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Just finished Foucault's Pendulum. I really wish I had archives so I could check out the Book of the Month thread on it. Eco really breaks down the world of his characters during the final chapters; all through the novel we've seen them building this scheme, and then it starts to come to life like an inflatable pool toy, and we're unsure whether or not the Plan is really true. It sort of plays out like a court case, with both sides giving their evidence. The reader, depending on his viewpoint, can see one way or the other (through most of the novel, I was convinced that it was all coincidences). Then there's this stunning, irrefutable evidence that shakes up absolutely everything, and then this stunning, irrefutable evidence is dissected. It's a nice touch that a good portion of the very end of the book is sort of a character study of Belbo and his motives, and probably the motives of everyone. At some point I'll probably re-read this.
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Jul 22, 2008 17:16
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Just finished Anthony Burgess's The Wanting Seed. It was...interesting. Not as tightly written as A Clockwork Orange. The plot was sort of clunky, as well. On top of that the book is massively homophobic. If it was severely cut down (from a pretty bloated 280 pages), it'd be a lot more interesting, but it tends to ramble and really doesn't present anything in a neat order. As a whole, it feels more like a nearly-final draft than a finished novel.
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Jul 30, 2008 08:08
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ProfessorFrink! posted:The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. I think I said this elsewhere, but it's a shame that most people have The Great Gatsby hosed up for them by high school teachers. On its own, it's actually a pretty funny drama with some interesting metaphors about America, but teachers latch onto the metaphors and spend all the book beating it into the students. It's almost to the point where it's practically looked down upon because of reading it high school.
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Aug 3, 2008 06:41
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Ironic Twist posted:Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut, the first Vonnegut novel I have ever read, and there will definitely be more. I think Breakfast of Champions is my favorite Vonnegut. While I can't really pinpoint why, I think it has to do with the fact that it runs very smoothly from beginning to end, and it's very precise in its storytelling. And it's loving hilarious.
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Aug 17, 2008 08:25
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Umberto Eco's The Name Of The Rose. I read Foucault's Pendulum last year, and much like that Rose has a lot of almost-skippable vaguely-essential passages dealing with heady subjects (with Foucault's it was cults and cabals, Rose it was religion and its relationship with philosophy). In both cases I think all of this is worth reading if you really really really want the full experience, but if you're in it for a mystery book about monks dying then skip away. The book works on at least two levels in that way. Eco has a superb way of presenting mysteries and then providing really satisfying answers. When we finally find out what's in the library, who's killing the monks, etc., it's like eating a really juicy fabulous steak that we've been smelling as it cooked. It's a rare talent.
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Nov 5, 2009 07:22
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VelociBacon posted:Neuromancer by William Gibson I just finished it as well, and I mostly agree, lots of neat ideas sort of kludged together.
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Feb 21, 2017 23:49
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If you can trod through thirty pages of "then Case, the ol electric cowboy, rode that sleek electro slice-n-dice over Tokyo, where the slipslops were glorby" then you can get through the chapter about the door in Name of the Rose.
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Feb 22, 2017 07:58
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stereobreadsticks posted:Yeah, I never really thought of Eco as an especially difficult author, and of the novels I've read from him I think the Name of the Rose is the most accessible. Foucault's Pendulum and Baudolino have kind of slow starts that almost feel like intentional obstacles to keep less dedicated readers from getting to the good stuff, and the Prague Cemetery is off putting just because the main character is such a terrible person, but I don't remember anything in the Name of the Rose that would keep me from recommending it to just about anyone. Eco was concerned with his books becoming pop culture for some kind of "wrong reason" so he actively wrote difficult passages into the early parts of his books (e.g., Adso describing the church door in fervent detail).
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Feb 22, 2017 19:58
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The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein This was fine. It's witty and entertaining and full of bon mots and sly observations but the calvacade of names and anecdotes don't always feel as if they bear as much fruit as they should. The overall effect is like living next door to a life, which is intriguing but it doesn't have the strange, overwhelming poetic flooding of Three Lives. Probably the most impactful element is the way she notes that people come to a bad or a good end later in life, and then says "but I am getting ahead of myself" and only a hundred pages later does the situation of the bad or the good end arrive and suddenly we're kind of burdened with a respect for how life is intractable. Definitely the funniest moment is Stein trying to get a book published and her publisher requesting more commas, and because she's a friend of his she agrees to give him two (2) commas, which she later removes.
