Booklog 2007: Week 6
Feb. 12th, 2007 12:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
trinityofoneWeek 6: 5-11 February 2007
30. Hey Nostradamus!, Douglas Coupland — This book actually contains very little in terms of plot—or anyway, what pieces of plot it has are only loosely connected. It’s divided into four sections, each narrated by a different character: a teenage girl who’s the victim of a school shooting, her boyfriend ten years after her death, his new girlfriend a few years after that, and his estranged father a few years after that. In a way, I guess you could say that it’s about how this one horrible event—which has already occurred when the narrative starts—continues to touch all these people years later, but really, that doesn’t seem to be it, either. Like most Coupland novels (especially the later ones) it’s really about family (those you find and those you’re stuck with) and loneliness (the universal condition, it seems). As usual, I’m impressed with Coupland’s ability to craft interesting characters and convincing narrators, and to find empathetic qualities in everyone—even Reg, the obsessively religious and cruel father, is not made to be wholly inhuman, and in fact seems real and tragic and almost beautiful by the end. So the plot, which is really the weakest part of this book, doesn’t really matter so much. As four portraits of four lives, it’s fantastic.
31. Fargo Rock City, Chuck Klosterman — I have kind of a love/hate relationship with Chuck Klosterman. I’ve read all his books (I left this one till last, because it’s about heavy metal and that’s not a subject I’m desperately interested in) and I think he’s frequently incredibly funny and often very insightful. But man, does he piss me off sometimes. In Fargo Rock City, that occurred when he decided to share his views on female music fans. Apparently, male music fans are more loyal and less likely to get distracted by every shiny new thing because men are more analytical and women are more emotional. Yeah. There are so many things wrong with that statement that I risk turning this into a huge rant, which I do not want to do. Leaving aside the issue of “loyalty” (well, after I point to exhibit A: the giant collection of U2 stuff that I’ve bought over the years even when a) I had no money, and b) what I was buying was redundant to stuff I already had save for an extra B-side or remix or miniposter or WHATEVER), for Klosterman to use the old “men are analytical, women are emotional” argument is so absurd in the context of this book that it’s almost hilarious. Because the ENTIRE BOOK is about Klosterman’s emotions. How much he loved heavy metal, and how much it changed and shaped his life, and how much he still loves it. How much it bugs him when people dismiss it without thought, and how he thinks it should be considered important because it was important to him. This is a raw outpouring of emotion! Only he’s a guy, so we’re not allowed to call it that. We have to call it analysis. Right. Do people—Klosterman and anyone else—really think that when women have emotions—which, y’know, we’re actually willing to admit are emotions—we don’t analyze them at all? That we’re just like, “I feel so HAPPY today! La la la!” or “I’m SAD today. I’m heading straight for the Ben & Jerry’s, no thought involved!” Or even, “I really like this band! I’m just going to listen to them and go to concerts and scream and try to sleep with the drummer AND NEVER CONSIDER MY MOTIVATIONS AT ALL.” Women are clearly brainless puppy-dog creatures!
Okay, so this may have tapped into some other issues I’m having right now? But the point remains. Klosterman’s “analysis” of what makes heavy metal important is actually very minimal: it was important to him. It was important to a lot of other people. Therefore it is important in general. And I completely agree with this. I think pop culture should be talked about, because it does say a lot about people and what matters to them—and what could be more important than that? This is why I like reading Klosterman in the first place: because he recognizes that, and talks about it in an amusing manner. It’s just when he decides that he’s an expert on women that he pisses me off. (Well, and some other times. But never mind.)
ANYWAY…all of that said, I actually enjoyed the rest of the book a lot. And I don’t care one iota about heavy metal. But Klosterman does make me care about other people caring.
