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Post by Desert Dweller on Jan 8, 2024 12:14:01 GMT -5
Midcentury, John Dos PassosI think I've mentioned more than once that Dos Passos's trilogy USA is one of my favourite books. This, one of his later efforts, is a return to that style and subject matter, thirty years on. That's a lot to ask. Does it stack up, I hear you clamouring to find out? Just about, I think. Ugh, I have GOT to finally read Dos Passos USA. I have the whole thing in a giant volume sitting on a shelf in my living room. I keep intending to read it, and then never do. I am moving it onto my list to read before Summer.
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ABz Bš¹anaz
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Post by ABz Bš¹anaz on Jan 12, 2024 0:07:30 GMT -5
Terry Pratchett fans: Humble Bundle has a DISCWORLD bundle with what looks like the entire series (38 BOOKS?!) for an $18 minimum donation. www.humblebundle.com/books/terry-pratchetts-discworld-harpercollins-booksI read/listened to several of the early books in the series around 1999-2001 and loved them, but never got around to reading more. When I saw The Amazing Maurice a year ago, it reminded me how much I love his stories, so I'm going to grab this bundle shortly to add to my queue. EDIT - I should mention that this bundle is redeemed via Kobo.com, apparently, an e-reader and ebook site/app. It's free to make an account and add the books to it, but there's no uploading them to your Kindle like I planned. No big deal, just FYI.
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Post by Ben Grimm on Jan 12, 2024 14:52:53 GMT -5
Terry Pratchett fans: Humble Bundle has a DISCWORLD bundle with what looks like the entire series (38 BOOKS?!) for an $18 minimum donation. www.humblebundle.com/books/terry-pratchetts-discworld-harpercollins-booksI read/listened to several of the early books in the series around 1999-2001 and loved them, but never got around to reading more. When I saw The Amazing Maurice a year ago, it reminded me how much I love his stories, so I'm going to grab this bundle shortly to add to my queue. It's missing a few (I think the last three; there are 41 books in the series), but it's still a very good deal for someone who hasn't already bought all of them.
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Post by DangOlJimmyITellYouWhat on Jan 13, 2024 0:00:30 GMT -5
I finally read Gideon the Ninth, which had been on my virtual to-read list for a while, and man. I liked the plot and world-building, but a great deal of the dialogue was jarring in the extreme. Itās sorta sci-fi, sorta fantasy, definitely not Our Reality, but a lot of the titular characterās speech patterns/phrasings are painfully modern, in a āhow these kids today talkā way, and it was really goddamn annoying. Not only will it be hella dated and hackneyed in a very short time, but thatāsā¦thatās also not how language works. How these kids talk today is a linguistic culmination of a whole host of factors that do not apply to that particular verse. You can create a smart-assed snarky character without having them use 21st-century slang like a modern 20 year old.
That aside, I did like what Muir was doing overall, so started Harrow the Ninth, andā¦she lost me about 30% in. It wasnāt the non-linear aspect, Iām fine with that, it just got reallyā¦ehā¦overblown, I guess? Overly invested in its own theology? A little bit, in a fictional setting, can be interesting,but just give me broad strokes, or, you know, show donāt tell. My theology/philosophy tolerance is perilously low.
And that gravest of all sins - I didnāt find Harrow compelling enough to begin with to be invested in a personality rebuild. I could have, but tbh it was being buried under all the theology overblowness.
Edit: oh dear god Iāve just read spoilers for the rest of the series, and Iām extremely happy I noped out when I did, because apparently thereās an explanation for the meme lord speech and it would have enraged me to read it after three books.
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Dellarigg
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Post by Dellarigg on Jan 13, 2024 5:04:23 GMT -5
The Art of Hunger, Paul Auster
In the mid- to late 90s, Auster had a break from publishing fiction, and plugged the gap with some non-fiction round-ups. This is a hefty collection of all sorts. It starts with essays and prefaces from the days of being a struggling writer in the 70s, cunningly chosen as if to show us the seeds of his own later work. That said, his all-consuming interest in 20th century French poetry is not 100% shared by me, and I ended up doing some skipping. There's also much talk of Kafka and Beckett, and that French bloke who walks on high wires between buildings. We get a few interviews by and with him, the latter the more interesting. He's quite good on his own laborious writing process. Then we come to some later prose efforts, most notably The Red Notebook, which looks at his interest in those strange synchronicities that crop up in life (such as a woman who unwittingly married her own brother, and coming across an Irish law firm called Argue & Phibbs). This is easily the best section.
