Category Archives: First Monday Book Day

First Monday Book Day

First Monday Book Day

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Reading related thoughts:

  • The Vonnegut re-read has now entered the post-Breakfast of Champions stage where I've read less of the books and they seem to be less well known.  I find that I'm more excited to read (or re-read) these.
    Read Slapstick in July and it was pretty good. The theme of the secondary family has been more obvious as I read all of these novels back to back and I think this is the biggest example of that theme in his work.  I wouldn't put this up there among the best Vonnegut, but I enjoyed it just fine.
    Jailbird and Deadeye Dick are up this month.  I honestly can't remember if I have ever read Jailbird before, so that will be interesting.
  • In previous editions of FMBD, I know I've talked about my enjoyment of Two Dollar Radio as an independent publishing house.  Well, I got Haints Stay by Colin Winnette from them this month and I tore through it in about 12 hours.  It's an "acid western" about two brothers (one who is transgender) that are bounty hunters who find that a boy has appeared in their campsite.It's a violent thing and Winnette is always writes in an unrelenting style (a style that I've loved in everything I've read of his) and I felt like this was my favorite book of his that I've read.  It was definitely my favorite July read.
  • I had heard good things about Wesley Chu's Tao series, so I read that this month as well.  From the first book (Lives of Tao - Chu's debut) to the third, you can see him improve as a writer and the whole series is an interesting setup (aliens have been inhabiting select humans since the dawn of history and controlling the development of human civilization).  I would say it was reasonably good sci-fi, and worth checking out, but nothing that was groundbreaking.
  • Next month is the now-somewhat-annual Science Fiction/Fantasy Short Fiction Award post - this year not quite so focused on the Hugo Award, but there's plenty of good stuff to link to and discuss.  So mark your calendars?
First Monday Book Day

First Monday Book Day: July

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Talking to Ourselves by Andres Neuman is a short novel from the Argentinian author that I read last month.  I had read the first novel of his to be translated (Traveler of the Century) a few years ago and that was a huge 600 page novel of ideas.  This book is very much the opposite of that, it is short and immediate and has a significant impact.

There are three narrators; Lito, the child, Elena, the mother, and Mario, the father who is dying of cancer, but hiding that fact from his son.  All three of the characters are hiding things but the father's illness and approaching death shadows the book throughout.  Father and son embark on a cross country trip that for the father is a last chance to create a memory, and for Lito is his first chance to truly enter his father's adult world.  All three narrative arcs continue to dance around each other always approaching, but never do they actually connect and find common ground.

It's a book about family and grief and illness.  Each of the three narrators is so fully realized and observed by Neuman that the book comes together very well.  Neuman has become one of those authors that I will follow and read whatever comes out from him next (a story collection is coming in October, I hear - consider me excited).

That was one of my favorite books I've read in the first half of the year. Hopefully, you all have had similarly great reading experiences this month and we can while away the next few days discussing them.

First Monday Book Day

First Monday (Observed) Book Day

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  • Don't know if there are any William Gibson fans here, but I read his latest book, The Peripheral, this month and thought it was very good.  The world building was fantastic, and although I was a little let down by a very tidy ending, I would still rank it among my favorite sci-fi books from the last year or so.

 

  • I read Cat's Cradle and God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater this month in my Vonnegut re-read project.  Cat's Cradle is still pretty great, although it's funny how much I remembered the post-apocalyptic parts of the book considering how little of that there actually is.  Mr. Rosewater was not my favorite of his, but it was one of the novels I hadn't read before, so the completist in me is happy to have read it.

 

  • I finished The Last Policeman series (The Last Policeman, Countdown City, World of Trouble).  Easy books to read, and I liked the setup for the mysteries (society is breaking down as an asteroid will destroy the Earth very soon).

 

  • I also finally got around to reading Citizen by Claudia Rankine.  It's a powerful book.  I was looking for where others posted their thoughts (I know Pepper and CH have read it as well), but didn't immediately find it.  It's very much worth a read.
First Monday Book Day

First Monday Book Day: Silkpunk

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One of the things that I enjoy about following a lot of the science fiction and fantasy awards is that you get to read great short stories by authors that are getting their first exposure, before they publish a novel.  That's how I was introduced to Ken Liu, through his short story "The Paper Menagerie" which was really good.  Since then, Liu has been really prolific in the short fiction realm, consistently writing really good stories (a collection of his short fiction is coming out later this year, and I'll probably buy it, even though I've read most of its contents already).