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Feb 10, 2018 18:23
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Absorbed Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann over the course of a couple of weeks. It's been a while since I've been properly sucked into a book, and it was really nice to have that sensation of longing to stop whatever productive thing I was doing so I could go back to reading. I've seen the subtitle, "Verfall einer Familie" ("fall of a family") translated as "decline of a family", but it's really more of a ruthless, limb-by-limb destruction, and the absoluteness of it, along with the powerful sense of finality, loss, and decay, rattled me. I was expecting a more general riches-to-rags plotline, but Mann systemically stamps out any source of joy in the family, with repeated deaths that highlight the fact that now is all there is, and no amount of bourgeois trappings or proclamations of faith can calm you when your last minutes are spent in feverish suffering. Despite this, it's also a funny, profound, and highly earthy novel. There are a lot of similarities to Tolstoy, particularly the narrative style of moving in and out of different perspectives and varying the scope from stately and historical to second-by-second psychological flow, though Mann's narrator remains at more of a remove than Tolstoy does. With Tolstoy, it feels like you're getting unfettered access to his characters' neurons, but here thought processes are delivered with more archness and irony (some bits reminded me a lot of Thackeray's Barry Lyndon). But his sense of place, character, psychology, sociology, and (most importantly) seemingly unimportant details all come together to create clear, vivid pictures, and the way that detailed scenes are spread across four generations of time creates a sort of dizzying effect of perspective and mortality. I haven't cried at a book in a long time, but the moment when [spoilers]Tony realizes that she'll literally never get to go home again, let alone be comforted by her mother[/spoilers] hit me really hard, and did so particularly because Mann gives the readers the ability to closely track these characters to this point, across so many years. I really appreciated the use of repetition and contrast - similar events happen repeatedly, allowing us insight as to how the characters deal with things differently - as well as the incessant hammering of fate and time. Something I'm still trying to pick apart is how things could have gone less poorly. One review suggested that those who followed the family's rule suffered, and those who didn't, didn't, but it doesn't seem as clear-cut as that. Moreso it seemed like the ultimate critique was of the necessity of needing to provide for yourself, particularly within the confines of societal expectation. The great-grandfather, under whom the family is thriving at the beginning of the novel, has a knack for his career, as does his son. But his grandson struggles with it, and his great-grandson has absolutely no aptitude for it for reasons that are very clearly illustrated. To not be good at playing your predetermined role, or, worse, to have no interest in it at all, is functionally a death sentence. I also sped through Erik Larson's The Devil in the White City, which was fine. Mostly it made me miss Bill Bryson's ability to spin a huge mass of vaguely connected factoids into a joyful kaleidoscope, and I couldn't help but compare it to his One Summer: America, 1927, which is one of his lesser books but covers a similar topic and ground. Bryson is a natural raconteur, but you can see Larson sweating to connect all of his accrued dots, so the effect is more like a jumbled collection of anecdotes and factoids interspersed with two intertwined biographies. His most annoying habit is a kind of winking precognizance. The book opens with one of the major figures riding on a huge ship across the ocean, and thinking about his friend, who is riding a slightly bigger ship back the other way. Larson doesn't name the ship until the epilogue, which is somehow more aggravating than if he'd just used the word "Titanic" in the first chapter and gotten it over with. There are all kinds of teases like this, and endless paragraphs that end like those "and that student was...Albert Einstein!" stories, which starts to feel almost painfully silly after the thirtieth time. The fact that he's writing about a serial killer, as well, also put me in mind of Sweeney Todd, which has a similar built-in winking quality. You know why you're watching Sweeney Todd, and you're anxious to get to the cannibalism. Similarly, you know why you're reading this book, and you're anxious to get to the dismemberment, but Larson is worse at playing footsie with the reader than Sondheim, so after a while I just felt plain impatience. Generally speaking, it's a much lighter book than it feels like it should be. Larson has a bit of a knack for descriptive lyricism, which helped for outlining the scale and variety of the fair, but even that falters when compared to something like Jean Shepherd's vivid, hallucinogenic memoirs of smaller-scale events. There's just not enough there.
