I haven't been posting these lately. I have been reading lots though. Here's where I left off. The Thing Around Your Neck (★★★★ 1/2) Slaughterhouse Five (★★★★ 1/2) The Stone Diaries (★★ 1/2) Deliverance (★★★★ 1/2) Childhood's End (★★) Don Quixote (★★★★) A Stir of Echoes (★★★ 1/2) Rum Punch (★★★★★) The Orphan Master's Son (★★★★★) The Last House on Needless Street (★ 1/2) Since there's so many, I'll be brief where I can. It'll still be a megapost. Forgive my typos. It will take a few passes for me to spot them all. -------------------------------------------- The Thing Around Your Neck (★★★★ 1/2) These are short stories written as if by a Nigerian Junot Diaz. I kind of prefer Diaz though. He's more ruthless. Still, there are some awesome stories here. They don't shy away from truths. My favorite is the one where the young female MC climbs this tree with a cousin she doesn't like. He falls to his death, or what shouldn't have been his death but was, because his grandmother watched him die. But there's more to it than that. I'm not doing it justice here, sorry, because it was profound. The girl wanted him to fall because she was jealous of his accolades, but she is a very unreliable narrator. Beautifully written imagery. Very blunt in how it treats life. I read this book because Adiche helped select the 2021 O Henry Prize stories and I wanted to be more familiar with her. I'm very impressed. -------------------------------------------- Slaughterhouse Five (★★★★ 1/2) I'm surprised they read this in schools. haha. I wouldn't want to read it with kids. For some reason I never read it back then, so I'm correcting that. It's about a man who has become unstuck in time. He's rather 4-dimensional and sees his whole life at once. The story is him hopping through events. It has one of the most beautiful anti-war passages I've ever read. It's not high poetry. The technique is fascinating though. He's living the scene in reverse. American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation. The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. . . . And it keeps going. The German fighters repair the planes, which return to base where the bombs are disassembled. Their minerals are buried underground. The image of that stayed with me. -------------------------------------------- The Stone Diaries (★★ 1/2) Pulitzer #28 for me in my quest to read them all. Eh . . . I didn't care for it. I found it silly how everyone around the MC kept dying. Her mother dies in childbirth. Her aunt is hit by a bicycle speeder (haha, sorry, it does seem stupid though). Her husband dies on her wedding night by falling drunk from the balcony. It's like Ju-On, the Grudge. No one around her can survive. The story is supposed to explore the difficulty of a woman's life. This is a common Pulitzer theme. "Olive Kitteridge" did this far better. Everyone in this book is rather deep and thoughtful. It's all overly poetic. It's also done from this high vantage that I find irritating. It's like going to an amusement park, and rather than getting on any crazy rides, you just go back and forth in the skycars and watch other people far below you having fun. You're never a part of the story. -------------------------------------------- Deliverance (★★★★ 1/2) Oh man. This one was awesome. If you saw the movie, then you basically read the book. There are some interesting points in the book that are drawn out more though. When the MC climbs that cliff at the end, it's harrowing. They build up his needs better in the book too. He wants to prove himself to Lewis (Burt Reynolds' character). The movie made it seem too easy. I will say that the director did understand how to elevate the two famous scenes. One is the dueling banjos (having actual music helped but the delivery was perfect), and the other will go unmentioned. You know which one it was. I kind of wish that scene wasn't in the book/movie. The story is exceptionally well told and I feel the luridness of that scene is too distracting. It's fine, in context, but everyone who sees the movie fixates on it. Oh well. The author was a poet (literally). Almost all of his other books are poetry. His skill with shaping the sentences was phenomenal and I wish he would have written more fiction. His descriptions of nature were simply wonderful. It wasn't overdone either. -------------------------------- Childhood's End (★★) I found this to be poorly executed. Aliens come to earth. Why are they here? What is the ultimate fate of humanity? The ending is way out there, I suppose, but getting there was a slog through cookie-cutter characters with all the personality