All of this is to say that I was very excited to read his debut novel "The Grace of Kings".  It's a fantasy epic that has some steampunk tendencies and a pretty clear basis in Chinese/Asian folklore.  This combination has spawned the term "silkpunk" which Liu has talked about here and there (this podcast was a really interesting - and spoiler free - look at the book and the author's approach and viewpoint on fantasy).

I loved the book.  It wasn't standard fantasy based around a hero's journey, but jumped right in with a large cast and pulled everything together.  It read like the recounting of a legend where various stories were all cast and recast with the same set of characters.  It really played to my enjoyment of his short stories, but at the same time it was cohesive.  It's long (around 700-800 pages), but it felt like it earned that length - the scope is enormous.

It's the first book in a trilogy, but I think it stands perfectly well on its own.  All in all, one of my favorites that I've read this year.

Some short things I read last month:

  • Reading "Labyrinth" by Amelia Gray and then reading this short piece about the editing process for the story was pretty interesting.  Some of the things seem petty and weird, but I find the thought process of an author revising a story that's "finished" really interesting.

 

  • Grunion Run by Juliet Escoria.  This was my favorite story from her collection, Black Cloud. I read the entire collecion this month in about two sittings.  It was good, all the stories were about this short and they all tackled influences (positive and negative) and things that pull at you long after you think you've moved past them.  Every story in the collection has a companion video.  Here's the one for Grunion Run, and it's weird (and maybe NSFW - language).

 

  • Ciaran Berry - For the Birds.  I'm not quite finished with Berry's collection, but this poem is one of the many so far that has caught me up in the mix of rustic image and historic allusion.  Here's the author reading the poem:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ul8Zb2LCJQY

First Monday Book Day

How Not to Read a Book

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In bullet points:

  • notice Redeployment by Phil Klay has won the National Book Award and decide it’s really something you should read even though you tell yourself you’re not someone who likes books about war
  • request it from library only to have it ready for pickup months later when you’re already in the middle of another book
  • not to mention it's the busiest time of the year at work and you’re trying to do at least a little work most evenings
  • don’t start reading until the day before it’s due
  • find out that this is one of those books that grabs you by the throat and doesn’t let go
  • keep reading
  • receive overdue notice from the library
  • check library website; see that there are 57 copies and 31 requests, so if you returned it you could probably get it again pretty soon
  • fear loss of momentum; keep reading
  • find this Q&A and become even more obsessed with finishing the book
  • pull out the book while standing on a crowded bus (because this is your only chance to read all day); a guy notices you, stands up, and gestures for you to take his seat; wonder if he is a vet
  • feel grateful because it really is much easier to read while not trying to avoid falling over every time the bus makes a turn; finish a story about a guy who really wants to find a whore; wonder if the guy would have still given you his seat if he knew it was for that

So what are you reading?

First Monday Book Day

First Monday Book Day

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A few thoughts.

Nebula Award nominees are out.  One pet peeve I have with SF/F awards is that so much is series-oriented.  This year 5 of the 6 nominees in the novel category are part of a series and one of them is book 7 in its series.  (To be fair, 2 of the nominees are the first book in the series) and so require an awful lot of someone who uses these awards as reading list fodder.  All that aside, I'm excited that The Three Body Problem was nominated.  I definitely plan to pick that one up at some point in the future, and I was always going to read Ancillary Sword given how much I liked the first book.

I read Player Piano as part of my ongoing passage through Kurt Vonnegut's novels.  It was pretty much as I remembered, not exactly what you think of when you think of Vonnegut, but so many of his consistent themes are right there from the very beginning.

I read some other stuff, but I'll save that for the comments.

Some good things that I found on the internet this month:

"Some Desperado" by Joe Abercrombie.  A short story title that should be read sarcastically.  It's a Western setting with a young woman trying to get away with the spoils of a robbery.

