|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
my rating |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1557091498
| 9781557091499
| 1557091498
| 3.90
| 5,337
| 1928
| Nov 01, 1997
|
really liked it
|
2024 reads, #27-29. These are the latest Hardy Boys books in the public domain to be released by the excellent nonprofit organization Standard Ebooks,
2024 reads, #27-29. These are the latest Hardy Boys books in the public domain to be released by the excellent nonprofit organization Standard Ebooks, which exists to take the sometimes clunkily laid out files of Project Gutenberg and instead present a clean, modern, beautiful, Kindle-style design and layout. (See my review of the first three novels to learn more about who exactly the Hardy Boys are, and why they’re so important to American popular culture.) I found these latest three to be just like the first three -- that is, fun for a lark, but not particularly great novels, and certainly not the kinds of books you would hand to a contemporary teen and expect them to get a contemporary sense of enjoyment out of them -- although I will say that book #5, Hunting for Hidden Gold, officially begins the tradition of the Hardy Boys having exotic adventures in foreign lands, even if in this case it means an abandoned gold mine in rural Montana, and that you can clearly see that ghostwriter Leslie McFarland (who notoriously hated writing these books, only doing so in order to pay his family’s bills) actually enjoyed himself this time, which is likely what led to more and more of these kinds of adventures in the series as the years and then decades wore on. (Plus, of course, as this series’ critics have pointed out, you can only have so many major crimes committed in the Hardy Boys’ small Atlantic Seaboard town of Bayport before the whole thing starts becoming ridiculous; here in just the first six books, for example, we’ve had five different rings of fugitive criminals who just happened to randomly choose Bayport as their location for hiding out from the manhunt trying to find them.) To be honest, what’s the far most interesting detail of these books now in the 2020s is simply the reminder of how amazing and science-fiction-like the entire subject of internal combustion engines still was in the 1920s when these were originally published, with the Hardy brothers along with their various “chums” absolutely obsessed with the brand-new “motorbikes” and “motorboats” that had just started getting released to the general public in these years. (Also amazing, the fact that average teens could easily afford motorcycles and speedboats in these years, yet another aspect of popular culture we’ve entirely lost in the 21st century.) Unlike the Tom Swift books from these same years, though, the Hardy Boys largely didn’t rely on technological gadgets for actually solving the crimes they always seemed to accidentally stumble into; so apart from their constant chases by boat and motorcycle, the stories primarily revolve around good old-fashioned procedural police work, greatly helped by their father supposedly being a nationally famous private investigator who to the chagrin of his wife is always quietly egging his boys on into such a life themselves. (Also interesting -- it’s this second batch of books that first make it clear that the 1970s children’s cartoon Scooby-Doo nakedly stole its most famous line from the Hardy Boys: “And I would’ve gotten away with it, too, if it wasn’t for these meddling kids!”) These books are fun but inessential, and should be read this way, with the understanding that the crime solving is laughably clunky and basic, the stories themselves full of outdated slang (“Well, if that don’t beat the Dutch!”) and formerly innocuous words that have now taken on saucy meanings in modern times (“‘Thanks for saving me!’ Frank ejaculated”). They come recommended in this warm but limited spirit. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
2
|
not set
not set
|
May 17, 2024
not set
|
May 17, 2024
|
Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 044808905X
| 9780448089058
| 044808905X
| 3.93
| 6,558
| 1928
| Jun 2003
|
really liked it
|
2024 reads, #27-29. These are the latest Hardy Boys books in the public domain to be released by the excellent nonprofit organization Standard Ebooks,
2024 reads, #27-29. These are the latest Hardy Boys books in the public domain to be released by the excellent nonprofit organization Standard Ebooks, which exists to take the sometimes clunkily laid out files of Project Gutenberg and instead present a clean, modern, beautiful, Kindle-style design and layout. (See my review of the first three novels to learn more about who exactly the Hardy Boys are, and why they’re so important to American popular culture.) I found these latest three to be just like the first three -- that is, fun for a lark, but not particularly great novels, and certainly not the kinds of books you would hand to a contemporary teen and expect them to get a contemporary sense of enjoyment out of them -- although I will say that book #5, Hunting for Hidden Gold, officially begins the tradition of the Hardy Boys having exotic adventures in foreign lands, even if in this case it means an abandoned gold mine in rural Montana, and that you can clearly see that ghostwriter Leslie McFarland (who notoriously hated writing these books, only doing so in order to pay his family’s bills) actually enjoyed himself this time, which is likely what led to more and more of these kinds of adventures in the series as the years and then decades wore on. (Plus, of course, as this series’ critics have pointed out, you can only have so many major crimes committed in the Hardy Boys’ small Atlantic Seaboard town of Bayport before the whole thing starts becoming ridiculous; here in just the first six books, for example, we’ve had five different rings of fugitive criminals who just happened to randomly choose Bayport as their location for hiding out from the manhunt trying to find them.) To be honest, what’s the far most interesting detail of these books now in the 2020s is simply the reminder of how amazing and science-fiction-like the entire subject of internal combustion engines still was in the 1920s when these were originally published, with the Hardy brothers along with their various “chums” absolutely obsessed with the brand-new “motorbikes” and “motorboats” that had just started getting released to the general public in these years. (Also amazing, the fact that average teens could easily afford motorcycles and speedboats in these years, yet another aspect of popular culture we’ve entirely lost in the 21st century.) Unlike the Tom Swift books from these same years, though, the Hardy Boys largely didn’t rely on technological gadgets for actually solving the crimes they always seemed to accidentally stumble into; so apart from their constant chases by boat and motorcycle, the stories primarily revolve around good old-fashioned procedural police work, greatly helped by their father supposedly being a nationally famous private investigator who to the chagrin of his wife is always quietly egging his boys on into such a life themselves. (Also interesting -- it’s this second batch of books that first make it clear that the 1970s children’s cartoon Scooby-Doo nakedly stole its most famous line from the Hardy Boys: “And I would’ve gotten away with it, too, if it wasn’t for these meddling kids!”) These books are fun but inessential, and should be read this way, with the understanding that the crime solving is laughably clunky and basic, the stories themselves full of outdated slang (“Well, if that don’t beat the Dutch!”) and formerly innocuous words that have now taken on saucy meanings in modern times (“‘Thanks for saving me!’ Frank ejaculated”). They come recommended in this warm but limited spirit. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
2
|
not set
not set
|
May 17, 2024
not set
|
May 17, 2024
|
Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 0448089041
| 9780448089041
| 0448089041
| 3.92
| 7,512
| 1928
| Mar 28, 1962
|
really liked it
|
2024 reads, #27-29. These are the latest Hardy Boys books in the public domain to be released by the excellent nonprofit organization Standard Ebooks,
2024 reads, #27-29. These are the latest Hardy Boys books in the public domain to be released by the excellent nonprofit organization Standard Ebooks, which exists to take the sometimes clunkily laid out files of Project Gutenberg and instead present a clean, modern, beautiful, Kindle-style design and layout. (See my review of the first three novels to learn more about who exactly the Hardy Boys are, and why they’re so important to American popular culture.) I found these latest three to be just like the first three -- that is, fun for a lark, but not particularly great novels, and certainly not the kinds of books you would hand to a contemporary teen and expect them to get a contemporary sense of enjoyment out of them -- although I will say that book #5, Hunting for Hidden Gold, officially begins the tradition of the Hardy Boys having exotic adventures in foreign lands, even if in this case it means an abandoned gold mine in rural Montana, and that you can clearly see that ghostwriter Leslie McFarland (who notoriously hated writing these books, only doing so in order to pay his family’s bills) actually enjoyed himself this time, which is likely what led to more and more of these kinds of adventures in the series as the years and then decades wore on. (Plus, of course, as this series’ critics have pointed out, you can only have so many major crimes committed in the Hardy Boys’ small Atlantic Seaboard town of Bayport before the whole thing starts becoming ridiculous; here in just the first six books, for example, we’ve had five different rings of fugitive criminals who just happened to randomly choose Bayport as their location for hiding out from the manhunt trying to find them.) To be honest, what’s the far most interesting detail of these books now in the 2020s is simply the reminder of how amazing and science-fiction-like the entire subject of internal combustion engines still was in the 1920s when these were originally published, with the Hardy brothers along with their various “chums” absolutely obsessed with the brand-new “motorbikes” and “motorboats” that had just started getting released to the general public in these years. (Also amazing, the fact that average teens could easily afford motorcycles and speedboats in these years, yet another aspect of popular culture we’ve entirely lost in the 21st century.) Unlike the Tom Swift books from these same years, though, the Hardy Boys largely didn’t rely on technological gadgets for actually solving the crimes they always seemed to accidentally stumble into; so apart from their constant chases by boat and motorcycle, the stories primarily revolve around good old-fashioned procedural police work, greatly helped by their father supposedly being a nationally famous private investigator who to the chagrin of his wife is always quietly egging his boys on into such a life themselves. (Also interesting -- it’s this second batch of books that first make it clear that the 1970s children’s cartoon Scooby-Doo nakedly stole its most famous line from the Hardy Boys: “And I would’ve gotten away with it, too, if it wasn’t for these meddling kids!”) These books are fun but inessential, and should be read this way, with the understanding that the crime solving is laughably clunky and basic, the stories themselves full of outdated slang (“Well, if that don’t beat the Dutch!”) and formerly innocuous words that have now taken on saucy meanings in modern times (“‘Thanks for saving me!’ Frank ejaculated”). They come recommended in this warm but limited spirit. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
2
|
not set
not set
|
May 17, 2024
not set
|
May 17, 2024
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0300117434
| 9780300117431
| 0300117434
| 3.90
| 9,859
| Jan 01, 1946
| Aug 28, 2006
|
really liked it
|
2024 reads, #15. I recently had the opportunity to mention Modernist playwright Eugene O'Neill when reviewing Joshua Mohr's similar (in my opinion) co
