I was correct last month in predicting that this month would be a struggle, though it ended up being for reasons different that I had thought. Instead of the reading being interrupted by my other hobbies, it was the writing that became the chore. I made time to read in the nooks and crannies of my day, but the writing could only be done in my precious late night free time, which was the time occupied by children, games, and sleep. I ended up getting most of it done longhand during down-times at work, and then having my lovely wife type it up for me - as she put it, don draper style. Next month will mark one full year of this project, and it will be the first time that I kept with a reading goal for the duration of the year. I am proud of myself, and proud of what my writing has become, especially compared now to where it started. The first few months are almost embarrassing in their brevity, and maybe at some point I'll have to re-read a few of them to give them a more thorough review. Next month’s post will be like the rest of the year, one big monthly post, but I think at the turn of the year I’m going to change the format of the blog. What I’m going to do starting next year is do away with monthly posts, and just post an individual review for each book I read. Maybe I’ll still do a monthly wrap up, but it would be no more than links to whatever I already put up in that month. Any constructive input or thoughts are, as always, appreciated. Unless what you have to offer is your typical sort of blind Internet assholery, in which case, go fuck yourself.
Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
Sometimes you read a classic and you can’t understand the fuss. Not so here, as this is a fuss I now understand, and this book deserves every accolade I have ever seen heaped on it. The writing, oh my god, the writing. It makes me want to stop right now, shut the laptop and go outside, because I know I will never ever make anything as poetic and beautiful as the prose in Lolita. The writing is closer to poetry than to the prose I am used to reading in most books, even from good authors who have an excellent command of the language. Nabokov is not writing this book to tell you a story, instead it is more like he is painting a picture with words. It is meant to be taken in, appreciated slowly. The problem this creates is that at times, this tendency not to rush, but to let each sentence flourish and bloom makes telling a cohesive story difficult. Rather, more specifically, it makes following the story at times difficult. Towards the end of the book, when I really want to know what is happening, and there are mysteries left to be solved, the book is in no more a hurry to move along then when it is in the beginning, setting the scene, lingering in each place that needs lingering. The last quarter of the book is like being stuck behind a slow moving yet beautiful woman at the airport. Yes, yes, the view is wonderful, but please could you hurry up a bit? It seems as if you are being challenged to not care about the plot, as it doesn’t have the sense of urgency that other books have when the plot naturally accelerates in light of a mystery or a conflict. Not that it wasn’t enjoyable, but whereas I was able to match the pace in the beginning, and linger along with the writing, towards the end it was hard to take the time I was required to take in order to enjoy each sentence - I wanted to speed up and find out what was really happening.
The subject matter was very interesting and multifaceted. Obviously an incendiary topic, but handled deftly enough to make this book rise above what could have been something written in very poor taste. The subject of relationship between a physically mature child and an adult is a curious one, with many shades of gray. As for illegality, the situation is clear in most cases, but the morality remains somewhat hazy, less so in the extremes. What happened here is one of those extremes, one that is rightly wrong in the eyes of the law. However, if she was 16, it might be different. She is still young, but is every person at 16 incapable of making those sorts of decisions? I’m not sure about that. Even in this case, it retains a small touch of the gray, as Lolita seems to have as much to do with the seduction as Humbert does. Clearly, most adults would have rebuffed her advances and removed themselves from the situation, instead of always angling towards it, and making conditions right for something sexual to develop. However it’s not written in a predatory sense, where he hunts and pounces with no interference from his young prey, instead she is the one who ultimately initiates all of the contact. It is made clear that he is used to watching from a distance and living in a fantasy world; I don’t think he would ever have been able to consummate any of his poorly chosen romances without any assistance. This makes it less than crystal clear to me, again - shades of gray. What also makes their relationship intriguing is its impermanence. Or you could say its impossibility. The impossibility doesn’t come from the law, or from normal societal taboos, at least not fully. The real challenge stems from the sorts of issues of compatibility that plague any relationship. Other than a physical desire for one another (or his physical desire for her along with her social desire for him, or whatever you might call it) there is virtually nothing they have in common. He is an intelligent man, well read - while she wants to read celebrity magazines and go to the mall. It makes this relationship more than a very poor idea borne out by a confused man and an equally confused child, it becomes symbolic of our worst sorts of yearnings, the sort that have no basis in logic or reality. To want something that doesn’t make you happy, or something you didn’t even want in the first place is a very normal problem, but no less destructive because of its ubiquity. I have these sorts of desires all the time, looking back into the past and longing for things that I can’t hope now to change or replay. I waste mental energy on that sort of thing more than I’d care to admit. Why do I spend so much time thinking warmly about things now that didn’t really make me happy even when I did them in the first place? Or, in a related sense, why do I want things that I know aren’t any better than what I currently have? At least I have the good sense not to act on these sorts of idle daydreams that everybody suffers from. The protagonist of this story, however, seems to draw much of his life’s difficulty from his inability to separate his reality from his fantasy. In this way what at first seems like a tawdry story about an ill conceived romance comes to stand in in for universal issues that most people struggle with. The more you layers you peel away from this story, the more layers that lie beneath it, waiting to be uncovered.
Reading this has made me re-evaluate how I approach certain classics. What I realized was that I am primarily interested in stories and characters - good writing is not a priority, but more like a bonus I will welcome. This is how I get pulled into competently (or poorly) written thrillers or memoirs. I have never had a love of poetry, which to me has always seemed like the printed equivalent of talking to hear yourself speak- it seems taken with itself. What this book did, for most of its duration, was to make excellent us of its high concept linguistic acrobatics to tell an engaging story. What I got from it was the privilege of reading incredible writing- something I really enjoyed. I know there are other classics out there praised for their writing specifically, and what has changed for me is that I might give them another chance, but focus more on what I am really reading them for. The actual words and sentences first, story second. My hope is that in the same way that this book lured me in with a story to give me the words, another book may have an excellent story to tell if I read it slowly, savoring each turn of phrase without pushing forward to find out what happens next. I guess I have learned to stop and smell the word rose, so to speak.
Rule of Four - Ian Caldwell
When I got this book, around its publication date, it was presented to me as a book taking its cues from the DaVinci code. In some ways, this comparison holds up, it is about a modern mystery set against the backdrop of Renaissance works being investigated. This is certainly what would make the comparison be drawn, but there is much more that separates them than this. This book, though in it there is a murder mystery, and a 400 year old book being decoded, is much more a story of a young man leaving college. It takes place at Princeton and like all strongly placed novels, I’m certain the book is much richer to anyone who went there. To the outsider it’s still a nice slice of Ivy League life. The author made the university’s rituals and peculiarities feel real and unique, making it feel like the sort of establishment that is old enough to have rock solid traditions that nobody really questions or understands any more. He admits in the end that he took a few liberties with some of the details of campus life, but mostly he tried to stay true to what life at Princeton was like to an undergrad.
The actual parts going through the ancient text and its secret meanings are fine, however, it seems less like a mystery you could work out, and more like a second story, mirroring the first. While this in itself is not a bad thing, the book is set up around these boys solving the mystery of this book that nobody else has figured out yet, and it seemed appropriate to let the reader try to puzzle some of it out. The real meat of the book to me is how well realized the main character is. He is a young man trying hard not to follow in his father’s footsteps, both personally and professionally. By the end he realizes how futile it seems to fight against that destiny. His father’s first love was this enigmatic Italian book (the Hypnerotomachia) and the son turned away from it as long as he could. Even once he let the book in to his life he made promises to himself and others to not let the book hold sway over him as it did his father. The boy and his father are good representations of the sort of people who have desires in their lives so strong, they overlap with romantic desires - not enough love to spread between people and things. Both the main character and his father have relationships fail because of their personal white whales they are compelled to chase. I think the author does a good job being honest about this and gives you an ending more in line with what might happen in a scenario like this instead of making the ending truly satisfying. You leave the story with a very clear impression of the difficulty one runs into trying to balance actual interpersonal love with one’s hobbies, passions and personal quests.
Year Of The Flood - Margaret Atwood
The is an alternate storyline to a book I read last month, Oryx and Crake. Set in the same world, covering roughly the same time-span, this book expands greatly on what was happening in other parts of the word during the events of Oryx. The highest praise I can offer this book is that it manages to stand apart from its companion without feeling tacked on or unnecessary. Even though there are characters who appear in both books, this manages to tell its own unique story, for a book like this seems like an accomplishment. This book is a well written piece of near future science fiction. It does a great job of making things seem different enough to know that things are advanced past where we are right now, but not so far flung that it seems out of the question to occur in my lifetime. I think that this world could handle another story line in it, though I wonder if it needs to intersect so directly with the existing story line in the way that this book did. The world is well realized and well expressed, and I would be interested to read more about the events that happened either before or after the flood (not really a flood, but a man-made plague).
The previous entry told the story of a man’s downfall due to hubristic scientific advance from the point of view of those responsible, this one is the story of others who see the coming disaster and try to prepare for it. The group about which the story takes place is somewhere between a hippie commune and a doomsday cult who focuses of natural living and a conscious rejection of unnatural and processed products. The group in this book (the gardeners) are presented in the same neutral fashion that the scientists were in the last book, letting you form your own opinions about them without having the author write them in a heavy handed manner in order to influence your feelings towards them. Given this sort of end of the world scenario other authors would be quick to assign some sort of blame, making it clear who is at fault for the downfall or more specifically who is right and who is wrong. Both sides here, both for and against unchecked advancement are not without faults of logic and action. Many of the members of the Gardeners break the core principles of the group routinely and their commitment to the cause is questionable. Many prove to be hypocrites, for when given chances to live in the gated compounds or take advantage of the comforts that science has granted society as a whole, they jump at them with no hesitation. Especially after the plague hits they are quick to use anything useful regardless of its origin. It makes it seem like when money is on the table they will use whatever is at hand, principles be damned. This ambiguity was endearing to me as it made the story seem more plausible - once society collapses so do its rules, no matter where you stood previously.