"Weary" by P.E. Garcia.  A quiet, but strong short story.  I'm not sure I can put my finger on why I liked this.  But I did.

"Pnin" by Vladimir Nabokov.  The short story that became the first chapter of the novel by the same name.  I actually read this a few years ago and loved it.  But then I came across this reading of it by Alexsander Hemon and I got to listen to it again.  I love the initial description of the title character and his situation.

First Monday Book Day

First Monday Book Day: Biography x3

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This year, I decided I was going to re-read (or read for the first time) all of Kurt Vonnegut's novels. With that in mind, I looked around for some books that get into the background of both the books and the author. This month I read three biographies of various types.  I'll admit that by the end of the third, I was feeling a little like I was going over the same material, but each was different enough.  Listed below are the books that I read all or part of this month.

THE MAN:

SoItGoes

And So it Goes - Kurt Vonnegut: A Life by Charles J. Shields

The word that comes to mind is "workman-like".  It's about as straightforward as a biography can be.  Point to point without much editorializing or analysis in between.  Still, this filled in a lot of details about Vonnegut's life that I was not familiar with (the kids, the wives, the agents, etc.) and gave me a pretty good framework for the other biographical books that I read.

Letters

Letters by Kurt Vonnegut (edited by Dan Wakefield)

Reading this directly after the Shields biography was about perfect.  A lot of the details that were only mentioned in passing in this book I was already familiar with from my previous reading.  I enjoyed Vonnegut's writing even in this non-narrative format.

PalmSunday

Palm Sunday by Kurt Vonnegut

One of many "autobiographical collages" that Vonnegut published that collects some of his lectures and writings and attempts to connect them together. This is perhaps a little redundant with respect to the collection of letters above, but it was interesting to see how Vonnegut connects things as opposed to an editor or biographer.  This added some depth to some life events, but as noted in the intro, I did start to feel like I was reading some of the same material.

THE NOVELS:  (Analysis - I've only started these two, so any thoughts are preliminary)

VonnegutEffect

The Vonnegut Effect by Jerome Klinkowitz

Klinkowitz has written a lot of analysis of Vonnegut's work.  This book breaks things down by novel.  Depending on how much I like this book, I might seek out some other Klinkowitz offerings (there are quite a few, here's his author's page on Goodreads, see if you can spot the theme).

UnstuckInTime

Unstuck in Time: A Journey Through Kurt Vonnegut's Life and Novels by Gregory D. Sumner

Lest you think that I am some kind of truly original visionary with the re-reading Vonnegut idea, here's someone who already thought of it and wrote a book about it.  This might be the book I'm most excited to read in this post.  I've only gotten through the prologue (an abbreviated biography - Argh!) and the section on Player Piano so far.

So, fair citizens.  What are you reading?

First Monday Book Day

First Monday Book Day: New Year

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The last book I read in 2014 was The Wanderer by Timothy J. Jarvis.

It's a horror novel (because what better time than Christmas for a little horror?) that loves what horror can be. The structure of the book is very aware of itself. A manuscript that describes something supernatural is found in the apartment of a recently disappeared author. But before you know even that, the first words of the book are an excerpt from that author's story:

"What is it?"
"An old manuscript. Much of it is hard to make out, but..."
Mr. Leatherbotham cut in.
"What? That worn-out old Gothic trope?"
He rolled his eyes.

The whole book careens along through the various stories (a demonic puppet show, a variation on Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came, and an homage to Lovecraft, among others) that come from chance meetings with strangers (another self-aware nod to "weird tales" and horror stories) while updating the main plot. It only perhaps loses steam once or twice but quickly finds its footing. The Wanderer is a book where a word like ichor feels right at home. The vocabulary is extensive and the description is remarkable. The prose is described as poetic in more that one place, and it's easy to see where that comes from. The description is concerned with things often visceral, often gory, often downright repulsive. Horrible things are happening in The Wanderer. And they keep happening.

I loved it, the main plot of an immortal man fleeing an immortal pursuer while all the stories spin out around him worked really well and put this right up there among my favorite reads of the year.

