the passing this week of Nick Tosches, who unfortunately was the very definition of an artist whose career sounded better on paper than how it actually played out in real life. He got his start alongside peers like Lester Bangs and Richard Meltzer as part of the first wave of "rock journalists" in the 1970s, with his 1981 biography of Jerry Lee Lewis, Hellfire, called by Rolling Stone "the greatest rock bio of all time" (although granted, that was 38 years ago, and they were his boss at the time); then as he progressed into middle-age and beyond, he started outputting a series of deliberately provocative novels as well, most of them metafictional tales in which the protagonist is a writer remarkably similar to Tosches but who finds himself in a series of dark fantastical ventures (including making a deal with Satan, becoming a vampire to regain his youth, and more), along with such outre nonfiction assignments for Esquire as traveling through the rural wilderness of southeast Asia to see whether any honest-to-God opium dens still exist in the 21st century. The problem with all this? The finished pieces are all mediocre at best, unreadable at worst, with select titles in that bibliography (such as the aforementioned novel about Tosches becoming a vampire and killing nubile young models during violent sex in order to regain his youth) making many people's dreaded lists of "worst books of all time." Certainly this was the impression I had of him in the early 2000s, when I took on The Last Opium Den, In the Hand of Dante and Me and the Devil and found all of them to be profoundly lacking as quality pieces of literature. But still, I knew that Tosches' death this week would probably mark the last time I ever even thought of him, and I thought he deserved one more read just to see if I could walk away thinking a little better of him; and so I decided to take on Hellfire, which almost everyone unanimously agrees was the best book of his career, and so I figured was my best shot of having a good impression of at least one of his books. But alas, this too was not only as terrible as the rest, but it was outright shocking how terrible it was, given its stellar reputation among a certain set of readers. What I've been forced to conclude is that, with the notion of applying traditional journalistic techniques to the subject of rock-n-roll being so new and novel at the time, and with readers of the countercultural age so obsessed with finding crazy, swear-laden, square-shocking writing that they didn't really care about the quality of said writing (but for more, see Hunter S. Thompson), it was more a case in the 1970s that writers like Tosches just happened to hit the hippie lottery, pumping out the exact kind of excruciatingly purple prose that that exact audience wanted to hear at that exact right moment in history, while if he had tried to start his career at any other time he would've been laughed right out of the editor's room. I can't by any stretch of the imagination picture how anyone could read Hellfire and walk away thinking it's great; it's barely readable, to tell the truth, its list of problems so long that the mere idea of trying to catalog them just exhausts me before I can even begin. I'm giving it a token one star to acknowledge its historical importance, and out of a grudging respect that Tosches managed to parlay such terrible writing into a lucrative and famous career that stretched for decades and encompassed twenty full-length books; but he's sadly a great example of everything that went wrong during the Postmodernist era, in which shock and irony took the place of actual artistic skills as the criteria by which the general audience judged creative projects in the popular culture. RIP to this influential figure; but Lord, please don't force me to read another one of his books ever again. ...more |
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| 0552124753
| 9780552124751
| 3.98
| 328,698
| Nov 24, 1983
| Jan 18, 1985
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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 Currently in the challenge: Martin Amis THE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they ever wrote Currently in the challenge: Martin Amis | Isaac Asimov's Robot/Empire/Foundation | Margaret Atwood | JG Ballard | Clive Barker | Philip K Dick | Daphne Du Maurier | William Gibson | Michel Houellebecq | John Irving | Kazuo Ishiguro | John Le Carre | Bernard Malamud | China Mieville | 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 I recently had the opportunity to download all 41 of the "Discworld" novels British humorist Terry Pratchett wrote between 1981 and his death in 2015; so I decided to go ahead and read at least the first couple, despite not being much of a fan of the fantasy genre, simply because this series' fans are so passionate and voracious in their fandom. But lo and behold, I was so blown away by his debut title The Colour of Money, I've decided to go ahead and commit to the entire 41-book run, and so have officially added Pratchett to my never-ending Great Completist Challenge. The key to this being so incredibly entertaining is stated by Pratchett himself right in the very first chapter -- that fantasy stories by their very nature are so ridiculous and nonsensical, the best way to approach them is to just embrace the ridiculousness wholeheartedly, and to play up the absurdist elements of the genre while completely ignoring even the tiniest nods to reality found in most other fantasy novels. This results in the book being a pretty even conglomeration of the "Lord of the Rings" books, the "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" books, and the films of Monty Python (all of which, it's worth noting, were hugely popular in the early-'80s years when Pratchett was writing the first "Discworld" novels), a healthy mix of High Fantasy tropes with silly jokes, sly references to other literary projects, and left turns into such unexpected territories that it will make you sometimes jump to your feet and cheer in public from the sheer cleverness of it all. By definition, the plotline of The Colour of Magic is difficult to sum up quickly; better perhaps to think of this as mainly devoted simply to taking a look at the various bizarre corners of this wholly non-realizable planet (which, for those who don't know, is infamously flat and rests on the shoulders of four elephants, who in turn ride on top of a planet-sized turtle who is slowly paddling its way across the universe, its gender being a source of great contention among the planet's competing religions). Within this insanity, we follow The World's Worst Hero as he is conscripted to be a tour guide for a traveller from a country that is famously insular (and famously rich); this gives Pratchett an excuse to jump willy-nilly from one outrageous environment to the next, as the duo stumble in and out of the clutches of simpleton barbarians, crooked pub owners, assassin guilds, magical orders, riders of semi-invisible dragons, watery guardians of this flat world's circular edge, and way, way more, the story jumping randomly from milieu to milieu and even (thanks to some quantum physics) hopping into a Scandinavian jetliner from our own world for about twenty minutes. If this already sounds like too much for you, you should steer well away from this book series altogether, because it just gets sillier from here; but if you've ever spent a Saturday night getting drunk and yelling "NI! NI! NI!" at your friends ("I demand....a shrubbery!!!"), this will be right up your alley, especially if you caught Amazon's recent adaptation of Pratchett and Neil Gaiman's Good Omens and thought, "This is fine and all, but couldn't it have been a little crazier?" If that's the case, then "Discworld" is the answer to your prayers, which despite the niche appeal has somehow managed to sell over 80 million copies worldwide, making Pratchett the UK's biggest selling author of the entire 1990s. I'm looking forward to finishing the entire run over the next decade, and of course sharing my thoughts of them all with you here. ...more |
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DID NOT FINISH. As both myself and my love of science-fiction have grown into adulthood, I've come to realize that the SF industry is actually split i