32. Lord John and the Private Matter, Diana Gabaldon — The first in a sort of spin-off series from the Outlander books, which I have not read. Or rather, I started reading Outlander but stopped after about 100 pages because I just couldn’t get into it. I had a similar problem here. This is historical fiction, set in mid-18th Century England. (A period I was pretty appalled to realize I have rather limited knowledge of; limited, I mean, to Tom Jones—and not even the book, the movie!) Lord John Grey is a fairly interesting character: he’s gay, the first man he loved died tragically, and the second is in another country and in love with someone else. The plot seems like it could be interesting too: Grey accidentally observes that the man who’s engaged to his young cousin has the pox and must find a way to break off the engagement; there’s also a murder that may or may not be connected. Right away you’ve got promise of trips into London’s underbelly, full of brothels and molly-houses. And yet…I just couldn’t get into it, man! I mean, unlike Outlander, I did manage to finish, but I just never felt engaged, never felt involved. It’s not that it was bad—although the several chapters of infodump toward the end were not my favorite thing ever; in fact, I’m sure lots of you would actually enjoy it quite a lot. I think this may just be one of those things where a certain author’s style just doesn’t work for me. I’ve had it happen with fanfic, too: I’ll recognize that something is good or at least competent, but it’s just not for me. Based more on style than on topic, which seems odd, but I guess it can happen. The synapses fail to connect. I can’t get emotionally involved, and thus I can’t really care about what I’m reading.
Please tell me I’m not the only one this happens to!
33. Uglies, Scott Westerfeld — This book has one of the least-promising first lines I have ever encountered: “The early summer sky was the color of cat vomit.” It sounds like a Bulwer-Lytton entry; even more so when you add the second sentence, which attempts to elaborate on the first. (“Of course, Tally thought, you'd have to feed your cat only salmon-flavored cat food for a while, to get the pinks right.”) BUT, this series had been recommended to me, so I pressed on. I’m so glad I did. This is a fantastic bit of post-apocalyptic, dystopian, teen sci-fi. Tally lives in a world where scientists have figured out a way to eliminate ugliness: everyone is made pretty on their 16th birthday. Of course, prettiness comes with a price, and while yes, it is exactly what you’d think if you’ve seen a single episode of The Twilight Zone or have half a brain, that doesn’t matter. There are plenty of other surprises, and Tally is a really interesting, flawed character. There are also great questy bits, which is something that I love—the epic journey—and a surprisingly convincing romance. (Bonus: Teh Boy is named David, and really the only description of him given is that he has a crooked smile. You can guess who I pictured. *eg*) But then you get hit with a cliffhanger! D’oh!
34. Old Man’s War, John Scalzi — The first 100 pages or so of this book are absolutely fantastic. The Colonial Defense Forces recruit citizens of Earth on their 75th birthdays to fight with them against the various alien species threatening the series of colonies Earth needs because of population overflow, war, all the usual ways we’ve fucked up the planet. Senior citizens sign up because the CDF promises to make them young again—if they sign a contract to serve for ten years. And most of them will probably get gruesomely killed in that time. But at least they won’t die old, right?
All of this stuff is fascinating. I loved the set up, the procedure and world-building involved in John Perry, 75-year-old widower and retired ad writer, joining the army and making friends with his fellow recruits and going through pre-procedure tests and through the actual procedure (which I won’t spoil) and the boot camp stuff that comes after. Scalzi describes the actual battles which follow with no less intensity, but once John starts fighting, the sense of who he is really gets lost. (I was actually waiting for that to be revealed to be part of the point, but it wasn’t.) John just becomes A Soldier, almost instantly. Besides his sense of loyalty and his lingering feelings about his dead wife, there’s very little left to connect him to who he used to be. It’s mentioned several times that John and his wife protested the big war on Earth, but John seems almost entirely unconcerned with the unquestioning massacre of various alien species. I must admit, it started to make me a liiiiiitle uncomfortable. Scalzi has said that his inspiration for this book was Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, and this book, I think, faces a lot of the same problems I’ve heard are inherent in that one. (I haven’t actually read it, so if I’m way off base, please tell me.) Both, I believe, walk the line between criticizing war and glorifying it, and so whatever message results is kind of muddled. I got the most enjoyment out of Old Man’s War when I, well, just tried not to think about it too much. Not an attitude I usually endorse, but there you go. Still, the underlying sci-fi concepts in this book—the stuff about identity—are really interesting; I am anxious to get my hands on the sequel, even if it means I’ll have to turn off my brain for a while. Or at least the hard-working liberal guilt section.