of wet cardboard. Because the story lasts a century or so, new characters keep needing to be introduced. Though they're all basically the same, too much time is wasted redefining them. An example of flawed story form, IMO. -------------------------------- Don Quixote (★★★★) You know, a lot of people say Shakespeare is funny, but I've never really laughed at any of his plays. Some things are mildly amusing. Mildly. I found Cervantes' Don Quixote to be genuinely funny though. Imagine writing a joke and people laugh at it in 400 years. Really think about that. You write something today, and in the year 2422, somebody laughs at your words. You brought them joy. Astounding when you think about it . . . This book was 420,000 words, and I wish Goodreads gave me full credit for it (should have been a 1500 page book, not 1200). Don Quixote is actually two books. Volume I is released in 1605. People loved it and other authors tried to cash in by writing sequels. (Imagine "Larry Potter and the Sorcerer's Phone.") Cerventes realized this and wrote Volume II. What's funny is that Vol II is aware of the first book. So part one exists inside part two in a meta sort of way. If Volume I is mostly about Don Quixote being delusional and imagining adventures, Vol II is about people creating fake adventures filled with actors for him to experience. I actually preferred the second half. Most people are burned out by then and say the first half is better. IMO, volume 2 is where it's at. This is my favorite excerpt from the whole book. Don Quixote is proving that he can go mad with grief. He's practicing in case his Lady Dulcinea del Toboso ever needs him to go mad. He wants Sancho to observe his "mad acts" and then let Dulcinea know how loyal Quixote is. He plans to run around nude in the wilderness and bash his head into rocks. Sancho says that he's already seen Don Quixote go mad often enough, so he doesn't need to watch new acts, he'll just inform Duncinea of the old acts, but then right as he's about to ride away on Quixote's horse, Rocinante, Sancho changes his mind: “Señor, your grace is right: so that I can swear with a clear conscience that I saw you do crazy things, it would be a good idea for me to see at least one, even though I’ve already seen a pretty big one in your grace’s staying here.” “Did I not tell you so?” said Don Quixote. “Wait, Sancho, and I shall do them before you can say a Credo.” And hastily he pulled off his breeches and was left wearing only his skin and shirttails, and then, without further ado, he kicked his heels twice, turned two cartwheels with his head down and his feet in the air, and revealed certain things; Sancho, in order not to see them again, pulled on Rocinante’s reins and turned him around, satisfied and convinced that he could swear his master had lost his mind. And so we shall let him go on his way until his return, which did not take long. "Revealed certain things . . ." hahaha! 400 years later. . . -------------------------------- A Stir of Echoes (★★★ 1/2) This was pretty good. A man is hypnotized as a party gag and develops psychic premonitions. He can also read people's minds. He's super-receptive, more or less. I feel the movie was better. It was more focused on the ghostliness and made some clever shifts in characters. In the book, the MC realizes his grandfather had "the sight," for lack of a better word. In the movie, the son is aged up a few years and the audience makes the connection there. The movie does an excellent job raising the stakes. Sadly, "The Sixth Sense" stole this movie's thunder because it came out at the same time. This is an excellent book, despite that, and the movie even more so. This was written in 1959 (same year as the Haunting of Hill House, I believe). It suffers a bit from that story's flaw, too. Namely that the people are too accepting of psychic phenomena. It made zero sense in Hill House, and only makes a little sense here. The husband and his wife are thrown for a loop by it, but at one point the MC husband goes to see a doctor and the doctor completely believes in mind powers. I found that (and other details) silly. It seemed to be a pattern back then. Not bad though. Richard Matheson writes with a high-kinetic style, as per usual, and I like that. -------------------------------- Rum Punch (★★★★★) Okay, I could write 5000 words on this easily, but I won't. Beautifully written. Perfect dialog. I can't stress this enough. PERFECT DIALOG. This book should be studied at university. It is more in depth than the movie (Jackie Brown). The characters are more tangled together here. There's also