And no I don’t mean it helps commit genocide, thanks no thanks mein kampf.
Rather, I mean a good book must function A good book is like a Trojan horse.
And no I don’t mean it helps commit genocide, thanks no thanks mein kampf.
Rather, I mean a good book must function like a Trojan horse. It needs some exterior elements that make us want to open the gates of our minds and invite it in. An interesting plot. Some thrill. Some suspense. A character or two to root for. Humor works too. Maybe great worldbuilding. Even unique voice can sometimes do it. Y’know, something that makes the novel FUN and ENJOYABLE to read.
But once the novel has gotten inside, it needs to deploy some hidden depths. Maybe a critique of free will. Or an exploration of non-standard pathologies. Or an analysis of the self-destructive nature of imperialism. Something that makes the novel WORTH reading, something to challenge and expand the reader’s mind.
If a novel fails at either task, then it’s not worth reading. Which, unfortunately, includes most novels. It’s challenging to find an author with both skillsets. Philip K. Dick is one such author.
But Man in the High Castle is not one such book.
I don’t want to say that Man in the High Castle has no plot. It does. Stuff happens. Characters have arcs. But none of it is compelling or interesting.
Which isn’t surprising, given what we know about how PKD developed this book’s plot. Famously, he was guided by the I Ching (aka fortune-telling). To give him credit, here’s exactly what he wrote: “I used it in The Man in the High Castle because a number of characters used it. In each case when they asked a question, I threw the coins and wrote the hexagram lines they got. That governed the direction of the book.”
The characters cast the I Ching maybe 10 times throughout the whole book? And of course PKD used his writerly skills to translate the vague lines into plot. In a D&D game, the dice rolls don’t create the story, the DM (and players) do. So I don’t think it’d be fair to say the plot was written randomly.
But I do think the mere fact that he opted to use the I Ching AT ALL tells us something about whether PKD had a strong plot in mind when crafting this book. Obviously, he didn’t. Or he wouldn’t have used the I Ching, right?
And it shows. There’s 4 or 5 points of view, and there’s some ostensible connections between them. But for the most part, they don’t intersect.. Neither are the character arcs themselves particularly dynamic.
That much for the entertaining exterior. But what about the book’s hidden depths?
Not particularly good either. As I cited in my review of his Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, PKD is interested in two questions: “what is real?” and “what constitutes the authentic human being?” In other words, ontology. Does Man in the High Castle help us answer these questions?
No more than, say, Lord of the Rings does.
Because while, yes, this book takes place in an alternate history in which the Axis won WW2, it contains the least explicit and implicit exploration of ontology of any PKD book I’ve read. Probably why it won the Hugo - because it’s one of his simplest and least strange books.
So the book isn’t terrible. There’s some good lines. I enjoyed the characters’ musings on race and the cognitive dissonant racism that many characters have toward their Japanese conquerors. The overall alternative history conceit is cool.
It’s just, every other PKD book I’ve read is better than this one. So… yeah. Go read one of them instead. Ubik, Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, etc....more
Abaddon’s Gate was a fun space adventure about human beings being human beings - stupid and tribalistic - even when a crazy alien wormhole gate is tryAbaddon’s Gate was a fun space adventure about human beings being human beings - stupid and tribalistic - even when a crazy alien wormhole gate is trying to kill them. Which is basically what the entire series is about. People being dumb, even though some alien stuff is trying to kill them. Actually, when you get right down to it, if you replace alien stuff with nature stuff, that’s basically the entire story of humanity. Classic!
I have mixed feelings about the book. On one hand, in contrast to the TV series, it’s the most superior. On the other hand, it’s my least favorite of the first three books. But that’s probably my fault.
First, the dramatic pull of the first half of the book comes from the mystery of The Ring. What is it? What is its purpose? Is it a danger?
But, having already watched the show, I already knew these answers. Without that mystery, the beginning of the book was slooooow going.
Second, I was simply not a fan of half of the points of view. Like earlier books, chapters cycle among different PoVs. In Abaddon’s Gate, we get four:
Holden is the same as usual. I’m not necessarily a fan of Holden himself, so much as a fan of Holden & crew. The package deal of Amos, Alex, Naomi, and Holden is always enjoyable to read and, by this point, we’re all basically honorary crew members of the Rocinate. In addition, Holden spends the book exploring the mysteries of the gate, which is great fun and opens a big space opera mystery that I’m looking forward to exploring in future books. I can’t say more for risk of spoiling, but I love sci-fi mysteries and this one is a Fermi classic: Where the hell are all the aliens?