DID NOT FINISH. As both myself and my love of science-fiction have grown into adulthood, I've come to realize that the SF industry is actually split into two very distinct parts, which sometimes overlap but many times have a wide gulf between them: there are the truly amazing authors in that genre, whose names tend to reverberate throughout the ages and way beyond the insular community of SF fandom itself (think for example of Isaac Asimov or Ursula K. Le Guin from the '60s, or China Mieville and N.K. Jemisin of right now); and then there is the much, much larger circle of writers who are only mediocre as storytellers, but happen to be heavily involved with the convention-going fandom aspect of the community, and so tend to sell as many books and win as many awards as the authors in the first category, despite writing bland novels that only a con-going nerd with little literary discernment could love. That's about the only way that I can explain why Mary Robinette Kowal's disappointing The Calculating Stars has managed to win this year's Hugo, Nebula and Locus Awards, despite being so middlebrow that I gave up a third of the way through out of sheer tedium; because Kowal is a 30-year veteran of the convention circuit and about as intense an insider as one can even get, holding such positions since the '80s as art director of Weird Tales magazine, president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, and programming chair of Worldcon, the very convention that gives out the Hugo Award that Kowal just won. The book itself has an extremely clever and properly Woke premise, which I suspect is the reason it's gotten so much attention: in an alternative history in which Dewey wins the 1948 Presidential election over Truman, and instead of NASA the country establishes NACA (the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics), a meteorite slams into the US eastern seaboard in 1952 and essentially kills the entire population of the east coast, starting a weather chain reaction that scientists come to realize will result in the oceans boiling over in another 50 years. This necessitates the world pulling together to quickly establish first a space program and then a plan to colonize the neighboring planets; and since most of the male scientists and test pilots were killed during the meteorite crash, women end up becoming this alt-history's version of Buzz Aldrin and John Glenn, adventurers full of derring-do but who can still come home and cook dinner for their nuclear family afterwards. (And it doesn't hurt that the only member of the Cabinet to survive the meteorite crash, a meek Secretary of Agriculture, just happens to be a Quaker and far-left liberal, who ushers in a wave of tolerance and diversity two entire decades before actual history's civil rights and women's lib movements, leading to a '50s space program full of women and African-Americans and Jews and Muslims and everyone else you can imagine.) The problem, though, is that Kowal's prose doesn't nearly hold up to this admittedly fascinating premise, a clear case of a book that's being loved by its fans much more for its concept than its execution; characters are two-dimensional, the dialogue is often sickly-sweet and fatally sentimental (lead hero Elma York's relationship with her enlightened husband might as well have been cribbed from the Seinfeld "I Wuv Ooh, Shnoopie!!!" episode), plot advancement is glacially slow, and much of the conflict essentially boils down to your great aunt Mabel in a poodle skirt, throwing her fist in the air and shouting, "GIRL POWER!" I admit, in the times we live in, just this alone is often enough for an artistic project to be hugely popular -- see for example the dreadful remake of Ghostbusters from a few years ago, which even its fans tend to justify with statements like, "Sure, it's half-baked crap, but it's half-baked crap with women!" -- but I myself simply have to have more than this before I can really get into a novel, with The Calculating Stars failing so quickly and spectacularly at its literary aims that I couldn't even make it to the halfway point, which I usually try to push myself to reach before giving up on a popular book for good. Based on all the fawning it's receiving, your own reaction has a big chance of being very different than mine, and more power to you if so; but if you've read my other reviews and trust my opinion on these matters, then you should do yourself a favor and go into this book duly warned and with expectations low. ...more |
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| Jan 09, 2018
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Just once in my life, I would love to read a memoir about a person who engaged in interesting and unusual sexual activities, and have them gleefully a
Just once in my life, I would love to read a memoir about a person who engaged in interesting and unusual sexual activities, and have them gleefully admit that the sex was great, that they had a ton of fun, and that they don't regret a single thing. But unfortunately, as I discovered when writing a book on the subject myself about twenty years ago, although there are thousands of Americans on any given day who are happily engaging in orgies or sex with strangers with wide-open eyes and a guilt-free conscience, none of these people will ever get a publishing contract; because in this Puritan-created nation of ours, for the millions of people who don't engage in these activities, the only way they can stomach their tales of prurient sexuality is if the narrator either gets punished at the end of it all, or is miserable and guilty while it's going on. And thus do we now have America's two millionth memoir about someone who hated having kinky sex, Erica Garza's Getting Off, in which this Los Angeles web journalist spends years having the kind of insane sexual experiences you will only be able to dream about, and complains the whole time about how sick and awful she felt about it all, and how glad she is that she's no longer doing so. The trouble starts right in chapter one, in which Garza admits that ever since puberty, she's intricately associated the concept of sexual pleasure with the concept of overwhelming shame, mostly because of being raised by conservative Mexican parents who would force her to cover her eyes during kissing scenes in movies, and whose entirety of sexual education to her as a teen consisted of a stern warning to never ever let anyone ever touch her "dirty parts." No wonder, then, that by the time Garza was in her twenties, and engaging in the kinds of bad relationships and one-night-stands that most people in their twenties experience, it triggered an all-consuming shame spiral that led her into a tail-eating snake of evermore risky behavior and evermore guilt, each feeding off the other until finally getting saved by the cult-like New Agey woo-woo of the '60s EST cousin known as the Hoffman Process. (Also, of course this book ends with Garza married and preparing to have a baby, because how could any self-respecting American memoir about interesting sex not end with the narrator married and preparing to have a baby? YAY PURITANS!!!) I admit, I feel a bit guilty myself today for giving this book only three stars, because it's not like Garza is a particularly bad writer; but Christ, this is such an exact cookie-cutter version of every other American sex addiction memoir that it might as well not even exist, the lack of two stars less for anything bad and more for Garza not bringing a single new, unique or interesting thing to the table. (Also, I must pettily confess that the three stars is partly to punish publisher Simon & Schuster, for once again engaging in the most lazy and uninspired acquisition policy in human history. Jesus, no wonder your industry is almost dead.) If you're like most people and can't enjoy a naughty story without someone getting punished for the sin of enjoying themselves, by all means pick this up; but if you're someone who actually likes interesting sexual activities and was hoping for a joyful, wise look at the subject, I'm afraid you're going to have to keep on looking. ...more |
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Aug 07, 2019
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Aug 07, 2019
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| 0062458736
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| 3.56
| 13,245
| Jun 04, 2019
| Jun 04, 2019
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it was ok
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So to establish my bona fides right away, let me mention that I've read and loved all 16 novels that Neal Stephenson has now written in his life (yes,