The end wasn’t bad by any means but it drastically changed how I viewed the end of the previous book. The story lines meet up in a very direct sense and offer resolution to the ending in Oryx, one which I felt was purposely inconclusive. At about 95% complete we see the ending scene as it was left standing in Oryx and then its resolution, which now makes perfect sense as there were people involved with it in the previous book whose identities you didn’t know then, but do now. The problem for me was that it was nice not knowing, the ending was effective as a mystery. While I certainly was curious about the outcome after the first books’ ending, it was like a well preformed magic trick - not knowing the secret is part of the charm. Once you get to peek behind the curtain and see what the gimmick is, your curiosity may be satisfied but at the expense of the wonder and mystery that uncertainty can lend a story.
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.
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.
September
In writing these reviews I’ve been trying to find a consistent voice, and I have been generally pleased with the results after a few months of trying. In fact I feel sort of embarrassed going back to read some of the early entries and seeing how short and uninspired they were. Not to be too critical, I guess I was falling back on old methods; in years past I’ve kept reading lists that weren’t really much more than bullet pointed lists with occasional elaboration. Writing more about each book has forced me to change slightly the way I read in the first place. When I am reading a book now, I’m not trying to force a story or a theme out of it, but I am trying to keep a part of my mind open for inspiration. Sometimes it comes to me early and easily, sometimes I have to work at it a bit. For a few reviews I have just started writing and seen where it goes, and for some I just stumble across it during a conversation, or I see a relevant point in some other medium to use as a jumping off point. But this month I have a new problem in that I’ve read things that I just can’t find a full topic to write about. It came up with the third book in the series by Larsson, which is not bad at all. I just don’t have anything to say about it in long form. I don’t want to write a 3 sentence review, but if I did it would go like this: Good read. A lot like the others. Too bad he wont write any more in the series. Also in this category are The internet is a playground by David Thorne, and Brian’s winter by Gary Paulsen. Respectively, the ultra short reviews would be: I really hope all of his emails are real correspondences, it makes them so much funnier that way, and yep, more hatchet, but really cold this time. On to the long ones.
Salt - Mark Kurlansky
I have a soft spot for a particularly dry sort of non-fiction, of which this book is a great example. My wife used to tease me about a book I read about how each of the states came to have its particular borders. To me it was an interesting look at how the balance between federal and state power in the u.s. has changed over time, but to her it was an almost comically dry book that would have been hard to read even at gunpoint. I tried to read her a little bit out loud once, and she made me stop after only a few sentences. It is her loss that she will never now know how it came to be that the southern border of Michigan didn’t incorporate the then booming port towns of Toledo and Gary in exchange for the land that would become the upper peninsula. Sometimes with books this dry the premise can sound good, and with what the author has to present it might make a really good and dense say, long form magazine article, or chapter in a larger book. However, once you try to make it into a full length book, and when you don’t have a narrative to rely on, it really slows down towards the end. You’ve already seen the same formula play out in all the earlier chapters, all the same general facts in the same general order. With the state boundary book, there are definitely interesting stories to be had concerning certain borders, but the author tells you every tale of every single border, regardless of if it even remotely worth telling or not. Salt suffers from the same problem, which is, I guess, one of editing. I was really interested in many of the historical aspects of salt throughout human history and I felt sort of dim for not realizing how important it was in ancient societies. But, sweet jesus salt, you need to pick and choose. I don’t need to know the type of salted fish that each society of man since the invention of writing has eaten in lean times. I think we could just have said in the beginning of the book: look, lots of people ate fish. Salted fish. Lots of times sardines, then later it was cod. Bang! I just eliminated 75 pages from the book. This is not to say the entire book suffered from editing problems, or repetition, I did learn quite a bit. The Chinese, Romans, and later the renaissance Italians all had major tax revenues from the sale of iron and salt. The control of salt mines or other salt works played a major part in the placement of early settlements, and was the crux of many military conflicts. The problem was that despite all the good stuff, the boring fish salting parts outweighed it, and I had to quit reading the book at seventy percent. That is probably the farthest I’ve ever been into a book without finishing it. I’m usually a stickler about finishing a book after a certain point, but I just couldn’t do it this time. I’m not even sure how we finally got salt to be such a easily available commodity in modern times, and I would really like to know. Maybe with some distance I’ll be ready to go back and find out the thrilling conclusion to how we now salt foods in the canning process, and which fish we currently salt the most.
Divergent - Veronica Roth
There seems to be quite a lot of science fiction/fantasy young adult novels of varying degrees of quality lately that have become very popular. On one hand you have your harry potters, and your hunger games, while on the other hand you have your twilights, and all of your, I’m assuming, even lower quality twilight derivatives. Seriously, have you been to a bookstore lately? The young adult section is preposterous, lousy with sexy vampire knockoffs. Sometimes I feel conflicted about reading these (not the sexy vampire knockoffs, the regular YA books), almost like if I read them and like them that it reflects poorly on me and my taste in books. This book skirts the line for me between books that are acceptable for children to read but are written well enough to have value for adults, and books that are just for kids. I enjoyed reading it, and would probably read a sequel if it came out, but it didn’t grab me the same way the hunger games did. There was more adolescent pining, and more doe eyes, more swooning than in that. Not that I am made of stone; it was in part, a pleasant reminder of days past. I remember what it was like to feel an electric thrill just to be holding someones hand, or the rush you felt throughout your whole body when you were just talking to, or looking at someone you had feelings for. Maybe I’m being too critical of the writing, saying it is so youthful, when all that was really happening was that I was feeling old while reading it because I was remembering how far removed I am from that mindset.
Despite generally liking this new wave of science fiction, some of the problems I have with it stems from my personal feelings towards that genre as a whole. I think a lot of these YA scifi books are intended perhaps not exclusively for new readers, but readers who are new to books featuring magic, or future technology. My problem with them is that I usually want more background information on the world itself. I come to these worlds for the details, the history, all the little details. I feel like with this book, you are given some background, but not the whole picture. The world is sort of fucked in this book, but I want to know why. How did it get this way? There exists a brand new society. OK, again, how did that come to be? Was it a war, a peaceful revolution? Did we go full caveman for a while before building this new thing from the ashes? Instead of it just being a story that happens to be set in this new and fanciful place, I want to know about this new place and how it affects the characters who occupy it. I want it to seem like a real and plausible place, and I want to see how the people reflect the world in their actions. A story set in a place and time I know is going to have all of that back and forth already, and even one set in an unfamiliar place but in my time is going to have a lot of contextual clues for me to work with. A story, even one that isn’t fantastic in nature, but that is set in a different time and place than I know has to be as much about the place as it does the people. It doesn’t do me any good to know about Frank Mccourt, without getting a feel for what Ireland of the 1930’s was like. It didn’t do me any good to get to know Francie Nolan without learning how she related to Brooklyn of 1912. I don’t feel like I can really get to know a character without some context, and I don’t mind having to work at learning about the world they live in, but in order to do that the world they live in has to be made real enough for me to feel like I can place them in it.
Kurt Vonnegut - Man without a country
Kurt Vonnegut is a special author to me, I discovered him at a time in my life where it seemed like I was just waiting to hear what he had to say. I remember reading cat’s cradle while on vacation with my mom in Florida, I had picked it up on a whim from a very agreeably priced local used bookstore. His blend of dark humor and wit was one I was instantly in love with, and I have read most of his books more than once. I read his final work on a whim as a palette cleanser between other books, and as always, he has quite a lot to say. Some of it is great and timeless, but a few of his opinions sound old fashioned. However, for a man who has seen and done so much, I think we can forgive him his old fashioned-ness.
I could write a lot about him, or about most of the topics in his book, but Instead I’ll just relay a point he made that had not occurred to me about a popular saying. The saying he talks about is a quote taken from Karl Marx, that religion is the opiate of the masses. The context I usually hear this quote used in is as a critique of modern Christianity. The way it usually seems to be used is to compare religion to opiate addiction: it is easy to get into, hard to kick, and all encompassing while you are under its spell. I myself have used it in this context before, and I still think there is some truth in that comparison, and certainly not limited to Christianity. The point that Vonnegut makes was one I had never considered before, and it was this: at the time of Marx’s writing, opiates were one of, if not the only truly reliable pain killer available to doctors. It seems that this may be the missed point about this quote - that it isn’t the addictive qualities we have come to associate with the opiate family, but the relief of pain it and only it can truly provide. As I have grown away from my brash youth, I have come to realize that despite the fact that it plays no role in my life, religion does provide comfort to millions of other people. It is easy to sit outside and criticize those who have faith, but it is missing the point entirely that organized religion, despite its many (many) faults can provide a very serious relief of metaphysical angst to people in a way that for them, nothing else can. This was a very insightful look at a quote I have heard so many times without giving it any real critical thought, and it reminded me to always think twice about the things you hear or read, and to try to look beneath the surface for what else might be in there.