Bull is the Earth-born security chief on the OPA battleship The Behemoth. His PoV contains heavy political drama and power struggles, which I find fun to read. His pragmatic, consequentialist morality meshes well with my own, which made empathizing with Bull rather easy. So another good PoV. But these next two…
Melba is Clarissa Mao, daughter of the now disgraced Jules Pierre-Mao, the corporate villain of the first books. Her PoV is heavy on emotional introspection, as she goes about trying to destroy James Holden’s life because she’s upset he busted her criminal, psychopathic daddy. Boofuckinghoo. Cry me a river, I want to go kayaking. Maybe this makes me a bad person, but I just couldn’t sympathize with a spoiled girl working through her daddy issues by lying and murdering and hurting innocent people and then getting all upset about it after-the-fact. Every time her PoV came up, I groaned. Eughh.
Anna Volovodov is a Methodist pastor who visits the Ring as a member of a cultural entourage. I vastly preferred Anna’s PoV over Melba’s, but Anna’s didn’t sit well with me either. My issues are two-fold:
1] I don’t care about family drama and “but think of the children” type motivations and concerns are completely lost on me.
2]I’m a very devout agnostic (I didn’t start that way…), who’s heavily studied theology and philosophy.
I’ll spare you my thoughts about the first point, except to say that much of Anna’s emotional angst revolves around her family, which she has left behind. For my own reasons, I didn’t care. Your mileage may vary, depending on your own interest in family drama and/or children as a motivation.
As for the latter point, Anna is a pastor and acts like it. Now she’s not a fanatic, for sure. But that didn’t make her sanctimonious self-righteousness any less off-putting. She’s always talking about forgive and forget, and in God’s eyes all people are equal and yadda yadda. And every time I listen to a person - fictional or real - go on in such a vein, I’m like, Did you read the same Bible I did? Because in the Bible I read, for every act of forgiveness, there’s something like that time God summoned a bear to murder 30 children because they called his prophet Elijah some mean names. And for every line about all children being equal in God’s eyes, there’s some massacre of the Gentiles.
And again maybe I’m just a bad person, but I don’t care to listen to people invoke the greatness of an entity whose actions are essentially those of a mass shooter, except on a grand scale. I mean, the dude included a torture chamber when he designed the universe. Let’s not kid ourselves here, God is a tyrant.
Which isn’t to say I found Anna’s viewpoint unrealistic or poorly written. If you’re inclined towards religion or at least not as fed up of it as I am, you might enjoy her PoV. But I’m not inclined, and I am fed up, and I didn’t enjoy her PoV. As an ex-Christian who has spent hours studying philosophy and religion, there wasn’t anything here to advance my grasp of the religious mindset. With one exception, but it took me about 500 words to explain that exception… which was too many words, so I deleted it from the draft. But if you’re interested in having a discussion about faith, leave me a comment [But beware if you interpret ‘discussion’ as ‘argument’: if you’re going to argue religion with me then at the bare minimum, you should know off-hand what the ‘cosmological argument’ is. That is, if you have to look it up, then we’re simply not in the same philosophical weight class, and an argument between us will be a waste of time for us both.].
So between PoV issues and some pacing turbulence, Abaddon’s Gate was an uneven read, for me.
That said, this book was vastly superior to the TV show. It’s that damn budget. There’s a lengthy drawn out conflict between two groups fighting for control of the Behemoth. It takes up the final third of the book, and there’s some serious battles between the two groups. It’s great action fun. But in the TV series, it’s like… one episode, and it feels more like a family tiff than an actual war.
That’s not necessarily a criticism of the TV series; that’s just the nature of the beast. With limited funding, you can only have so many sets, that you film on over and over, which will naturally create a more limited feel. The book is simply more expansive than the TV series.
…
…
Expansive. The Expanse. Yeah. I’ll see my way out now....more
I thought I would hate Ready Player One. The one phrase I kept seeing from reviewers was '80s nostalgia porn.'
See, Ready Player One tells the story ofI thought I would hate Ready Player One. The one phrase I kept seeing from reviewers was '80s nostalgia porn.'
See, Ready Player One tells the story of Wade Owen Watts, a teenage gamer who spends MOST of his time in the giant virtual world OASIS, the monopolistic hub of both entertainment and business in a dystopian future. At the start of the book, the owner of OASIS dies. His will lays out a quest for a magical Egg, the obtainment of which will confer fabulous wealth AND control of OASIS. Since this guy LOVED the 80s, naturally this quest is going to involve a TON of 80s culture. Hence, the ‘80s nostalgia porn.’
Negative reviewers brought this up, asking, ‘Who’s the audience?!’ of this YA-marketed book. Would millennials get or understand the references? Others said that this wasn’t really 80s nostalgia. It was just ‘name-dropping’ that failed to capture the GENUINE culture of the 80s.
