Just finished The Plague by Albert Camus. Wow, this is a great book. I liked The Stranger a lot, but this is a league above. Events both shocking and commonplace are told in a calm, natural manner that reminds me of Tolstoy. All of the characters are fascinating and unique. It's a beautiful book about something very ugly, and it can be read either literally or allegorically. Highly recommended.
Now, continuing on my effort to read everything by Oscar Wilde. I've come to his poems, which I honestly don't really want to read. But I'm a completionist and will read it all. So far, fairly dull stuff.
Picked The Sisters Brothers back up, I'm about 60% through that and really enjoying it. Also Started Adam Carolla's In Fifty Years We'll All be Chicks and I also really like that. I also just bought Pines, Not Taco Bell Material, and Ready Player One on kindle.
I still think it could have been 100 or so pages shorter than it was, but I enjoyed it, overall, immensely. I was still very glad and excited to get back to the main focus of the story though, the last segments with Toru and the Well were haunting and wonderfully well done. Some great pay-off there. The main flaw, I think, is just how often (and dry) the expository background stuff was for a number of the characters. The events were interesting (mostly), but the delivery was dry and perfunctory, which was weird because the first 300 pages were so intensely readible and well paced/written on a sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph level that it was hard to believe they came from the same author and in the same book. But in light of everything else the book does so successfully, it's hard to hold those elements too much against the whole.
The Disaster Artist - Hilarious read, I hope we one day find out Tommy's source of endless money. If Franco can pull off the movie we might have the next Ed Wood.
The Disaster Artist - Hilarious read, I hope we one day find out Tommy's source of endless money. If Franco can pull off the movie we might have the next Ed Wood.
According to his producer/buddy in an interview on How Did This Get Made he got millions from his ESL teacher (who may or may not have been a lonely widower type).
Just finished up 1Q84, was waiting for that moment where all the superfluous elements would all add up, but it just never happened. While I'm not familiar with Murakami, book 3 in it's entirety just seemed an exercise in trying to make it a similar length to the first 2 books.
Just finished up 1Q84, was waiting for that moment where all the superfluous elements would all add up, but it just never happened. While I'm not familiar with Murakami, book 3 in it's entirety just seemed an exercise in trying to make it a similar length to the first 2 books.
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles, at least, has this problem. Not that the elements don't add up in a certain way, but they seem more clearly tacked together than the first two books, which were fairly outstanding overall.
Simply one of the most unique experiences available, that's what! I envy that I can't read it again for the first time. It really captured my imagination!
For myself, I'm on like Chapter 19 of the Count of Monte Cristo and it is everything I hoped. So good, and still so accessible!
I recently read "Meditations" by Marcus Aurelius Antoninus and loved it, and it really got me interested in Stoicism. It came into my life at the exact right time that I needed it. So, to delve deeper into the subject, my next reading shall be the writings of Seneca; "Of Peace of Mind" and "Of the Shortness of Life". Those are quick reads so I'm going to follow them up with rereading selections from "Meditations" hoping to appreciate them on a deeper level of understanding.
I'm really thankful I found these books at this time in my life!
I've been on a big Irvine Welsh kick lately, just finished Filth:
I really loved it, the main character is such a complete and total asshole and it works out so horribly for him that you can't help but want to be a better person after reading. Fuck the police.
It's been ages since I've read a fiction, and I'm getting back into it with this. Cheers for the recommendation! I'm afraid I've spoiled the ending for myself though.
loved it. it's a labyrinthine narrative, unique in its approach with dual storylines that collide in imaginative and horrific ways. some may consider it too post-modern, but its stylistic approach works wonderfully imo, where the text itself mirrors the twisted narrative and psyche of its protagonist.
I'm having a hard time picking and sticking to a book.
Need to finish Trainspotting as I'm too far into it to give up (and I like it), but I took a big break (like, 5 months).
I'm also still feeling sad from finishing A Fine Balance and A Thousand Splendid Suns and am hoping to find a new book similar to the feelings the aforementioned books gave me. I've, as a result, gotten into Kite Runner, but now I'm balancing both Trainspotting and Kite Runner (though I intend to finish the former first).