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - J.K. Rowling
My wife Has a special relationship with the harry potter series, they are without a doubt her favorite books. She has read the series through in its entirety at least 6 or 7 times, though her super fan-dom ends there, falling well short of the robe wearing, slash fiction writing, brewing your own butter-beer sort. I was the one who introduced her to the books, though in a roundabout fashion. I read the books in college, receiving the first four as a gift from my mother, who knew I liked to read, and sent me them after hearing all the hullabaloo. After giving them the sort of look Ron might have given his christmas sweater (BOOM!) I decided to give them a try, reasoning it would have been rude to exchange them without reading them at all. So I laid down in bed and opened up the first book, pledging to stop no sooner than two chapters in. As you may have seen coming, I read all four straight through, only breaking for food and sleep. I got the remaining three as they came out, narrowly dodging spoilers for all three later books, as they came out in the summer and I was working at camps for all those years. When the sixth book came out I was dating my wife to be at the time, and she asked me if I thought she would like that book. I said yeah, but you should start with the first one. What I did not realize at the time was that this suggestion was almost like putting her on the rack and demanding under duress of bodily harm that she ignore me and start with the sixth one, like a wang. Which she did. She than turned around and read the whole series, from the beginning, and then number six again. Which made her want to start over. So, when the last book came out, we were both eagerly anticipating it. We went out the morning after release, and each bought our own copy so that we could both power through it simultaneously, in order to avoid one of us knowing more than the other, and possibly having the long awaited ending get ruined for us when we went back to camp on Monday. This was the only time I had read the seventh book, and she requested that I read it again, so that I could actually take my time and enjoy it. She also though I might have a different opinion about it this time. We made a deal, a book exchange, where I agreed to read this if she read a book of my choice. I had her read slaughterhouse five, she hated it. Go figure.
As it turns out, this is a really good book. It wraps up one of the most popular book series of all time, and it does it in a totally satisfactory way, which is much more than can be said of the endings of many otherwise great series that shit out towards the end. It has been since the seventh book was first released that I have read any harry potter, and in the meantime I have seen the movies a number of times. The movies, while good, aren’t as good as the books, and some of the characters creep in and take over their novelized counterparts in your head. In their defense, the movies have some really incredible casting choices in them, many more good than bad. The problem is that this seems to make the bad ones stick out that much more. Yes, Hermione is a bit more shrill than I thought she was in the books, but what I am really talking about is Dumbledore in movies three through seven. He is the worst. THE WORST. Dumbledore is one of my most beloved characters across all literature, just the perfect mixture of dad, grandpa and teacher. It’s not just that the actor doesn’t do him justice, its that he gets him the opposite of right. He yells, and loses his temper, he isn’t warm or caring. He misses out on all the things that make the character right and good. It was nice to get the real character, the one I remember from the books back in my head as the gold standard.
******* YARRRRR, HERE BE SPOILERS FOR BOOK SEVEN *******
So, there are three main things I didn’t like when I first read the seventh book. The first was the sequence where Harry, Ron and Hermione are all stuck in the tent, searching for horcruxes. I remember feeling like it dragged, and was poorly paced. It didn’t seem that way at all this time. Even though it is slower than some of the other parts of the book, it still seemed well paced, and appropriate for that part of the story. It gave me a better feeling of how cut off they were from everybody else during their search, and how alone they were in the fight, or at least how alone they felt. The second issue I had the first time through was that I felt like the sequence where harry goes to meet voldemort in the woods felt contrived and poorly explained afterwords. Again, I did not feel the same way this time through. Even though I couldn’t now draw you an exact set of instructions on how to set up a proxy horcrux in a target of a killing spell that puts a part of your soul into them, it all seemed appropriate for the end of the book. For some reason this time through I didn’t need iron clad logic, or it just made more sense to me; or I wasn’t at the end of a day long reading binge, with eyes on the finish line. The last point I had a change of heart on was the last chapter of the book, set 20 odd years after the battle of hogwarts. I have a very clear memory of disliking that chapter, feeling like it sounded juvenile after the relative seriousness of the seventh book. This time through, again, I just didn’t have that criticism. It felt like a fine coda to a serious book. It was economical in the way it gave you just enough bits of post-school harry potter to give you an impression of the world. You knew the world had to be peaceful enough to get all the kids back to school, and that various wizarding families were still going strong. So, the short version here is that my wife was right in telling me to re-read this, and that I do have a renewed appreciation for what Rowling has created with this series.
Salt - Mark Kurlansky
I have a soft spot for a particularly dry sort of non-fiction, of which this book is a great example. My wife used to tease me about a book I read about how each of the states came to have its particular borders. To me it was an interesting look at how the balance between federal and state power in the u.s. has changed over time, but to her it was an almost comically dry book that would have been hard to read even at gunpoint. I tried to read her a little bit out loud once, and she made me stop after only a few sentences. It is her loss that she will never now know how it came to be that the southern border of Michigan didn’t incorporate the then booming port towns of Toledo and Gary in exchange for the land that would become the upper peninsula. Sometimes with books this dry the premise can sound good, and with what the author has to present it might make a really good and dense say, long form magazine article, or chapter in a larger book. However, once you try to make it into a full length book, and when you don’t have a narrative to rely on, it really slows down towards the end. You’ve already seen the same formula play out in all the earlier chapters, all the same general facts in the same general order. With the state boundary book, there are definitely interesting stories to be had concerning certain borders, but the author tells you every tale of every single border, regardless of if it even remotely worth telling or not. Salt suffers from the same problem, which is, I guess, one of editing. I was really interested in many of the historical aspects of salt throughout human history and I felt sort of dim for not realizing how important it was in ancient societies. But, sweet jesus salt, you need to pick and choose. I don’t need to know the type of salted fish that each society of man since the invention of writing has eaten in lean times. I think we could just have said in the beginning of the book: look, lots of people ate fish. Salted fish. Lots of times sardines, then later it was cod. Bang! I just eliminated 75 pages from the book. This is not to say the entire book suffered from editing problems, or repetition, I did learn quite a bit. The Chinese, Romans, and later the renaissance Italians all had major tax revenues from the sale of iron and salt. The control of salt mines or other salt works played a major part in the placement of early settlements, and was the crux of many military conflicts. The problem was that despite all the good stuff, the boring fish salting parts outweighed it, and I had to quit reading the book at seventy percent. That is probably the farthest I’ve ever been into a book without finishing it. I’m usually a stickler about finishing a book after a certain point, but I just couldn’t do it this time. I’m not even sure how we finally got salt to be such a easily available commodity in modern times, and I would really like to know. Maybe with some distance I’ll be ready to go back and find out the thrilling conclusion to how we now salt foods in the canning process, and which fish we currently salt the most.
Divergent - Veronica Roth
There seems to be quite a lot of science fiction/fantasy young adult novels of varying degrees of quality lately that have become very popular. On one hand you have your harry potters, and your hunger games, while on the other hand you have your twilights, and all of your, I’m assuming, even lower quality twilight derivatives. Seriously, have you been to a bookstore lately? The young adult section is preposterous, lousy with sexy vampire knockoffs. Sometimes I feel conflicted about reading these (not the sexy vampire knockoffs, the regular YA books), almost like if I read them and like them that it reflects poorly on me and my taste in books. This book skirts the line for me between books that are acceptable for children to read but are written well enough to have value for adults, and books that are just for kids. I enjoyed reading it, and would probably read a sequel if it came out, but it didn’t grab me the same way the hunger games did. There was more adolescent pining, and more doe eyes, more swooning than in that. Not that I am made of stone; it was in part, a pleasant reminder of days past. I remember what it was like to feel an electric thrill just to be holding someones hand, or the rush you felt throughout your whole body when you were just talking to, or looking at someone you had feelings for. Maybe I’m being too critical of the writing, saying it is so youthful, when all that was really happening was that I was feeling old while reading it because I was remembering how far removed I am from that mindset.
Despite generally liking this new wave of science fiction, some of the problems I have with it stems from my personal feelings towards that genre as a whole. I think a lot of these YA scifi books are intended perhaps not exclusively for new readers, but readers who are new to books featuring magic, or future technology. My problem with them is that I usually want more background information on the world itself. I come to these worlds for the details, the history, all the little details. I feel like with this book, you are given some background, but not the whole picture. The world is sort of fucked in this book, but I want to know why. How did it get this way? There exists a brand new society. OK, again, how did that come to be? Was it a war, a peaceful revolution? Did we go full caveman for a while before building this new thing from the ashes? Instead of it just being a story that happens to be set in this new and fanciful place, I want to know about this new place and how it affects the characters who occupy it. I want it to seem like a real and plausible place, and I want to see how the people reflect the world in their actions. A story set in a place and time I know is going to have all of that back and forth already, and even one set in an unfamiliar place but in my time is going to have a lot of contextual clues for me to work with. A story, even one that isn’t fantastic in nature, but that is set in a different time and place than I know has to be as much about the place as it does the people. It doesn’t do me any good to know about Frank Mccourt, without getting a feel for what Ireland of the 1930’s was like. It didn’t do me any good to get to know Francie Nolan without learning how she related to Brooklyn of 1912. I don’t feel like I can really get to know a character without some context, and I don’t mind having to work at learning about the world they live in, but in order to do that the world they live in has to be made real enough for me to feel like I can place them in it.
Kurt Vonnegut - Man without a country
Kurt Vonnegut is a special author to me, I discovered him at a time in my life where it seemed like I was just waiting to hear what he had to say. I remember reading cat’s cradle while on vacation with my mom in Florida, I had picked it up on a whim from a very agreeably priced local used bookstore. His blend of dark humor and wit was one I was instantly in love with, and I have read most of his books more than once. I read his final work on a whim as a palette cleanser between other books, and as always, he has quite a lot to say. Some of it is great and timeless, but a few of his opinions sound old fashioned. However, for a man who has seen and done so much, I think we can forgive him his old fashioned-ness.