violent subplots that are missing from the movie. It just didn't have room for them (and it wasn't exactly skimping on runtime). Samuel L Jackson was perfect as Ordell. Robert Forster was perfect as Max. The others were also very well chosen. The basic premise is that a woman is going to take a fall for a criminal, and rather than see her midlife ruined with no chance of recovery, she decides to fight back with her smarts. Hey, the book ends differently than the movie . . . It's close. Tarantino followed the book as faithfully as he could. Even so, the switch happens fast at the end, and it's just a single nebulous line, but it's there. You know what it implies. I feel the change was made because of missing subplots. The book's ending delighted me and I spent a while punching the air. Rum punch! Rock on! (That's not actually what rum punch means. It's one of Ordell's codes for various schemes he has going on. He makes up titles for each crime. I don't remember the movie explaining that. Maybe I missed it.) I liked this one so much that I bought a signed first print. -------------------------------- The Orphan Master's Son (★★★★★) This is Pulitzer #29 for me. It's somewhat similar to "The Sympathizer," which was about a man leaving North Vietnam. OMS is about a nameless man who's assumed to be an orphan. He travels through his life under fake identities and survives what is basically a 1984 dystopia. This book was absolutely brutal. It feels like the final chapter of 1984 stretched over hundreds of pages. There's some shocking scenes in here, so it's not for the timid. I found lots of it funny though. It's laced with black humor. I like how the North Koreans are always trying to shame the Americans and make them look inferior. The Dear Leader handed Ga the revolver. “Do you recognize this?” “It looks just like the revolver the orphan soldier described, the one they used in Texas to shoot cans off the fence. A forty-five-caliber Smith & Wesson, I believe.” “You do know him—now we are getting somewhere. But look closer, this revolver is North Korean. It was constructed by our own engineers and is actually a forty-six-caliber, a little bigger, a little more powerful than the American model—do you think it will embarrass them?” I find that funny. The whole scene where they recreate a Texas dude ranch was outrageous and I laughed lots. Kind of reminds me of Catch-22 in its wackiness and dark overtones. Anyway, if I had a choice between traveling to North Korea or swimming with sharks, I'd choose the sharks. This is one of the better Pulitzers but you better be ready for an unforgiving trip. -------------------------------- The Last House on Needless Street (★ 1/2) Hahaha! No. I thought this book was about something else. I thought it was about a presence in the woods that was snatching kids and that only the prime suspect in the cases could defeat it. That would have made a decent story. I give it an extra half-star because it was trying. But . . . I'm sorry. Spoiler: Let me sum up the plot with a Garfield metaphor The MC is Jon Arbuckle. He is insane. He speaks like Lenny from "Of Mice and Men." He has kidnapped Liz, the vet, and keeps her trapped in his house. Her legs are crippled and she can't escape. (? Don't ask me. It's either walk out on two legs or stay put.) Jon's cat, Garfield, reads the bible. He's rather Catholic. Eventually, Liz is able to communicate with Garfield. She can read his thought bubbles. Then --calling Director Shyamalan-- she realizes she IS Garfield. That's why Garfield can read. Together they must escape the fiendish Jon Arbuckle. They stab him and try to get away. Then --calling Director Shyamalan-- she realizes she is Jon Arbuckle too. They are all split personalities. There is also what I can only call a rabid Odie. He does the stabbing. As yet another twist, Jon Arbuckle never killed anyone. He's an abused innocent. There are zero on-the-page kills in this book. There's a couple described in the past, I guess. But they're accidents. It was all a misunderstanding. Jon is rescued by a park ranger and inexplicably becomes gay in the last five pages. It comes from out of nowhere. Whoosh! You can't do that. There has to be some sort of logic to it, some progression. That makes the ranger Lyle? I think that was the name of Jon's buddy. Anyway, they live happily ever after. I have no words. There were some other shenanigans with a corrupt therapist and a sister looking for closure. None of this was well written. Lots of hair standing on end, rapidly beating hearts, gasps, and other assorted cliches. Here is me after the final page.
