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0140088911
| 9780140088915
| 0140088911
| 3.69
| 24,022
| Jan 1984
| Mar 04, 1986
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did not like it
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Back in 2011, I saw this movie titled Martha Marcy May Marlene, about a young woman who recently escaped from a cult. It had a very high rotten tomato
Back in 2011, I saw this movie titled Martha Marcy May Marlene, about a young woman who recently escaped from a cult. It had a very high rotten tomato score (it’s at 90% right now), so I figured that it had to have at least some redeeming qualities. Instead, it became the only film that managed my lowest rating, a single star. At the time I wrote, “See, art does not need to be happy. In fact, it rarely is. Alas, this has caused some people to mistake anything with despair, depression, and destitution as art. This is not so. Dragging viewers through mud, through the slime of humanity, accomplishes nothing. Art – good art – no matter how awful its depiction of humanity has a way of… inspiring viewers. Of pulling them above above that muck, giving them wings.” This perfectly describes how I feel about Money: A Suicide Note. I gave it fifty pages to ever rise about the muck, but it only dug itself deeper. The protagonist is a sleazebag porno director but that’s not his problem. His problem is that he’s a loser. He spends the vast majority of these fifty pages (and, from what I’ve read in other reviews, the remainder as well) doing little but worrying that his girl is cheating on him, sitting in his hotel room drinking, and occasionally mustering up the energy to go to the strip joint to drink there. All of this written in a stylistically sharp prose that ultimately turns purple as it suffocates on a lack of substance. I have a rule about books, movies, and television shows. If my consumption of it only detracts from my life, then I should stay well away from it. I consider this not only a wise plan of action, but also the foundation for good criticism. The way I see it, it doesn’t take much skill to peddle human misery as narrative and art. Rather, the true artist can take us down to the greatest depths, the worst darkness of humanity and STILL find some light there. That’s tough. That takes genius. Money: A Suicide Note had no light, no joy, no genius, at least that I ever encountered. If you’re a huge fan of black comedy & postmodernism or otherwise have found your life suffused with dangerously high levels of optimism, I might well recommend this book. Otherwise, I’d keep your distance. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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not set
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May 19, 2017
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Paperback
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0765335298
| 9780765335296
| 0765335298
| 3.72
| 5,265
| Oct 20, 2015
| Oct 20, 2015
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did not like it
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Because I am unable to resist the seductions of irony, here is a quote from Robert Downey Jr.: This is probably going to get quoted in every publicatioBecause I am unable to resist the seductions of irony, here is a quote from Robert Downey Jr.: This is probably going to get quoted in every publication just because I said it. And I’m not even saying anything. I’m not talking about my films, I’m not talking about my life, and I’m not talking about the world. And yet, the media will print it simply because I said it. And at this moment in time, I bet there is an artist around the corner of this hotel, on the street, with a mind far beyond ours, but we will never listen to him simply because he has not appeared in a movie. He goes on to say, “And that is what is fucked up about our culture,” but that’s not the point I’m trying to make. Instead, I’d like to appreciate for a moment the popularity of celebrities and the compelling nature of fiction in general. We all have known the experience of watching a film and finding ourselves on the edge of our seats, empathizing with the characters. This, even though we know that they are just actors, in NO DANGER whatsoever, and that, even if “based on a true story,” what’s actually happening on the screen is an artificial construct, no more real than a golem’s dream. Yet there we are, caring. Somehow these characters in their imaginary worlds approximate truth in a way that actual reality, confusing and indeterminate as it is, cannot. Many people, particularly a certain stripe of intellectual, would call us fools and escapists, mere addicts of the phantasmagorical. I know a fellow who foreswore all fiction and instead dedicated himself exclusively to documentary film and non-fiction books (and also joined a nudist colony). David Foster Wallace in his essay E Unibus Pluram suggested our television obsession causes a chain reaction of disassociation in which American fiction writers get their dosage of reality from fiction – which is itself written by personages who have based their reality on consumed fiction – thereby creating a recursive spiral down the rabbit hole, until what we think is reality is not real but an infinitely regressed, telephone-game garbled version of it. Even if I were to agree in principle, I would not agree in sentiment. I think humanity’s capacity for empathy is nothing short of amazing. I'd say that when we engage in narrative, we are exercising our empathy muscles. All forms of narrative do this, but the intimate nature of written literature does it best. A good book – with complex, diverse characters and morally gray situations – is the empathy version of a Crossfit workout. As such, I’d claim that readers are, if not the best people in the world, at least the most empathetic. I believe our pathetic little meatsack hearts, brimming with narrative and character, carry on the great work of humanity in a way that the mighty wielders of the sword and the hammer and the abacus do not. I say that the greatest and most beautiful machine or theory, wielded without empathy, is not only inhuman, but antihuman. Alas, Radiance demands little exercise of our empathy muscles (or perhaps too much). It’s not that it doesn’t contain complex characters, morally gray situations, or a great imagination, but that they are not presented in an engaging manner. Instead the author utilizes language, structure, genre, and form as ends unto themselves, rather than as means to an end (that end typically being the exploration of humanity). Put simply, the author Catherynne Valente wanted to eat her cake and have it too. To quote from an interview she had with John Scalzi: I’m not going to lie. This book is crazypants. I threw everything I had into it. Heart and soul and probably some cartilage and eyeball fluid, too. I wanted to write a melodrama about a wild, living and breathing and squabbling Solar System. I wanted to write a horror-romance about huge, elemental aliens. I wanted to write a non-linear postmodern SF novel that was also a page-turning thriller because I secretly always wanted to write a hardboiled noir murder mystery. I wanted to write a badass adventure about film patents. I wanted to write a book about movies. About seeing and being seen. About what the camera does to us when it never leaves our side. About who has the right to speak, and who has to buy it. About the meaning of science fiction in a science fictional universe. And through it all I wanted to write about a lost girl who didn’t come home. It all hangs together, I promise! Alas, Catherynne Valente, you’ve made a promise you couldn’t keep. Not for this reader at least. It doesn’t hang together. It’s too much in too little space. Worse, you’ve committed the one sin no author – whether her book is a non-linear postmodern narrative or not – can commit: you didn’t give us a reason to care. Now those who do like this book might argue that I’m committing the affective fallacy. That I’m critiqueing a piece of literature based on how it makes us FEEL (as opposed to what it makes us think). They would trumpet the book’s non-linear narrative and metafictional elements as an explicit choice that may make the book more difficult to read but that is NECESSARY to the story’s ultimate purpose: To explore the subjective nature of reality, and of film’s intersections with it, and the methods and consequences of how and where we choose to focus the spotlights of our eyeballs, ears, and minds. I would counter that not all non-linear narratives are created equal. Even if the mere EXISTENCE of a non-linear narrative OUGHT to tell us the author is trying to make some metafictional comment about genre or narrative, that doesn’t mean she actually accomplished her aims. I’d go further still: even the ACCOMPLISHMENT of these aims wouldn’t necessarily make the book worth reading. Instead, each reader must ultimately ask him or herself, is the metafictional exploration of genre worth reading if the author has failed to provide a compelling underpinning of humanity? My complete lack of engagement with this novel would answer a resounding NO. But do not mistake this as MERELY an opposition to postmodern fiction. True enough I consider postmodern lit a form of intellectual masturbation, but a 1-star rating from me is an even greater condemnation. I think Radiance is a particularly bad example of post-modern lit. By way of contrast, I’d bring up Italo Calvino’s post-modern book If On A Winter’s Night a Traveler. That book is in many ways as difficult and experimental as Radiance. But I love it. I love it because underpinning its non-linear structure is a humor and keen