I could write a lot about him, or about most of the topics in his book, but Instead I’ll just relay a point he made that had not occurred to me about a popular saying. The saying he talks about is a quote taken from Karl Marx, that religion is the opiate of the masses. The context I usually hear this quote used in is as a critique of modern Christianity. The way it usually seems to be used is to compare religion to opiate addiction: it is easy to get into, hard to kick, and all encompassing while you are under its spell. I myself have used it in this context before, and I still think there is some truth in that comparison, and certainly not limited to Christianity. The point that Vonnegut makes was one I had never considered before, and it was this: at the time of Marx’s writing, opiates were one of, if not the only truly reliable pain killer available to doctors. It seems that this may be the missed point about this quote - that it isn’t the addictive qualities we have come to associate with the opiate family, but the relief of pain it and only it can truly provide. As I have grown away from my brash youth, I have come to realize that despite the fact that it plays no role in my life, religion does provide comfort to millions of other people. It is easy to sit outside and criticize those who have faith, but it is missing the point entirely that organized religion, despite its many (many) faults can provide a very serious relief of metaphysical angst to people in a way that for them, nothing else can. This was a very insightful look at a quote I have heard so many times without giving it any real critical thought, and it reminded me to always think twice about the things you hear or read, and to try to look beneath the surface for what else might be in there.
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - J.K. Rowling
My wife Has a special relationship with the harry potter series, they are without a doubt her favorite books. She has read the series through in its entirety at least 6 or 7 times, though her super fan-dom ends there, falling well short of the robe wearing, slash fiction writing, brewing your own butter-beer sort. I was the one who introduced her to the books, though in a roundabout fashion. I read the books in college, receiving the first four as a gift from my mother, who knew I liked to read, and sent me them after hearing all the hullabaloo. After giving them the sort of look Ron might have given his christmas sweater (BOOM!) I decided to give them a try, reasoning it would have been rude to exchange them without reading them at all. So I laid down in bed and opened up the first book, pledging to stop no sooner than two chapters in. As you may have seen coming, I read all four straight through, only breaking for food and sleep. I got the remaining three as they came out, narrowly dodging spoilers for all three later books, as they came out in the summer and I was working at camps for all those years. When the sixth book came out I was dating my wife to be at the time, and she asked me if I thought she would like that book. I said yeah, but you should start with the first one. What I did not realize at the time was that this suggestion was almost like putting her on the rack and demanding under duress of bodily harm that she ignore me and start with the sixth one, like a wang. Which she did. She than turned around and read the whole series, from the beginning, and then number six again. Which made her want to start over. So, when the last book came out, we were both eagerly anticipating it. We went out the morning after release, and each bought our own copy so that we could both power through it simultaneously, in order to avoid one of us knowing more than the other, and possibly having the long awaited ending get ruined for us when we went back to camp on Monday. This was the only time I had read the seventh book, and she requested that I read it again, so that I could actually take my time and enjoy it. She also though I might have a different opinion about it this time. We made a deal, a book exchange, where I agreed to read this if she read a book of my choice. I had her read slaughterhouse five, she hated it. Go figure.
As it turns out, this is a really good book. It wraps up one of the most popular book series of all time, and it does it in a totally satisfactory way, which is much more than can be said of the endings of many otherwise great series that shit out towards the end. It has been since the seventh book was first released that I have read any harry potter, and in the meantime I have seen the movies a number of times. The movies, while good, aren’t as good as the books, and some of the characters creep in and take over their novelized counterparts in your head. In their defense, the movies have some really incredible casting choices in them, many more good than bad. The problem is that this seems to make the bad ones stick out that much more. Yes, Hermione is a bit more shrill than I thought she was in the books, but what I am really talking about is Dumbledore in movies three through seven. He is the worst. THE WORST. Dumbledore is one of my most beloved characters across all literature, just the perfect mixture of dad, grandpa and teacher. It’s not just that the actor doesn’t do him justice, its that he gets him the opposite of right. He yells, and loses his temper, he isn’t warm or caring. He misses out on all the things that make the character right and good. It was nice to get the real character, the one I remember from the books back in my head as the gold standard.
******* YARRRRR, HERE BE SPOILERS FOR BOOK SEVEN *******
So, there are three main things I didn’t like when I first read the seventh book. The first was the sequence where Harry, Ron and Hermione are all stuck in the tent, searching for horcruxes. I remember feeling like it dragged, and was poorly paced. It didn’t seem that way at all this time. Even though it is slower than some of the other parts of the book, it still seemed well paced, and appropriate for that part of the story. It gave me a better feeling of how cut off they were from everybody else during their search, and how alone they were in the fight, or at least how alone they felt. The second issue I had the first time through was that I felt like the sequence where harry goes to meet voldemort in the woods felt contrived and poorly explained afterwords. Again, I did not feel the same way this time through. Even though I couldn’t now draw you an exact set of instructions on how to set up a proxy horcrux in a target of a killing spell that puts a part of your soul into them, it all seemed appropriate for the end of the book. For some reason this time through I didn’t need iron clad logic, or it just made more sense to me; or I wasn’t at the end of a day long reading binge, with eyes on the finish line. The last point I had a change of heart on was the last chapter of the book, set 20 odd years after the battle of hogwarts. I have a very clear memory of disliking that chapter, feeling like it sounded juvenile after the relative seriousness of the seventh book. This time through, again, I just didn’t have that criticism. It felt like a fine coda to a serious book. It was economical in the way it gave you just enough bits of post-school harry potter to give you an impression of the world. You knew the world had to be peaceful enough to get all the kids back to school, and that various wizarding families were still going strong. So, the short version here is that my wife was right in telling me to re-read this, and that I do have a renewed appreciation for what Rowling has created with this series.
August
I was asked by a co-worker during a conversation about hobbies out of work, when I have time to do all the things that I do. The specific thing in question was designing and building a metro rail system for all my friends in Minecraft in order to speed up overall mining operations. Not that, past this, I claimed to be a great doer of things, but I mentioned that In addition to fake public works projects, I also read quite a bit. Additionally, I also find time to play other games (video and board), cook the occasional fancy meal, and write all this. I mentioned that sometimes I work on wood too, but that was mostly to look extra accomplished, I haven’t really worked on any wood projects in a while. Now I’ll be the first to admit, I’m really not that motivated of a guy, I feel like I’m somewhere in the middle/lower middle in terms of overall human levels of get up and go. But the take away from the conversation was that it was astounding, given the number of children in my house, the amount of free time I seem to have to fill with my various hobbies. Do I do more than I realize? Or do I work with people who don’t fill their time with hobbies, but instead with..... something else? I never quite figured out what. Maybe TV, maybe just family affairs.
Ok. Books.
The botany of desire - Michael Pollan
This was an interesting read about the human relationship with four breeds of plants: the tulip, apples, marijuana, and potatoes. These specific plants were selected mostly because of their ability to adapt to human desires, hence the title. Each one of these plants has the ability to change quite easily, or more specifically to be changed by humans quite easily. If you were so inclined, I think it would be easy to assume the author has a poor grasp of evolutionary biology, due to his constant discussion of the plants desires, as if they are willing and knowing participants in their own evolution. I’m confident the author knows what he is talking about, and is using the term in a poetic way, or as a way of summing up the will of not the individual plant, but of the species for overall survival. And even then, I don’t think he uses the term in the same way as a human desire, with it’s sense of purposeful agency, but instead as a force one is incapable of fighting, more of a destiny than a desire. It does seem like an excellent toe hold for someone who wanted to try to pick apart the evolutionary stance this book takes, though maybe I’m giving that camp too much credit here; I don’t think they base much of what they say on evidence and reason.
Each plant that the author chose to focus on has its own way of adapting itself to human beings, and the reason we interact heavily with not just these plants, but most of the plants we grow is specifically because of the ease in which they adapt to our needs. Marijuana plants will grow in almost any condition, and react quite favorably to modification of its genetics and growing conditions.They will grow larger and faster if you give them more light or Carbon Dioxide than they would ever find in nature, with no adverse side effects; it has a nearly inexhaustible appetite for growth. On the other hand, instead of marijuana’s malleability, the apple gives us genetic variety. Each apple contains five seeds, all of them wildly genetically different. This allows us to cull from a seed planted orchard only the trees and fruits that have the traits we want, selecting some for durability, or sweetness, or color. This variety also allows for the apple to adapt to new environments quite easily; being so different makes it more likely that sat least one will thrive in a given area, making it easy to move the apple through different climates and growing regions.
My only complaint was that the author continued to harp on this dichotomy between Dionysus and Apollo, comparing the plants and their various proponents to either a wild Dionysus, or an ordered Apollo. Not that it was a bad comparison, or more specifically, not that it would have been a bad comparison just the once, but it seemed to get brought up in every chapter, sometimes in multiple spots. Some of the comparisons were alright, but after the fourth or fifth time of hearing about the wild Dionysian abandon of this, that or some other thing I wanted to say “OK, mike, I get it. Untamed wilds. Awesome. Lets move it along.” This is a minor quibble though, overall this was a very insightful book regarding the co-evolution of humankind and the plants we are drawn to.
The girl with the dragon tattoo - Steig Larsson
My mother has been advising me to read this for a while, and at first I put it somewhere in my queue past the top three, then continued to shuffle it downward as newer and more pressing books came along, or at the very least, books I happened upon sooner after finishing whatever it was I was on at the time. She has given me good advice before, so it wasn’t a polite sort of, oh yes, that sounds good, I'll be sure to get to that when I have time, but oh... I have so many things to read first - no, no, why don’t you just keep it for now sort of situation. Anyway, I got around to it, and it is quite an enjoyable book. Other people who told me to read it warned me to press through the first 100 or so pages, and that it picked up after that. I liked it right away, though I admit it starts slow - but that is one of the things I like the most about this series: it is willing to take its time, stopping to smell the character development flowers, if you will. Rare is the book willing to have a long span of time be devoted to really kick ass and thorough researching segments. Despite the upcoming (second) film version of this book, I don’t think this is the sort of book that translates well to cinema. There is so much of it that comes from character’s inner thoughts, or from finding a key piece of data in a library, that it will take some serious screenplay modification to keep the pace of the film from being unwatchable. (You know what would translate well to film? The hunger games. I rarely cared about what Katniss was thinking, and would love to be able to focus mostly on the games, and the world, and not give more than one half of one shit about which of her boys she is going to hold hands with, or whatever. No inner thoughts, just a few brief mopey stares at some young beefcake, and then back to more hunger, and more games.) Despite the slow start, and your opinions on that, it turns into a pretty intense page turner at some point. The real draw for me though was that is does this without veering into Dan Brown territory, and forcing you to acknowledge the poor writing whenever you give it any praise, so as to avoid looking like some sort of literary philistine.