2024 reads, #15. I recently had the opportunity to mention Modernist playwright Eugene O'Neill when reviewing Joshua Mohr's similar (in my opinion) contemporary novel Damascus (my review); and that reminded me that I actually got interested in this writer around the same time many years ago that I got interested in his peer Tennessee Williams (after my brother first moved to New Orleans, a city I've now gotten to visit eight or nine times myself), but that I couldn't find any decent filmed versions of his magnum opus The Iceman Cometh (they're too old, or only available on DVD), and that I had always meant to get around to reading the written version someday. Well, that day is here! Originally written in 1939, it wasn't produced until 1946, but it's actually set back in 1912 when O'Neill was in his mid-twenties; so while ostensibly about New York in the years before World War One, O'Neill uses artistic license to also comment on the Great Depression that was in its final years when he wrote this. It's set at a dive bar in Greenwich Village, a place that's supposed to look like an even cheaper and dirtier version of that neighborhood's real-life McSorley's (still open in 2024!). O'Neill explains in the play's introductory notes that it's a Raines Law type of hotel; and yeah, I had to look that up too, and that turned out to be a Victorian-era law originally meant to cut down on public drinking by adding new restrictions to when bars could be open, but with an exception for hotels, who could serve alcohol at any time to their guests, as long as it was in a back room during times when it's illegal to the public. That led to an explosion of ultra-cheap, horribly disgusting "hotels" created on the floor above a bar, roach-infested single-room occupancies, where the rummy inhabitants could drink virtually 24 hours a day, by way of the the bar downstairs running a curtain halfway across the room during closed public hours, and thus counting it as a "back room." It was a destination for the lowest of the low, the "lumpen proletarians" as Marx called them -- the washouts, the violent, the mentally challenged -- which of course was catnip to O'Neill, who is just as well remembered anymore for being a vocal and enthusiastic supporter of an American Communist revolutionary movement right after the successful one in Russia in the 1910s; an early friend of party founder John Reed (and who in fact had an affair with Reed's wife), he was well-known throughout his career for his radical, polemic, far-left plays, which he combined with the relatively new Realist movement (or "social realist" if you like) first seen among people like Anton Chekov and Henrik Ibsen in Europe a few decades previous. Before O'Neill, Broadway theatre simply wasn't set at places like dive bars, full of prostitutes and mob enforcers and sad old former anarchists turned into fatalistic drunken sots (the character O'Neill obviously designed as his stand-in, while writing this a full 20 years after his youthful adventures with the Communist Party); and much like his peers Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller, it was only in the "legitimahhte THEATAHHHH" where this kind of boundary-pushing transgression was being allowed during the Mid-Century Modernist years (don't forget, this didn't premiere publicly until after World War Two), so that got O'Neill a tremendous amount of press and prestige simply for being in the right place at the right time, including four different Pulitizers over his career and the Nobel Prize. But as I unfortunately discovered when working my way through the oeuvre of Williams as well, a little less than a decade ago, what was so daring and shocking and naughty at the time has in many cases not aged well at all, and now come across like a lot of stagey, outdated melodramatics that have long fallen out of favor with an audience that's now exclusively trained on naturalistic performances seen in movies and streaming series. That's certainly the case with Iceman, which can no longer traffic in the titillated shock that one of the characters is actually a pimp (!!!), and when stripped of that becomes just an interesting but not great story and overtold and with too many characters and with all of them with their knobs turned up to eleven at all times. Oh, and did I mention too many characters?! 18 of them, as a matter of fact, 16 of which are bar regulars, and are all on stage at the same time for an entire four hours, just basically repeating everyone else's dilemmas but through a slightly different filter, like that episode of The Simpsons where Homer goes to the Super Bowl with like a group of twelve Springfield male regulars, and only a single joke is given to the entire group of 12 throughout the episode and all 12 have to react the exact same way at the exact same time. That's certainly what Iceman feels like: you have not only the spirit-broken anarchist and O'Neill stand-in Larry, but another anarchist from Europe who used to publish a radical newspaper, and some young anarchist whose mom used to hang out with Larry when they were young; then you also have two veterans of the Boer Wars, one from each opposing side, and a Boer War reporter, the three essentially serving the exact same role as the trio of anarchists; and then you also have three prostitutes who don't have any differentiation whatsoever, a mentally challenged bartender who serves as their pimp, and a lothario con man who's the "sure, I'll marry ya, sweetheart" boyfriend of one of the hookers; then on top of that, you have a washed-up alcoholic former cop, a washed-up alcoholic former lawyer, and a washed-up alcoholic former owner of a gambling house, who yet again essentially all serve the same role in this play; and then finally you have the bar's curmudgeonly owner Harry, his brother-in-law, and another bartender. Sheesh, O'Neill! Get this down to six characters and a runtime of two hours, and maybe you'll finally have something then! But of course all of this is skipping over the greatest element of the play, and the reason it had so much power to shock and move people back in the mid-1940s when it first came out; and that's Theodore "Hickey" Hickman, an indelible archetype of Modernism in the same way Arthur Miller's Willy Loman from these same years is, and what saves this play from being just a drab exercise in talky political activism like so many of O'Neill's other plays are. This is one of those moments where I'm glad I never read this until my mid-fifties, when I've had a wide and deep enough education about literary history to deeply understand what was influencing O'Neill when he created this character, and what was going on among the various political strata of American society when this first got written. For example, without this education, I wouldn't have realized that O'Neill describes Hickey so to look exactly like George Babbitt from Sinclair Lewis's 1922 Babbitt (written 13 years before O'Neill wrote the first draft of Iceman), a sort of portly and perpetually jolly fellow who was basically born to run a car dealership or another type of heavy hands-on sales-heavy business. And indeed, Hickey is a full-time salesman, who at the end of every year-long circuit around the country he does, ends up back at this bar to celebrate the owner's birthday by basically blowing a couple weeks' pay on giving everyone in the SRO an unlimited tab for about three or four days, making it the Wino Christmas that everyone there eagerly looks forward to every year with salivation. It's important to remember that leftist social-realist authors such as O'Neill really didn't like people like Babbitt at all, and in fact didn't even really like Lewis for coming up with the character or writing a book about him. Lewis was sort of the Jonathan Franzen of his time, who wrote witty dramedies about the foibles of the upper-middle-class during the Roaring '20s years, right before the stock market crash and the Great Depression; and socialism-friendly authors like O'Neill rightly saw people like Babbitt as the people who made the country's economy tank in the first place, the very people the socialists and communists were fighting against, which made Lewis a ridiculous timewaster of an author in the eyes of many leftist authors in the '30s, just past his commercial height (Lewis had five national bestsellers in a row in the 1920s, and then none ever again), and it says a lot about what we're supposed to think of Hickey that O'Neill modeled him after this extremely well-known character who by then had become shorthand in society for "comfortably fat middle-classer who caused the economy to crash." But here is where it gets even more interesting; because soon after Hickey shows up again for his annual visit (which happens fairly early in the play, which is why I don't consider it a spoiler), he announces that he's given up drinking and become a new man, and that although he'll still be buying drinks that year, he's determined to get everyone there to eventually see the light and try to walk the straight and narrow path again. And here's another place where I'm glad I didn't get to read this until I'd had a lot of other fundamental books under my belt; because it's only now that I realize that O'Neill makes Hickey talk here almost exactly -- I mean, sometimes word for word -- like Dale Carnegie in his How to Win Friends and Influence People, which only came out a mere three years before O'Neill wrote the first draft of Iceman! That's not a coincidence! See, as I learned last year after reading it myself (my review), history has largely forgotten this, but the entire self-help genre and movement (which you might also see called "personal development," as manifested in modern years by people like Tony Robbins) can demonstrably all be traced back to Carnegie's 1936 original and it alone; a salesman who eventually became renowned for the live seminars he put on for sales trainees, he single-handedly invented this genre by basically doing a transcript of one of his live events, which immediately caused a sensation that has since led to a billion-dollar industry almost a century later. And leftist, socialist writers like O'Neill hated Carnegie too; because the self-help, personal-development movement, ultimately coming from a sales mindset like it does, is in a way sort of like elevating free-market capitalism into a form of religion or lifestyle, which you can see fully played out in our late-stage-capitalism times by such "Dale Carnegie on steroids" authors as Tim Ferriss (my review). So that's fascinating, to take this character who looks like Babbitt and give him a Carnegie "Come to Prosperity Jesus" moment, because to contemporary audiences of the first production, these would've been strong signals that there's something incredibly shady about this character. And indeed, there is, and it's such a legitimately unique and shocking moment that I'm going to let it remain a spoiler, even though it's 78 years old; but I can tell you spoiler-free that it's one of those kind of truly memorable endings that elevates the entire story that came before it, and it's a known fact that we mostly remember stories by their endings and not what came before, so it's easy to see why people went so nuts for this play when it first came out. It sounds like literally what it was, if you took a dreary, politically focused social-realist author but weaved in a Crying Game or Sixth Sense-type shocking ending to their latest book, not in a gimmicky way but in one that profoundly helps explain and strengthen what's been said in all the four hours that came before. So yeah, by all means, let's call this one of the three foundational plays of American Modernism, like Wikipedia told me people do, along with Miller's Death of a Salesman and Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire. All of those legitimately are powerful works, and they're worth celebrating for the stir they caused at the time, which of course eventually led to the Grove Press obscenity trials of the early 1960s and the eventual elimination of "public decency" bans; but we can do that celebrating while also understanding how the world has passed on from these kinds of works in the 50, 75, 100 years since them, and how what was groundbreaking at the time can come off as unintentionally hokey to us anymore. That's not a contradiction for someone like O'Neill, but rather a reason to continue reading and celebrating him, for laying the early, admittedly clunkier groundwork not only for the boozier side of his more sophisticated literary family tree (among people like Charles Bukowski or Joshua Mohr who I mentioned at the beginning of this write-up), but the more academic (like early David Mamet or Sam Shepard). It comes with a warm recommendation in this spirit, even if you should keep your expectations low. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