sense of the absurd that give readers a reason to care. More technically, Calvino’s novel plays with structure by way of concatenation. By this, I mean it tells micro-stories compelling in their own right but then ends them at the height of climax, a level of tease to make any Arabian concubine proud. A Winter’s Night’s meta-story is then about the reader (often pronounized as ‘you’) in his search to find the rest of the story and therefore closure. Story structure thus mirrors story theme: how readers engage with narrative as a whole and how our expectations for a standard narrative structure (rising action -> climax -> falling action -> denouement) have become inculcated in us and in fact now inform our fundamental conceptualizations of things like romantic relationships, life and death, and even our debates on intelligent design versus the theory of evolution. Deep deep stuff. Catherynne Valente, as the above quote reveals, thinks she’s also writing about deep deep stuff. But the difference is that Radiance's form and content have a fractious, dissonant (and unengaging) relationship. In a different interview with Clarkesworld Magazine, she writes: I had to give myself permission to do certain things, use certain tricks—like including scripts, audio, shifting POV, and the other ephemera and metafictional elements you mention. It’s pretty much a postmodern free-for-all. At first I kept thinking: I can’t just describe what’s onscreen in a movie inside the book. That just makes it look like I’d rather be making a movie. I had to get to a point where I could say: I actually can do that because it’s my book and that’s the right way to do it. That phrase – “a postmodern free-for-all” – says it all. The book is a mish-mash of ideas and forms, its structure a shotgun spread rather than a sniper’s intimate voyeurism. The quote as a whole is an admission of self-indulgence. She includes scripts, audio, shifting POV, and other ephemera and metafictional elements not because doing so highlights explorations on “seeing and being seen; on what the camera does to us when it never leaves our side; on who has the right to speak, and who has to buy it; and on the meaning of science fiction in a science fictional universe” – but because she bloody well wanted to, propagating the mistaken post-modern confusion that MERE EXPLORATION of structure is, BY ITSELF, evidence of great and skillful artifice, if not authorial courage, and therefore worthy of being read. Well I disagree. I would quote Picasso when he wrote, “In my opinion to search means nothing… To find is the thing. Nobody is interested in following a man who, with his eyes fixed on the ground, spends his life looking for the purse that fortune should put in his path. The one who finds something no matter what it might be, even if his intention were not to search for it, at least arouses our curiosity, if not our admiration.” As I read through Radiance’s self-indulgent epilogue (which amounts, quite clearly, to the author justifying her decision to use a shotgun structure because “humans do not proceed in an orderly fashion from one scene to the next” – which, by the by, is a standard postmodern claim that is completely false. Au contraire, it is the tragedy of humanity that we have no choice but to creep in a chronologically linear fashion from scene to scene and tomorrow to tomorrow until the last syllable of our borrowed time); its boring essays from fictional film critics; its lists of ship’s manifest (and here I thought I left that self-important scheiss behind back on Walden Pond); and its long rants mistaking high-octane, purple prose like, “the Earth fucked the sky and made a hundred children” for genuine exploration of humanity – as I went through all this, I was never once engaged mano y mano. This was no story but a magic show by a patchwork golem, a dazzling array of images and words that held all the cohesive meaning of a fireworks display. I was never shown why any of these characters might have a superior grasp than I do on, e.g., who has a right to speak, or what it means to be seen, or what the camera does to us when it never leaves our side. Worse, I was never shown why I should CARE what any of these characters think. In short, I would argue Radiance failed to ever find, or demonstrate, humanity in necessary quantities to overcome the artificiality of its narrative and structure. Its demands on my empathy muscles came far too late, far after it had lost me. Earlier, I brought up Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night, a Traveler as a successful example of postmodern literature. It is therefore with great irony (and thus also circularity) that I believe the concluding paragraph from NY Times’ 1981 review of the book nails exactly how I feel about Radiance: And then the book, for all its formidable wit and skill, is a confession of failure, and I think we shall get it wrong if we insist on converting all its apparent misses into clever hits. The stalled writer, the one who is in love with beginnings, says, "I would like to be able to write a book that is only an incipit, that maintains for its whole duration the potentiality of the beginning, the expectation still not focused on an object." This is a desire, not a program. An expectation permanently unfocused will die, and an expectation that can't be focused is simply a disappointment. … As a book about broken narrative promises this work is impeccable. But its very success in this vein leads us to the sadness of its central subject, the absence of the artist, Dickens, Tolstoy, Stendhal, Dostoyevsky, who could brilliantly keep the promises he made....more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jun 10, 2016
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Jun 12, 2016
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Jun 10, 2016
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Hardcover
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140003468X
| 9781400034680
| 140003468X
| 3.94
| 514,897
| Nov 1985
| Oct 05, 2003
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really liked it
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Reading Love in the Time of Cholera is like watching flowers bloom. Beautiful, and boring. The book is so boring, in fact, that I could spend no more th Reading Love in the Time of Cholera is like watching flowers bloom. Beautiful, and boring. The book is so boring, in fact, that I could spend no more than thirty minutes at a time traversing its dense narrative of obsessive love. I’d read something brilliant, get all gung-ho, and then face-plant into three pages about the river boat industry. Thus, not being able to read as I normally prefer (that is, Alice in Wonderland style), I instead carried love & cholera with me everywhere, reading it whenever I could wrest a half-hour chunk from time’s jealous grasp. Unbeknownst to me, however, love & cholera is apparently a giant badge declaring membership to the HEY STRANGER TALK TO ME ABOUT THINGS club. See, normally I’m an invisible human being who can sneak in and out of places, conversations, and bank vaults with nary a ripple. Love & Cholera in hand, however, and suddenly I had a spotlight following me. No matter where I went, people wanted to talk to me about their lives. Example: I walk into a wine-store. Lady asks if I need help. Nope. I’ve got one slot open, I say. But as I’m searching, I remember I’ve actually got two. I’d just polished off a bottle of 15 year Macallan and the last of my vodka. Alright. So I get two bottles. Lady behind the counter says, “I thought you only had one slot open.” “There’s always room for one more,” I say. I pause. Look awkward. Then add, “Room for one more wine bottle on a wine rack I mean.” “Uh huh,” she says and then her eyes lit on love & cholera. Oh jeez. Incoming. Lady tells me she’s read love & cholera. Read it for a boy, in fact. Tells me all about it, this teenage romance two decades past. She seems surprised to be telling me this or even remembering it, trails off in her story, and finishes, that’s how you know a book-worm loves you, don't you? When she moves your favorite book right to the top of her massive reading backlog, because she thinks this will help her understand you. Sure, I say. Sure is. Then, not five minutes later, at the sandwich shop, a middle-aged woman asks me how to order a sandwich. I tell her. It’s one of those where you make your own. Choose your own bread, cheese, spices, sauces, meats, etc. She admits intimidation. I admit I choose randomly. And then her eyes land on the love & cholera in my hand. Incoming. She loves the book. Absolute favorite. It’s helped her, she tells me, with her husband. Almost a divorce. But in fact, because of the book, she realized the difficulties have made her love him not less but more. How strange, she told me in so many words, that the ease of their marriage is what gave them so much trouble. The only way they could inject energy into it was with the struggle. An affair, she admitted (to me, a complete stranger!!). But now it’s all right. “That’s good,” I say, “I’m glad things are going well with your husband.” “Thank you,” she says and then boom, back to being strangers. Never see her again. I get my sandwich and sit down and eat it. It’s terrible. Probably because I randomly chose what to put on it. But y’know, I keep doing it, because sometimes it’s glorious. Sometimes I get a combination of flavors I’ve never encountered before. But I never order it again. It’s like the lady said. Familiarity breeds contempt. And what does any of this have to do with an actual review of love & cholera? I suspect love & cholera’s existence as a membership badge for the HEY STRANGER TALK TO ME ABOUT THINGS