Positive reviewers, on the other hand, wrote that the 80s nostalgia summoned forth their 'inner geek.' Ready Player One was, to them, a celebration of geek culture.
“Great,” I thought when I saw these before reading RP1, “it’s going to be some stupid golden-age nostalgia nonsense. It’s going to be like a cultural-wide inside joke repeated ad nauseam.”
Then I read RP1. Ummmmmmm+++mm++mmm, did we read the same book?
I was born in 1985. I am a geek, if not an obsessive one. As such I got some of the references but only some. I have seen Wargames and Monty Python’s Quest for the Holy Grail – but I didn’t derive especial pleasure from the parts of the quest that required Wade to literally act out a scene from the movie. Likewise, when references were made to things I didn’t get – Modern Family, for example – I didn’t feel left out either.
The thing is, the 80s culture nostalgia, while ostensibly being an integral part of the plot, is ultimately like the cilantro garnish thrown on top of a delicious meal. Like, yeah maybe if you REALLY LOVE cilantro, it’ll be key. Or if you REALLY HATE it, you won’t be able to eat the meal. But the rest of us are focused on the meat and potatoes.
In the case of Ready Player One, the heart of the story involves the conflict between real & virtual interaction. It’s about the loneliness of our internet-centric world, about the deceptiveness of our virtual personas, about corporate greed, and about the importance of friendship. Seriously. Importance of friendship. It is also, despite the ostensibly happy ending, extremely bleak.
Can we talk about our virtual world for a bit? I have tumblr, twitter, and facebook accounts, and they all disturb me for different reasons.
With Facebook, you can, essentially, edit your life. You can post only your best pictures. You mention only your vacations, your good times – or even just your BIG times. It calls to mind a quote from Ann Beattie’s short story Snow: “Every life is interesting if you omit mention of most of it.” In Facebook (and on other social media outlets), most of a person’s life is omitted. Instead we get this deceptive sense of BUSYNESS. Other people’s lives all seem so HAPPENING. And ours, by comparison, seems less so.
RP1 explores this idea via avatars. With few exceptions, everyone's OASIS avatar is more beautiful than the person behind it. I mean, obviously, right? Is this dishonest? Does it create a false sense of beauty in the world? Or does it demonstrate that humanity's inner beauty is greater its outer beauty? And what about other issues, like gender or skin color? If you know you're going to be discriminated against for being a woman or a person of color, then how about making your avatar white and male? Is that cowardly? Just in general, is it cowardly to misrepresent yourself online, perhaps as someone better than who you are? Or is projecting a superior version of yourself simply the first step to making it a reality?
Tumblr, on the other hand, often strikes me as incredibly lonely. Check out the poetry tag for example. A solid chunk of the poems are lonely cries out into the void, unheard poets casting their sadness like a hook into the ocean of the internet, desperately hoping some giant fish will snap it up and save them from their sorrow. I think, if you asked these people, they’d understand that this isn’t going to happen. But the impulse – the NEED to connect, the NEED to believe your thoughts and opinions have value – is very real. People want to think their loneliness has deeper meaning.
RP1 explores this loneliness. The main character Wade (aka Parzival) is an outcast and a loner. No real family, no real friends. His life has consisted of YEARS of studying 80s culture in hopes of finding the mystical Egg. He does this because he has no other purpose in life. The romance of this book – with a fellow egg hunter named Art3mis – is primarily virtual. Does the book dedicate long passages to exploring this real v. virtual? No. Nor did I want it to. This isn’t James Joyce. But it’s there, like a phantom, haunting every chapter, every scene, every character.
The last of the social media is twitter, which is BY FAR my least favorite social media outlet. I tried to maintain an account but, since originally writing this review, gave it up. I got into too many situations in which I ALMOST had a really good discussion, but couldn't, because genuine discussion between intelligent, educated individuals cannot be bite-sized. Instead, Twitter is one giant advertising platform. Not just for corporations but for people too. Authors promoting their work. People promoting their ideology.
Which, yknow, that’s not a BAD thing necessarily. In concept, it’s good for authors to have the means to promote their work. It’s good to have this open platform for the dispossessed to have a voice. Unfortunately, in execution, it all just amounts to branding. Because of the nature of twitter, there’s little real conversation or deeper engagement. It’s mostly just brand-shots fired back n forth at or with one another. Buy my book, my product, my idea, my existence. It's a conversation among eyeballs, a mad zoo of people desperately trying to find legitimization in the things they do.