2
|
not set
not set
|
Mar 02, 2024
not set
|
Mar 02, 2024
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 1324006374
| 9781324006374
| 1324006374
| 3.89
| 3,496
| 1926
| May 17, 2022
|
2024 reads, #5. DID NOT FINISH. Up to this year, I actually didn't know anything about French writer Sidone-Gabrielle Colette, who published professio
2024 reads, #5. DID NOT FINISH. Up to this year, I actually didn't know anything about French writer Sidone-Gabrielle Colette, who published professionally under just her last name, except that she's considered a feminist icon by some people, and that she apparently wrote a series of novels during the Jazz Age that were considered scandalous at the time. So that made it exciting when the Chicago Public Library announced the other week their acquisition of a brand-new translation by Rachel Careau of two of Colette's better-known novels, 1920's Cheri and 1926's The End of Cheri, because it represented a rare opportunity for me to pick up a writer this old and famous without knowing even a single thing about them, an opportunity I didn't want to pass up. And indeed, one of the most shocking things I discovered after starting this is that the Cheri of the books' titles is actually the most flaming, prancing queen I've ever seen in any book ever published before 1970 (think Sean Hayes' "Jack!" from the 1990s sitcom Will & Grace, but with even his over-the-top antics cranked up to eleven); and I have to give Colette a lot of credit for the mere act of getting away with it, which she seems to have pulled off by giving him just the flimsiest, most transparent romantic dalliances with a series of dimwitted young women within the high-society circles he travels in, even though Cheri very, very clearly has a much bigger obsession with these dimwitted young women's rich, eccentric, sharp-tongued middle-aged mothers (think Megan Mullaly's Karen from Will & Grace). Unfortunately, though, I personally can't fucking stand Will & Grace, and I find this kind of literary character to be much more annoying and exasperating than charming, so I myself didn't last very long with this book. Certainly, though, your experience might be very different than mine, especially if you loved Will & Grace (it's hard to emphasize enough just how uncannily similar it is to this book, written 75 years previous), so by all means take this on if you think you're the kind of person who would enjoy it. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
Jan 18, 2024
|
Jan 18, 2024
|
Hardcover
| |||||||||||||||
| 0448089033
| 9780448089034
| 0448089033
| 3.90
| 8,871
| 1927
| 1990
|
liked it
|
2023 reads, #91-95. I recently discovered that the first three Hardy Boys books, all of them published in 1927, have passed into the public domain, so
2023 reads, #91-95. I recently discovered that the first three Hardy Boys books, all of them published in 1927, have passed into the public domain, so I thought as a nostalgic treat I would go ahead and read them, since they can now be legally downloaded for free. I'm sure I don't have to tell any of my fellow middle-aged Generation Xers how large this book series loomed over my life as a kid in the 1970s; it was essentially the de facto gift that boys always gave other boys whenever they'd get invited to a birthday party at the rollerskating rink or Showbiz Pizza, because it was one of the few book series in those years still being released as hardbacks, so was deemed a "more substantial present" than the Judy Blume paperbacks we were all actually reading in those days, instead of these badly dated snoozers (or so they were perceived by us at the time). That makes it an ironic situation, that I owned something like 20 or 25 Hardy Boys books at the height of my childhood, but I don't think I ever read even a single one of them all the way from the front cover to the back; so this was another thing that made me curious about reapproaching the series, to see if I had avoided them back then simply because I wasn't a fan of these kinds of action-adventure stories (a genre I still don't like very much, even now in my mid-fifties), or if they're perhaps terribly written and we've all collectively built up this false memory of them being good. That turned out to be difficult to determine in the case of the first three, which I read almost a hundred years after they were first published, because they can't help but be artifacts of their times by now, and so in many ways are so outdated that it appears ludicrous that the publishing industry was still trying to present these as "contemporary stories" back when I was a kid in the '70s. For those who don't know, the series is centered around two brothers in their late teens named Frank and Joe Hardy who live in the small Atlantic Seaboard town of Bayport; inspired by their father, a retired New York City detective who's now a renowned private investigator, the two are fascinated by the act of solving mysteries, especially easy to do in their case since the local police force are the most incompetent group of boobs this side of the Keystone Cops. (Leslie McFarlane, who bitterly ghostwrote the first 25 titles of the series, made it clear in his correspondence with friends that part of his aim with these books was to make an entire generation of youth suspicious of authority figures, since he otherwise hated writing these kinds of children's books and wanted to do something in them to please just himself.) The first three books of the series are essentially cookiecutter stories with the same exact plot; namely, some ne'er-do-wells slink into Bayport and set up a criminal operation in an abandoned building "on the edge of town" (shuttered mansions in the first two books, a shuttered mill in the third), which the Hardy brothers accidentally stumble across during their motorcycling adventures in the country with their chums (get ready for a lot of references to "chums" and "pals" and "lads" in these novels), which they're then forced to solve themselves because of the local police force not believing them and Dad off on his own adventure, which invariably leads to the Scooby-Doo-like capture of the criminals ("I would've gotten away with it if not for those meddling kids!") and a huge reward from the wealthy industrialist the criminals had been planning on targeting (all in all, around a quarter-million dollars in today's money when you add up the rewards of the first three books, leading to one of the common complaints this series has received over the decades, that the Hardy Boys can essentially drop everything and travel halfway across the world whenever they want, because of being basically millionaires before they've even graduated high school). That makes the books okay for what they are, and certainly prototypes for the "kids have actual agency" school of thought about children's literature that didn't become the mainstream norm until the 1950s, easily explaining why they were so explosively popular from the moment they began being released (when these were first published, most kids' books were still being written in the Victorian style, in which it was the adults who actually saved the day and children were presented as silent admirers who always deferred to the superior wisdom of "dear Papa"); but they're still a product of their times, including badly outdated slang and technology, a focus on activities no actual teens have been into since your grandparents' times (get ready for a lot of talk about speedboats and ham radios), and clues that by today's standards would be considered cartoonishly obvious (an entire major plot point in the first book, for example, revolves around all of these people being too stupid to understand that a criminal might wear a wig when committing a crime, leading to dozens of pages of teens standing around saying, "But he can't be the robber! HE HAS BLACK HAIR!!!!!!1!!"), making these interesting historical documents but in no way at all fun reading experiences that can be enjoyed in a contemporary way. However, this still didn't answer my question about why I in particular didn't seem to connect with the Hardy Boys books back in my '70s youth, when the latest titles were being written in the contemporary culture; so after finishing these three, I went to the Chicago Public Library and checked out two of the titles written during my own childhood and that I in fact personally owned back in the day, 1972's The Masked Monkey (ghostwritten by Vincent Buranelli) and 1975's The Mysterious Caravan (ghostwritten by Andrew Svenson). They weren't exactly bad, which means that I definitively rejected them at the time mostly because I simply didn't like the action-adventure genre in general (interestingly, both of these titles are from the Hardy Boys' proto-Indiana-Jones "globetrotting years," in which the stories start in Bayport but before they're over take the brothers to such exotic locations as the South American rainforest and the Moroccan desert); but the pre-read assumption I did confirm is that a big part of why I rejected them at the time was simply because in the '70s they were still being written in the stilted, awkward prose of 1950s Mid-Century Modernism (and being illustrated in this outdated style as well), and all of us back then had gotten used by that point* to adults trying to feed us old 1950s crap and telling us it's still great for contemporary times, and us summarily ignoring all this old 1950s crap without ever going back and giving it even a second thought. [*It's surreal and hilarious to me now to think back to my childhood in the 1970s and remember just how incredibly much of it still revolved around popular culture from the 1950s; keep in mind that "children's entertainment" hadn't yet become the trillion-dollar industry it now is, and that at that point the '50s were only twenty years old, so back then we didn't think twice about the idea that the only thing on television on weekday afternoons were reruns of things like The Lone Ranger and George Reeves' Superman and ancient old Three Stooges and Little Rascals shorts. Watching those now, another entire 50 years after the fact, it's hard to believe that these kinds of shows were being presented to us as perfectly fine and normal contemporary entertainment, stuff we actual kids just essentially ignored altogether, one of the major reasons Generation X became so obsessed with producing quality children's entertainment once we became adults ourselves.] So all in all, my mini-dive into the world of the Hardy Boys this month was the kind of mixed bag these experiments always tend to be; illuminating from a historical standpoint, sort of nominally worth my time from an entertainment aspect, but not even close to being anymore the actual contemporary stories appropriate for contemporary kids that Simon & Schuster still desperately want to convince you they are. Have fun if you're an oldie like me, reapproaching them for nostalgic reasons; but for God's sake, don't force these badly dated relics anymore on any actual ten-year-old boys in your life. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
2
|
not set
not set
|
Dec 2023
not set
|
Dec 01, 2023
|
Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 0448089025
| 9780448089027
| 0448089025
| 3.95
| 10,890
| 1927
| 1994
|
liked it
|
2023 reads, #91-95. I recently discovered that the first three Hardy Boys books, all of them published in 1927, have passed into the public domain, so