club is because that’s more or less what the book is. Reading love & cholera really is like listening to a particularly amusing, passionate, long-winded stranger tell you his life story. Except not on an airplane but instead, say, on a dirigible for some extra exoticism & freshness. And make that stranger also self-deprecating because love & cholera is more a comedy than it is a love story. Or perhaps it’d be more accurate to say that it’s a real love story, rather than a Hollywood love story, because real love stories always contain an element of absurdity, which is why real love is as confusing as it is grand. Let me give an example of absurdity. The main protagonist Florentino loves Fermina, but she marries someone else (this is not a spoiler). In order to work out his unrequited love, he takes up writing love letters for others… and this happens: His most pleasant memory of that time was of a very timid young girl, almost a child, who trembled as she asked him to write an answer to an irresistible letter that she had just received, and that Florentino Ariza recognized as one he had written on the previous afternoon. He answered it in a different style, one that was in tune with the emotions and the age of the girl, and in a hand that also seemed to be hers, for he knew how to create a handwriting for every occasion, according to the character of each person. He wrote, imagining to himself what Fermina Daza would have said to him if she had loved him as much as that helpless child loved her suitor. Two days later, of course, he had to write the boy’s reply with the same hand, style, and kind of love that he had attributed to him in the first letter, and so it was that he became involved in a feverish correspondence with himself. Before a month had passed, each came to him separately to thank him for what he himself had proposed in the boy’s letter and accepted with devotion in the girl’s response: they were going to marry. Incredible, right? This interweaving of romance, pathos, and absurdity exists from page 1 to the very end. Which is why, even as boring as it is, love & cholera is an incredible book. It’s no more and no less than a fictional person’s life story, complete with all sorts of ridiculousness, dead ends, and random pointless tragedy. And you know what I realized near the end? That I knew these characters – Fermina Daza & Florentino Ariza – better than I knew almost any actual person. In fact, as I pondered further, I realized I know more about fictional characters than I do about actual human beings. I’m not some hermit either, so I don’t think I’m alone in this, and I wonder what it means. But that, I’m afraid, will have to be the topic of some other review, for this one is done. I need to go check on some flowers. Make sure they're still colorful. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Mar 17, 2016
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Mar 07, 2016
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Paperback
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0765385244
| 9780765385246
| 0765385244
| 3.54
| 3,885
| Sep 01, 2015
| Sep 01, 2015
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it was ok
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DSKL@()*$SJDL#NRK#JNFLKNGSN@KMNCJNKS#(*$&FJNSRKJWR ARGH!! Okay. Vexation voided, frustration exfoliated. So I’m gonna lay into this mafa. I gonna take a DSKL@()*$SJDL#NRK#JNFLKNGSN@KMNCJNKS#(*$&FJNSRKJWR ARGH!! Okay. Vexation voided, frustration exfoliated. So I’m gonna lay into this mafa. I gonna take a machete upside this beyotch, gonna show you guts, some shock-of-white-bone, a little bit o critique hoodoo. But before I do, allow me to expound on why I must needs wage this figurative war. I believe in the ‘Challenging’ book [exhibits A, B, & C]. A disparaging of the easy pleasure read being not my intent, I nevertheless offer the following thesis: the most worthwhile and memorable reading experiences usually involve a level of difficulty. These books, by the hammer and chisel of structure, language, and character, reshape our preconceived notions on race, gender, culture, history, epistemology, or even basic story-telling. The shattering of long-held beliefs is a beautiful cataclysm, and I might state with no qualification that human experience contains no greater sublimity than the upward transformation of a mind. And yet the same key which unlocks heaven can also unlock hell. It’s often difficult to distinguish between literature whose challenge is a function of its complexity and literature whose challenge is a function of obscurity or bad writing. These latter, lesser quality doppelgangers can be quite the malediction. I would posit that, indeed, they can weigh the entire readership down. They can lead to anti-elitism, nihilism, and ennui. I have witnessed first-hand their effect on young readers especially, who get turned off literature as a result of assignments by undiscriminating English teachers. As such, I’m a regular assassin of the pseudo challenging [exhibits A, B, & C], a class of literature which, alas, contains The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps. Which I regret real hard. This bro Kai Ashante Wilson got some srz writing chops. Bones ‘n cojones a-plenty this g-thug gangsta masta flash blaster gots. He can chalk a wicked storm… when he wanna. Slash the first hunnered-fitty pages and you got a mad killer story here. Stone cold quality, and ain’t that a shame? Because, the obvious talent of the author and my enjoyment of the final 50 pages notwithstanding, the first hundred fifty are a bore and a chore and I shall lay before thee, on the altar of your consideration, my ruminations on why. The first failing: an incongruous interweaving of two disparate dictions. On one hand, the unknown narrator writes in a sophisticated and antiquated style that I have, herein, attempted to replicate. This, juxtaposed with dialogue replete with urban slang, the type of whipsong back n’ forth you might encounter in a rap battle between two gangs in the hood. There IS a deeper literary purpose for this, in that it approximates the dual nature of the book’s protagonist Demane, who is a demi-god, containing both mortal fallibilities (i.e. the ‘lower’ diction of the dialogue) and divine powers (i.e. the ‘higher’ diction of the narration). You could even argue it serves as a sort of implicit societal commentary, a check against racial preconceptions – after all, why am I calling this diction ‘lower?’ What makes it ‘lower’ exactly? Unfortunately, this duality of diction is one of those conceits that doesn’t quite work in application. In actuality, the checkerboard language constantly pulls the reader out of the story, reminding us over and over of the artificiality of the work in our hands. It’s like a kung-fu movie where the wires are obvious on the actors’ backs. Does it MATTER how beautiful their choreography, how magnificent their palikinesis*, given it’s so obviously manufactured? *This book also contains the style gimmickry of footnotes. Here's mine: I invented the word palikinesis because I have long sought a word to mean ‘the motion of a warrior’ and found none. So palikinesis – ‘the motion of battle.’ Problemo numero duo: This bae be one big oozy blob o structureless guano. Just cuz, ima use my bro Orson Scott Card’s structures. He throw down quatro categoricals: Milieu – in this story, some regular negro enter a cray-cray land and be all, what up with this cray cray land? Sorcerer Demane ain’t no regular negro – he FROM the cray cray land. So it ain’t no exploration of the cray cray. Character – in this story, some negro get all fed up with his shit and be like, eff the po-po, imma change my life. Sorcerer Demane ain’t like that, he chill as a caravan guard. He ain’t gon’ change a dayum thang, and dun wanna anyway. Idea – in this story, there be some wild n crazy mystery. some hollah mystery, like who dun killed this bro or like in 2001: Space Odyssey, what up wit dat black stone and dem monkeys? Ain’t no mystery here, tho. Mebs wat this lion-creature wizard ‘jukiere’ doin killin’ folk on the Road the caravan gotta traverse, but it ain’t much. Event – in this story, some crazy shit be going down in the fabric of the universe, like dat cray mafa Sauron be knockin some tall-ass pointy eared crackas left n right or that white bruh Emperor Palapatine be unbalancing the force like crackas always doin. But ain’t no imbalance in this story. And dems the quatro. In other words, the Sorcerer of the Wildeeps appears blind to story-telling structure. Plot remains elusive throughout the first three-fourths of the book, which find not their home in the Wildeeps but in a waystation called the Station. In fact, the events of the first 150 pages are completely inconsequential to the events of the last 50. This MAY have been interesting had there been any stakes in this section, but there aren’t. What does Demane want? The human heart of The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps is a love story between protagonist Demane & his fellow demi-god, the Captain. Demane yearns to couple with the Captain, physically & emotionally. But he does. Nothing stands in their way. Social stigma, maybe, but this is anemic in the supreme. Such stigma is implied rather than explicit. The book lazily assumes that today’s societal standards apply to this [non-contemporary, fantasy setting]. What does the Captain want? Dunno. What’s stopping them from getting what they want? Dunno. Why are these characters even part of the Caravan? Dunno. When I was halfway through The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps, I had the opportunity to expound upon it to an acquaintance over supper. I mentioned how its epidermis