35. The Martian Child, David Gerrold — This book was incredibly frustrating. I stumbled across it at the library and picked it up because I’d heard that it’s being made into a movie starring John Cusack. I was also somewhat intrigued by the premise, which is based on the author’s own life: a single, gay sci-fi writer decides he wants to adopt a kid, but the boy he becomes committed to is very troubled and thinks he (the boy) is a Martian. My main worry going in was that it was going to be too saccharine (favorable comparisons to Tuesdays with Morrie on the front cover are actually more likely to deter me than make me read something); it mostly wasn’t. Instead, however, it’s incredibly scattered. The book starts out at a fairly normal pace, but halfway through Gerrold abruptly changes gears and goes from describing how he tried to help his adopted son, Dennis, to adjust, to actually—though self-consciously—thinking that Dennis may really be from Mars. Then that line of thought is abruptly abandoned. Other seemingly major incidents—like a conflict with intolerant neighbors that we’re told resulted in legal action—are glossed over in a paragraph or two, while other (lame) running jokes and frankly irrelevant thoughts on the nature of storytelling are given pages of pages of time. It’s a mess. A well-intended mess, but a mess.
Oddly, I do think this could make a good movie, if whoever’s adapting it gives it some badly-needed structure. Although—guess what?—a quick check of IMDb reveals that in the film, Cusack’s character is suddenly straight. Sigh.
36. Pretties, Scott Westerfeld — Sequel to Uglies, as I suppose is semi-obvious. I don’t want to say too much about this book because it would spoil Uglies, which I think a lot of you would enjoy. But, like volume one, this book was incredibly exciting and compelling. It falls a little bit into that sequel trap, repeating some of the aspects of the first book; in fact, there’s something frustratingly cyclical about the narrative. However, it has several thrilling set-pieces that are unique to it, and it introduces some interesting new aspects of the world, as well as some interesting new characters. Westerfeld has moved from the Tally/David romance of the first book to something of a love triangle in this one, and it’s very well done—whatever choice Tally makes, it’ll be the right one and the wrong one, which is just the sort of structural stability a good love triangle needs. (Normally, I would propose “Threesome!” as a solution, but these characters are 16, so that’s a little icky.) But then…cliffhanger again! Dammit. This Westerfeld guy is not to be trusted. ;-)
37. The Road, Cormac McCarthy — Ho, boy. This is the most depressing, bleakest post-apocalyptic novel I’ve ever read. I know that sounds redundant almost, but it’s really not: most of the other bits of apocalyptic fiction I’ve read contain some kind of hope, some chance that civilization will rebuild, that humanity will continue, that there’s something worth fighting for. This book has cannibals. And no hope, not really—which McCarthy actually deals with really well. The man and his son go on because they go on, they keep surviving for as long as they can and hope that there’s meaning even in that (though there may not be). McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic setting is beautifully described—his prose is incredible, and by itself enough to tempt me to read more of his work. He does the Terry Pratchett thing (yes, I just compared Cormac McCarthy to Terry Pratchett—how awesome is that?) of no chapter breaks, but this story is easily swallowable in one sitting (with a couple of bathroom breaks)—and I suspect it may even be better like that. There’s a wonderful flow to it, almost lulling despite the horror of much of what father and son encounter. It’s like a long, slow slide into that final sleep.
Part of me wanted something more climatic to happen at the end, but I can see a million ways that that wouldn’t have worked, so I’m all right with the conclusion. Anyway, this book is more about the experience as a whole than any one piece of it, I think.