For its exploration of these and other themes, I consider RP1 to be a depressing book. Without giving any spoilers, consider the fate of all the obsessed egg hunters NOT explicitly mentioned. If the evil corporation – IOI - that opposes Wade and his friends manages to win by cheating, then all of these years of obsessed egg hunting have been for naught. They are wasted. And this one thing that gave them purpose & meaning in life… it’s over.
But you know what? Even if Wade or one of his friends wins, the same is also true. Yes, Wade or whoever wins gets all the money and protects OASIS from IOI, but he is just one of THOUSANDS or MILLIONS of egg hunters who had dedicated their lives to finding the egg. Put like that, this whole quest becomes incredibly sadistic. How cruel to put up such a shining hope of wealth and escape, knowing that only ONE person can achieve it.
Luckily there is a way out of this interpretation and it lies in friendship. So, yes, regardless of the outcome, there will be thousands who had their life purpose stripped away from them. And yet… they will still have the friendships they’ve formed in pursuit of their quest. They’ll still possess the bonds created by having a common goal.
That's the real point of this book, the joy of geekdom in general, and the saving grace of social media. It’s like how, in Watchmen, Ozymandias (& Dr. Manhattan) realize the world NEEDS something to unite it, or else it’ll all fall apart in conflict. Well Geekdom does unify people. The Marvel Universe? The Star Wars reboot? Blizzard's latest game? George RR Martin's laziness next book? These unify people in excitement and anticipation. And social media is the venue by which this unification can happen.
That’s what RP1 is, ultimately, all about. It’s not just some pointless ‘nostalgia 80s porn.’ It’s about how Geekdom unifies people in friendship and how it’s that FRIENDSHIP – not the actual geek stuff – that truly matters.
In short, despite its obvious flaws, I loved Ready Player One....more
This is a noir 'hardboiled' (i.e. wise-cracking detectives, femme fatales, and no twin-brother hiding in a cabinet with a poisoned needle nonsense) myThis is a noir 'hardboiled' (i.e. wise-cracking detectives, femme fatales, and no twin-brother hiding in a cabinet with a poisoned needle nonsense) mystery written in the 1930s. It's about a string of murders, a suspiciously absent mad rich-guy inventor, and the alcoholic detective Nick and his alcoholic wife Nora.
Supposedly it was meant to be something of a comedy. It's not that funny. I never laughed. Maybe had I known it was meant to be a comedy before-hand I might've laughed. But if you need to tell someone it's supposed to be funny for it to be funny, well...
Basically, I'm going to write the same thing here that I wrote for The Maltese Falcon, also written by Dashiell Hammett: He's noticeably inferior to Raymond Chandler. We're not talking Generic Soda versus Coca Cola. We're talking Generic Soda versus that organic, hand-crafted, bottle-carbonated, cane-sugar only, thousand year old family recipe soda crafted by nuns in a monastery situated on top of a mountain. The stuff that is like $10 for a four pack. There's a big difference.
So in the end, while the book was mildly entertaining and the dialogue nothing to sneer at, if you want to read good noir, read Raymond Chandler....more
Perhaps, had I not read this in an airport and on airplane, trapped in that strange limbo between home and not-home, I would not have loved this so.
AlPerhaps, had I not read this in an airport and on airplane, trapped in that strange limbo between home and not-home, I would not have loved this so.
Almost certainly, had I not already known that the author Michael Ondaatje was first and foremost a poet, I would not have loved it so. I would not have known how to read it, but being forewarned, I knew to disengage my normally logical, rational thought processes. Attempting to read The English Patient as you might read, say, The Hunger Games is like trying to hold a river in your fingers.
No. You must leap into the river and drink deep.
The poet is not all that interested in framing a precise image with precise words. The poet's target is far more ambitious than mere description: the poet aims for emotion. And emotion is a wild, reckless thing, hardly logical: love for a grandmother summoned by the aroma of cheap potpourri; some chaotic confluence of squeaks and scratches rendering us paralyzed because it touches some hidden fear; or the feel of sand squishing between our toes unlocking a childhood memory of such potent happiness that we wonder how we could have possibly ever misplaced it.
I could say that the English Patient is a story set in pre-, mid-, and post-WWII, about spies and the desert and a young nurse and a Sikh sapper (disarmer of bombs) and the titular man, the mysterious English patient, all holed up in a half-destroyed Italian villa, which is filled with booby traps and a countryside full of unexploded bombs. I could say that, and you might think it sounds exciting, but honestly I'd be leading you astray.
The superficial plot is not the point; that only exists to create a framework for the depths of what is, in essence, a novel-length love poem. But not love in the saccharine Disney sense, love in the sense that most of us know it. Love as a hormonal tidal wave that carries us into foolishness and irrationality; love as a choice we make, an affirmation of optimism and hope in the face of a fundamentally pessimistic reality; love waltzing with war; love as the clash between melancholy and hope. Love made real, depicted as a series of concrete images, like water dripping onto an old threadbare sofa; and a girl in a thin dress holding two bomb wires; and a search for a lost oasis; and an old book whose pages have been taped over with poetry.
