Ok, so, I finally finished the latest installment of A Song of Fire and Ice
That pretty much wore me out. But I have started a new epic -- Ken Follett's The Pillars of the Earth.
Of course, Follett has no chance of rivaling Martin for scope or spectacle, and I'm not entirely persuaded by the 3rd person omniscient POV so far, but I'm starting to get into the story. Like with a Disney film (uhh, except for John Carter, which I saw on Sunday with The Boy), at least one parent has to die in the opening scenes or already be dead. Oh, wait, John Carter was "dead" in the opening scene. Check that box.
Back to Follett. Yes, poor Tom Builder's wife gets offed within the first 50 pages or so. Which is about where I am. Surely, Follett won't set ol' Tom up as the hero of the story and then G.o.T. him at the end of the next act, right?
I also managed to read a chapter or so of Richard Dawkins' The Blind Watchmaker, his 1986 masterpiece in defense of full-metal jacket, no holds barred evolutionary theory. If you care about the culture war struggles between the "intelligent design" folks and the mainstream of biology education, this book is an indispensable resource for understanding where the hardest of the hardcore evolutionary theorists are coming from. Fair warning: Dawkins is downright disdainful of both I.D. and, more generally, religion (a viewpoint that comes out even more strongly in his 2006 book, The God Delusion). But he also is a literate and nimble defender of the scientific method and of evolutionary biology. Perhaps most pertinently for this audience, Dawkins is responsible for the term meme.
What are you reading?
I read The Selfish Gene and quickly thereafter The Extended Phenotype, but have so far missed the later headliner works.
I found E. O. Wilson's Consilience a nice piece to add to the canon.
I have Consilience on my shelf, but haven't gotten to it yet.
I finally finished Catch 22. I understand why it went on as long as it did, but towards the end it really felt like a slog to me to get finished.
Yup, that's how I felt about it, too. I found a lot of Catch 22 interesting, and a lot of it not interesting. I should probably read it again.
I think it is brilliant how the difficulty in getting through the later chapters mirrors the difficult situation of Yossarian (and everyone else in the book).
Finished The Grapes of Wrath and am now working through Clarence Darrow For the Defense.
Read After the Apocalypse by Maureen McHugh, after hearing lots of praise for it. I usually love collections of short stories, but none really grabbed me in this collection. Good but not great.
Also read Light Boxes by Shane Jones. I enjoyed this one, the imagery was interesting and the fantastical elements were dark and weird. A quick read, and probably not for everyone, but it hit that sweet spot for me.
No idea what I'm going to read this month. Plenty of things on my to-read list, but nothing that I'm itching to start on right now.
Ameritopia by Mark Levin. Great read on old literature about utopia and the building of America. However, very intellectually exhausting. Gotta be in the mood to read this one.
Through the Shadowlands by Sibley? A look at the love story between C.S. Lewis and Joy Davidman. Very enjoyable to see history through their eyes.
Percy Jackson and the Harry Potter lookalike okay, that's not the actual title, but wow there are so many parallels. On book 4. Hoping to finish the series before Easter, but doubtful.
I started reading Pillars a couple years ago, but didn't end up finishing it, probably because I had to concentrate on an exam, but I've been meaning to come back to it at some point.
I read the first Hunger Games book the other day. I have no idea why it got so popular. For a young adult novel, it was adequately written with adequate characters and an adequately interesting plot. But there was absolutely nothing memorable about it. If it wasn't for the burgeoning Hunger Games media takeover, I would probably forget all about it in a week or two. I don't think that I will be reading the other books in the series.
I read all three over the winter in amongst various other books. They're enjoyable enough, but the first book in particular has to be the worst-proofread book I've ever read. There were typos everywhere, and it was very jarring.
are they more poorly written and sophomoric than the Eragon books? Because those suh-hucked.
I can't imagine it is. I certainly didn't put myself through Eragon. I just kept finding obvious misspellings and weirdly composed sentences. That issue got cleared up in the second book.
Like I said, I found the series enjoyable enough. It doesn't quite live up to the concept (which is what drew me to the books in the first place), but they're ridiculously quick reads, and they're fun enough for YA, which is all I was really looking for at the time.
I am easily amused and more than willing to read the YA stuff. I read about a dozen or more of the Redwall books back when my kids were into those. Formulaic, repetitive, but fun nonetheless.
Oh yeah, I read about 6 or 7 of those back in the day. That guy had to have had a single madlib card that he generated the plot to every single book from that series from, but they were fun for the time.
And yet you still haven't read Rip Foster yet?? It really should be your book of focus in next month's post. Campy and dated as it is, all the action would make an excellent movie, given an Akiva Goldsmith screenplay treatment.