There are a couple of interesting—although mostly irrelevant—things I’d like to mention about McCarthy’s style. I like and understand why he chooses not to use dialogue tags—I’ve done that myself, and think that it makes sense in terms of the narrative here; it preserves the horrible, frightening feeling of quiet. What I don’t get, however, is whatever argument he seems to have with apostrophes. He doesn’t use them in words like “doesnt” or “cant,” but does for things like “he’d.” I don’t understand this as a stylistic choice—I don’t see how it works with anything else at all, or has any effect but to be stubborn and confusing. (Which is obviously why the apostrophe is kept in for “he’d”—because otherwise you’d look at the word and go, “Bwah?” WHICH IS WHY WE USE APOSTROPHES IN THE FIRST PLACE.) I’m all for manipulating language if it has a narrative purpose (I kind of like the conclusion of Ulysses). But I don’t get the sort of Gertrude Steinian theory that we should shorten everything as much as possible. It doesn’t make writing easier to understand; it makes it harder. And kind of ugly. AND, if you don’t respect your friend the apostrophe, you end up with things like page 89.
However, none of that affected my enjoyment of the book at all. (Well, the grammatical mistakes kind of did, but I don’t want to blame McCarthy for that.) It was creepy and tragic and beautifully written. I’m not sure why this is considered OMG LITERATURE when it’s ground sci-fi has been covering for years, but that’s a whole other “poor abused genre fiction” rant right there. Hi, I’m tangent girl today.
Total Books: 37
30. Hey Nostradamus!, Douglas Coupland — This book actually contains very little in terms of plot—or anyway, what pieces of plot it has are only loosely connected. It’s divided into four sections, each narrated by a different character: a teenage girl who’s the victim of a school shooting, her boyfriend ten years after her death, his new girlfriend a few years after that, and his estranged father a few years after that. In a way, I guess you could say that it’s about how this one horrible event—which has already occurred when the narrative starts—continues to touch all these people years later, but really, that doesn’t seem to be it, either. Like most Coupland novels (especially the later ones) it’s really about family (those you find and those you’re stuck with) and loneliness (the universal condition, it seems). As usual, I’m impressed with Coupland’s ability to craft interesting characters and convincing narrators, and to find empathetic qualities in everyone—even Reg, the obsessively religious and cruel father, is not made to be wholly inhuman, and in fact seems real and tragic and almost beautiful by the end. So the plot, which is really the weakest part of this book, doesn’t really matter so much. As four portraits of four lives, it’s fantastic.
31. Fargo Rock City, Chuck Klosterman — I have kind of a love/hate relationship with Chuck Klosterman. I’ve read all his books (I left this one till last, because it’s about heavy metal and that’s not a subject I’m desperately interested in) and I think he’s frequently incredibly funny and often very insightful. But man, does he piss me off sometimes. In Fargo Rock City, that occurred when he decided to share his views on female music fans. Apparently, male music fans are more loyal and less likely to get distracted by every shiny new thing because men are more analytical and women are more emotional. Yeah. There are so many things wrong with that statement that I risk turning this into a huge rant, which I do not want to do. Leaving aside the issue of “loyalty” (well, after I point to exhibit A: the giant collection of U2 stuff that I’ve bought over the years even when a) I had no money, and b) what I was buying was redundant to stuff I already had save for an extra B-side or remix or miniposter or WHATEVER), for Klosterman to use the old “men are analytical, women are emotional” argument is so absurd in the context of this book that it’s almost hilarious. Because the ENTIRE BOOK is about Klosterman’s emotions. How much he loved heavy metal, and how much it changed and shaped his life, and how much he still loves it. How much it bugs him when people dismiss it without thought, and how he thinks it should be considered important because it was important to him. This is a raw outpouring of emotion! Only he’s a guy, so we’re not allowed to call it that. We have to call it analysis. Right. Do people—Klosterman and anyone else—really think that when women have emotions—which, y’know, we’re actually willing to admit are emotions—we don’t analyze them at all? That we’re just like, “I feel so HAPPY today! La la la!” or “I’m SAD today. I’m heading straight for the Ben & Jerry’s, no thought involved!” Or even, “I really like this band! I’m just going to listen to them and go to concerts and scream and try to sleep with the drummer AND NEVER CONSIDER MY MOTIVATIONS AT ALL.” Women are clearly brainless puppy-dog creatures!
