Finally, I'm back to reading books I haven't read. It's been too long. I'm starting Sula by Toni Morrison today. I've read some her stories before, which I enjoyed, but this will be the first novel I've read by her (Yes, I have Beloved on my shelf, but I'll get to that too). I'm excited because I've already heard good things about this one and it is a rather short read, so I may finish it pretty quick whether I like it or not. In any case, should be a good time.
Well, Sula was an interesting read, though I don't think I'll revisit it. I thought the first half was considerably better than the second, and I found myself far more interested in the minor or secondary characters than the title or main ones. It tries to unify itself by recalling earlier events, but it somehow still feels broken. I was kind of upset by the second half because I enjoyed the first so much. Sula herself became a plague in metaphor and then it was just a roll out of the inevitable. Oh well. Next, I'm on to Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49. I've heard a ton of good things about this author, but never had the pleasure of reading his work. Hopefully it's a good first.
Try Song of Solomon When/if you do... let me know what you think if the ending. I was liking it all until the last few pages. The ending... pissed me off Spoiler: i'm an annotator!
Good luck with Pynchon, he doesn't win any accessibility trophies. One of my staff sergeants recommended Gravity's Rainbow to me back when I was 19. I read it, didn't fully understand it (except to notice years later when the movie version of Trainspotting plagiarized a scene from it). So I re-read it a couple years ago and understood it even less. Tough book, very Literature with a capital everything. I think I enjoyed it, there are certainly parts of it that have stayed with me. For another thread perhaps.
Ha! Look at all them little notes. Looks like you have a hole punched birthday card filling a page too! Mine look like that, but with page folds and underlines. I come back years later, unless it was a first edition, and don't even know what I found interesting in most of them. I'll get to that one sometime. I have Beloved on the shelf, so that may be my next of hers first. I've come to kind of like these overlyliterary ones, and know it's a bit of a satire, so I may end up liking it. In any case, as with most these 'literary' works, it's pretty short. So if I don't get it or like it, it's only like six hours of life lost.
I had to read Song of Solomon this semester (first Toni Morrison novel for me). The writing is gorgeous but I wasn't crazy about it. The ending was.. unexpected, but it made sense to me. About to start Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald, the 15th and final book of the semester.
I finished The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosinski this week. That's one that will stick with me. I highly recommend it if you're in the mood for a book about the darkest side of humanity. I started the Africa Trilogy by Chinua Achebe. It's a whole lot of tell and no show, and I'm having a little trouble keeping track of who's whom by their names, but so far, it's not a bad read. I'm told it gets intense.
Well, I think a lot of his writing is based off of his African literature, culture, and language theoretical writing, so I can imagine it is quite dense. Good theory to get acquainted with though. Allows you to read translated African literature in a very different light.
Power of the Dog by Don Winslow. It's good. Mindlessly violent, over the top, relatively thin in the character department, but, hey it's a crime/drug cartel book and doesn't try to be any more than that. Got a good conversational writing style, too.
I am still slotging my way through The Ministry for the Future. I've opined here that I think the "rule" of "show, don't tell" is often pushed too hard. Mr. Robinson heard me. Nothing but pages upon chapters of dreary omniscient infodump followed "notes of meetings" told in a sort of verbal shorthand that are more infodump. I'm 64% done and can only think of four events that happened involving named characters.
I'm reading Red Mars and I'm getting a similar vibe. I like it but he doesn't get to the point that quickly; lots of description, which I enjoy, now that we're actually on mars, but seeing the point in all the red soil is hard.
See I liked the Mars trilogy despite his exposition. Or maybe because of it. I remember thinking that that was a series that showed the flaws in the "show don't tell" mentality because at least there it worked for me. The new one though is just infodumps and exposition.
Yep, get what you are saying, and I do like the read, it's just a longer form than usual and if you are used to reading more concise writing it takes a bit longer to get used to. It's good though. Perhaps his earlier work was better.
I'm two thirds of the way through Dune Messiah. I finished the original Dune earlier this year, just in time for the film.
Yeah, if they don't move it again. what is it now, end of next year? I never got passed the first book.
I finished Cormac McCarthy's "Blood Meridian," a delightful YA romp through the American Southwest. Our MC, known only as "the boy," joins a jolly bunch of adventurers and learns the power of friendship. The world of Blood Meridian truly is a fantasy utopia where any soul would be lucky to live. I sometimes felt it wasn't gritty enough. It was very safe and sanitized. I was especially surprised that no people met a grim fate. No men, women, children, infants, Americans, Mexicans, Apaches, Yumas, dogs, horses, or dancing bears were in any way harmed. A very relaxing read, indeed! A man seeks his own destiny and no other, said the judge. Will or nill. Any man who could discover his own fate and elect therefore some opposite course could only come at last to that selfsame reckoning at the same appointed time, for each man's destiny is as large as the world he inhabits and contains within it all opposites as well. This desert upon which so many have been broken is vast and calls for largeness of heart but it is also ultimately empty. It is hard, it is barren. Its very nature is stone. I give Blood Meridian 5 bottles of mescal out of 5. Spoiler: Spoiler Cormac McCarthy does in fact wind up being a centaur, I mean horse man.
I actually put that one down unfinished. Loved The Road in both print and film, but BM... Well, the abbreviation sums up my opinion and saves me some typing.
Yeah, The Road is still my favorite too. No Old Country for Old Men is a close second. My least favorite was The Orchard Keeper, which I honestly couldn't figure out. I read the notes after I was done and was like, "Oh! That's what was going on." Really made me feel dumb. Beautifully written though. Blood Meridian is about wanton violence and the ugliness of life. I feel it's a metaphor for life being so godless that we're living a literal hell on earth. It's a real downer, but I have to say, it's nearly Shakespearean in its prose. At times I feel his writing actually surpasses Shakespeare (gasp!). I know, but it does. It really is on another level. If you or me tried to write like that, everyone would laugh, but somehow McCarthy does it with sincerity.
I actually have his second novel, Outer Dark, and it's rather wild how good he is with trimmed down scene direction and language. He's able to isolate tones and themes almost effortlessly throughout his work, even in his first one which isn't half bad of a story. Quite short too. His darkness knows no bounds, and it creeps up and envelops the reader before they know entirely what's happening. Always a good experience with McCarthy's novels.
Yeah there's some sick shit in Outer Dark. Even by his standards. His Border Trilogy isn't as... biblical? It's kind of Faulknerian (McCarthy inherited Faulkner's editor when he died)... without any dead babies or cannibalism. There's a whole bush of dead babies in Blood Meridian. It's kind of like, dude, really?
I finished the African Trilogy by Chenua Achebe. I can't say I loved it. I may have had too high expectations for the drama. I was expecting something between Zulu and Hotel Rwanda. I thought the realities of the European colonization of Africa would be presented in horrific detail. They weren't. I know from reading that other peoples went through serious abuses and tragedies. It wasn't badly written though. Expectations aside, it was a goodish read. If I could borrow a bit from @Seven Crowns for a second, I'd give it three inscrutably idiomatic parables out of five. Seriously, with the freakin' parables, Chenua.