Over all, it's uneven, and dragged in places. Luckily, there was a separate publication of The Red Notebook, with only a few other selections from this added to it, coming in at about half the length. Much more palatable.
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Dellarigg
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Post by Dellarigg on Jan 21, 2024 6:32:00 GMT -5
John Clare: A Biography, Jonathan Bate
A sad tale, this one. John Clare was one of the better nature poets this crabbed and sodden land has produced, but his route to greatness could hardly have been tougher.
Born into the rural working classes of Northamptonshire - he was known as the Peasant Poet - he managed to make himself the toast of London for a brief season in the 1820s. His first volume sold better, and was more feted, than that of his contemporary, John Keats. His eye for flora and fauna, and his use of plain dialect and folk tale stylings, made him something of a novelty, and grants and annuities relieved some of the burden of making a living and supplying for his growing family (he sired seven surviving kids; one of his grandkids died in the 1950s). However, while his subsequent books were more accomplished, each of them sold worse than the one before. With the death of Byron and the rise of the novel, poetry went through something of a slump at the worst possible time for Clare. Plus, these grants and annuities were at the behest of the aristocracy, and some of his more radical positions on land ownership and class and poverty had to be tamped down.
Throw in a taste for drink and promiscuity, his habit of writing in a frenzy and then falling idle, as well as season-long spells of physical ill-health, and it's not hard to see where this is heading. In his 40s, he cracked up, and spent the second half of his life in an asylum. Here he fell into lengthy delusions, where he thought he was Byron, or a boxer, or the father of Queen Victoria, or that the pupils had been removed from his eyes. An early infatuation with a Mary Joyce led him to believe she was his alternate wife, and he pined for her badly. He still wrote verse to a high level, however, and now became known as the Mad Poet, when he wasn't being neglected.
Bate is one of the best writers around on matters literary, and I've happily devoured his books on Shakespeare and Ted Hughes. This might be the best one of his I've read, the sadness of the story bringing out a narrative drive that cuts through the usual dryness of literary biography. I can overlook his occasional snippiness with me on twitter.
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Dellarigg
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Post by Dellarigg on Jan 23, 2024 10:39:58 GMT -5
Under The Greenwood Tree, Thomas Hardy
This was Hardy's second novel, and the one in which he set the pattern that would see him through many more: a rural setting, a rustic chorus (literally in this case: they're the church choir) of varying intellectual abilities, and a young woman with three suitors of varying suitability. He keeps it very light, even at its most dramatic and poignant, and indeed this has the reputation of being his happiest book; that might be tied to it also being his shortest, coming in at a mere 200 pages. There are even a few laughs to be had, and he is excellent on the pangs of being a young man hit by love. He also uses the dialect word 'dumbledore' for bumblebee.
I read it in three days, and enjoyed it more than I thought I would. All very charming.
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Dellarigg
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Post by Dellarigg on Jan 26, 2024 11:33:39 GMT -5
The Ordeal of Gilbert Penfold, Evelyn Waugh
The English novel after Joseph Conrad and before, say, Kingsley Amis, doesn't hold much interest for me: I can't get started on Virginia Woolf and DH Lawrence, not when plucky Americans like Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Dos Passos were doing so well for themselves. About the only UK writer from that period I've looked into is Evelyn Waugh. And the results are decidedly mixed, old boy.
This one is moderately autobiographical. A balls-up with his meds left Waugh thinking he was going round the twist for a short while, and since nothing goes to waste, especially towards the end of a career when ideas aren't exactly hailing down, the experience was quickly frogmarched onto the page. So here we have a writer in his 50s who treats his aches and pains and insomnia with a sleeping draught of his own devising; he soon starts hearing voices, and thinks a trip to Ceylon/Sri Lanka is just the thing he needs. The voices, of course, follow him on-board, and all sorts of homicidal, persecutory, and predatory fantasies are played out.
Even at a mere 180 small scale pages, this is hopelessly overstretched. And, as I've usually found with Waugh, the prose is on the bare bones of its arse, barely rising above jotted notes at times. I suppose it simply doesn't do for a gentleman to be seen making an effort. A Handful of Dust is pretty good, though.