of beautiful language exacerbates its lack of plot or stakes. I analogized in the following manner: an unscrupulous automobile merchant sells you a classic 1967 mustang, gorgeous, except it lacks an engine. Fie you conniving merchant and your Machiavellian chicanery! You’d rather have been sold an ugly car with no engine because then at least you’d have had reasonable expectations. At least your cynicism would have been increased to only the (N-1)th degree. At least you wouldn’t have been so vulnerable to the merchant’s dastardly deception. When I made this comparison, I thought I was just being clever. But it was, in fact, prophetic. Cuz this bitch gets real. After hunnered fitty, this homeboy gets itself an engine and it freakin moves. It soars. My bruhs, D and the Captain, actually get to the Wildeeps and they got a real hanker for some killin’ vengeance and dat cray lion-beast ‘jukiere’ dun wanna let em have it and it real sexy. I mean, it helped that the distracting language shifts between dialogue & description were eliminated, but primarily it was the addition of an internal structure over which the well-written coating could be hung. You know, a plot. The powerful description made SENSE when Demane and the Captain traversed the Wildeeps, moving from planet to planet throughout the cosmos in a haphazard maze of space/time discontinuities. The sense of wonder was palpable. I found myself rapidly churning through the ink-scape, engaged in frenzied, fevered page-turning, actually interested in what occurs next. That’s the power of having character stakes. So…. GAH. Frustrating. I didn’t really want to lay into this. I take minimal joy in it. I like its fresh perspective, its more intimate scope. And the author's talent at wordcraft is undisputed. But that doesn’t change the reality of the reader's time being wasted for 150 pages. If only the author had taken a machete to his story, I wouldn’t have needed to. If only he had hacked off that structureless blob in the front and provided the salient points in sharp staccato within the journey & hunt, then he’d have had a fantastic novelette. That’s not what we got though. We got a confusing, bipolar, dramatically unbalanced novella. Basically, we got bad juju, and that’s the truth, bruh. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Dec 27, 2015
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Dec 30, 2015
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Dec 27, 2015
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Paperback
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4.25
| 93,988
| Feb 01, 1996
| 2005
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did not like it
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Fifty pages in, I hated this book. Not just those fifty pages, mind you. The entire book. Just as the homeostatic behavior of an electron is a microco
Fifty pages in, I hated this book. Not just those fifty pages, mind you. The entire book. Just as the homeostatic behavior of an electron is a microcosmic reflection of the homeostatic behavior of a covalent bond, of an animal cell, of a human body, of a community, of a state, of a... well you get the idea… so too is every chapter, page, paragraph, sentence, and word a reflection of the greater whole. Really, I only needed the first two paragraphs to understand what DFW was going to do with this book. Really, I've already read the whole shebang. All it takes is a mind like a magnifying glass and one salient detail. To wit: The second chapter/section is filled with paragraphs several pages long. Interesting. Now I think we can safely say that DFW was aware of typical writerly conventions in which paragraphs do not span 6 pages. Ergo, we know he made a conscious stylistic choice. But why? Now obviously and ostensibly, he made this stylistic choice to approximate the manic, exhausting nature of an addict's neuroses, particularly the deal-making and second (and third and fourth and fifth) guessing churning through his inner narrative, a not inaccurate depiction of an intelligent individual who has come to distrust his own thoughts. A classic symptom of, in fact, depression. So, surprise DFW was intelligent and depressed. Naturally, his depiction is alright. Unfortunately, barring the obnoxious stylistic choice, the paragraphs in question are desolate and barren, completely empty of anything remotely interesting to someone who already understands the nature of what I refer to as 'The Hierarchy of Intellectual Watchmen.' You know, a second mind to watch the superficial thoughts, a third mind to watch the second, and on and on, down to a level depending on your intellect or your capacity to function with an nth-number of neuroses. But I digress. I was investigating the reason for this choice, these annoyingly long paragraphs. So we know it's a conscious choice and we know the ostensible reason for it. But as a writer myself, I can tell you that's not enough. He *had* to know, just as I know, that page long paragraphs piss people off. It's like if you punch someone in the face, it pisses em off. So usually you don't do it, right? Even if you've got good cause. Still DFW did it. Why? To thumb his nose at typical writerly conventions. To jab the reader in the eye. DFW wanted the reader to WORK for his enjoyment. Now we're getting somewhere more interesting. Standard postmodernism, essentially, but still, let's pretend like it's a new idea. Interesting, I write, because that's not how (most) entertainment works in modern society. Spectator entertainment is what we got. Passive-like. OK. So now I know what the book's raison d'etre is. To use a completely unnecessary pretentious French term. I mean, really, I could have just used the word ‘theme’ right? Hell, I coulda just written 'OK. So now I know what the book's about.' But I'm sure you'll understand that, given the nature of the book I am critiqueing, I must armor myself against the idiotic conflation of a preference for precision and economy in language & style with simple-mindedness. But again I digress. Allow me to recapitulate what I know about Infinite Jest, this so-called Magnum Opus, and its author David Foster Wallace: DFW was very clever, yet incapable of managing his intellect. Not surprisingly he was also depressed. His stylistic choices are gratuitous, self-indulgent, and unrestrained, ergo it is likely his characterization will be the same, meaning he probably won't even try (or succeed, at any rate) at making his characters other than mere reflections of himself, meaning they'll all be intelligent, depressed, and too self-aware for their own good. The book, likewise, is self-referential, which is another way of saying self-indulgent, which is another way of saying - stylistically speaking - childish. In short: post-modernistic, or as my writing teacher called it, intellectual masturbation. Content-wise, the book will offer a one-sided, one-dimensional, yawn-worthy critical exploration of passive entertainment, particularly its addictive properties. True and nefarious, certainly, but a banal truth, excessively obvious to anyone with more than two brain cells knocking about in that cavern we call a skull. Now I suppose I could continue to delve deeper into many layers as to why DFW chose to use page-long paragraphs and what this choice and the content within tell me about the rest of the book, but to do so would be to suggest that a knowledge of bio-chemistry is necessary to fall in love. Nah. You should know by now I hate this book. I have said so. I hate what it implies about the beauty of elegant, restrained prose, about the difficulty of writing a story populated by real, human people rather than the cold, lifeless caricature found herein. I hate it so much, in fact, that ...alas, no. I could not finish it. My secret hope of an epiphany to uncover the blinds over my eyes failed to materialize. The process of doubt and dislike had become catastrophic and exponential. The more read, the more I hated it. Several hundred pages in, I killed our relationship. And the rebound with other books was oh so sweet. To once again be within the capable hands of a story-teller! I’ll make no claims about DFW’s abilities as a writer, but I will say he is no story-teller. Infinite Jest is a grotesquely overweight, poorly dressed 10 page essay. ...more |
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4.16
| 176,044
| Apr 28, 1985
| May 2010
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Macbeth might very well have been referencing this book when he bemoaned that life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying noth