Okay, so this may have tapped into some other issues I’m having right now? But the point remains. Klosterman’s “analysis” of what makes heavy metal important is actually very minimal: it was important to him. It was important to a lot of other people. Therefore it is important in general. And I completely agree with this. I think pop culture should be talked about, because it does say a lot about people and what matters to them—and what could be more important than that? This is why I like reading Klosterman in the first place: because he recognizes that, and talks about it in an amusing manner. It’s just when he decides that he’s an expert on women that he pisses me off. (Well, and some other times. But never mind.)
ANYWAY…all of that said, I actually enjoyed the rest of the book a lot. And I don’t care one iota about heavy metal. But Klosterman does make me care about other people caring.
32. Lord John and the Private Matter, Diana Gabaldon — The first in a sort of spin-off series from the Outlander books, which I have not read. Or rather, I started reading Outlander but stopped after about 100 pages because I just couldn’t get into it. I had a similar problem here. This is historical fiction, set in mid-18th Century England. (A period I was pretty appalled to realize I have rather limited knowledge of; limited, I mean, to Tom Jones—and not even the book, the movie!) Lord John Grey is a fairly interesting character: he’s gay, the first man he loved died tragically, and the second is in another country and in love with someone else. The plot seems like it could be interesting too: Grey accidentally observes that the man who’s engaged to his young cousin has the pox and must find a way to break off the engagement; there’s also a murder that may or may not be connected. Right away you’ve got promise of trips into London’s underbelly, full of brothels and molly-houses. And yet…I just couldn’t get into it, man! I mean, unlike Outlander, I did manage to finish, but I just never felt engaged, never felt involved. It’s not that it was bad—although the several chapters of infodump toward the end were not my favorite thing ever; in fact, I’m sure lots of you would actually enjoy it quite a lot. I think this may just be one of those things where a certain author’s style just doesn’t work for me. I’ve had it happen with fanfic, too: I’ll recognize that something is good or at least competent, but it’s just not for me. Based more on style than on topic, which seems odd, but I guess it can happen. The synapses fail to connect. I can’t get emotionally involved, and thus I can’t really care about what I’m reading.
Please tell me I’m not the only one this happens to!
33. Uglies, Scott Westerfeld — This book has one of the least-promising first lines I have ever encountered: “The early summer sky was the color of cat vomit.” It sounds like a Bulwer-Lytton entry; even more so when you add the second sentence, which attempts to elaborate on the first. (“Of course, Tally thought, you'd have to feed your cat only salmon-flavored cat food for a while, to get the pinks right.”) BUT, this series had been recommended to me, so I pressed on. I’m so glad I did. This is a fantastic bit of post-apocalyptic, dystopian, teen sci-fi. Tally lives in a world where scientists have figured out a way to eliminate ugliness: everyone is made pretty on their 16th birthday. Of course, prettiness comes with a price, and while yes, it is exactly what you’d think if you’ve seen a single episode of The Twilight Zone or have half a brain, that doesn’t matter. There are plenty of other surprises, and Tally is a really interesting, flawed character. There are also great questy bits, which is something that I love—the epic journey—and a surprisingly convincing romance. (Bonus: Teh Boy is named David, and really the only description of him given is that he has a crooked smile. You can guess who I pictured. *eg*) But then you get hit with a cliffhanger! D’oh!
34. Old Man’s War, John Scalzi — The first 100 pages or so of this book are absolutely fantastic. The Colonial Defense Forces recruit citizens of Earth on their 75th birthdays to fight with them against the various alien species threatening the series of colonies Earth needs because of population overflow, war, all the usual ways we’ve fucked up the planet. Senior citizens sign up because the CDF promises to make them young again—if they sign a contract to serve for ten years. And most of them will probably get gruesomely killed in that time. But at least they won’t die old, right?