So to establish my bona fides right away, let me mention that I've read and loved all 16 novels that Neal Stephenson has now written in his life (yes, even his disavowed 1984 debut, the now out-of-print The Big U), and consider him one of my top-three all-time favorite writers currently alive and publishing new work. So what a profoundly heartbreaking thing, then, to finish his latest, the 900-page virtual-reality morality tale Fall: Or, Dodge in Hell, and have to be forced to admit to myself, "You know, that book was...well, it was kind of crappy, is what that book was." During the first half of the manuscript, I became convinced that this was because Stephenson turned in a clunker of an actual storyline here; because, for the first time in his career, Stephenson takes on here the very contemporary real-world issue of the "Red Pill" revolution of the 21st century (which I'm defining here as the interconnected throughline that links together the Bush administration, the rise of Fox News, the Tea Party, Gamergate, Sad Puppies, 4chan, the Meninist movement, incels, the alt-right, and the dark ascendency of "God Emperor" Trump). Seemingly not a single person in the last twenty years that opposes this movement has been able to write critically about the subject without just losing their shit and quickly devolving into lazy, badly written doomsday scenarios about the nightmarish hell our world will become if these people were to ever gain unstoppable power; and Stephenson too succumbs to this hacky temptation, painting an America 30 years from now that has essentially broken down into a civil war between "The Stupids" and "The Smarts*," in which the Stupids have forcefully overtaken large swaths of the Midwest through a Christian version of the Taliban (a brand-new strain of Protestantism which rejects the entire New Testament because it depicts Jesus as a "beta cuck," about the most lazily on-the-nose reference to the alt-right one can even make), who then proceed to literally crucify people from burning crosses for such Old Testament sins as wearing clothes that mix together different strains of animal fibers. [*Also, let me confess that I lost my patience quickly with Stephenson's attempts in this section to paint autistic people as superheroes, through his unending self-righteous declarations about how much better he and his little STEM buddies are than the rest of us mouth-breathers. Autistic people aren't fooled by fake news! Autistic people's feelings aren't hurt by blunt opinions! Autistic people don't feel obliged to engage in pointless small talk! Thank God we autistic people are around to save all you blathering morons from yourselves!] Then in the meanwhile, we also follow the fate of one of the characters from Stephenson's 2011 novel Reamde, billionaire videogame developer Richard "Dodge" Forthrast, who unexpectedly dies one day at which point it's revealed that, earlier in his life, he got convinced by a startup buddy to have his body frozen, so that maybe one day in the future his brain can be brought back to life if science ever invents a way to do so. And through a convoluted series of events, science does in fact invent a way, and just two decades after his death at that, by essentially scanning a complete digital copy of the trillions of neural pathways in his brain, then letting those digital pathways virtually interact again within a town-sized complex of newly invented "quantum computers." But this being a game developer, the first thing Dodge's digital brain does to make sense of his situation is to start building out a World Of Warcraft-type fantasyland for him to place himself in, with Stephenson burning through literally hundreds of pages in describing in excruciating detail just what it must be like when a brain has its consciousness wiped, then starts filling it in again bit by bit from the retained memories of its subconscious. "What are these two fleshy appendages underneath my torso? What are these ten smaller appendages attached to the bottom of these two? What are these squiggly symbols I keep picturing when attempting to count these appendages? What is this locomotive motion I seem to be engaging in when placing one appendage in front of the other? What is this hard gravelly surface these appendages seem to be pushing against during its locomotion?" Jesus CHRIST, Stephenson, ENOUGH already, we fucking GET it, WE FUCKING GET IT ALREADY!!!!1!! It was at this point, already 400 pages in, that I finally lost my patience for good, and initially decided to abandon the novel altogether; but just out of curiosity I ended up flipping through the rest of it and reading the increasingly smaller non-virtual-world parts, because I was simply too interested in knowing how the story ends up finishing out. And that's when I realized that it's not actually the storyline itself that's the problem here; when you look at the overall plot in quick big-picture form, it's actually quite interesting, an attempt by Stephenson to do no less than retell the religious story of God's creation of the universe, his war with Lucifer, the manipulation of Adam and Eve as pawns of this war, the path towards self-sentiency and human technological progress that was the fallout of this war's manipulation, and the final battle between good and evil that's foretold in the Book of Revelations, but all seen through the filter of the speculative question, "What if our old religious stories actually came about because an alien race figured out a way to digitize themselves, and the first couple dozen people who got imperfectly digitized became the angels and devils of our Bible, and everything we know and experience in our universe is actually just the result of a giant computer running on this alien planet, and the aliens are actually watching and analyzing us in minute detail but have no way of communicating with us about it?" Seen in this light, then, the real problem of the novel becomes immediately clear; because while Stephenson has claimed in recent interviews that his intent with the virtual-world part of this manuscript was to "bury a fantasy novel within the middle of a science-fiction novel," what he actually did was write a slightly altered 500-page version of the King James Bible. And as anyone who was ever forced to go through this during Bible summer camp as a kid knows, reading big chunks of the King James Bible as if it were a narrative novel is the most tedious activity in the entirety of human existence, which sadly turns out to be the case here too with Stephenson's rewritten version of it. When examined in Wikipedia form, Fall actually has a lot of fascinating things to say, not least of which is Stephenson's ultimate conceit at the end, which is that maybe the human race's fate is to live on in body-free, pure-energy form, cruising the universe in a self-perpetuating and self-repairing Dyson sphere long after the fragile biological version of our species is dead and gone back on Planet Earth. If Stephenson had explored these topics through a tight, action-packed 350 pages, it could've been one of the best books of his already excellent career, exploring many of the same issues in his 2008 Anathem but through the prism of our real contemporary society. So what a shame, then, that he instead turned in this profoundly overlong, page-fluffing, endlessly rambling and pretentiously purplish version, a book that will be hard for even his hardcore fans to finish, and that everyone else will give up on long before that point. It pains me to have to admit that, because up to now I had thought of Stephenson as an author who could do no wrong; but alas, it turns out that he's just as capable of clunkers as every other author, his first major miss here in a career that's otherwise been full of hits. As much as I hate to say it, my recommendation here is to skip Fall altogether, and wait a few more years for what will hopefully be a return to his normal brilliancy. ...more |
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Jun 15, 2019
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Jun 15, 2019
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| 178733094X
| 9781787330948
| 3.53
| 11,377
| Aug 14, 2018
| Feb 28, 2019
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DID NOT FINISH. As the former owner of a small press, I can see why the pitch for Nico Walker's Cherry would be like catnip for any publisher that cam