Macbeth might very well have been referencing this book when he bemoaned that life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Certainly, Blood Meridian is a tale full of violence and sweeping language, sepulchral yet also bildungsromanic in its periscopic reconnoiter of humanity's maturation from Old West barbarity to Modern Age sentiments of peace - false though they may be - while also following the nameless protagonist's volatile orbit into, around, and out of the massive evil personages of Captain Glanton and Judge Holden, a binary system of malevolence both human and supernatural, like a red giant dancing around a black hole in a cosmic tango. Do you understand what you just read? Possibly. But how unnecessarily obtuse! Well the whole book is written like that. Even worse, really. It's rife with needless adjectives and adverbs and unnecessary details, exotic in their phrasing, but mundane in meaning and empty of wit. The language, far from serving its purpose to communicate, instead functions like a silken veil cast over the reader's bridal eyes to obfuscate the reality of an aged, doddering groom. DAMN! These metaphors. I can't stop. Let me try again: Blood Meridian is like Toy Story - if the toys were not personified with individual personality and instead simply manipulated by impersonal appendages whose face remained forever off-screen. That is, a story without character. This was one of my first lessons as a writer. I remember it still, this beautiful descriptive piece I wrote about a great aerial battle between two nameless empires and the flames and fury and sacrifice and heroism on display. I was so proud of this piece. It had beautiful language. Yet when I showed it to others, the response was tepid. Why? Because without an underlying humanity, beautiful prose is only so much empty light reflected across dead waters. It is a damn shame because there are elements in Blood Meridian that are superb. The character of Judge Holden is impressive to say the least. The final fifty pages have an actual plot, instead of pointless (and again let me emphasize WITLESS) wandering across deserts. Yet as good as those final pages are, and as superficially interesting as Judge Holden and his meandering discourse are, they in no way make up for the barren desert that is this novel, supposedly "one of the Greatest Works of American Literature." Hardly. But truly I love this book for what it demonstrates about its readership. No one - absolutely no one - can question the beauty of language in Blood Meridian. I've seen other reviewers accuse Cormac McCarthy of an illicit affair with a thesaurus. Nope. You can't write 300+ pages of prose like this with a thesaurus as a crutch. No doubt it played its part, but such verbiage can only result from a life-time of drowning in an ocean of ink. Alas, all that beautiful language and all that skill wrought so little of actual interest. Again, let me just be clear: this book is empty. It is empty of humanity and intelligence (the clear intelligence BEHIND the writing notwithstanding). Blood Meridian inspires very little of *actual* thought, as even the most positive reviews demonstrate. They all talk style style style. And what does that say about us Americans, or indeed about people in general? We love our packaging more than we love what's inside. This is a maxim of such potency that entire commercial empires have risen and fallen by its keen edge. Let me finish with a quote from Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye, first published in 1953, which I think says it all: Man has always been a venal animal. The growth of populations, the huge costs of war, the incessant pressure of confiscatory taxation – all these things make him more and more venal. The average man is tired and scared, and a tired, scared man can’t afford ideals. He has to buy food for his family. In our time we have seen a shocking decline in both public and private morals. You can’t expect quality from people whose lives are a subjection to a lack of quality. You can’t have quality with mass production. You don’t want it because it lasts too long. So you substitute styling, which is a commercial swindle intended to produce artificial obsolescence. Mass production couldn’t sell its goods next year unless it made what is sold this year look unfashionable a year from now. We have the whitest kitchens and the most shining bathrooms in the world. But in the lovely white kitchen the average person can’t produce a meal fit to eat, and the lovely shining bathroom is mostly a receptacle for deodorants, laxatives, sleeping pills, and the products of that confidence racket called the cosmetic industry. We make the finest packages in the world, Mr. Marlowe. The stuff inside is mostly junk. And there you go. Take the last two sentences. That's Blood Meridian for you. ...more |
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4.14
| 2,114,303
| 1985
| Apr 1998
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The Handmaid's Tale, a dystopia with heavy tones of feminism, tells the horrifying story of Offred, a Handmaid, a woman whose identity and agency are
The Handmaid's Tale, a dystopia with heavy tones of feminism, tells the horrifying story of Offred, a Handmaid, a woman whose identity and agency are torn from her, so that she might serve as a baby factory. I call it horrifying but let me be clear: This is not the sharp horribleness you might feel when you witness a shouting match between your parents; when you break-up with a girlfriend or boyfriend; or when you read about the latest shooting on the news. No. The Handmaid's Tale summons the horribleness of the alarm clock. It's the horribleness of the smooth beauty of young skin growing loose and dry with age, the tick & tock of mortality. It's the horribleness of pulling into the same parking lot at the same building for the same job for ten years, it's the horribleness of political candidate after political candidate who see only power instead of people. It's the horrible grind of a world that could be better, but isn't. It's the horribleness of hopelessness. That's the real genius, the real triumph of the Handmaid's Tale, the simple matter-of-fact mundanity of its horrible routine. The way it's told without bells and whistles. I like, too, the calm and stately prose of the book, its focus on minute details, its understanding that life's little joys are what we most cherish... and miss most when they are gone. But that is about all that I liked. The horribleness of this book felt, to this reader at least, much like the horribleness of a haunted house. Because sign after sign after sign tells you that the 'performers' in the haunted house will not touch you, will not hurt you in any way, the fear you experience isn't really fear. It's startlement. The Handmaid's Tale is a book that operates by startling you. It is a book which, above all, is didactic, polemic, and preachy. It is the sermon of a woman who would use fear to warn against a society which would use fear to control you. Isn't that just a bit ironic? I even found one reviewer's response to be: "Question your government. Question your society. Question your spouse." Your spouse?! Is that the message of this book? I have noticed that a great many books with "messages" - that is, those considered classics or Literature with a capital L - suffer from the same backwards, artificial feel that The Handmaid's Tale suffers from. Let me explain: It is my experience as both writer and reader that good books must be written forward. You sketch a cast of characters, sometimes deeply and sometimes not, and you sketch a world and then you ignite it with the match of a conflict and then you step away. You use your mind, your daily experiences as a sort of incubator for the story. You guide the story if it gets too far off its path, but you do this only if you must. As you write the story, you gain a better understanding of your characters and their situation and you often go back to rewrite. But what you do not do is write the world in such a way as to make the plotting easy. You don't give traits to characters simply so they can function as a plot device. You don't do this because to do so imbues the story with an air of artificiality and intentionality that reeks of fast-food and political speeches. The Handmaid's Tale was not written forward. It was written backwards. Margaret Atwood had a point set firmly in mind and then created a world to prove her point. It'd be like if I wanted to tell a story about how horrible ducks were and then just filled it with these stories of ducks murdering other ducks and subjugating each other and doing horrible things to each other. And, regardless of whether these things are true or possible or likely or unlikely or impossible, the story just doesn't feel real. It feels like bullshit and Hollywood and sham. It feels like what is called in logic a tautology. It just plods forward in a completely predictable fashion, toward a logical, foregone conclusion, offering neither surprise (it takes 100 pages for the first surprising thing to happen!) nor much insight. And that is a damn shame because I love nothing more than a good book. The Handmaid's Tale is not a good book. It is a book with a Point and a book that is pointless: it will not change the minds of those who are already (or on the path to become...) oppressors of women. It will only confirm the opinions of those who live in fear of society and men, who view feminism in a militant rather than optimistic light. The Handmaid's Tale is a book that confronts nothing and resolves nothing. It paints a picture of a horrible world and does nothing with it. ...more |
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4.02
| 1,155,326
| May 19, 1942
| Mar 28, 1989
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it was ok
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I was at a vineyard once and, at a nearby group, one of the staff was describing their wine, with the usual highfalutin language: "…aroma of the black
