October

We are coming into the slowest reading months of the year for me, the game release months. I'm trying hard to keep it going, but it feels now like November might be a bit of a task, whereas it has been mostly a pleasure up to this point to keep notes of my reading. I've started a classic, and plan on reading some non-fiction too in order to satisfy my need to keep out of a reading rut, thematically or otherwise. Wish me luck.

Oryx and Crake - Margaret Atwood

After last month’s teen novels, I sought out something a little more high brow. I wanted what I felt like I was looking for at the end of divergent, which was a more fully realized world, or characters who occupy the reality laid out before them more completely; I feel like I got both with this book. This is the sort of book that makes me want to track down the entire collected works of the author and add them to my list of “check to see if they’ve written anything new lately” list. It deals with, in an relatively un-sensationalized manner (difficult given the topics): the end of humankind, genetic modification, the desensitization found in the dark corners of the Internet, and the perils of unchecked scientific progress. It would have been easy for this to slip into lifetime movie territory, making wild claims and accusations, exhuming ghosts from every issue large and small. Even just saying that it is about unchecked genetic modifications leading to worldwide disaster makes it sound hysterical, but it is handled well, I assure you. The world the book takes place in is a near future setting, but I would hesitate to call it science fiction, as nothing that takes place seems completely fantastic given a few decades of progress. I guess I hesitate to call it sci-fi because the fantastic elements don’t overwhelm from the story, they serve to enhance it. The world isn’t just a clever theory, or a series of set-pieces, it really feels like a living breathing thing, shaping and shaped by its inhabitants.

I feel like I have been keyed into endings lately, and the ending of this book falls into the sopranos style of ending: purposefully uninformative (is there a more appropriate literary reference here? If so I’m not familiar with it. In combing my mind for comparisons, the sopranos series ending was the only big one that jumped immediately to mind). What I do like about this, despite the hanging feeling, is that it forces you to think, to have to analyze the characters involved to really see how you think it plays out after the curtain falls. This is no chore, however, as the main characters are well written, the sort who you naturally wonder about, and build theories around. It is not only the actual conclusion of the story that stops before it is resolved; there are (by design it seems, not by omission) some major story points that are left un-answered. This is not a book for those who need ends loose tied up, and hands to be held along the way. Fair warning, you will be forced to think critically about the plot, and the characters, often times drawing your own conclusions about the story based on the main character’s limited view of events. I’m not making it out to be some Finnegan's Wake shit, but still, this is not the next step for those who are at the teen sci-fi level.

The stars my destination - Alfred Bester

This book came to my attention as an inclusion on a number of different best of lists, so I decided to give it a try. This is a great book, no doubt about it. More specifically, I think given it’s publication date of 1956 that this is an important book. During the body of the book, it suffers from some of the same problems as other older works of science fiction, in that not only does the subject matter seem dated by the omissions of scientific progress made after it was written, but the writing itself feels different. Reading this after something more modern is like watching a move made in 2010, and then the godfather. They operate at fundamentally different speeds, and are almost speaking different artistic languages. As I was reading it, I noticed that it was clearly ahead of its time, dealing with subject matters that wouldn’t become typical in this sort of book for years to come. In fact, I knew it was an older book, but I had it pegged at around late seventies but with a retro sensibility. I also knew it was fairly highly regarded, and as the book wore on I wondered if this is the sort of thing that may have been groundbreaking at the time, but that had aged poorly. The sort of thing that gets included on best-of lists by people who were moved by it when it was first released, but whose popularity is a mystery to anybody who comes to it late. Certain pieces of art have a sense of incredible novelty at the time, and may be the first of their kind, but don’t have the overall level of quality to make them classics in the truest sense: groundbreaking and of the highest quality. As the book pressed on I was convinced this had to be the case, but then I came to the ending. It is late coming on, and it seems like a decent enough book for about the first 90 percent, but then out of nowhere comes this incredible conclusion. It changes the whole tone of the book, casts it in a whole new light. It is the rarest of endings, the one that is so good it forgives the earlier sins of the work. In fact is runs directly opposite to so many endings, the kind that sully the entire body of work because of the weak willed fizzle they make you end on, instead of wrapping up with any sort of punch. Chapters come into focus that before seemed bizarre for the sake of being bizarre, and parts earlier that I had to flip back to to see if I missed a part now make prefect sense. It was done so deftly though, I didn’t see it coming. It’s not a heavy handed foreshadowing, where all the clues are laid out so obviously that even if you don’t get it right away, you know eventually you’ll make sense of it. It just seems poorly written at first, and then, wham, it all falls sharply into focus right before it wraps up. Despite what few shortcomings may remain, there is no doubt when you are finished that this is one of the best science fiction books ever written, and if you haven’t read it, you should.