With books that have been translated, it is hard to tell what stems from the cultural differences, or the peculiarities of the language, and what instead is just the way that particular author writes. At one point somebody is said to be as daft as a syphilitic pole cat. Is this a common turn of phrase in Sweden? I really hope it is, and that it was just so colorful that it defied anything other than literal translation. This other-ness adds a nice flavor to the experience, though I worry in some cases what I might be missing by not being in on some of the knowledge that might fill in some of the gaps. For example, if you were familiar with the Midwest, and I told you that I was from rural Indiana (I’m not) and that I went to college in Chicago, but then I moved to Madison after school, all those places would color a picture of the person being described. Maybe a bit of a hayseed, who goes to a big city to get away from his country roots, he then decides to get away from the rush of the city but still be somewhere with a lively arts community. If you weren’t familiar with any of those places, then you would have no more information than could be found on a map. Like if I said to you that I grew up in Malmo, and then went to university in Gothenburg, but decided later to move to Trollhattan; not quite the same story is painted, instead it is just reads as a series of facts. This book makes me, at some points, feel like I may be missing out on some of the details between the lines. I still don’t know the cultural standing of the Nykvarn municipality. I don’t really know the difference between the Fiskargatan and Lundagatan Neighborhoods. I’m not really sure if they are even neighborhoods, or if they are regions, or suburbs. To be fair, I don’t know the difference between the upper east side and lower west side of new york city, so this is not a thing unique to books taking place outside of America, but still - sometimes it just feels like reading names off a map with no frame of reference. The author does a good job of giving you some contextual clues, but I’m sure to a Stockholm native the book is a much richer read.
The Alchemist - Paulo Coelho
I’m not sure what I expected given the back of the book blurb on this one (I’m not sure how I know the back of the book blurb, given that the back of the book I read it on is matte black, but I do) which states in various breathless ways what a life-changing read this is, and how it will forever alter your view of the world. I wanted for this to be true, to really have an eye opening experience. I’ve had them before with books, but they all seemed to be either in the impressionable 12-14 stage, or the equally impressionable 20-22 stage. I went back to read Ishmael a while back with the same desire, though that time it was to see if it held up over time. It did not. So I wonder if my feeling towards this would have been different if I had read it at the same time that I read Ishmael.
Regardless of what might have been, this did have the effect on me I would have hoped. Not that it was bad, it just seemed sort of simple. In fact, simple by itself would have been preferable. The story isn’t the problem - a young man goes from Spain to Egypt to see the pyramids and has to suffer through a number of setbacks on the way. The book has a good message: if you work towards following your dreams they will (be much more likely to) come true. The problem is that it makes this so fucking obvious the whole time. Hey, hey hey, did you know your destiny is your own? HEY! LISTEN! DESTINY! LIFE DREAM! I generally don’t like it when “the message” is made a central theme of the book (show, game, so forth). Central theme might not be the right way to describe it; How about instead, I don’t like it when the subtext becomes the text. If it had just been a story about a young man going on an adventure instead of being complacent in his life, I think I would have drawn a message from that. Instead, it makes damn well sure that you know that if you FOLLOW YOUR DREAMS the universe will HELP YOU ACHIEVE YOUR DESTINY. Subtext should always be sub to some degree or it ruins whatever meaning it could have had, like having to explain the punchline to a joke. I usually resent this sort of hand holding, and appreciate being allowed to figure things out on my own; I like the feeling of understanding that comes from having to mull over an idea in my head. I think that in cases like this, the story would be able to stand on its own if it was just written straight. If the message is good enough, it will rise to the top and people will understand it. Well, certain people will, and I think that is the real issue. By lowering the bar, you let a lot more people in on what is really going on. And again, the message (that is loud-speakered at you from almost every page) is not a bad one, maybe a bit new-agey towards the end, but still a good thing to think about. Is it worth it though? Is it better to have a book that reaches more people, but alienates those who like to think for themselves, or have an somewhat obtuse theme that only comes to those willing to dig for it? I guess it depends on which side you are asking. For me, I truck with the latter, and thought this book came off as trite and heavy-handed.
The girl who played with fire - Steig Larsson
***SPOILER WARNING***
The thing that struck me to write about regarding this book contains major spoilers for both this book, and season five of the wire. If you want to read/see either and haven’t, this is the last book for the month, go ahead and stop right here.
***SPOILER WARNING***
It is a shame that the author passed away, as after reading this book I think there is probably more than just one remaining book’s worth of fertile writing ground for these characters and this setting. This book, like its predecessor, starts slow. And again, I liked this part of the book very much. It is rare that a mystery book just lets the characters get fleshed out without getting right to the meat of things. I guess what is rare is that the book has such a laid back pace to start with and it never feels boring. I was interested to know what was going on in the lives of the main characters, and with their jobs, travels, and so forth. It was refreshing. And again, like the first one, at some point it moves slowly and seamlessly into a fast paced story, one that is hard to get too far away from.
My wife and I watch some TV series, not that many, usually ones that are critically well regarded, and for dramas, usually we watch them all in one fell swoop. We watched the entirety of the sopranos, mad men and battlestar galactica in the course of a few weeks each. Right before the birth of our second child, we hunkered down for what is generally regarded as the best television series of its time: the wire. It’s reputation is well deserved, and it was a pleasure to watch. One of the most likable characters in the show is a man named Omar. I was trying to think of what title to put in front of him, like I could have said, a robber named Omar. Or I could have said a noble anti-hero named Omar. But that is the beauty of the show, it doesn’t fit well with easy archetypes. It is the exact opposite of a book like the alchemist. It doesn’t hold your hand at all. In fact, if you reach out to hold its hand, it swats you away with a harsh look on its face. By the time we get to the fifth season, many of the characters slide from the moral gray area they occupy into the moral black area, making clearly bad decisions in order to (poorly) rectify the bad decisions made by others. Omar is left as one of the only remaining people who seem to be following a code. He was one of the very few characters out of many whose actions we felt deserved some sort of positive outcome; he was the last man standing. In the second or third to last episode he is killed in a humiliating and anti-climactic way. He was acting alone, with nobody who would carry on his task. I was crushed. I actually yelled out, and threw something to the floor. It felt so unfair. At the end of the episode I said I wasn’t interested in finishing the show, and part of me really did feel that way. I felt betrayed.
I bring all this up because of the end of girl who played with fire. In the end one of the main characters is finally meeting up with her father, a man who abused her and her mother, a clear cut villain by any definition. She finally tracks him down and in a conflict with him (the sort she has creatively escaped from before), she gets shot. First in the hip, then in the shoulder, then in the head. Her perspective fades to black and the next scene is her father burying her at the spot of the shooting out in the woods. This was only a day or two after the incident with Omar, and I said out loud, albeit very quietly, “are you fucking kidding me?” I was ready to open my window and drop my book onto my back porch. After just shy of two books worth of getting to know and like this girl, now they just shoot her in the head and bury her in an unmarked grave? It was too much to handle. I put the book down for a minute and thought about it, and it seemed out of character for this author. I kept reading, and it turns out that the shot to the head was not fatal, and she ends up clawing her way out of the shallow grave. That fits in much more closely with the tone of these books than if, ha-fucking-ha, one of the two main characters dies shamefully and short of their goal two books in.
These two incidents made me think about the death of characters, especially in light of the fact that I specifically praised it when in regards to game of thrones. I still feel about deaths the way I said I did for that series, but I can’t quite put my finger on what makes it different. In the girl who played with fire the character was too central to the story line for it to sit well, But in the wire, the comparison was more direct to game of thrones - an ensemble drama where very few characters, if any, are without faults. Why was the death of one character so much more unpleasant in Baltimore, than in Westeros? There are definitely parallels between the two, and specifically between the characters who die, but there is some difference between the two that I can’t reason out. I remember being astonished at some of the deaths in game of thrones, but instead of leaving a bad taste in my mouth and making me lose interest in the story, after I resumed reading it made me want to read more. I wish I had a pithy ending for this, but I don’t. It is just a question at the end with no good answer. Sometimes the death of main characters draws me in and sometimes it pushes me away.
Ok. Books.
The botany of desire - Michael Pollan
This was an interesting read about the human relationship with four breeds of plants: the tulip, apples, marijuana, and potatoes. These specific plants were selected mostly because of their ability to adapt to human desires, hence the title. Each one of these plants has the ability to change quite easily, or more specifically to be changed by humans quite easily. If you were so inclined, I think it would be easy to assume the author has a poor grasp of evolutionary biology, due to his constant discussion of the plants desires, as if they are willing and knowing participants in their own evolution. I’m confident the author knows what he is talking about, and is using the term in a poetic way, or as a way of summing up the will of not the individual plant, but of the species for overall survival. And even then, I don’t think he uses the term in the same way as a human desire, with it’s sense of purposeful agency, but instead as a force one is incapable of fighting, more of a destiny than a desire. It does seem like an excellent toe hold for someone who wanted to try to pick apart the evolutionary stance this book takes, though maybe I’m giving that camp too much credit here; I don’t think they base much of what they say on evidence and reason.
