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The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime by Mark Haddon. It's about an autistic boy who decides to try and solve the mystery of who killed his neighbor's dog, and then comes face to face with the break up of his parents relationship. It's narated first person from the POV of the autistic boy. The wierd, detached nature of this perspective is what gives the book most of it's appeal. The plot itself is sort of bland, but it's written in such a way that you don't really mind. Very quick, easy read and I'd reccomend it if you've got a weekend to kill. The Blue Light in the Sky and Other Stories by Can Xue. It's a collection of short stories by a chinese author whose style has been heavily influenced by the works of Kafka and Borges, but which at the same time retains its own special wierdness. Her fiction is about as abstruse as I've ever encountered from this sort of story, and I suspect the translation is a bit rough at times, which doesn't help. Nonetheless, some of the stories are excellent and I'd reccomend it to anyone who's a fan of this kind of fiction and doesn't mind a story where you sort of hit it like a brick wall and slide off. (i.e. the sort of person who likes this kind of fiction) Next on the list: Bias by Bernard Goldberg.
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Nov 26, 2006 10:39
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| # ¿ Apr 29, 2024 07:47 |
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Neverwhere by Neil Gaimen. I remember seeing the BBC miniseries a long time ago so I bought it on a whim. Gaimen's one of those authors that runs sort of hot and cold for me. This was pretty good though, fast-paced and well-written with just enough wit to be entertaining without bogging it down with attempts at being funny. A good light read. The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall. Fished this out of the bargain bin at B&N for about six bucks. Mostly bought it because of the cover art. (I'm a sucker for good graphic design). Interesting premise, executed well. It draws its theme and style heavily from Murakami, and it suffers a little (perhaps unjustly) in the inevitable comparison. There's some House of Leaves style typographical tricks here, too, but more understated; it never quite reaches the same level of obnoxiousness that HoL did. All in all a very good read, highly recommended for fans of Murakami or postmodernist style novels. I don't know how universal B&N's bargain books are, but the hardbound edition I picked up is an absolute steal at six dollars, too. Baby Babbeh fucked around with this message at 23:47 on Jun 15, 2008 |
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Jun 15, 2008 23:30
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Just finished On Such a Full Sea by Chang-Rae Lee. This book feels like about 3/4ths of a masterpiece. It accomplishes the things that the best sci-fi accomplishes — its vaguely post-apocalyptic world feels fantastic yet oddly plausible, with just enough parallels to our world to raise uncomfortable questions without hammering you over the head with the symbolism. It touches on contemporary topics like income disparity, public participation vs. personal expression, the healthcare crisis and our approach to aging, and the post-9/11 bunker mentality without letting the big ideas overwhelm the story or letting things devolve to mere allegory. There's also an interesting framing mechanism — it's told from the point of view of the community the main character leaves at the beggining of the book as it comes to grips with her departure, and thus what it really becomes is a story of how a people interprets events and incorporates them into their unique myth structure. It's really fascinating, and timely. In some ways this is the best novel about the post-Great Recession world yet written. But its main problem is that it just kind of goes nowhere. Characters come into the story suddenly and leave just as suddenly, and its only a very few that get any sort of satisfying outcome. The main character's story also ends abruptly. While I'm all for ambiguous or open endings, it didn't feel like a true climax, narrative wise. The main character is also basically a cypher, so she doesn't really have any kind of character arc. I don't really come out of the book thinking she's in a different place than she was at the beginning. The community-as-narrator, interestingly, has more of an arc, but even there its not explicit enough how its changed, or what might happen next. I get the feeling that Lee wanted kind of the literary equivalent of Truffaut's freeze-frame on the beach in the 400 Blows: our hero, shattered by events, captured on the brink of terrible possibilities. I guess that works in film but it's harder to pull off in print. I'm all for ambiguous or open endings, but it requires a sense of climax that's lacking here. Don't get me wrong, On Such a Full Sea is still a very good book. But the weak ending I think holds it back from really being a great one. Baby Babbeh fucked around with this message at 19:33 on Mar 25, 2014 |
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Mar 25, 2014 19:19
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Franco Potente posted:Just finished the new Haruki Murakami novel Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage. After the tremendous waste of time that was 1Q84, I was wary on picking up another Murakami novel, but this one was vastly superior. Shorter, tighter, with a plot where things actually happen (don't get me wrong, I did Murakami's flat characters, unexplained weirdness, and continual digressions, but 1100 pages of it was far too much). There are still characteristic dream-like atmosphere, but the stakes felt much more real and personal. I may be in the minority, but I think Murakami's shorter, lighter novels are far better in general then his big tentpost books. Like, Kafka on the Shore was kind of muddled and pointless but After Dark just had incredible energy and never overstayed its welcome.
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Aug 27, 2014 00:45
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If you think that dystopian novels are about what the future will be like, you're not really getting it. They more than most sci fi are basically exaggerated parables about the present, and they aren't really supposed to be the logical or even the possible future result of current events and trends. Rather, they're current events and trends exaggerated and taken to an absurd degree to make an ideological point. They're also, when we're talking about the most famous ones, speaking to anxieties felt by (generally British) leftists in the West in the middle part of the 20th Century. These are explicitly novels that use a future society as a tool to forward an ideology, although a lot of people mistake them as speculation about the ultimate ends of an ideology. Obviously that's not going to be for everyone, but complaining that they aren't realistic misses the point. They aren't realistic, but that's the novel working as designed.
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Dec 1, 2014 21:09
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Just finished Submergence by J.M. Ledgard. Holy poo poo. This book basically knocked me on my rear end. It's not especially long but it is especially detailed, painting these incredibly rich portraits of things as diverse as terrorist lodgings in Africa and things living at the bottom of the ocean that's never seen light. Reading it is sort of like being made aware of how big the world really is, but also how small and fragile everything is at the same time, and how meaningless most things actually are. I've heard it called "postmodern airport fiction" and it kind of is — the two main characters, a British super spy and a globe-trotting, genius oceanographer — seem like they'd be at home in a Clive Cussler novel, but Ledgard delves so deeply into their psyches and their personal histories that they arrive at a kind of three dimensionality that's rarely seen in popular novels. The plot, such as there is, is nothing special — it's about a man captured by terrorists thinking back on a short relationship he had with a woman. But it's sort of like Moby Dick — the book is actually about it's many diversions, rather than the plot, so it doesn't matter that nothing much actually happens. Linguistically, it's interesting — Ledgard sort of builds it up from a lot of short declarative sentences that describe what's happening but leave it to the reader to assign meaning to it. It jumps freely through time and place, but it's not quite stream-of-consciousness, and it never gets hard to read. Easily the best book I've read in months.
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Mar 19, 2015 00:33
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| # ¿ Apr 29, 2024 07:47 |
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I wouldn't really say that Pale Fire and House of Leaves are similar except at the most superficial level. House of Leaves is a fairly simple story trying its damndest to make you think its complex and Pale Fire is a very complex story hiding behind a veneer of simplicity. They're different enough that I don't think enjoying one will necessarily mean you like the other but for what it's worth Pale Fire is excellent and probably my favorite Nabakov novel.
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Jul 2, 2015 22:18
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