What Are You Reading?

I'm actually having a kind of weird problem reading the Leviathan series - the books are too heavy!  My hands get horribly stiff holding them and I can't read a book that's on my lap because I get a headache.  I guess I could see if I can get in ebook form from the library though. 

Since the last time I posted here, I've read Peter Matthiesen's (barely) posthumously published book In Paradise, and Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game.

In Paradise was kind of strange but overall pretty good.  Its premise is that a Polish-born American professor of poetry attends a Zen Buddhist retreat at Auschwitz, ostensibly to research for a book he's writing on famous poet and Holocaust survivor
Tadeusz Borowski, but really because (SPOILERS past this point) he was curious to discover the fate of his most-likely-Jewish mother who quite likely died there.  The book largely serves as an exploration the difficulty of determining how one should commemorate a tragedy on such a massive scale as the Holocaust.  Matthiessen on the whole does a good job with this, and doesn't arrive at any easy or pat answers.  Despite the fact that Matthiessen, who was himself a Zen Buddhist, based the novel on the three separate retreats he took to Auschwitz, the story itself makes the retreat far from the overwhelmingly life-changing experience that one can easily imagine such a thing being tritely billed as.  The book also deals with the complicated and much-debated issue of the culpability of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust, with several of the retreat visitors being Catholic clergy.  The main character befriends a young sister who is rebelliously progressive and who attempts to avoid dishonestly the Church from all blame in the Holocaust (which, as an ex-Catholic, I can attest to the fact that it's pretty uncommon for a member of the clergy to not pick the least damning narrative available when it comes to the Church's atrocities).  The main character, being a deeply flawed individual and also a bit of a creep, becomes smitten with her, and unwisely is unable to avoid acting inappropriately towards her, in spite of her obvious discomfort with anything going beyond friendly intelligent conversation.  The main character eventually goes too far in his inability to control himself and is left to realize that he's not a good person, and in more ways than just being a creep.  Because when his search to discover the fate of his mother fails, he must come to grips with the fact that he was driven to search her out not only out of a desire to learn what happened to her and anger at the anti-Semitic paternal grandparents who played a role in raising him, but also with the fact that one of the main reasons he put off his search for so long was because of disgust at the fact that he feels some shame about the fact that he himself is half Jewish.  The novel ends on the rather depressing note of the main character grappling with his own feelings of brokenness and self-loathing.  As I said, I thought it was pretty good, though certainly far from perfect.  There were some pretty poorly sketched minor characters, some of whom seemed to exist solely to display some specific intolerance throughout the course of the emotionally turbulent retreat, and a slightly more sketched-out minor character is an evolutionary biologist who is studying the evolutionary origin of evil and talks about his work in overly philosophical terms and doesn't seem to think at all like an actual scientist.  And the unrequited romance angle, in spite of being pretty unambiguously portrayed as inappropriate, was just really weird and it's kind of hard to sympathize with the main character on any level when he's acting so stupidly.

Obviously, when you have a book described as "moral fiction" that's written by a raging homophobe like Card, it is going to be at best problematic, and at worst a terrifying display of horrific intolerance.  On the whole, I felt like Ender's Game tended to be much closer to the former.  SPOILERS follow. There's certainly some ridiculous moments; Card seems to be the kind of person who thinks that including a couple of smart girls and a smart minority precludes him from being a sexist and racist, and yet moments like where the main character is told that an elite military academy for children rarely take girls because they have "too many centuries of evolution working against them" are maddeningly stupid and sexist.  Because this could mean one of three really stupid things:  1.  Card legitimately believes that evolution has caused profound sexual dimorphism in human intelligence, which is super, super sexist (not to mention obviously not backed up by actual science at all).  2.  Card doesn't think that girls are inherently inferior to boys, but, being a conservative dumbfuck with questionable views about science, is doing some nonsensical science-bashing, making the absurd claim that in a futuristic society that's mastered faster-than-light communication, humanity's understanding of evolution would have regressed to decades (if not over a century) behind actual contemporary evolution's understanding of the subject with respect to the lack of sexual dimorphism in human evolution, which is also infuriating.  (On an unrelated note, during Mazer Rackham's speech about the Bugger's not caring about their drones or whatever, he gets into some really flawed species selectionist bullshit.)  3.  He's referring to the fact that because of testosterone and whatnot, girls would be at a disadvantage in the Battle Room (I'm just going to assume that anyone who's read this far into my comment has read the book, and knows what I'm talking about), since strength and speed are to a certain extent elements of the game.  But if that's the case, then the Battle Room is an idiotic concept in the first place, since it places girls at an intrinsic disadvantage, and was essentially cutting the pool of people from which Earth's savior would be found in half, which is just shitty logic, and hence really annoying.  There's also the bit where, Alai, Ender's Black Friend Who Exists To Show Us That Orson Scott Card Isn't A Racist Or Else Why Would Ender Be Best Friend's With a Black Guy, and Ender are teasing each other, and Ender calls Alai a ni**er, as if Card thinks that a racial slur, even in jest, is equivalent to Alai's preceding dig at Ender.  But apart from (relatively rare) moments of disgusting idiocy on Card's part, the book was pretty good.  A concept like the Battle Room would have probably been used in a lot of books as simply a cool concept, whereas Card writes it into a surprisingly morally ambiguous world for a socially regressive piece of shit.  Even though Card seems a bit too ready to absolve Ender of all blame for what his actions and hold him up as a Mary Sue in a society of otherwise morally corrupt individuals, Ender makes for a pretty disturbing protagonist all the same, given that he's essentially a six year old vicious killer from the start of the book.  I was also surprised that a guy as racist, sexist and viciously homophobic as Card would be so critical of as intolerant and alarmist a political commentator as Valentine's Demosthenes character. Anyway, overall I thought it was pretty good, and I apologize that this whole post is so long and yet so poorly-laid-out, with respect to my barely-structured pseudo-reviews.  