Huh. Never heard of Rip Foster.
I read a lot of that kind of stuff as a kid (Andre Norton's work springs to mind), but I don't recall any Blake Savage books.
I think that's the only book he wrote under that pseudonym. Anyway, it's free on the 'net off Gutenberg, and it's seriously good fun.
Just finished 1861, The Civil War Awakening by Adam Goodheart, which by the title I am sure you can get the basic idea. Interesting historic piece about American History at the start of the Civil War. Pirate, you would like this one.
Danke, I'll add it to my queue.
Well, I've typed out a post twice now and it's disappeared when I tried to mail it. Maybe WordPress doesn't like my links? Meh, hell if I know. Anyhow, I read A Princess of Mars and The Gods of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs. I really enjoyed them, much more than I did any of the Tarzan books I've read. I think Burroughs writing in first-person for the Mars books helps to stunt some of the overly-descriptive phrasing he used in his better-known series. I still plan on seeing John Carter at some point, especially since it looks like it stuck pretty close (relatively speaking) to the books from what I've seen of the trailers.
Both were caught in the spam filter. Akismet works really well, but sometimes stops strange things.
I figured that was it, but I had a terrible feeling that it was a remnant April Fools' joke.
I also read A Princess of Mars, beings it's been well over 30 years since the last reading. It's entertaining yet pretty dry, but you've got to give a 100 yr old story a bit of a break. I didn't mind most of the tweeks the movie made with the plot, but not remembering the rest of the series, I don't know if the changes hurt any subsequent books' plots (assuming they ever were green-lit for sequels to John Carter).
After reading David Brin's recommendation list, I think I'm going to give The Engines of God a whirl next.
Finished The Forever War. I liked it and the ending was happier than I expected.
Currently very close to finishing On a Pale Horse. So far an amusing take on the Incarnations (Death, Time, Fate, War, and Nature).
Never finished the Incarnations series. Piers Anthony got real old for me, real fast.
I suspect I won't read many more. I finally, nearly four months later, will get a chance to use my ereader on a consistent basis and I have other books queued up on that.
The Forever War is in the pantheon for me. I also very much enjoyed Forever Peace. Not really a sequel.
Went back and read The Road again. I really enjoyed the story and picked up a lot more of the "paternal love" themes. First time through I think I was more swept up with McCarthy's development of a truly believable post-apocalyptic world than the somewhat subdued interactions between father and son.
I received Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance from my younger brother for Christmas. At present, I'm about halfway to California with the narrator and his son. Despite my liberal arts background, I've never done well with philosophy; not sure why. My brother earned a B.A. in philosophy from this fine institution. Though I don't know him all that well, I think he may have hit upon something by giving me this particular book. Much of the "story" has been very instructive and made the material more accessible. I think it better conveys the methods of thinking about some of life's really tough questions than most academic philosophy texts do. That being said, unlike most of the non-fiction I read, I'll admit that I've had to actively work at reading it. We'll see how it ties everything together in the end.
After hearing about it from you guys, I asked for and received A Confederacy of Dunces from my wife for Christmas. I was only able to make it through ~30 pages on vacation, but I cannot wait to get back into it.
I just started reading A Confederacy last week, and I'm enjoying it thus far.
Definitely one of the funniest books of all time. Sheenie's parents met Toole's mother at a party once and told me, "It's no wonder he killed himself." Apparently the mother in the book perfectly described his own mother.
meat: I'll be interested to compare notes when we're done. Also, I got your e-mail but haven't responded. Suffice it to say, sounds like a plan. Let me know about the matting/mounting cost and shoot me an address to send the funds.
TDP: I was surprised to learn he was so young when he died, but with a mother like this I suppose it seemed like the better alternative.
The Road was a devastating and destabilizing read, laying low that which is humanity. Natch. Nikto. Nada.
Didn't read much last month. Too busy writing stories that DK just didn't quite like enough.
Hoping to start War and Peace soon. I may have gotten myself into Super Mario Galaxy though, and that might have to be finished first.
Last couple of books I read were The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay and Gulliver's Travels. I couldn't believe how awesome Gulliver's Travels actually was. I know it's a classic, but I was seriously impressed. Kavalier & Clay was a solid read, and while I was reading it I loved it, but I think something about the end left me a little cold, because it faded from my mind pretty fast.
Kavalier & Clay is sitting on our living room couch at home. Still haven't tackled it. There were significant sections of The Yiddish Policeman's Union that I really didn't like to make me a little apprehensive.