Each plant that the author chose to focus on has its own way of adapting itself to human beings, and the reason we interact heavily with not just these plants, but most of the plants we grow is specifically because of the ease in which they adapt to our needs. Marijuana plants will grow in almost any condition, and react quite favorably to modification of its genetics and growing conditions.They will grow larger and faster if you give them more light or Carbon Dioxide than they would ever find in nature, with no adverse side effects; it has a nearly inexhaustible appetite for growth. On the other hand, instead of marijuana’s malleability, the apple gives us genetic variety. Each apple contains five seeds, all of them wildly genetically different. This allows us to cull from a seed planted orchard only the trees and fruits that have the traits we want, selecting some for durability, or sweetness, or color. This variety also allows for the apple to adapt to new environments quite easily; being so different makes it more likely that sat least one will thrive in a given area, making it easy to move the apple through different climates and growing regions.
My only complaint was that the author continued to harp on this dichotomy between Dionysus and Apollo, comparing the plants and their various proponents to either a wild Dionysus, or an ordered Apollo. Not that it was a bad comparison, or more specifically, not that it would have been a bad comparison just the once, but it seemed to get brought up in every chapter, sometimes in multiple spots. Some of the comparisons were alright, but after the fourth or fifth time of hearing about the wild Dionysian abandon of this, that or some other thing I wanted to say “OK, mike, I get it. Untamed wilds. Awesome. Lets move it along.” This is a minor quibble though, overall this was a very insightful book regarding the co-evolution of humankind and the plants we are drawn to.
The girl with the dragon tattoo - Steig Larsson
My mother has been advising me to read this for a while, and at first I put it somewhere in my queue past the top three, then continued to shuffle it downward as newer and more pressing books came along, or at the very least, books I happened upon sooner after finishing whatever it was I was on at the time. She has given me good advice before, so it wasn’t a polite sort of, oh yes, that sounds good, I'll be sure to get to that when I have time, but oh... I have so many things to read first - no, no, why don’t you just keep it for now sort of situation. Anyway, I got around to it, and it is quite an enjoyable book. Other people who told me to read it warned me to press through the first 100 or so pages, and that it picked up after that. I liked it right away, though I admit it starts slow - but that is one of the things I like the most about this series: it is willing to take its time, stopping to smell the character development flowers, if you will. Rare is the book willing to have a long span of time be devoted to really kick ass and thorough researching segments. Despite the upcoming (second) film version of this book, I don’t think this is the sort of book that translates well to cinema. There is so much of it that comes from character’s inner thoughts, or from finding a key piece of data in a library, that it will take some serious screenplay modification to keep the pace of the film from being unwatchable. (You know what would translate well to film? The hunger games. I rarely cared about what Katniss was thinking, and would love to be able to focus mostly on the games, and the world, and not give more than one half of one shit about which of her boys she is going to hold hands with, or whatever. No inner thoughts, just a few brief mopey stares at some young beefcake, and then back to more hunger, and more games.) Despite the slow start, and your opinions on that, it turns into a pretty intense page turner at some point. The real draw for me though was that is does this without veering into Dan Brown territory, and forcing you to acknowledge the poor writing whenever you give it any praise, so as to avoid looking like some sort of literary philistine.
With books that have been translated, it is hard to tell what stems from the cultural differences, or the peculiarities of the language, and what instead is just the way that particular author writes. At one point somebody is said to be as daft as a syphilitic pole cat. Is this a common turn of phrase in Sweden? I really hope it is, and that it was just so colorful that it defied anything other than literal translation. This other-ness adds a nice flavor to the experience, though I worry in some cases what I might be missing by not being in on some of the knowledge that might fill in some of the gaps. For example, if you were familiar with the Midwest, and I told you that I was from rural Indiana (I’m not) and that I went to college in Chicago, but then I moved to Madison after school, all those places would color a picture of the person being described. Maybe a bit of a hayseed, who goes to a big city to get away from his country roots, he then decides to get away from the rush of the city but still be somewhere with a lively arts community. If you weren’t familiar with any of those places, then you would have no more information than could be found on a map. Like if I said to you that I grew up in Malmo, and then went to university in Gothenburg, but decided later to move to Trollhattan; not quite the same story is painted, instead it is just reads as a series of facts. This book makes me, at some points, feel like I may be missing out on some of the details between the lines. I still don’t know the cultural standing of the Nykvarn municipality. I don’t really know the difference between the Fiskargatan and Lundagatan Neighborhoods. I’m not really sure if they are even neighborhoods, or if they are regions, or suburbs. To be fair, I don’t know the difference between the upper east side and lower west side of new york city, so this is not a thing unique to books taking place outside of America, but still - sometimes it just feels like reading names off a map with no frame of reference. The author does a good job of giving you some contextual clues, but I’m sure to a Stockholm native the book is a much richer read.
The Alchemist - Paulo Coelho
I’m not sure what I expected given the back of the book blurb on this one (I’m not sure how I know the back of the book blurb, given that the back of the book I read it on is matte black, but I do) which states in various breathless ways what a life-changing read this is, and how it will forever alter your view of the world. I wanted for this to be true, to really have an eye opening experience. I’ve had them before with books, but they all seemed to be either in the impressionable 12-14 stage, or the equally impressionable 20-22 stage. I went back to read Ishmael a while back with the same desire, though that time it was to see if it held up over time. It did not. So I wonder if my feeling towards this would have been different if I had read it at the same time that I read Ishmael.
Regardless of what might have been, this did have the effect on me I would have hoped. Not that it was bad, it just seemed sort of simple. In fact, simple by itself would have been preferable. The story isn’t the problem - a young man goes from Spain to Egypt to see the pyramids and has to suffer through a number of setbacks on the way. The book has a good message: if you work towards following your dreams they will (be much more likely to) come true. The problem is that it makes this so fucking obvious the whole time. Hey, hey hey, did you know your destiny is your own? HEY! LISTEN! DESTINY! LIFE DREAM! I generally don’t like it when “the message” is made a central theme of the book (show, game, so forth). Central theme might not be the right way to describe it; How about instead, I don’t like it when the subtext becomes the text. If it had just been a story about a young man going on an adventure instead of being complacent in his life, I think I would have drawn a message from that. Instead, it makes damn well sure that you know that if you FOLLOW YOUR DREAMS the universe will HELP YOU ACHIEVE YOUR DESTINY. Subtext should always be sub to some degree or it ruins whatever meaning it could have had, like having to explain the punchline to a joke. I usually resent this sort of hand holding, and appreciate being allowed to figure things out on my own; I like the feeling of understanding that comes from having to mull over an idea in my head. I think that in cases like this, the story would be able to stand on its own if it was just written straight. If the message is good enough, it will rise to the top and people will understand it. Well, certain people will, and I think that is the real issue. By lowering the bar, you let a lot more people in on what is really going on. And again, the message (that is loud-speakered at you from almost every page) is not a bad one, maybe a bit new-agey towards the end, but still a good thing to think about. Is it worth it though? Is it better to have a book that reaches more people, but alienates those who like to think for themselves, or have an somewhat obtuse theme that only comes to those willing to dig for it? I guess it depends on which side you are asking. For me, I truck with the latter, and thought this book came off as trite and heavy-handed.
The girl who played with fire - Steig Larsson
***SPOILER WARNING***
The thing that struck me to write about regarding this book contains major spoilers for both this book, and season five of the wire. If you want to read/see either and haven’t, this is the last book for the month, go ahead and stop right here.
***SPOILER WARNING***
It is a shame that the author passed away, as after reading this book I think there is probably more than just one remaining book’s worth of fertile writing ground for these characters and this setting. This book, like its predecessor, starts slow. And again, I liked this part of the book very much. It is rare that a mystery book just lets the characters get fleshed out without getting right to the meat of things. I guess what is rare is that the book has such a laid back pace to start with and it never feels boring. I was interested to know what was going on in the lives of the main characters, and with their jobs, travels, and so forth. It was refreshing. And again, like the first one, at some point it moves slowly and seamlessly into a fast paced story, one that is hard to get too far away from.
My wife and I watch some TV series, not that many, usually ones that are critically well regarded, and for dramas, usually we watch them all in one fell swoop. We watched the entirety of the sopranos, mad men and battlestar galactica in the course of a few weeks each. Right before the birth of our second child, we hunkered down for what is generally regarded as the best television series of its time: the wire. It’s reputation is well deserved, and it was a pleasure to watch. One of the most likable characters in the show is a man named Omar. I was trying to think of what title to put in front of him, like I could have said, a robber named Omar. Or I could have said a noble anti-hero named Omar. But that is the beauty of the show, it doesn’t fit well with easy archetypes. It is the exact opposite of a book like the alchemist. It doesn’t hold your hand at all. In fact, if you reach out to hold its hand, it swats you away with a harsh look on its face. By the time we get to the fifth season, many of the characters slide from the moral gray area they occupy into the moral black area, making clearly bad decisions in order to (poorly) rectify the bad decisions made by others. Omar is left as one of the only remaining people who seem to be following a code. He was one of the very few characters out of many whose actions we felt deserved some sort of positive outcome; he was the last man standing. In the second or third to last episode he is killed in a humiliating and anti-climactic way. He was acting alone, with nobody who would carry on his task. I was crushed. I actually yelled out, and threw something to the floor. It felt so unfair. At the end of the episode I said I wasn’t interested in finishing the show, and part of me really did feel that way. I felt betrayed.
I bring all this up because of the end of girl who played with fire. In the end one of the main characters is finally meeting up with her father, a man who abused her and her mother, a clear cut villain by any definition. She finally tracks him down and in a conflict with him (the sort she has creatively escaped from before), she gets shot. First in the hip, then in the shoulder, then in the head. Her perspective fades to black and the next scene is her father burying her at the spot of the shooting out in the woods. This was only a day or two after the incident with Omar, and I said out loud, albeit very quietly, “are you fucking kidding me?” I was ready to open my window and drop my book onto my back porch. After just shy of two books worth of getting to know and like this girl, now they just shoot her in the head and bury her in an unmarked grave? It was too much to handle. I put the book down for a minute and thought about it, and it seemed out of character for this author. I kept reading, and it turns out that the shot to the head was not fatal, and she ends up clawing her way out of the shallow grave. That fits in much more closely with the tone of these books than if, ha-fucking-ha, one of the two main characters dies shamefully and short of their goal two books in.