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Post by Jean Luc de Lemur on Jan 26, 2024 20:37:47 GMT -5
Ernest Gellner, Plough, sword, & book. A sweeping economic and intellectual history by a philosopher and social anthropologist, the bookās about how those two histories are matched: itās impossible to separate the two, changes in our philosophy of wealth, exchange, order, and science are intertwined with the material changes that brought them about. Gellnerās been dead since the nineties, but the bookāfrom 1988āmore than holds up. In terms of history, at least, I think that it still holds up, in part because Gellnerās working at an abstract enough level that itās not tied to specific things that have been found/refuted and partly because (judging by who recommended it to me) Gellner was just rightāor at least remains validāon a lot of his history. That extends to the presentāeven with mentions of the Communist world Iām shocked it was written before the fall of the Soviet Union. When Gellnerās talking about the present or future itās still our present and future. I have a bunch of pages bookmarked on my pdf of it and, looking back, I often canāt remember exactly what prompted me to bookmark the page, thereās just so much there worth looking at again.
Kazuo Ishiguro, Remains of the day.
Iām glad I read this now rather than at Stevensās age when he takes that road trip!
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Dellarigg
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Post by Dellarigg on Feb 1, 2024 10:30:28 GMT -5
Chopin: Prince of the Romantics, Adam Zamoyski
Pedestrian biography of the composer and pianist.
Chopin's life is only mildly interesting. Early brilliance developed into a cautious talent that knew what to pursue and what to avoid: he didn't write symphonies or operas, for instance, and he was also chary about giving public performances. His health was atrocious from the start, so consumptive that the wrong weather three cities away could land him in bed for a month, this condition killing him at the age of 39. (Incidentally, he wrote the funeral march you all know.) He was also one of those who seemed to prefer adoring someone from afar, rather than getting into the sweaty mess of a relationship, though he did have a long affair with French novelist and sexual trailblazer George Sand. She is by far the most interesting character here, with her manly dress and louche promiscuous ways; George Sand was a pen name, and perhaps some obscure formality is being observed, but Zamoyski constantly refers to her as George Sand, never just Sand, sometimes three or four times in a paragraph. Drove me crazy.
As I said, kind of indifferently written, and hardly enlivened by the pawings of European history he lived through, or by walk-on parts from Lizst, Victor Hugo, and Charles Dickens. Not everyone can be Beethoven, I suppose.
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Dellarigg
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Post by Dellarigg on Feb 9, 2024 10:04:48 GMT -5
James Joyce, Gordon Bowker
Three satellite figures are of particular interest in this biography. First is his old man, John, who took the family from relative wealth to the direst poverty in only a few years of silliness with money and drink. (Similar downfalls, I've noted, occurred to the fathers of Shakespeare and Dickens.) Second, his younger brother, Stannislaus, much put-upon in terms of making loans and generally running around tending to Joyce's needs. Third, his daughter, Lucia, who ended up in mental hospitals from her late 20s onwards: while a rejection by the young Samuel Beckett has mostly been blamed for these troubles, attention has latterly shifted to the cramped living conditions the Joyces endured, with all the opportunities this afforded for spying on the parents having sex.
Joyce himself comes out of it all, for good and bad, as the ultimate writer. Tremendously self-absorbed, barely able to talk about anything but the work in front of him, and mightily pissed off that the outbreak of WWII would stop people reading Finnegans Wake, he seemed to think that everyone should feel honoured to be helping him usher these great books into the world (and quite a few of them were). This assistance was largely financial, of course. Around the time he'd established himself, in a tiny way, with his first two publications and was about to embark on Ulysses, a wealthy American heiress stepped in with regular stipends to ease his concerns. Life before this had been a desultory trek with his wife, Nora*, and their two kids around various tatty European districts, trying to find teaching work, and nothing much changed after it: something of his father's son, Joyce no sooner had money than he was lavishing it on big tips and drink. He liked nothing more than coming home drunk, it seems, after an 11 hour day in which he gouged out two sentences. His constant drain on his patron is one of his less attractive qualities, however grateful he was for the assistance.