There wasn't any particular part that bothered me, though I can certainly see that some people might have had problems with parts of the book. I haven't read The Yiddish Policeman's Union, but I've read both Kavalier and Clay and Summerland, both of which were good but "just missing a little something extra" (or something along those lines), so I think I'm probably done with Chabon for a while (if not forever).
Still, I'd encourage you to give it a go, since it's a quick enough read. I mean, if you've already got it sitting there...
I consider Kavalier and Clay to be one of my all-time favorites, but now that I think about it it's been so long since I read it last I don't think I could even articulate why.
Summerland, on the other hand, was... well I just don't understand why that book was written. Tall tales and weirdo baseball sounds like a great combination in theory, but after writing a few chapters Chabon should have just been like "what the hell am I doing?" and stopped.
Yes, exactly, on Summerland.
I really liked Kavalier and Clay when I was reading it, but something about the way it ended... it just faded into the background for me. Honestly, the end reminded me of the end of Against The Day,
but if you compare the two, Pynchon kicked the ever-living-snot out of Chabon.
I wouldn't put Kavalier on my short list of all-time favorites, but most of it was pretty compelling. The last quarter or so dragged a bit, IIRC.
I'd love to know what Chabon's contribution was to the John Carter script. There was too much Star Wars prequel material in it for my tastes (echoes of the pod race; the Tharks look a bit too much like Genosians; the arena fight; the white apes look an awful lot like wampas).
But if this had been released as a summer sci-fi action thriller, I think it would have done better. It's throw-away good fun. Not up to the level of Raiders, not as compelling as the original Star Wars, but in that vein.
I've picked up Gulliver like 5 times, and I always lose interest about the time he's freed in Lilliput.
Lilliput was by far the most boring part of the book for me. Especially after he was set free. Though his "crime" and conviction in that section is pretty memorable.
I couldn't believe how awesome Gulliver's Travels actually was.
If you haven't already, you should read The Life and Opinions of Tristam Shandy, Gentleman to follow up your recent foray into 18th c. lit.
I have Tristam Shandy on my shelf. I'm pretty set on War and Peace next, and I want to read some more Pynchon this summer, but I'll move it to the top of the queue behind those two.
I took a great books class in college, where the professor just gave us a list of 100 of the greatest books of all time (his list, trended older/representative by author (i.e. only 2 Dostoyevsky listed)). Tristam Shandy was on that list too.
I've been slowly making my way through the ones I didn't read there, mixing in other books (Kavalier and Clay, etc.) as I go. War and Peace is one of the biggies I need to get to still. Looking forward to it as one of those bucket-list type accomplishments.
Which Pynchon are you thinking of? I've read several of the shorter novels, but have yet to tackle some of the longer ones such as Mason and Dixon or Against The Day.
It'll almost certainly be Inherent Vice (his newest, and apparently most accessible, novel). I've read V. twice, Crying of Lot 49 and Against The Day(/i>. I also started Mason and Dixon, but I was going through a little burnout at the time, so ended up putting it down. I loved everything I read in it, and so far I'd say that was the easiest read of his (even though it was written in language that would fit the era).
I'm, obviously, a huge Pynchon fan. I'd say V. is a great one to start with, if you're looking to go for his longer novels. Unless you want to pick up Inherent Vice with me this summer...
I've read V, The Crying of Lot 49, Gravity's Rainbow, and Vineland, but absolutely loathed Inherent Vice... YMMV.
YMMV = ?
How were Vineland and Gravity's Rainbow? I know Gravity's Rainbow is supposed to be the big, thick, impossible one, but I wonder if Against The Day didn't steal that top spot? I loved Against The Day, and was thinking of trying it again, but the commitment on that one is huge.
Your Mileage May Vary
I love both those books. Dr. Chop wrote her masters thesis on G'sR which is where I started with Pynchon. I felt like IV was an impostor novel wearing a Pynchon dust jacket, but, again, this was just my impression.
I've been looking forward to IV for some time, so I think I'll forge ahead with it all the same. Perhaps Gravity's Rainbow will be next on my Pynchon list.
It's neck and neck between him and Dostoyevsky for my favorite author. I'm kind of working on a book of my own, and I aspire to Pynchon-ness, only, you know, not nearly as intelligent.
Oh, I wasn't trying to dissuade you.
And yet, here we are, me fighting against your dissuasion.
I'm having trouble imagining loathing any of Pynchon's works.
Just re-read Adventures of Maqroll by Alvaro Mutis. Hard to describe, but seductive real-in story-telling, bringing both sea-tales, and land adventures to bear. Nothing to compare to - really like.
I'm in.