The English Patient is not a book that you can read in snatches, ten pages here, ten pages there, no more than you can turn love on and off like water droplets from a spigot. It is full on thunderstorm or it is nothing. As such, The English Patient is best read in a single sitting, trespassing deep into your own mind, beyond the borders of consciousness and sensibility, into the blurry subconscious realms of Emotion. Not all people have the focus and the time and the desire to undertake such an expedition. And even those who do cannot always manage to combine them together. But if you can, and if you do manage it, the poetry of The English Patient will stick with you always....more
While it's true that Sam Spade & The Maltese Falcon came first and inspired Raymond Chandler, this is one case in which the original is not the superiWhile it's true that Sam Spade & The Maltese Falcon came first and inspired Raymond Chandler, this is one case in which the original is not the superior.
Raymond Chandler could write circles around Dashiell Hammett, and it shows. Chandler's novels ooze with style, with flavor, with voice, with period details and noir delight, but this guy, famous though it is, feels like a stripped down version of all that. Sure the plot is there, the femme fatale, the double-crossing and innuendo, the wise-cracking tough guy detective, but I never felt much delight in inhabiting his world. The prose is clean and serviceable, but sometimes I want more than that. Sometimes I want sprinkles on my ice-cream, and fudge and brownies and bananas. When I read Chandler, every new line is like turning a corner in a Ripley's Believe It or Not. What new delight, what new bizarro, will confront me?
Not so with Maltese Falcon, not so at all. Undoubtedly, I would have liked this guy a lot more if I had read him before I'd been introduced to Chandler. But I wasn't. So instead it just feels like a poor man's Chandler....more
The book was written in tandem with the screenplay for the Kubrick film, which I think is rather unique and interesting.
As for the book itself, it wasThe book was written in tandem with the screenplay for the Kubrick film, which I think is rather unique and interesting.
As for the book itself, it was enjoyable, more enjoyable than the film in my opinion, though I wish I had watched the movie before reading the book. Ambiguity is the movie's lifeblood and the book tends to clear all that up.
Of particular interest is how much time Arthur C. Clarke devoted to explaining the mundane realities of space travel, such as the zero g bathroom or the delicate bone structure & atrophied muscles of those who have grown up in a low-gravity environment. Like all good sci-fi, 2001 A Space Odyssey is more about ideas than it is about space battles, though there's enough malice and conflict in here to make it an enjoyable read.
But if you don't like sci-fi, I would probably avoid....more
Just, ah, terminated Beloved by Toni Morrison and oh how I was disappointed by it.
There is a difference between obscurity and depth, a difference betwJust, ah, terminated Beloved by Toni Morrison and oh how I was disappointed by it.
There is a difference between obscurity and depth, a difference between an honest look at human nature and the undisciplined pandering of human misery. There's just so much STUFF in Beloved. Themes, motifs, tonal and style shifts, surrealism, magical realism, stream-of-consciousness, metaphors, hard-hitting images of rape and slavery. No one can deny that.
But it's not particularly well-blended. It's like a child who thought a gourmet meal could be made by taking a filet mignon, asparagus, pepper, butter, fresh baked Italian round, olive oil, a fine Malbec and throwing it into a blender. But it can't, of course. Every gourmet chef understands that it's not the principal components that make a good meal but their combination and presentation.
Let me try to state it more plainly:
The main issue with Beloved is that Toni Morrison is a fine writer whose style (at least in Beloved) lacks discipline. Point-of-view jumps all over the place, in a manner that I found least enjoyable to the reader and most convenient to the writer. Need to explain another character's perception of an event? Switch to em! Never you mind that much of life's love and conflict come from the unbridgeable distances between our minds.
The book's suspense and forward momentum are crippled. There's no sense of free-fall in Beloved. I liken opening a good book to Alice right before she enters wonderland. I'm on a quick jaunt and suddenly there's a tunnel and down I go into a wondrous land, falling toward a grand culmination at the bottom! I know this grand ending exists because I know how gravity (novel structure) works, but more importantly I can feel it - in my heart, in my soul - this sense of GOING somewhere, of something wonderful headed my way.
I felt none of that in Beloved. It's not that there weren't mysteries or genuine emotions at stake. Rather it was that lack of discipline again. Just when I would build a reading fervor, Toni would handicap it by switching to an annoying stream-of-consciousness that wasn't present for the first 200 pages of the book. Five page paragraphs? No problem.
