"ANTISOCIETIES is a collection of ten stories about isolation - what it does to people, and what isolated people do to each other and themselves. An ominously quiet town. A haunting young adult novel from the turn of the century. Two starving captives frozen in agony. A young boy from a doting family. A man in a cheap Halloween mask. A succession of portraits of people trapped in their own identities, some of whom insist on their own ideas because they would have nothing at all without them. People for whom being seen by another is terrifying. And, like any collection of portraits, ANTISOCIETIES is also a collection of speculative mirrors ..." It's more like Weird fiction. Melancholy and understated. Cerebral as well since it's Cisco.
I finished the second Witcher book and the amount of time spent on Geralt and Yennefer is making me wonder if they'll ever get to the point of their relationship. Because it's mostly just incessant whining (much like me about the book, I guess). But my next read has been extremely pleasant. My parents loaned me The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman. It takes place in a retirement community and there's murder and intrigue and a protest where people chain themselves to a cemetery gate. It's light-hearted while being mysterious (as ... all mystery novels aim to be...). I'm almost done with it and then I'm thinking I'll give the rest of Atlas Shrugged a go. I stopped reading it a while ago because of reasons I can't remember (probably moving and packed it in the wrong box), but I want to finish it soon. Slow progress on my to read shelves, but progress is progress.
Kiley Reid's Such a Fun Age. It's...fine. Actually my wife and I had an interesting discussion about it...she told me she found it fascinating because all the characters resemble people we know, and I can only think "Why would I want to read about people I already know?!"
The horror I'm reading has well thought characters and great complicated relationships... And that's about it. I don't think I can finish it even though I'm 75% in. It just seems to keep declining. Everything builds to anticlimax and the descriptions of the same concepts are endless. Chapters dedicated to the same thoughts repeating over and over. I feel like the author intended that, to make us feel as exhausted as the characters maybe? Doesn't make for an enjoyable read though and there's no payoff for making it through those endless repetitive descriptions. That said I feel like the author is very talented but that this book was a miss.
Finished Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen tonight. It was decidedly average. Although likely groundbreaking at the time due to the characters, as a modern reader I found it to be a whole lot of tropes all in one place doing exactly what tropes generally do. At the very least, it didn't end like Sense and Sensibility did with an extremely obscure convenience which I'm fairly shocked isn't disdained more readily. Instead, it ends happily, a bit too happily for my taste I guess, and rather dully. Pretty much everyone ends up well and at least moderately happy and et cetera...so that makes the general story just boring for me. The least boring parts for me, and this is somewhat stretching just for pure want of entertainment, was Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth's impetuous tones towards one another when they quarrel about all sort of misinformed nonsense. It livens everything up and keeps the reader interested. But then there's the three hour long ending of slow inevitability and damnable happiness that just sucks all the moisture out of the air. Austen, as with Sense and Sensibility or Northanger Abbey, does extraordinarily well in implementing her theme, though in this book it tended to be quite a bit more over-bearing than the others. The themes are built very naturally around the characters. And the characters are most certainly Austen's most advantageous quality. All of them are quite distinct and very real feeling. Quite the feat as there are a lot of them and the initial five who make up most of the dialogue in the novel are all sisters. Austen masterfully controls these characters without ever having them lose character, instead revealing them over time to their actual demeanors despite others prejudice (yay, theme!). I also tended to quite like Mr. Darcy. Elizabeth is entertaining at times, but then also quite annoying as well. I'm sure it's with intention to be that way, but I never was the greatest fan, even though she is often claimed to be Austen's 'hero.' The novel was, however, lacking the same kind of humorous wit and comedy that could be found in characters like Mrs. Jennings in Sense and Sensibility, or in the overall writing of Northanger Abbey. It was a bit of a disappointment in that regard, as some scenes in those two novels did make me quite happy at times or laugh aloud. Pride and Prejudice unfortunately spends a great deal of time pointing out the faults of both pride and prejudice, mirroring the thematic structure of the contrasting sense and sensibility theme laid out in the other novel. This structure does have the advantage of forcing discernably different characters, but reading them back to back just makes it feel like you're reading the same book all over again. For me, the ranking of Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility is interchangeable, though I would lean towards Sense and Sensibility because it was less over-bearing with its thematic interjections. Northanger Abbey still remains my favorite of the group. I'll lastly take on Persuasion next week, which is almost universally hailed as her best. I feel that I read these differently than a typical Austen reader, so we shall see if I hold in such high esteem.