Anyway, this is a highly readable book. I have a copy of Richard Ellman's biography, but only hazy memories of it. This one is a great deal less scholarly, I expect, and doesn't stint on the gossipy, sexual, kinky** side of things. For all his failings, Joyce emerges the way Beethoven does from the biographies of him I've read recently, a man making heroic, evolutionary efforts in adversity. (He even had eye problems that correspond to Beethoven's deafness, undergoing countless operations that made little or no difference.) He was scared to the point of fainting by dogs and thunder. Writing was a colossal effort, and his daughter's problems in later life also wrung him dry. He died of complications from a perforated ulcer at 58.
* Their first date was the 16th of July, 1904 - the day on which he set Ulysses. That date, incidentally, included her giving him a handjob.
**He was once walking with a chamber maid back to her rooms when she split off to go behind a wall and pee; the sound, and general excretory matters, became inextricably linked to sexual excitement for him. Some of his letters to Nora display this interest to the nth degree.
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Dellarigg
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Post by Dellarigg on Feb 10, 2024 11:30:27 GMT -5
Searching For Robert Johnson, Peter Guralnick
A very slim volume from 1989, a mere 68 pages, a good few of them enlivened with photos. It's more of a meditation on the songs and their impact and less a biography. Guralnick, who would later pen more than 1000 pages on Elvis, seems to've given up quickly on that aspect, as it's packed out with testimony from contemporaries who mostly conclude that he was pretty unknowable anyway. Still, he could've at least mentioned the wives by name.
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Dellarigg
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Post by Dellarigg on Feb 13, 2024 9:49:10 GMT -5
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce
Thought I'd revisit this after reading the biography (and still not feeling ready for Finnegans Wake - not that anyone is, or can be, ready for that). I first tried it in my 20s but didn't get much out of it, no doubt feeling intimidated and resentful in the presence of much-trumpeted greatness. I'm glad to say we got on a lot better this time, but as ever with Joyce, there comes a point where you get left behind.
The first half is outstandingly great: the childhood and early adolescence of Stephen is as good a presentation of such things as I've encountered, possibly even better than David Copperfield. Like Shakespeare and Nabokov, reading Joyce gives you that eerie sense that he's able to see right through you in a way that most other writers stop short of. The sports lesson at the start, and the hellfire sermon in the middle, are all I remembered from my first reading. From there, of course, things become more complicated. Joyce's style, along with the budding writer, evolves into poetic convolution, and Stephen's thoughts and conversation on philosophy, religion, and aesthetics, threw me off quite a few times. Maybe the next go-round will be the keeper.
Still, easily a contender for the best thing I'll read this year.
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Dellarigg
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Post by Dellarigg on Feb 22, 2024 5:35:53 GMT -5
Selected Joyce Letters, edited by Richard EllmanThe bulk of these letters are to Joyce's three main support systems. He gives a bit of a performance to each of them. First is his younger brother, Stanislaus, with whom he's a typical older brother: a bit bossy, a bit superior, very demanding, but also showing a lot of affection in his own brusque way. Second, his wife, Nora, on their rare periods of being apart for one reason or another - of which more later. Thirdly, his rich patron, Harriet Shaw Weaver, who gets the buttoned-up, diligent Joyce, always keen to emphasise how he's working into the night when he's asking her for extra money. Only in the occasional letter to male friends do you get the sense that the real relaxed and humorous Joyce is coming through. The letters to Nora are, I suppose, the main draw. A good few of them are sexual. A good portion of that sexuality is niche, unless that's just me. Obviously, it was the family who released them long after Joyce and Nora were dead, but you have to wonder - there's no way on God's earth they would've wanted this stuff known, even if he does touch on it in Ulysses now and again. Didn't stop me reading them, of course, or from providing this link to some of the highlights: www.mentalfloss.com/article/74934/13-nsfw-lines-james-joyces-incredibly-dirty-love-letters
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Post by Jean Luc de Lemur on Feb 23, 2024 18:56:23 GMT -5
Continued with the Bond series with Goldfinger[/b]: This one starts out well, we get the harder-edged, cynical, Bond who recognizes his job is awful and weighs him down. The book turns lighter as Bond tries to recover from the jobāhe meets Goldfinger socially hereāand is assigned to the an (initially low-key) investigation as a sort of breather assignment. The filmās pretty effortlessly light, and while the book goes for that as well it only succeeds partially. The golf game feels interminable. The Fort Knox heist is kind of boringālike with Dr. No the space/nuclear age update really added something.