What dealt the final blow to my relationship with this book was this paragraph, which I will attempt to copy as exactly as I can:
"We are not crouching now we are standing but my legs are like my dead man's eyes I cannot fall because there is no room to the men without skin are making loud noises I am not dead the bread is sea-colored I am too hungry to eat it the sun closes my eyes those able to die are in a pile I cannot find my man the one whose teeth I have loved a hot thing the little hill of dead people a hot thing the men without skin push them through wit poles the woman is there with the face I want the face that is mine they fall into the sea which is the color of bread she has nothing in her ears if I had the teeth of the man who died on my face I would bite the circle around her neck bite it away I know she does not like it now there is room to crouch and to watch the crouching others it is the crouching that is now always now inside the woman with my face in the sea a hot thing"
Oh the sheer fucking arrogance of a writer who believes she can approximate human emotion with syntactical gimmickry.
NO. Just NO. You cannot force emotion upon me. I am the reader, you are just the writer. You may be the navigation, but I am the engine. You may be the storm, but I am the ocean itself. You build the path, but it is I who must walk it. And this is no path I care to walk. It is a meandering nonsensical path with waterfalls and lilies thrown willy-nilly by a gardener who understands the images of emotions but not the flow.
Already I can foresee the response to that claim, that if anything her meandering narrative & style have perfectly captured the way people actually think, the fragmented narrative of our minds and memories, especially when they are tinged blue and red with deep emotion. I concede that some people may think that way.
But literature is not life. Literature is a telescope which looks at life from a distance. And this particular telescope? It's got a foggy lens. Its creator should have cared less about the fanciful engravings on the side and more about its fundamental inner-workings. Perhaps then we could have looked upon the star in all of its mighty glory instead of being blinded by a grand light and simply assuming that beyond it must be something mighty and glorious....more
It's a book about dinosaurs on a resort island. That includes velociraptors and tyrannosaurus rexii, of both adult and juvenile variety. There was alsIt's a book about dinosaurs on a resort island. That includes velociraptors and tyrannosaurus rexii, of both adult and juvenile variety. There was also some promise of ice cream in the Safari Lodge's kitchen. But when we get there, there is no ice cream. Just velociraptors.
As you might therefore expect, this is a rather harrowing techno-thriller.
It is the tale of one nine year old girl's quest for ice cream. A great many things stand in her way, including the aforementioned dinosaurs, a creepy old man, the entirety of chaos theory as explained by mathematician Jeff Goldblum (played by Ian Malcolm), a poisonous loogie, and this insufferably useless know-it-all Norse paleontologist named Dr. Grantenheimer. Also electrified fences!
I have seen some other insufferable know-it-alls making such complaints about this book like, "There is very flat characterization" or "The prose lacks a distinct UV-quality to it which prevented it from imbue-ing my skin with a rich gold lustre" or "sensationalism and misuse of scientific concepts." As best as I can tell, these people must have missed the part with the dinosaurs on the island resort.
You really owe it to yourself to read this page-churner of a thriller....more
I don't get the complaints about Michael Crichton's writing. Take the following complaint about this book:
"It's a boring procedural with flat, uninterI don't get the complaints about Michael Crichton's writing. Take the following complaint about this book:
"It's a boring procedural with flat, uninteresting characters."
Yeah. It's a procedural. That's what Michael Crichton writes. Explorations of a scientific idea. He's an asker of "What If?" What if we were able to recreate dinosaurs. What if we developed nanotech and it got away from us. What if a deadly alien virus came down from a satellite.
I like such stories. When I buy a Michael Crichton, that's what I want to read, and that's what he delivers. Complaining that it's not a character-centric drama is like going to see Transformers and complaining about the lack of a good script....more
I read this a week or two ago, and I keep waiting for some idea of how I would review this. Or even whether I liked it or not.
I don't know. So allow mI read this a week or two ago, and I keep waiting for some idea of how I would review this. Or even whether I liked it or not.
I don't know. So allow me to just talk randomly.
The Outsiders is sometimes credited for creating the Young Adult genre. I mean sure, before then, you had books like A Wrinkle In Time. But go read that book. For a children's book, it's complicated! You didn't really have books for children and books for adults. Rather you had books for adults that just so happened to appeal to children.
The Outsiders, though, yeah this is YOUNG ADULT. If the publishing industry was run by some sort of giant robot-god-like-thing, then it would stamp this with YOUNG ADULT. Yeah that's how I picture the giant robot-god-like-thing: a poorly assembled mechatronic creation like you might find if you stole the tyrannosaurus rex from that Jurassic Park ride in Universal Studios and peeled off its skin. And it would have like ninety arms and have giant stamps with all the genres or judgments like APPROVED or REJECTED. And there would be a lot of steam. I imagine it would have some poor editor slaves, faces grimy but for their eyes, protected by horn-rim glasses.