2023 reads, #91-95. I recently discovered that the first three Hardy Boys books, all of them published in 1927, have passed into the public domain, so I thought as a nostalgic treat I would go ahead and read them, since they can now be legally downloaded for free. I'm sure I don't have to tell any of my fellow middle-aged Generation Xers how large this book series loomed over my life as a kid in the 1970s; it was essentially the de facto gift that boys always gave other boys whenever they'd get invited to a birthday party at the rollerskating rink or Showbiz Pizza, because it was one of the few book series in those years still being released as hardbacks, so was deemed a "more substantial present" than the Judy Blume paperbacks we were all actually reading in those days, instead of these badly dated snoozers (or so they were perceived by us at the time). That makes it an ironic situation, that I owned something like 20 or 25 Hardy Boys books at the height of my childhood, but I don't think I ever read even a single one of them all the way from the front cover to the back; so this was another thing that made me curious about reapproaching the series, to see if I had avoided them back then simply because I wasn't a fan of these kinds of action-adventure stories (a genre I still don't like very much, even now in my mid-fifties), or if they're perhaps terribly written and we've all collectively built up this false memory of them being good. That turned out to be difficult to determine in the case of the first three, which I read almost a hundred years after they were first published, because they can't help but be artifacts of their times by now, and so in many ways are so outdated that it appears ludicrous that the publishing industry was still trying to present these as "contemporary stories" back when I was a kid in the '70s. For those who don't know, the series is centered around two brothers in their late teens named Frank and Joe Hardy who live in the small Atlantic Seaboard town of Bayport; inspired by their father, a retired New York City detective who's now a renowned private investigator, the two are fascinated by the act of solving mysteries, especially easy to do in their case since the local police force are the most incompetent group of boobs this side of the Keystone Cops. (Leslie McFarlane, who bitterly ghostwrote the first 25 titles of the series, made it clear in his correspondence with friends that part of his aim with these books was to make an entire generation of youth suspicious of authority figures, since he otherwise hated writing these kinds of children's books and wanted to do something in them to please just himself.) The first three books of the series are essentially cookiecutter stories with the same exact plot; namely, some ne'er-do-wells slink into Bayport and set up a criminal operation in an abandoned building "on the edge of town" (shuttered mansions in the first two books, a shuttered mill in the third), which the Hardy brothers accidentally stumble across during their motorcycling adventures in the country with their chums (get ready for a lot of references to "chums" and "pals" and "lads" in these novels), which they're then forced to solve themselves because of the local police force not believing them and Dad off on his own adventure, which invariably leads to the Scooby-Doo-like capture of the criminals ("I would've gotten away with it if not for those meddling kids!") and a huge reward from the wealthy industrialist the criminals had been planning on targeting (all in all, around a quarter-million dollars in today's money when you add up the rewards of the first three books, leading to one of the common complaints this series has received over the decades, that the Hardy Boys can essentially drop everything and travel halfway across the world whenever they want, because of being basically millionaires before they've even graduated high school). That makes the books okay for what they are, and certainly prototypes for the "kids have actual agency" school of thought about children's literature that didn't become the mainstream norm until the 1950s, easily explaining why they were so explosively popular from the moment they began being released (when these were first published, most kids' books were still being written in the Victorian style, in which it was the adults who actually saved the day and children were presented as silent admirers who always deferred to the superior wisdom of "dear Papa"); but they're still a product of their times, including badly outdated slang and technology, a focus on activities no actual teens have been into since your grandparents' times (get ready for a lot of talk about speedboats and ham radios), and clues that by today's standards would be considered cartoonishly obvious (an entire major plot point in the first book, for example, revolves around all of these people being too stupid to understand that a criminal might wear a wig when committing a crime, leading to dozens of pages of teens standing around saying, "But he can't be the robber! HE HAS BLACK HAIR!!!!!!1!!"), making these interesting historical documents but in no way at all fun reading experiences that can be enjoyed in a contemporary way. However, this still didn't answer my question about why I in particular didn't seem to connect with the Hardy Boys books back in my '70s youth, when the latest titles were being written in the contemporary culture; so after finishing these three, I went to the Chicago Public Library and checked out two of the titles written during my own childhood and that I in fact personally owned back in the day, 1972's The Masked Monkey (ghostwritten by Vincent Buranelli) and 1975's The Mysterious Caravan (ghostwritten by Andrew Svenson). They weren't exactly bad, which means that I definitively rejected them at the time mostly because I simply didn't like the action-adventure genre in general (interestingly, both of these titles are from the Hardy Boys' proto-Indiana-Jones "globetrotting years," in which the stories start in Bayport but before they're over take the brothers to such exotic locations as the South American rainforest and the Moroccan desert); but the pre-read assumption I did confirm is that a big part of why I rejected them at the time was simply because in the '70s they were still being written in the stilted, awkward prose of 1950s Mid-Century Modernism (and being illustrated in this outdated style as well), and all of us back then had gotten used by that point* to adults trying to feed us old 1950s crap and telling us it's still great for contemporary times, and us summarily ignoring all this old 1950s crap without ever going back and giving it even a second thought. [*It's surreal and hilarious to me now to think back to my childhood in the 1970s and remember just how incredibly much of it still revolved around popular culture from the 1950s; keep in mind that "children's entertainment" hadn't yet become the trillion-dollar industry it now is, and that at that point the '50s were only twenty years old, so back then we didn't think twice about the idea that the only thing on television on weekday afternoons were reruns of things like The Lone Ranger and George Reeves' Superman and ancient old Three Stooges and Little Rascals shorts. Watching those now, another entire 50 years after the fact, it's hard to believe that these kinds of shows were being presented to us as perfectly fine and normal contemporary entertainment, stuff we actual kids just essentially ignored altogether, one of the major reasons Generation X became so obsessed with producing quality children's entertainment once we became adults ourselves.] So all in all, my mini-dive into the world of the Hardy Boys this month was the kind of mixed bag these experiments always tend to be; illuminating from a historical standpoint, sort of nominally worth my time from an entertainment aspect, but not even close to being anymore the actual contemporary stories appropriate for contemporary kids that Simon & Schuster still desperately want to convince you they are. Have fun if you're an oldie like me, reapproaching them for nostalgic reasons; but for God's sake, don't force these badly dated relics anymore on any actual ten-year-old boys in your life. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
2
|
not set
not set
|
Dec 2023
not set
|
Dec 01, 2023
|
Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 1557091447
| 9781557091444
| 1557091447
| 3.92
| 18,504
| 1927
| Oct 01, 1991
|
liked it
|
2023 reads, #91-95. I recently discovered that the first three Hardy Boys books, all of them published in 1927, have passed into the public domain, so
2023 reads, #91-95. I recently discovered that the first three Hardy Boys books, all of them published in 1927, have passed into the public domain, so I thought as a nostalgic treat I would go ahead and read them, since they can now be legally downloaded for free. I'm sure I don't have to tell any of my fellow middle-aged Generation Xers how large this book series loomed over my life as a kid in the 1970s; it was essentially the de facto gift that boys always gave other boys whenever they'd get invited to a birthday party at the rollerskating rink or Showbiz Pizza, because it was one of the few book series in those years still being released as hardbacks, so was deemed a "more substantial present" than the Judy Blume paperbacks we were all actually reading in those days, instead of these badly dated snoozers (or so they were perceived by us at the time). That makes it an ironic situation, that I owned something like 20 or 25 Hardy Boys books at the height of my childhood, but I don't think I ever read even a single one of them all the way from the front cover to the back; so this was another thing that made me curious about reapproaching the series, to see if I had avoided them back then simply because I wasn't a fan of these kinds of action-adventure stories (a genre I still don't like very much, even now in my mid-fifties), or if they're perhaps terribly written and we've all collectively built up this false memory of them being good. That turned out to be difficult to determine in the case of the first three, which I read almost a hundred years after they were first published, because they can't help but be artifacts of their times by now, and so in many ways are so outdated that it appears ludicrous that the publishing industry was still trying to present these as "contemporary stories" back when I was a kid in the '70s. For those who don't know, the series is centered around two brothers in their late teens named Frank and Joe Hardy who live in the small Atlantic Seaboard town of Bayport; inspired by their father, a retired New York City detective who's now a renowned private investigator, the two are fascinated by the act of solving mysteries, especially easy to do in their case since the local police force are the most incompetent group of boobs this side of the Keystone Cops. (Leslie McFarlane, who bitterly ghostwrote the first 25 titles of the series, made it clear in his correspondence with friends that part of his aim with these books was to make an entire generation of youth suspicious of authority figures, since he otherwise hated writing these kinds of children's books and wanted to do something in them to please just himself.) The first three books of the series are essentially cookiecutter stories with the same exact plot; namely, some ne'er-do-wells slink into Bayport and set up a criminal operation in an abandoned building "on the edge of town" (shuttered mansions in the first two books, a shuttered mill in the third), which the Hardy brothers accidentally stumble across during their motorcycling adventures in the country with their chums (get ready for a lot of references to "chums" and "pals" and "lads" in these novels), which they're then forced to solve themselves because of the local police force not believing them and Dad off on his own adventure, which invariably leads to the Scooby-Doo-like capture of the criminals ("I would've gotten away with it if not for those meddling kids!") and a huge reward from the wealthy industrialist the criminals had been planning on targeting (all in all, around a quarter-million dollars in today's money when you add up the rewards of the first three books, leading to one of the common complaints this series has received over the decades, that the Hardy Boys can