Short postmodern book club: 2 Years, 8 Months, & 28 Nights

I'm going to try to check out a copy of the book from the library tomorrow, so I shall likely be joining in with my thoughts soonish.

Desert Dweller There’s some good vintage erudite roasting in the comments (my favorite bit of the review is where he calls thinks the standard description of jinni is some over-the-top Rushdie-ism).

Just clicked it open again. Read the second paragraph that actually describes the plot. Before I read those comments you mention, I have to assume at least one of them pointed out that this reviewer doesn't seem to understand the literary difference between fantasy and magical realism. Being that I have read 3 Rushdie books, I would never call him a fantasy writer. It is also weird that the reviewer seems to believe that Rushdie is just cashing in on some recent trend of fantasy/sci-fi going mainstream. There's several things wrong, there.

Jinni being "creatures made of smokeless fire" is something he has a problem with? He thinks 1. This is made up by Rushdie and 2. This is "flashy rhetoric".  ?  Ahem, Google? "Arabic Mythology - Jinn are beings of flame or air who are capable of assuming human or animal form."  Of course, I didn't actually have to google that because I've read 2 versions of "The Arabian Nights", and dozens of novels set in Egypt, Turkey and Persia/Arabia.

Kept reading the review. He calls this one "wordy"? It's 304 pages. How "wordy" could it be? And does he think Averroes is fictional? He thinks Ibn Rushd is just Rushdie sneaking his own name into the book? As in, this guy exists for the sake of feeding Rushdie's vanity? WTF?

Now reading the comments... ugh, Kinja..... Yes, some excellent comments there, thankfully covering what I just posted and more!

Oof, yeah, that is definitely a bad review. I'm not saying the book isn't bad. I haven't read it yet. It might be bad. I've read a bad Rushdie book, so I know it can happen. But, wow... I hate how snobby this sounds, but it isn't really. I don't expect every single person to understand all the forms, structures and allusions in literature. And I don't think people should be prohibited from reading a novel until they do understand all that stuff. However, if someone doesn't understand all of that, they shouldn't be reviewing it for a site whose readers would expect that level of understanding from the reviewer. You can see from the comments that the AV Club readers have an understanding of the context that the reviewer doesn't have.

I actually really miss going to the Old Country for the book discussion. The old set of commenters had quite a few people who don't post here who had interesting book-related comments.

I don’t think that guy ever reviewed anything for the AVC ever again, either. But you can totally have a super-wordy, dense short book. Where I am now in Two Years &c. is actually a bit like that—it’s the most fully-fantastic bit so far (not very spoilery spoiler follows), , and it’s enough of a change of pace and alien enough to me that I actually did need to slow down and really, really think about what was going on.

But that’s more a credit to how fluid a read this book is—I’ve found it very easy to just sit down and start reading, and lose track of time. If I could figure out how to word it right I’d make some kind of hackneyed point about the similarity between historical legends and anecdotes about New Yorkers (so I’m making that point in an oblique way, I guess), but they really do interface well.

Ahoy Rushdie readers. Going on vacation in a couple of days and putting my books together. Trying to read through stuff that's been sitting on my shelves. What should I take? The Moor's Last Sigh or Shalimar the Clown?

I'm almost finished with the book, and will probably read the last two chapters and post my thoughts on it tomorrow, but first I have a question.  Has any philosopher ever written a response to Averroes' magnum opus called The Incoherence of the Incoherence of the Incoherence?

Oh hey, so I finished this book ages ago, but have been really bad about doing write-ups on stuff I've been reading lately.  Anyway, I thought it was pretty good.  It took me a little while to get into it, and the comedy didn't always land to me, and stuff like "schlubby unremarkable 60 year old dude has sex with an attractive philosopher half his age" is very septuagenarian author dude-esque.  But I eventually warmed to it a bit, and came to have some affection for the characters fighting off the evil djinn; the description of Mr. Geronimo's and Dunia's brief relationship was pretty good.  I enjoyed it, but a couple of months on, I'm finding it hasn't made much of an impression on me.