I was at a vineyard once and, at a nearby group, one of the staff was describing their wine, with the usual highfalutin language: "…aroma of the black-berry balanced by tannins and the subtle earthiness of sandalwood." One of the members of the group took a drink and said, "Oh yes, I can taste the sandalwood." After they left, I commented to my own sommelier, "How in the world do people know what sandalwood tastes like?" She laughed and responded, "If you put it on the bottle, someone will always taste it." I suspect the great depth so many people find in The Stranger is largely a result of the fact that its depth was 'put on the bottle.' Which is hilariously ironic: The Stranger is, after all, an absurdist text about a man who refuses to behave in the way that society expects him to behave. Yet here we have a book celebrated for its depth by readers who, for the most part, apparently fail to even grasp said depths. Oh kool-aid, how sweet thy taste. But before you dismiss me as an intellectual snob, let me offer a true story: this book made an acquaintance of mine go crazy (to be more precise, reading it triggered his latent sociopathy). This resulted in a sort of Kessler Effect that damaged those around him. I had to watch the darkening of a beautiful soul - his girlfriend, my friend, who'd already had to deal with a father suffering from delusional disorder. Not only that but this book offends me personally. I actually am a card-carrying, dyed-in-the-wool Existentialist. I believe the universe offers neither intrinsic morality nor meaning. I believe the individual creates his own morality and meaning, in life, literature, and everything else. Contrary to popular belief, this is a fundamentally empowering, liberating belief. And yet the term 'existentialist' invokes negative, nihilistic connotations because of crap like The Stranger. So let's explore some of the nonsense you might encounter in fellow readers' responses to The Stranger: "Mersault [the protagonist] is an Existentialist hero" So here’s what happens, in a nutshell: the protagonist Mersault goes through life rather passively, existing more as a creature of gross senses than a sentient, thinking being. His mother dies in the beginning, and he doesn’t feel much because there’s not much of a sensory experience attached to it. Eventually, he ends up randomly killing an Arab and goes on trial. Yep there's the plot. Now I don't dispute that The Stranger is a Hero’s journey, albeit not a hero in the traditional sense. But it’s only at the VERY VERY end – when he rants and raves at the priest – that he actually becomes what one could conceivably call ‘an existentialist hero.’ But even with that ending, Mersault is BY NO MEANS an existentialist. He's a sociopath and an idiot. Existentialism is not nihilism; it’s not about being a blank void of a human being, which is what Mersault is. He’s lazy and a coward. Failing to assign meaning to anything, he allows society and the people around him to assign meaning for him. Thus he loses his freedom. THAT'S NOT EXISTENTIALISM. Existentialism is about having the courage to ignore the values society attempts to place upon you and instead creating your own. It’s very much a life-affirming philosophy, not nihilistic or anti-society like The Stranger makes it out to be. The pure existentialist is a non-conformist, as opposed to an anti-conformist. The pure existentialist neither follows the crowd in jumping off the bridge NOR fails to follow the crowd in jumping off the bridge. He stops and thinks about it first and then decides. Sometimes there are damn good reasons to jump off the bridge, like when Godzilla is rolling up with a mouth full of lightning. "Mersault is put on trial for failing to conform to society" Certainly Camus may have intended it as such, and it is easy to read it the way. His trial is rather farcical after all. But honestly, that's superficial+1 reading the text. Mersault would never been on trial in the first place had he not committed murder. Which has nothing to do with failing to conform to society...? "Existentialism requires atheism" It’s true that Camus believed that making the ‘leap of faith’ in response to the absurd nature of reality was a cop-out. He believed following any religion caused a critical corruption in your free-will/free-thinking capacities. I personally am agnostic, but I disagree with his claims. There’s nothing intrinsically impossible about investigating a religion and finding it good and then choosing, of your own free will, to follow it. Sure, adopting a religion wholesale is a foolish idea. But then so is adopting ANYTHING wholesale, including Camus’ own Absurdist doctrine. There’s nothing wrong with using religion (or the holy book of a religion) as a foundation for one’s interface with reality. "I empathize with Mersault. I'm an outsider too." What in the nine Applejacks hells!? Mersault is a bad human being. He’s not some courageous rebel. There's this false dichotomy you can either be A) a conformist, a mere cog in society or B) you have to be a heartless, amoral sociopath like Mersault. CHU CHU. WELCOME TO THE NOPE TRAIN. It is more than possible to be a non-conformist AND a friendly, caring, kind human being. So it rather disturbs me to see teenagers, or even adults, glorify The Stranger as this anti-authority, anti-society bible. It isn’t. Not only do such people miss the point of this book, but their praise suggests they want to pursue their lives in a way that, very likely, will be spiritually, emotionally, and materially unrewarding. ~~~~ Basically, I think The Stranger is a mediocre book because, without its philosophical underpinnings, it’s mediocre. And its philosophical underpinnings are mediocre too. It misrepresents existentialism and inadvertently lionizes emotional & intellectual laziness and jerkface-ness. It (apparently) leads to an interpretation that is nihilistic and anti-society, leading readers into The Stranger’s figurative jail, when I suspect Camus meant to show people the way out of it. Whoops! ...more |
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9781400033416
| 1400033411
| 3.96
| 447,905
| Sep 16, 1987
| Jun 08, 2004
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it was ok
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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 betw 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 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 |
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Jan 30, 2013
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1400065453
| 9781400065455
| 1400065453
| 4.02
| 65,152
| May 13, 2010
| Jun 29, 2010
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it was ok
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Despite my great love for Cloud Atlas (also by Mitchell), The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet did not quite do it for me. I might even go so far as
Despite my great love for Cloud Atlas (also by Mitchell), The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet did not quite do it for me. I might even go so far as to say that, at times, it felt like The Thousand Visits to the DMV, if the DMV were staffed by highly literate history professors who accompanied every eye-exam and form signing with an exhaustive digression into various arcane automemorabilia that may or may not be quite interesting, excepting the fact that it's the DMV, a successful attendance of which can best be summarized as "wham bam thank you ma'am." While a successful book reading would certainly not be characterized similarly, the general feeling of thwarted expectations is the same: I approached this book seeking to achieve something - some resonance with the story and its characters - and went away disappointed. What it ultimately came down is that I didn't understand the... hm what to call it? The drive, the gist, the point, the moral? No, not moral. Consistency, perhaps? Yes that's a good word for it. Thousand Autumns is not consistent - it is a cheesecake filled with too many rich, wonderful, exotic ingredients, and then improperly baked. It's got anardana, wattleseed, sumac, mace (nutmeg shells), juniper, mahlab, kaffir lime, etc, etc. While any given bite may be bursting with flavor, the overall taste lacks consistency. To some, such a gleeful mixture of ingredients may signify great and wondrous Literature, but, to me, signifies someone who attempted to write great and wondrous Literature and failed and therefore should have made sure they understood how to bake a simple cheesecake - that is, write a good story - before adding in the complexifying spices. In a good story, a Dutch clerk named Jacob de Zoet stationed in the Japanese port of Nagasaki would not have fallen in love with a woman for no reason whatsoever. A good story-teller wouldn't have done this because he would have known that to build a character's motivations upon a love that happens magically and without due process would cause the entire story to ring with a false note. A good story-teller would also probably not randomly switch narrative points of view - it goes from Jacob de Zoet to a Japanese NINJA (not seriously but... yeah, actually, pretty much) to an English captain and to a few others and back, without bothering to establish any sort of tempo in the rise and fall of suspense and intrigue. If David Mitchell had been interested in telling a good story, he would not have done this. But he was more interested in writing Literature. Which is fine, okay. Not every book needs to be a "good read" to be a, um, good read. But Thousand Autumns is not good Literature, either. Such tomes have a haunted quality, infused with the whispered dreams and nightmares of fictitious characters. Their ideas sneak in and possess us like ghosts, bubbling to the surface of our thoughts at odd times, when writing a love letter or closing our eyes for a quick brain break or tucking in our children or watering our garden or taking a dump. I really really wanted this book to have such a quality, which is why I gave myself three weeks between finishing it and writing this review. I gave it time for the ideas to bubble up to the surface. However, no such thoughts ever arose, and so I had to conclude: this book had no haunting quality and it is not Literature. It is mediocre. So to return to what this book lacked: vision. It lacked heart. It was written to be clever and exhaustively researched, first and foremost, and somewhere along the way, in David Mitchell's editing kitchen, the damn fool forgot to add the heart of the book, he forgot to add the cheese to the cheesecake. ...more |