Itās really weighed down by the racism and homophobia, though. Some of itās the weird trying-for-modern-but-just-missing of Dr. NoāFleming was aware that a character obsessed with named Goldfinger could easily sink into antisemitic stereotype and is sure to let us know heās not Jewish. How do we find this out? By having Bond hanging out at a restricted club when he first meets Goldfinger. Usually this sort of thing doesnāt bother me at all (Iām reading a book old book to qualify for social security by a conservative Brit, what do I expect?), but the earnest-but-clumsy attempt to avoid antisemitism by showing Bondās okay in an antisemitic environment is well-meaning in comparison to what happens. Koreans are barely human. Flemingās musings on lesbianism are probably not atypical for the time, and they make the reader very glad that time has passed.
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Post by repulsionist on Feb 25, 2024 14:53:44 GMT -5
The Complete Madame Realism And Other Stories, Lynne Tillman (2016)
I used Goodreads' "You Might Like" when browsing the site to stumble upon a John Waters' Approved Reading List. This book was on it. My library had it; their only Semiotext(e) holding. I've since done some investigating about Ms. Tillman. Like Henry Green's lack of narration as modernist device for new storytelling, Tillman uses postmodernism as a reference to create characters speaking in the here and now, expecting the reader to have some context of what's discussed, and using the means of the device to pose observation as cultural criticism; most usually about art. Her first few pages of "Madame Realism" sing like early Waters' monologues, which as it happens, and why I pursued this book in the first place, sinks deep into my black little heart. Madame Realism is the female peer to Sir Realism. Most of Madame Realism's work appeared in Art in America throughout the late 70s to 90s.
The later stories are from a pseudonymous author Paige Turner. Ms. Tillman goes for the discreet but obvious laugh, if you're seeing the joke as it's said or written. We'll see if I can muster the will and constitution to write some "lessons learned" after finishing this.
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Dellarigg
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Post by Dellarigg on Mar 1, 2024 4:35:02 GMT -5
Moll Flanders, Daniel Defoe
There are two main challenges to getting through this book. First, not only are there no chapter breaks, there are no white space breaks* - it's 380 pages of uninterrupted garrulity. Second, Defoe chooses not to use character names. This makes things difficult when we're referring to characters from a hundred pages ago.
But if you can get over that, it's not a bad romp. Moll is a likeable narrator, and she also acts as a sort of how-to guide for women: how to get a husband, how to trick him as to the status of your virginity, how to cope with finding out you've accidentally married your brother, how to morally adapt to a bit of whoring, and how to be a successful pickpocket when age has swiped away your comely looks. A valuable service, I'm sure.
One of those classics I've had lying round for years but never got to. I hope to vanquish Fanny Hill this year, also.
*I'm actually not sure what the technical term for this is. Double space at the end of a scene/passage, anyway.
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Post by Lurky McLurk on Mar 1, 2024 9:04:39 GMT -5
Moll Flanders, Daniel DefoeThere are two main challenges to getting through this book. First, not only are there no chapter breaks, there are no white space breaks* - it's 380 pages of uninterrupted garrulity. Second, Defoe chooses not to use character names. This makes things difficult when we're referring to characters from a hundred pages ago. I read Robinson Crusoe a couple of years ago, and let me tell you it certainly made me appreciate the following century's developments in how novels are structured.
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Post by Jean Luc de Lemur on Mar 1, 2024 20:35:45 GMT -5
Dellarigg What was Defoeās intent with that? I know there arenāt any names in The Tale of the Genji, just honorifics and how theyāre related, but thatās a consequence of the periodās court politics (I havenāt read it, but I understand translations try to figure out ways around this).
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Dellarigg
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Post by Dellarigg on Mar 2, 2024 3:52:40 GMT -5
Dellarigg What was Defoeās intent with that? I know there arenāt any names in The Tale of the Genji, just honorifics and how theyāre related, but thatās a consequence of the periodās court politics (I havenāt read it, but I understand translations try to figure out ways around this). Moll herself narrates the story, and since almost all of her activities are immoral, illegal, or otherwise compromising, she avoids naming names to protect identities. Of course, aliases would've worked fine, but it's too late now.
