This month I finished Jeff Vandermeer's Southern Reach trilogy (pictured above if I figured out the header thing correctly). He released all 3 books this year, and it was kind of nice to be able to finish one and know that the next was coming out in a month or two (eat your heart out GRRM fans!).
The series itself was interesting and at times really good. A portion of the coastline has been cordoned off and designated as "Area X" after an incident. Several expeditions have been sent in, but none have been successful in determining exactly what is going on.
Annihilation follows the twelfth expedition into Area X,
Authority follows what happens at The Southern Reach, the organization sending in the expeditions, in the aftermath of book 1.
Acceptance sends some characters back into Area X and investigates the incident that started the whole thing.
The setting in all of these books is awesomely weird. In Area X, in the Southern Reach, the feeling of isolation, paranoia, and alienation comes through in a very real way. The plot tended to lose itself occasionally. In book 1, you spend the entire book inside the head of the narrator, and she doesn't know what's going on any more than you do. As I said above, that's great for an atmosphere of paranoia and isolation, but not so great for figuring out what is going on. Books 2 and 3 deliver a bit more in the plot department, making book 1 almost the foreword to the rest of the trilogy.
I enjoyed the series. It didn't blow me away, but I liked the weirdness enough that I was glad to have read it.
On the subject of series, I was looking through my "recently read" list and I have started a bunch of different series that I just haven't got around to finishing. Maybe next year that will be a good reading goal. How about the Citizens of the WGOM? What series have you finished recently? What series have you started recently? What series has you patiently awaiting the next volume?
Put all that, or any other book stuff below.
Entire Southern Reach Trilogy available for free!
I'd be really interested in reading these but I have no idea when I'd get to them and I have no idea how to sign up for the exchange anymore. Nor do I have many books TO exchange unless there's a bunch of people interested in weirdo manga!
There is no sign up. Just email me your mailing address whenever you want them and I'll send them along.
Don't worry about having things to exchange, it isn't meant to be a "take one out, put one in" kind of thing. Just a way for people to maybe find a book they are interested in that's languishing on someone else's bookshelf.
Yes you did. I resized (and cropped a teeny bit) to reduce the 3264x1836 and 948 KB image to 1038x576 and 101 KB.
Thanks!
Speaking of GRRM, I wrapped up A Dance With Dragons last week and will now join the legions of Martin fans clamoring for The Winds of Winter which, math apparently tells us, will be sometime in 2017.
This felt a bit more slow-going, at least until the last 250 or so pages, then I binge-read until 3 am on consecutive nights and finished it over a bowl of breakfast cereal. I don't have time to get into what's happened between A Game of Thrones and now, but having read the series from start to most recent book over the past few months really makes me appreciate Martin's work. I've found the story arc, character development and world building to be well done and I've actually started to enjoy his attention to detail. I'm excited to go through your list of recommendations to keep me busy until the next one comes out.
Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman. I borrowed this from a friend at work and read it in about 3 days. Not nearly as engrossing as American Gods, but somehow I think that's a tough measure to live up to. I didn't see the twist coming in this one until it slapped me in the face, but Fat Charlie and his brother were interesting and their story was captivating enough that I'm glad I didn't catch it until I did. There was some other stuff going on that I didn't think helped to move this forward, but all in all, it was a fun read.
Some Children's Stuff that Kernel has been requesting:
Going On A Bear Hunt by Michael Rosen and Helen Oxenbury - not the most competent parenting on display, but the illustrations are amazing and the language is fun for father and daughter.
The Gas We Pass: The Story of Farts by Shinta Cho - I picked this one up at Goodwill for $1.50 and my guess was correct, a non-fiction book about farts with zoo animals and tooting noises is a huge hit with Kernel.
The Water Hole by Graeme Base - beautifully drawn story about the seasonal cycle of a water hole. Starts in Africa and works its way through various landscapes & continents. A counting book with an ecological theme and hidden animals (for example, a tree root that's a snake when you look closely).
My favorite book I read last month was A Questionable Shape by Bennett Sims.
A man and his friend search New Orleans for the friend's father, who is probably a zombie, since the city is suffering from an outbreak of the undead. The narrator was the highlight for me. He was smart, introspective to a fault, and just the right amount of paranoid and sad to deal with this particular search and its ramifications, both for his friendship and his other relationships. The whole book is very internal, which is different from what you would normally expect from a zombie novel, and it struck that right chord with me and I really enjoyed it.
I finished A Memory of Light early in the month. So...I then re-read The Eye of the World. The Wheel weaves as the wheel wills.
Read Scalzi's Lock In, which was entertaining and built on an interesting premise, and The World's Shortest Stories, which is a Fiction 55 collection similar to the 59 word challenge in Spookymilk Survivor. I think several from there were better than several in the book.
Lock In seemed interesting. One of those books that I might someday-if-I-end-up-in-a-bookstore-at-just-the-right-moment pick up and read.
three of those four short stories are just whatever
Two of those three were the worst in the book - not sure why they were showcased.
Boy, did we move a lot of books last month! Sadly, I didn't read any of them.
My "big book" for September was The Idiot by Dostoevsky.