DID NOT FINISH. As the former owner of a small press, I can see why the pitch for Nico Walker's Cherry would be like catnip for any publisher that came across it: based on his incredible true story, it's the tale of a small-time drug dealer who ends up enlisting in the army and going to the Middle East, divulging all the secrets about drug abuse and human-rights violations that his "brothers in arms" are doing over there, then getting back to the US and becoming a heroin addict to self-medicate his PTSD, eventually robbing banks to feed his habit before being caught and thrown in jail, which is precisely where he wrote this manuscript on a rusty old manual typewriter in the prison library. As Kenny Bania would say, "THAT'S GOLD, JERRY! GOLD!!!" So what a shame, then, that this book turns out to be exactly what you would expect from someone in Walker's situation; that is, unreadably fucking terrible, precisely the kind of manuscript you assume you'd get from a halfwit junkie who's never professionally written anything in his entire life, banging out a story a thousand words at a time on a prison typewriter when he's not busy avoiding gang warfare or trying to not get stabbed with a shiv. Walker's the kind of writer who, if he wasn't in jail, would be that dude who shows up to your shitty neighborhood open mic every single week without fail, and who forces you to run out to the sidewalk for a non-existent cigarette every single time he steps up on the stage, because he's such an insufferable Bukowski-wannabe hack whose prose is so painful that it gives you a headache every time he opens his goddamn mouth. He may have hit the lottery by getting a connected douchebag hipster interested in his story (which is what led to the Buzzfeed article, which is what led to Tyrant Books getting involved, which is what led to Walker getting a contract with Alfred A. Knopf, which is what led to him selling the movie rights for several million dollars); but none of that makes the manuscript itself worth reading, an excruciating torture of purple prose that will make you want to overdose yourself just to be put out of your misery. Buyer beware. ...more |
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Jun 06, 2019
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Jun 06, 2019
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Hardcover
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| 0316055433
| 9780316055437
| 3.92
| 749,922
| Sep 23, 2013
| Oct 22, 2013
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Goodreads 2019 Summer Reading Challenge 2. The book is better: Read a book being adapted for TV or film this year DID NOT FINISH. Like a lot of my Gener Goodreads 2019 Summer Reading Challenge 2. The book is better: Read a book being adapted for TV or film this year DID NOT FINISH. Like a lot of my Generation X peers, I went nuts for Donna Tartt's 1992 literary debut The Secret History, a masterful blend of Brideshead Revisited and gothic horror that was partially based on her time at Bennington College in the '80s, where she palled around with fellow Gen X superstars Bret Easton Ellis and Jonathan Lethem. (And indeed, both this novel and Ellis's novel set at Bennington, The Rules of Attraction, make sly references to each other's characters; it was just that they were published five years apart, so most people didn't notice.) But I didn't bother with her follow-up a decade later, 2003's The Little Friend, because each and every person I've ever known who has read it has declared it one of the most universally awful books they've ever taken on; and I also initially skipped her massive 2014 Pulitzer winner The Goldfinch, because most of the people whose literary opinions I respect have complained about this being nothing more than a mediocre Young Adult story, and that its eventual Pulitzer win is not just undeserved but a profoundly depressing statement about how much the American arts and letters has crumbled in our anti-intellectual, Kardashian-moron, God Emperor Trump times. But the whole point of me participating in this year's Goodreads Summer Reading Challenge was that I wanted an excuse to take on a bunch of books I normally wouldn't, just to shake things up a bit during the warm weather; and so when I learned that this title counted towards the task of reading a book that's getting made into a movie later this year, I figured it was finally time to take it on. But alas, I didn't even get through a third of it before giving up in anger and disgust, because this indeed turns out to be nothing more than a Young Adult novel, and a badly written one at that. Among its many literary crimes, it portrays its teenage hero with the kind of fussily pretentious adult voice that simply would never happen in the real world (just for one example, no 13-year-old boy in the history of time has ever described a stranger as wearing "black oxford brogues and a beautifully tailored navy suit"); jams together an endless series of Dickensian unlikely coincidences in order to prop up a plot that's only meaty enough for a short story; and paints its villains with such a cartoonishly broad brush that you can't help but unintentionally laugh every time they show up, sneering and twirling their mustache. BLECH. A book that single-handedly lowered the prestige of the Pulitzer Prize several steps, it is to be avoided at all costs; and if its precious, overly sentimental trailer is to be believed, so should the coming movie. ...more |
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Jun 01, 2019
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| 0985452374
| 9780985452377
| 4.05
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| Sep 06, 2018
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really liked it
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So how is it that I find myself this year reading the collected work of controversial "masculinist" author Jack Donovan? Well, that's because, after b
So how is it that I find myself this year reading the collected work of controversial "masculinist" author Jack Donovan? Well, that's because, after being blown away earlier this year by Chuck Palahniuk's newest novel Adjustment Day, I learned that during Palahniuk's interview tour for that book, he called Donovan the smartest writer on masculinity working today; and that alone made me curious enough to pick up his three full-length books, even though I identify as a left-leaning moderate and typically don't read radical philosophy on either the left or the right. Unfortunately for me, though, I accidentally started with what is his newest book, which apparently builds on the fundamentals laid out in the previous two, so you'll have to forgive me if my review seems a bit incomplete and doesn't address either The Way of Men or Becoming a Barbarian. (Rest assured, reviews of these will be coming later this summer.) And indeed, this book does in fact feel a bit incomplete if you take it on as your first Donovan read; essentially a contemporary response to the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, A More Complete Beast mostly concerns itself with the issue of how an authentic man should actually behave out in the real world of the 2010s (a world he cleverly calls the "Empire of Nothing"), but assumes that you already know what defines an "authentic man" because of having already read The Way of Men which is entirely devoted to the subject. That said, the biggest surprise of this book is how rational and measured it actually is, given how much he is worshipped within alt-right and white-nationalist circles, and given that he runs a chapter of a masculinist organization that the Southern Poverty Law Center classifies as a hate group. Donovan's main point here is in fact a very sensible piece of advice that all of us could benefit from following, no matter what our particular politics; that one of the main factors that drives negative behavior is resentment, the idea that we are "victims" of an "other" that is "inherently evil" merely because we disagree with it, and that our best way of dealing with it is by defining our actions in opposition to their own. Instead, Donovan argues, we're all better off by simply embracing the things we believe in as an end unto itself, and simply living our lives according to those principles without regard to what other people think of it, or what those people might do to try to hinder us. I 100 percent agree with a statement like that, and furthermore think it's advice that can be adopted by liberals, feminists, and anyone else who has ever