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repulsionist
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Post by repulsionist on Mar 3, 2024 15:43:53 GMT -5
BAD: The Autobiography of James Carr, James Carr (1975) Firsthand account of a delinquent brought up in a hardscrabble environment. Certainly, a fickle tale of "opportunity is what you make of it". Mr. Carr chose violence-to-power as his path. This is an interesting document because it's a contemporaneous accounting of the California Penal System to that of Edward Bunker's No Beast So Fierce (1973). Carr's dictation of his life story also had a Folkways' Recording. I first read this book around 20 years ago. I revisited it shortly thereafter. I picked it up again because it was available at my library system. My personal journey of staying out of penal institutions had no alignment with Carr's, but his conclusions toward the latter parts of the book are that of a radical - which I can align with. The absence of conscience throughout his life proved charismatic to many others. The mayhem he perpetrated by rite of his lack of conscience, nothing I want to associate with. The degradations he himself experienced and also dished out are terrifying to contemplate. Strangely, the accounts of violence and hustling do wear thin at points. The transformation of convenience to prison reform radical and security associate to Black Panthers provides insights into the 60s' radical culture and its ultimate principle of "By Any Means Necessary". If it all interested, please see libcom's forewords and afterwords from previous editions for further context with respect to 60s' radicalism.
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Dellarigg
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Post by Dellarigg on Mar 4, 2024 6:16:39 GMT -5
The Zone of Interest, Martin Amis
My second reread of this, after nine years and galvanised by the recent film. Though it should be pointed out that the two have little in common - if the film had a different title, I would never have known it was an adaptation*.
This is one of Amis's typical male rivalry stories - the apotheosis of same, in fact. To Auschwitz comes the attractive young Nazi Angelus 'Golo' Thomsen, related to and protected by Martin Bormann. He's a known and successful adventurer when it comes to women, and inevitably sets his sights on the wife of the commandant (here called Doll instead of Hoss; she's called Hannah instead of Hedwig). She shows signs of reciprocating. They're found out early, but know they're found out, and a cat and mouse game ensues, with both men vying for her on the battleground of a previous lover she had in the 30s, who disappeared into the penal system and whose fate is to be uncovered. Also drawn into the turbulence is Szmul, one of the Jewish men given a job at the camp of helping facilitate and then clean up the murders (and who could do without more trouble, really). The action covers the fateful hinge of the war: the catastrophe of Stalingrad.
This is a top notch Amis book, in many ways his most complete. Harried throughout his career for not writing with enough plot and emotion, for being all style and humorous nihilism, he provides plenty of propulsion and heartache here (and pulls off both brilliantly). There's still style, of course, and comedy (I liked Doll's idea that some women like rough men, men 'with a bit of fart and armpit about them'), but obviously the setting demands a lot, and he matches it. What a writer he was.
*All right, the setting's the same, and there's the commandant and his wife, though they're presented wholly differently here. The only other thing that seems lifted from the book is the commandant, when he's at a social gathering, wondering how easy it would be to gas everyone present. Anyway, I liked the film a lot, too.