These two incidents made me think about the death of characters, especially in light of the fact that I specifically praised it when in regards to game of thrones. I still feel about deaths the way I said I did for that series, but I can’t quite put my finger on what makes it different. In the girl who played with fire the character was too central to the story line for it to sit well, But in the wire, the comparison was more direct to game of thrones - an ensemble drama where very few characters, if any, are without faults. Why was the death of one character so much more unpleasant in Baltimore, than in Westeros? There are definitely parallels between the two, and specifically between the characters who die, but there is some difference between the two that I can’t reason out. I remember being astonished at some of the deaths in game of thrones, but instead of leaving a bad taste in my mouth and making me lose interest in the story, after I resumed reading it made me want to read more. I wish I had a pithy ending for this, but I don’t. It is just a question at the end with no good answer. Sometimes the death of main characters draws me in and sometimes it pushes me away.
July
Well, two kids hasn’t stopped me from reading yet, though I’m pretty sure the worst of the sleep deprivation is yet to come; it has only been less than a week as of this writing. Last night I noticed that my book light might have been too bright for her, even though her bassinet is on the opposite side of the bed from me. This would be a difficult development, because I can usually count on at least 15 minutes or so of reading every night. Maybe I need to do my reading in a more covert fashion, and prop a blanket over my head while I do it.
John dies at the end – David Wong
I went into this one blind, picking it on title alone from positive Internet word of mouth (Word of hand? Letter of keyboard mouth?) The author writes for cracked.com, which despite formerly being the poor man’s mad magazine, has carved itself out a pretty funny corner of the Internet mostly via clever lists. As it turns out the book became popular in much the same way as I had originally heard about it. The author had written a short horror/comedy story, and posted it online around Halloween instead of his usual writing, and it got a small following. He continued this trend every year, and the following grew steadily until he decided to put all of the stories together into a book. This book reflects its origin by sometimes feeling a bit disjointed, though this makes perfect sense given that it was written piece by piece over a large span of time. There are story lines that fizzle out, and others that come in somewhat unexpectedly later on in the arc of the book. You cannot try to take this book at face value and make sense of all the ins and outs of the plot, it is by no means that precise. The book does a great job presenting a very specific mood throughout without seeming to care very much if the entire plot is logically airtight. In this regard it is much more David Lynch than Christopher Nolan; sometimes (constantly) weird shit happens, and you just have to roll with it and not think too hard about it.
By the end of the book I was left with was roughly the same feeling I remember from evil dead and army of darkness – an easygoing mix of scary and funny, these two things joined securely by absurdity. I am usually not one for serious horror in any medium, my overactive imagination takes whatever fright is actually there and ramps it up to terrible, otherworldly levels. My usual response is something like turning all of the lights on, locking the windows and putting a chair in front of the door, standing up in the middle of the bed for the entire night with a machete and a football helmet. Just to be safe. Please let the jury see exhibit A, the great event horizon freak out of 1997-1999; and exhibit B, the time I read the shining at night in the winter, what-the-fuck-was-I-thinking. This book did not trip my usual fear reflex, though some parts were creepy, it was creepy in an atmospheric way, instead of creepy in an I-can’t-sleep-ever-again-way.
One of the things that the author did that I found particularly endearing was in his characterization of the evil forces in his world. In this world there are major supernatural forces at work, across multiple dimensions, and as it goes, some of them are pretty fucking evil. Many fictional inter-dimensional evil forces are the strong silent type, see your typical saurons, or cthulus. Silent, evil, most of their work done through lesser evil intermediates. All communication with them is usually limited to a sense of dread, madness or pain. Not so the major evil in this book, Korrok, who is depicted as the guy you always hated in school, the bully, the asshole. Destructive merely for the sake of his own personal enjoyment, instead of fulfilling some sort of prophetic destiny for evil, the main antagonist takes perverse joy in what he does, and imagining all the hurtful ways he could do it. He physically embodies all the world's assholes and bastards, and talks to you the way you’d think they would talk to you, if they were a giant evil throbbing psychic eyeball. In ways it reminds me of Randall Flagg from the stand, evil, but with a lot of personality to go along with it. Not enough to win you over to his side, but enough so that you remember him, standing apart from all the others evils you’ve crossed paths with.
Seventh son – Orson Scott Card
I was looking for a quick read so that I wasn’t tied up with something when dance with dragons came out, so I re-read the first book from the alvin maker series. A good series, especially in the beginning, but each book loses a little of the spark that really drew me to the first one, though a little slower than card’s other series (ender’s Game) which not only fell off the rails in the third book, xenocide, but also crashed into the mountain and shit itself. This series doesn’t hit the wall all at once, but each sequel past number two or three is definitely worse than the one before it, but never by a large enough margin for you to put the series down - you have too much invested in it. By the fifth and sixth books, they are nearly unreadable, and you wonder how you got lured so easily into a bad book. If there was a serious disaster you could have just quit, but the quality level keeps slowly drawing you in deeper, until you are drowning in the quagmire of book 6. Maybe a quick check on Wikipedia for dates of publication to see if he lost his mojo all at once across all series....yeah, 1991 seems like the cut-off. I’ll just let it be known that ender’s game and it’s sequel, and this book and the next two after it are excellent books for most young readers, the rest of each series is to be dealt with at your own risk, and with forewarning.
Ender’s game is probably my favorite book, if measured purely by nostalgic value. It had immense meaning for me when I first read it at 12 or so, hitting at exactly the right time for maximum artistic impression. I have read it more times than any other single book, never going more than a year or two without going back to it. This one piece of art has always been so close to me, but the artist who made it is somebody whose opinions I find sort of reprehensible. This is a hard divide to span, loving the art, but hating the artist. I know some people who have disavowed him and all his works based on his personal views, and the publicity he draws about it. In his case I feel that he is a bigot, and a vocal one at that. But it really isn’t any different if the artist in question is more of a crazy person, like of the Kanye West variety, or sort of an asshole, of the David O. Russel variety. Both are not men I’d probably enjoy knowing personally, but both are excellent at what they do. Many of history’s most beloved artists have been terrible alcoholics or drug addicts, or just generally bastardly. Is it not possible that making truly great art for many must come from a place of turmoil? I usually fall on the side of the argument where you forgive them their faults, and enjoy the things they make as objects divorced from their creators. It seems like a can of worms the other way, where you have to vet the creator of everything you come across to make sure one of them isn’t a bit of a shit. The feeling I get from people who want to banish certain artists works based on their personalities is that they are being somewhat arbitrary in these decisions. If you dug deep enough into most of the people who make the things you love, I worry what you might dig up.
Dance with dragons – George R. R. Martin
I’ll follow the same structure I set out for my review of books one through three.
Short version: sigh. Slightly longer version: FUCKING SIGGGHHHHHHHHHHHH.
I’m not sure where to start here; I’ve been so excited about this book for so many years. The shortest way to actually sum up how I felt about this book is to say that, at the end of it, it was not that book I expected or wanted it to be. Which I guess is my fault for expecting it to be anything in the first place, that is always a certain path to disappointment. It is fair, for those of you who have some familiarity with fantasy books, to say that he wheel of times this series pretty hard in this book. There are so many new names and faces, or names and faces that were peripheral characters before who are being drawn closer to the spotlight. Not that that is a bad thing, or a bizarre thing in a series with such a high character mortality rate, but the manner in which it is done is maddening. I don’t want new threads to be introduced this late, not when there is so much going on in the world that I already care about. I want the things that have been set down already to be resolved. Is that an unfair desire? I don’t know, maybe it is unrealistic. I just don’t want entire sizable fractions of the book devoted to new entirely new characters, when there are major characters who are left dangerously in the lurch, or whose wheels seem to be spinning chapter after chapter. Let me re-phrase what I said before: It’s not that I dislike new twists towards the end of the story, what I don’t like is when they feel shoe-horned in, or like they were never planned in the first place. Lots of times I like to feel like the author knows what is going on, or more importantly, what is going to happen later. Again, I think this is unrealistic. I know from reading what some authors write about their own writing process, that sometimes things happen that they didn’t foresee, or that characters become almost self aware, and start behaving in ways that go against the original plan of the plot without going against their own nature. As a reader, though, it is frustrating. I’ve seen enough good fictions lose their way later on because it seems like they are shooting from the hip instead of sticking to the original story. If, in some cases, there ever was an original story line to follow. I watched some lost, and got tired of it, that’s not what I’m looking for.
It’s not that nothing happens, things do happen. Not nearly as much as happens in books one and three, the agreed upon high points of the series, but it’s not to say that NOTHING happens throughout. The real problem, and this is a bizarre problem for a 1000 page book, five deep in a series, is that I felt like it ended too early. A more apt way to describe this is to say that it ended on the wrong beat to keep this book and the next one interesting. It seems like pretty basic narrative structure to have a character arc, but that is still needed to keep you invested in any story, even one as convoluted as this one. At the end of books one and three, almost all of the characters have had major development in the book, but many questions are left unanswered, many times by the cliffhanger ending. Cliffhangers aren't a problem, they just have to happen at the right point in the story to work properly. In order to avoid any serious spoilers, I’ll draw a comparison to star wars. Near the end of the empire strikes back, luke learns that vader is his father, after a long struggle to go to him and confront him. This would be an example of a good cliffhanger. There is some resolution (his quest to find vader) but also many new questions asked. If empire were this book, it would end when luke arrives at cloud city. Yes things would have happened in the movie, but the ending would have left you limp. No real questions would have been answered, the character arc was less of an arc, and more of a character tangent. Instead of seeing something big happen, and being excited about even more happening, the credits would roll, and you would think “That’s it? That was the end?”