unhealthily adopted a "victim mindset" towards the world. In this, then, Donovan is actually calling for the end of such embarrassing displays as the tiki-torch-wielding demonstrations of 2017 Charlottesville; those solve nothing, he argues, and merely encourages men to define themselves in terms of how they're being "held back" by the rest of our modern emasculated society. But that said, Donovan definitely visits Crazy Town at certain points here, in a way that makes me suspect that he lives there much more permanently in his previous books; and that would make sense, since his first two books are about how to define an "authentic man" in a perfect, hermetically sealed theoretical world where everything goes right, while this newest book is about the complications of that authentic man living in the messy real world that you and I all occupy. Plus he's also guilty of the same thing most radicals are guilty of, both on the left and right, of making contradictory statements and then not acknowledging the contradiction or trying to resolve it; just for one telling example, he argues that what we know of the distant past is filtered through the romantic propaganda of writers with an agenda to push long after the fact, and therefore inherently shouldn't be trusted, but then turns around and defines a modern authentic man through this exact romanticized propagandic language. (An authentic man is a "barbarian;" an authentic man is beholden only to his "tribe;" an authentic man is a "predator" who kills wolves and "wears their head" as a trophy.) Ultimately whenever I read a book like this, I always tend to ask myself, "How does it compare to Roxane Gay?" Gay, for those who don't know, is essentially the version of Donovan for radical liberals, by which I mean that the polemic statements she makes in her books are warmly embraced by her most hardcore fans, but held at arm's length and viewed with a lot of skepticism by pretty much every other person on the planet besides her most hardcore fans. In this book at least, I didn't see anything Donovan was saying that was any more outrageous than the things Gay says; and if you want to live in a world where Gay has the right to publish new books and gain new fans, then by definition you're required to live in a world where Donovan also has the right to publish new books and gain new fans, because freedom of the press doesn't mean "freedom just for the people you agree with." This balancing of radicalism across the spectrum earns the book a middle-of-the-road 3 stars; the fact that Donovan expresses his radicalism much more intelligently than I expected is what earns it the extra 4th star I'm giving it today. But that said, I acknowledge that there are more troubling parts of Donovan's personality and life that aren't addressed in this book; see for example this eye-opening 2017 piece by The Cut, in which the slippery relationship he has with violent white nationalists is more fully explored. (It's also worth noting that Donovan is gay, although he defines himself as an "androphile," meaning "someone who loves masculinity so much that he has sex with men," in an attempt to distance himself from the liberal victim politics of the modern LGBTQ community. This adds a whole new layer of complexity to the coldly dismissive attitude in A More Complete Beast he has towards the very idea that woman might have anything worth saying that a man should bother paying attention to.) It's important to acknowledge these things when taking a critical look at any political or philosophical writer, because no writer lives in a perfect vacuum, especially when the only thing you know about them are their own books which of course paint them as the most wonderful and perfect person who exists. Rest assured that I will be keeping all of these real-world issues in mind when doing my next Donovan dive, this time into his first book, the 2012 modern masculinist manifesto The Way of Men. ...more |
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May 10, 2019
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May 10, 2019
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Paperback
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| 0316403784
| 9780316403788
| 4.07
| 8,561
| 1964
| Aug 05, 2014
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it was amazing
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I recently learned not only that Oscar-winning surrealist filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos' next movie is going to be an adaptation of Jim Thompson's notori
I recently learned not only that Oscar-winning surrealist filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos' next movie is going to be an adaptation of Jim Thompson's notorious 1964 noir Pop. 1280, but that many fans consider this book to be the dark pinnacle of this famed crime novelist's career, which was all the excuse I needed to check it out of my local library the other day. And indeed, this is exactly as great as its reputation has it, a particularly nasty little piece of work that you can burn through in a single day if you feel like it. Set in a thoroughly unenlightened 1910s, it's the story of the sheriff of the smallest town within the smallest county of the unnamed state where it takes place, who presents himself to the public as a genial but lazy dimwit who generally never arrests anyone as long as the town "behaves itself" enough to warrant the treatment, but who in reality uses this public perception to shrewdly manipulate the people around him into doing the dirty business of making sure his town runs smoothly in the first place. The reveal in the finale of why he goes to all this trouble, seemingly for no personal gain whatsoever, is one of the all-time greatest explanations of nihilism the arts has ever seen, an ending as bleak and hopeless as anything HP Lovecraft ever wrote; and as a new fan to Thompson's work, it makes it easy for me to understand why his dime-store pulp novels like this one didn't sell nearly as well as his contemporaries' books back when they were first coming out, but have since developed a cult following among society's intelligentsia which are starting to find a brand-new life in Hollywood. (Like his peer Philip K. Dick in the sci-fi world, Thompson died in the 1970s relatively unknown except among hardcore genre fans, but decades later found mainstream society finally catching up to his sensibilities, with recent popular Hollywood adaptations of his work that include After Dark, My Sweet, The Getaway, The Grifters and Casey Affleck's exquisite The Killer Inside Me. This newest production from Lanthimos, who himself gained mainstream fame for the first time last year from his bizarro historical costume drama The Favourite, promises to raise Thompson to his highest public profile yet.) It comes strongly recommended, not only to crime fans but those who want to get a head start on what will undoubtedly be a batshit insane adaptation by Lanthimos later this year. ...more |
Notes are private!
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none
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1
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not set
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Apr 26, 2019
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Apr 26, 2019
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Paperback
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| 1328762211
| 9781328762214
| 3.56
| 63
| unknown
| Nov 06, 2018
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did not like it
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I picked this up from the library under the impression that it was going to be a practical guide to the things you should actually be looking for when
I picked this up from the library under the impression that it was going to be a practical guide to the things you should actually be looking for when determining whether a bottle of wine is worth the price a store is asking for it. But instead, this turned out to be a guide on how to talk so annoyingly pretentious and insufferably douchebaggy about wine that you will chase off all the other people who had been so innocuously invited to your friend's dinner party with you. If you enjoy referring to wine as a "living creature" that you have the capacity of loving more than your spouse or children, by all means pick this up; but please, I'm begging you, for everyone's sanity stay the hell away from all the rest of us.