I'm one and a half books into Stephen King's Bill Hodges/Holly Gibney series. I didn't think I was a fan of hard boiled detective novels, but they're quite good. Then again, maybe it's just Stephen King I like so much. They're not his best books ever, but they still have his style of deep intimacy. I love being in the heads of his characters.
U and I: A True Story by Nicholson Baker. It's basically an appreciation of John Updike and his influence on Baker. It's light and entertaining but now I want to read Updike. I have always heard positive things but have never gotten around to him. Suggestions?
I really enjoyed The World According to Garp, later made into a pretty good movie starring Robin Williams. But it uncomfortably reminded me of my own life and mother.* Garp's life was shaped, for better and for worse, by the 'remarkable woman' who was his mother. As I remember it (or am I transposing my own life onto it?) the book reveals how terrible of a mother a remarkable woman can be, though the rest of the world thinks she's amazing. * Actually it helped me make a lot more sense of my life come to think of it, just took me a while to process it.
Agatha Christie, The Clocks. For nonfiction, I have a book on Gustav Klimt. Can't recall the title but it has great photographs, some of work I've never see before..
Highly enjoyed most of the stories in Antisocieties. The cover might've made it look like a kind of underground bit of juvenile writing, but it's a highly thoughtful collection of melancholy stories. The best way I can describe it is a cross between Jorges Luis Borges + Thomas Ligotti.
That was John Irving. Good writer though. I haven't read *Garp*, but it's on my list. He was more of a short story writer, but I like novels, so the first on my list (haven't read it yet) is *Rabbit, Run*. It's the beginning of a series that's by far considered his best work. Two of them won Pulitzers. Very few people have won multiple Pulitzers.
Been reading the samples that Amazon let's you download then buying used paperbacks of the ones that hook me. I've got quite a few on the way.
Sounds uncannily like a certain part of Jeff Vandermeer's Annihilation, aside from the special suit thing (and the fact that I thought you said she was a cadaver—THAT had me thinking some very strange things!)
Never read that one but saw the movie. This one is more claustrophobic spelunking and being controlled by a narcissist. The big thing is the suit can be controlled remotely in almost any way. How is that book?
A certain dead white skin color is common to some cavers and cadavers due to lack of sun exposure in the former and lack of blood circulation in the latter.
It's much better than the movie. Actually the movie was a conglomeration of the entire trilogy with a lot missing and parts of it completely changed. Actually I gotta say, I really enjoyed the whole trilogy quite a bit, Best reading I've done in a long time. This actually is still very close to what happened in the book, except there was no suit. But the woman who was down in the tunnel had been conditioned, unknown to herself, to respond powerfully to hypnotic commands by the 'handler' up topside, and to black out while she was doing it and remember nothing later. The handler wasn't a narcissist, but had a pretty scary agenda of her own. And all the women of the expedition were going insane and changing into human/animal or human/plant hybrids.
I worked with an attorney once who was a real stinkweed/human hybrid. (Scurries off to look for the book online.)
That's interesting. I've avoided Annihilation because I hear the term "weird fiction" thrown around and that makes me think abstract, complicated language--which I don't enjoy all that much. Same reason I'm avoiding House of Leaves. I should download the sample of Annihilation though, see if the writing style is something I can chomp on.
Yeah, there is some of that, especially in the 3rd book. But I like the way Vandermeer writes. At times it reminds me a lot of Stephen King at his best. In fact I think King must have been a big influence on him.
I skimmed through the first book online last night. Interesting writing. I might've read the entire thing except I dislike reading books online.
I finished this last week and brought it back to my folks. Then this evening I thought I'd see what all the fuss was about A Court of Thorns and Roses, by Sarah J Maas, and it went as I expected it to. I read it mostly for distraction, and it did that. Now I'm going to try and decide if I want to read the rest of the third Witcher book (I started out of order on accident), or if I want to try Atlas Shrugged as I mentioned previously. Or if I want to read something entirely different.