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Post by Jean Luc de Lemur on Mar 4, 2024 20:52:45 GMT -5
The Sleeper Awakes, H.G. WellsYou may know the story better as a Futurama premiseāa man accidentally is put in a state of suspended animation for centuries, only to wake up finding the interest in his account has made him the richest man alive. Unlike Fry, Wellsās Graham does not spend his fortune on the last surviving tin of anchovies. Rather his heirs manage his estate into a global force, making them the de facto world leaders. Now Grahamās awakened to claim his inheritance, and has to face the fact that heās both become a figurehead for others and that the revolution his awakening has sparked is running out of control. Despite the great political and economic importance of his awakening, though, Graham gets fixated on one thing: flying. It reminds me of this tweet: Graham wants nothing more than to become a pilot, and his constant insistence on taking flying lessons as his hosts try to acclimate him to the world around him is very endearing (he also has to join the unionāpilotingās a closed shop). The book even ends with a dogfight. Part of the interest in this book is in trying to imagine things from the 1899 point of view. Thereās a lot of prescient stuff (and a fair amount that hasnāt come true but established the fictional contours of an SF future but without their current SF names, e.g. arcologies), but a fair amount is off too, close enough to know what we use for those purposes today but far enough in form that you canāt just substitute an altered version in your imagination. Wellsās description of world culture and politics is also interesting and a mix of swings, hits, misses, and half-hits/half-misses. English is the dominant world language, Hinglish in India, Spanglish dominant in Latin America, and pidgin English in most of the rest of the world (including China). Germanās number two (big oops) and French number three, including in Africa, which is still under colonial rule by the English and French. Thatās where things go astray. The aristocrats trying to control Graham (whose own sympathies are with the proletariat, literally enslaved by his trust) bring in colonial troops from Africa to quell the revolution. Is Wellsās intent to show that the violence and authoritarianism the French and English exhibited in the colonies reflects back on the metropoles? Yes. Does he do it in a very racist way? Also yes. The bookās delightful until itās third act, which is really unpleasant to read and kind of ruins the whole thing. The ending dogfight, too, is an odd, anticlimatic way to end a story of global revolution. Well between two Ian Flemings and a surprisingly retrograde entry from H.G. Wells I think Iām done with the English for now. On to Octavia Butler for penanceā¦
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Post by repulsionist on Mar 13, 2024 13:33:34 GMT -5
Son of a Grifter: The Twisted Tale of Sante and Kenny Kimes, the Most Notorious Con Artists in America: A Memoir by the Other Son, Kent Walker and Mark Schone (2001)
Keanu Reeves' *whoa* at the first 20 pages. I expect similar exhalations throughout.
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Post by Celebith on Mar 14, 2024 3:07:15 GMT -5
I finally read Gideon the Ninth, which had been on my virtual to-read list for a while, and man. I liked the plot and world-building, but a great deal of the dialogue was jarring in the extreme. ... Edit: oh dear god Iāve just read spoilers for the rest of the series, and Iām extremely happy I noped out when I did, because apparently thereās an explanation for the meme lord speech and it would have enraged me to read it after three books. Forget the speech, the wikipedia summary makes the whole thing sound a bit torturous, if only for the names and other nonsense. Gene Wolfe's 'new sun' series are among my favorite books, and I like Moorcock and even Peake, but despite the review comparisons, this seems like a hard no.
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repulsionist
TI Forumite
actively disinterested
Posts: 3,560
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Post by repulsionist on Mar 16, 2024 1:52:25 GMT -5
The Beans of Egypt, Maine, Carolyn Chute (1985)
This should've been on the bookshelf in my wheelhouse long ago. Vernacular-written Mainers are the villainous heroes of what begins Chute's principal work she's most recognised for. She has since migrated into populist militia screeds. That said, she's a writer, not a primitive; the kind that hums a story in its location. I seeĀ Other Voices, Other Rooms styles in plainspoken explanations of dĆ©classĆ© things. Was made into a 1994 film that pumps from the well of My Own Private Idaho, Twister, What's Eating Gilbert Grape, maybe Gas, Food, Lodging too. Is the reason by which Frances Bean Cobain has her middle name.Ā
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Dellarigg
AV Clubber
This is a public service announcement - with guitars
Posts: 7,504
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Post by Dellarigg on Mar 16, 2024 6:35:41 GMT -5
Yellowface, Rebecca F Kuang
A novel that caused something of a splash last year, this is the zippiest read I've come across in a long time - I finished it in two days, which isn't like me.
Struggling writer June Hayward is sort-of friends with the suddenly stratospherically successful Athena Liu. When Athena dies, June swipes her latest manuscript on the plight of the Chinese in WWI, and does enough rewriting to be able to pass it off as her own with a clear conscience, albeit under the name Juniper Song. Complications naturally follow, and we adroitly negotiate a range of genres, from social satire to thriller to horror, with a dash of literary metafiction. June's bitter, whiny, self-justifying narrative voice is very of the minute, as is the depiction of twitter pile-ons and the truly scabrous hypocrisy of the New York publishing world (I'm sure London is much better). While it reads like an anxiety dream, it's also very funny in places, and super-compelling.
Kind of galling that this is the author's 5th book at the age of 27, but never mind, I'll still recommend it.