I guess I'll say Trainspotting in the hopes of finally finishing it!
Just finished Hyperion. Well you guys weren't kidding, that was an incredible book. Was riveting throughout and pages just flew by. I probably would have finished it sooner if I could keep my focus and just read for hours on end.
Finished The Curse of Chalion which I really enjoyed! Loved Cazaril. <3 Excited to start on the sequel once it gets here. Hopefully UPS learns how to ship stuff to my apartment by then.
Right now I'm reading this on a recommendation from a co-worker. It's a quick enough read, thankfully. But I really can't get into any story that's about some young quirky woman who changes the protagonist's life.
It's surprisingly very readable. And inspires me to be like Socrates and pose questions about their use of abstract terms and break them down for the nonsense that they really are.
Slow start, but it's picked up speed in chapter 5. I can certainly see the influence it had on Brandon Sanderson.
Earlier I tried the audiobook of The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making, but the narrator (the author Catherynne Valente) may have not been the best choice. I made it to chapter 7, and gave up
Just finished The Plague by Albert Camus. Wow, this is a great book. I liked The Stranger a lot, but this is a league above. Events both shocking and commonplace are told in a calm, natural manner that reminds me of Tolstoy. All of the characters are fascinating and unique. It's a beautiful book about something very ugly, and it can be read either literally or allegorically. Highly recommended.
.
Pretty similar to The Power of Habit, but instead of focusing on how to form habits, they focus on strengthening willpower, which has a lot to do with forming habits. So yea, I am going to start forming good habits and increase my Willpower, since, well, even if it isn't something that can be improved and will make me a better more understanding and 'with it' person for longer, at least I will have formed a bunch of good habits.
3 stories finished out of 4, not including the Appendix.
I was expecting something else when Mumei compared VanderMeer to Wolfe, so the first story, Dradin, In Love, bewildered me. I sensed that Dradin's narrative was unsustainable, that it was going to end way before I reached the end of the book, and I couldn't imagine where the story would go after that. When it became clear that City of Saints and Madmen was an anthology, I saw Dradin, In Love in a new light. It is simply an introduction to the city of Ambergis, which is the real motive force behind these stories.
Dradin, In Love
I didn't enjoy this as much as I would've liked. My expectations of a cohesive narrative might've interfered with my immersion in his story, but, looking back, I just didn't like Dradin. He didn't really interest me until
the truth behind his amnesia became evident
, and by then the story was finished. I was far more interested in Ambergris itself, trying to place its technological and cultural level, and looking for the parallels VanderMeer was drawing between his fictional city and real ones. I suspected London, but found that improbable given VanderMeer's rootless upbringing. Ambergis is, more likely, a mishmash of all the cities VanderMeer experienced as a child of parents in the Peace Corps.
The Early History of the City of Ambergris
This was much better. It's ironic that Social Studies and History were my least enjoyed subjects in High School, but I absolutely adore fictional histories of fictional places, especially when told from the perspective of fictional historians. There's just something about the craft of talking about a fabricated city as if it was real that appeals to me, more than a true history ever could.
I appreciated the honesty of a city like Ambergris, which eschewed the unbelievable millenia-long, destiny-infused histories that's endemic in speculative fiction. Ambergris' origins are humble, its founding motivated by a mixture of convenience and economic interests, which is just about how any real city is formed. Its progress is also briskly paced and plausible,
starting as a humble whaling settlement to become, as is implied, a modern metropolis with skyscrapers and motor vehicles.
No banal mythologising here.
On the other hand, the presence of the "Cinsorium" gave Ambergris' history a unique flair. Tonsure's
haunting account of the city beneath Ambergris reveals the truth of their city: they exist only through the mercy of the mushroom dweller's civilization, in defiance of the often egregiously imperialistic nature of other fictional cities and civilizations.