The brief and wonderous life of Oscar Wao - Junot Diaz

I knew going in that this was a book about a Dominican nerd living in new york, and I expected it to be just that, but as it turns out this book is about much more than the titular Oscar. It goes deep into Dominican history, going many steps past what I thought when it first reveals that the story is not limited to present day new york. It goes from character to character, and changes its tone with each change to reflect the subject of the chapter. The book seems the sort that is intensely personal, drawing from a range of influences important to the author. He references pop culture touchstones heavily, drawing constantly on the lord of the rings, akira, comic books, and various other nerdly detritus. I enjoyed the back story of the DR, it fit in with the other history of Latin America I know about, and expanded on it nicely. It paints an excellent picture of the country, and many of the particularities unique to it and its people. It also makes me feel like I now better understand more of the subtle regional differences between Cuba, Puerto Rico, Miami, Haiti, and the rest of the Caribbean.

If I had to offer up some sort of disappointment it was that this story has a lot (to put it more precisely, a shit-lot) of Spanish turns of phrase and slang. I guess I could have looked them all up to make sure I knew what was going on, but I know enough Spanish cuss-words to get by on about a third of it; had enough contextual clues to roughly understand another third of it, and was plain lazy for the last third, hoping I wasn’t missing something critical. There is no way the author, writing such a personal story could have written it as anything other than partially bi-lingual. Given the amount of Spanish you find in America, it is nobody’s fault but mine that I haven’t bothered to learn more for my own use. Still, it made me feel like I was missing out on some of the relationships defined by those terms used amongst the often dysfunctional family members to describe one another. I can’t really fault the author for this lack of understanding on my part, I really just wish the kindle could have a Spanish dictionary in addition to its regular one. Despite the fact that the language barrier left me feeling at times like I was on the outside looking in, I also felt like I was brought into a world foreign to me, and allowed to see it from the inside as it really is.

Never let me go - Kazuo Ishiguro

I picked this book almost from a hat to round out my reading this month. I don’t know what list I got this from, or anything about the author when I picked it. I had started and stopped a large number of books between the last book and this one, and I just decided to press through with this one just to get something started. The ending was profound to me personally because it made me feel like all of the books I read this month adhered to a few common themes, completely by accident. This particular book was an excellent capstone to the months reading because it was the thread that united all of the other books. This book didn’t wear its identity on its sleeve the whole time; in fact quite to the contrary it has an underlying sense of magical realism that it almost seems like it is going out of its way to hide from you. (This is where is intersects with Oscar Wao, which also dabbles briefly with magical realism in the form of communications with a guiding spirit, and not in the metaphorical way, but in the “hey there is an actual mongoose spirit totem talking you out of your troubles in a vision” sort of way.) You get the sense from early on that something is different about the children at the school that this book takes place in, in fact it is spelled out in bits and pieces throughout the story roughly what is going on. But you don’t realize the bigger picture until the very end of the book, the scope of the story and the meaning of all the lives of all the people you have gotten to know. Here it ties clearly to Stars my destination - it waits until you think it couldn't get any more unresolved, and then, BAM, the end slams into you, a thousand pounds of understanding all at once. Every event you have just heard about is cast with new shadows, in light of what was revealed at the end. Just like in Stars, things that seemed innocuous or confusing before now make perfect sense, and not in a ham handed way that suggests a twist coming up, it just becomes something more profound once you know how everything fits together. The last thread is tied to Oryx, and it is the plausibility that surrounds the nuts and bolts of the plot. Though the story invents certain scientific realities, nothing is entirely fantastic. It could either be something that hasn’t happened yet, or an alternate history scenario, where a certain development was pursued in this universe, where as in ours, it was culled. It even shares the view that Oryx holds regarding scientific progress - pessimistic without being histrionic. It makes you think about right and wrong concerning scientific breakthroughs in a roundabout way and the real victory is that it is done without resorting to heavy handed scare tactics and straw man arguments to bolster its own viewpoint. This is ultimately a cautionary tale about unchecked progress and ignorance, though it hold those cards until the very end, and despite the lingering sadness, It is a pleasure to read.