I loved the first part, the introduction to the prince and the cast of characters for the novel. The conclusion of part one was great fun and perfectly in line with what had come before up to that point. After that, I merely liked the rest. Much of it was too melodramatic with every character doing things "suddenly" (although from reading other reviews it seems that might be the translation I was reading). Overall, I liked the prince and the other main characters and I liked the fact that he had to do things the way he did them, even though everyone could see how it was going to turn out.
I didn't have much trouble with Russian names and keeping everyone straight, although maybe that was because I was warned going in that it could be confusing.
October Big Book - 1Q84 by Murakami. Starting this today. I had previously started this right as I moved last year and so never got past page 70. I expect better results this time.
I've been wanting to read something by Murakami for a few years now. I found this excerpt of his new novel interesting.
I blew through Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki in like two days. It was great and I recommend it highly. I prefer some of his other work, but the book really hit me in the feels because of some of the parallels to my life experiences.
I don't find a ton of time to read, but I make time for most Murakami. 1Q84 is currently sitting on my desk taunting me. I'm not sure I can work myself up to start that right now, but I really want to read it.
The Idiot So what did you take out of The Grand Inquisitor chapter?
It's one of my favorite chapters in lit.
I was very worried when I didn't remember that chapter in The Idiot. Turns out that was a different book.
The dinner party at the end of book one was far and away my favorite scene in the book.
LOL - a trick question
My new job (meaning the loss of my busrides each day) and the Valet (and the attention and parenting he needs) have drastically cut into my reading. I'm about halfway through Middlesex and am enjoying it quite a bit. Before that, I finished up The Dred Scott Case by Don Fehrenbacher and found it really good. The first 200 pages giving a history of slavery in the territories was a little much to me (but I doubt most readers had just finished reading the first 5 volumes of Allen Nevins's Civil War project just before starting it), but the final 300 pages analyzing the decision(s) and its aftermath were excellent.
I finished Zealot (as the audiobook) this month. It was a very interesting reading of the subject matter. Thanks for giving me the push to check it out. I was surprised to find that it was the only non-fiction book I've taken in this year so far.
Zealot was very good. I've shared it with a bunch of other people who have enjoyed it as well.
Glad you enjoyed it. I knew quite a bit from some colleges classes I had taken, but I found it very accessible and interesting.
I should add that Chris Jaffe, the biggest history nerd there is, told me the author's history of the origins of Islam is even better.
I'm reading Captains Courageous to the boys. I had found it at a used bookstore for a dollar. It is pretty difficult to slog through because of the author's attempt to make realistic language on a fishing boat at the time. Not sure how much the boys are getting out of it because of the difficulty to understand the characters when they talk.
The Empathy Exams by Leslie Jamison. Essay collection. So I don’t exactly sit around saying, “Hey, I really feel like reading an essay collection right now.” But I just kept hearing about this book. I started it in August and I think it worked well to read it a bit at a time. Jamison explores empathy in a variety of ways, including as a standardized patient. (You can read that essay here.) She’s interested in the form of the essay as well as her subject matter, and she brilliantly weaves together topics (such as artificial sweeteners or three teens incarcerated for murders they may or may not have committed) with her own personal thoughts and experiences. This approach may not sound entirely promising, but she pulls it off extremely well, and I would absolutely recommend this book to anyone here.
Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabakov. Novel . . . if you can call a foreword, poem, commentary on the poem, and index a novel.
I read Lolita and Pnin in college and thus had the benefit of a professor’s guidance. I was daunted going into this one on my own and while I’m sure I missed a lot, I’m glad that I stuck with it. By the time I got through the foreword, I was aware that Kinbote was an unreliable narrator, and ultimately I found him to be hilariously unreliable. I felt at turns confused and frustrated as I read, but by the time I got to the fourth canto (I flipped back and forth between the poem and the commentary) and could see where things were headed, I was at least somewhat enjoying Nabakov’s game. I wouldn’t call it a fun read, but in the end I did find a certain amount of aesthetic pleasure in it, even if the book did send me running for the dictionary more often than I care to admit.
DG, let me know if you have questions or want to talk more about anything in particular.
I'm likely not done with essays for the year. I can't wait to get my hands on On Immunity by Eula Biss; the reviews I've read here and here already made my brain want to explode. I just requested Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay as well. Oh! And after reading this article, I'm totally reading Not That Kind of Girl by Lena Dunham.
This crowd will no doubt enjoy (or enjoy lambasting) this bit: a top ten of unfinishable novels.
I struggled with One Hundred Years of Solitude. C'mon, one can only eat so much dirt.
I read One Hundred Years of Solitude with relative ease. It being a school assignment may have helped with my motivation. It being a high school assignment, I also had way more time for reading.
Re: top 10: That list is incomplete without Ulysses. Unless you infer that nobody starts to read it.
After Pale Fire, I started another leviathan - Pynchon's Against The Day from a recommendation by the dude at the Beer Cave (1084 pgs). Strange to read Pynchon with coherent, full sentences that end in periods (unlike Gravity's Rainbow, which was like an encyclopaedia thrown into the Vitamix).
Also started Wounded Tiger (non-fiction!), a history of cricket in Pakistan. Interesting read. I recently ordered Willow on the Comcast so have been tracking on Test stick and ball in the Oval.