...more
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none
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1
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not set
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Apr 22, 2019
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Apr 22, 2019
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Hardcover
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| 0399551417
| 9780399551413
| 3.77
| 5,177
| Mar 07, 2017
| Mar 07, 2017
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really liked it
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As friends know, here at the age of 50 I've started learning American Sign Language (ASL) for the first time, and am doing a deep dive into the politi
As friends know, here at the age of 50 I've started learning American Sign Language (ASL) for the first time, and am doing a deep dive into the politics and culture of the Deaf community with a capital "D," as a way of compensating for my ever-decreasing hearing and hopefully opening a new avenue for my shrinking social life. (See my review of A Deaf Adult Speaks Out for a long explanation of what exactly "Deaf culture" is, and why it's so important to learn about before getting involved with the community.) Now that I'm starting to finish up all the older books on my recommendation list, I thought it was time to start checking out some more contemporary books on what Deaf culture has progressed into in the 21st century; and as you may imagine, that largely involves turning to the world of Young Adult fiction, a genre that has exploded in popularity since the 1997 introduction of young Master Potter, and that generally takes on "woke" subjects like the disabled, the LGBTQ community, and people of color a lot more than projects designed for adults. This 2017 novel by Whitney Gardner is fine for what it is, the engaging tale of a rebellious, graffiti-tagging Indian-American Deaf girl with lesbian parents who alienates just about everybody she meets, and her struggles to assimilate into a mainstreaming program at a hearing high school after getting kicked out of her previous Deaf one; but I was unfortunately reminded while reading it that, as a 50-year-old heavy reader, I simply can't enjoy the simplistic storytelling and overly earnest emoting of Young Adult fiction no matter how much I want to. I'm giving it a good score anyway, because my disappointment has to do entirely with me and not with Gardner as an author; but nonetheless, I think my forays into Deaf culture by way of Young Adult novels have officially come to an end just as quickly as they started.
...more
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1
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not set
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Apr 20, 2019
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Apr 20, 2019
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Hardcover
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| 0735222487
| 9780735222489
| 3.51
| 328
| Aug 15, 2017
| Aug 15, 2017
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DID NOT FINISH. This actually isn't a bad book, a coming-of-age tale set in the lower-Manhattan 1980s arts community; but the main female protagonist
DID NOT FINISH. This actually isn't a bad book, a coming-of-age tale set in the lower-Manhattan 1980s arts community; but the main female protagonist is a character type that just grates on my nerves, both in fiction and in real life, a bratty trust-fund art-school girl who talks in the overly florid, overly pretentious style of...well, a bratty trust-fund art-school girl. I probably could've muddled my way through 250 pages of it, but 400 pages turned out to be just too much, although I would certainly recommend this book to others who don't mind this type of archetype as much as I do.
...more
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1
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not set
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Apr 17, 2019
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Apr 17, 2019
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Hardcover
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| 0099748614
| 9780099748618
| 3.71
| 10,815
| 1989
| Feb 2003
|
it was ok
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Martin Amis was recently in the news again, for a reason I now can't remember, and it made me think about how I knew absolutely nothing about this fam
Martin Amis was recently in the news again, for a reason I now can't remember, and it made me think about how I knew absolutely nothing about this famed British author, despite him having popped up on the literary radar regularly for the last forty years. And so when I was at my neighborhood library the other day, and learned that none of my reserves had yet arrived, I used that as an opportunity to check out what is arguably Amis' most famous book, 1989's London Fields. Unfortunately, though, I discovered that the book is just barely tolerable, not in the "this is objectively terrible and always has been" sense, but more in the sense of, "I can see why this was such a big hit in 1989, so too bad for Amis that this kind of storytelling has so profoundly fallen out of favor in the thirty years since." And that's because this fits exactly into the middle of the wheelhouse in that curious historical period that's perhaps best called, "Nerdy Generation X White Males Write Brutal Late-Postmodernism Noir Stories As A Way Of Legitimizing Their Misogyny And Racism," which started life with the early-'80s "Brat Pack" authors like Bret Easton Ellis and Jay McInerney and reached its apex with the mid-'90s scripts of Quentin Tarantino. The simple objective fact is that London Fields is a relentlessly offensive novel, one in which an unapologetic serial child rapist serves as one of our main four protagonists, the action is centered around a dive bar filled with barely literate black men who are all wife-beating drug dealers who communicate in caveman pantomime, and the only female of the foursome is a manipulative self-hating shrew who loves anal sex and houses a suicidal deathwish, a Persian woman of color whose excessive body hair is sexually fetishizied by the three men who are each held in her thrall. Of course, if you were around in those years like me, you'll remember that Amis and others got away with this naked misanthropy by claiming that it's all a deliberately over-the-top fairytale, and that in the Age Of Irony we were living in, none of it was to be actually taken seriously by the audience (and that you were an uneducated Jesse Helms philistine if you did), which then turned Amis and the others into literary superstars, cool-as-fuck tough guys who dared to push the buttons of the staid, repressive Reagan/Thatcher-loving audience around them. By the 2010s, though, we now recognize the truth, that artists like these are not tough-guy heroes but instead pasty, weaselly villains, whose violent anti-hero fairytales were not done as coolly detached comments on Postmodernist society, but rather as barely concealed rationalizations for their petty hatred of anything they can't control or dominate; and such men are no longer treated as award-winning millionaire celebrities, but rather as the dangerous incel losers who organize anonymous troll wars against writers of color who are more successful than them, and who tuck down their fedoras a little more as they enter the gay danceclub or black church or Muslim mosque with their automatic rifle in hand. Despite all this, I'm still giving London Fields 2 stars instead of 1, because it at least serves as an important historical document, a reminder of how easy it used to be for straight white males to spin-doctor their hatred so that they somehow looked like the hero for sharing it, and a reminder of why our current "woke" times was so necessary in the first place. But this overwritten, plotless mess is not worth your time anymore as just a general piece of commercial fiction to be read for pleasure, an unending slog that is all empty machismo bravado and no substance, and which trades on tawdry, distasteful shock as an unconvincing way to justify its existence. The shell game for these kinds of writers is now over, and we should all be extremely thankful for that, so do yourself a favor and leave this dreck back in the dustbins of history where it belongs. ...more |
Notes are private!
