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I barely met half my goal last year - 9 out of 18. Shameful! More shameful than usual! I didn't even post in the old thread after the beginning, it was so shameful!... or I was lazy, whatever. I considered not setting a reading goal at all this year but then I saw Stravinsky's sorta-structured challenge. I've been trying to bust outside my comfort zone - one of the things I miss about being a student was the unexpected delights from reading something I never thought I'd enjoy. I got a little taste of that in last year's challenge when I read The Man Who Was Thursday, but I still found myself going back to sci-fi and fantasy more often than not. Having a sorta-structure should help me fight this inclination, so I'm in for 2015. My goal is 24 books... ambitious, given my history these last few years, but it allows me to incorporate all the bullet points in the OP with a little room for a fix of sci-fi or fantasy along the way. I'm tempted to toxx myself for something just to light a further fire under my rear end, but I have no idea what would be a worthy toxx condition, so shame will just have to be my motivator yet again. My goodreads account, for those I haven't added over the years.
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Jan 3, 2015 07:21
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January isn't over yet but I won't get another book finished before it is, so I'm posting my update now. I try to post summaries and thoughts and (not very good) reviews of everything I read on my Goodreads profile, so I may not speak as much about some books. 1. Oryx and Crake - Margaret Atwood (Challenge 2: Read a female author) An interesting take on a post-apocalypse scenario. This book could have also fit for the "Something post-modern" part of the challenge, given its structure of starting near the end and retelling the apocalypse through flashbacks. There are lots and lots of things about this story that could be discussed (playing god, the role of the mysterious woman, the odd take on the Hero's Journey, the value of arts vs science, etc), but what resonated most strongly for me was the way the characters and situations highlight the various facets of humanity. I really don't want to say much more about this as the only way to prove my point is to cite a lot of spoilery stuff; my GR review is spoilery but life's too short to worry completely about crybabies. If you like sci-fi and post-apocalypse stories, this is a good literary novel to try. I'll likely pick up the rest of the trilogy at some point though, from the ending, I'm somewhat afraid the rest may deviate into more standard stuff. Atwood is a smart and established author, though, so that assuages my fears a little. On a side note, I'm kind of surprised at myself that it took me this long to read one of her novels. I'm Canadian, and she's been part of our national fabric for my entire life, so I'm familiar with her and her work and yet never read any. Maybe I'll grab some other novels (not just the MaddAddam trilogy) as this year's challenge progresses. 2. The Blind Owl - Sadegh Hedayat, Translated by Naveed Noori (Challenge 10: The Blind Owl) This book is certainly an experience. I don't know if I really could, over even should, try to describe it. You should just experience it. The best summary I will attempt is that it's an excellent metaphor for the unrelenting drive to create, highlighting the repeated (but always subtly different) cycle highs and lows through which a creator is pushed and its ultimately all-consuming fire. I grabbed this as an ebook before Stravinsky had posted the link to Bashiri's translation, though in the long run I think having access to two versions will be beneficial. In the introduction to this version, Noori contends it is a more faithful translation as it was done directly from one of Hedayat's original mimeographed copies, whereas the older translations were based upon an inferior French translation, which itself was done by someone not fully familiar with Persian. Having never read any other translations - and I'm definitely not able to read the original - I have no idea if this version really is better or if this is just the translator trying to sell the book. Given its short length and the theme of subtly-variant-recursion, it's a delicious irony that I have the opportunity to read it again in a different way. 3. Red Harvest - Dashiell Hammett (Challenge 19: The colour red) A couple of years ago, when I wanted to keep up with the Awful Book of the Month, I read The Big Sleep and enjoyed it. I was familiar with the themes and style of hard-boiled fiction from tv and movies, but it was the first actual book I had read in the genre. I had wanted to read more but never got around to it. When I was brainstorming for things which could meet the colour red challenge, I thought of this book through the shamefully geeky method of remembering it was the inspiration of 'Blue Harvest,' the production code name from Return of the Jedi. The book is a progenitor of the hard-boiled genre. It's actually four short stories, written for magazines, with the intention of telling a continuous story set in one dirty town. Due to this, it sometimes feels a bit disjointed, as it changes beats just a little too abruptly when the story transitions. There are also, at times, characters introduced and disposed of in short order - unavoidable in a story about a mob war in a dirty town - which feels a little frustrating when you're trying to follow the plot beats. The plot isn't the big draw for this book, though - the characters are. Especially the main character, Hammett's Continental Op, a private detective with a floating sense of ethics when it comes to getting results. There's not much more to say; it was written when the genre was being formed, so it uses all the cliches because it was part of what made them cliches in the first place. Currently reading: Words of Radiance - Brandon Sanderson I just started this last night. So far it's exactly what I expected, which is a good thing.
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Jan 26, 2015 06:56
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