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Dec 24, 2021 22:39
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That’s fair! It’s what I get for relying on my high school German, lol.
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Dec 25, 2021 00:15
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Spent the last week reading The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen. The first chunk of the book, revolving around Chip, a shithead professor of cultural studies who sleeps with one of his students and then writes a terrible screenplay about it, kinda put me off, because it felt like too many novels I've read that are about literary professors who have affairs with their students (an oddly populous genre) and at times felt like a pale retread of White Noise. Franzen does a good job of getting into Chip's head, but we spend a lot of time there at first (almost 150 pages - take that, bishop myriel), and by the time he's stumbling through the streets cursing himself for using the word "breasts" too many times in his script, I was just about ready to start ruffling forward in the book to see if other things start to happen (I'm aware of the irony that Chip's script features a "hump" of difficult monologuing for the audience to get over before the action begins). The main thing that kept me hanging on was the occasional intrusion of other perspectives, which floated across Chip's manic perspective like tantalizing little bubbles, but I can't deny that by the time I got to the second part, which plunges us into the life of Chip's sibling, Gary, I was starving for anything else. This is, mostly, the pattern of the book. We're given the perspectives of the five main characters in fairly large chunks, each one getting most of their own devoted segment, and though I think the Chip section runs too long and a little too closely to better works in the same genre, there's something to be said for the way Franzen is able to pull everything around into a totally new perspective and, as we're granted access to more and more perspectives, how he's able to play them off of each other. He also has a wonderful and all-consuming knack for observation, and for bending observations under the lens of these varying perspectives, so that we begin to pick up how characters might be (mis-)interpreting each other, even when we're not being granted mental access to both sides of a conversation. The narrative changes voices as it changes characters, but always remains at just enough distance for the reader to observe these changes and pick up on the delusions that are hidden from the characters who have them. The last segment is fairly devastating. Alfred, the father, has spent most of the (present) sections of the novel in varying states of (frighteningly well-described) dementia, and, eventually, suffers a Johnny Get Your Gun-style fate that is unflinchingly depicted and very, very painfully true to life. Franzen essentially gives this to the reader as the pound of flesh that must be extracted in order for the other characters to be granted their freedom - their corrections - from the misery that, to a great degree, he inflicted upon them. Can we accept him as being terrible enough to suffer like this at the end of his life? But here, again, we have to consider his perspective in the novel, his hard-lined morality and aloofness and the way he justifies himself, and how that's set against the things he says to others, the things he believes and espouses. Can a person really deserve suffering? I think there are some issues here and there throughout the novel - Chip's section is long and there are echoes of White Noise that are mostly distracting for the fact that they kind of lead to a dead end - but overall it's a really spectacular and engaging work.
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Jun 11, 2022 23:55
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Dune by Frank Herbert was a way breezier read than I was expecting, though that might just be because the only memory I have of reading it in middle school was struggling really hard to wrap my head around the prose. For the most part, it's just good old fashioned medieval mythmaking with a bunch of sci-fi bells and whistles, but you can tell how much work Herbert put into those bells and whistles to create a vividly realized world with a lot of depth behind all the casual tossed-off references. I do think the first half of the book is far better than the second half, if just because the intrigue there is more...intriguing, and Herbert has a tough time shaping Paul's arc in the final third into a manageable dramatic shape. He also has a habit of using thudding internal monologues to communicate things that either have already been told to us, or could have been worked more organically into the text, but it's also fun seeing the ways that people work at cross-purposes, even if it doesn't always feel organic. I was also surprised by how nondescript it is, but maybe that's down to expectations set by the wild visuals of Lynch's film, and the grand scale of Villeneuve's. I love the sandtrout, more of them please.
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Mar 2, 2024 03:20
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jesus WEP posted:just remember, it’s never too early to stop reading dune sequels I grew up on nonsense sci-fi so I'm prepared for silly bullshit but I'm not sure if I can handle any significant degradation in writing quality.
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Mar 5, 2024 21:45
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