Even if Dradain, In Love was a weak story overall, its position at the start of this anthology is vindicated by The Early History of the City of Ambergris. The hints and whispers sprinkled throughout Dradin coalesce into a deep and engaging mythos with The Early History. It's a shame the anthology couldn't begin with this story instead, but considering the piecemeal structure of anthologies, it was better than VanderMeer opened with Dradin, and then escalated into The Early History than the inverse.
The Transformation of Martin Lake
There's no good starting point for this so I'm just going to go down a list of things that make this story stand out, not just among the other stories in this anthology, but among fictional in general.
Parallel Narratives Transformation is split into two narratives that run side by side. The first is framed as an art guide, of the kind you'd see in museums, discussing the life of the titular Martin Lake and the inspirations and significance of his art. The second is a traditional third-person narrative. In the first, we're exposed to his art: the materials he used, the techniques he employed, the subjects he painted, the symbolism, etc. We get a glimpse into the life of Martin Lake, just as we would acquire a surface understanding about Picasso or Van Gogh in typical art history lectures. In the second, we get to see precisely the chain of events that elevated him from a talented but obscure artist squandering his gifts into a master of his craft. The art guide's clinical, academic dissection of his work sharply contrasts the harrowing, first-hand experience that would lead to his transfiguration into a cultural icon.
It's this disparity that makes the parallel narrative technique compelling. A recent, prominent example of this technique is True Detective (S1), which was a balancing act between Future!Rust's and Future!Marty's accounts to Gilbough and Papania, and the actual events of the 1995 Ledoux case. The question of "How did they get from A, to B?" is what made True Detective such great television, and VanderMeer manages to one-up Nic Pizza in Transformation.
Art in Fiction
Like The Early History of the City of Ambergris, the genius of the "art guide" in Transformation lies in its genuineness. I'm not one for museums and visual art academia, but I've been exposed to it all my life and recognize the language. Transformation could easily pass for a professional analysis of visual art. I wager that this is no coincidence, and that VanderMeer, in the course of his work, has written and edited many such analyses. That's the only explanation for his authentic prose, not just when analyzing art that can't be seen, but talking about the creation of art itself. I suspect that, under different circumstances, VanderMeer could've gone into painting, and it's one of the beauties of fiction that authors can live out their abandoned dreams and fancies through prose.
I bring this up because writing unconvincingly about art is one of the most common sins that spec-fi writers commit. Authors that attempt to write about poetry, or music, or dance, can quickly destroy their readers' sense of immersion with obviously shallow understanding of these art forms. To an extent, I blame Tolkien, who founded an entire genre on the back of ballads and arias and song. Apparently, copy-cats didn't get the memo that Tolkien actually studied and understood folk music, folk poetry and other non-prose art forms he utilized in Lord Of The Rings and The Silmarillion. He didn't take Poetry Workshop 101 and started composing The Lay of Luthien. He worked at it. This is much more than I can say for authors like Rothfuss, who clearly have no idea what they're talking about when they try their hand at poetry or music.
Conveying Visuals Through Words
It's a commonly held maxim that a writer cannot and should not attempt to "describe a dance". The writer should focus on the overall feeling and emotions being expressed by the dancers in question, instead of the minutiae of their movements. This is true for music as well, as there is no practical way of conveying pitch, tone and melody without breaking immersion. The same reasoning applies also to visual arts. Any dance, any song, any painting, once confined to a page, loses a dimension or two in the process, like projecting a cube onto a flat surface.
VanderMeer overcomes this limitation of the written word by speaking of art in a way that is only possible as a storyteller. Because Martin Lake is his creation, he has the opportunity to talk about Lake's art objectively. Throughout the story, we see, on one hand, the way Lake's work is perceived by critics, who speculate on its symbolism and allegories. On the other, we vicariously experience the trials and tribulations that provided the inspiration for Lark's seminal pieces. We have the privilege of knowing the backstory behind each of his paintings, a privilege few, if any, art critics enjoy in reality. And even though the paintings are imaginary and invisible, the emotions we underwent, as readers, were no less real. These emotions create an evocative piece of art inside our heads, without a brush ever needing to come into contact with canvas.