essentially drop everything and travel halfway across the world whenever they want, because of being basically millionaires before they've even graduated high school). That makes the books okay for what they are, and certainly prototypes for the "kids have actual agency" school of thought about children's literature that didn't become the mainstream norm until the 1950s, easily explaining why they were so explosively popular from the moment they began being released (when these were first published, most kids' books were still being written in the Victorian style, in which it was the adults who actually saved the day and children were presented as silent admirers who always deferred to the superior wisdom of "dear Papa"); but they're still a product of their times, including badly outdated slang and technology, a focus on activities no actual teens have been into since your grandparents' times (get ready for a lot of talk about speedboats and ham radios), and clues that by today's standards would be considered cartoonishly obvious (an entire major plot point in the first book, for example, revolves around all of these people being too stupid to understand that a criminal might wear a wig when committing a crime, leading to dozens of pages of teens standing around saying, "But he can't be the robber! HE HAS BLACK HAIR!!!!!!1!!"), making these interesting historical documents but in no way at all fun reading experiences that can be enjoyed in a contemporary way. However, this still didn't answer my question about why I in particular didn't seem to connect with the Hardy Boys books back in my '70s youth, when the latest titles were being written in the contemporary culture; so after finishing these three, I went to the Chicago Public Library and checked out two of the titles written during my own childhood and that I in fact personally owned back in the day, 1972's The Masked Monkey (ghostwritten by Vincent Buranelli) and 1975's The Mysterious Caravan (ghostwritten by Andrew Svenson). They weren't exactly bad, which means that I definitively rejected them at the time mostly because I simply didn't like the action-adventure genre in general (interestingly, both of these titles are from the Hardy Boys' proto-Indiana-Jones "globetrotting years," in which the stories start in Bayport but before they're over take the brothers to such exotic locations as the South American rainforest and the Moroccan desert); but the pre-read assumption I did confirm is that a big part of why I rejected them at the time was simply because in the '70s they were still being written in the stilted, awkward prose of 1950s Mid-Century Modernism (and being illustrated in this outdated style as well), and all of us back then had gotten used by that point* to adults trying to feed us old 1950s crap and telling us it's still great for contemporary times, and us summarily ignoring all this old 1950s crap without ever going back and giving it even a second thought. [*It's surreal and hilarious to me now to think back to my childhood in the 1970s and remember just how incredibly much of it still revolved around popular culture from the 1950s; keep in mind that "children's entertainment" hadn't yet become the trillion-dollar industry it now is, and that at that point the '50s were only twenty years old, so back then we didn't think twice about the idea that the only thing on television on weekday afternoons were reruns of things like The Lone Ranger and George Reeves' Superman and ancient old Three Stooges and Little Rascals shorts. Watching those now, another entire 50 years after the fact, it's hard to believe that these kinds of shows were being presented to us as perfectly fine and normal contemporary entertainment, stuff we actual kids just essentially ignored altogether, one of the major reasons Generation X became so obsessed with producing quality children's entertainment once we became adults ourselves.] So all in all, my mini-dive into the world of the Hardy Boys this month was the kind of mixed bag these experiments always tend to be; illuminating from a historical standpoint, sort of nominally worth my time from an entertainment aspect, but not even close to being anymore the actual contemporary stories appropriate for contemporary kids that Simon & Schuster still desperately want to convince you they are. Have fun if you're an oldie like me, reapproaching them for nostalgic reasons; but for God's sake, don't force these badly dated relics anymore on any actual ten-year-old boys in your life. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
2
|
not set
not set
|
Dec 2023
not set
|
Dec 01, 2023
|
Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 0877281475
| 9780877281474
| 0877281475
| 3.48
| 1,605
| 1917
| Jun 01, 1975
|
2023 reads, #75. DID NOT FINISH. I've been wanting to read this short novel by the notorious occultist Alastair Crowley ever since I learned it was wh
2023 reads, #75. DID NOT FINISH. I've been wanting to read this short novel by the notorious occultist Alastair Crowley ever since I learned it was where Mark Frost cribbed the idea of the "Black Lodge" and the "White Lodge" for use in the "conspiracy of conspiracies" TV show Twin Peaks he co-created with David Lynch. But alas, while Crowley meant for both this and all his other "Simon Iff, Mystic Detective" stories to be easy-to-read pulp thrillers in the manner of Sherlock Holmes, at a time in his life when he was flat-broke and it was suggested that such easy-reading material connected to his famous name would sell like hotcakes, I don't think he really had any idea how to actually write pulp stories that would appeal to a large general audience, turning in a barely readable book here that's a mess both conceptually and mechanically. I must confess, even with this being not even 150 pages, I still barely made it even a quarter of the way through before giving up in confused boredom, not so much a novel as it is a sneaky way to publish an occultism academic textbook, complete with the pages upon pages of impenetrably dense New Age nonsense a term like that implies. Maybe the hardcore Crowley fan will be able to get through this, but for all the rest of us, this book works better as a concept than an actual reading experience.
...more
|
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
Sep 22, 2023
|
Sep 22, 2023
|
Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
| 1400034205
| 9781400034208
| 1400034205
| 4.19
| 49,745
| 1944
| Jan 01, 2003
|
2023 reads, #36. DID NOT FINISH. I decided to finally read W. Somerset Maugham's 1944 The Razor's Edge because of a "movie scavenger hunt" I'm doing o
2023 reads, #36. DID NOT FINISH. I decided to finally read W. Somerset Maugham's 1944 The Razor's Edge because of a "movie scavenger hunt" I'm doing over at Letterboxd (i.e. Goodreads for film nerds), in which one of the tasks will have me watching both the 1946 adaptation with Tyrone Powers and the 1984 adaptation with Bill Murray, and I wanted to read the book first so I'd have a common base to compare them both to. But holey moley, what an unreadable mess this turned out to be, for a book that's now so famous! The problem here lies right in that year mentioned above that this was published; for while the book itself is about a young soul-weary man smack-dab in the middle of the Jazz Age's Lost Generation following World War One, the book itself wasn't written until a good 20 years later, in the middle of World War Two, long after the vitality of the events from that generation and when all involved were already on to their middle-aged child-rearing years. In fact, it's even worse in Maugham's case; born in 1874 and already a published author before even the Victorian Age had ended, he was not only in his forties going into his fifties when the actual events happened that this story is based on, but in his late sixties and heading into his seventies when he wrote this book about those times; and it just badly, badly feels like this, like a 70-year-old grandpa trying to write about a generation he was already too old to understand when they were young and rebellious, and has nothing to say about them now a generation later than what Wikipedia told him about "Age Comma Jazz Slash Lost Generation." So that begs the question -- why? And as far as I can tell, from my limited research into the subject by essentially reading Maugham's Wikipedia page myself, it's because the author in real life started getting into Eastern religions and mysticism himself only in these late-1930s and early-'40s years, and so when naturally wanting to write about the subjects simply thought that a book set among the F. Scott Fitzgerald/Hemingway crowd in the late '10s and early '20s would give him a natural excuse to do so. But yow, 70-year-old Maugham writing about soul-sick globetrotting twentysomething Larry Darrell is exactly the SNL comedy sketch you would expect from that set-up, just endless scenes of two rosy-cheeked Brits in a patter of, "Say, old chum, I hear you're heading off to the subcontinent soon, what what?" "Yes, my good chap, it is indeed true that I head to the mysterious jungles of India next month to consult with the Maharajah of Punjab over their local caves of mystery." "Good show, governor! Another gin and tonic for you?" "Right-ho, I say! Another G&T will just hit the spot before my next adventure!" Whoo, Maugham, really? I valiantly stuck it out for the entire first third of the novel; but once he finally made it to India and I saw that ol' W.S. was going to have our hero continue to talk in his "right right, what what, governor" speech the whole time he was there too, I just really lost my will to go on. I gotta honestly say, I don't understand how this book has become such a well-loved classic by now, other than maybe to understand that Maugham was already in his "revered elderly national treasure" years when this book came out, so an eternally "awwww!"ing audience was giving him a wide berth to be as slow and sentimental as he wanted here, and it was this initial wave of critical fawning that led to the next generation putting it into the canon. I mean, not really -- if not for the two movie versions, both of which are pretty obscure by now themselves, I don't think most people would remember The Razor's Edge at all anymore, since his much more famous book is 1915's British boarding-school drama Of Human Bondage, so I'm not sure if we really have to worry at this point whether this book is getting too much of a free pass from society at large since society at large has largely forgotten it by now. But still, there are much better books to be read about the Jazz Age or the Lost Generation or whatever you want to call it, both from the authors who were young and already writing while they were living through it (but see also Henry Miller, Anais Nin, the entire Dadaist movement, the entire Surrealist movement, etc. etc.) and through modern projects written generations later that look at our own times through this retro filter (I'm thinking specifically of Christina Ricci's Zelda Fitzgerald in Z), so my official recommendation is that you not bother with this one at all, but rather stick to Maugham's earlier Edwardian-era dramas of class if you want to read him at his best. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
Apr 14, 2023
|
Apr 14, 2023
|
Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
| 0743297318
| 9780743297318
| 0743297318
| 3.92
| 15,058
| 1929
| Oct 10, 2006
|
2022 reads, #48. DID NOT FINISH. I've been wanting to sample the work of Thomas Wolfe for over 30 years now, ever since becoming a fan of the Beat Poe