Anyway. The Outsiders was written by a sixteen year old girl. Very obviously so. It tells the story of the Greasers vs the Socs, or more simply the poor versus the rich. The members of the Greaser gang aren't very scary as gang-members. They slick back their hair, wear tight shirts, and quote poetry. They differentiate between the words 'tough' and 'tuff.' And they arrange fights, sorry rumbles, for, uh, just the helluva it I guess. In fact, they act like gang members if written by a sixteen year old girl.
Which, um, yeah, they are. Yeah there's a nice way to end a review:
As a teacher, I sometimes try to convince kids that reading is AWESOME and FUN and GREAT.
The kids tend to go >:O "OH YEAH?!?!?! What's so great about As a teacher, I sometimes try to convince kids that reading is AWESOME and FUN and GREAT.
The kids tend to go >:O "OH YEAH?!?!?! What's so great about it, huh?! Is it better than NETFLIX & CHILL?! Is it more fun than CALL OF DUTY MODERN WARFARE NINE!? Is it more exciting than shooting TERRORISTS?!"
"Well, no, maybe not more exciting but it's a nice quiet time to--"
"I don't have TIME for reading. I'm president of the SILVER NEEDLE club! And I have to practice violin! And I have AP calculus and AP psychology and AP basket-weaving! I need to VOLUNTEER at the homeless shelter. Those help me get into college! Which helps me get a good job and make the dolla billz! What's reading do?"
"Well it helps you maintain an internal narrative and-"
"Internal WHAT?"
"You know hold a conversation with yourself about your life and--"
"Talk to MYSELF? Oh Teacher Erik you so crazy!"
It's about that time though that I pull out my giant "Cell-phone Smasher" hammer and hurl it across the room. It zips through the air, destroys a beaker of hydrochloric acid, kills a zombie pig, drinks a gallon of low-fat milk, cracks a couple cellphone screens, and returns to my hand, where it is struck by lightning and gives my voice that special glow:
"SILENCE YOU MISERABLE PROTO-HUMANS! Golden Compass is more exciting than shooting terrorists! It's got talking, armor-wearing polar bears. It's got aeronaut cowboys, who fly in hot-air balloons! It's got witches, who live for six centuries! It's got gun-toting gypsies! It's got child-snatchers! It's got experimentation on children! What's not to like about child experimentation, huh? I THINK THIS CLASS NEEDS MORE OF THAT, WHAT DO YOU THINK?"
"Mister Erik!!!! You can't talk to us like-"
"I can talk to you in whatever goddamn way I please. I'm the big cheese here, I'm the bee's knees, I'm the rooster on the haystack. Reading's good stuff, you see? It takes you on an adventure. It challenges you with new ideas and confronts you with novel ethical situations. The Golden Compass is set in an alternate universe, where science and theology are the same thing. How else you going to travel to another world? Ain't by boat, but by book. And in this world, people's souls are physically manifested in the forms of daemons, of animal familiars. That's what you call a metaphor, and it's a good one for talking about souls, innit? I don't suppose that's important is it? A discussion of the SOUL?"
My students are getting teary-eyed now and snuffling, but I power on.
“The Golden Compass is a thinkin’ book. It’s a thinkin’ adventure book that’s not too deep. About SIN. And religion and free will and good and evil. It’s also about growing up. Lyra’s a headstrong, manipulative, free-spirited wild thing. In fact, she’s a bit like you all. Maybe you could learn something from her. Because yeah you’re right, reading a book may not be as fun as shooting a rocket launcher or as career-advancing as an AP class. But life ain't about making the dollar bills or acquiring power or security. Them's the means to an end, but not the end itself. Life's about something more than that, it’s about letting your imagination go, about falling deep into something beyond you, about exploring this world we have and what purpose we may have in it and what duties we must fulfill. It's about adventure and imagination and transformation of ourselves and the world around us. This book --" I drop it heavily on the desk "--it's got imagination and dreams a plenty."
"Of course," I add, "it isn't perfect, either. But that's part of life, too."
And my students, they stare at me all starry-eyed and excited about life and eager to transform themselves--
And then I wake up, and a student is raising his hand, and asking, "Teacher Erik - what's the point of learning any of this?"
And I sigh and launch into an explanation I've made a thousand times before and will have to make, I know, a thousand times again......more
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold is basically a book in which two men sit in a room and talk with each other. Really, that's it. And while John le CaThe Spy Who Came in from the Cold is basically a book in which two men sit in a room and talk with each other. Really, that's it. And while John le Carre's good at writing dialogue, he's not -that- good.