Thoughts on New Weird
So, "New Weird", for those not in the know, is a modern movement in spec-fi to move away from the juvenile power fantasies that characterized the genre early on in its infancy. This lack of sophistication is one of the reasons why fantasy and sci-fi, even today, is scorned, not just by academia (who'll sneer at anything), but by mainstream society as well. It's only recently with adapted works like Game of Thrones and All You Need is Kruise Kill that the broader public is warming up to the kinds of stories us nerds have been enjoying for decades.
What characterizes New Weird, and sets it apart from its forebears and modern contemporaries, is its blend of science fiction, fantasy, Lovecraftian horror and magic realism. It's not quite as dry as Kafka, but not as pulpy as S. A. Corey either. It's a compromise between "literature", which demands realism in terms of plot, characterization, and setting, and "fantasy", which promises creativity, wonder, and above all else, escapism. Trying to describe New Weird is difficult, because the very purpose of the movement is to defy the labels society applies to speculative fiction.
Basically it's spec-fi written by hipsters, for hipsters.
Anyway, VanderMeer is, supposedly, part of the vanguard for this movement, and it shows. Once I tapped into the rhythm and groove of Ambergris, I realized I was enjoying it in the same way I fell in love with Mieville's Bas-Lag. Unlike Mieville, however, VanderMeer is less concerned with the overt, that is, strange monsters, weird cultures and alien technologies, than the implicit, the kind of writing that co-opts your imagination to express and accentuate the author's intent. I firmly believe the latter is much more difficult than the former, and so VanderMeer has quickly catapulted himself to become one of my most respected authors. I'm looking forward to finishing this book, and am eager to pick apart the rest of his bibliography. I pause only because Transformation honestly left me breathless. Its impact was such that it demanded a lengthy ode to VanderMeer.
Thoughts on New Weird
So, "New Weird", for those not in the know, is a modern movement in spec-fi to move away from the juvenile power fantasies that characterized the genre early on in its infancy. This lack of sophistication is one of the reasons why fantasy and sci-fi, even today, is scorned, not just by academia (who'll sneer at anything), but by mainstream society as well. It's only recently with adapted works like Game of Thrones and All You Need is Kruise Kill that the broader public is warming up to the kinds of stories us nerds have been enjoying for decades.
What characterizes New Weird, and sets it apart from its forebears and modern contemporaries, is its blend of science fiction, fantasy, Lovecraftian horror and magic realism. It's not quite as dry as Kafka, but not as pulpy as S. A. Corey either. It's a compromise between "literature", which demands realism in terms of plot, characterization, and setting, and "fantasy", which promises creativity, wonder, and above all else, escapism. Trying to describe New Weird is difficult, because the very purpose of the movement is to defy the labels society applies to speculative fiction.
Basically it's spec-fi written by hipsters, for hipsters.
Two quick comments: Academics no longer sneer at sf and fantasy, well maybe still fantasy a bit, but sf has a long and rightful academic industry. And fantasy is catching up...
And New Weird is not just for hipsters. Otherwise, pretty good observations.
You might want to check out Interstitial fiction as it tries to address some of your concerns.
I have only read Blood Meridian out of those three. It is filled with lengthy descriptions of the scenery of the American West, and characters making self-destructive violent decisions. If that sounds good to you, go for it.
both are horrifying and infuriating in their own ways.
dirty wars is fairly packed with information and history, and while it is somewhat hard to keep track of it all, it definitely paints a more cohesive picture of some of the names and institutions heard sporadically (or not at all) though the media. it helps to highlight the differences in military procedure between presidents, focusing especially on clinton, bush senior, and obama. how the guidelines for acceptable actions have grown exponentially post 9/11, and rapidly since.
bad samaritans is more concise, focusing on the grand myth of the free market and other neoliberal economic dogma. how it is espoused through institutions like the international monetary fund, the world bank, and the world trade organization, how these policies and stipulations surrounding loans or grants generally seem to be in an attempt to kick away the ladder from developing countries. stymieing growth and opportunity before their economies become a threat to the established powers.