2022 reads, #48. DID NOT FINISH. I've been wanting to sample the work of Thomas Wolfe for over 30 years now, ever since becoming a fan of the Beat Poets in my early twenties and learning that this Early Modernist pioneer was an influential favorite of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and others; so after being reminded of his existence yet again a couple of weeks ago, I impulsively ran to the library and checked out his 1929 debut Look Homeward, Angel, an unabashedly autobiographical novel which looks at Wolfe's troubled childhood in Asheville, North Carolina (where he eventually became a permanent persona non grata, due to his unflattering depiction here of both the town and its citizens). But alas, just 50 or so pages into this, I discovered the thing that millions of other disappointed readers have discovered over the last 93 years, which is that unless you intimately connect with Wolfe's rambling, digressive prose here, heavily influenced by the rise of stream-of-consciousness writing among his Early Modernist peers, you're largely going to find this book a shaggy, almost unreadable mess, with little moments here and there that are undeniably beautiful but surrounded by pages upon pages of the kind of masturbatory fluff that turns so many people off when it comes to this particular era of literary history. For sure, if someone ever wanted to do a special reading challenge entitled "How We Eventually Got To The Modern MFA Novel," I can now clearly see that Wolfe would be included in such a challenge, alongside such peers as Theodore Dreiser and Sherwood Anderson -- even from the little I read, I could see a direct line from Wolfe to Robert Penn Warren, then from Warren to John Updike, then from Updike to Jonthan Franzen -- but unfortunately for me, I'm largely not a fan of the Modern MFA Novel, and to be fair you could equally include this book in a reading challenge called "How We Eventually Got All The Freaking Problems Of The Modern MFA Novel." It should be approached with this understanding in mind, that it's essentially a prototype for a story style that wouldn't be perfected until the Postmodernist authors of the 1970s, and that your reaction to it will be intricately tied to what your reaction is to such modern Wolfesque authors as Joyce Carol Oates and others. Buyer beware! ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
Oct 14, 2022
|
Oct 14, 2022
|
Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
| 0486437272
| 9780486437279
| 0486437272
| 4.15
| 91
| May 01, 1998
| Feb 11, 2005
|
it was amazing
|
2022 reads, #23. It was only recently, through some random article at some random website I stumbled across, that I learned that those dramatic black-
2022 reads, #23. It was only recently, through some random article at some random website I stumbled across, that I learned that those dramatic black-and-white drawings of Early Modernist skyscrapers I've been occasionally seeing my entire life were all the product of one man, Hugh Ferriss. Originally a simple architectural draftsman who would be hired by firms to do up 3D depictions of proposed projects in order to sell them to investors, as the years continued his personal style started creeping more and more into them, including his obsessive love for the severe shadows and nighttime depictions of German Expressionism, until he had become a virtual one-man genre unto himself that influenced everything from Fritz Lang's Metropolis to the early superhero comic books of DC. I learned that the Chicago Public Library actually owns a 1986 reprint of his 1929 career peak The Metropolis of Tomorrow, and it sure doesn't disappoint. Split into three sections, the first third simply highlights his then already existing illustrations of skyscrapers actually in the real world (already hugely popular and widely reprinted in commercial magazines even in his own lifetime); the second third examines some of the coming issues involved with the continued urbanization of America's cities, including most famously his look at why cities need to enact height zoning laws so to avoid the growing problem of "concrete canyons" (which, indeed, most major cities in fact did enact in the years following this book's publication); and the last third, perhaps most famous now, depicts Ferriss' high-minded ideals about what a perfect future city might look like, which in good 1930s style is pretty much reminiscent of Albert Speer's own plans in these years for a post-war redesigned Nazi Berlin. (Ah, those Modernist architects and their obsession with grand boulevards!) Well worth your time if you can ever track down a copy of this book at a rummage sale or used bookstore, Ferriss is worth remembering for the outsized effect he had on popular culture (for one notorious example, he singlehandedly invented the look of virtually every Batman movie that's been made since), and his thoughts about urbanism and population are a great study piece for anyone who wants to know more about the issues concerning sociologists during the rise of the "Skyscraper Era." It comes strongly recommended in this spirit. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
2
|
not set
not set
|
May 10, 2022
not set
|
May 10, 2022
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 1788441028
| 4.18
| 340,600
| Jan 01, 1937
| Apr 2016
|
it was ok
|
2022 reads, #14. There's a longer story here, but basically a recent freelance assignment from a sales training professional got me thinking about my
2022 reads, #14. There's a longer story here, but basically a recent freelance assignment from a sales training professional got me thinking about my own sales techniques as a freelance book editor, and how a more deliberate sales system might be put into place for increasing both clients and rates but without ever feeling cheesily salesman-like, the threat of which has so far totally put me off the subject in my life. This has me reading several foundational texts in this topic for the very first time, including Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People (my review), which turned out to be a lot more helpful and relevant than I would've ever initially given it credit; but then there was also today's book, which unfortunately was exactly as helpful and relevant as I initially gave it credit, that amount being "not a whole lot." Written in 1937 by a forerunner of the Tony Robbins school of personal guruing (that is, if you can't do something impressive yourself, at least get yourself seen in the company of a lot of impressive people, so to become "impressive by association"), a slim volume that promised how you -- yes, YOU! -- can achieve the heights and fortunes of such close personal friends as Franklin Roosevelt, Andrew Carnegie and Woodrow Wilson. (Like many of the other pioneers of the "self-help" movement -- and hell, I guess even to this day -- Napoleon Hill actually started as the dirt-poor child of some dirt-poor farmers in backwoods Appalachia, eventually becoming an unusually good salesman in Chicago and parlaying that plus personality into all the successes he had afterwards, who may or may not have actually known any of the people he claimed to be friends with. It's exactly these kinds of guys, the ones who first built the self-help industry, that people like Sinclair Lewis was parodying in his 1920s "Zenith" novels, and that Andy Griffith was portraying in Elia Kazan's 1951 black comedy A Face in the Crowd.) Nothing wrong with that, I suppose, and I acknowledged in my review of How to Win Friends that this can still contain very interesting and useful information, like how Carnegie surprisingly turned out to be a forerunner in empathy, self-compassion, and other elements of the ultra-contemporary "wellness" movement. But while Hill's book shares Carnegie's habit of sounding like a sing-songy old-timey radio announcer ("Have you, friend, ever suffered from the monstrosity known as LONELINESS?"), Hill doesn't have nearly as interesting or penetrative of insights to share, a 14-point program that starts with such utterly generic things like, "Step 1: You really gotta want it! No, I mean you really, really gotta want it! Step 2: Now tell yourself what you want! That's right, really tell it to yourself!" before I started rapidly losing interest and skimming through the chapter titles to learn all the rest. So as such, Hill's book is not like Carnegie's, which can be considered a foundational text that eventually leads to contemporary books like The Tipping Point and The Black Swan; Hill's foundational text instead eventually leads to dreck like The Secret, and all the other books over the years whose main argument has been, "If you just really, really, really want it bad enough, you'll eventually get it! ...And if you don't get it, you must've not wanted it bad enough, so screw you, your fault." The sheer energy that often goes into that effort alone is enough for many people to become a success, but it's not really that he's teaching you that much, more that he's delivering a literary equivalent of a two-by-four to the back of the head while screaming, "GET GOING! GET GOING! GET GOING!" That's fine if that's what you need, but you're not actually going to learn any interesting modern lessons about the world from this book, which is why Carnegie's keeps getting read by the millions here in the 2020s, but Hill's book has largely languished into obscurity. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
2
|
not set
not set
|
Apr 04, 2022
not set
|
Apr 04, 2022
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||||
| 0385732953
| 9780385732956
| 0385732953
| 4.24
| 26,101
| 1951
| Aug 23, 2005
|
it was amazing
|
2022 reads, #11. There's a longer story here, but basically one of my friends has recently decided in her fifties to finally pursue a lifelong goal, t
2022 reads, #11. There's a longer story here, but basically one of my friends has recently decided in her fifties to finally pursue a lifelong goal, to not only become a successful children's author but a highly influential and groundbreaking one, in the spirit of Judy Blume or John Green; so that has her reading classics from the genre these days that first missed her attention as an actual child, which in turn has me occasionally reading children's classics that first missed my own attention as an actual child. This is one of them, first published in 1951, eventual winner of the Charles W. Follett Award and the first-ever National Jewish Book Award for children's literature; it can be rightly called "Little House on the Prairie but for an urban Jewish family," in that it's based on the true childhood of the author (who was in late middle-age when she wrote it), who grew up in a Yiddish immigrant family who lived in Manhattan's Lower East Side in the 1910s, in the height of its days as a tenement-filled magnet for fresh Eastern European immigrants, especially Yiddish Jews from Tsarist Russia's "Pale of Settlement" (i.e. the countries that have always borne the brunt of the damage from Russia's collisions with the West -- Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, etc.). To be clear, it's very well-done, a charming and captivating look back at these crowded, noisy, smelly streets from the nostalgic filter of an eight-year-old girl who saw it all with magic and wonder; but as I pointed out to my friend in our mini-book club of it afterwards, it's not a coincidence at all that this found a publisher just three years after the publication of Anne Frank's diary, and I remarked how if it this had come out twenty years previous or twenty years in the future, it wouldn't have gotten nearly the kind of traction from society that it did by coming out directly after the Holocaust, when the Western arts was looking for as many heartwarming stories about Judaism they could find. Also, be aware that this is written from a pre-Beverly Cleary point of influence, i.e. all the kids are angelic little docile sweethearts and the forever wise parents are always patient and understanding, one of the last big hurrahs of the "Don't Speak Unless Ye Have Been Spoken To" school of children's literature before Mid-Century Modernism and then Postmodernism put an end to it for good. Still, the pure joy the girls get out of things like the giant beards and bellies of all the shopkeepers along their street, or eating a plain baked sweet potato for a penny because it's literally the one thing they'll have all week with any kind of sugar in it whatsoever, is worth the time alone it takes to read this slim little volume, not to mention the entire chapter devoted to all the sisters getting scarlet fever (!), which is to say nothing of the ridiculously Dickensian coincidence to end the entire thing. It comes strongly recommended in this spirit, a chance to see a forgotten classic written in a Mid-Century Modernist style but about subjects you've never seen Mid-Century Modernism take on before, an eye-opening experience still very much worth the time of your own current tween kids. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