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none
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1
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not set
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Apr 10, 2019
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Apr 10, 2019
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Paperback
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| 1387116452
| 9781387116454
| unknown
| 4.20
| 5
| Jul 23, 2017
| unknown
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liked it
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Nathaniel Schmeling's Timing the Infinite is written in the grand, proud tradition of the bizarro genre; so in other words, it doesn't overly concern
Nathaniel Schmeling's Timing the Infinite is written in the grand, proud tradition of the bizarro genre; so in other words, it doesn't overly concern itself with adhering to any kind of internal logic to its universe (kind of like reading a cartoon that's been written out as a novel), and big chunks of it are done in stream-of-consciousness prose, the story of a psychedelics-loving computer coder whose tale is mostly seen through his LSD-addled mind. For me personally, that's not my particular cup of tea, and in fact it's fair to say that for most general non-bizarro readers, they will find this so tedious and maddening that they will be inspired to track down Schmeling in real life, just so they can angrily smack him in the face as hard as they can. But if you're a fan of, say, Mark Leyner, Chuck Palahniuk, or pretty much any book from Eraserhead Press, this will be exactly up your alley, a fine example of bizarro lit that you'll want to check out soon. I'm giving it 5 stars to that specific audience, and 1 star to everyone else, which averages out to the 3 stars I'm assigning it at Goodreads.
...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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Apr 02, 2019
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Apr 02, 2019
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Paperback
| |||||||||||||
| 1250114144
| 9781250114143
| 3.47
| 261
| Apr 25, 2017
| Apr 25, 2017
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DID NOT FINISH. This actually is not a bad book, a character study of a dysfunctional young couple and their world-weary globetrotting adventures, but
DID NOT FINISH. This actually is not a bad book, a character study of a dysfunctional young couple and their world-weary globetrotting adventures, but it's hampered by three details that I in particular have a low tolerance for: the prose is much more flowery and artsy than my normal tastes; for being written from the point of view of a male narrator, it never stops feeling like it's coming from the mind of a female author; and it's set within the world of wealthy, willowy, Eastern Seaboard liberal-arts trust-fund hipsters, a milieu I don't particularly like and that certainly I find impossible to make any kind of emotional connection to. None of these three elements are dealbreakers on their own, but all three of them at once made me give up on this novel pretty quickly, although I would still recommend it to those who don't mind these kinds of details as much as I do.
...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 27, 2019
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Mar 27, 2019
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Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
| 0393652599
| 9780393652598
| 3.14
| 7,734
| May 01, 2018
| May 01, 2018
|
it was amazing
|
It would perhaps be best to start my review of Chuck Palahniuk's newest novel, Adjustment Day, with a factual recap of the book's premise, since all m
It would perhaps be best to start my review of Chuck Palahniuk's newest novel, Adjustment Day, with a factual recap of the book's premise, since all my complex and hard-to-articulate opinions of the book stem from it. Namely, it posits a day after tomorrow in which the alt-right movement actually gets their shit together enough to pull off a successful armed revolution, after which they split the US up into a series of ethnostates (all whites in the north, all blacks in the south, all LGBTQ people in California, with Asians and Latinos and Jews shipped back to their respective homelands). And unlike most such tales written by academic liberals like Palahniuk, here he intimates that everything works out happily ever after for the men who pull this off, in large part precisely because the academic liberals who should've opposed them instead battle each other into extinction over the dwindling resources of the now abandoned urban centers of the US; and because all those angry Riot Grrrls and MeTooers promptly turn tail once the male population dwindles, women generally now spending their time competing with each other for the romantic affections of the few eligible men left in society. So yes, in other words, it's The Handmaid's Tale rewritten as a utopian fantasy by the people who won the revolution; yes, in other words, it's The Turner Diaries rewritten by one of our nation's best and most mature novelists, not the usual sloppy amateurish manuscript we expect of these kinds of storylines, but a polished and brilliant book that could easily be eligible for the Pulitzer Prize (that is, in an alternative world where such a thing could even be contemplated), and that makes the extremely persuasive argument that the alt-right have legitimate complaints about society that all of us really should be paying a whole lot more attention to, instead of our current policy of blanket-shunning the entire movement and everything they have to say as worthless drivel. Those are the inarguable facts about the content of Adjustment Day, an easy enough thing to put down on paper; so the much more complicated thing becomes the question, what exactly are we intellectual liberals to make of such a book? As my Twitter followers know, I for one went through a whole range of complex emotions while reading it, which is why this review is so hard for me to pin down: first a surprise sympathy for the revolutionaries, and a budding excitement over the idea that they will actually pull off their militarized coup; then anger at Palahniuk for tricking me into sympathizing with a bunch of backwards "toxic males;" then anger at the far-left academic liberals of the world who came up with terms like "toxic males" in the first place, in order to dismiss any opinion they don't particularly like; then the dawning realization that this book is not so much about supporting the alt-right than it is about profoundly criticizing the progressive left, for thinking that their farts smell like wildflowers and that they can quite naturally do no wrong; and then finally the realization by the end that, no, what Palahniuk is really doing here is simply examining the subject of men and masculinity, and specifically the question of how men are supposed to understand their masculinity better in a world that automatically shuns and vilifies the entire concept as "toxic," no matter how cursory the examination? After all, Palahniuk himself has said many times in interviews that this book is to his early hit Fight Club what Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged is to The Fountainhead; in other words, in both cases the earlier novels are a look at one individual person in the world who lives a sort of