What Are You Reading?

I recently read Cat's Cradle this week too, but unfortunately I had the opposite reaction. I thought it was heavy-handed, confusing, and inconsistent in tone. It's supposed to be a satire, but I felt that Vonnegut neutered a lot of the satire in the book with the self-aware narrator. Satire needs someone to take everything seriously, and the narrator doesn't. 

Is that the one with Goldenboy and the Turtle? I picked it up a few years ago to see what it was like because GRRM kept rambling on about the series in his blog. I enjoyed it, but it didn't really draw me into Universe enough to warrant continuing with the series.

He kind of is is in a very European “Well, why don’t they just assimilate?” sort of way,* although the main brunt of his critique is towards the creation of “studies” programs at universities, which is definitely tied up with his experience at Cornell in the 1960s I have no experience with ethnically-oriented “XYZ studies” programs so I can’t vouch for or against tem (my university had “XYZ Languages and Literatures,” which were more linguistics or literature/history degrees where you’d read stuff in said language). And that’s another big reason why I’d have a hard time recommending it—it is a very narrow book about the importance of a core, Ancients-oriented humanities curriculum with a lot of tangents, not a broad-ranging cultural critique focused on the university.

*That said, Bloom does show awareness elsewhere when deflating boomer nostalgia, noting that all the late-sixties-centered back-patting happened after real achievements—and sacrifices in name of those achievements—were made by decidedly non-college-campus-oriented protestors. The constant juxtaposition of insight and cluelessness is one of the most frustrating things about this book, but then again Bloom proudly spent much of his life within faculty walls so what do you expect?

Anyway, on to happier subjects. Despite having lived in China back in 2007, I never got around to reading Peter Hessler’s Oracle Bones, which is an excellent look at 1990s/early 2000s life in China from a number of perspectives (Hessler’s own expat one, those of his students from rural Sichuan county growing up, and a Uyghur who moves the US), interspersed with a story about the oracle bones from deep in Chinese history and the scholarship drama surrounding them. Although I haven’t been in China for a long time, it felt true to when I was there and is still a great picture of the country in transition.

I’m now reading On Alexander’s Track to the Indus[/b] by Aurel Stein, the big archaeologist/geographer of Central Asia in the early 20th century. It’s him going through the mountains of Swat looking for mountains and ruins related to Alexander’s conquests and the pilgrimages of Tang-dynasty monks. The book’s more interesting for what it is and for what Aurel Stein did for its actual contents, which are a bit on the dry side, but if this is about as close as I’ll probably get to visiting northern Pakistan in the foreseeable future so I’ll take what I can get.

Also, I bought it at Abbey Books in Paris. While I made the requisite visit to Shakespeare and Co. when I was there (more because Craig Ferguson went than anything else), I preferred Abbey Books by a wide, wide margin. It’s a bit more interesting and idiosyncratic in its inventory, which is what you want from a brick-and-mortar place, after all (I also bought Wilfred Thesinger’s The Marsh Arabs there). It’s a bit like Canada to the US—still big, but kind of out-of-the-way and it has its own, less-known-to-the-outside-world charms, which is appropriate since it’s identifiable by the huge Canadian flag outside the door, the shelves dedicated to Canadiana, and the fact that I was offerred (and accepted!) a coffee with maple syrup there.
[/span]

I read Your House is on Fire: Your Children All Gone by Stefan Kiesbye this weekend. I read the whole thing and was very disappointed, both in the book and in myself for finishing it. It was just a litany of one bad thing after another. It's one of those books that I just want to ask the author "why did you even write that?"

Not recommended.

I read that this year too, and I wanted to love it but it never completely, 100% engaged me. I ended up just liking it quite a bit. Did you have an easier time than I did getting sucked into the plot?

Local library finally got the last Locke & Key book, so I read through that a couple nights ago.  Also, currently reading Sherman Alexie's War Dances, which is nothing less than great.

I'm reading The Moonstone (1868) by Dickens' buddy Wilkie Collins, and am reminded that by the time he wrote it he was a serious laudanum addict. The book is great...and very interested in opium.

Currently reading All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr.  I've been a big fan of his since his first short story collection.  I met him about 8 years ago and he mentioned he was working on a book taking place in WWII and now it's finally published.  The fact that he spent nearly a decade on it is evident.  I'm about halfway through and it's amazing.  Highly recommend it.  It's his best book yet, which is saying something because his short story collections have been pretty fantastic.

Anubis Gate is great fun. My faves of his are The Drawing of the Dark and the Fault Lines series (Last Call, Expiration Date & Earthquake Weather). Other stuff is OK; I like Declare a lot but others didn't.

I read the first book in a new series by Brandon Mull (a children's/YA) author about some kids that are kidnapped into another world and made into slaves. It was actually pretty good. I think it's called Five Kingdoms. I never could get into his Fablehaven series, though.

I'm reading the X-Men: Days of Future Past TPB in Korean, because why the hell not?

lol at your first girlfriend, that's hilarious.

Aggressively meta...Borges is really the best comparison, or Alan Moore's Promethea. With some Phantom Tollbooth thrown in. Calvino's If On A Winter's Night A Traveler and Krzhizhanovsky's Letter Killers Club also deal with the question of how real stories can be.

What she's really doing is standard 13-year-old bullshit. You remember when you had all those Deep Thoughts for the first time? "What if we're all just characters in someone else's story? Whoa, this is so deep!" (Weed may have been involved.) These are ideas most bright kids have at some point; Borges and other metafiction writers explored them for the rest of their lives. I doubt this kid read any of them, so when I mentioned them in my (very carefully considered) review on GR (which I hope that makes her day, because I spent like half an hour on it), the goal was to maybe interest her a little in these terrific authors.

I didn't mention Promethea because it's been a while since I've read it so I can't completely stand by its quality. I remember it being pretty cool. The title character is brought to life by literature or something, right? Anyone?

Criminal: The Last of the Innocent, Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips. There is no escape from Patton Oswalt, who provides the introduction. Happily, this is a disturbing, imaginative entry in the series, with the typical neo-noir shadows and darkness alternating with Archie-style flashbacks to the Archie/Jughead/Betty/Veronica/Reggie archetypes' youth (the latter shifting from, say, Li'l Jinx to Archie proper in terms of artistic style, depending on the age). I read this in between Raymond Chandler stories (in The Simple Art of Murder) and it's interesting to note the propulsive rhythms of the storytelling in both. Got a real charge out of this one and really ought to get cracking on the other Criminal entries.

I loved Declare, the way the mystical stuff was just one more front in the Cold War was interesting. That speech when the defector was being persuaded to give up secrets was great, I'm remembering that in case I need to interrogate someone.