All of this stuff is fascinating. I loved the set up, the procedure and world-building involved in John Perry, 75-year-old widower and retired ad writer, joining the army and making friends with his fellow recruits and going through pre-procedure tests and through the actual procedure (which I won’t spoil) and the boot camp stuff that comes after. Scalzi describes the actual battles which follow with no less intensity, but once John starts fighting, the sense of who he is really gets lost. (I was actually waiting for that to be revealed to be part of the point, but it wasn’t.) John just becomes A Soldier, almost instantly. Besides his sense of loyalty and his lingering feelings about his dead wife, there’s very little left to connect him to who he used to be. It’s mentioned several times that John and his wife protested the big war on Earth, but John seems almost entirely unconcerned with the unquestioning massacre of various alien species. I must admit, it started to make me a liiiiiitle uncomfortable. Scalzi has said that his inspiration for this book was Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, and this book, I think, faces a lot of the same problems I’ve heard are inherent in that one. (I haven’t actually read it, so if I’m way off base, please tell me.) Both, I believe, walk the line between criticizing war and glorifying it, and so whatever message results is kind of muddled. I got the most enjoyment out of Old Man’s War when I, well, just tried not to think about it too much. Not an attitude I usually endorse, but there you go. Still, the underlying sci-fi concepts in this book—the stuff about identity—are really interesting; I am anxious to get my hands on the sequel, even if it means I’ll have to turn off my brain for a while. Or at least the hard-working liberal guilt section.
35. The Martian Child, David Gerrold — This book was incredibly frustrating. I stumbled across it at the library and picked it up because I’d heard that it’s being made into a movie starring John Cusack. I was also somewhat intrigued by the premise, which is based on the author’s own life: a single, gay sci-fi writer decides he wants to adopt a kid, but the boy he becomes committed to is very troubled and thinks he (the boy) is a Martian. My main worry going in was that it was going to be too saccharine (favorable comparisons to Tuesdays with Morrie on the front cover are actually more likely to deter me than make me read something); it mostly wasn’t. Instead, however, it’s incredibly scattered. The book starts out at a fairly normal pace, but halfway through Gerrold abruptly changes gears and goes from describing how he tried to help his adopted son, Dennis, to adjust, to actually—though self-consciously—thinking that Dennis may really be from Mars. Then that line of thought is abruptly abandoned. Other seemingly major incidents—like a conflict with intolerant neighbors that we’re told resulted in legal action—are glossed over in a paragraph or two, while other (lame) running jokes and frankly irrelevant thoughts on the nature of storytelling are given pages of pages of time. It’s a mess. A well-intended mess, but a mess.
Oddly, I do think this could make a good movie, if whoever’s adapting it gives it some badly-needed structure. Although—guess what?—a quick check of IMDb reveals that in the film, Cusack’s character is suddenly straight. Sigh.
36. Pretties, Scott Westerfeld — Sequel to Uglies, as I suppose is semi-obvious. I don’t want to say too much about this book because it would spoil Uglies, which I think a lot of you would enjoy. But, like volume one, this book was incredibly exciting and compelling. It falls a little bit into that sequel trap, repeating some of the aspects of the first book; in fact, there’s something frustratingly cyclical about the narrative. However, it has several thrilling set-pieces that are unique to it, and it introduces some interesting new aspects of the world, as well as some interesting new characters. Westerfeld has moved from the Tally/David romance of the first book to something of a love triangle in this one, and it’s very well done—whatever choice Tally makes, it’ll be the right one and the wrong one, which is just the sort of structural stability a good love triangle needs. (Normally, I would propose “Threesome!” as a solution, but these characters are 16, so that’s a little icky.) But then…cliffhanger again! Dammit. This Westerfeld guy is not to be trusted. ;-)
37. The Road, Cormac McCarthy — Ho, boy. This is the most depressing, bleakest post-apocalyptic novel I’ve ever read. I know that sounds redundant almost, but it’s really not: most of the other bits of apocalyptic fiction I’ve read contain some kind of hope, some chance that civilization will rebuild, that humanity will continue, that there’s something worth fighting for. This book has cannibals. And no hope, not really—which McCarthy actually deals with really well. The man and his son go on because they go on, they keep surviving for as long as they can and hope that there’s meaning even in that (though there may not be). McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic setting is beautifully described—his prose is incredible, and by itself enough to tempt me to read more of his work. He does the Terry Pratchett thing (yes, I just compared Cormac McCarthy to Terry Pratchett—how awesome is that?) of no chapter breaks, but this story is easily swallowable in one sitting (with a couple of bathroom breaks)—and I suspect it may even be better like that. There’s a wonderful flow to it, almost lulling despite the horror of much of what father and son encounter. It’s like a long, slow slide into that final sleep.