theoretically perfect life when it comes to the philosophy being discussed, while the second book in both cases are more sweeping looks at what might happen if an entire society starts thinking and behaving like the hero of the first book. And 23 years later, it's pretty common knowledge by now that Palahniuk's still remarkable debut novel Fight Club is one of the most astute and transgressive looks ever done of masculinity, of the violent and chaos-embracing blood-eating black soul trapped inside the heart of everyone with a penis ever born, and what a man's proper response should be in order to tame this inner demon and put it to productive use in society. It's also a well-known fact by now that the alt-right movement has essentially co-opted Fight Club as a sort of "red pill" introduction to their cause, a gateway drug of sorts that gently introduces many of the main issues that drive the masculinist movement, and especially the fact that mainstream society, as currently dominated by a media friendly to far-left progressive liberalism, doesn't even allow these issues to be discussed as a valid topic of conversation, instead blithely dismissing the entire subject of masculinity as "toxic poison" to be shunned, shamed and ridiculed. Adjustment Day is essentially Palahniuk publicly acknowledging what has happened with Fight Club and the alt-right over the last two decades, and arguing that the alt-right and the election of Trump is exactly what happens if you try to will an entire subset of the population out of existence; that if you don't allow rational and well-reasoned discussions to take place about masculinity, men will instead embrace the most radical and least-reasoned discussions about the subject, will band together under a legitimate and very much earned feeling of threat. If you get angry while reading Adjustment Day, that's good because you should get angry. We should all be angry that we have created a society where the only way to even examine the issue of what makes men men is to angrily embrace the most extreme and violent view of the subject as possible. It's exactly for this reason, of course, that academic liberals have largely been dismissing Adjustment Day; The Guardian, for example, called it "feeble," "vapid" and "incoherent," while the New York Times didn't think it was good enough to even bother reviewing in the first place. That's a big mistake, and exactly the kind of self-fulfilling prophecy the book is warning liberals about in the first place -- that by utterly dismissing every single issue in the world that doesn't personally relate to you as "worthless," you give others who care about these issues no other choice than to force you to confront the issue, precisely by violently embracing the most extreme and cartoonishly terrible aspect of the issue and, say, voting him into the White House. That's why the eventual fates of the ethnostates in Adjustment Day is the most brilliant aspect of the entire book, because it's Palahniuk poking vicious fun of far-left liberals' towering sense of smugness and self-importance; namely, California's "Gaysia" almost immediately becomes a militaristic police state, as the LGBTQ community quickly realize that, for the first time in their history, they now have to start worrying about producing gay babies as fast as possible, and resort to conscripting all lesbians at gunpoint into forced artificial insemination; while once all the African-Americans finally gather together in the Deep South to inaugurate "Blacktopia," it's revealed that the common Hollywood scriptwriting cliche of the "Magical Negro" is in fact quite literal, and that the black community has had the capacity this entire time to bring about a science-fictional Wakanda-like golden age, in which giant pyramids float to the moon and nation-wide communal hymns bring an end to aging and death by natural causes. That's one of the most genius things Palahniuk could've done here, because he's taking every single fantasy progressive liberals have ever expressed about how much better the world would be if straight white males were no longer in charge, and basically throws them all back in their faces as the ridiculous cartoons they are. That will be a tough thing for liberals to swallow, which is mainly why they've been staying away from this fellow liberal, openly gay, Vancouver-residing author's new novel in droves. But you'll be a better human being if you buck this trend yourself and try to embrace what Palahniuk is saying here, and understand that he's not trying to glorify the alt-right in this book but rather point out that some of the things they complain about are legitimate complaints that should be taken seriously, not coldly dismissed in a crassly cynical effort to sell more shaving cream. If you want to be a better human being, read this book and try to understand it for what it is. If you don't, then keep dismissing it like everyone else, and hunker down in your ivory tower waiting for the armed revolution that will undoubtedly come in its wake. ...more |
Notes are private!
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none
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1
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not set
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Feb 26, 2019
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Feb 26, 2019
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Hardcover
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|
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|
|
my rating |
|
|
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|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
| 3.65
|
really liked it
|
Nov 08, 2020
|
Nov 08, 2020
| |||||
|
| 3.62
|
it was amazing
|
Oct 10, 2020
|
Oct 10, 2020
| |||||
|
| 3.79
|
really liked it
|
Sep 28, 2020
not set
|
Sep 28, 2020
| |||||
|
| 3.60
|
really liked it
|
Sep 23, 2020
|
Sep 23, 2020
| |||||
|
| 4.40
|
it was ok
|
Sep 22, 2020
|
Sep 22, 2020
| |||||
|
| 4.06
|
it was amazing
|
Sep 15, 2020
|
Sep 15, 2020
| |||||
|
| 3.81
|
it was amazing
|
Aug 27, 2020
not set
|
Aug 27, 2020
| |||||
|
| 4.03
|
Aug 05, 2020
|
Aug 05, 2020
| ||||||
|
| 2.94
|
Aug 05, 2020
|
Aug 05, 2020
| ||||||
|
| 3.19
|
liked it
|
Mar 17, 2020
|
Mar 17, 2020
| |||||
|
| 3.14
|
Feb 17, 2020
|
Feb 17, 2020
| ||||||
|
| 2.10
|
Feb 11, 2020
|
Feb 11, 2020
| ||||||
|
| 3.60
|
really liked it
|
Feb 08, 2020
|
Feb 08, 2020
| |||||
|
| 3.59
|
really liked it
|
Nov 21, 2019
|
Nov 21, 2019
| |||||
|
| 4.22
|
did not like it
|
Oct 27, 2019
|
Oct 27, 2019
| |||||
|
| 3.98
|
it was amazing
|
Oct 10, 2019
|
Oct 10, 2019
| |||||
|
| 3.99
|
Sep 04, 2019
|
Sep 04, 2019
| ||||||
|
| 3.64
|
liked it
|
Aug 07, 2019
|
Aug 07, 2019
| |||||
|
| 3.56
|
it was ok
|
Jun 15, 2019
|
Jun 15, 2019
| |||||
|
| 3.53
|
Jun 06, 2019
|
Jun 06, 2019
| ||||||
|
| 3.92
|
Jun 2019
|
Jun 01, 2019
| ||||||
|
| 4.05
|
really liked it
|
May 10, 2019
|
May 10, 2019
| |||||
|
| 4.07
|
it was amazing
|
Apr 26, 2019
|
Apr 26, 2019
| |||||
|
| 3.56
|
did not like it
|
Apr 22, 2019
|
Apr 22, 2019
| |||||
|
| 3.77
|
really liked it
|
Apr 20, 2019
|
Apr 20, 2019
| |||||
|
| 3.51
|
Apr 17, 2019
|
Apr 17, 2019
| ||||||
|
| 3.71
|
it was ok
|
Apr 10, 2019
|
Apr 10, 2019
| |||||
|
| 4.20
|
liked it
|
Apr 02, 2019
|
Apr 02, 2019
| |||||
|
| 3.47
|
Mar 27, 2019
|
Mar 27, 2019
| ||||||
|
| 3.14
|
it was amazing
|
Feb 26, 2019
|
Feb 26, 2019
|
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