I like the world this book takes place in quite a lot, the atmosphere, the history, all of it. I also like the characters, and as a work of minor to medium character development, this is the cat’s pajamas. However, I also like the over-arcing plot of the books, and mid range character development takes up space that could be devoted to propelling the story in some direction. The worst part about all of this, is that I still feel so close to this series, and so invested in it, that I’m certain to be waiting in line (online) when the next one comes out, and I’m sure I’ll have full faith that it will restore this series to it’s former glory. After 15 years and 5000 pages it fucking better.
John dies at the end – David Wong
I went into this one blind, picking it on title alone from positive Internet word of mouth (Word of hand? Letter of keyboard mouth?) The author writes for cracked.com, which despite formerly being the poor man’s mad magazine, has carved itself out a pretty funny corner of the Internet mostly via clever lists. As it turns out the book became popular in much the same way as I had originally heard about it. The author had written a short horror/comedy story, and posted it online around Halloween instead of his usual writing, and it got a small following. He continued this trend every year, and the following grew steadily until he decided to put all of the stories together into a book. This book reflects its origin by sometimes feeling a bit disjointed, though this makes perfect sense given that it was written piece by piece over a large span of time. There are story lines that fizzle out, and others that come in somewhat unexpectedly later on in the arc of the book. You cannot try to take this book at face value and make sense of all the ins and outs of the plot, it is by no means that precise. The book does a great job presenting a very specific mood throughout without seeming to care very much if the entire plot is logically airtight. In this regard it is much more David Lynch than Christopher Nolan; sometimes (constantly) weird shit happens, and you just have to roll with it and not think too hard about it.
By the end of the book I was left with was roughly the same feeling I remember from evil dead and army of darkness – an easygoing mix of scary and funny, these two things joined securely by absurdity. I am usually not one for serious horror in any medium, my overactive imagination takes whatever fright is actually there and ramps it up to terrible, otherworldly levels. My usual response is something like turning all of the lights on, locking the windows and putting a chair in front of the door, standing up in the middle of the bed for the entire night with a machete and a football helmet. Just to be safe. Please let the jury see exhibit A, the great event horizon freak out of 1997-1999; and exhibit B, the time I read the shining at night in the winter, what-the-fuck-was-I-thinking. This book did not trip my usual fear reflex, though some parts were creepy, it was creepy in an atmospheric way, instead of creepy in an I-can’t-sleep-ever-again-way.
One of the things that the author did that I found particularly endearing was in his characterization of the evil forces in his world. In this world there are major supernatural forces at work, across multiple dimensions, and as it goes, some of them are pretty fucking evil. Many fictional inter-dimensional evil forces are the strong silent type, see your typical saurons, or cthulus. Silent, evil, most of their work done through lesser evil intermediates. All communication with them is usually limited to a sense of dread, madness or pain. Not so the major evil in this book, Korrok, who is depicted as the guy you always hated in school, the bully, the asshole. Destructive merely for the sake of his own personal enjoyment, instead of fulfilling some sort of prophetic destiny for evil, the main antagonist takes perverse joy in what he does, and imagining all the hurtful ways he could do it. He physically embodies all the world's assholes and bastards, and talks to you the way you’d think they would talk to you, if they were a giant evil throbbing psychic eyeball. In ways it reminds me of Randall Flagg from the stand, evil, but with a lot of personality to go along with it. Not enough to win you over to his side, but enough so that you remember him, standing apart from all the others evils you’ve crossed paths with.
Seventh son – Orson Scott Card
I was looking for a quick read so that I wasn’t tied up with something when dance with dragons came out, so I re-read the first book from the alvin maker series. A good series, especially in the beginning, but each book loses a little of the spark that really drew me to the first one, though a little slower than card’s other series (ender’s Game) which not only fell off the rails in the third book, xenocide, but also crashed into the mountain and shit itself. This series doesn’t hit the wall all at once, but each sequel past number two or three is definitely worse than the one before it, but never by a large enough margin for you to put the series down - you have too much invested in it. By the fifth and sixth books, they are nearly unreadable, and you wonder how you got lured so easily into a bad book. If there was a serious disaster you could have just quit, but the quality level keeps slowly drawing you in deeper, until you are drowning in the quagmire of book 6. Maybe a quick check on Wikipedia for dates of publication to see if he lost his mojo all at once across all series....yeah, 1991 seems like the cut-off. I’ll just let it be known that ender’s game and it’s sequel, and this book and the next two after it are excellent books for most young readers, the rest of each series is to be dealt with at your own risk, and with forewarning.
Ender’s game is probably my favorite book, if measured purely by nostalgic value. It had immense meaning for me when I first read it at 12 or so, hitting at exactly the right time for maximum artistic impression. I have read it more times than any other single book, never going more than a year or two without going back to it. This one piece of art has always been so close to me, but the artist who made it is somebody whose opinions I find sort of reprehensible. This is a hard divide to span, loving the art, but hating the artist. I know some people who have disavowed him and all his works based on his personal views, and the publicity he draws about it. In his case I feel that he is a bigot, and a vocal one at that. But it really isn’t any different if the artist in question is more of a crazy person, like of the Kanye West variety, or sort of an asshole, of the David O. Russel variety. Both are not men I’d probably enjoy knowing personally, but both are excellent at what they do. Many of history’s most beloved artists have been terrible alcoholics or drug addicts, or just generally bastardly. Is it not possible that making truly great art for many must come from a place of turmoil? I usually fall on the side of the argument where you forgive them their faults, and enjoy the things they make as objects divorced from their creators. It seems like a can of worms the other way, where you have to vet the creator of everything you come across to make sure one of them isn’t a bit of a shit. The feeling I get from people who want to banish certain artists works based on their personalities is that they are being somewhat arbitrary in these decisions. If you dug deep enough into most of the people who make the things you love, I worry what you might dig up.
Dance with dragons – George R. R. Martin
I’ll follow the same structure I set out for my review of books one through three.
Short version: sigh. Slightly longer version: FUCKING SIGGGHHHHHHHHHHHH.
I’m not sure where to start here; I’ve been so excited about this book for so many years. The shortest way to actually sum up how I felt about this book is to say that, at the end of it, it was not that book I expected or wanted it to be. Which I guess is my fault for expecting it to be anything in the first place, that is always a certain path to disappointment. It is fair, for those of you who have some familiarity with fantasy books, to say that he wheel of times this series pretty hard in this book. There are so many new names and faces, or names and faces that were peripheral characters before who are being drawn closer to the spotlight. Not that that is a bad thing, or a bizarre thing in a series with such a high character mortality rate, but the manner in which it is done is maddening. I don’t want new threads to be introduced this late, not when there is so much going on in the world that I already care about. I want the things that have been set down already to be resolved. Is that an unfair desire? I don’t know, maybe it is unrealistic. I just don’t want entire sizable fractions of the book devoted to new entirely new characters, when there are major characters who are left dangerously in the lurch, or whose wheels seem to be spinning chapter after chapter. Let me re-phrase what I said before: It’s not that I dislike new twists towards the end of the story, what I don’t like is when they feel shoe-horned in, or like they were never planned in the first place. Lots of times I like to feel like the author knows what is going on, or more importantly, what is going to happen later. Again, I think this is unrealistic. I know from reading what some authors write about their own writing process, that sometimes things happen that they didn’t foresee, or that characters become almost self aware, and start behaving in ways that go against the original plan of the plot without going against their own nature. As a reader, though, it is frustrating. I’ve seen enough good fictions lose their way later on because it seems like they are shooting from the hip instead of sticking to the original story. If, in some cases, there ever was an original story line to follow. I watched some lost, and got tired of it, that’s not what I’m looking for.
It’s not that nothing happens, things do happen. Not nearly as much as happens in books one and three, the agreed upon high points of the series, but it’s not to say that NOTHING happens throughout. The real problem, and this is a bizarre problem for a 1000 page book, five deep in a series, is that I felt like it ended too early. A more apt way to describe this is to say that it ended on the wrong beat to keep this book and the next one interesting. It seems like pretty basic narrative structure to have a character arc, but that is still needed to keep you invested in any story, even one as convoluted as this one. At the end of books one and three, almost all of the characters have had major development in the book, but many questions are left unanswered, many times by the cliffhanger ending. Cliffhangers aren't a problem, they just have to happen at the right point in the story to work properly. In order to avoid any serious spoilers, I’ll draw a comparison to star wars. Near the end of the empire strikes back, luke learns that vader is his father, after a long struggle to go to him and confront him. This would be an example of a good cliffhanger. There is some resolution (his quest to find vader) but also many new questions asked. If empire were this book, it would end when luke arrives at cloud city. Yes things would have happened in the movie, but the ending would have left you limp. No real questions would have been answered, the character arc was less of an arc, and more of a character tangent. Instead of seeing something big happen, and being excited about even more happening, the credits would roll, and you would think “That’s it? That was the end?”
I like the world this book takes place in quite a lot, the atmosphere, the history, all of it. I also like the characters, and as a work of minor to medium character development, this is the cat’s pajamas. However, I also like the over-arcing plot of the books, and mid range character development takes up space that could be devoted to propelling the story in some direction. The worst part about all of this, is that I still feel so close to this series, and so invested in it, that I’m certain to be waiting in line (online) when the next one comes out, and I’m sure I’ll have full faith that it will restore this series to it’s former glory. After 15 years and 5000 pages it fucking better.
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