Part of me wanted something more climatic to happen at the end, but I can see a million ways that that wouldn’t have worked, so I’m all right with the conclusion. Anyway, this book is more about the experience as a whole than any one piece of it, I think.
There are a couple of interesting—although mostly irrelevant—things I’d like to mention about McCarthy’s style. I like and understand why he chooses not to use dialogue tags—I’ve done that myself, and think that it makes sense in terms of the narrative here; it preserves the horrible, frightening feeling of quiet. What I don’t get, however, is whatever argument he seems to have with apostrophes. He doesn’t use them in words like “doesnt” or “cant,” but does for things like “he’d.” I don’t understand this as a stylistic choice—I don’t see how it works with anything else at all, or has any effect but to be stubborn and confusing. (Which is obviously why the apostrophe is kept in for “he’d”—because otherwise you’d look at the word and go, “Bwah?” WHICH IS WHY WE USE APOSTROPHES IN THE FIRST PLACE.) I’m all for manipulating language if it has a narrative purpose (I kind of like the conclusion of Ulysses). But I don’t get the sort of Gertrude Steinian theory that we should shorten everything as much as possible. It doesn’t make writing easier to understand; it makes it harder. And kind of ugly. AND, if you don’t respect your friend the apostrophe, you end up with things like page 89.
However, none of that affected my enjoyment of the book at all. (Well, the grammatical mistakes kind of did, but I don’t want to blame McCarthy for that.) It was creepy and tragic and beautifully written. I’m not sure why this is considered OMG LITERATURE when it’s ground sci-fi has been covering for years, but that’s a whole other “poor abused genre fiction” rant right there. Hi, I’m tangent girl today.
Total Books: 37
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-12 08:45 pm (UTC)I'm astonished that you expected plot from Coupland *g*. It's not really what I expect from him...
Your Fargo Rock City comments are interesting. I think there's definitely room for examination of the differing ways in which men and women tend to engage with their subjects of interest (because there really are major differences, and they're interesting), but it sounds like he's mostly just talking rubbish. Also, I don't see why "analytical" should correlate with "longer attention span" anyway, there's no necessary link. He sounds foolish! You should write an insightful yet cutting review and publish it somewhere he will see! Or, um, something *g*.
I like Gabaldon's writing myself, but I definitely understand your problem with it. Or, at least, the type of problem. I can't read Dickens, because it bores me stupid (apart from A Tale of Two Cities, which I remember as getting quite good at the end *g*), and sometimes I feel like a real failure as a reader. But, you know, whatever. It doesn't work for me. I believe it's good, because so many other people believe it is, but it does nothing for me. I have the same problem with the Beatles, mostly.
And the Scalzi sounds interesting. I'd been thinking about reading it; he's part of the writers' community in and around LJ, so I've seen him post, and other people had recommended his books. It sounds interesting, if flawed. Same on the Westerfeld books, which are on my reading list...
Although—guess what?—a quick check of IMDb reveals that in the film, Cusack’s character is suddenly straight. Sigh.
Oh, you do shock me. There's probably a female love interest, too, regardless of whether there's any romance in the book...
(no subject)
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Date: 2007-02-12 08:56 pm (UTC)You'll see why I knew from the first time I saw Sling Blade that ol' Billy Bob must have been a fan of his as well.
There is a bleakness to his stories, but at the same time a very human aspect as well..no happy endings, like life a lot of the times.
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Date: 2007-02-12 09:24 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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From:(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-13 12:41 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-13 02:13 am (UTC)2.) The Gerrold book is based on a short story he wrote, of the same title, for The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction that I read more than 5/6 years ago and was charmed by. Sounds like the central idea couldn't sustain a book-length work of fiction, but the short story is ridiculously charming.
3.) Cormac McCarthy's prose makes me skin crawl. Yes, totally subjective, but whatev. Can't read him.