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Jun 23, 2012
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0060589469
| 9780060589462
| 0060589469
| 3.78
| 233,835
| Apr 1974
| Apr 25, 2006
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it was ok
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None
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Aug 19, 2011
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Mass Market Paperback
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0312263996
| 9780312263997
| 0312263996
| 3.71
| 15,642
| May 25, 1999
| May 2000
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Aug 19, 2011
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4.12
| 996,581
| 1967
| Jun 24, 2003
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it was ok
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3.91
| 42,204
| May 10, 2000
| Apr 05, 2001
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0312282990
| 9780312282998
| B007C4D1G2
| 4.18
| 205,020
| Sep 19, 2000
| Aug 01, 2001
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it was amazing
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Kavalier and Clay isn't just a book. It's a how-to manual for comic books, a grimoire of magic tricks; it's an experience, a life philosophy, a wondro
Kavalier and Clay isn't just a book. It's a how-to manual for comic books, a grimoire of magic tricks; it's an experience, a life philosophy, a wondrous tome as religiously crafted as a monk's hand-illustrated Bible. It is exhaustively researched, almost garishly so, offering up interesting factoids about magic, about Harry Houdini, about high-culture parties involving Salvador Dali in an old-fashioned diver's suit, about the World Fair in NYC. Most of all, the Amazing Adventures of K&C is about comic books. It is to the comic industry what Cryptonomicon is to cryptography. It so convincingly blends fiction and history and culture that the simple idea of critiqueing it - of offering less than five stars - seems bizarre. Like giving three stars to the theory of gravity because y'know, yeah gravity is OK, but it could be better. The idea is ludicrous. Now, by five stars, I do not mean that the book is perfect. It isn't. Several plot points feel like proverbial bridges-to-nowhere. That is, they are built up but then forgotten, like jokes missing their punchlines. The ending is facile, neatly and unbelievably wrapped and ribbon-tied. Chabon was a little too indulgent of extranneous details. It runs out of steam at certain points and conceivably, for those less inclined toward Literary-style plotting, it will seem boring. But these flaws make the book feel imperfect in the same way that life feels imperfect. Things don't always work out for us, people don't always respond the way we want them to. That's just the way it is, and our only real choice is what we do with the hand that is dealt to us. Love it or hate it but only a fool laments the basic inevitabilities of life. I pay this book the greatest compliment I can pay to any fiction book: by the end, I began to doubt that it even was fiction. I wanted to google the main characters - the writer Samuel Clay and the artist Josef Kavalier - and their comic book The Escapist just to see if they were real. The book is so full of rich details, of unnecessary specifics, name drops, and historical allusions that it feels completely and absolutely true, a slice of fiction that isn't fiction at all. Yes, none of this may have happened, but that doesn't mean it's not true. To conclude, I barely mentioned what the story was about. Well, if you're considering reading a Pulitzer Prize winner, then you're probably like me. You don't really care what it's about, only whether it's good or not. Well, it's good. Read it. Unless you don't like Literary fiction, in which case don't read it. ...more |
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1
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Aug 18, 2011
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Paperback
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140679239X
| 3.80
| 189,995
| May 05, 1927
| Dec 27, 1989
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it was ok
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To the Lighthouse is a book best read in relaxing, desultory circumstances - perhaps on the beach, while the waves gently nibble on your toes, or atop
To the Lighthouse is a book best read in relaxing, desultory circumstances - perhaps on the beach, while the waves gently nibble on your toes, or atop some mountain veranda, whilst seated before a cozy fire, or perhaps on a bench in some hidden garden, surrounded by lillies and roses and the scents of spring. But then what activity is not enjoyable in all of those circumstances? Baking cookies or writing a dissertation or being stabbed to death, which of these is not superior in exotic, relaxing climes? In plainer language, I mean that To the Lighthouse is a book heavy on thought and light on plot. The conflicts, though sometimes hard to find, are certainly there, but the plot is almost nil: it exists almost entirely in subjectivity, in the thoughts of the characters. As such, this is a book that is for the philosophers, the literati, the professors, the erudites, the pretentious, and the poets. This is a book which functions primarily as a catalyst for your own thoughts, as a mirror into your own self - you read it and consider your own life so if there's not much there, if you are not gifted (or cursed) with introspection, then you may very well find nothing of worth in these pages. There is no vicarious adventure here, there is only meditation and contemplation. This presents a conundrum for me. I opened this book, saw immediately what type of book it was, put it down, then picked it up, suddenly fearful that my mind had regressed, that I was no longer capable of handling what might be called "sophisticated books," that I had somehow devolved into a story-fiend, searching only for the quick fix of a thriller. After finishing the book (and, I must admit, glad that I did - the stylistic elements of the writing are fabulous), I realized that this wasn't the case. Rather it was this conundrum: if the book's depth must ultimately come from me, from harmonies and echoes of my own philosophical musings, then why need I bother with the book? The simple truth is that I needn't; that, if so desired, I could just as easily watch a cardinal in flight and have as deep and profitable (which is to say completely profitless) meditations as when I read this book. Not everyone is able to set aside such driftless, frivolous time for simple thought. But I can, so I ask: What then, is the point of reading this book? I could write of Woolf’s lyrical style, the way her metaphors flow like sunflowers perking up in a gentle summer breeze, how they do not make strict logical sense, how you will read them and might recall distantly how, once, you saw something entirely mundane, like a child chasing a rabbit through tall stalks of golden grain, and felt a vague sense of importance, of connectedness, of some greater meaning of it all. I might mention the incredible complexity of her scenes -- for this 200+ page book covers a mere two days (albeit separated by ten years) -- and how deep and realistic are the thoughts of her characters. I might mention how pertinent are her portrayals of gender imbalances, of man’s seemingly inexhaustible thirst for feminine sympathy, how men need their women to give meaning to their lives. I might speak of how this novel so accurately portrays the impossible emotional and cognitive distances that separate people and the ways in which family and lovers try to bridge them. But to delve more deeply into these admirable qualities of the book would be to suggest something which is not true: that the book does have a point. Because for all of the immense writing prowess that Woolf displays here, this story, so unnecessarily dense, accomplishes no more than solidifying beliefs already held. If you believe in the ideas portrayed here (perhaps you’ve simply been unable to find the language with which to express them) then you will now accept them as divine truth. But if you do not, and in many cases I did not, then what? What is it that I have gained? I have not been instructed in any new knowledge or philosophy -- I have not, to use the language of the book, been given a boost to move from a philosophical comprehension level of Q to a level of R. I have only been slightly entertained. I have not been transported by the richly detailed, but ultimately mundane, life presented here. My imagination has not been whetted, has not been stoked. What then, I ask? -- I must also add that Virginia Woolf’s use of pronouns was exceedingly irritating; they’re like cars driven by Italians. They come swerving, out of nowhere, bash into you, and then speed away, their drivers cursing heartily and unintelligbly. You feel vaguely that there was something you ought to have known or done differently, but the truth is that, nope, they're just crazy. ‘He,’ and ‘she,’ and ‘it’ will abound, with an antecedent that can often only be located by irksome sleuthing. ...more |
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Mar 27, 2011
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Paperback
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0312422156
| 9780312422158
| 0312422156
| 4.03
| 645,338
| Sep 04, 2002
| Sep 16, 2002
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it was ok
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Too much Pulitzer, not enough story.