Finished up The Humans earlier today and really liked it. 4/5, very interesting sci fi, and hilarious at times. Just wish the climax had been a little different. Easy to recommend.
Think I'll dive into another football book next, but will see.
I've read Blood Meridian and Lies of Lock Lamorra. Out of those two, I would go with Blood Meridian unless you're coming off something heavy and want an easy going, comfortable read. Blood Meridian is not an all time favorite, I'm actually not a big fan, but it is spectacular in places. Too abstract a lot of the time and too monotone in general, it's still very powerful.
The Lies of Lock Lamorra starts off with a cool premise and... that's about it. Don't get me wrong, it's enjoyable throughout, but there are no outstanding qualities to speak of.
Just finshed The Way of Kings and holy shit was it good.
The last couple chapters I was listening to and had to pause the audiobook and move back to the kindle just so I could find out what was going to happen faster.
Cant wait to start Words of Radiance but I am thinking of either reading The Martian or Pandemic before I dive back into a big novel.
Now, continuing on my effort to read everything by Oscar Wilde. I've come to his poems, which I honestly don't really want to read. But I'm a completionist and will read it all. So far, fairly dull stuff.
Agreed. I took two Wilde classes, one in undergrad, one in grad, and never got an appreciation for his poetry. The Ballad of Reading Gaol was okay, but for all of Wilde's individualism, his poetry relied on too many Classical and Romantic tropes. Was it Yeats who called Wilde an, "almost great poet"? lol
Finished up 3 A.M by Nick Pirog. Humorous with a good plot. 4 out of 5.
Now reading: Battle Royale by Koushun Takami. About 25% into the book and I am really enjoying it. It is extremely graphic in terms of gore so not recommended for those who are squeamish. My only (very small) gripe is the author (or translation) says "That's right..." really often.
Going to start reading 'The Ocean at the end of the lane' by Neil Gaiman along side with Battle Royale.
I just finished reading Cibola Burn and I feel like a real asshole after having talked myself into that book choice. My complaints remain and I'm too goddamned stubborn to just give up on the series. Maybe I'm just a masochist. Either way, time for a new book. I think I'll take up The Flamethrowers, my girlfriend just got done with it and she thinks I may like it. I have my reservations: the art world, the seventies, blech. Gods, I am a surly fuck.
I've just started book 5 of The Wheel of Time, The Fires of Heaven. I started book 1 in January and hoped to read one WoT book a month... Now I'm just hoping to finish the series by the end of next year. I'm rather tempted to just ignore all other books and games and everything else, and just buckle down and get these books read.
Well, Cupid's Dart was pretty much what I thought it would be. At least it was quick.
Reading through The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder. I kinda wish I could have been around for the early computer industry, but I doubt I would have been allowed to be involved in it as anything but a secretary.
Just finished Towers of Midnight (WoT book 13). Still having trouble resisting the urge to go on a wiki binge (which is hard when I look up names I've forgotten).
Fuck the columns of rhuidean, those sequences are goddamn unsettling
.
I read that there is a short story accompaniment to AMoL in Unfettered that focuses on
Shara
. Should I read the short story first or AMoL first?
I've just started book 5 of The Wheel of Time, The Fires of Heaven. I started book 1 in January and hoped to read one WoT book a month... Now I'm just hoping to finish the series by the end of next year. I'm rather tempted to just ignore all other books and games and everything else, and just buckle down and get these books read.
Fires of Heaven is probably one of my favorites. Enjoy.
Although you're probably going to slow yourself down a bit once you hit books 8-10 (11 picks up and RUNS).
Otherwise known as I Am a Cat. Picking it up again after putting it down about 2 years ago. Figured my Japanese is good enough to finish it this time around.
Otherwise known as I Am a Cat. Picking it up again after putting it down about 2 years ago. Figured my Japanese is good enough to finish it this time around.