2
|
not set
not set
|
Apr 03, 2022
not set
|
Apr 03, 2022
|
Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 0486422453
| 9780486422459
| 0486422453
| 4.29
| 98,141
| 1929
| May 08, 2002
|
it was amazing
|
2021 reads, #45. I find myself with a certain amount of emotional and creative malaise these days, as I come out the other side of The Weirdest Year O
2021 reads, #45. I find myself with a certain amount of emotional and creative malaise these days, as I come out the other side of The Weirdest Year Of The Last Century not really knowing what I want my life post-pandemic to exactly look like; and especially as I tackle for the first time the emotional fallout of the very public failure of my small press back in 2017, trying to decide how exactly I'm going to reapproach the entire subject of the arts here in my early fifties, feeling really burned out on the entire topic of the monetization of creativity, which has been a running theme in my life for the last three decades. One of my Goodreads friends here suggested that this sounded like a perfect time to re-read Rainer Maria Rilke's classic 1929 Letters to a Young Poet, a series of open thoughts about creativity that were originally written from a 27-year-old to a 17-year-old in the opening years of the 20th century, but that have been inspiring millions of others ever since. Like many, I originally read the slim book (barely a hundred pages even with giant type and huge margins) when I was a teenager myself, given to me as a gift by a well-meaning adult; and like many in those circumstances, I found my first read of it only so-so, in that his exhortations to live life passionately fall on many teenage deaf ears because of so many teenagers already living life passionately. But approaching it here at 52, like many of those well-meaning adults who hand this out to moody teens like candy, I found this much more engaging the second time around, not necessarily because I've changed my mind about what Rilke actually has to say, but because the pure exuberance in which he says it is a really remarkable and emotionally recharging thing to witness. Ultimately the advice here is no great shakes, even though it's quite astute for being the thoughts of someone who isn't even yet 30 -- that we should be patient like trees when it comes to our lives (that is, don't get upset about any particular season, because there's always another one just around the corner), that if we don't feel the burning need to create art then we shouldn't even bother, that the act of sharing your art is inherently the act of diluting it, which is why we should never pay attention to any outside feedback whatsoever, whether positive or negative in nature, among lots of other insights in this conceptually packed tiny manuscript. What's remarkable, I realize now in late middle-age, is to see all this advice gathered together in one manuscript, when formerly I've had to learn it by bits and pieces all over the place as I've lived the last 35 years of my adult life, which is why so many find this such a great book to pick up every couple of years to get a real creative recharge out of life, much like how a lot of people re-read Marcus Aurelius's Meditations under the same circumstances for the same reason. It's a natural compendium of great advice about creativity, and keeping that flame of passion burning in your life no matter what the circumstances, so it makes finding an artificially created compendium of the same material unnecessary, a fascinatingly complete one-stop guide to combating spiritual burnout that I must confess worked wonders on me. That makes me super-glad for Alexa's recommendation, and super-glad that I'm having a chance to recommend it to you too, a book that did more to combat my existential post-pandemic ennui than all of those contemporary lifehacking "YOU CAN CRUSH IT!!!" guides added together. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
2
|
not set
not set
|
Jul 17, 2021
not set
|
Jul 17, 2021
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0316403946
| 9780316403948
| 0316403946
| 3.66
| 930
| 1942
| Aug 05, 2014
|
THE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they ever wrote Currently in the challenge: Martin Amis THE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they ever wrote Currently in the challenge: Martin Amis | Isaac Asimov (Robot/Empire/Foundation) | Margaret Atwood | JG Ballard | Clive Barker | Philip K Dick | Daphne Du Maurier | William Gibson | Michel Houellebecq | John Irving | Kazuo Ishiguro | John le Carre | Bernard Malamud | China Mieville | VS Naipaul | Chuck Palahniuk | Tim Powers | Philip Roth | Neal Stephenson | Jim Thompson | John Updike | Kurt Vonnegut | PG Wodehouse Finished: Christopher Buckley | Shirley Jackson DID NOT FINISH. I recently had the chance to download all 29 novels written by Jim Thompson, originally spurred by learning that surrealist filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos' next movie is going to be an adaptation of Thompson's late-career noir classic Pop. 1280, but also because I've been a fan of various other Thompson novels that have now been turned into movies, including After Dark, My Sweet, The Getaway, The Grifters, and Michael Winterbottom's unforgettable adaptation of The Killer Inside Me. But I've been warned several times already that Thompson's oeuvre is the very definition of hit-and-miss; and indeed, after starting with his very first book, 1942's Now and On Earth, I found it so unsatisfying that I decided to just abandon it altogether and move on quickly to the next. It's important to remember that Thompson started his career wanting to be a "serious" writer, prompted by his time in the New Deal's Federal Writers Project during the Great Depression, the home of virtually all the famous far-left social-realist political authors that were to come out of that period; and so for his first novel, he wrote a semi-autobiographical tale about down-and-out blue-collar workers that's very much in the vein of Richard Wright, Nelson Algren and John Steinbeck, and by "in the same vein" I mean a plot that can only be described as, "Everything is miserable and then it all gets even more miserable, fuck you Herbert Hoover." (Indeed, it's worth noting that this book was published just a year after Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, with Thompson clearly taking most of his cues here off that hugely influential progressive tale.) The interesting thing about this novel is how much more gleeful Thompson is here than most of his 1930s Communist-flirting social-realist buddies to throw his reader into the absolute deepest part of the pit of filth and shit where the characters from most of these kinds of stories live; while authors like Wright and Algren had already learned by this point to lace their doom-and-gloom stories with moments of levity and poetic beauty, the very thing that allowed them to keep working in this vein well into the '50s, Thompson doesn't even get ten pages before relating a story about a mother having to pick bits of broken glass out of her baby's malted milk powder before feeding her, then being so flustered by the experience that she accidentally gives her two other kids a nearly fatal overdose of pharmacy-grade opium. It's easy in anecdotes like these to see how Thompson ended up being such a master of the outrageous noir by this point two decades later; but it's also easy to see why he crashed and burned so badly in his attempt to be a serious social-realist writer along the lines of Steinbeck, which is what forced him into the world of low-class but reliably paying dime-store novels in the first place. I'm glad I got to take on this first novel and understand all this context about the later, more famous books by Thompson I'll eventually be reading; but now that I've done it and shared the experience here, rest assured that you no longer have to do so yourself. For now, onward and upward to 1946's Heed the Thunder, which according to Wikipedia is a transitional novel where Thompson was still toeing the progressive social-realist line, but this time sets his story among a Jesse-James-like gang of low-class criminals in Great Depression Nebraska. Keep an eye out for my review of that next month. Jim Thompson books now reviewed: Pop. 1280 ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
May 22, 2019
|
May 22, 2019
|
Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
| 1406953210
| 9781406953213
| 1406953210
| 4.10
| 6,819
| Oct 04, 1919
| Nov 03, 2006
|
liked it
|
This was my latest read through the free service DailyLit.com, which breaks up public-domain books into sections of just a thousand words apiece, then
This was my latest read through the free service DailyLit.com, which breaks up public-domain books into sections of just a thousand words apiece, then emails you each section once a day for however long it takes to finish it. As regulars remember, I've actually now finished many of the most famous books of the 500 or so DailyLit offers, so am now starting to approach some of the more minor and obscure titles in their catalog; and although PG Wodehouse as an author certainly isn't obscure, this particular 1919 book is, one of the first adult novels of his career and published long before any in his most famous series, the indelible "Wooster and Jeeves" stories. It wasn't too bad, and I would actually give it 3 1/2 stars if Goodreads allowed half-stars, an Edwardian-style romantic farce that relies on mixed-up identities and comedic coincidences for its humor, and that definitely displays foreshadowing of the "lovable upper-class twits" kind of writing that makes the Wooster/Jeeves books so enjoyable; but it's also easy to tell that this is from the start of of Wodehouse's career, back when he was still relying on copying other styles that were already popular, and hadn't yet reached the literary maturity of forging his own. It comes moderately recommended to Wodehouse completists or others who happen to find a copy of this book plunked in their laps; but if you're going out of your way to read him for the first time, you're better off picking more classic books from later in his career, the ones that so firmly established him as one of the most beloved British humorists of all time. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
Mar 21, 2019
|
Mar 21, 2019
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0060929871
| 9780060929879
| 0060929871
| 3.99
| 1,901,789
| 1932
| Sep 01, 1998
|
liked it
|