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1
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Feb 24, 2011
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Paperback
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0060747226
| 9780060747220
| 0060747226
| 3.50
| 63,414
| Sep 27, 2005
| Sep 26, 2006
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did not like it
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Me: I wish this book had never come to me. I wish I had never learned to read. Gandalf: So do all who have tried to read it. But that is not for them t Me: I wish this book had never come to me. I wish I had never learned to read. Gandalf: So do all who have tried to read it. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the literacy that is given to us. There are other authors at work in this world Erik, besides the will of Gregory Maguire. Barnes and Nobles was meant to stock this book. In which case, you were also meant to pick it up. And that is... well that's a discouraging thought I see now. Hmph, I'm bamboozled. Oh well. ...more |
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Feb 01, 2011
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0060987103
| 9780060987107
| B007CGOP4C
| 3.54
| 602,608
| Sep 29, 1995
| 2000
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it was ok
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I would have liked this book better had I not read the sequel (attempted to read it because I gave up - I actually don't even know where it is. It cou
I would have liked this book better had I not read the sequel (attempted to read it because I gave up - I actually don't even know where it is. It could be anywhere. It could be underneath my pillow right now waiting for me to go to sleep so that it can strangle me with its pretentiousness. In fact, I have sometimes heard strange noises beneath my bed or near my printer, and I suspected they were giant, highly intelligent cockroaches. More likely, the sounds are a result of the second book, Son of a Witch). The book is OK. But it's a narrative mess. Maguire builds some momentum with his characters and his ideas and then he'll jump five years into the future, and it all gets reset because the characters seem totally different. There are more unexplained ideas and details and plot-points than Lost had, and that's saying something fierce. What killed me most of all, however, is how emotionally empty Maguire's story-telling is. I realized this with Son of a Witch, which has literally zero characters that I cared about. There's really no excitement or mystery; Maguire seems to be far too focused on the minute details of clever and vivid writing. The result is that his books (at least the two I read) seem like a beautifully decorated house, whose refrigerator is empty, whose bookshelves are empty, and whose beds are lacking in both blankets and pillows. That is a depressing house. I respect his mastery of language, I just wish it had a purpose. My advice: skip the book, go see the musical, which is better! ...more |
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Feb 01, 2011
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Paperback
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0451528522
| 9780451528520
| 0451528522
| 3.64
| 198,913
| Feb 02, 1897
| Sep 03, 2002
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it was ok
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Wells is famous for changing the course of science fiction. Up to the time of his writing, science fiction was more about the science than it was abou
Wells is famous for changing the course of science fiction. Up to the time of his writing, science fiction was more about the science than it was about the fiction: a reader need but pick up one of Jules Vernes' famous adventures to see that the science is painstakingly presented as quite real, quite feasible. Wells, however, opted to go further afield, using science that was not yet possible (indeed, we've yet to invent the invisible man or a time machine, and the latter seems entirely impossible in the sense that Wells wrote of it). More importantly, Wells decided to focus on the fictional elements - his stories are not about the machines, but about the characters using the machine. He wanted to explore his characters in an engrossing plot. The Invisible Man does not do this. The plot is boring, there's an almost complete lack of characterization besides the Invisible Man (and even his is quite superficial), and at no point in the story did I feel like something was at stake. Sure, the science of invisibility was believable enough for a layman, indeed, I'd never actually considered doing invisibility by matching the refraction of air. But that didn't cause me to care one bit about what was happening in the narrative. It's easy to see that Wells was primarily concerned with explaining a phenomenon that would have been quite bewildering to his audience. There are long passages in which people wrestle with the invisible man and Wells describes these at great length and detail. And yet we who have seen (or not seen, as the case may be) the invisible man on the big screen have little enough need for such descriptions. You should read this only if you are a die-hard sci-fi fan or on a quest to conquer the classics. ...more |
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Jan 07, 2011
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Mass Market Paperback
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my rating |
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3.69
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did not like it
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not set
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May 19, 2017
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3.72
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did not like it
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Jun 12, 2016
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Jun 10, 2016
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3.94
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really liked it
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Mar 17, 2016
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Mar 07, 2016
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3.54
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it was ok
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Dec 30, 2015
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Dec 27, 2015
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4.25
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did not like it
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not set
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May 26, 2015
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4.16
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it was ok
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not set
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Nov 11, 2014
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4.14
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it was ok
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not set
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Dec 15, 2013
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4.02
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it was ok
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not set
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Apr 22, 2013
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3.96
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it was ok
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not set
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Jan 30, 2013
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4.02
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it was ok
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not set
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Jun 23, 2012
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3.78
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it was ok
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not set
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Aug 19, 2011
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3.71
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did not like it
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not set
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Aug 19, 2011
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4.12
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it was ok
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not set
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Aug 19, 2011
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3.91
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did not like it
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not set
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Aug 19, 2011
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4.18
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it was amazing
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not set
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Aug 18, 2011
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3.80
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it was ok
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not set
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Mar 27, 2011
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4.03
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it was ok
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not set
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Feb 24, 2011
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3.50
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did not like it
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not set
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Feb 01, 2011
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3.54
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it was ok
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not set
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Feb 01, 2011
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3.64
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it was ok
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not set
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Jan 07, 2011
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