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Post by Celebith on Mar 19, 2024 2:51:46 GMT -5
Crying in H-Mart, by Michelle Zauner. It was waitlisted on Libby, and while I was eager to read it, I wasn't quite as keen on reading it right now. Still, it became available, and with more folks waiting for it, I figured I might as well. Considering that it started as an essay in the New Yorker, it hangs together fairly well. There's a general narrative to it, but you could read it episodically over time and it would still work. A few passages are reused / rephrased throughout, almost like a friend relating a story to you, forgetting that they'd already told you some part or another.
It's good, and worth reading, although I feel like I'm more adjacent to its target audience(s) than a part of them. Part of it is grief and growth going through a parent's death while still working to mend a broken relationship, part figuring out an identity as an obviously biracial other, regardless of which of their cultures they were in. I'll probably pick up a paperback copy at some point. It's the sort of book that can almost always find someone who needs to borrow it.
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Dellarigg
AV Clubber
This is a public service announcement - with guitars
Posts: 7,504
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Post by Dellarigg on Mar 20, 2024 11:55:08 GMT -5
Space Odyssey, Michael Benson
If we absolutely have to have a 450 page book on the making of a single film that isn't by Werner Herzog, then it has to be Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey.
A predisposition towards the film obviously helps, but I was rapt withal. It took four years to make, with scarcely fathomable levels of innovation demanded every step of the way. The entire concept was in flux from the first day of writing till the final edit, which must've had MGM delighted. The actor who played the chief monkey, and who choreographed the other performers, was a heroin addict who had his own room to shoot up in, so invaluable was he to the production. The actor who played Poole was married to Stefanie Powers, later of Hart To Hart fame, and while he was a bit of a wild-living roughneck, he was able to thrash Kubrick every time they played chess.
While there are highly interesting sidemen, including largely unflappable writer Arthur C. Clarke and effects man Douglas Trumbull, who would've been drafted to Vietnam during shooting if he hadn't told them he was gay*, Kubrick is of course the main draw. He's as expected in lots of ways. He demanded a lot of himself, and probably a bit more from everybody else - if people weren't quitting or having nervous breakdowns, then progress wasn't being made. He was a bit of a hoarder when it came to credit, which left a lot of bad feeling, especially with Trumbull. The myth of the steely genius had to be bolstered at all times, with only his wife seeing the side of him that admitted he was an asshole who didn't know what he was doing. (You can understand the doubts. Surely the monkeys would look silly. Surely cutting most of the expositionary dialogue would be confusing for everyone. Using the relatively trivial Blue Danube instead of a stately Mahler symphony was surely a bad choice. Using a real leopard will surely get someone killed. And so on.) So there was a lot more fumbling through than I'd thought there would be, with, as I said, most of the plot and themes being worked out while they were filming, and then filming again during editing. Even the final edit wasn't final: when the New York premiere registered 241 walk-outs before the interval, Kubrick spent the next three days hacking 20 minutes from the running time.
But it all worked out, of course. The initial reviews were damning, but more than one critic went to see it again a week later and humbly issued their apologies. It found a young audience, and was the highest grossing film of 1968. It zapped the head of everyone from Scorsese to Spielberg to James Cameron. It's a shame I just watched it the week before I got the book, because now I want to see it again, probably in 4k.
*they accepted this, despite knowing him to be married with a kid at the time.
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Post by Lurky McLurk on Mar 20, 2024 14:47:09 GMT -5
Yellowface, Rebecca F KuangA novel that caused something of a splash last year, this is the zippiest read I've come across in a long time - I finished it in two days, which isn't like me. Struggling writer June Hayward is sort-of friends with the suddenly stratospherically successful Athena Liu. When Athena dies, June swipes her latest manuscript on the plight of the Chinese in WWI, and does enough rewriting to be able to pass it off as her own with a clear conscience, albeit under the name Juniper Song. Complications naturally follow, and we adroitly negotiate a range of genres, from social satire to thriller to horror, with a dash of literary metafiction. June's bitter, whiny, self-justifying narrative voice is very of the minute, as is the depiction of twitter pile-ons and the truly scabrous hypocrisy of the New York publishing world (I'm sure London is much better). While it reads like an anxiety dream, it's also very funny in places, and super-compelling. Kind of galling that this is the author's 5th book at the age of 27, but never mind, I'll still recommend it. I've been waiting for this to come out in paperback.
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