Don't get me wrong; the book is tightly written, a thriller, a mystery, a page-turner. It's written with authority. It had a definite Cold War aura to it. But it was just... hollow?
Perhaps my response to the book suffers since I read it immediately after finishing The Book Thief, by Markus Zusak. Both have very bleak tones, both are written rather simply and to the point. And yet the Book Thief managed to take that bleak tone, the grim palette of war and suffering, and paint something beautiful, something inspiring and grand. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold is bleak bleak bleak and then ends on the bleakest note of all.
Do you see my criticism? Without an inner light, a deeper message, an attempt to reach into the heart of mankind and reveal something mysterious, the book's quality rests solely on its writing mechanics. Mechanics which, frankly, are flawed:
The "mystery" was, at least to me, almost patently obvious. It was also absurd. Without giving away any spoilers, a spy agency would not risk its greatest asset on what basically amounts to a gamble on human nature. It was a real shame, for a book otherwise so carefully realistic.
The entire thing, the whole shebang, both the mystery and the character's motivation, rests on a love relationship which was hardly believable. Liz, an "attractive" twenty-something Communist librarian, is supposed to fall madly and deeply in love with the protag Alec, a mean fifty-year-old drunk who hates communists. Uh. What? Thus the parts where Liz talks about her love of Alec (and vice versa) come across the cheapest sort of deus ex machina soap opera melodrama.
With all that said, I did give the book 3 stars. It's good, just not as good as I wanted it to be....more
It tells the story of a low-IQ fellow named Charlie Gordon who has an 'operashun' and becomes a geniusFlowers for Algernon felt like two books in one.
It tells the story of a low-IQ fellow named Charlie Gordon who has an 'operashun' and becomes a genius. That's book one. The ascent I'll call it. But of course - and honestly I'm not even going to worry about spoilers, sorry - he eventually realizes that this operashun is not permanent. Then he descends from genius back to his original low intelligence self. That's book two. The descent.
I wasn't a huge fan of the ascent. It reads like the cliff-notes version of 'the troubles of being a smart person' complete with the stereotypes of 'intelligence magically means you don't have to work hard to learn!' and 'everyone thinks I'm arrogant but really just no one understands me!!!' and 'I grow impatient with less intelligent people.' It's not that there isn't an element of truth to these, it's just that they're not terribly insightful. Like a precocious child's perspective on intelligence. He can predict the isolation, but he could not explain it in such a way as to evoke a true understanding of the situation. I daresay that's why, while there exist prodigy piano players and tennis players and composers, I've never in my whole life heard of a ten year old prodigy writer. Maybe that's realistic, considering that Charlie Gordon becomes a genius so quickly, but it's not terribly interesting to me as a reader.
Consider: the height of the ascent is that Charlie Gordon realizes that intelligence without giving back or intelligence without love is dangerous and bad. Gee. Whoda thought?
But this book does have great themes. It explores questions about how we deal with mental disorder & retardation, the many types of intelligence (e.g., emotional vs 'academic' intelligence), the role of intelligence in romantic love, and others.
Now THESE themes reach their peak during the second half of the book, during the descent. That half is simply fantastic. It's emotional and humanizing in a way that the first half simply is not.
I suspect the major differences is that, while few of us (including the author), can empathize or even sympathize with what it may be like to become suddenly smarter, most of us are well aware of what it means to grow dumber. That is, what it means to grow older and to become, well, less than we used to be. Sure Charlie Gordon's degradation is much more rapid, but when we're 90 years old, looking back on the past 30 years of our lives, well, memories have a way of condensing, don't they? It'll feel pretty rapid to us then.
Overall, it was a good book. Not intellectually but emotionally, and I think that's just a little bit ironic....more
Treasure Island is a standard adventure story, which has been copied so often that, while it may have been original when it was first written, it hardTreasure Island is a standard adventure story, which has been copied so often that, while it may have been original when it was first written, it hardly is today. That is the nature of books and time: they become obsolete, they do not stand the test of time.
Treasure Island, however, hardly fails the test of time. If you haven't read it, I would recommend you do so. It's a swift, pleasant read that, yes, feels a bit shallow, but it has plenty of charms to make up for that....more
I found this book surprisingly enjoyable, even though I read it in high school. Jane Austen, though certainly not this poor destitute working-class feI found this book surprisingly enjoyable, even though I read it in high school. Jane Austen, though certainly not this poor destitute working-class female writer that she is sometimes erroneously portrayed as, is quite the masterful writer. A definite recommendation for the fairer sex, and I think many men would not find the material quite as sappy as they might expect....more
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