Now, I'm continuing my re-read of Faulkner's Light In August, and reading Robert Jordan's The Fires of Heaven.  I've also just started Andy Weir's The Martian, which is a lot of fun so far.

*also nodding furiously* Not that I've re-read Ender's Game recently, or plan to, but I'm glad to hear that smart people don't think it's as awful as Card himself is; I was awfully fond of it as a teenager.

I liked Ready Player One because although it's dumb wish fulfillment, I found it enormously likable and entertaining dumb wish fulfillment.

For an aficionado of 80's culture the super-nerd character seems not to have liked action movies. No Top Gun, no Terminator, no Commando, no Best of the Best or Predator or Die Hard or many others. Weren't the 80's the action movie decade?

It was a brisk, breezy read, to be sure; I was just annoyed at the critical praise, as well as from friends. If "80s nostalgia is a wonderful thing," as one of my friends put it, why didn't they just fucking watch Real Genius again for the (probably) hundredth time? Don't get it all over literature!

Also, @cub, I'm pretty sure The Last Starfighter qualifies as an action movie (if a wonderful one that's sci-fi as well). If memory serves (I have to find a different phrase but love using it so much), super-nerds back in the 80s would have found stuff like Liquid Sky "gay" or something (which, admittedly, it was in part).

I should, but in this case it had explicit LGBTQ content (at least for the mid-80s). Admittedly, I'm basing my remembrance of super-nerds on anecdotes (my friends and I managed to transcend the sci-fi/action nexus and become nascent cineastes, but it was a near-miss).

Also, Lance Guest was fantastic in Starfighter; I saw his introduction for the DVD and wondered why he hasn't been in more over the years.

I'm reading a ton lately. Right now I'm reading Crime and Punishment for book club here, Sophie's World for a little two-person book club @ifwewait and I are doing (though I'm waiting to start until he's on his upcoming trip) and then lots of quick-read YA novels in between.

Finally got around to reading The Fault in Our Stars. The book is one of those weird cases where I can't really argue that detractors are wrong, per se, but their concerns didn't really register to me, outside of a couple of scenes in Amsterdam (applause in the Anne Frank house? REALLY?) and maybe the V for Vendetta scene (which still rang true as something a teenage boy would totally do). It definitely avoids the "cancer book" cliches, which I haven't seen any really argument with, but while it does fall into many "first love" cliches, honestly, it usually does so because first love is cliche. I've seen Augustus called a "manic pixie dream boy", but once again, I can see where people are getting that impression but I never thought that his infatuation with Hazel was unrealistic; teenage boys get hung up on girls all the time and it's not like Hazel had no redeeming qualities. He's also a bit of dick sometimes, and his weakness for metaphor is really annoying but also realistic.

The book's not perfect; I'd probably give it a solid B. Some of the dialogue is too precocious (though these are smart teenagers and lots of the stuff they say does come across as something a pretentious teen would say), and I've already complained about some of the scenes in Amsterdam; when the book dips into cliches, it really dips into cliches. But at least those cliches are deeply felt and, at least to me, came across as a pretty plausible way that something like this would happen. It's not for everyone, but it did work for me.

I've read all but the last couple of chapters that Dawkins tacked on to The Selfish Gene over the past few months, and I also thought it was a ton of fun.  And, so far as I know, Dawkins' view on the matter is more or less widely accepted these days, although I heard the phrase "kin selection" get thrown around a lot in college bio courses, but Dawkins' quibbles with that were more or less semantic if I remember correctly.  I know that I had a professor who noted that the book was noteworthy in that it both explained its concepts very well to a general audience, while also containing insight that was new to actual geneticists and stuff.  So yeah, The Selfish Gene is pretty awesome, and I'm definitely planning to read The Extended Phenotype sometime in the nearish future.  Dawkins is pretty cool when he's actually talking about science.

I did read it in one night - took about 4.5 hours I think.  Yeah, if he had succeeded with the dog, I think I would have been very upset!

I was trying to finish the book a while back before the end of the semester when I'd have to return it to the library, but I was also reading that Chandler collection, so I ran out of time, and I'd only gotten like a third of the way through the prisoner's dilemma chapter.

Regarding the religion thing, I get the feeling Dawkins has just always been an asshole.  I mean, did your version have the endnotes too?  We're talking about a guy who claims that he loudly sings a marginally different original line of "Auld Lang Syne" when singing it in a group because it's the correct version.  I think he's just a bit of an asshole by nature.  But he's also a good scientist and communicatory of science, so yay!  Also, reading the meme chapter makes his claims about religion being a diseased state of mind or whatever at least begin to make some sense, even if it's a massive logically flawed, over-generalization of the sort that an even vaguely precocious teenager might make (I am an atheist, just not of the Dawkins anti-theist sort, anyway, I think I'll stop this now to lower the risk of there being a debate on religion in this thread, which would make me very sad).

Fans of The Expanse: the writers are doing a live chat on IO9 right now.
io9.com/author-james-s-a-corey-is-here-to-talk-to-you-about-le-1590502271/all

Excellent! Glad that worked out for you.

I'm currently reading The 13th Tale by Diane Setterfield. I plan to squeeze in a few more chapters tonight. It's addictive, but written in such a smart, thoughtful manner. Highly recommended!

I'm also reading Galveston by the dude who created True Detective, which is decidedly less fun and interesting.