Listening to an audiobook of Jack Vance's Dying Earth (the first book in the series, consisting of short stories.) Amazing. I think my favorite so far is Liane the Wayfarer.
Rosario Castellanos (transl. Esther Allen), The Book of Lamentations. I read this in college and remembered really liking it, so this is a re-read for me. Also my kids are in dual-language English/Spanish school now, so I figured I should probably re-familiarize myself with some Latin American literature that's not by Garcia-Marquez or Borges. Anyway I'm finding it still fine, definitely worth a read although not as mind-blowing as I remember. There's way more head-hopping, in particular, than I think you could get away with nowadays. And sometimes the melodrama reaches almost telenovela-esque heights. But I also seem to recall that it's an extremely slow burn, with the tension ratcheting up quietly until the bonkers ending, so I'll give it some time.
Vonnegut is a personal favorite who I discovered in high school, but not from this book. I was that kid that was given a choice, so I read one the teacher recommended against. Instead of Slaughterhouse five I read R.A. Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land. The first Vonnegut I ever read was Player Piano. That was significant in that it was written in 1950 about people being displaced in the workforce by machines. We are seeing this now. I participated in it as an engineer. The other one I read in HS was Mother Night. Now I have read nearly everything he has published and my two favorites were Jailbird, about some ordinary government worker who takes the fall for some higher ups during the Watergate scandal. It is set during the incredible two days following his release. It spoke to me since Nixon resigned the summer after I graduated from high school. I read it shortly after its release in 78. The other is Hocus Pocus, about a former army officer with a bad case of PTSD from his service in Vietnam who becomes a professor at a private college for the learning disabled children of the upper class. I was teaching at a for-profit trade school when I read it and the parallels were strikingly ironic. I was teaching the academically unprepared children of the lower class for a company who was only interested in their money. That experience woke me up to a learning disability that is undetectable from talking to people with the condition, dyslexia. I was teaching technical drawing using a software program called AutoCAD and noticed many student having peculiar troubles. I couldn't figure it out until a new student told me he was looking forward to having me help with his dyslexia. I was the most skilled in the subject on that faculty, and the "councilors" (high pressure sales people) were feeding them the BS that I was special ed qualified. That job became one of my biggest sources of work related PTSD. OT and a bit of advice. If a school advertises heavily on TV, they are earning the best reputation money can buy.
Grey Eminence by Aldous Huxley. It's a biographical account of François Leclerc du Tremblay, the Capuchin friar and confidant of Cardinal Richelieu, and one of the most powerful men in Europe. He was a bizarre figure: at once a devoted mystic, and a practitioner of Machiavellian power politics. Huxley goes into some detail about the practice of Christian mysticism. @Xoic would probably like it. Anyway, I am familiar with Brave New World, but if all of Huxley's books are of this caliber then there's reason to rank him very highly.
Read The Doors of Perception. It's Huxley describing and analyzing tripping on LSD. The passage with the sunlight on the chair has stuck with me for decades.
My wife's dad was a veteran of that. Did the book mention John Basilone. There's a lot of stuff around here named for him (town adjacent to a major Marine Corps base.) I googled him. He was a medal of honor winner during the campaign, and the description of his actions paint him as a true to life Rambo. He went on to win a Navy Cross on Iwo Jima where he was killed.
His exploits were portrayed in the HBO series The Pacific as well. He and his wife only got to spend eight days together before he went on his final deployment.
I brought out some old books I haven’t read in a while; To Kill a Mockingbird, and One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest. I also picked up a couple books the wife bought me a couple years ago: Twenty Years Later, and Don’t Believe It by Charlie Donlea. Today I started Run Rose Run by James Patterson and Dolly Parton. I still have a stack of books two feet high to catch up on, and I don’t know how many ebooks to get to.