[Score: 5 stars as a comedy, 1 star as a drama, averaged out to 3 stars for Goodreads. Read on for the explanation.] Believe it or not, I managed to ge [Score: 5 stars as a comedy, 1 star as a drama, averaged out to 3 stars for Goodreads. Read on for the explanation.] Believe it or not, I managed to get to the age of 49 not only without ever reading Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, but even without learning any spoilers about the plot or story, so I was excited this week to be able to throw myself into it without knowing the least little thing about it, other than that many people consider it the spiritual brother of George Orwell's 1984. And so that's why it came as such a confusing surprise when I did start reading it, and my immediate first thought was, "Wow, this is...kinda terrible. A society that worships Henry Ford like a god? Whose members vomit in disgust at the very idea of marriage and romantic love? Where infants are taught to hate intellectualism by giving them books of nursery rhymes, then hitting them with an electric cattle prod whenever they try to read it? This is a joke, right? Huxley must have meant this as a joke, right? No person in their right mind could read this crap and seriously consider it a dramatically brilliant predictor of the future, right? RIGHT?" And that's when I finally read the Wikipedia pages for both Huxley and this book, and learned the fascinating truth -- that Huxley in fact deliberately did mean for Brave New World to be a joke, and the fact that the academic eggheads he was precisely making fun of now treat this as a serious drama is the biggest joke of all. Turns out that Huxley's first four books before Brave New World were all comedic satires along the lines of George Bernard Shaw, making vicious fun of such subjects as flapper fashion (Crome Yellow), the Jazz Age artistic community (Antic Hay), and the then-trendy post-war fascination for the Renaissance era (Those Barren Leaves), while also being a contributor of witty think-pieces to Vogue and Vanity Fair in these same years. Huxley fully meant for Brave New World to be his fifth comedic satire of this series, to be read in the same tongue-in-cheek spirit as the first four, essentially a wicked parody of such utopian academic intellectuals of the time as HG Wells, mostly known by us now for proto-science-fiction like The War of the Worlds, but hugely famous in his own time for a series of books whose central premises were, "Gee whiz, the future's going to be so great, and I can't wait to live there!" Huxley thought it would be hilarious to write his own "Gee whiz, the future's going to be great" book, but to upend the genre by making all the future developments things that audiences in the 1920s would react to with disgust and horror -- a society deliriously happy now that they've gotten rid of romantic love and natural childbirth, where messy and unfair democracy has been replaced with a algorithm-controlled caste system, where people are conditioned from birth through genetic manipulation and Pavlovian reinforcement to be unquestionably happy with whatever role in life the big computer of the central government has assigned to them. And to add to the ridiculousness, after reading a found copy of Henry Ford's autobiography during a long and boring sea voyage from Europe to America that previous summer, and finding it so ludicrously self-important as to turn into an inadvertent comedy, Huxley decided to set his backwards-utopian society in a far-future time when Ford has been elevated to the next Jesus or Muhammad, within a world that now treats capitalism and automation as literal religions. As far as I can tell, the only reason Brave New World started getting treated seriously in the first place is that, by complete coincidence, several of the things Huxley wrote here as a joke were things that the Nazis in Germany started trying to actually do with complete earnestness just a few years later, especially when it came to Huxley's fanciful ideas about eugenics being the "hope of the future;" then after World War Two was over, when neo-liberal academic intellectuals were desperate to find things to explain to their mouth-breathing inferiors (i.e. the general public) why fascism was so wrong, they latched on to Huxley's former comedy and transformed it into "The Prescient Classic That Brilliantly Foretold The Coming Of Fascism," which was then intellectually linked with the deliberately serious and profoundly better 1984 so that one couldn't think of one without thinking of the other. (For comparison, note that it was these same exact post-war neo-liberal academic intellectuals who latched onto The Diary of Anne Frank to essentially paint the entire Jewish race as pious, sexless do-gooders who have never done a single wrong thing their entire lives, the exact emasculating characterization that Philip Roth was railing against in his countercultural classics like Portnoy's Complaint; and that both of these books' grossly unfair generalizations were further cemented by literally decades of lazy high-school teachers assigning them as required reading while towing the official party line about "what they meant.") That's a real shame, because Brave New World is actually subversively brilliant as long as you read it as a comedy, one that has nothing but contempt for intellectuals who think the future's going to be great simply because it's the future, financially backed by amoral business tycoons who think just because they're rich, that somehow automatically makes them qualified to be sociologists too. When seen like this, the book has a lot to still say even about such contemporary figures as Malcolm Gladwell and his deep-pocketed buddy Bill Gates; but when viewed through the filter of it supposedly being a straightforward drama, like decades of academics have brainwashed us into thinking, Brave New World is awful, a hacky and unsubtle slog that makes any intelligent reader go, "How could anyone ever take this crap seriously?" The secret is that Huxley never meant you to, which is the real key to enjoying this deliberately over-the-top satire. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
Feb 05, 2019
|
Feb 05, 2019
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0812966120
| 9780812966121
| 0812966120
| 3.74
| 13,528
| 1912
| Dec 10, 2002
|
really liked it
|
In the last six months I've gotten back into the habit of frequenting DailyLit.com, a really cool service that will take a public domain book and emai
In the last six months I've gotten back into the habit of frequenting DailyLit.com, a really cool service that will take a public domain book and email you just a thousand words of it each day, allowing you to serially read it over the course of a few months. The problem, though, is that over the last decade I've ended up reading a huge amount of the most famous public domain novels out there, eliminating many of the 250 or so titles that DailyLit offers; and so I'm finding myself stretching out and taking on some books this year that I normally wouldn't have done otherwise, with the latest being the most famous book by revered early 20th century Western author Zane Grey, who eventually published a whopping 90 of them (including 25 titles he had finished but not yet published by the time of his death in 1939, allowing his publisher to continue publishing a brand-new book by him once a year all the way to 1963). That 1912's Riders of the Purple Sage is his most famous of all 90, then, is actually quite ironic, because it contains almost none of the tropes we now associate with Westerns; instead it's a domestic morality tale and pretty over-the-top anti-Mormon screed, set in Utah and centered around the ranch of highly revered single woman Jane Withersteen, a member of a fundamentalist Mormon sect but the only one of her congregation to also be friendly to the non-Mormon ranch hands and orphans of the area (known among the Mormons as "gentiles," which will be confusing at first to modern readers who are used to this being a term just for non-Jews). Our story is basically a melodrama about Jane's struggle to remain loyal to her church while fighting off the lecherous polygamy and "woman ownership" of those dirty worthless Mormons, while also taking care of a motley crew of gentile stragglers who have congregated around her idyllic home, including her roughshod but intensely loyal employees who manage her prize-winning herd of cattle who feed along the sage-covered hillsides of her ranch (thus explaining the eponymous "riders" of said "purple sage"). This being a genre novel from 1912, most of it will sound pretty ridiculous to modern ears, so be prepared for a lot of forgiveness for various literary crimes (including it being guilty of "Charles Dickens Syndrome," i.e. throwing in a two-page exposition dump at the very end in order to quickly explain a ludicrous turn of events designed expressly to give the book a happy ending). But that said, there are also parts that are still legitimately powerful and mature, making it easy to see why Grey became such an intensely loved author in the years between World War 1 and 2; especially affecting, for example, is the B-story about ranch hand Bern Venters, who shoots a notorious masked bandit just to learn that she's a beautiful and scared teenage girl, and who then nurses her back to health among the forgotten Native American caves of a Shangri-La-like hidden paradise valley, the two slowly falling in love over their shared fate as damaged souls with violent pasts that hide tender inner hearts. It's a surprisingly sophisticated characterization for a book this old and pulpy, and the same can be said for a number of other major scenes in the book; and man, Grey was certainly an expert at painting a sweeping visual picture of a harshly beautiful American West, with plenty of scenes that are the literary equivalent of a widescope landscape shot while the soundtrack swells in the background. I'm not sure how many other Grey novels I'll take on in my life, but I'm certainly glad I read at least one of them, and I would recommend this for others who might want to take on one themselves, although I wouldn't necessarily push it on people who don't already have a natural curiosity for it. Consider that my limited suggestion, and heed it accordingly. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
Jan 22, 2019
|
Jan 22, 2019
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0316323705
| 9780316323703
| 4.24
| 647,364
| Aug 1938
| Dec 17, 2013
|
liked it
|
I recently downloaded the complete works of Daphne du Maurier as one big torrent, and have been slowly starting to make my way through the books. I st
I recently downloaded the complete works of Daphne du Maurier as one big torrent, and have been slowly starting to make my way through the books. I started with 1936's Jamaica Inn, which I found only okay, a great plot that's unfortunately buried in a lot of overly flowery prose, written in a Victorian Romantic style that's gone profoundly out of flavor by the 21st century; then last week I finished her next novel after that, probably the one she's most known for, 1938's Rebecca, which...er, I found only okay, a great plot that's unfortunately buried in a lot of overly flowery prose, written in a Victorian Romantic style that's gone profoundly out of flavor by the 21st century. It's easy to see with her books why mainstream critics dismissed her for decades as an inconsequential "women's writer," despite the storylines themselves having a kind of dark narrative bite that belie their fussy historical settings; to be frank, you're much better off simply watching Alfred Hitchcock's excellent adaptation of Rebecca, which gets this dark narrative across much more succinctly while cutting out most of the treacle of the book. I haven't given up on du Maurier yet -- I'll at least be reading My Cousin Rachel before the year is done, as well as her speculative late-career novel Rule Britannia (in which a haughty Great Britain leaves the European Union in 1972, has its economy crash as a result, then is taken over by a fascist government [!!!]); but at this point I'm keeping my expectations low and am breezing through these rather quickly, a writer I'm discovering that I greatly admire but don't exactly like.
...more
|
Notes are private!
|
2
|
not set
not set
|
Apr 02, 2018
not set
|
Apr 15, 2018
|
ebook
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
my rating |
|
|
||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
| 3.90
|
really liked it
|
May 17, 2024
not set
|
May 17, 2024
|
|||||
|
| 3.93
|
really liked it
|
May 17, 2024
not set
|
May 17, 2024
|
|||||
|
| 3.92
|
really liked it
|
May 17, 2024
not set
|
May 17, 2024
|
|||||
|
| 3.90
|
really liked it
|
Mar 02, 2024
not set
|
Mar 02, 2024
|
|||||
|
| 3.89
|
Jan 18, 2024
|
Jan 18, 2024
|
||||||
|
| 3.90
|
liked it
|
Dec 2023
not set
|
Dec 01, 2023
|
|||||
|
| 3.95
|
liked it
|
Dec 2023
not set
|
Dec 01, 2023
|
|||||
|
| 3.92
|
liked it
|
Dec 2023
not set
|
Dec 01, 2023
|
|||||
|
| 3.48
|
Sep 22, 2023
|
Sep 22, 2023
|
||||||
|
| 4.19
|
Apr 14, 2023
|
Apr 14, 2023
|
||||||
|
| 3.92
|
Oct 14, 2022
|
Oct 14, 2022
|
||||||
|
| 4.15
|
it was amazing
|
May 10, 2022
not set
|
May 10, 2022
|
|||||
|
| 4.18
|
it was ok
|
Apr 04, 2022
not set
|
Apr 04, 2022
|
|||||
|
| 4.24
|
it was amazing
|
Apr 03, 2022
not set
|
Apr 03, 2022
|
|||||
|
| 4.29
|
it was amazing
|
Jul 17, 2021
not set
|
Jul 17, 2021
|
|||||
|
| 3.66
|
May 22, 2019
|
May 22, 2019
|
||||||
|
| 4.10
|
liked it
|
Mar 21, 2019
|
Mar 21, 2019
|
|||||
|
| 3.99
|
liked it
|
Feb 05, 2019
|
Feb 05, 2019
|
|||||
|
| 3.74
|
really liked it
|
Jan 22, 2019
|
Jan 22, 2019
|
|||||
|
| 4.24
|
liked it
|
Apr 02, 2018
not set
|
Apr 15, 2018
|
Loading...