First Monday Book Day

First Monday Book Day: Goals

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December is here. The final month of the year, where everyone starts publishing their "best books of the year" lists and I start to compile my reading list for 2015. More on that next month probably. This month is our last chance to meet our reading goals for 2014 (if we set any - I did, of course, and I tracked the whole thing on a spreadsheet, because that's who I am).

I had two goals for 2014.

1) Read 60 books (I usually set my goal somewhere around 50, then adjust as life happens). I'm about 50 pages from finishing my 58th book of the year right now, so things are looking good for that.

2) Read about one "big" book per month that I have wanted to read before, but never found the time. An attempt to clear away some of my backlog that really worked out well, I think. Read some really interesting books and checked off a few bucket-list books.

Here's my final list of "big" books for 2014 in general order of how much I enjoyed them (I'm going to start Midnight's Children next week and finish before the end of the month).

Author Title
Laszlo Krasznahorkai Seiobo There Below
David Markson This is Not a Novel
Georges Perec Life A User's Manual
Roberto Bolano The Savage Detectives
Bruno Schulz The Street of Crocodiles
+ Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass
Fyodor Dostoevsky The Idiot
Jorge Luis Borges Labyrinths
Neal Stephenson Cryptonomicon
John LeCarre The Spy Who Came in From the Cold
+ The Looking Glass War
Italo Calvino Invisible Cities
Haruki Murakami 1Q84
Kobo Abe The Woman in the Dunes
Vladimir Nabokov Pale Fire
Thomas Pynchon Gravity's Rainbow
J.G. Ballard Concrete Island

So, what do you have left to read in 2014? What are you reading right now?

First Monday Book Day

First Monday Book Day: Reading in Translation

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J.M.G. Le Clézio - DésertLast week, as we rolled south toward Kansas, Mrs. Hayes and I occupied our minds with podcasts. The pillowy ride of the new (to us) full-size Buick sedan and the monotony of eastern Iowa might have lulled us to sleep were it not for The Incomparable, The /Filmcast, Roderick on the Line, and Radiolab. "Translation," last week's Radiolab episode, got me thinking about the books I've read in translation, particularly the book I'm reading right now –  J.MG. Le Clézio's Désert, translated in my edition by C. Dickson.

This is my first modern French novel. I dutifully read, as I'm sure many of you did, Voltaire and Victor Hugo and Guy de Maupassant in high school. I might be forgetting a few. Since I don't speak French, I never read any of them in anything other than English, just like I'm reading Le Clézio. Mostly, reading this book is flying blind. I'm ignorant of any conventions in French literature, and completely reliant on C. Dickson to convey Le Clézio's entire persona as an author – characterization, phrasing, pacing, voice, everything except the plot. If Désert were a film by Godard or Melville I might have more to go on; I wouldn't need a translator to help with anything other than dialogue. But C. Dickson's my only lifeline to the ship Le Clézio is sailing across the Sahara. I'm over halfway through it, and while I can't say if I "get" it yet, I can say with conviction I'm in awe of the writing. Or is it the translation?

I read and translated a little Russian literature in Russian as an undergrad: Pushkin and Akhmatova and Gogol come to mind. I don't speak or read Russian well enough to read a book anything but haltingly, but at one time I got along enough to form a few opinions, mainly about poets. Blok and Akhmatova blew me away. I know enough about Russian literature and culture to have a decent idea of what an author or poet is doing or the society his work is engaging. With the French, I have no idea. (I will be even more lost when I finally get to Ha Jin's War Trash, hopefully by the end of the year.)

It's funny. Some of my favorite authors are those I can only read in translation. Murakami, for example. There are books of his I like better than others, but despite my near-complete ignorance of non-automotive Japan and my total Japanese illiteracy, he is definitely near the top of my list of favorite writers. How much of that do I owe to Murakami, and how much of it to his English translators, Jay Rubin and Philip Gabriel? I suppose I could answer that by saying I never recommend anyone read Constance Garnett's translations of Dostoevsky or Tolstoy or anybody else. (Please. Read the newer and superior Prevar & Volokhonsky translations.) A good translator gets out of the way and imparts as much of the original author's vision and voice as possible, and a bad one can completely destroy the original while leaving the reader completely unaware of the demolition. The problem is knowing which translator has been at work.

What are you reading?