I'm currently reading three different books. Technically four, but actively reading three. Blood of Elves by Andrej Sapkowski (I'm not enjoying it) In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan (this is what I read when I have to wait somewhere. It's interesting, but not compelling as I started it back in February and still haven't finished it) Walden by Henry David Thoreau (I just started it tonight because I didn't feel like reading anything else and I'm doing the sacrilegious thing of underlining passages I like. It's in pencil!) And the one I've got on my list to finish this month as well as the others is Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson. I got angsty over it and set it aside until I could be a reader about it again.
Finished Leviathan Wakes. Decent sci-fi action/space opera, but I don’t foresee myself continuing with the series. The ceaseless tension and page-turning prose are the book’s strong suits imo, while its plot, themes, and cast of characters were less than excellent, but better than bad. 3.5 stars. Currently reading: A River Runs Through It. I adore the movie and I’ve always wanted to read the novella. Soon I’ll be able to claim I have.
When the movie came out I was stationed in Hawaii. One of my buddies was from Montana and we went to see the film together. I remember walking out of the theater at the end and saying to him "If that's where you live, where the heck do you guys go for vacation?"
I just finished reading Me, Too by Thomas T. Thomas. It's a followup to a book he wrote in 1991 about an AI computer virus, basically, which gets loose in the pre-internet. I really liked the first book, and the second is from 2016 or so which makes it even more relatable, but... Spoiler ...there's a little girl in the book who becomes a minor plot driver when her parents are murdered in front of her in a carjacking. Specifically shot at close range in the face. Then the carjackers throw the girl into oncoming traffic where she bounces off of one car and is run over by a truck, "injuring" her skull, ribs, and legs. Later on the computer program arranges things so a woman it is working with can assume the identity of the girl's fictitious great-aunt and not end up in the foster care system because reasons. But the thing that bugs me is that the girl is fine. Totally fine. No problems whatsoever, physical, emotional, no PTSD, no casts, no disfigurement, no handicaps, nothing. It's like the author forgot that she witnessed the brutal and unprovoked murder of both her parents followed by being crushed by a truck and just let her pop up like Arnie in Last Action Hero. So the AI POV in the book was good, but the human characters, well...
I saw in on an airplane over the Pacific returning from Taiwan. I had planned on sleeping on the flight, so didn't get headphones. I was blown away by the gorgeous photography. When it came around on TV I went out of my way to see it. Good story too. Tom Skerritt deserves more recognition than he gets.
I'm reading Emotional Intelligence: Why it can matter more than IQ by Daniel Goleman. Very good. Vistas have opened. Recommend.
I reject the notion that a person's intellectual worth can be distilled into a single number called IQ. I have heard of the notion of Emotional Intelligence, and from what I have heard, it seems to be a better, more nuanced, notion of intelligence. My wife and I are a classic example of different flavors of smart.
Just finished "Requiem for Rome" and "Fall of the Camarilla" to the RPG Vampire the Requiem. I've had them for some time now but finally got around to read them. Now moving on to "Thebes: The Forgotten City of Ancient Greece" by Paul Cartledge.
After finishing A River Runs Through It, which was as beautiful and poignant as I’d hoped it would be, I picked up The Terror by Dan Simmons. I’m not far in, but what I’ve read from Simmons has been outstanding.
I loved A River Runs Through It. It might be time to reread it. I took The Man Who Walked Through Time on my trip but didn't get a chance to read it. It's next on the reread list.
Ok, Cartledge's book about Greek Thebes is finished and now I turn to a book about something else entirely. "Japan's Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism".
Yesterday, I finished Jim Corbett’s Man-Eaters of Kumaon. His climactic confrontation with the Thak Man-eater is just…storybook.
Definitely. They’re not all quite as dramatic as the last one, but the way Corbett goes into what makes a tiger or leopard turn man-eater and and the process of hunting them makes for a fascinating read.
